SV: "invasion"?

[rohan.oberoi at CORNELL.EDU]

Lars Martin Fosse wrote:

>I have a question here: To what extent are the works of Elst etc. read in
>India, and how important is this debate among Indians in general? Is there
>a blossoming literature on the subject in the vernacular languages, or is
>this basically a small group of ideologists talking to each other?

The short answer is that the debate appears to have become quite
important partly because of its political centrality to the ruling
party's (the BJP's) ideology.  The party forms the current government
and has 197 of 543 members in parliament.

The BJP sells (!) several "anti-Aryan-Invasion" works by Talageri,
Sethna, Rajaram & Elst (see "http://www.bjp.org/today/bookshop.htm").
See also: "http://www.bjp.org/history/elst-ivw.html".

The "OIT" (Out of India Theory, to coin a phrase) also seem to have
become mainstream in Indian academia despite the lack of acceptance
among scholars outside India of any non-intrusive explanation of the
Indo-Aryan family's presence in India.  Edwin Bryant, whose book on
the subject ("The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate: In Quest of the Origins
of Vedic Culture") is out from OUP this month, reported on RISA-L
several years ago:

"Outside of JNU and Delhi University, I was surprised to find almost
all the faculty members in the ancient history dept's of the other 20
or so campuses I visited in India were highly suspicious of the Aryan
migration theory." ("http://www.acusd.edu/~lnelson/risa/d-iaryan.txt")

I don't know anything about the coverage of this in "vernacular"
literature (presumably writings in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, etc) so I
can't comment on that.

Rohan.