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

Sat Sep 15 04:51:12 UTC 2018

Regarding the first paragraph of Dr Elst's post, there's an elegant and
profound book on this subject by Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India
<https://www.worldcat.org/title/aryans-and-british-india/oclc/652492240&referer=brief_results>(1997).
There's more to this topic than is suggested by Dr Elst's brief post,
including the general early nineteenth-century belief in Mosaic time, and
the sea-change in thought that followed the discoveries of Lyell on geology
and Darwin on evolution that placed human history forever in a new
chronological framework, dispelling older quests for an Edenic age in 4000
BC.

Best,
Dominik Wujastyk

--
Professor Dominik Wujastyk <http://ualberta.academia.edu/DominikWujastyk>
,

Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity
,

Department of History and Classics <http://historyandclassics.ualberta.ca/>
,
University of Alberta, Canada
.

South Asia at the U of A:

sas.ualberta.ca

On Fri, 14 Sep 2018 at 19:37, koenraad.elst--- via INDOLOGY <
indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

>
> 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 <
> 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 available
> <https://archive.org/details/indiaingreeceort00poco> on Archive, and
> there is some information
> <https://www.worldcat.org/wcidentities/lccn-no2007036969> 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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