EJVS 7-2 (part 3) § 8. Have Words, Will Travel! Talageri's lack of linguistic knowledge gives him a permit to accept whatever pleases his fancy when it comes to etymologies, using these Nirukta- or Kratylos-like fantasies as grounds for his fanciful "historical" deductions. These deductions are legion, especially in the later parts of the book, where unchecked etymological speculation abounds and stands proxy for legitimate historical information. A few examples should suffice. On p. 119, the kIkaTa chieftain pramaganda (see Witzel 1999, 1999a) is identified with the country of magadha in S. Bihar. However, the hymn in question, RV 3.53.14, clearly speaks of kurukSetra and surroundings, some 750 miles to the west. It refers to the performance of the azvamedha (3.53.11) after sudAs' victory in the Ten Kings' Battle (7.18; cf. Witzel 1995), to which this late vizvAmitra hymn of family reminiscences seems to look back. But magadha is not related in any way to pra-maganda, at least not in Sanskrit, as T. tries to insinuate; for Austro-Asiatic possibilities, however, see Witzel (1999a). To equate magadha and -maganda in Sanskrit is folk etymology, as virtually no part of both words can be explained as Indo-Aryan (there is no root mag and no suffix an-da or a-dha, etc., see Witzel 1999). Yet T. draws wide-ranging historical conclusions from his folk etymologizing -- in the best style and tradition, incidentally, of his "scholars" of the 19th century! On p. 113, T. connects the tribal name gandhArI 1.126.6 (correctly: gandhAri, and 1.126.7!) with that of the semidivine beings, the gandharva, and just stops short of producing an etymology. On p. 133, T. produces the folk etymology kazyapa ~ kazmIra (< kazyapa-mIra!) and draws far-reaching conclusions from this: he makes the "kazyapas of Kashmir" (which is not mentioned before pataJjali, 150 BCE!) the original Soma priests who "entered the Rigveda at a late stage" (p.134). In reality, the name kazyapa "tortoise" is inherited from Indo-Iranian (Avestan kasiiapa, cf. the modern Kashaf Rud on the Iran-Afghan border). This goes back to the Central Asian substrate word *kac'yapa (Witzel 1999a, Lubotsky forthc.) and has of course absolutely nothing to do with Kashmir. In addition, Soma, a plant of the high Iranian, Pamir and Himalayan mountains -- especially that of mUja-(vat); cf. Avestan muzha -- originally had a Central Asian name as well (aMzu). Indo-Iranian *sau-ma, with regular development (au > o) to Ved. so-ma and (s > h) to Avestan haoma, Old Persian hauma, is a simple and rather descriptive derivative of su "to press." (Incidentally, the discussion of Soma by T. also contains a lot of misunderstanding of Indo-Iranian mythology, and a page or so of free association on early Vedic history, p. 136.) In the face of all of this, then, how is it possible that "the evidence in the Rigveda thus clearly shows that the Vedic Aryans did not come from the Soma-growing areas bringing the Soma plant and rituals with them" (p.135)? T., as a linguist, does not notice that the name of Soma and its formation precede the Vedic period: they were already Indo-Iranian. The following "etymologies" and "historical' conclusions based on them can only to be described as free association. The name of the pUru tribe is explained by T. as the origin of the word for "man," puruSa (p.147), like manu > manuSa. A glance into Mayrhofer's dictionaries would have supplied T. with a legitimate range of explanations for the multiple Rgvedic and later Middle Indo-Aryan forms of puruSa / pUruSa, etc. Similarly, the name of the Arya he explains as being identical with Irish Eire, while this goes back to the equivalent of Ved. pIvarI "the fat (country)." Or, note the impossible alina = Hellenes (but Gr. h- < *s- !) on the map opposite p. 264. T.'s equation of the names of the paNi and the Germanic gods, the Vanir, is of the same amateurish etymological "quality." Like S.S. Misra's reconstructions (1992), regressions to the early 19th century! These are outmatched in absurdity only by his treatment of comparative Indo-European mythology. The animals of the RV do not fare better under T.'s charge. On pp. 120-136 he deals with words for the elephant, tiger, etc., all of which he declares to be "purely Aryan" (p.122) or to have "a purely Aryan etymology." He gives four words for "elephant," ibha, vAraNa, hastin and sRNi (RV books 1, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10). Of these, ibha has been discussed for more than a hundred years, although T. is not apparently aware of the discussions. Geldner, Mayrhofer and others are not even sure whether one or all cases of ibha actually refer to the elephant. T., however, imagines even "perhaps a temple elephant" in the RV -- another first, "Vedic temples"! His kings, dynasties, and temples look as though they were taken from the popular comic books, Amar Chitra Katha, rather than from the Rgveda. The etymology of ibha is equally uncertain. The connection recently proposed by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, with Greek ele-phas etc., suffers from irregular sound correspondences. What is i-bha in Indo-Aryan, "this + animal"? Both vAraNa and hastin are obvious new formations: vAraNa (mRga), if it refers to the elephant indeed, means "impetuous (wild animal)"; and hast-in clearly is the (animal) characterized (-in) by a hand (hasta). Finally, sRNi refers to a sickle, not an elephant. Does agni have an elephant as his tongue (RV 1.58.4)? Again, we notice that we have to countercheck T.'s data at every step. Further, the word for "peacock," mayUra, has been given various etymologies, from Dravidian to Munda. But neither its root (Skt. mA "to bellow"?) nor its suffix (yU-ra??) nor its word structure (mA > ma? + yU-ra??) is Indo-Aryan, as T. has it. Finally, on p. 298, T. declares the words for rhinoceros, khaDgI [read khaDga! --MW] and [the post-Vedic(!)] gaNDa to be "derived from purely Indo-European roots"! The retroflex sounds alone should have created enough suspicion of substrate origins to check an etymological dictionary before making statements as the ones above (see M. Mayrhofer's etymological dictionaries, 1953-1975, 1986-96). In sum, when T. tells us (p.123) "The combined evidence of river-names, place-names and animal-names gives us a single unanimous verdict: the Vedic Aryans were inhabitants of the interior of India, and their direction of expansion was from the east to the west and northwest," his verdict is based on the erroneous approaches and methodologies, or rather the lack thereof, criticized above. § 9 Westward Ho! Talageri as Patriot The conclusions in the final chapters of the book are based on the sorts of "evidence" critiqued above, and it would be pointless to discuss them at length. Much of them are simply repeated from T.'s 1993 book. However, a few glaring points will be selected for comment. Chapters 5-7 of T.'s book ("The Historical Identity of the Vedic Aryans," "The Indo-Iranian Homeland," and "The Indo-European Homeland," on p.137-331) are the outcome of the preceding chapters 1-4. The results cannot be better than the those of the preceding chapters. In fact, those results only get worse. To begin with, T. describes what he represents as the dominant model of the influx of Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian speaking semi-nomadic tribes into Greater Iran and Greater Panjab in simplistic 19th-century terms as the movement of "a people in South Russia; one branch of these Indo-Europeans, the Indo-Iranians, migrated towards the east and settled down in Central Asia; much later, one branch of these Indo-Iranians, the Indo-Aryans, migrated southeastwards into the northwestern parts of India; and thus commenced the story of the Aryans in India" (p.137). Modern linguistics, archaeology and philology have modified this simplistic picture significantly, especially in the last few decades. We now tend to speak of transfers of ideologies, subsistence systems, language, and spiritual culture from one group to the other (Ehret 1988) as often as movements of people. Such processes do not necessarily involve large-scale migrations, although actual physical movement and intermarriage are not excluded. Various types of military interaction, such as cattle rustling (gaviSTi, RV), raids, actual war-like clashes (saMgrAma), battles (raNa, yudh-) and even the now much-despised incidental invasion of smaller or larger bands, groups or tribes may or may not be part of the picture. Incidentally, since Talageri's preface expressively proposes the Hebrew Bible as an example of a violent invasion scenario, we can point out that such an image is a mirage. Palestine archaeology does not suggest that "invasions" and large-scale destructions took place in the way they are described in the Torah: Biblical scholars, like Indologists, long ago replaced 19th-century invasion theories with acculturation models. All of this, of course, is lost on T., who claims that Western scholars continue to apply what he mistakes as modern biblical models to the case of India. The case of a mythical Yayoi-time "invasion" of horse riding warriors into Japan and their subsequent spread up to Central Japan (Yamato) -- again, so clearly described in the old Japanese Kojiki and Nihon Shiki -- is similar. In all cases an acculturation scenario applies (Witzel 1997). Further comparative studies in historical times, say of the movements of the Germanic or Slavic, Arab or Turkish tribes, would show that many variations of transfer and actual takeover were possible. In any study of early S. Asia the stress must be on a multiplicity of ways in which the transference of the parent Indo-European and Indo-Iranian spiritual cultures (mythology, rituals, poetics, etc.) and material cultures (chariots, horses, etc.) took place to other groups, including those that first appear in the RV as Arya tribes. Nothing of all of this is seen in T. Instead, he simply tells us: "But all this is the version of the scholars. As we have already seen, the scholars are wrong in their fundamental proposition that the Vedic Aryans moved into India from the northwest. They are also wrong in their conclusions about the historical identity of the Vedic Aryans" (p.136). What Talageri would replace this with is his own purANa-inspired "history." On p. 154 we get T.'s Eire "Ireland" deriving from Arya, as "different Indo-European peoples were each, individually and separately, calling themselves by this particular name." However, he restricts the use of the word "Arya" to the pUru tribe, while all other Indo-Aryans are supposed to be the dAsa of the RV. The chapter involves a lot of detailed attributions of tribes, dynasties, and priests that need to be tediously checked against legitimate evidence item by item, like every other detail in the book. The whole is a house of cards, being based on the skewed analysis of the RV analyzed above. When T. comes to the home of the Indo-Iranians, he repeats: "the identification of Central Asia as the location of this common Indo-Iranian habitat and of South Russia as the location of this common Indo-European habitat are purely arbitrary hypotheses with absolutely no basis in archaeology or in written records." In voicing this typically strong-worded opinion, T. does not take into account the evidence of the introduction into Proto-Indo-Iranian ritual of Soma, of its actual physical location in the Central Asian high mountains, or of its distribution among the Saka (haumavarga), the Avestan Iranians, and the Old Persians as well as the Rgvedic tribes (Staal, forthc.). Also ignored are the copious data of a common Indo-Iranian language, mythology, ritual, etc., which have recently been supplemented by the discovery of a common Central Asian linguistic substrate both in Old Indo-Aryan and in Old Iranian (Witzel 1999a, Lubotsky forthc.). Sometimes, the same words can be found twice in slightly different forms, which points to a persistent local C. Asian substrate -- not, as T.'s theory would require, just a local Panjab one (for details see Witzel 1999a, 2000, forthc.). The evidence suggests that various Indo-Iranian tribes entered a non-Indo-European speaking area, Bactria-Margiana, and brought new local loan words, taken over there, with them into Iran and the Greater Panjab. Though T. uses Avestan texts in translation (p.178 sqq.), his use of them is far from sophisticated. Here too, his lack of linguistic training shows. We find the same kind of easy folk etymologies criticized above. The Vedic aGgiras thus become Avestan angra (correctly Avest. aGra, Old Avest. angra "hostile" -- which would correspond to Ved. *asra!). And so on. T. also discusses the famous list of sixteen Iranian countries of the vIdEvdAd, closely following G. Gnoli's interpretations (Gnoli 1980). However, these are flawed in many of their details (Witzel 2000), and so is T.'s conclusion (p. 199) that "the Iranians ultimately originated either in southern Afghanistan itself or in areas further east.... analysis and description of Avestan geography clearly suggest that the antecedents of the Iranians lie further east..." -- that is, in India, of course! T. opts for the Panjab, as hapta h@Ndu is mentioned in the vIdEvdAd (actually, as the second least desirable of sixteen countries, since it is "too hot" for comfort!). Like Gnoli, he has not understood the structure of the vIdEvdAd list. T. selects, out of the five major RV tribes, the anu as the Iranians living in the Panjab side-by-side with their more eastern neighbors, the Indo-Aryans: "the Punjab (saptasindhu or hapta-h@ndu) was not a homeland of the Vedic Aryans, but was a homeland of the Iranians" (p. 203). But Iranian has none of the local Panjab and U.P. loanwords that are found in Vedic, which means that the Old Iranian languages just cannot come from the Panjab (Witzel 1999a, forthc. EJVS 7-3). The discussion of the Iranians leads T. to that of the Ten Kings Battle, in which the Anu (his Iranians) took part. It is here that the transition from fantastic etymologies to fantastic "history" most fully takes shape. Of the participants in the battle, T. identifies the pRthu with the Parthians (attested only much later in Iranian history!); the parzu with the Persians (although the word is the predecessor of Pashtu, and the parzu are the neighbors of the gandhAri and arATTa; see Witzel 1980, 1997); the paktha with the Pakthoons (although this is just a modern dialect form of Pashtu, and paktha is, per K. Hoffmann, the ordinal number "fifth"); the bhalAnas with the Baluchis (although these Western Iranian tribes appear in present Baluchistan only about a thousand years ago!); the zivas with the Khivas (by which he understands the 19th c. Kingdom of Khiva in Uzbekistan!); and the viSANins, identified, for no good reason at all, with the "Pishacas (Dards)." As if these identifications were not ridiculous enough, he goes on with even more fanciful etymological links with even more distant peoples: The RV bhRgus are the Phrygians (in modern NW Turkey!); the zimyu are the "Sarmatians (Avesta sairimas)"; and the alinas are the Alans (in the Central Caucasus)! In the same vein, he turns a poet, kavaSa, into the King of the anu -- whom he further identifies with the famous Avestan figure kavi kavAta (correctly, kauui kauuAta) and the purANic kekaya/kaikaya! Give Talageri one consonant, and he will identify. How did Voltaire reportedly put it? "Consonants count little, vowels nothing." Talageri then (p. 208 sqq.) lets the anu migrate from the Panjab and Kashmir (= airiian@m vaEjah, actually Central Afghanistan, Witzel 2000) to Iran and Central Asia. In passing, he identifies the Iranian yima's mythical underground vara fortress with RV "vara A pRthivyA" (p.210), although the Old Iranian vara myth has close links with the corresponding Nuristani tales and the Rgvedic Vala myth. In sum, Talageri thinks that "the records of 'the later Vedic period' show that the Vedic Aryans and the Iranians were located in an area stretching from (and including) Uttar Pradesh in the east to (and including) southern and eastern Afghanistan in the west" (p.229). He laments that "the scholars, however, are not accustomed to deriving conclusions from facts; it is their practice to arrive at conclusions beforehand (the conclusion, in this particular case, being based on an extraneous, and highly debatable, linguistic theory about the location of the original Indo-European homeland), and to twist or ignore all facts which fail to lead to this predetermined conclusion." Of course, T. (1993, 2000) himself does nothing of this kind! The last 100-page chapter on the Indo-Europeans (p.232-331), mostly repeated from his 1993 book, has even stranger tales to tell. His motto appears to be: The further from Mother India, the more fantastic things become. In brief, according to T., one of the five major tribes of the RV, the Druhyu, made it all the way into Europe: they constitute all other Indo-European peoples. He sums up his work in his inimitable style: The "case for an Indian homeland is so strong," he tells us, "and the case for a non-Indian homeland so weak, that, in spite of any number of academic dictators decreeing 'under pain of (academic) death' that the Indian homeland theory be abandoned without serious examination, or with only perfunctory and determinedly skeptical examination, the academic world will ultimately be compelled, nevertheless, to accept the fact that the Indo-European family of languages originated in India" (p. 331). (For a brief refutation of this Hindutva "pet idea," see Hock 1999 and Witzel forthc.) If T. wants to convince "the scholars" of his ideas, he has to be a trifle more rigorous than he is in this book. His book may have convinced the convinced, and he may even have convinced a large(?) section of the present generation of Indian scholars (cf. Bryant 1999) and of the Indian population inside and outside the country ("anti-Nehruvian", "anti-Marxist" and "pro-Hindutva", or whatever they may call themselves these days), but 10-20 years from now, all these views will be found in the dustbin of history. That is, unless the present trend continues of official support for such ideas, and a whole generation of school children is brought up on this unsavory nationalistic brew -- which continues with proposed Ph.D. programs in "Scientific Astrology." *** This brings me to T.'s underlying political agenda. I have intentionally not discussed it so far, but have preferred to let his "facts" speak for themselves. Talageri's "scholarly" agenda is laid out clearly in both in his 1993 and 2000 books. "In our earlier book, we had taken up the subject of the Aryan invasion theory in all its aspects, and conclusively established that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages. However, this second book has become imperative for various reasons: 1. The literary evidence for our conclusion in our earlier book was based primarily on purANic sources. ... the Rigveda is the only valid source for the period... this detailed analysis of the Rigveda emphatically confirms our theory... the actual data in the Rigveda shows that they [the Vedic Aryans] were in fact inhabitants of the area to the east of the Punjab, traditionally known as AryAvarta. The Punjab was only the western peripheral area of their activity. ... This book is, therefore, an answer to criticism: it shows that a detailed analysis of the Rigveda, far from weakening our theory, only makes it invincible." (p. xvii sq.). In sum, T. is an amateur with an obvious agenda as well as a patently absurd thesis, expressed in his 1993 book, that he desperately needs to support. According to T., the RV is the oldest Indo-European text and contains the oldest Indo-European mythology. It was brought westwards by the Indo-Europeans who moved from the Gangetic Motherland out of India in several bands, the last of which where the Iranians. Much of T.'s two books merely restate, with the addition of Epic-purANic legends, what S.S. Misra (1992) and many others before him had expressed. Talageri's work, like so much "revisionist" historical writing today, is nothing more than a cottage-industry exploitation of a current political trend. The over-confident, indeed "invincible," conclusions that T. draws concerning the Westward drift of Vedic tribes are familiar Hindutva fantasies. T.'s scenario is, of course, not one suggested either by linguistics nor archaeology nor any other of the historical sciences. Talageri pretends to know the direction, time frame, and sequence of these imagined Indo-European emigrations from the subcontinent -- all drawn from a dated Victorian translation of a text that T. himself is incapable of reading in the original. Curiously, in speaking of his imagined migrations into Europe from the subcontinent, he again mixes Rgvedic information with purANic data. The emigrants to Europe are given the Rgvedic name of druhyu, which according to his reading of the purANas were expelled from India: "The purANas (vAyu 99.11-12; brahmANDa III.74.11-12; matsya 48.9; viSNu IV.17.5; bhAgavata IX.23.15-16) record: pracetasaH putra-zatam rAjAnAH sarva eva te, mleccha-rASTrAdhipAH sarve hyudIcIm dizam AzritAH" (p. 260). Never mind that udIcI diz "the Northern direction, the north" usually refers just to the Northwest of the subcontinent (cf. AB, pANini, etc.), not to Iran or Europe. Forget too that the criticism of the Northwest, especially the Panjab, is made from the point-of-view of the post-Rgvedic orthoprax kuru-paJcAla center, and is prevalent already in ZB, pataJjali and Mbh. -- and not only in the medieval purANas. Based on the purANic statement quoted above -- expressed in the mid to late first millennium C.E.(!) -- T. constructs a detailed scenario of an invasion(!) of Europe, three thousand years earlier, by the druhyu. (This word means, literally, "the ones who seek to cheat." Non-linguist as he is, T. missed a great chance for a "socio-ethnic" study based on an etymology!) Talageri's historical fantasy is, not unexpectedly, the exact reversal of the century-old theory of an Aryan immigration into the subcontinent. Just as some Indian writers from the late colonial period found Indian "colonies" all over South-East Asia (again neglecting the various modes of cultural transfer!), the present generation finds Indians and Indian civilization all over the "West" (and occasionally at the root of Chinese civilization as well). Post-traumatic stress and therapeutic writing, half a century after decolonialization? Westward ho! *** eke vadanti, vitathaM tv evAhaM bravImIti ha smAha zrIkaNThaH... I would be remiss if I failed to mention at this point the bellicose tone of Talageri's own book. The study is written throughout in a tone of "rightful outrage" against 19th-century colonialism, as though that were still an active force today. It shows, on every page, apocalyptic certainty and self-assured conviction -- as though the world had been saved by the "invincible" case he was making of an Indian home of all Indo-Europeans. Throughout T. expresses himself in a familiar scholastic pANDita style. Every minor flaw in the wording of an "opponent" is leapt on -- hairsplitting and ignoring inconvenient arguments -- to "win" the case. In short, "winning" minor arguments appear to be more important for him than getting at the truth underlying it. All this detracts from his announced undertaking, which supposedly involves a dispassionate attempt to uncover the history encapsulated in the RV's dominant ritualistic poetry. But a dispassionate search for truth is hardly part of Talageri's agenda. More often than not, T.'s polemics border on the farcical. He accuses the Iranist Skjaervo of mentioning the "Seven Rivers" of the vIdEvdAd but then of "pointedly avoid[ing the] mentioning anywhere that this refers to the Punjab ... since it runs counter to the Theory" (p.184). T. forgets the fact, mentioned later (p.230), that Skjaervo's teacher Humbach holds a different opinion about the location of the Seven Rivers (upper Oxus). Skjaervo apparently did not mention this simply because the work used by T. was a brief summary (perhaps also as to not commit gurunindA?). Instead of accepting the obvious, however, T. discovers conspiracy theories everywhere. T.'s case of India as an "original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages" (p. 232 sqq.) often reads like a parody of the work of "the scholars." By "the scholars," as suggested earlier, he primarily has in mind "Western scholars" -- as if a division into "Indian" and "Western" is possible in the 21st century! He writes, in his typical polemical fashion: "The scholars, however, are not accustomed to deriving conclusions from facts; it is their practice to arrive at conclusions beforehand" (p. 229). In his biased view, "the scholars" are "staunch followers" of the (so-called Aryan Invasion) Theory who occasionally "admit" to certain facts -- that is when they honestly mention certain facts that may allow for other interpretations, or that may even speak against their own proposal or theory. T.'s polemics against those who do not automatically treasure the "hoary" traditions that he imagines for ancient India come in for special scorn. An enumeration of such passages would fill many pages. Page after page we find ranting against "(Western) scholars" -- a term clearly built on the present Indian (right wing) denouncement of the "eminent historians" of Delhi. Occasionally, however, T. lapses into "a bored yawn" (p.344). Some disagreeing Indian scholars, even K.D. Sethna, otherwise called "the bhISma pitAmahA of Indian historians," i.e. of the present wave of revisionist writers, are not spared either (p. 423). And note, "There is even an extreme lunatic fringe ... A political "scholar," Rajesh Kochhar, as part of a concerted campaign... He does this under cover ... This is the level to which "scholarship" can stoop, stumble and fall" (p. 96-97). Talageri has reserved special invective for me (p.425-476, to which criticism I will come back later) as I had dared, in 1995, to denounce, in passing, his 1993 book as nationalistic. Indeed, it is a chauvinistic fantasy, on the same lines as the second part of the book under review here. Read, e.g., this characterization of my work (my italics, p.121): "a modern Western scholar, a staunch and even fanatical supporter of the Aryan invasion theory... tries generally to twist and distort the information in the Rigveda..." . And so on and so forth. All of these less-than-desirable traits further detract from a supposedly dispassionate study of the invaluable historical evidence locked away in the RV. T. may actually have thought he was setting out to find the truth, but due to his obvious ideological leanings and his lack of expertise in many fields, he set himself up to find precisely what he wanted most to find: evidence of an Indian homeland for all Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, and RV tribes. That vision may be psychologically and even spiritually satisfying for some, as visions of the sort found in The Bible was Right After All (Keller 1956) might be for some "Westerners." However, both visions remain fantasies. *** While it is always justified to look again at the sources and begin to re-evaluate history, even of a remote period as that of the Veda, the present revisionist Hindutva wave has other aims in mind. An obvious goal is to display the "hoariness" and uniqueness of ancient-most Indian culture and its imagined importance for the rest of the world. Against such a background, no cultural innovation and certainly no trickling in, immigration or "invasion" from the outside is allowed. Everything created by "Indian" civilization for the past 9000 years or so, beginning with the early agriculturists of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan(!), has been local and no (major) influences from the outside can be tolerated. This, of course, would make it the oldest tradition on the planet: The RV, to recall Talageri's words, "is the oldest and hoariest religious text of the oldest living religion in the world today: Hinduism." Underlying these claims is the familiar Hindutva agenda that suggests that all non-Hindus are ultimately "foreign" peoples in India, and a blot on the body politic. One culture (Vedic), one language (Sanskrit), one people: bhArata ueber alles! And, in spite of certain well-attested cultural influences (e.g. in astronomy!), of repeated immigrations and of actual invasions -- from the Old Persians and Greeks to the Huns, Turks and Moghuls and the interaction and acculturation that all such political developments brought with them. In other words, history is written with an ulterior motive in mind, that of "nation building." Facts count little, dates nothing! The sources of the revisionist writing of history and of the present Hindutva boom generally go back to Dayanand Sarasvati, Shri Aurobindo and other (religious) leaders of the 19th century, but over the past ten to twenty years, the range and number of such productions has risen sharply. Publishing companies such as Voice of India or Aditya Prakashan specialize in such books, and more traditional publishers, for whatever reasons, chime in. There exists a closely knit, self-adulatory group now, members of whom often write conjointly and/or copy from each other. An incomplete but typical list would include: Choudhury 1993, Elst 1999, Danino 1996, Feuerstein, Kak, and Frawley 1995, Frawley 1994, Kak 1994, Klostermaier (in Rajaram and Frawley 1997), Misra 1992, Rajaram 1993, 1995, Rajaram and Frawley 1995, 1997, Rajaram and Jha 2000, Sethna 1980, 1981, 1989, 1992, Talageri 1993, 2000. Others fill the Internet with statements ranging from half-way scholarly opinions to inane accusations and outright slander. A cultural war is in full swing. The various Hindutva-inspired proposals for a new history of ancient-most India do not present a cogent picture (see next issue of EJVS). They neglect the linguistic evidence, and they run into the serious chronological and geographical difficulties described above. They distort the textual evidence of the RV to make it appear to jive with Harappan town civilization with its stratified society and international maritime trade. They rewrite the literary history of the Veda to fit in improbable dates for the composition of most of its texts. They like to maintain an Indian homeland for Indo-Europeans, despite the fact that early South Asian loan words are entirely missing in all other Indo-European languages but are copious in (Rg)Vedic. In sum, in spite of his scholarly pretensions, Talageri remains an amateur historian with an obvious political and cultural agenda and a patently absurd thesis. As ancient history, his thesis is a failure; as a political attack on "Western" scholarship, it does not fare better. T.'s motives are revealed in this quote in his preface from Vivekananda: "the more the Indians study their past, the more glorious will be their future, and whoever tries to bring the past to the door of everyone is a benefactor of the nation." -- Foremost among these "benefactors," we find, "being the Voice of India family of scholars who will ever remain the intellectual focal point for exercises in rejuvenation of the innermost spirit of India" (p. xxii). Such "benefactors" include, of course, Talageri (1993) himself, who also figures in the ultra-nationalistic website HVK (Hindu Vivek Kendra), http://www.hvk.org/ -- which is well worth a glance. Wehret den Anfaengen! §10 Marching Backwards into History It has become abundantly clear by now that T.'s book is more "historical fantasy" than "historical analysis." As such, wide acceptance of its ideas would hamper the study of the RV and of the oldest Indian history, at least in the Indian popular mind, for a long time to come. It certainly does not do what he pretends to do at the start: to exclusively follow the evidence of the RV wherever it goes. This was my own course of action when I wrote the paper that initially triggered Talageri's polemics (Witzel 1995). As I emphasized then, reconstruction of the historical data locked in the RV demands the systematic collection and analysis of many types of data scattered in the text. That summary paper was a first attempt to give a comprehensive view of the historical conditions underlying the RV. In it I outlined some of the methodological principles underlying such a reconstruction. Some further principles have been added since, and are noted below. A careful comparison of T.'s parameters will show that he surreptitiously took many cues from my 1995 paper and adopted something crudely approximating the methods suggested then. But -- angry as he was at me for criticizing, in passing, his 1993 book, -- he never clearly says so in the first part of his new book. On the contrary, in the very first sentence of his book he claims: "I have little to acknowledge to anyone (except, ... the modern scholars responsible for fundamental books on the Rigveda, such as Ralph T.H. Griffith and Vizvabandhu...), since this section is almost entirely a product of my study." Surprisingly then, in the second part of his book, T. initially praises my approach (p. 434 sqq.), before he enters into an extended vociferous, and sometimes abusive, critique, based as it is on the wrong use of methodologies, as discussed above. The many methodological and factual absurdities in Talageri's book are obvious now. They can be easily confirmed by any scholar who bothers to identify the late- and post-Vedic origins of T.'s data. But all this will not be so obvious to less specialized readers, including the Indian lay persons constituting Talageri's main audience. That is why we cannot let books like T.'s slide by, as Indologists tended to do with similarly absurd works produced a few decades ago. The Rajaram's, Frawley's, and Talageri's of today, unlike most of their predecessors, are driven by a religious/political agenda that could poison serious historical discussions for decades to come. The potential effects on contemporary Indian society of that agenda evoke even worse premonitions and fears. A better understanding of the history of the Rgvedic period is only possible when all the paths described elsewhere (e.g., Witzel 1995) have been diligently pursued. The path is a long one, but promising early results have already come in, confirmed as well by independent research -- e.g., by Th. Proferes (1999) and J.R. Gardner (1998). *** In the future, what we really have to do is to apply the lessons learned over the past few centuries concerning the interpretation of texts in a large variety of cultures. We must learn the lessons of philology, which might be defined as "the study of civilization based on its oral and written texts." In doing so we have to be aware, as I stressed in 1995 (another point overlooked by Talageri), of our own individual biases or historical conditioning, whether reflecting a "Western," Indian, or other context. It is important, in the case of the RV, that we free ourselves of the "confident reliance on just a few translated Vedic texts and the unwarranted reliance on [the much later] Epic and purANic texts... which also by their very nature (as bardic compositions) cannot correctly reflect the historical facts of a period thousand(s) of years earlier" (Witzel 1995). All this, of course, is precisely what Talageri never manages to do. The parameters to be used in an approach to Rgvedic history were clearly spelled out in my 1995 paper. After listing the problems in approaching this archaic poetical text and its ritualistic and mythological background, I pointed out the several historical layers, the geographical and tribal divisions, and the great mobility of the authors. I also added a list of study parameters -- many if not all of which are "echoed" (if only in a distorted way) in T.'s initial chapters some five years later! How does the saying have it? "Plagiarism is the best form of flattery"? I quote from my 1995 paper (307 sq.), which detailed these parameters: "A) The structure of the RV itself, with its relative order of hymns ... B) The relationship of the various tribes and clans to the books of the RV ... C) The authors of the hymns: deduced from occasional identification of themselves, from the patterns of refrains which act as 'family seals', and from the traditional attribution of hymns to certain authors in the anukramaNI. D) Geographical features, especially rivers and mountains. E) This information can then be combined in a grid of places, poets and tribes. F) Finally, this grid can be combined with a chronological grid established on the strength of a few pedigrees of chiefs and poets available from the hymns." I continued that "to all this may be added data from linguistic investigations, as well as cultural data from the text on religion, ritual, material culture, local customs, etc...." in order to "construct a multiaxial grid with variables of time, space and social situation. Once that grid is plotted ... we may begin the writing of Rgvedic history." This still is where we stand now, due to the failure of T.'s book, and my final clause still applies as well: "To my knowledge this has never been attempted in detail; nor is it the principal aim of this paper: rather, I shall try to lay the essential groundwork for the undertaking of this exercise and relate some initial results in conclusion." I have since collected more data in all these areas as well as in some others (meters, substrate words and linguistic influence, grammatical innovations such as the absolutive, dialect forms, archaisms, etc.). The investigation is ongoing and will take time. Writing criticisms, such as the present and similar ones, represents a tedious, if necessary detraction from the main goal. Modern computer programs, though, help in organizing and accessing such multi-axial data as described above (see J.R. Gardner, EJVS 6, 2000). Only a full investigation involving not just poets, chieftains ("kings") and geography but also many other parameters will lead us to a fuller picture of the RV, its structure, time frame and geographical settings. Until then, we only have some incidental investigations, many of them misleading (Bhargava 1971, Chauhan 1985, and of course, T.). My mention of these writers does not mean that others not discussed here are infallible. I have a few problems with R. Kochhar's analysis (1999), and I certainly do not exclude my own past work from criticism. Apart from many printing mistakes in my 1995 paper (and its companion piece from the same volume; see my comments, 1997: 262), I have also since changed my opinion, based on new evidence, about the relative date of the bulk of RV 2, which I would now include in the mid-level texts. As I have indicated elsewhere, the 1995 papers were first drafts draft (stringently summarized and edited by G. Erdosy), based on many still unpublished notes; these papers will be reprinted in the future in corrected versions. A full treatment, based on some two dozen parameters, would probably differ in details, though I do not expect it, so far, to differ from the main outlines given in my 1995 papers. To repeat it one last time: once the text-internal parameters, especially those of RV structure, have been studied, the rest should follows fairly easily -- that is as easily as this difficult, archaic, and highly poetical text will allow us. Solid reconstruction of the history hidden in the RV demands linguistic rigor, independence from purANa-like world views, and above all a kind of political integrity. Serious attempts to understand ancient Indian history are badly diverted by the intellectual detours we are sent on by books like Talageri's. The facts should be allowed to speak for themselves and to lead us -- not a pre-enlightenment agenda. *** Reconstruction of the historical world of the RV is being carried out individually and by a loose group of international scholars who share their data and the electronic tools that help us access them. Those who are interested in this kind of collaborative approach are welcome to approach the present author. Even "ideology" must not be a hindrance. I recall with pleasure my meetings at Hoshiarpur with the late Acharya Vishva Bandhu, a "staunch supporter" of the Arya Samaj, whose great 16-volume Vedic Word Concordance is an excellent tool for research, created in the age of pencil, paper and type setting. It also is largely free of religious and traditional bias. This shows that real cooperation is possible. It is possible for us to work together in interpreting Vedic texts objectively, without imposing on them extraneous ideas. We may hope that the increasing spread of electronic media may allow more and more scholars and lay persons to share in this discovery and to check for themselves where grand claims are made and tall tales are told. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bhargava, P.L. India in the Vedic Age: A History of Expansion in India. Lucknow: Upper India Publishing House 1971 Bokonyi, S. Horse Remains from the Prehistoric Site of Surkodata, Kutch, late 3rd Millennium B.C. 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Proceedings of the conference on the Indus civilization, Madison 1998. =============================================================================== COLOPHON Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies ============================ Editor-in-Chief: Michael Witzel, Harvard University Managing Editor: Enrica Garzilli, University of Perugia Assistant Editor: Makoto Fushimi, Harvard University Technical Assistance: Ludovico Magnocavallo, Milano Editorial Board: Madhav Deshpande University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Harry Falk Freie Universitaet Berlin Yasuke Ikari Kyoto University Boris Oguibenine University of Strasbourg Asko Parpola University of Helsinki -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- email: ejvs-list@shore.net witzel@fas.harvard.edu http://www.nautilus.shore.net/~india/ejvs European mirror: http://www.asiatica.org or http://www.asiatica.org/publications/ejvs/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (©) COPYRIGHT NOTICE ISSN 1084-7561 The Materials in this journal are copyrighted. ONE COPY OF THE ARTICLES AND REVIEWS MAY BE MADE FOR PRIVATE STUDY ONLY. ALL COPIES MADE FOR WHATEVER PURPOSE MUST INCLUDE THIS COPYRIGHT NOTICE. THE TEXTS MAY NOT BE MODIFIED IN ANY WAY NOR MAY THEY BE REPRODUCED IN ELECTRONIC OR OTHER FORMAT WITHOUT THE WRITTEN PERMISSION OF THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF. EJVS-LIST@shore.net THE ABOVE MATERIALS WERE FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES. ALL INQUIRIES ARE TO BE SENT TO THE EDITORS. -- iti parisamaaptam -- ============================================================================= ======================================================== Michael Witzel Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138, USA ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages) home page: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies: http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs