[INDOLOGY] India in Greece by Edward Pococke (19th century)

Sat Sep 15 01:36:50 UTC 2018

Dear listfolk, 

The case of Pococke's work, for all its obsoleteness, illustrates how India remained the leading Homeland candidate *in Europe* well into the 19th century. This early OIT already existed even before the notion of an IE language family. Voltaire, Johann Herder, Immanuel Kant and others had already traced European culture to India before William Jones' 1786 message of an IE kinship. The key role of Sanskrit in this discovery, and the closeness of Sanskrit to the earliest versions of reconstructed ancestral PIE, made it logical to put the Homeland in India. The classical expression of this Indocentric phase was Friedrich Schlegel's book Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, 1808. But even August Schleicher's 1861 story in PIE about the sheep and the horses is still a lot more Sanskritic than later reconstructions of PIE. 

This needs to be said because AIT polemicists, both among professional linguists and among New-Rightist ideologues, always fulminate that the OIT is a "Hindutva concoction" (usually with the implication that "it is politically motivated, so we need not bother answering it"). This is factually incorrect, starting with the fact that VD Savarkar, launcher of the notion Hindutva in his 1924 book Hindutva, simply accepted the AIT, then clad in the aura of science and the prestige of European academe. What much is true is that the Hindutva current latched on to the OIT once KD Sethna revived it in the 1980s. This was after 150 years in which the AIT had played a prominent political role in anti-Hindu discourse, first in British colonial self-justification, then as a cornerstone of the Nazi worldview (contrary to 19th German Indomania, Hitler had a deep contempt for Hindus), and then, until now, as the alpha and omega of the Dalitist and Dravidianist movement and of the Christian Missionary claim on the Tribals. Even then, the Hindutva movement has never invested any effort in pro-OIT research but piggy-backs on the lone efforts of a handful of scholars. It has never even familiarized itself with the state of the art, which explains the uninformed nonsense whenever they open their mouths about the Homeland debate. 

Yesterday and today there was a conference of the Indogermanische Gesellschaft in Brussels. During the tea breaks, I discreetly asked around for opinions on the Urheimatfrage. Result was the same as I always find at such conferences: most professionals of IE linguistics have no real opinion on it. Either they are camp-followers of an Urheimat somewhere on the Wolga, simply because that it what was taught to them (thus even two very prominent scholars in the field), or they say that "we will never know", since the question has been around for so long and so many things have already been claimed. For most, it is not a live issue anymore, if only because any concern about origins is deemed quaint; this contrasts with the strong passions the question still provokes in India. It follows that only a small minority really champions the AIT and argues the AIT, not really many more (though with far more institutional support) than the active and competent OIT champions. The latter can be counted on the fingers of two hands, with the majority being Europeans. 

Anyway, to sum up: the Pococke case is a reminder that, while the term "OIT" only dates to the 1990s (presumably coined by Edwin Bryant), the OIT as an explanatory model dates to the 18th century, staying on deep into the 19th, and stems not from India but from Europe. 

Dr. Koenraad Elst 

(till recently Visiting Professor of Indo-European Studies at the Indus University, Ahmedabad, a job that by Indian law I could only get because there was no qualified native candidate in sight) 

Van: "Indology" <indology at list.indology.info> 
Aan: "Martin Gansten" <martingansten at gmail.com> 
Cc: "Indology" <indology at list.indology.info> 
Verzonden: Vrijdag 14 september 2018 08:34:20 
Onderwerp: Re: [INDOLOGY] India in Greece by Edward Pococke (19th century) 

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>From a quick google search "India OIT Pococke", 
his work appears well known and used in various writings related to the "Out of India" view. 
Best, 
Christophe 

Le 13 sept. 2018 à 20:40, Martin Gansten via INDOLOGY < [ mailto:indology at list.indology.info | indology at list.indology.info ] > a écrit : 

A colleague working on Hellenic religious reconstructionism recently came across an 1852 book by one Edward Pococke entitled India in Greece: Truth in Mythology (Containing the Sources of the Hellenic Race, the Colonization of Egypt and Palestine, the Wars of the Grand Lama and the Bud'histic Propaganda in Greece) . The book itself is [ https://archive.org/details/indiaingreeceort00poco | available ] on Archive, and there is some [ https://www.worldcat.org/wcidentities/lccn-no2007036969 | information ] on the author on WorldCat, but not much. Would anyone on this list happen to know more about Pococke and his work? 

Thanks in advance, 
Martin Gansten 

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