[world-vedic] Sonia Gandhi and the great Aryan myth.

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It seems that a few clarifications are necessary here.

 

> Date sent: Wed, 29 Sep 1999 09:49:25 -0700 (PDT)

> Bharat Gupt <abhinav

 

> Robert Zydenbos wrote:

 

> A Reaction:

 

> To claim that the Indian Expressed is motivated to favour the BJP

> through Gurumurthy and Gautier is factually incorrect. It publishes

> views and counterviews of all persuations, and myself being an

> occasional contributor of its "Main" article on the edit page have

> published several pieces criticising the BJP.

 

The Indian Express obviously is not something like the Organiser

or Saamne. Fortunately not. But a certain leaning is visible.

 

> "Up-to-date Indologists" may have discarded Aryan invasion theory

> decades ago but if it is still taught as unquestioned FACT of

> history from Class 7th to Ph.D. programs in India till date,

> leading newspapers, intellectuals, academics and hence even the

> politicians are under every compulsion to talk about it. The

> "up-to-date indologists" themselves have never complained about

> this prevailing anchronism of Indian syllabus.

 

But is this at all relevant when contemporary academic Indologists

are attacked? I sincerely believe that it is neither my, nor my

Western colleagues' business to spend time going through Indian

high-school and other textbooks and then to preach to Indian

textbook authors what they should write. With due respect I believe

that this is basically an Indian affair, to be sorted out in India by

Indians. (If an Indian textbook author were to ask me my opinions, I

would share them with him / her -- that is a different matter.)

 

(Let us also bear in mind that school textbooks never represent the

latest developments in research. It was taught in high schools in

the 1940s that it was unthinkable that an atom could be split.)

 

What is plainly vicious is that an internal Indian affair is being

fought out using the bugbear of the 'foreign hand'. The Indian

academic opponents of Hindutva (Romila Thapar a.o.) are

systematically being depicted as a kind of mindless traitors to the

Indian nation who are in league with foreign scholars who

supposedly have nothing better to do than to perpetuate antiquated

ideas from a colonial past.

 

The Aryan invasion theory is defunct. If those who wish to rewrite

Indian history complain about anachronisms, then it would be a

shabby irony if they would replace those anachronisms with a new,

xenophobic anachronism of their own making.

 

> And when a lady of Italian birth and bringing, unfamiliar with

> Indian languages, is staking her claim to India's most powerful

> office, the historical paradigm of a past hegemony, does acquire

> great relevance. It is not simply a matter of petty

> party-politics.

 

Thank you for confirming that the Hindutva attack against

intellectual freedom is part of a larger political campaign.

 

Mrs Gandhi is an Indian citizen, and whatever her qualifications

may or may not be, she occupies a position according to the laws

of India. If the Indian people democratically grant her authority (as

people of Indian birth have received in other countries, by the way;

as people from other countries have received in again other

countries), then perhaps we should respect that, don't you think?

 

Again: irrespective of whether the Indian politics are petty or big, it

_cannot_ be condoned that politically motivated individuals malign

earnest contemporary scholars, be they Western or Indian or

whatever, and publicly accuse them of absurdities by means of

plain lies, for the sake of cheap publicity. This is what is

happening, and this is what I am speaking out against.

 

> Why every move to see the holes with the invasion theory is dubbed

> as Hindutva agenda and the animus with which the newer hypothesis

> are being criticised indicate the vested interest of certain

> sections of European scholarship itself.

 

The "holes" had already been identified by researchers in the

West, without Hindutva aid. There are no European / American /

etc. conspiracies / vested interests in this field. But there is free

enquiry, in which a wide range of data (and not only isolated Indian,

but also ancient data from other regions of the world) is evaluated.

 

> Every skeptik of AIT is not a BJP votary and every non-tenured

> academic is not a Hindutva hireling.

 

Again: "AIT" is defunct. There is no point in being a 'skeptic'.

 

One major point of my previous mailing is: Not everyone who dares

disagree with the Hindutva crowd is automatically "in the same

camp with Hitler", as one popular Hindutva writer literally wrote

about me...

 

> It is again incorrect to assert that the Aryan invasion theory is

> dead. Yes "invasion" has been substituted by "migration in waves",

> but the essential message of racial clash of civilisations remains

> the same.

 

The "essential message" could also be: a meeting of peoples,

cultural exchange, dialogue and a blending of civilisations... India

as a haven for humanity, irrespective of people's origins... "E

pluribus unum", an ancient forerunner of America... Migration need

not be negatively understood, even if there are traces of conflict.

 

But the notion of meeting, dialogue, exchange and blending is

horrifying to the religious fundamentalists who propagate Hindutva,

and we may assume that it is precisely for this reason that there

are people who still insist on writing about "AIT": the word

"invasion" suggests wrong, injustice, something that must be

rejected. Preserving the "I" in "AIT", instead of contributing to an

earnest scholarly discussion, has polemical value -- and nothing

else.

 

The very first step towards a genuine discussion would be to drop

the anachronistic "I". Secondly, the quaintly paranoid (and

implicitly xenophobic racialist) idea that "Europeans" (which?

Dutch? Finnish? Russian? perhaps American too? The 1996

Lausanne-Ann Arbor conference on "Aryan and Non-Aryan in India"

took place in the USA, with mainly American participants) today

have 'vested interests' (which are never pointed out by Hindutva

writers) and have something to gain from "AIT" (idem) should be

given up. As long as this does not happen, the demand for a

dialogue on the part of the revisionists is a sham.

 

> No consensus has been reached so far to revise the basic tenet of

> the earlier philologists that Aryans were a fair/white-skinned

> "race" who succeded in dislodging and hegemonising over the Munda

> Dravidians (now politically read Tamils).

 

Tamils? Tamils??? And what are "Munda Dravidians"? More than

120 years ago (!) R. Caldwell in his _Comparative Grammar of the

Dravidian Languages_ wrote that Munda is not Dravidian...

 

Again: you must accept that academic researchers, Western and

other, are _not_ responsible for odd interpretations by Indian

politicians.

 

> The Greece of the Golden age, circa 5th cent. BCE, [...]

 

I hope you realise that academia is not a prophetic business in

which religiously eternal truths are proclaimed, but an ongoing

search that is guided by relevant facts, open enquiry and reason.

And this is why we must protest against Rajaram and Hindutva

obscurantism.

 

Concerning the concluding, plainly political comments in your

message: You are free to express your personal dislike for Mrs

Gandhi by exercising your vote in the current elections. But I hope

you agree that some ephemeral political interests should not come

in the way of the advancement of knowledge, and that they cannot

justify the kind of attacks against scholars such as I have reported

here. Knowledge is _not_ advanced by the quasi-religiously

inspired, ethnocentric, politically motivated obscurantism and mud-

slinging of Rajaram & co. One can read just how obscurantist he

and his friends are by using the URL I have previously given.

 

I have spoken up in defence of a basic human right: intellectual

freedom and open, rational scholarly enquiry, and I have pointed

out inaccuracies and deliberate misrepresentations in the blatantly

unscholarly attacks against those (Indian and non-Indian) who

oppose certain points on the Hindutva agenda. As a result, I have

been made a target of maligning of a quite vulgar sort. You were a

member of the Indology List (where you asked how you could join

RISA-L) when Elst started his defence of Rajaram and denunciation

of me, but perhaps you did not read all of it, since you did not raise

your present objections there. In any case, you can read it now. I

hope you will agree that this is something that deserves to be

condemned in no uncertain terms.

 

 

 

Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos

Mysore (India)

e-mail zydenbos

 

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