Nalanda University

[J.B. Sharma]

Swaminathan,
 by competing histories I do not just mean the Frawley, Kak,
Fuersten (sp?) et al. The magazine "Hinduism Today" has a timeline of
ancient Indian history which I doubt is contributed by the above
mentioned folks. There also remains the theory propounded by Colin
Renfrew. There are many  Websites by other folks which also
question the AIT/AMT (one interesting site is by a Leonard Reuter).
These types of websites seem to have increased over the years.
Furthermore, discussions on this forum on the topic do not point to
an unambiguous view of the ancient India and its chronologies well.
The Linguists and the Archeologists just do not agree.  Since
Historical Science does speak of events embedded in space and time,
the scientific process does apply here. The venerable
naturalist/biologist Edmund Wilson of Harvard  (who just passed away
recently) speaks of the idea of 'consilence'; how all theories in
science end up connecting so beautifully with each other (physics,
chemistry, earth science, biology etc). He did accuse anthropologists
etc of coming up with theories having not much to do with reality.
(No offence meant to any scholar here; I am just paraphrasing). This
implies for a 'historical science' model to be valid ALL the
available evidence must fit. This is not the case with AIT/AMT and
associated chronologies as  currently propounded.
 So the question remains; How must the independant and concerned
scholar position himself/herself upon examination of all the
evidence, on the bane of competing histories in India ?
Regards,
J.B. Sharma

> ---"J.B. Sharma" <jsharma at HERMES.GC.PEACHNET.EDU> wrote:
> >  ... There remain competing histories in place for medevial India (as
> > they do for ancient India as well) ...
>
> Do you mean by 'competing histories' for 'ancient India', the
> school advocated by David Frawley etal.,?
>
> Swaminathan Madhuresan
>
>
>
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