(Fwd) re: M. Mishra: Autochtonous Aryans? - A review

[Guest guest]

indictraditions, Michael Witzel <witzel@f...> wrote:

Re: Madhusudan_Mishra@h...

29 May 2001 16:29:57 -0000

 

29 May 2001 16:32:19 -0000

New EJVS, 7-3: AUTOCHTONOUS ARYANS- A Review

 

 

Prof. Mishra's "review" is mostly concerned with his own "Indus

language" (for which, see below and EJVS 7-1), and it is little

concerned with what I have writen in EJVS 7-3.

 

To begin with, his characterization of my paper is erroneous and shows

serious flaws in following the arguments presented:

 

* I have not " just summarised the views of the last two centuries"

 

On the contrary, I have tried to discuss matters as up to date as

possible (basically Jan.1, 2001), and have added many new facets (such

as the dates for the ling. details of the Rgveda), -- all of which

must have escaped Mishra.

 

* I do *not* "agree almost in entirety" with the views of the past 200

years.

 

In fact I have denounced this kind of simplification of the

discussion of the whole question in the very EJVS paper under

discussion! I do not agree with the various individual statements

made by, say, W. Jones, Bopp, Schleicher, M. Mueller, Meillet, and

certainly not with de Gobineau or Chamberlain, etc.

Scholarship has progressed since then.

 

* Expressively, I have *not* "taken them for granted although no

Social Science research deserves such dignity."

 

See the last point. All were discussed in detail. Checked an

rechecked. Where does Mishra get his 'conclusions' from? Not from

reading my paper.

 

 

Again, misrepresentation:

 

* "instead of being critical in his review,he becomes

ironical,sometimes offensive when he says that so and so has no right

knowledge of this or that."

 

It is our duty to point out when XYZ has no idea what he/she talks

about. That is called criticism.

 

Otherwise, we can also write (SF) novels. You are always free to

accept/believe in, e.g., an 'astronomical code' of the RV, based on a

collection of RV Mantras and on Vedic rituals before their time, ---

that's up to you. Maybe you feel better that way. Or believe in

chariots in a "hoary" RV before they were even invented. But that is

not science. It is falsification or simply SF.

 

I do not know what kind of scholarly literature Prof. Mishra reads but

tomaintain that "Many mistakes may be pointed out in standard research

work,which are not misprints or slip of mind,but shows ignorance of

the author.But for this they are not rebuked" is just another

fantasy. Scholars get rebuked all of the time, first by their

colleagues. Several examples (*me* included) in EJVS 7-3.

 

 

 

LINGUSITICS?

 

 

All of these general points apart, when Mishra get down to business,

LINGUISTICS, he only talks about his own Indus language theory, *not*

about any of the sections 12-18 of EJVS 7-3. His is not a review but a

piece of self-promotion. I will not comment on that. However, he also

says that I am

 

"...convinced ... that India is a multi-racial and polyglot country on

account of the several historical and pre-historical invasions"

 

Actually, I speak of *various* processes, and not just the hackneyed

'invasion' -- can you imagine a Stone age invasion into previously

non-Sapiens territory? Processes which landed Indo-Eur., Dravidian,

Munda [not Mishra's Santali!! This is just a subbranch of Northern

Munda], Burushaski, Kusunda and various substrate languages, etc. in

the Indian subcontinent. thy arrived witrh and after after the first

immigration from Africa, starting c.50,000 BCE.

 

Also, he confuses race and language....again! (Of course, I

condemnend this in EVJS 7-3)

 

Further:

 

"Thus according to him,the inflexional Sanskrit was the language of

the invading people and the agglutinative Dravidian was the language

of the invaded people.Let us for sometime forget the Santhal group."

 

Where would I have written *that*? It is Mishra's own fantasy. I

actually like it :-) -- a war of the Inflexionists against the

Agglutinationists (and the Infixationists = Munda)! Do you infix?

Yes? -- then let me beat you up!

 

Things are as always much more complex. (And, do not forget that

Sanskrit has suffixes and infixes as well !)

 

The rest (cow discussion etc.) is Mishra's own theory, actually a

fantasy (see below). I invite him go to any linguistics department in

North America, Europe, Japan, Australia etc. and record for how long

people will listen to his "theory".

 

Again: "...the way in which Sanskrit differs from Dravidian and

Santhal. Sanskrit is inflexional but Dravidian and Santhal are

agglutinative, different typologically,not genealogical".

 

Apart for the fact that Santali (Munda) is a prefixing and infixing

language, which has acquired suffixes under the influence other Indian

languages, the 3 are *not* genetically related (unless, in 50,000

BCE!)

 

They belong to three clearly defined language families: IE, Drav.,

Munda. (And there are several others in the subcontinent: Burushaski,

Kusunda, Andamanese, Tibeto-Burmese, etc,etc.)

 

Munda is closest related to Mon-Khmer, Khasi etc., -- not to Sanskrit,

Greek, Latin, English etc. (or Dravidian).

 

These language families differ in grammatical formation and structure

as well as in basic vocabulary. Try to use a Tamil 100 words Swadesh

list of basic words (hand, mouth, sun, etc.) in Santal-land and you

won't be understood at all, as well as vice versa, etc.

 

 

The rest is a new Mishra-Purana (similar to the SS Misra-Purana quoted

in EJVS 7-3):

 

 

 

Nava-Mishra-Purana:

 

 

" The most primitive language,of the isolating stage,probably present

in the extant Indus inscriptions, ... had just entered the

agglutinative territory when certain natural calamity dispersed them

into four groups.the Southern group went to the extreme South in the

land of the hot sun (Dravida as they called it).The eastern group went

to the hills and forest of the Central India.The Western group went to

the land of the Soma plant on the Iran-Afghan border.The Northern

group shifted northwards to the land of the seven rivers."

 

Where would one find ANY supporting materials for this Purana?

 

"While the language of the Western and Northern groups under the

favourable conditions of the nature reached the inflexional stage, the

languages of the Eastern and Southern groups limped on the

agglutinative stage for all times to come."

 

This is imagined 'Lingua Indica' Darwinism: Poor Dravidians, they

cannot inflect! Not to speak of the happy, always dancing Bollywood

Santal tribals, they are doomed to agglutination -- just like the

Turks, Koreans, Japanese etc. No progress ever expected from *them*!!

 

The Purana continues:

 

"While a group of the Western people marched toward Central Asia on

their way to Europe,some of them also came back to the land of the

Seven rivers,others remaining there forever.The people in the

land of the Seven rivers started the Pastoral Vedic culture...."

 

 

 

Mishra may however be right when he says

 

"There should be no doubt now that Aryan,Draviadian and Santhal people

belong to the same stock..."

 

but that would refer to *genetics*, especially mtDNA, not linguistics.

Again, he confuses race, language and culture ...

 

"and there languages are related to a common ancestor."

 

Yes, maybe 50,000 BCE, but not by the time of the Indus Civ.

(2600-1900 BCE), and Mishra's own Indus language.

 

 

The rest of this "review" deals with his "evolutionary theory" of

Indus Indo-European about which I have already said the needful.

 

 

 

In sum:

 

An imagined isolating Indus language (like Old Chinese, or -- almost

-modern English) cannot be the ancestor of Sanskrit, Greek., Hittite

etc. for example, for simple chronological reasons:

 

The highly inflectional Hittite is attested since c. 1600 BCE (max.,

1900), and Greek since 1200 BCE (perhaps 1400). These two languages

are already completely different from each other and from earliest

Rgvedic Sanskrit. They cannot have evolved from"Indus", say, between

2000 BCE and 1200 BCE, out of a "primitive" (!! like Chinese? --

Mishra) monosyllabic, isolating Indus language, in just a few hundred

years....

 

There are just too many stages to go through: from pre-IE sepparate

words for the locative, *i, then being loosely

attached (agglutinative), to one built into the

stem system (inflexion), to again being lost in Greek (exc. for some

Homeric forms)...

 

And so one could go on... I will not. Let others comment on the rest

of the fantasies collected in Mishra's note and his Indus books.

 

Too much time and effort lost already with going through all of the

revisionist, indigenist, autochthonous stuff!!

 

 

 

 

Worst of all, Mishra's theory is not falsifiable.

 

 

Just as my own new one (facetiously of course): the Indus language

is derived from Lemurian. It can be described as follows... {here,

fill in any grammar of an imagined language, such as Clingon}. Its

sounds are represented by the following Indus symbols ...{here fill in

any you want, "duck in pond", "squirrel", Sethna's spoked wheels,

Kalyanaraman's chariots drawn by Rajaram's horses, etc. etc.}.

 

Nobody will be able to falsify this new fantasy ... simply, as nobody

can read and understand the Indus script and language.

 

But there would be plenty of ground to show that "my" arguments would

be flawed in certain details, e.g. horse, chariots, wheels, before

their time in Southern Asia etc. etc..

 

In sum, a discussion of all of the above is another colossal loss of

time, with no useful outcome, except for pointing out how *not* to do

a reconstruction of India's past.

 

 

Final footnote:

 

"The word kirAta occurs since the VS (30,16), and Manu has put them

in the category of the drAviDas, but it is free from a strictly

racial controversy. They have never remained concentrated to a region

due to their wandering habit, which is confirmed from the central

syllable -ra-. In Prakrit, it is cilAa, but it is difficult to

identify them with some modern group with identical name."

 

For Mishra's edification, the word occurs since the Atharvaveda, and

it refers to "hill" tribes dealing with herbs. They appear in Gupta

time Nepalese inscriptions and in local historical records (see

Suniti Kumar Chatterjee's old book) as the previous rulers of the

Kathmandu valley and survive to this day as the kiraMt (kirant) tribes

of Eastern Nepal : the Rai and Limbu, speaking a Himalayish version of

Tibeto-Burmese. They do not have "a wandering habit" but are

agriculturists with their own "Veda", the Rai Muddum...

 

More than enough...

 

 

Well, not to forget Subrahmanya's unique contribution to the

discussion:

 

" this writeup seems to be mostly

a rehash of all the emails that were exchanged on the

Indology list. Nothing new is presented"

 

He is the one to judge!

 

 

 

Cheers, M.W

 

 

==============

========================================================

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.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm

 

Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies: http://nautilus.shore.net/~india/ejvs/

--- End forwarded message ---

[Guest guest]

Can we get Mr. Mishra's original comment? Thanks in advance.

 

Regards

Bhadraiah

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, vaidix@h... wrote:

>

> Can we get Mr. Mishra's original comment? Thanks in advance.

>

> Regards

> Bhadraiah

 

Respected Sir,

 

I thought you might have read Prof. M. Mishra's Linguistic

analyses in Indian Civilization and/or Indic Traditions .

 

Mishra's construction of Indus language with Sanskrit syllables:

INDOLOGY/message/790

 

His etymology of draviDa/dramiDa:

INDOLOGY/message/791

 

Regards,

N. Ganesan