[Ind-Arch] [Abhinavagupta] Fascinating journey through Sindhu-Saraswati civilization at LMU

March 30, 2009

Dear Shri Ravilochanan,I see, what I wrote does not make any sense whatsoever to you. But the fantasies of Talageri on the date of Zarathustra, defying the evidence of the Account of Alberuni as well as of the Inscription of Darius make sense to you. Talageri's date of Rigveda also defies all astronomical evidences. I have no quarrel with the OIT but his chronology is not correct. Prof. Witzel had questioned Talageri on his works but he (Prof. Witzel) has not made any adverse comments on my paper ( which I presented in the WAVES conference in 2008, where I demolished the AIT / AMT from the historical records), a copy of which he has. It is time that Talageri recognises the true chronology of ancient Indian History such as that Sandrocottus was Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty as seen from the Account of Alberuni and not Chandragupta Maurya. The

correct chronology will in fact reinforce the OIT.Sunil K. Bhattacharjya --- On Sat, 3/28/09, ravilochanan iyengar <ravilochan_tn wrote:ravilochanan iyengar <ravilochan_tnRe: [ind-Arch] [Abhinavagupta] Re: Fascinating journey through Sindhu-Saraswati civilization at LMUIndiaArchaeology Date: Saturday, March 28, 2009, 11:28 AM

Dear Sri BhattacharyaYour 'arguments' make no sense whatsoever. Clinging to some fantasies based on a mixture of Puranic genealogies and the 'Kali Era' is not an answer to AIT/AMT. It woud be better to follow the steps of Sri Talageri. Fantasies are harmful to Hindus in the long ru as well as short run. In the short run, people like Witzel will use such writigs to simply paint in black all the OIT writers and arguments. In the long run, we might become the idiotic fanatics that the Muslims and Christians are at present. Please consider this with an unbiased mind.Ravilochanan --- On Sat, 28/3/09, Koenraad Elst

<koenraad.elst@ telenet.be> wrote:Koenraad Elst <koenraad.elst@ telenet.be>[ind-Arch] [Abhinavagupta] Re: Fascinating journey through Sindhu-Saraswati civilization at LMUIndiaArchaeologySaturday, 28 March, 2009, 6:14 AM

IndiaArchaeology, Sunil Bhattacharjya <sunil_bhattacharjy a wrote:

>

> You are quoting the mistakes of Sethna as if to prove that the western scholars / historians were right.<

You are projecting your own lack of logical capacities on me. Claiming one person's wrongness and then deducing a whole thesis about historical data is typically your own procedure. By contrast, i am in no way under the illusion that one historian's flaws prove anything at all about any historical theory, not even the wrongness of the theory that that flawed historian espouses. It is me who has, in the AIT debate, insisted numerous times that any flaws imputed to Witzel, Farmer, Thapar etc. make no difference whatsoever to the rightness or wrongness of the AIT, OIT or any other theory whatsoever. People can say the truth for the wrong reasons, so I avoid your favoured fallacy of deducing a theory's truth or otherwise from an individual's presumed qualities.

>

> It is true that Sethna himself goofed up with two things. First he did not know, just like all the western scholars including you did not know too, that Piyadassi (Ashoka Maurya) was different from Devanampiya Piyadassi (Samudragupta - Ashokaditya) .<

Strange that two emperors six hundred years apart had the same title element piyadassi. If this had been Sanskrit, which spans regions and centuries in identical form, it could have been truth; but in ever-changing Prakrit, it is unlikely.

> Secondly Sethna as well as the western scholars including you did not know that the Ashokan pillar was of Samudragupta. So tell me in what way the western scholars are better off than Sethna in this particular case. This amply proves that you are not interested in facts and you are biased against the scholars who sincerely want to bring out the truth.>

And there we have your favourite fallacy in reverse: deducing from the alleged wrongness of a thesis an allegation against an individual. Most outsiders who read this latest post of yours will consider it ridiculous. This may be because they are mentally frozen into the school version of Indian history, as you are likely to allege. Nonetheless, they are right in laughing at your post. If nothing else, then this one deduction does fully merit to be called ridiculous: "This amply proves..." When Hindu history-rewriters use logical connectors like "this proves", it's always safest to reach for your gun, for invariably a fallacious conclusion is sure to follow. Any truth or otherwise about Ashokan pillars etc. is logically unconnected to any of your allegations against me being "biased" and the rest.

Now that Hindus have taken to imitating Muslims, Christians, Nazis and Communists regarding book-burning, cartoon-banning and the like, I suggest you do your burning selectively: take all the dictionaries and burn out the lemmas "thus", "so", "it follows", "consequently" and the like. You should delete those words from your language, for you never ever use them correctly, and it seems you have no intention ever to do so.

Regards,

KE

>

> Koenraad <Koenraad@.. .>

> [Abhinavagupta] Re: Fascinating journey through Sindhu-Saraswati civilization at LMU

> Abhinavagupta

> Wednesday, March 25, 2009, 5:08 AM

>

> Abhinavagupta, Kaushal Vepa wrote:

> >

> > Since the ICIH 2009 conference has been mentioned rather derisively BY Koenraad Elst (...) I should clarify, as the convener of the conference, what our goals were in this conference. incidentally Koenraad was a guest at this conference,and he had made a specific request to be given a slot to speak.I would have hoped he would have the courtesy as a guest to refer to the conference by its proper name .<

>

> The circumlocution was because I couldn't remember the exact title, nothing else. But of course the conference was devoted to rewriting history, viz. history as currently taught.

>

> > The question of rewriting Indian History is surely an expression of the contempt he has for our attempts. He specifically alluded to our rewriting of history, and he keeps repeating this even though i patiently explained to him that the question of rewriting only occurs, if we accept the colonial paradigm which was written by British ICS officers and in some cases like James Mills and Karl Marx by people who had never set foot in India. For most of us who grew up in independent India and have never known the proper history of India, this remains a process of discovery and deciphering of our past. That it is an uphill task is certainly no secret>

>

> It seems that you mean that the question of rewriting history does not arise because what Mill, Marx etc. wrote is no history at all, and the the chronology of India as presented at the chronology is merely a restoration of an existing history of India that the colonialists and Marxists have wiped under the carper. I'm afraid that, on the contrary, no precolonial native chronology of India existed, only bits and pieces from which we now, taught by the colonials in historical methods, may hope to compose a consistent chronology.

>

> Moreover, if you want to prove the "colonial" historians wrong, a comprehensive rebuttal would ideally contain an explanation of how they were misled into drawing the wrong conclusions. They usually did give specific reasons for e.g. the sheet-anchor Sandrokottos/ Chandragupta. So far, I've only seen those arguments being ignored or being waived in a very loose manner. Thus, when an Ashokan pillar lists five non-Sanskrit king names, each of them resembling Greek names of known Hellenistic kings, what are the chances that all five merely happen to resemble Greek (Aliksundara/ Alexander, Amtiiyaka/Antiochos ) but actually belong to unknown kings of unknown language, as claimed by Sethna?

>

> The attitude of far too many Hindu history-rewriters is one of: "Leave me alone with your troublesome questions of method! I don't need method, I have scripture that tells me all I need to know!" If the outside world refuses to follow you, it may be less a matter of colonial bias than of a normal revulsion at the arrogance of such history-rewriters. I say this even when supporting some of the positions of the history-rewriters, es^p. on Aryan origins. That position, viz. against the AIT, has likewise been compromised no end by the ridiculous reasoning (apart from foul language) adopted by a number of very vocal Hindu history-rewriters.

>

> > If Koenraad had expected that as a result of the conference we would change the text books, he is clearly exhibiting a degree of naivete not commensurate with his knowledge of this problem. I do not know what he is talking about when he refers to the usual wailing about the anti-Hindu bias in the textbooks.. Obviously this is a history conference and mention was made about the bias in text books world wide . we could hardly ovid mentioning that central fact

> >

>

> As if I had ever disputed that the Indian history textbooks are biased. The point is that even any ideal unbiased version of history has no chance of making it into the textbooks if you mess things up as thoroughly as the BJP government has done. Among the invited speakers were prominent participants in the BJP efforts. It simply won't do to let them get away with criticizing the usual Thapars and Habibs without having their own record put to scrutiny.

>

> And was it a history conference? Some contributions, yes. But others, oh well. Like that physicist or so who came to project his power-point essentially just juxtaposing Sanskrit words with quantum-physics terms, as in a parody on the "Tao of Physics" genre. I've seen the type too often at similar conferences, WAVES etc.: businessmen who like to see their name on a book cover, contribute a fat wad of dollars to the organization, and in return are allowed to fill a slot with a totally garbled juxtaposition of half-understood terminology from various unconnected fields.

>

> In this instance, a lady Sanskrit professor from Orissa faulted him not for his utter lack of method but for mispronouncing "Patanjali" (with long first a). She agreed with him that it was ridiculous to say Hindus had no sense of history, giving as her reason that "we Hindus have invented history: the word Itihasa means 'history'!" So how is that for a method of proof: a mere word as proof for the existence of the thing designated? The word "centaur" exists, so centaurs exist? Of course the Itihasa writers meant to conserve a memory of the past, but by now "history" means more than that, viz. a critical investigation of testimonies of the past so as to reconstruct it as faithfully as possible. In discussions on lists like BEF, IndiaArchaeology, AncientIndia etc., I still see time and again how Hindus just don't get the merest basics of historical method, with a childlike reliance on scripture, and then rarely scripture as it really is but

scripture

> as summarized in popular retelling.

>

> Most of all, I recall the Lankan professor Gunatilake, who gave one of the best papers, being insulted and interrupted by the chairman who faulted him for bringing in politics (viz. the Christian role in Tamil Eelam separatism), when "Geopolitics" was actually one of the themes mentioned in the conference title. He wondered aloud if he hadn't come to the wrong conference, and in passing lambasted the proposed Purana-based chronology as being totally unscientific. Maybe he was prejudiced about that, but at any rate he hadn't heard any convincing arguments in its favour.

>

> But yes, Kosla-ji, I am grateful for the invitation and I had a good time at the conference.

>

> Kind regards,

>

> [Koenraad Elst]

>

> [2nd response to Kaushal's post (18 March 2009) at

>

> http://groups. / group/Abhinavagu pta/message/ 4893

>

> Rest of this thread at Sunil's post (22 March 2009) at