down with objectivity, down with dialogue

[Koenraad Elst]

Dr. Wujastyk, I'm doing my best to contain myself, but some of these
academic contributions just make my fingers itch for typing out a very very
brief reply.

According to Ravindan Sri, keeping scholarship separate from politics is
"fascistic", a view I've heard before among Marxist India-watchers,
obviously related to the glaring lack of objectivity (which Stalin already
denounced as "bourgeois objectivity") in their writings.  In fact,
Ravindan's rejection of non-political scholarship is one point on which
Hitler and Stalin agreed.  It is "fascistic".  Though we all have our
ideological and other conditionings, we are deontology-bound to make our
research as untainted by them as possible.

Dr. Fosse proposes that the competing schools on the Aryan invasion question
stop talking to each other.  But is already being done.  Even when AIT
defenders talk to their opponents, it is mostly for abuse rather than
scholarly communication.  From the excerpts I've seen so far, even the new
volume on Aryan & Non-Aryan (Michigan conf 1996) follows that pattern.

Dr. Fosse challenges us to explain IE culture and expansion.  Very simple:
there is some cultural unity in the ancient IE-speaking cultures because of
a common linguistic-cum-cultural origin, located in one homeland, regardless
of whether this is India, Russia or any other.  The expansion is due to some
tribes leaving that homeland, regardless of whether etc. (but preferably,
realistically, a demographically ebullient homeland such as India rather
than a thinly populated one).  It is true that many Indian participants in
the debate have so far neglected the non-Indian part of the IE family (a
kind of pubescent self-absorption in a society emancipating itself from
interiorized colonial perceptions), and that some non-linguists have
erroneously denied the very principle of linguistic reconstruction and the
IE language family.  No matter, for their work on non-linguistic aspects of
the matter has been useful, and others can supply the linguistic dimension.

Meanwhile, why not focus on the dimensions which the AIT proponents have
neglected?  Or even explicitly dismiss as unimportant, e.g. Shereen
Ratnagar's latest explanation of the absence of any archaeological traces of
the Aryan invasion, viz. that there are so many invasions that have remained
unidentified in the archaeological record (which one?  For the Indo-Greeks,
we have coins and Greek-influenced sculpture; for the Turks, we have the
apparition of mosques, typical citadel lay-out, so-called Islamic glazed
ware; of the European invaders, future archaeologists will find churches and
railways, etc.).  And even of the linguistic data, quite a few are also not
taken into account, e.g. many have remarked the archaic look of Vedic
Sanskrit yet failed to draw the obvious chronological conclusion; e.g. the
implications of "proto-Bangani" (if confirmed), e.g. the splendid match
between the Indocentric scenario and the Lateral Theory, e.g. the existence
of a common "secondary homeland" for the European branches of IE (common
non-IE isoglosses e.g. lexically fish/piscis etc.) indicating the phases of
IE expansion vs. the absence of such for the Asian branches.  Enough to keep
us busy in a real dialogue.

Yours sincerely,
Koenraad Elst
http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst/