On S. Farmer, also on invasion

[Steve Farmer]

I hate to continue on this vein, but I feel it is necessary to
add one more message to this thread.

The attacks on me and Michael Witzel aren't only on this List,
nor are they attacks by village idiots. We are regular targets as
well in the RSS paper, the Organizer, as well as in many other
India-centered Lists. The attacks are coordinated by professional
Hindutva propagandists, including above all (besides N.S.
Rajaram), Ashok Chowgule of Hindu Vivek Kendra, a far-right group
with ties to Rajaram, Talageri, Elst, the RSS, etc. Ashok
Chowgule also regularly sends me harassing emails -- the most
recent arriving this morning. After awhile, all this starts to
take its emotional toll...

The most recent RSS attack on us was posted in an article a day
or so ago by Vishal Agarwal (well known to many on this List) in
the IndianCivilization group. I've had to contact a lawyer in the
past because of Agarwal's slanderous remarks, which have forced
him to apologize online. I may unfortunately have to pursue that
course again.

The RSS article (dated April 1) attacks Michael Witzel, me, and
Asko Parpola. I am identified (old story) as

  a computer programmer who live (sic) in California. At
  various times he has claimed to be a Sinologist, a
  comparative historian, a geneticist, a historian of science
  and just in time for the Frontline article it seems that
  he became an Indologist after only two months.

For the full article, see
http://www.hvk.org/articles/0401/3.html, which I now notice
*also* comes from the Hindu Vivek Kendra website!! There is much
unintended humor in the article, whose style and contents (no
matter whose name is on the byline) clearly reflect the work of
N.S. Rajaram himself (note the bit about horses with 34 ribs, an
old Rajaram line). It also speaks of the "near-absence of horse
seals" in the IVC (read: none!!) -- a claim which could only come
from Rajaram.

All these claims about me (I'm a "computer programmer," etc.)
were first made by Rajaram to the Indian press after Michael and
I published "Horseplay in Harappa" and a followup article, "New
Evidence on the 'Piltdown Horse' Hoax" in Frontline last fall.
Those articles clearly destroyed Rajaram's credibility, and he
and the Hindutva crowd have done everything they can to go after
us personally since. Rajaram knew then and knows now that his
claims about me are false, since we have corresponded about them
more than once. Parpola is attacked in the article for the same
reason, since he also contributed a followup article to
"Horseplay." Romila Thapar has, predictably, been attacked as
well, since the first article that Michael and I wrote was
followed by her backup commentary. For all the original articles,
if anyone out there hasn't seen them, with other contributions by
Iravatham Mahadevan & Richard Meadow, see
http://www.safarmer.com/frontline. Supposedly the collected
articles will soon come out in a book in Hindi translation.

It is very unpleasant to have to defend your scholarly
credentials repeatedly against such attacks when the other side
can claim no historical credentials whatsoever. S. Talageri, who
uses the Hindu Vivek Kendra facilities, reportedly is a bank
worker; Rajaram taught industrial design in the U.S. before he
returned to India; Frawley hawks Vedic Astrology readings from
his Website.

My academic background, in brief, hopefully one last time: I have
been an academic all my life; I have a Ph.D. from Stanford
University in cultural history; I have spent a total of 18 years
teaching the history of science, premodern Western history, and
comparative history in two U.S. universities and one college, and
probably will return to teaching in the next year (now I'm
researching fulltime); I'm lecturing on my work in premodern
history this summer in Germany, at Herzog August Bibliothek; I'm
a former Harvard University research fellow and past Research
Fellow for the National Endowment for the Humanities; I've also
held many other research grants and fellowships; I've never
claimed to be a Sinologist or geneticist, but I do collaborate
with a Sinologist, John B. Henderson, with whom I have
collaborated for many years. In the past two years I've published
a long academic book on premodern Western thought and several
academic articles, including a collaborative piece in French. I'm
currently working on other articles and a book on the interaction
of neurobiology and literate traditions. My interests in Indology
primarily revolve around chronological problems, which are
closely linked to the model discussed in that book. If Indian
chronologies were in sync with Chinese and Western chronologies I
probably would never appear on this List.

I've never  worked as a computer programmer or written a single
line of commercial code. My only work with computers is academic,
involving simulations of the ways in which premodern textual
traditions cross-culturally became layered over time. My work
here is with several collaborators including a NASA computer
modelist (P. Robinson), my Sinologist collaborator, and more
recently the mathematician Ralph Abraham (one of the founders of
chaos theory; on Ralph see James Gleick's classic _Chaos: Making
a New Science_ [1987]). All our collaborations are of an academic
and not commercial nature.

My deep apologies for discussing my background on the List
another time: It is about the last thing that I want to do. The
only "qualifications" that I recognize in research are a high
regard for evidence. But Big Lies told repeatedly, and not
corrected, can inflict deep professional damage, and I feel that
I have to keep the record straight.

I would prefer that this thread end here and that we go on to
other things. But I also want people to know -- if they don't
already -- that these people are not just casual crackpots. They
have a big political agenda in mind and full-time people working
on their slanderous campaign.

S. Farmer