Aryan invasion debate

[Koenraad Elst]

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/