Outlook letters page

[Michael Witzel]

Thanks, Dominik, for drawing our attention to the letters in
        http://www.outlookindia.com/20001120/letters.htm
referring to my short 1600 word summary, in OUTLOOK, of S.Farmer's and my
much longer paper in FRONTLINE.

All of these, plus some very recent comparable gems from Japan, China, and
Vietnam, have now been conveniently collected by E.Brooks at his web site
of the Warring States of early China:
http://www.umass.edu/wsp/method/antiquity/index.html
(It also includes Steve's world shaking discovery of sattelite dishes at
2600-1900 BCE !)

As for OUTLOOK November 20, 2000, letters:

Readers may note that I have sent in a correction to the editors.
More interesting, perhaps, the reaction of Cambridge (UK) archaeologist
Dilip K. Chakrabarti, -- who cannot even get the name of his close
colleague R. Meadow [sic, correctly!] right.
His reaction is skewed in several aspects:

> Meadows' opinion [on horses! -:)] is related to his socio-politics
>vis-a-vis India

I am not aware of any, and I should know, his office is across the street
and we have been teaching *jointly* for 10 years. He is interested in old
*animal bones* only -:)

> and is not shared by other equally competent archaeologists.

The question here is not one of earth digging archaeology & its
interpretation, but of EQUID bones. How many run-of-the-mill archaeologists
can distinguish the bone of a  hemione from that of a horse or an ass?

I will forward this to Meadow, and maybe, he will respond. His answer is
already printed, in fact, at:

Meadow, R. H. and A. Patel. A Comment on "Horse Remains from Surkodata" by
Sandor Bokoyi. South Asian Studies 13, 1997,  308-318; cf. also the summary:
Meadow, The Review of Archaeology, The Transition to Agriculture in the Old
World, 19, 1998, (Special Issue  ed. by Ofer Bar-Yosef), 12-21.



As for Chakrabarti's charge:
> Secondly, Witzel seems upset by a recent
> genre of writings which question the
> basic premise of Aryan migration.

Upset? This is about evidence and conclusions, not about perceived or
imagined personal feelings. For a lot of freely *expressed* sentiment,
however, see Chakrabarti's recent slim book :
Chakrabarti, D. P. Colonial Indology. Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian
Past.  New Delhi : Munshiram Manoharlal 1997
If you wish, I can gather -- the rather unfavorable -- reviews of that
book. One by C.Lamberg- Karlovsky, I recall.


>  Why they should continue to believe in such an
>  unashamedly racist proposition, despite the absence of
>  acceptable archaeological data, is their business.

This sentence nicely indicates that Chakrabarti, for all of the excellent
libraries at Cambridge U., has no idea what he is talking about.

The "Aryan Migration" is concerned with the introduction of the INDO-Aryan
languages, with IA spiritual, and much of IA material culture into South
Asia, not with an imaginary Aryan 'Race'. He could have asked his
colleagues at Cambridge, the Allchins and Lord Renfrew. In fact, I have
protested such racist views for a long time, in writing.
In which decade, nay, in which century does he live?

As for archaeological data, he should have added, 'so far' to the last
sentence. The Huns were not found in European archaeology until some 20
years ago when their graves were discovered in Hungary (reference please?)

As "non-invasionist" archaeologists tell me, there is a huge gap in
exploration between Khorasan and Kabul (not to speak of the Panjab plains,
exc. for Cholistan) as far as the 2nd millennium BCE is concerned. The
equivalent of a "Hunnic" grave may be discovered tomorrow, and strange
things indeed emerge from Afghanistan now, by the day. At this moment, we
cannot tell. But, we have the evidence of linguistic and spiritual/material
culture (in the texts)-- which he does not mention.

>  However - and this needs emphasis -
>  there's nothing to choose academically between their writings
>  and the writings of characters
>  like Witzel,

Thanks! KaruNA in action. -- A sentence such as the preceding one is
patently wrong as it is based *only* on the still lacuneous archaeology of
the region/period.

Too bad that "the celebrated archaeologist Dilip Chakrabarti (Cambridge,
UK)" -- as he was announced on the list called IndianCivilization --
should present his readers with such a lacuneous (and misrepesenting)
picture, even if it is just in a letter to the editor.

M.Witzel
========================================================
Michael Witzel
Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University
2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138, USA

ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages)
home page:  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm

Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies:  http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs