Explaining discontinuities in culture

[Guest guest]

Tibetan culture was dramatically changed by Padmasambhava and a very small

number of knowledge carriers from India to Tibet. In the case of China also,

a small number of Indian monks going there and a small number of Chinese

students coming to India were able to bring about a major transformation. In

neither of these instances was there an invasion or migration - in other

words, these intellectual transformations were not correlated to a large

transfer of genetic material from one population to another. Yet, if the

history were lost, archeologists and linguists might be postulating that

such discontinuity of culture could only be explained by a flow of human

beings in large numbers. Ravi Shanker moved Indian music into dozens of

American academies and concert halls, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made meditation

a household word with numerous spin-off movements, etc - none of these

involved large numbers of humans to do a transfer of knowledge.

 

(There could even have been a hypothetical scenario in which someone similar

to Padmasambhava moved a complex knowledge system in one direction while

population was moving in the other, because the two are independent.)

 

In the Middle East, the cultural discontinuity brought about by the Prophet

Mohammed was a major one, but entirely internal - there were no outsiders

from the region responsible at all. Had there been no surviving history,

would linguists and archeologists have been able to imagine such profound

cultural changes taking place entirely as internal revolutions from within

the society?

 

In the case of Jesus, the invasion of Romans was into the Middle East, and

yet the complex new knowledge system of Christianity moved out into the

Roman Empire.

 

Given these examples, it amazes me that when there is discontinuity in

India, scholars jump hastily to look for some external agency. As Inden has

explained, it is presumed that India lacked agency and was stuck in a frozen

state except for foreign intrusions to shake it up. So when Dr. Mughal from

Pakistan explained at the Harvard Roundtable (which by the way, was an

outstanding affair), that the later Harappan period had a discontinuity from

earlier periods, he DEMONSTRATED that there was also continuity underneath

at the same time. He disagreed with theories postulating external

intervention, and has felt that internal forces of radical transformation

deserve consideration. Are Harappans to be denied agency of self

transformation?

 

Why must it be that other societies can and do transform internally, but

that in the case of India this is deemed untenable as a hypothesis? This

mentality runs deep. Is this why many people find it hard to believe when

told of India's contributions to world civilization, as that would run

counter to this model they are stuck in? It would raise questions of

legitimacy of the religious 'saving' mission, and of the secular models of

westernization being spread.

 

By the way, I don't believe in any OIT either. The facts seem to fit no

simplistic model currently on the table by anyone.

 

Indology must expand to also include the study of Traditional Knowledge

Systems - their emergence, movement, etc. This makes it a more complex

field. But these expansions of Indology also challenge the tight control

mentality over its boundaries, with tall walls and a few fierce chowkidars

manning the gates. Maybe, the gates should be opened and the walls made

semi-permeable. It would put the chowkidars out of work, but expand the

field and create plenty of new and more exciting work.

 

Rajiv Malhotra

The Infinity Foundation

53 White Oak Drive

Princeton, NJ 08540

www.infinityfoundation.com

Attachment: (application/ms-tnef) winmail.dat [not stored]

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, "Rajiv Malhotra" <rajiv.malhotra@a...> wrote:

> Tibetan culture was dramatically changed by Padmasambhava and a very

>small number of knowledge carriers from India to Tibet. In the case

>of China also, a small number of Indian monks going there and a small

>number of Chinese students coming to India were able to bring about

>a major transformation. In neither of these instances was there an

>invasion or migration - in other words, these intellectual

>transformations were not correlated to a large

> transfer of genetic material from one population to another. Yet,

>if the history were lost, archeologists and linguists might be

>postulating that such discontinuity of culture could only be

>explained by a flow of human beings in large numbers. Ravi Shanker

>moved Indian music into dozens of American academies and concert

halls,

>Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made meditation a household word with numerous

>spin-off movements, etc - none of these

> involved large numbers of humans to do a transfer of knowledge.

[...]

> By the way, I don't believe in any OIT either. The facts seem to

>fit no simplistic model currently on the table by anyone.

 

Dear Dr. Malhotra,

 

The process of Mahesh Yogi showing TM flight thru' yoga, and

Ravishankar's introduction of Indian music to the West is quite

different, the language shift that happened when the Aryan tribes

moved into India cannot be compared with these. We cannot avoid a

small percentage (5%? 10%?) of Aryans moving into India after the IVC

declined, and the imposition of the varNa scheme.

 

Incidentally, does the TKS systems include Dravidologists from reputed

universities from India and the West? Very detailed explanations of

trees, plants, flowers - for 100s of them can be found in 2000+ years

old sangam poetry. In fact, sangam poetry is nothing else except

Nature. When the bhakti tradition starts in Shaivism and Srivashnavism

that sweeps across entire India, the stalavrikshams of each shaiva and

vaishnava temples are told elaborately in the massive corpus of Tamil

bhakti poems.

 

I don't believe upper caste Indians are Europeans becuase geneticists

cannot account for the acculturation takingplace several centuries

ago? What if say a group learnt Sanskrit and claimed they are Brahmins

in ancient India?

 

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-shl/WA.EXE?A2=ind9802&L=indology&P=R1089

3

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-shl/WA.EXE?A2=ind9802&L=indology&P=R2115

4

 

When TKS study gains strength, the importance of Classical Tamil texts

will become readily apparent.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

-------------------------

 

------------------------------

A) Language Change:

*******************

 

When the incoming Indo-Aryans have attained sufficient political

power and population numbers, the existing people abandoned and/or

were made to abandon their native language (some form of Dravidian?)

and started to use Indo-Aryan tongues. Is this formulation written by

anyone? Much like how Spanish in Mexico or Portugese in Brazil spread

as a "prestige" language, as suggested by Dr. Fosse. I searched

academic databases, could come up with interesting, but did not see

anything for Indic situation. Is this because scarce written data from

Dravidian side exists, to a lesser extent from Indo-Aryan.

 

William Labov, On the mechanism of linguistic change, NY

J. P. Lantolf, Linguistic change as a socio-cultural phenomenon, PhD

P. S. Ureland, Prehistoric bilingualism and pidginization as forces

of Linguistic change, J. IE studies, 7, 77-104, 1979

L. M. Torres, Linguistic change in a Language contact situation: A

cross-generational study, PhD, 1988

etc.,

 

 

**********************************************************************

***

 

B) Place Names:

***************

 

The vast databank of Indian settlement names is under-researched.

Lot more work can be done. For example, I give a section of an old

posting in Indology. Old names from inscriptions should be special, in

this regard.

 

MICHIGAN-LAUSANNE INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR

"ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS IN SOUTH ASIA :

EVIDENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND IDEOLOGY"

 

October 25-27, 1996

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

 

DRAVIDIAN PLACE NAMES IN MAHARASHTRA

 

F. C. Southworth (University of Pennsylvania)

 

In their book _The_Rise_of_Civilization_in_India_and_Pakistan_

(1982), the Allchins state that there is a substratum of Dravidian

place names in Maharashtra. This statement, based probably on the

ideas of H. D. Sankalia, has never been properly investigated.

Fortunately there exist two lists of Maharashtrian village names which

provide the data for such a study. My investigation of these names

turned up a number of candidates for Dravidian origin among the

suffixes of Marathi place names. Among these suffixes, the most

promising is -vali/oli, both because of its high frequency and because

its Dravidian origin is not questioned (< Drav. paLLi 'hamlet, camp,

place to lie down' < paT- 'lie,fall').

 

A study of the spatial distribution of village names with the suffix

-vali/oli shows 90% or more of them concentrated in the coastal

region known as Konkan. In the remainder of the Marahi-speaking area,

the greatest concentration is in the southern part of the Desh, i.e.

in the districts of Kolhapur and Solapur. A number of other suffixes

of probable Dravidian origin are also found in these areas, though

they are of lower frequency of occurrence. Thus these suffixes of

Dravidian origin are in a continuous distribution with the Dravidian

paLLi, as well as with similar suffixes in the state of Gujarat

(discussed in Sankalia's doctoral thesis, which is based on early

inscriptions in Gujarat). Thus there can be little doubt that these

areas were previously inhabited by speakers of some Dravidian

language(s).

 

>The paper will also discuss reflexes of Dravidian paLLi in place

names in Sindh and Pakistani Panjab, where the evidence is somewhat

less clear.

--

 

Satyanarayana Dasa, Dravidian in North Indian toponymy, Varanasi,

1987

V. Khaire, Dravida Maharashtra, 1977

K. Nachimuthu (editor), Perspectives in place names,

1987, Trivandrum has a paper by

Lalitha Prabhu on Palli and its variants in Central India.

(I don't know whether Prof. F. C. Southworth has seen this one)

Parso Gidvani has written on Sindhi names from Dravidian.

Krishnapada Goswami, Place names of Bengal, 1984

H. D. Sankalia, Prehistory of India, 1977

H. D. Sankalia, The prehistory and protohistory of India and

Pakistan,

N. Lahovary, Dravidian origins and the West, 1963

G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, Bombay, 1979

For years, F. C. Southworth has written on related topics:

a) The reconstruction of Prehistoric South Asian language contact,

in E. H. Bendix(ed.), The uses of linguistics, p. 207-234, NY 1990

b) Dravidian and Indo-European: The neglected hypothesis,

Int. J. Dravidian linguistics, 11, 1, p.1-21, 1982

c) Lexical evidence for early contacts between Indo-Aryan and

Dravidian,

in Aryan & Non-Aryan in India, UMich. 1979

d) F. C. Southworth, Ancient economic plants of South Asia:

Linguistic archaeology and early agriculture.

in Language and Culture: Studies in honor of E.C. Polome,

p. 649-648, 1988

e) Linguistic masks for power: some relationships between semantic

and

social

change.

Anthropological linguistics, 16, p. 177-191

f) Linguistic stratigraphy of North India, IJDL, 3, 2, 1974

 

C) Substratum theory:

*****************

 

von Munkwitz-Smith, Jefrrey C.

Substratum influence in Indo-Aryan grammar,

PhD thesis, 1995, U. Minnesota

 

O. Szemerenyi, Structuralism and substratum:Indo-Europeans and Aryans

in the Ancient Near East, Lingua 13, 1-29, 1964

 

Jaroslav Vacek, The non-IE linguistic substratum in the IE

languages of India, with reference to the Ashokan inscriptions.

1969

 

C. A. Winters, The Dravidian and Manding substratum in Tokharian,

Central Asiatic Jl., 1988, v.32, 1-2, p. 131-

 

D) Retroflexion in Sanskrit:

********************************

 

M. B. Emeneau in Collected papers says:

"The fact, however, that the later in Indo-Aryan linguistic history

we go, the greater is the incidence of retroflex constants and the

further fact that most of the Dravidian languages and the

proto-Dravidian itself have this type of consonants in abundance, can

only lead to the conclusion that the later Indo-Aryan developments are

due to a borrowing of indigenous speech habits through bilingualism,

and to the well-grounded suspicion that even in the early development

of retroflexes from certain IE consonant clusters results from the

same historic case."

 

A recent article:

Eric P. Hamp, On the IE origin of retroflexes in Sanskrit,

JAOS, 116, 4, 719-

 

****

>From Prof. George L. Hart, UC at Berkeley:

 

Relations between Dravidian (Tamil) and Sanskrit

 

 

Actually, Sanskrit has many Dravidian syntactic features as well as

loan words from Dravidian. A few of these are very old -- even as

old as the Rig Veda. Clearly, Sanskrit came to be spoken as a second

language by Dravidian speakers, and, as is common in such situations,

these speakers transferred syntax from their native languages into the

new language. Such features include the use of api, of iti, and of

evam, and also, I believe, of certain compounds. These ARE

Indo-European words, not Dravidian, but their usage is equivalent to

similar particles in Dravidian languages (e.g. Tamil -um, enRu, taan).

Prof. Murray Emeneau has written at length on this phenomenon. The

North-Indian Indo-Aryan languages are even more akin syntactically to

Dravidian languages. I have tried to show that many of the major

conventions of Sanskrit literature, and especially of poetry, come

from a Dravidian poetic tradition (e.g. the messenger poem such as

Meghaduta, the idea of lovers suffering in separation during the

monsoon, etc. etc.). The fact is, it is not possible to talk about

Sanskrit as a separate "non-Dravidian" tradition -- the truth is far

more complex. George Hart.

 

Presumably, the people who adopted Sanskrit (or something akin to it)

in North India didn't have a highly developed literature -- there are

still some Dravidian languages in N. India like that. On the other

hand, history is full of cultivated languages that have been replaced

by less developed newer ones -- e.g. Elamite speakers started

speaking Persian and Elamite disappeared. People tend to speak

whatever language gives them influence, prestige, and the ability to

survive -- to some extent, English has this function in modern India

(at least in some parts, e.g. IIT's). Most areas of the earth have

changed their language 3 times in HISTORICAL times (at least this is

what I learned in a linguistics class at Harvard a long time ago). I

wouldn't say Sanskrit is Dravidian -- it isn't. But it has many

intriguing "Dravidian" features not found in other (non-Indian)

Indo-European languages. (Retroflexes, for example -- called

murdhanya in Skt). This stuff is interesting, isn't it? GH

 

One of the most intriguing contributions of the Tamil area to

Sanskrit is the Bhagavatapurana. It is pretty universally agreed

that it was written by a Tamilian and that it is filled with motifs

and themes from the Divyaprabandha and other Tamil literature. Its

author also uses "Vedic" forms -- sometimes incorrectly! -- to try to

make it sound old and hoary. This work has catalyzed Bhakti

movements all over India and is, arguably, one of the most important

works in the Sanskrit language. An example of a Tamilism is the word

avamocana, "inn." This occurs nowhere else in Sanskrit -- it is

clearly a translation of Tamil viTuti. On the other hand, the

greatest poet of all Indian literature, Kampan, took his story from

Sanskrit. There has been an enormously productive interchange

between Sanskrit and Tamil. GH

[Guest guest]

Dear Dr. Malhotra,

 

Here is how an archeologist explains the IE language

transfer in India or Greece.

 

Is this model to be rejected for India? Any reasons?

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

-------------------------------

Antiquity, Sept 1995 v69 n264 p554(12)

Horse, wagon & chariot: Indo-European

languages and archaeology. David W. Anthony.

 

The dynamics of Indo-European expansion

 

The expansion of the Indo-European languages must have

involved many episodes of language shift over a long

period of time. There is no single explanation for

these many episodes; they occurred in different

places, at different times, for many different

reasons. Even the initial expansion seems to have been

facilitated by different processes to the east and to

the west of the PIE core area.

 

Language shift has been modelled by archaeologists in

two ways: demographic expansion and elite dominance.

In the first, a group with a more intensive economy

and a denser population replaces or absorbs a group

with a less intensive economy, and language shift

occurs as an epiphenomenon of a wave-like demographic

expansion (Renfrew 1994; Bellwood 1989). In the

second, a powerful elite imposes its language on a

client or subject population. While both processes can

be important, language shift is more complex than

these models imply. Language shift can be understood

best as a social strategy through which individuals

and groups compete for positions of prestige, power,

and domestic security (Anthony in press). What is

important, then, is not just dominance, but vertical

social mobility and a linkage between language and

access to positions of prestige and power (Mallory 1992).

The expansion of the Indo-European languages eastward

into the steppes was linked to innovations in

transport. The resultant development of deep-steppe

pastoralism combined with river-valley agriculture

made it possible for a substantial population

predictably and productively to exploit the grasslands

that occupy the center of the Eurasian landmass. The

conquest of the grasslands permanently changed the

dynamics of historical development across the Eurasian

continent by establishing a bridge, however tenuous,

between the previously isolated societies of China,

Iran, the Near East and Europe. In a sense, the

eastward expansion of the pastoral-agricultural

economy might be analogous to the 'demographic wave'

that Renfrew and others have applied to the

Indo-European expansion in Europe. However, the

cultural-archaeological context shows that the steppes

were already populated; the process by which this

resident population became IE-speakers was cultural,

not just demographic.

 

A relatively small immigrant elite population can

encourage widespread language shift among numerically

dominant indigenes in a non-state or pre-state context

if the elite employs a specific combination of

encouragements and punishments. Ethnohistorical cases

in Africa (Kopytoff 1987; Atkinson 1989) and the

Philippines (Bentley 1981) demonstrate that small

elite groups have successfully imposed their languages

in non-state situations where they:

 

* imported a powerful and attractive new religion or

ideology (as the Sintashta-Petrovka culture seems to

have done);

 

* controlled sufficient wealth to offer gifts and

loans on a lavish scale (documented in the

metallurgical wealth of Sintashta-Petrovka);

 

* controlled sufficient military muscle to punish

those who resisted (chariotry might have increased the

power of the Sintashta-Petrovka people);

 

* occupied strategic positions on critical trade

routes (Sintashta controls access to the Orenburg

gateway between Europe and the steppes);

 

* and actively pursued marriages and alliances with

the more powerful members of indigenous groups,

offering them enhanced prestige and vertical social

mobility in the new order.

 

Simply defeating and dominating the indigenes is

insufficient, as the Norman conquest of England and

the Celtic conquest of Galatia demonstrate. Language

shift occurs when it confers strategic advantages on

those who learn the new language. An elite must be not

just dominant, but open to assimilation and alliance,

and its language must be a key to integration within

an attractive socio-political system, as it was for

the Roman state at one end of the political spectrum

and for Baluchi nomads (Barth 1981) at the other.

The diffusion of the IE languages eastward into the

steppes should be understood as a social process, not

as an epiphenomenon of a demographic shift. The

diffusion westward into Europe was fundamentally

different in ecological, cultural and economic terms.

It also probably began much earlier. Intrusive kurgan

cemeteries in the lower Danube valley (Panaiotov 1989)

and eastern Hungary (Ecsedy 1979; Sherratt 1983)

probably testify to a sustained Yamna incursion at

about 2900-2700 BC (Anthony 1990). Yet the small-group

social dynamics responsible for language shift might

have been very similar in Europe and the steppes. In a

European context in which wagons and animal traction

were becoming increasingly important in the domestic

economy (Bogucki 1993), the pastorally-oriented

societies of the western steppes might have been seen

not as culturally backward 'Huns', but rather as

enviably rich and worthy of emulation. Wheeled

vehicles may have significantly altered the

organization of agricultural labour in eastern Europe,

since one person with a wagon and oxen could transport

crops from field to farm that would earlier have

required the co-operative labour of a group (Bankoff &

Greenfield 1984: 17; Bogucki 1993). Wagons made

systematic manuring possible, opening areas with less

productive soils to agricultural exploitation. Wagons

required draft oxen, enhancing the overall importance

of cattle-raising, while horseback riding made cattle

stealing easier, encouraging inter-community raiding

and warfare. Wagons may have encouraged the evolution

of increasingly dispersed and individualizing social

communities (as automobiles have done in this

century). Shifts in values may have been encouraged by

changes in eastern European community organization and

economy that were themselves caused partially by the

adoption of wheeled vehicles and horseback riding. All

of these changes might have set the stage for the

adoption of new languages just at the time that the

Yamna incursion into the grassy plains of the lower

Danube valley and eastern Hungary began.

 

At the root of both expansions lie the speakers of

PIE, whose kinship systems, religious concepts, and

social organization can be understood through their

own reconstructed vocabulary - an unprecedented

opportunity for anthropological archaeologists, if we

can agree on how it should be exploited.

--

[Guest guest]

>naga_ganesan@h... wrote:

>I don't believe upper caste Indians are Europeans becuase geneticists

>cannot account for the acculturation takingplace several centuries

>ago? What if say a group learnt Sanskrit and claimed they are

>Brahmins in ancient India?

 

manusmRti allows the upper castes to marry from any other castes, and

this facility is not available to lower castes to marry upper castes.

If this was really practiced even for 2000 years it might have led to

cherry picking by higher castes to select best looking females,

leading to concentrating of much needed features and deprivation of

features in lower castes. The practice may have stopped 1500 years

ago. How does this affect genomics?

 

Regards

Bhadraiah

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, vaidix@h... wrote:

> >naga_ganesan@h... wrote:

> >I don't believe upper caste Indians are Europeans becuase

geneticists

> >cannot account for the acculturation takingplace several centuries

> >ago? What if say a group learnt Sanskrit and claimed they are

> >Brahmins in ancient India?

>

> manusmRti allows the upper castes to marry from any other castes,

>and this facility is not available to lower castes to marry upper

>castes. If this was really practiced even for 2000 years it might

>have led to cherry picking by higher castes to select best looking

>females, leading to concentrating of much needed features and

>deprivation of features in lower castes. The practice may have

>stopped 1500 years ago. How does this affect genomics?

>

> Regards

> Bhadraiah

 

I recall that Lars Martin once mentioned about Brahmins

with dark skin color recorded even in old times.

The gene flow must have been a two way path, Manu

records the one way he likes to have.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

[Guest guest]

> I don't believe upper caste Indians are Europeans becuase

geneticists

> cannot account for the acculturation takingplace several centuries

> ago? What if say a group learnt Sanskrit and claimed they are

Brahmins

> in ancient India?

 

God, here we go again. Upper caste Indians are Indians, not

Europeans. The fault is not with the answers from genetics. It lies

with the questions people expect it to answer. I am my mother's son,

but am probably genetically related to my uncle's wife, given Indian

customs about marrying within the jAti. Genetics can and does show

the degree of this relationship, independent of the marital kinship

between my uncle and his wife.

 

If upper caste Indians are genetically related to Europeans, then

genetics will tell you so. If upper caste Indians became upper caste

predominantly through a process of acculturation, then genetics will

show that upper caste Indians are genetically far away from Europeans.

 

Believe me, in this day and age, most educated upper caste Indians

would like to downplay their genetic closeness to Europeans.

 

Vidyasankar

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, naga_ganesan@h... wrote:

>

> Dear Dr. Malhotra,

>

> Here is how an archeologist explains the IE language

> transfer in India or Greece.

>

> Is this model to be rejected for India? Any reasons?

 

Counter-question : how much non-IE influence is discernable

in Vedic Sanskrit ? How much non-IE influence is discernable

in ancient Greek ? Quantify this, and then explain how the

same model can apply.

 

-Arun Gupta

[Guest guest]

> Counter-question : how much non-IE influence is discernable

> in Vedic Sanskrit ? How much non-IE influence is discernable

> in ancient Greek ? Quantify this, and then explain how the

> same model can apply.

>

> -Arun Gupta

 

That big job has been handled by Indologists for about 150

years. They uniformly reject the OIT model, and are convinced

that IVC high language isn't Sanskrit.

 

"How much of Indian culture is non-IE" is given in volumes

Aryan and Non-Aryan in India edited by Madhav Deshpande

in 1979 and 1999. Parpola in his publications argues that

astronomy in Vedic texts is largely pre-Aryan. I recall

J. Bronkhorst also says that astronomy heritage is non-IE

in his paper in the recent volume, Aryan and Non-Aryan in India.

 

Abandoning the archaeologist Anthony's model, do we

go for OIT spreading from India to Europe?

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, naga_ganesan@h... wrote:

>

> > Counter-question : how much non-IE influence is discernable

> > in Vedic Sanskrit ? How much non-IE influence is discernable

> > in ancient Greek ? Quantify this, and then explain how the

> > same model can apply.

> >

> > -Arun Gupta

>

> That big job has been handled by Indologists for about 150

> years. They uniformly reject the OIT model, and are convinced

> that IVC high language isn't Sanskrit.

 

Who said anything about OIT ?

 

Here is your original question :

 

"Here is how an archeologist explains the IE language

transfer in India or Greece.

 

Is this model to be rejected for India? Any reasons?"

 

Your post implies that it is either the Greek model or OIT

with no other possibilities. But is not the correct test of

a language replacement model that it explains the observed

outcomes ?

 

-Arun Gupta

[Guest guest]

Dr. Arun Gupta wrote:

>Your post implies that it is either the Greek model or OIT

>with no other possibilities. But is not the correct test of

>a language replacement model that it explains the observed

>outcomes ?

 

Acculturation, co-opting with incomers with technology

of chariots, new forms of religion, etc., is the plausible

phenomenon of language shift to IA. Do you have any other

interesting hypotheses?

 

Archaeologist Anthony model:

INDOLOGY/message/647

 

When I wrote my mail:

INDOLOGY/message/646

 

An Indologist wrote a private mail:

<<<

> The process of Mahesh Yogi showing TM flight thru' yoga, and

> Ravishankar's introduction of Indian music to the West is quite

> different, the language shift that happened when the Aryan tribes

> moved into India cannot be compared with these. We cannot avoid a

> small percentage (5%? 10%?) of Aryans moving into India after the

IVC

> declined, and the imposition of the varNa scheme.

 

 

Dear Ganesan,

 

I just wanted to thank you personally for this mail.

It is a bibliographic gem, just splendid!

 

Best regards,

>>>

 

I'd like to hear any hypothesis for IA language

origins in India. OIT, mild OIT, or anything else.

 

Just saw Prof. Witzel's private message.

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan

[Guest guest]

(1) The abstract of the Bamshad, et. al., paper states :

 

"We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of

proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting

in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic

affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans."

 

So, how does someone conclude from this where the varna system

originated ?

 

(2) As I pointed out earlier, Table 4 of Bamshad, et. al.,

seems to imply that East Europeans are closer to Indian

(Dravidian) Upper Castes and Indian (Dravidian) Lower Castes

than they are to West Europeans.

 

So, perhaps one can take the point of view that East Europe

and India were peopled by successive waves of people with a

common ancestry.

 

The Bamshad paper is misleading in suggesting groups such as

"Europeans", "Asians", "Africans" and trying to find Indians as

a composite of these. "Europeans" are not a genetic group (and

I bet, neither are "Asians"). Or rather, I think Indians and

East Europeans have a better claim to be one group than East and

West Europeans.

 

So, for instance, I can postulate a Central Asian population that

separated out around 50,000 years ago from "West Europeans" and

"Asians", and these people in successive waves peopled Central Asia

and India. I postulate that Dravidians, Harappans, Vedic Aryans,

Iranians, Shakas, etc. are all of this stock.

 

This looks very much like an "Aryan Invasion Theory", but there

is a slight shift in emphasis, if you think about it a bit.

E.g., Hitler's "Aryans" had very little part in this version of

history -- they have been mostly confined to Western Europe for

upwards of 25,000 years.

 

(http://www.sciam.com/news/111300/3.html, and Dr. Stephen Hodge's

earlier post describe how Western Europe was populated.)

 

-Arun Gupta

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, suvidya@o... wrote:

> So, for instance, I can postulate a Central Asian population

>[...]these people in successive waves peopled Central Asia

> and India.

 

A "Central Asian population" - how can they "in successive

waves peopled Central Asia ..."?

[Guest guest]

Because 50,000 years ago they were presumably small in number

and located somewhere within and not all over the vastness

of Central Asia. I hope you realize how vast Central Asia is :

Kazhakstan alone is 2.7 million square kilometers (compared to

modern India's 2.9 million square kilometers.)

 

-Arun Gupta

 

INDOLOGY, naga_ganesan@h... wrote:

> INDOLOGY, suvidya@o... wrote:

> > So, for instance, I can postulate a Central Asian population

> >[...]these people in successive waves peopled Central Asia

> > and India.

>

> A "Central Asian population" - how can they "in successive

> waves peopled Central Asia ..."?