Aryan invasion debate

[George Thompson]

Welcome to the list, Dr. Elst.  I would like to know what passages in the 
Rgveda make you think that the RV is pre-Harappan. I look forward to your 
reply.

In the meantime I will continue my readings of the RV.

Best wishes,

George Thompson

In a message dated 9/2/99 6:11:08 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
ke.raadsrots at UNICALL.BE writes:

> Respected Colleagues,
>  
>      I am the lone indologist cited among the Aryan invasion skeptics by
>  Vishal Agarwal.  When reading the debate of the past week, it all looks so
>  familiar to one who has followed this debate for the last nine years.  Two
>  professors walk out, one because he has better things to do, another 
because
>  he has wasted enough time on "rebuttals" of the crazy arguments offered by
>  former NASA scientist NS Rajaram and his ilk.
>      There certainly are higher things in life than Indology, but within
>  Indology, there is at present no debate more consequential than the one
>  about the AIT.  Suppose Rajaram is right, the RgVeda is pre- rather than
>  post-Harappan, and the dominant language in Harappa was Indo-Aryan,-- that
>  would render most of the extant literature on ancient India obsolete.    As
>  for those numerous rebuttals, I'd like to see one or two of them.  Most
>  pro-invasion polemicists, like Romila Thapar and Shereen Ratnagar, focus on
>  alleged political connotations (not realizing that Hitler was in their own
>  camp?), but beat around the bush when it comes to the hard evidence.  Here
>  too it is all blamed on Indian chauvinism, but how does that apply to the
>  increasing number of Western skeptics (say, archaeologist Jim Shaffer whose
>  spade fails to dig up any bone or artefact identifiable as invading Aryan)?
>  Apart from political invective, there is the insulting amalgam with
>  Atlantis-mongers or with some eccentric Russian cult.  To which I say: you
>  can only compare two things if you know both of them, and your familiarity
>  with the non-invasionist argument does not match your knowledge of the
>  reasons why the earth is flat.  What is offered is no comparison but
>  projection of the traits of the known object of contempt to the unknown
>  object of contempt.
>      I'm glad to hear that some team somewhere is preparing a systematic
>  refutation of this Indocentric nonsense.  But that's another constant in
>  this debate: the evidence is always with someone else, some reassuring
>  authority.   Linguistics is always invoked as proving the AIT, while a
>  linguist told me that his discipline is unable to decide the matter, "but
>  there is of course the archaeological evidence".
>      Finally, the shrill tone in which Aryan invasion skepticism is dealt
>  with here, reached an unpleasant high with the interpretation of Vishalji's
>  advice to be more polite vis-à-vis Aryan invasion skeptics "for your own
>  self-preservation" as a threat of physical violence.  This is really bad.
>  What Vishalji meant was clearly that when the present orthodoxy is
>  superseded by a new paradigm, the present-day denunciations of that new
>  paradigm will look ridiculous, and this in proportion to the grim tones in
>  which they are expressed.  And even if there is no change of paradigm,
>  polite debating mores would better befit a forum which so prides itself on
>  its academic status.
>  
>  Dr. Koenraad Elst
>  Peter Benoitlaan 7
>  3010 Leuven, Belgium
>  http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/