AryaPrefaceTalageri1905

Preface

The unique place of Shrikant Talageri’s contribution to the Indo-European

Homeland debate

The Indo-European language family

In human history, the realization of kinship between languages was rather
slow in coming. In antiquity, a few people remarked on the similarities between
Greek or Latin, which were far more systematic than those between Latin and
Etruscan or between Greek and Phoenician. It was a correct intuition, but was not
pursued to the point of creating the discipline of Comparative and Historical
Linguistics. Of course, people were aware of the kinship between the different
daughters of Latin: the Romance languages. And as soon as Arabic became
known in Europe, Jews and a few Churchmen saw its kinship with Biblical
Hebrew.
The first real scholarly discovery in this field came in the 17 th century,
when the kinship between the Finnish and Ugric (starring Hungarian) languages
was established. Whereas the kinship between, say, Finnish and Estonian was
trivial, as they had visibly come about as dialects of the same language, Finnish
and Hungarian were not mutually understandable. Yet, in a matter of decades,
they and a dozen other languages of Northeastern Europe were given a place in
the reconstructed genealogy of the newly defined Uralic language family. Since
“racism” is one of the slurs with which Indo-European linguistics is still being
demonized, let us emphasize that all the peoples concerned, as well as their non-
Uralic neighbours, were of the same white race, so racism was not an issue here.
The Indo-European (IE) language family formally became an object of
research in 1786 with the famous “philologer” speech by British judge William
Jones before the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata. On that occasion, he
acknowledged the role of Sanskrit in the discovery and praised India’s classical
language as superior to Latin and Greek. This may be contrasted with India’s
main Anglicizer half a century later: TB Macaulay, who derided the whole of
Sanskrit literature as inferior to a British library bookshelf, and spent his leisure
in Kolkata reading the Greek rather than the Sanskrit classics. Contrary to the
mature period of colonialism, when Indian culture would come to be held in low
esteem, the decades around 1800 witnessed a veritable Indomania in educated
circles in Europe, which helps explain the welcome given to the novel idea of IE
kinship.
William Jones was not the discoverer of IE though: its outline had been
mapped in preceding decades by French Jesuits working in India, principally
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux. The French after their defeat in the Seven Years’
War against Britain in 1763 had lost their colonial ambitions in India and settled
for a handful of peripheral trading-posts.But still, if not a colonial, then at least a
missionary motive could be attributed to these pioneers of IE (just as the 19th-
century pioneers of Dravidian philology were also missionaries). And that indeed
is how numerous Hindu chauvinists deal with the fact of IE kinship: they dismiss
it as but a flimsy construct planted for ulterior motives, viz. to delegitimize India
as a self-governing country (colonization) or belittle Hinduism as less than a valid
alternative to Christianity (conversion). Few of them ever feel the need to
investigate the matter, so that they have remained ignorant of the IE data. They
are satisfied at having identified a motive and assume that that settles the matter:
anything said by anyone with suspect motives must ipso facto be wrong.
But that is not how scholarship works. That Jesuits in India had missionary
motives is not controversial, nor is Jones’s functioning within the colonial
establishment. But whatever their motives, they had applied the scientific method
as then understood, and their concept of an IE language family has withstood all
subsequent storms and all ideological changes within the IE research community.
After colonial administrator William Jones, the torch of IE research was taken
over by scholars from Germany and Austria, countries that had no colonial
interests in South Asia. Later still, decolonization took place and the colonial
angle became irrelevant. Yet all these developments, all these changes in the
researchers’ possible motives, made no difference to the scholarly consensus.

Brief history of the Homeland debate

Once the IE language family was accepted, it gave rise to the assumption
of a common origin, and therefore to the question of where this Homeland had
been located. The Out-of-India Theory (OIT) prevailed for several decades
around 1800, with India as the Homeland whence the European branches moved
west. This was, though not logically compelling, an economical hypothesis given
the central role of Sanskrit in the discovery. This was the language closest to the
putative ancestral language or Proto-Indo-European (PIE), with e.g. three
numbers (singular, dual and plural) and eight declension cases (including locative
and instrumental), whereas Latin and Greek had only two c.q. six/five. But they
retained significant remnants of the lost categories, illustrating that the Sanskrit
version was indeed the original one. So, Sanskrit was visibly closer to PIE, and
from linguistic closeness, geographical closeness was inferred.
But gradually it was realized that the difference between PIE and Sanskrit
was a bit larger than assumed at first. Thus, the distinction between the vowels
a/e/o in Greek and other branches was collapsed into /a/ in Sanskrit, not the other
way around; and Greek /k/ continued the PIE consonant, whereas the Sanskrit
c/ś/ṣ was an evolved form. For example, Greek okto(eight) was deemed fairly
true to the PIE original whereas Sanskrit aṣṭa was considered to have evolved or
“deviated” from the original. It was deduced, plausibly but not logically
compellingly, that this linguistic distance between PIE and Sanskrit should
translate into a geographical distance between the Homeland and India.
This then led to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT): locating the Homeland
in Bactria, Russia or Europe meant that the presence of Sanskrit in India could
only be explained through an invasion from the northwest. (Since the 1820s,
“Indo-European” or “Indo-Germanic” rivalled with the newly-coined but
Sanskrit-inspired name “Aryan” to designate the language family.)
For nearly two centuries, the centre-stage has been taken by theories
favouring a non-Indian Homeland, which from the Indian viewpoint are
collectively called the AIT. This started with Bactria, then Germany or Anatolia
or the Balkans, but increasingly converged on SW Russia as the dominant
Homeland option. Non-linguists are under the impression that linguistics has
proven this non-Indian Homeland, and many linguists too, but very few can tell
you what exactly that proof would be. My own professor of IE linguistics said
that it had been proven by “the archaeologists”, and this way, most people who
believe in such evidence assumes that someone else has provided it.
The majority opinion in the West vaguely accepts a steppe Homeland but
is essentially agnostic, considering the whole controversy a bit obsolete:
questions of origins remind them too much of the Biblical or feudal emphasis on
ancestry. Also, they vaguely know that the quest for a Homeland has been tainted
by politics, first in Britain, then in Germany, and even now in India, and they
don’t want to be bothered with this. They shudder at the sight of the passions it
still invokes in India. Usually they have no idea of the political havoc wrought by
the AIT there.

Return of the OIT

The OIT, which in polite company had been hibernating for a century and
a half, made a comeback among Hindu scholars and laymen plus a handful of
Western archaeologists and linguists around 1990. Just as Hindu laymen had
dismissed the idea of IE kinship as merely a weapon forged by an ideology
desirous of the Indian bodies (colonialism) or souls (the mission), now Western
academics and their Nehruvian acolytes decided that the OIT was only an
invention by another ideology, Hindu Nationalism (a.k.a. Hindutva). Both parties
are mistaken in thinking that a theory can simply be “concocted” by politicians;
though for laymen, this sin is more forgivable than for academics.
The opening shot was fired back in 1982 in the book Karpāsa by KD
Sethna, the elderly former secretary of the philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose. He
found that karpāsa, “cotton”, had been absent from the Rg-Veda but present in
the Harappan cities in the same area, mainly the Saraswati basin. He concluded
that the Rg-Veda (perhaps minus its 10th book, which is centuries younger than
the other 9), predates -2600, when the high tide of Harappan city culture started.
Initially, the only linguistic work done in the service of the OIT was by the
late Satya Swarup Misra, but it was cursorily dismissed as very weak by the
establishment. Later, more unbeatable arguments were developed by Nicholas
Kazanas (a Greek professor of Sanskrit and convert from the AIT; mainly on the
greater rootedness of Sanskrit), Shrikant Talageri (on the isoglosses and on the
Iranian-Uralic lexical exchanges) and myself. Still, sum total, linguistics has so
far only provided a malleable type of evidence, a probability but not the final
word. At any rate, the findings of Historical and Comparative Linguistics turn out
to be perfectly compatible with a scenario of Indo-European emigration from an
Indian Homeland, and marginally even indicate it.
As for a response from the establishment, it has been distinctly niggardly.
Here is a theory central to their discipline, viz. the Pontic Homeland, it is being
challenged, and instead of being curious about the new arguments, or mobilizing
against the challenger, most scholars pretended that nothing was happening.
The major exception here is Edwin Bryant’s research into the debate,
which triggered some genuine engagement by established scholars with the OIT
around the year 2000, even if mostly in an attempt to refute it. One of the most
serious examples was Hans Heinrich Hock’s plea that the internal dynamics of
the break-up of PIE into its daughter languages (the isoglosses) militate against
an Indian Homeland. Our author Shrikant Talageri has provided a refutation to it,
but it remains a case of serious scholarly debate. However, shortly after that, ranks
closed and ears closed, so that henceforth there was only stonewalling from the
AIT side, or personal attacks.

Proof from the hard sciences?

Archaeology is a harder science, though less informative about the
language of the society studied. It failed to find any traces of the momentous event
that an Aryan invasion must have been. Or perhaps it did: as a young
archaeologist, BB Lal made his name in ca. 1960 by identifying the Painted Grey
Ware as a signifier of the Aryans on the way deeper into India. Till today, that
finding is still being cited as proof of the Aryan invasion. Yet, decades ago, BB
Lal changed his mind: he had merely tried to force-fit the data into the reigning
paradigm, when in fact they put that paradigm itself into doubt.
Today the nonagenarian dean of Indian archaeology concurs with most of
his younger colleagues that there is no archaeological trace of an Aryan invasion.
Along with David Frawley, who remarked on the “paradox” of literarily attested
Vedic and archaeologically attested Harappan culture being disconnected by the
AIT, Lal says “Vedic and Harappan are but two sides of the same coin”. An
overview of the archaeological data has been presented in book form, easily
accessible for non-archaeologists, by the naturalized Indian of French origin,
Michel Danino; and it finds no trace of the revolutionary changes that would have
accompanied this momentous Aryan invasion.
This contrasts with Europe, where the -3rd millennium gives plenty of
evidence of a demographic and cultural upheaval as a consequence of the Yamna
(Russian: “pit-grave”) culture’s expansion westwards. From Russia to Portugal
and Ireland, the whole European subcontinent was revolutionized by an
immigration that, on present indications, coincides with its linguistic Indo-
Europeanization.
As for the new contributions by genetics, a newer version of the old skull-
measuring physical anthropology, it can add a lot to our knowledge of human
migrations, but not necessarily to our knowledge of language movements and a
language family’s homeland. Genes don’t speak, just as skulls don't or pottery
doesn’t speak: while a human migration may be proven by a sufficient number of
such findings, we still don’t know what happened to their language. Upon entry
into a new already-inhabited territory, invaders often adopt the native language.
Of all the groups that entered India in the last 3000 years, either as conquerors or
as refugees, not one has preserved its original language, let alone imposed it on
the natives.
Nonetheless, the AIT school, after having totally avoided taking
cognizance of the OIT arguments for more than a decade, has suddenly turned
jubilant over certain findings by geneticists. Some genetic discoveries actually
favoured the OIT, and those had been passed over in silence, but now that David
Reich’s research in Harvard seemed to support an AIT scenario, it made
headlines. It was applauded among pro-AIT scholars, and also in Western
Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”) circles that still see the AIT as a pillar under their
European identity project. For the Indian audience, it was reformulated by Tony
Joseph in his book Early Indians. It is this publication and the ensuing debate that
have provoked the reply by Shrikant Talageri which you find in the present book.

Stonewalling
Let us look deeper into the phenomenon that is bound to draw the attention
of future historians: the water-tight stonewalling exercised by the AIT-camp
against all OIT arguments.
On a debating forum, an AIT champion summarized why after this brief
engagement, his school had given up on the OIT school and on the whole debate:
“They didn’t deliver.” There is a measure of truth in this. The people capable of
arguing the OIT case could literally be counted on one hand and did not form an
organized school. They were often absent on forums where they should have
made their arguments heard, so that the anti-AIT case was made by whoever was
around to grab the microphone. And about this flock of “underinformed but
overopinionated” mouse-clicking hotheads, the less said, the better.
They were just followers, and were particularly smug about considerations
that don’t carry any weight for scholars. As complete outsiders, they pontificated
(and continue to do so) that Comparative and Historical Linguistics is only “a
pseudo-science”, a claim which they as ignoramuses are in no position to evaluate
one way or the other; and that there is no such thing as an IE language family in
the first place. Even more, they congratulated themselves on the allegation of
ulterior motives, which even if true would have no consequences for the argument
made, and moreover, in so doing they anachronistically projected onto the
present-day scholars the things that could arguably have been held again Friedrich
Max Müller and his generation of Orientalists, viz. being agents of the mission or
the colonial/imperial project.
These rhetorical altercations gave the Hindu debaters a bad name. The
legitimate case for the OIT rarely if ever reached the opposite camp, and the
chatter that did reach it created the impression that the OIT was the preserve of
Hindu chauvinists impervious to reason. They decided to stonewall this useless
debate with a bunch of wilfully ignorant people, whom they moreover perceived
as having done a kind of stonewalling of their own. For indeed, the Hindu
polemicists did engage their opponents in debate alright, but they pooh-poohed
the actual case made by the IE establishment scholars and merely raged against
imaginary colonialist or racist concoctions.
This is not only a negative impression about the AIT denouncers that the
AIT believers have acquired. The arrogance and smugness of many Hindu
polemicists has even put off non-Hindu scholarly defenders of the OIT, such as
Nicholas Kazanas, the Russian scholars Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev (who has argued
for lexical exchanges between PIE and its northern neighbour Tibetan, thus
establishing PIE’s presence in North India) and Aleksandr Semenenko (who has
matched many Harappan findings with Veda passages), and indeed myself. We
deplore that our own good name is soiled along with the OIT by the uncouth
behaviour and intellectual failure of numerous Hindu amateurs. As for myself, I
can testify that the noise made by these polemicists has cost me dearly, for the
AIT camp merely had to juxtapose my name with theirs in order to neutralize any
arguments I had to offer. A few of us are on the battlefield, actually facing the
adversary’s best weapons, but these trolls are sitting smugly in their corner
muttering how unfair it is to compare anything Indian with anything inferior,
unmindful of the consequences of their own behaviour.
At least, that was and is the case on these noisy internet forums. But then,
why go there in the first place? For an established academic who is not
exceptionally lazy, it should be a routine thing to actually read the books written
by his opponents, rather than spend time on internet noise-boxes.And this is
where the true scholars arguing the pro-OIT case come in: they have provided a
solid argumentation and presented it in decent books, to which the other side has
never reacted. For the last few years, I mainly think of Nicholas Kazanas, Michel
Danino, and Shrikant Talageri.
During an award ceremony at an Indo-Europeanist conference in Louvain-
la-Neuve, Belgium, awardee Bernard Sergent gave a talk in which he mentioned
having read a review of a French-language book on the Aryan-related evidence
by Michel Danino. He added that he was not going to read the book itself, as “it
is not true anyway”. This was typical for the attitude of many AIT scholars: they
think they know beforehand that an OIT argumentation cannot be true and
therefore does not merit being taken cognizance of. One of the top experts, Rg-
Veda translator Stephanie Jamison, has openly likened the OIT school to flat-
earthers on whom no breath or ink should be wasted. Part of this dismissive
discourse consists in personal attacks on OIT defenders, targeting whichever part
of their persona is vulnerable to criticism, whether “the astrologer David
Frawley” or “the bank clerk Shrikant Talageri”, meaning in every case: don’t
waste time reading or answering them.
Such has also been the fate of Srikant Talageri’s last two books: The
Rigveda, A Historical Analysis (2000) and The Veda and the Avesta, the Final
Evidence (2008). I have personally given four copies of the latter to European
fellow scholars who had expressed their willingness to review it; none of them
did, and one of them confided to me that, against his expectation, he had not been
able to prick a hole in it, yet didn’t want to write this down for fear of getting
associated with the book, the OIT, and “therefore” (in a reference to the Hindu
internet trolls) Hindu superstitious amateurism.
This was a non-political scholar, and he disliked the Hindu polemical scene
for its low intellectual quality. However, that is a minority view, for the more
usual “guilt by association” here is with the politics involved, viz. Hindu
nationalism. That too has been thrown at Talageri, even by one of the top IE
scholars, Hans Heinrich Hock. It is he who has been mentioned above as offering
a serious linguistic argument against any scenario positing India as the Homeland.
Whether right or wrong, the development of a sophisticated argument did the OIT
the compliment of taking it seriously, a relief from the usual stonewalling. It
therefore disappointed me that even Hock would fall back on this guilt by
association with an Indian political current, viz. Hindu chauvinism.
That he did injustice to Talageri by identifying him as a narrow-minded
Hindu chauvinist, is not even the point. More unworthy of a real scholar is that
this gives all the weight to an aspect of the matter that, even if it had been true, is
irrelevant from a scholarly angle: someone can speak the truth all while having
motives you disapprove of, just as someone with approved political convictions
can propose a wrong theory. Scholarship is not about political likes and dislikes,
but about truth claims, and in that respect, as we are about to see, Talageri has
been defeating all his opponents.
All the same, I thought this altercation between Hock and Talageri was a
pity, as well as other acrimonious confrontations with Michael Witzel, Arnaud
Fournet and Vaclav Blažek. I know the world where they come from, have met
them in Indo-Europeanist or Vedicist settings, and very much sympathize with
their scholarly outlook on IE. Yet, I cannot find fault with Talageri either where
he points out their intellectual and (in their unfair attacks on him) human failings.

The literary evidence for India as Homeland

The linguistic indications are a weak type of evidence, but happen to be in
consonance with the more impressive literary evidence from the Vedic and
Avestan corpus gathered by Shrikant Talageri. This, then, will remain his major
claim to fame: the surprising discovery that literary evidence reaches back far
enough to provide information on the disintegration of undivided PIE.
Because of various linguistic and (perhaps wrongly interpreted)
archaeological data, the disintegration of PIE is estimated to have taken place in
about -3700. The oldest samples of writing in IE languages are conventionally
considered at least 2000 years younger: in Hittite, Mycenian Greek, and Vedic
Sanskrit. At least, the former two have been firmly dated, but the date of Vedic
Sanskrit is only derived from an unproven hypothesis, viz. the AIT. The invading
Aryans are taken to be fundamentally different in culture from the Harappans,
and since the Harappan cities declined only after -1900, the invasion must be
more recent than that, and the Vedic corpus (clearly set in India though tortured
in vain to yield mentions of a westerly homeland or an invasion) even more
recent. In this scenario, any memory of the “Aryan” emigration from the
Homeland had been lost, and it is indeed not even hinted at in the Hittite or
Mycenian corpus, let alone in the younger literatures in the other branches.
But then, Shrikant Talageri read the Rg-Veda. At first not even in the
original but in English translation. As his research progressed, he was to teach
himself some Sanskrit hands-on, but at that time he knew even less of the
language than most educated Indians, let alone the traditional Pandits or the
modern Indologists. His only linguistic experience consisted in writing a
monograph on his mother-tongue, Konkani.
But even in any of the flawed English translations available, the Rg-Veda
already gives a lot of information conflicting with the Aryan invasion scenario.
Indeed, it didn’t take any specialist knowledge, merely common sense, to find
that a candid reading of this text already tells a different story from the one taught
in conventional modern textbooks. An uncontroversial Indologist theory, viz. by
Hermann Oldenberg about the layeredness of the Vedic text, yielding a relative
chronological sequence of its different chapters, then increased the significant
information. Again, it took little more than an acquaintance with the information
available in most translations to see that the older chapters mentioned eastern
rivers, fauna etc. and the later chapters more westerly ones, so that the Vedas
unambiguously describe an east-to-west gradient, just the opposite of what the
AIT would make you expect.
A consultation of the Sanskrit original confirmed this picture. A closer
analysis of verse forms and name types proved that the Avestan and (the Sanskrit-
speaking founders of) the Mitannic cultures are clearly of a piece with the
youngest layer of the Rg-Veda. This in turn allowed for absolute chronological
information: the Rg-Veda is centuries older than the Mitanni kingdom of the mid-
2nd millennium, mainly a work from the -3rd millennium. This again is completely
at variance with an AIT that has the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans enter India only in
the -2nd millennium.
Talageri’s reading of the Vedic information also threw light on
archeological and linguistic data, a reason why academics from those disciplines
are really wrong to ignore his work. Thus, conventional scholars say that the Rg-
Veda mentions the chariot, and so they link its date to the archaeological finds of
chariots (in the past, this meant they could maintain that the Aryan invaders had
brought the chariots in ca. -1500, though now the recent finding of the Sanauli
chariot dated ca. -2000 would already create difficulties for the AIT). But
Talageri shows that only the final layer mentions chariots, whereas the earlier
layers only mention carts. Not that carts are unimportant: in my own opinion, they
are a large part of the secret to the IE-speaking migrants’ spectacular expansion:
this typically IE invention, with terms for six of its parts attested in all branches
of IE, allowed for fast and distant migrations not of bands of young men who
would end up marrying local women and losing their distinctive languages, but
of entire families who would fairly faithfully reproduce their language in the
Kavaṣanext generations. At any rate, the specific innovation of a new, lighter and
faster type of cart that became the chariot could well be dated to no earlier than
the late 3rd millennium and thus pin the last book of the Rg-Veda down to that
period, yet leave the other books free to be dated centuries earlier.
In linguistics, it has been argued by Vaclav Blažek that Indo-Iranian
imparted hundreds of words to the Uralic languages, alright, but that at least one
word went the other way, viz. a word for “moon phase” or “lunar eclipse”,
attested in even the most distant of the Uralic languages, that corresponds to the
Vedic name Gungu, indicating (the goddess of) the first lunar crescent after the
New Moon. This would prove that the Vedic people had had a history of staying
in the Uralic region before migrating to India. Talageri checks the layers of the
Veda and finds that Gungu appears only in a later part of the Rg-Veda, as well as
in the subsequent Atharva Veda, but not in the early parts of the Rg-Veda. Yet,
had the Vedic seers brought the name or concept of Gungu from their pre-
invasion habitat, you would have expected to see it in the oldest parts.
The Vedas mention memories of the emigration of the Druhyu tribe to the
northwest, a process described in a bit more detail in the oral tradition that later
came to be written down as the Puranas. Then they describe in some more detail
the defeat and emigration to the northwest of the Iranians, who spoke the IE
language most akin to Sanskrit. This last emigration marked the last phase of the
disintegration of PIE, that of the Druhyu tribe an earlier phase, arguably of those
branches that became the northern Europeans.
We owe it to the Brahminical tradition of memorization of their scriptures
that we still have what is, as per Michael Witzel, practically a tape-recording of
the first recitation thousands of years ago. That way, some human testimony of
the disintegration of the “Aryan” ancestral culture may have been preserved. And
we owe it to Shrikant Talageri that this has been brought to light.

The political connotations

Because a political angle is invariably brought in by most participants in

this debate, on both sides, I cannot send the reader who has been bombarded with
these political connations, away without setting the record straight on this aspect
of the debate.
More than any other topic concerning the ancient past, the Aryan debate is
loaded with a history of ideological abuse and consequential methodological
errors. For most people, the alarm bell accompanying the sound of the word
“Aryan” has to to with a strictly non-linguistic matter: racism.Yet, this political
overtone has its roots in a linguistic mistake, viz. an extremely consequential
mistranslation. This mistranslation was not a deliberate “lie” or “concoction”, as
alleged by many Hindu polemicists, but a side-effect of the racial prejudices that
were common in the later 19th and early 20th century, and that acted as coloured
glasses through which Veda translators read their material.
The Rg-Veda refers to the asikni or “black” people. Some uses of colour
symbolism are simply applications of the universal tendency to represent negative
properties with a black colour, as pointed out by Hock (in another rather
sympathizing paper on an aspect highlighted by the Hindu debaters); or they may
sometimes innocently refer to natural phenomena, e.g. kṛṣṇatvac, “the black
cover”, is the night, not “the black skin (of the aboriginals)”, as read by racially
biased translators. Yet, the racial-invasionist reading is very common and still has
some academic and wide laymen’s sanction.
Admittedly, a few instances do refer very clearly to a military enemy
identified as asikni/“black”. These are the bedrock of the racial version of the
AIT, ensuring that the other times “black” is used, it is not interpreted
metaphorically but “must” refer to skin colour -- a methodologically unwarranted
shift from linguistic to ethnic categories. Yet, as late as WW2, this same metaphor
of calling the enemy “black” was used by the Allies to designate the collaborators
with the Axis (e.g. Subhas Bose in British reports), regardless of skin colour. The
racial interpretation of “black” has therefore largely been discarded in scholarly
circles, at least consciously (though still lingering somewhat through inertia), but
is still very alive in certain Indian political movements where it may yet get real-
life consequences, particularly their anti-Brahminism. At any rate, in the past it
has had enormous real-life consequences, viz. in colonial and Nazi racism.
This word asikni characterizes a military enemy in the Battle of the Ten
Kings (RV 7:5:3, apparently repeated in 9:73:5), and is mostly translated or
explained as “the black aboriginals” resisting the Aryans invading from the west
(eventhough they are repeatedly described as encountering the Vedic people from
the west). Moreover, the Vedic priest Vasiṣṭha is described as śvitya, “white-clad”
(RV 7:33:1), which some translators render as “white-complexioned”. So,
“clearly” it was a confrontation between white Aryans and black Aboriginals.
But in fact, the enemies are led into battle by a king with an Iranian name,
Kavi, ancestral founder of the later Iranian Kauui dynasty, and a priest with an
Iranian name Kavaṣa, and their tribal names and nicknames all have Iranian
counterparts or are known from Iranian and Greek sources to refer to Iranian
communities. Moreover, their religion is described as having the typical
characteristics of Mazdeism: without Indra, without Devas, without fire-sacrifice
etc. And one detail removes “black” even farther from a description of the
enemies’ skin colour: it turns out that asikni mostly doesn’t even have the general
hostile connotation of blackness, but refers to a “black” circumstance only
applicable to these specific enemies, the Ten Kings. Asiknī, “the black (river)”, is
simply the Sanskrit name of the river whence they come, today the Chenab in
West Panjab.
Very obviously, the enemies of the Vedic people at that time, when Rg-
Vedic books 7 and 4 and the contemporaneous parts of books 1 were composed,
were Iranian, not “black aboriginal”. This is attested from so many angles that
one tends to wonder how this mistake could have been made at all, and how the
true Iranian identity of the Dāsas (Iranian rendered through Greek: Dahai) could
have been missed.
It has, at any rate, been an extremely consequential mistake. That white Aryan
invaders defeated black aboriginal resisters has been taken over by numerous
authors, including many who had no ideological agenda but naïvely lapped it up.
It underpinned a second and similar mistranslation, viz. that the Sanskrit term for
“caste”, varṇa, means “colour” in the sense of “skin colour” In fact, varṇa means
“one in a spectrum”: a colour in the visual spectrum, a class in the social
spectrum, but also a letter in the sound spectrum (hence varṇamāla for
“alphabet”). The whole edifice of the “racial Aryan”, notorious through its Nazi
application but equally popular in British colonial discourse and among its Indian
copycats, was based on nothing better than a simple mistranslation.
The political applications of the racially interpreted AIT include:
• the colonial justification of the rule by the pure Aryans (the British) over
the mixed Aryans (the upper castes) and the black Aboriginals (the lower
castes);
• the perfect illustration of the Nazi scheme of rule by the pure Aryan
(conceived as “Nordic”) race and the degeneracy of the India-based
Aryans through race-mixing with an aboriginal lower race;
• anti-Brahminism (“Brahmins, go back to Central Asia”);
• Dravidianism, claiming that the Aryans had stolen the whole Harappan
area from the Dravidians, who should now at least de-Aryanize and
possibly separate their remaining South India;
• Ambedkarism, claiming that the lower castes were the aboriginals
subdued by theAryan invaders and forced into doing the lowly labour
(even though BR Ambedkar himself had opposed the AIT and had
advocated Sanskrit as India’s link language);
• as well as the British-cum-missionary construction of the Tribals as
Ādivāsīs (“aboriginals”), an ancient-sounding neologism created in the
early 20th century and pregnant with the message that the non-Tribals
were invaders.
• Even now, some marginal Western advocates of a Russian Homeland still
identify PIE with the European race and attribute the successes of the IE
language family to an intrinsic European superiority.

Never in world history has a silly mistranslation been politically more

consequential. The projection of 19th-century colonialism and of the earlier
subjection of the Amerindians by European invaders onto ancient Indian history
has provided an illustration or justification to an array of modern political
ideologies, all of a more or less sinister or destructive character. If Western
scholars shy away from the OIT because of vague rumours associating it with
Hindu Nationalism (though its founding ideologue VD Savarkar was an AIT
believer while another Hindu Nationalist, BG Tilak, even cooked up his own
variation of the AIT locating the Vedic Homeland in the Arctic), they should have
all the more reason to shun their own AIT. After all, the latter has had many more
political ramifications, for a much longer time, in many more countries, and not
as a thought experiment of ivory-tower scholars but from a position of power
whence it could and did (and in the case of India: can and does) inform actual
policies.
So, this mistaken force-fitting of the Rg-Vedic data into the racial paradigm
should stand before us as a permanent warning of what pitfalls to avoid. Clearly,
in the late 19th century, the racial paradigm was so strongly entrenched that it
conditioned the minds of the translators to see racial categories where there
weren’t any. Today, the dominant egalitarian paradigm tends to project the same
categories onto ancient texts and history, though with the opposite valuation: now
the “black aboriginals” count as the good ones, entitled to compensation, the
“white invaders” as the bad ones, summoned to discharge their historical guilt.
This way, the racial interpretation of the AIT serves as a poison injecting divisions
and resentment into Indian society, even today. That is why Indian patriots expect
so much from a refutation of the divisive AIT.
Apart from an erroneous reading of the historical facts, the really
deplorable part of the pro-AIT stance is the projection of modern concerns and
categories onto ancient history. This flawed reading of the past is, again, a
problem afflicting both sides. On the AIT side, we had older European racism
and contemporary Indian identity politics and anti-Brahminism; but on the anti-
AIT side, we have, for example, the idea that Vedic struggles like the Battle of
the Ten Kings pitted good against evil (the continuation of an ancient tendency,
witnessed already in the demonization of “Asura”, meaning the enemy Iranians
who addressed their gods as Asura/Ahura), when in fact it only pitted “us”, the
Vedic tribe, against “them”, the others. As historians know, history is not a
morality tale. What people did in some historical episode was not meant to serve
as a projection-screen for modern political struggles. Rather, “the past is a foreign
country: they do things differently there”.

This book
Amid the fanaticisms and concomitant distortions on both sides of the
debate, we must admire the man who retains his calm and takes the best from
both the traditional and the modern contributions while seeing through and
discarding the deadwood in them. Always level-headed, Shrikant Talageri has
consistently exposed and opposed the various misuses made of the “Aryan”
theories, so far a lesser-known but equally important part of his work.
But in the present book he does his better-known scholarly routine. Ever
vigilant against the distractive tactics of the AIT party, he takes on the new fad of
appeals to genetics to save the AIT. They are trying to bypass the linguistic,
archaeological and literary testimony to the emigrations from India as the key to
the disintegration of PIE, so he endeavours to pin-prick their story.

Dr. Koenraad ELST

New York City, 1 May 2019