munda, vra_tya and kamboja: from saptasindhu to khmer

[Guest guest]

munda, vra_tya and kamboja: from saptasindhu to khmer

 

Abstract

 

It is hypothesised that munda (mleccha-speakers) of north-west Bharat

living in the saptasindhu region during the days of maritime,

riverine, Sarasvati civilization (ca. 3500 BCE to 1500 BCE) migrated

after the desiccation of River Sarasvati. Groups which migrated

included kamboja through Bengal and into Southeast Asia (khmer, in

particular) and Sri Lanka. Evidence from literature, coins, epigraphs

will be used to test this hypothesis.

 

More at:

 

IndianCivilization/message/63349 [For doc. and

maps, email: kalyan97]

[Guest guest]

INDOLOGY, Srinivasan Kalyanaraman

<kalyan97@g...> wrote:

> munda, vra_tya and kamboja: from saptasindhu to khmer

>

> Abstract

>

> It is hypothesised that munda (mleccha-speakers) of north-west

Bharat > living in the saptasindhu region during the days of maritime,

> riverine, Sarasvati civilization (ca. 3500 BCE to 1500 BCE) migrated

> after the desiccation of River Sarasvati. Groups which migrated

> included kamboja through Bengal and into Southeast Asia (khmer, in

> particular) and Sri Lanka. Evidence from literature, coins,

epigraphs > will be used to test this hypothesis.

>

> More at:

>

> IndianCivilization/message/63349 [For

doc. and

> maps, email: kalyan97@g...]

 

 

Dear Dr. Kalyanaraman,

 

After pondering for a while your hypothesis about the occurrence of a

protohistoric migration which would have led the Kamboja people from

Afghanistan to Cambodia, I understand that you postulate as its

necessary precondition an ancient admixture of Munda, Indo-Aryan and

Iranian speakers in Gandhara/S.E. Afghanistan, with the Austro-

Asiatic (AA) component of such a hypothetical cosmopolitan society

being singled out by you under the ethnonym "Kamboja" on the basis of

some debatable philological considerations.

 

While referring to Sylvain Lévi's philological work, your discussion

of the possible derivation of the name Kamboja from AA does not take

into account Michael Witzel's more recent suggestion that this

ethnonym may linguistically derive not from some protohistoric Munda

language, but rather from an extinct sub-family of AA that Witzel

tentatively labels as "Para-Munda", or else as "Para-AA" -- check

out, for instance, in Witzel's paper at

 

http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs0501/ejvs0501a.txt

 

This omission seems quite odd to me inasmuch as references to

Witzel's philological work on the origin of the Skt. word <kamboja>

are included in the same online paper appearing in the Kamboj Society

website from which you most likely copied and pasted the reference to

Lévi's -- see

 

http://kambojsociety.com/ancient_3.asp

 

Also check out what Witzel writes in his online paper at

 

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/Lingsit.pdf :

 

"[Rgvedic] tribal designations also are shifted 'outside' to other

groups, especially to areas progressively further away from the

perceived center as time progresses. Typical cases are those of

<kamboja> in SE Afghanistan > SE Asia, <triliGga> in Andhra > Telaing

in Burma, <kaliGga> in Orissa > Karen in Burma, <zyAma> in Bengal >

Siam, <campA> > Cham in S. Vietnam."

 

As I have been remarking in the course of our past online discussions

on Munda migrations on the IndianCivilization List, "Para-Munda" is

not the same as Munda. As a matter of fact, Prof. Witzel never and

nowhere maintained that his hypothetical "Para-Munda" speakers were

the ethnic ancestors of the present Munda-speaking tribes of central-

eastern India.

 

CONCLUSION # 1: Your supposed derivation of the ethnonym Kamboja from

Munda is not proven at all.

 

Further on in your post you proceed to speculate about a hypothetical

long-distance migration of your "Kamboja Mundas" from Gandhara/S.E.

Afghanistan to Cambodia via the Gangetic plains or, alternatively,

via the Tibetan plateau. After reaching Cambodia, your "Munda

Kambojas" would have founded there the Khmer civilization (am I

right?). Of course, I may jokingly add, only the bald- or shaven-

headed among them did actually migrate from Gandhara, as is suggested

by your citation of PANini: "kamboja muNDaH, yavana muNDaH"! Are you

really so sure that, in PANini's time, the Skt. term <muNDa> (the

original meaning of which was "bald-headed" or "shaven-headed") were

already meant to designate the present Munda-speaking tribes of

central-eastern India? As a matter of fact, the Indo-Aryan ethnonym

<muNDa> appears to have come into vogue in a much later period to

designate the chiefs/heads ("muNDas") of a single tribal people of

Ranchi district in present-day Jharkhand, i.e., the proper "Mundas",

whose language is Mundari, and whose ethnonym was chosen by modern

linguists as the name of the whole of the Munda sub-family of the AA

language family; and, for that matter, this ethnonym has nothing to

do with the supposed (only by yourself) bald or shaven heads

supposedly displayed by ancient Munda speakers! Where, by PANini, did

you collect the notion that ancient Munda speakers were bald- or

shaven-headed? On the other hand, purANnic literature and the MBh.

just suggest that the Kambojas and their neighbours the Yavanas --

certainly *not* the Mundas! -- wore their head-hair short.

 

Again in this connection, I wonder why you, like all other OITers,

reject all ethnogenetical theories resting on the self-evident notion

that peoples, languages and cultural complexes have often migrated in

the past from one place to another ONLY when the vector of the

hypothesized migration is labelled as "(Indo-)Aryan", while you

freely allow other ethnic groups -- for instance, your

hypothetical "Kamboja Mundas" -- to cover thousands of kilometres in

their migratory path (in this case, from Afghanistan to Cambodia).

 

Moreover, if the "Kamboja Mundas" migrated from Gandhara to Cambodia

to ultimately found the Khmer civilization there, how is that the

reconstructed Proto-Khmer language was not already influenced by

Sanskrit? (Sanskrit borrowings into Old Khmer are attested only

starting from the inscriptions belonging to the Khmer civilization's

mature phase). After all, weren't the Kambojas of the Harappan

period, according to your own hypothesis, part and parcel of a vast

multilinguistic society within which Sanskrit would have been

the "high" language -- the sacred language of the then supposedly

already existing Vedas? What about your and Subash Kak's theories --

which regrettably suppress all of the distinctions between different

language families elaborated by linguists -- about a "language

continuum" encompassing Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages at

that early date?

 

CONCLUSION # 2: There is no evidence whatsoever that the Mundas --

or, for that matter, even Witzel's "Para-Mundas" -- ever migrated

from Afghanistan to Cambodia and that their language, supposedly

already influenced by Sanskrit, originated Old Khmer language.

Similarly, there is also no evidence whatsoever that protohistoric

Munda or "Para-Munda" speakers ever reached the Elburz Range in

search of metal ores, as you have suggested in a series of messages

you recently posted here and there; and there is also no evidence

whatsoever that protohistoric Munda speakers ever settled as metal-

smelters in the Ahar-Banas cultural complex area -- another fixation

of yours.

 

The relation between the Munda and Mon-Khmer sub-families of AA is

explained away by most of experts in the field by resorting to an

entirely different argument, namely, as a distant relation between

two branches of one proto-language that separated during the

Neolithic period (approximately, according to Robert Blust's recent

esteem, seven thousand years ago). The geographic area where this

hypothesized language split occurred is still subject to debate, but

yet it is generally located somewhere around or in proximity to the

Bay of Bengal. Robert Blust and Gérard Diffloth propound the Burma-

Yunnan border region as the AA homeland. David Stampe's hypothesis

that the AA homeland lay in South Asia is more debatable, although

the work being made by this scholar in the field of comparative Munda

linguistics is invaluable -- check out his web directory at

 

http://www.ling.hawaii.edu/faculty/stampe/AA/Munda/

 

CONCLUSION # 3: The rechristening of the lower Mekong Valley as

Kamboja must be explained in other ways than your far-fetched

hypothesis according to which the name Kamboja might have been

imposed onto that land by some phantasmal "Munda Kamboja" migrants

coming from Afghanistan.

 

The rise of the Khmer civilization has been described by eminent

scholars as a slow process of Sanskritization mediated by the pre-

existing Mon civilization of coastal Burma and Thailand. This

acculturation process is perfectly explained by assuming that waves

of Indian colonizers started to settle in those S.E. Asian countries

around the turn of the Christian era. Those Hindu and Buddhist (or

Hindu-Buddhist) early colonizers were highly civilized Indo-Aryan and

Dravidian speakers, NOT Munda-speaking tribals!

 

Kindest regards,

Francesco Brighenti