Indian Populations and their Genetic Affiliations

(Click to enlarge)

The Human Genetic History of South Asia

Partha P. Majumder

Summary:

South Asia — comprising India, Pakistan, countries in the sub-Himalayan region and Myanmar — was one of the first geographical regions to have been peopled by modern humans. This region has served as a major route of dispersal to other geographical regions, including southeast Asia. The Indian society comprises tribal, ranked caste, and other populations that are largely endogamous. As a result of evolutionary antiquity and endogamy, populations of India show high genetic differentiation and extensive structuring. Linguistic differences of populations provide the best explanation of genetic differences observed in this region of the world. Within India, consistent with social history, extant populations inhabiting northern regions show closer affinities with Indo-European speaking populations of central Asia that those inhabiting southern regions. Extant southern Indian populations may have been derived from early colonizers arriving from Africa along the southern exit route. The higher-ranked caste populations, who were the torch-bearers of Hindu rituals, show closer affinities with central Asian, Indo-European speaking, populations.

Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 4, R184-R187, 23 February 2010
Full article (link)

Indian scientist set to change world history

Poorly written TOI article, but Singhs comments are interesting (I'm assuming the reporter quoted him correctly). 

TNN 5 December 2009, 01:27am IST

VARANASI: Was Max Muller at fault when he propagated the White Invasion theory? Did Aryan Invasion did not take place? Are we going to witness a change in world history? If reports of Prof Lalji Singh — an internationally acclaimed biotechnology expert — are to be believed, recent studies and research work on tracing genetic lineage of primitive human species have already suggested a different world history, enough to prove a major breakthrough in this field.

Prof Singh of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, who was in the city on Friday to inaugurate the three-day international conference on emerging trends in biotechnology organised by School of Biotechnology, Banaras Hindu University, told reporters that the recent studies would also change the theory of White Invasion (given by Max Muller of Germany).

There was no White Invasion, neither there was any Aryan Invasion as was believed in the past, he said referring to the recent studies on diversity of Indian population that had been published in 'Nature' magazine. The studies indicated southern route of migration of East African population (believed to originate 70,000 years ago) towards Indian sub-continent via Gujarat coast and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, he added.

Saying that Indian population was made up of many populations that have varied genetic compositions, he also added recent studies on DNA linkage indicated an invisible thread (trait) that bounded the Indian population comprising populations of other countries in the sub-continent including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Malaysia, believed to have originated almost 33,000 years ago.

"The study is on to trace the ancestors of Ancestor North Indian (ANI) population, while the ancestors of Ancestor South Indian (ASI) population has been already traced," he said. "Ongee and Jarva species have been established to be the ancestors of ASI population while DNA matching has found resemblance of East African population with Kurumbha species in Kerala and Raghuvanshi of West Bengal," he added.

"We are looking for DNA from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Jammu and Kashmir to trace the origin of ANI population and once that is established, we would be in a position to indicate the movement of ANI population towards European countries that would change the face of world history," he said. "We are also waiting for clearance of Ministry of Environment and Forest to start major project on revival of endangered animal species including Asiatic lion, tiger, leopard and black buck through cloning technique. We are also working for standardisation of cloning process that would prove to be a milestone in conserving endangered animal species," he added.

Prof Lalji Singh is also heading Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species (LACONES) for their revival in the country.

Link

Taj Mahal builders used Harappan measurement units (Lead)

By K.S. Jayaraman
Bangalore, July 9 (IANS) Designers of the 17th century Taj Mahal, the finest piece of Mughal architecture, employed the same unit of measurement used by the Harappan civilization as far back 2000 BC, according to a study by an IIT-Kanpur professor. These units were used by builders in India till the British imposed their own units in the 18th century.
The study by R. Balasubramaniam of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and reported in the latest issue of Current Science, has for the first time shown that the unit of length called ‘angulam’ - mentioned in Kautilya’s treatise on statecraft “Arthasastra” dated 300 BC — was used without a break in India for over 3,900 years.
The ancient ‘angulam’ has been found to be equal to 1.763 modern centimetres, according to Balasubramaniam, a professor of materials and metallurgical engineering. He has carried out dimensional analysis of some of India’s historical structures, built during different times, to identify the measuring units used in their engineering plans.
He says he was surprised that ‘angulam’ and its multiples ‘vitasti’ (12 angulams) and ‘dhanus’ (108 angulams) have been used as the unit of measurement right from the Harappan times - the highly developed civilization that thrived for a few centuries on the floodplains of the Indus river in what is now northwest India and Pakistan - till the pre-modern era when the Taj was built.
Balasubramaniam, who last year studied the dimensions of the 1,600-year-old Delhi Iron Pillar at the Qutub Minar complex, found that ‘angulam’ and its multiple ‘dhanus’ were used as the basic units of length in its design.
For example, the total height of the pillar is exactly 4 dhanus, Balasubramaniam told IANS.
Now in a paper published in Current Science, Balasubramaniam has shown that the modular plan of the Taj Mahal complex is based on use of grids of sides measuring 60 and 90 vitasti. He says the study has established that the design and architecture of the Taj is based on traditional Indian units codified in “Arthasastra” and that “there is nothing foreign” in its design.
“The fact that the unit of angulam of 1.763 cm could match very well the dimensions of historical monuments establishes the continuity of India’s engineering tradition through the ages for as long as 3,900 years,” says Balasubramaniam in his paper.
“With the new knowledge we can analyse all the important ancient structures in India,” he says, and hopes the findings “will open a new chapter in the study of metrology (science of measurements)”.
But how did the angulam tradition remain unbroken for so long?
As quoted in the website of Nature India, Balasubramaniam believes the workers from the Harappan days were perhaps using some kind of scale “that was handed over through generations”.

Read more: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/taj-mahal-builders-used-harappan-measurement-units-that-british-discarded-lead_100215622.html#ixzz0YColXqE1

The Cradle that is India - Subhash Kak

Ideas about early Indian history continue to play an important role in political ideology of contemporary India. On the one side are the Left and Dravidian parties, which believe that invading Aryans from the northwest pushed the Dravidians to south India and India's caste divisions are a consequence of that encounter. Even the development of Hinduism is seen through this anthropological lens. This view is essentially that of colonial historians which was developed over a hundred years ago.


On the other side are the nationalist parties, which believe that the Aryan languages are native to India. These groups cite the early astronomical dates in the Vedas, noting these texts are rooted firmly in the Indian geographical region. But Leftist scholars consider such evidence suspect, politically motivated, and chauvinistic.
In recent years, the work of archaeologists and historians of science concluded that there is no material evidence for any large scale migrations into India over the period of 4500 to 800 BC, implicitly supporting the traditional view of Indian history. The Left has responded by conceding that there were probably no invasions; rather, there were many small scale migrations by Aryans who, through a process of cultural dominance, imposed their language on north Indians.


The drama of text-book revisions, both during the NDA and the current UPA governments, is essentially a struggle to impose one or the other of these viewpoints. In any other country, such a fight would have fought in the pages of academic journals; but in India, where the government decides what history is, it is a political matter.


Now, in an important book titled The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey out of Africa (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2003), the prominent Oxford University scholar Stephen Oppenheimer has synthesised the available genetic evidence together with climatology and archaeology with conclusions which have bearing on the debate about the early population of India. This work has received great attention in the West, and it will also interest Indians tremendously.


Much of Oppenheimer's theory is based on recent advances in studies of mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the mother, and Y chromosomes, inherited by males from the father. Oppenheimer makes the case that whereas Africa is the cradle of all mankind; India is the cradle of all non-African peoples. Man left Africa approximately 90,000 years ago, heading east along the Indian Ocean, and established settlements in India. It was only during a break in glacial activity 50,000 years ago, when deserts turned into grasslands, that people left India and headed northwest into the Russian steppes and on into Eastern Europe, as well as northeast through China and over the now submerged Bering Strait into the Americas.


In their migration to India, African people carried the mitochondrial DNA strain L3 and Y chromosome line M168 across south Red Sea across the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. On the maternal side the mtDNA strain L3 split into two daughters which Oppenheimer labels Nasreen and Manju. While Manju was definitely born in India the birthplace of Nasreen is tentatively placed by him in southern Iran or Baluchistan. One Indian Manju subclan in India is as old as 73,000 years, whereas European man goes back to less than 50,000 years.
Considering the paternal side, Oppenheimer sees M168 as having three sons, of whom Seth was the most important one. Seth, in turn, had five sons which are named by him as Jahangir, H, I, G and Krishna. Krishna, born in India, is the ancestor of the peoples of East Asia, Central Asia, Oceania and West Eurasia (through the M17 mutation). This is what Oppenheimer says about M17:

South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a 'male Aryan Invasion of India.'

Study of the geographical distribution and the diversity of genetic branches and stems again suggests that Ruslan, along with his son M17, arose early in South Asia, somewhere near India, and subsequently spread not only south-east to Australia but also north, directly to Central Asia, before splitting east and west into Europe and East Asia.


Oppenheimer argues that the Eurocentric view of ancient history is also incorrect. For example, Europeans didn't invent art, because the Australian aborigines developed their own unique artistic culture in complete isolation. Indian rock art is also extremely ancient, going back to over 40,000 BC, so perhaps art as a part of culture had arisen in Africa itself. Similarly, agriculture didn't arise in the Fertile Crescent; Southeast Asia had already domesticated many plants by that time.


Oppenheimer concludes with two extraordinary conclusions: 'First, that the Europeans' genetic homeland was originally in South Asia in the Pakistan/Gulf region over 50,000 years ago; and second, that the Europeans' ancestors followed at least two widely separated routes to arrive, ultimately, in the same cold but rich garden. The earliest of these routes was the Fertile Crescent. The second early route from South Asia to Europe may have been up the Indus into Kashmir and on to Central Asia, where perhaps more than 40,000 years ago hunters first started bringing down game as large as mammoths.'


This synthesis of genetic evidence makes it possible to understand the divide between the north and the south Indian languages. It appears that the Dravidian languages are more ancient, and the Aryan languages evolved in India over thousands of years before migrations took them to central Asia and westward to Europe. The proto-Dravidian languages had also, through the ocean route, reached northeast Asia, explaining the connections between the Dravidian family and the Korean and the Japanese.


Perhaps this new understanding will encourage Indian politicians to get away from the polemics of who the original inhabitants of India are, since that should not matter one way or the other in the governance of the country. Indian politics has long been plagued by the Aryan invasion narrative, which was created by English scholars of the 19th century; it is fitting that another Englishman, Stephen Oppenheimer, should announce its demise.


(Link)

More Aryan Invasion Rubbish

I came across some typical crap coming from an American newspaper about the Aryan invasion through my RSS feed today(newsfeed, not the political party). A 1999 article was quoted to start off yet another pointless debate on the Aryan Invasion Theory on a forum. The signature of the person who started this topic says a lot about the mentality of people who buy into the Aryan Invasion Theory-  "Let's keep America beautiful by getting rid of niggers, spics, kikes, queers, and feminists!"

Defenders of the theory conveniently forget that haplogroup R1a1, which is most often associated with the Aryan Invasion, is prevalent amongst tribes as well as lower castes of India in very high frequencies and not restricted to the upper castes by any means. The age,diversity, variance and frequency of R1a is highest in South Asia - with the age and variance amongst tribals being higher than in upper castes, almost proving that the origin of Y-DNA haplogroup R1a1 is RIGHT HERE IN INDIA. The direct correlation of haplogroup R1a1 and R2(high/low freq and variance in the same areas across the country) further suggests that they cohabited throughout, and coincidence can almost be ruled out (R2 is exceedingly rare, whereas R1a1 is present in high frequencies in Europe). Indian society evolved from tribal groups over millennia. I won't even get into the fact that there is absolutely no archaeological evidence of any kind of invasion at the time the so called white Aryans "took the women and set up the caste system in India". Since '99 however, the Aryan Invasion Theory has almost totally lost ground due to research in many fields, including genetics. The current trend is to manipulate and model studies on Indo-European languages to suit arrogant western beliefs that 'Proto-Indo-European', the supposed precursor of all IE languages, originated in Europe or Central Asia. South Asia is always totally sidelined in these western studies even though it is a known fact that Sanskrit is still the most advanced language on earth and is still used in India. Why the obsession with Central Asia being the homeland of mankind outside Africa and the Middle East? It's was and still is quite an inhospitable place whereas South Asia was and is a country rich in resources - perfect for human habitation.

Aryan Invasion Theory supporters are alive and kicking till this day, flogging this dead horse regardless of countless studies disproving the theory. Many Indians themselves subscribe to AIT, maybe they love the idea of being partly European(it's common knowledge that most Indians look up to whites and white skin), however distant and  despite present day racist European supporters of this theory referring to ALL Indians as mongrels and half breeds who are literally 'bastards' - descendants of rape victims of the white invaders - not just North Indian 'Aryans'. All I can say is that I feel sorry for the low self esteem of these Indians. There are also many South Indians who love to support this theory because of their age old hatred of North Indians and possible inferiority complex due to their generally darker skin color(check out 'fair and lovely' sales in the south). The Brits also inferred that  since North Indian 'Aryans' are outsiders that stole the land and enslaved the local 'Dravidians' besides pushing them down south, they have every right to do the same. Also, after the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization, the very same proponents of the Aryan Invasion Theory(AIT) had to change their story overnight from the Aryans being a noble and intelligent lot, to them being savages that destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization(IVC), LATER settling down and writing the Vedas and inventing Sanskrit. Oh yes, and of course they quickly added that the IVC was 'Dravidian' - thereby giving South Indians yet another reason to hate the North.

It's time Indians woke up and realize that this is just a very outdated, racist and divisive idea instilled till this day in the minds of the gullible. In fact it is still being taught in schools all over India as fact, when it was always just a THEORY. AIT is a sham. Both South Indians, who believe they have been victimized by the North, and North Indians who believe they are superior due to alleged white European ancestry are losers at the end of the day. Neither of these things are true.  It's only the racist white man that will have the last laugh if Indians go on being deluded and continue being subservient to the west, buying hook line and sinker any horseshit that is fed to them.

Neo-Colonial Captive Minds By Devan Nair (former President of Singapore)

Devan Nair, former President of Singapore, has sent the following message to be posted to the ECIT egroup. As an intellectual, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, and student of the recent re-evaluation of the Aryan-Invasion Theory, his message is very interesting to ponder.

The age of colonialism may be over, but not that of neo-colonial Captive minds in India as elsewhere in the former colonial territories. Nations struggled for and won political liberation from imperialist thralldom. But their tertiary institutions of higher learning hardly ever (with rare indigenous exceptions) displayed any compelling urge to free themselves from the restrictive, eurocentric disciplinary paradigms inherited from western universities, or to delve into their own unique native spiritual, cultural and intellectual resources that, even if not altogether annulled, were rendered more or less otiose. And it was precisely from the corridors of domestic academia that the dangerous and divisive infection of captive minds spreads to all fields of the public life of a once subject nation.

India is a prime example of a once great civilization with an Incredibly rich spiritual, literary, artistic, cultural and intellectual heritage, not to speak of production, manufacturing and medical expertise; a heritage that Indian academic and political leaders honor more in the breach than in the observance. Nationalist rhetoric and ritual genuflection, with an eye on the voting predilections of a volatile electorate, are the best the politicians seem capable of. Most worrisome of all is that the infection has affected the perceptions and self-appraisal of large sections of the Indian national collectivity itself, despite the intuitive pronouncements of great spiritual leaders of the Indian renaissance like Dayananda Saraswati, Vivekananda
and Sri Aurobindo.

In the highly praiseworthy cause of countering and arresting Trends inimical to India's right development as a member of a global Community of nations, I am confident that your work is of crucial importance, not only for Indian and international practitioners of Indian insights (as in Auroville), but also for the Indian social/political/national collectivity itself. I am sure you will agree that our aim should be, not to denounce everything western, as there is much of great value in western achievements, particularly in the vital fields of modern science and technology, which are today inseparably part and parcel of the global heritage of mankind. On the contrary, your goal is to counter the threat to genuine globalization posed by the tendency in certain western academic quarters to denigrate eastern traditions, and to shamelessly appropriate, using different terminology and without due acknowledgement, the work of Indian pioneers in the important field, for instance, of the psychology of consciousness, and to present such clearly dishonest efforts as original western discoveries. That is intellectually dishonest, which deserves to be exposed and dissolved in the blinding glare of broad daylight. A genuinely global community of nations can and should only proceed on the basis of honest scholarship. Unmasking self-serving dishonesty in some areas of western or eastern scholarship is a service towards expediting the irreversible evolutionary process towards a genuinely united humanity.

To give just one illuminating illustration, we might mention the Nearly universal and quite uncritical acceptance by both Indian politicians and the generality of national and international academics, of the 19th Century myth of the "Aryan invasion of Dravidian India" and of the arbitrary classification of the population into Aryan and Dravidian ethnic types. The damage inflicted on the political perceptions of the population poses a threat to the very integrity of India as a unique political and cultural entity. Witness the two most dominant political parties of Tamil Nadu, the DMK and the ANNA DMK (the 'D' standing for 'Dravida'). They swallowed hook, line and sinker the shallow, ill-researched "findings" of 19th Century European Indologists. Even India's present national anthem perpetuates the Aryan/Dravidian divide by referring to 'Dravida'. It was a wrong-headed decision to discard the original national anthem "Vande Mataram" ('Salutation to the Mother' Ð for the land of Bharatmata was originally conceived, not as a merely secular/geographical abstraction, but as Mother India Herself). It was the mantric potency of "Vande Mataram" that ignited the fiery beginnings (1905-1910) of the Indian aspiration for complete independence from British rule after Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal. And the man who picked it out from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's classic Bengali novel 'Anandamath' was no less a leader than Sri Aurobindo himself. To the surprise and consternation of the British Viceroy and his officials, thousand-throated cries of "Vande Mataram" rent the skies of India during the inspiring beginnings in those dramatic years of the national independence struggle.

And what of the real intentions of these 19th Century western Gentlemen still so greatly revered by several leading Indian academics? In a marvelous book "THE INVASION THAT NEVER WAS" by Michael Danino/Sujata Nahar, published by THE MOTHER'S INSTITUTE OF RESEARCH in Delhi (1996), the best known icon of 19th Century Indology Max Muller was effectively demolished in his own words; hoisted on his own petard, as it were. I quote directly from Michael Danino: "Even the celebrated Max Muller (whose research work, interestingly, was commissioned and generously paid for by the East India Company after he had been engaged by Macaulay), wrote to his wife ((ref. Friedrich Max Muller, Life and Letters, Vol.1; London: Longmans, 1902, p328): 'This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda, will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion and to show them what The root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has Sprung from it during the last three thousand years." So? The seemingly "impartial" scholar was in truth a Macaulayite tool for the accomplishment of grandiose imperial aims.

This plan misfired largely due to the great Indian savants (not academics, mind you!). The first to dispute the Aryan myth was Dayananda Saraswati. He rejected out of hand the whole 19th Century European view of the Veda. Here Michael Danino quotes Sri Aurobindo: "Dayananda seized justly on the Veda as India's Rock of Ages. In the matter of Vedic interpretation I am convinced that whatever may be the final complete interpretation, Dayananda will be honored as the first discoverer of the right clues." (ref: Sri Aurobindo, Centenary Edition 1972, Vol. 17, p. 334). Danino continues: "By the same token, Dayananda forcefully opposed the Christian missionaries' vilification of India's ancient culture, and engaged in public debates with some of them (with maulanas too), especially in Punjab where a wave of conversions had taken place."

Danino proceeds to quote: "Dayananda's performance in public debates not only stopped further conversions, but also gave birth to a new movement, 'shuddhi' (purification) of those who had been enticed away from Hindu society ...... It sent a wave of consternation through the missionary circles and restored Hindu confidence. In days to come, the missionaries became more and more reluctant to meet Dayananda in open forums."

Writes Danino: "With Vivekananda's deep knowledge not only of Hindu scriptures but of Western history and religions, he was quick to see the gaps in the Aryan edifice." In a lecture in USA, Vivekananda remarked scornfully: "And what your European Pandits say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign land snatching away the land of aborigines and settling in India by exterminating them is all pure nonsense, foolish talk. Strange that our Indian scholars too say 'Amen' to them.... And all these monstrous lies are being taught to our boys." (Vivekananda Complete Works, Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1963; Vol. V, p. 534-535).

Danino goes on to write that in another lecture, this time in India, Vivekananda was in a more humorous mood, but mercilessly to the point: "Our [European] archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came from, the Lord knows where. According to some, they came from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who think that the Aryans were all red-haired ....... If the writer happens to be a black-haired man, the Aryans were all black-haired. Of late, there was an attempt to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes.... Some say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryan came from anywhere outside India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-Aryans ..... is equally illogical and equally irrational..... The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else...... And the more you go on fighting and quarrelling about all trivialities such as 'Dravidian' and 'Aryan,' and the question of Brahmins and non-Brahmins and all that, the further you are from that accumulation of energy and power which is going to make the future India." (Vivekananda Lectures from Colombo to Almora; Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1992; p. 222, 230).

Coming to Sri Aurobindo's immense contribution, Danino writes: "A systematic refutation of the Aryan invasion theory had to wait until Sri Aurobindo. In 1910, after he had worked for a decade to awaken the spirit of independence in India, and spent a year in prison, he learned that the British had finally decided to deport him under new draconian laws (they regarded him as 'the most dangerous man we have to deal with at present"); leaving Bengal he sought refuge in Pondicherry, then a French possession. There, soon afterwards, he took up his study of the Veda....While reading the Sanskrit text, he also came to question the European scholars' view of the Veda which, 'like the majority of educated Indians,' he had so far 'passively accepted without examination.' (ref. Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Centenary Edition, vol. 10, p. 33-34). He soon realized that 'If the modern interpretation stands, the Vedas are no doubt of high interest to the philologist, the anthropologist and the historian; but poetically and spiritually they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge and deep religious wealth is the most imposing and baseless hoax that has ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout many millenniums. Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or is it not rather the culmination of a long increasing and ever progressing error?'" (Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, April 1985, p 27).

Danino: "With his usual keenness of vision, Sri Aurobindo wrote: 'In India we have fallen during the last few centuries into a fixed habit of unquestioning deference to authority....... We are ready to accept all European theories, the theory of an 'Aryan' colonization of a
Dravidian India, the theory of Nature-worship and henotheism of the Vedic Rishis...... as if these hazardous speculations were on a par in authority and certainty with the law of gravitation and the theory of evolution.' (ref: Ibid., p 41). 'So great is the force of attractive generalizations and widely popularized errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder talking of the Indo-Aryan races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions.'" (Sri Aurobindo, the Origins of Aryan Speech, in The Secret of the Veda, op.cit., p. 193).

"How prophetic', writes Danino, "if we consider that this was written some twenty year before the growth of Nazism with its claims to 'Aryan kinship'! In his Secret of the Veda, which started appearing from 1914, Sri Aurobindo called on his fellow countrymen not to be 'haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on the modern mind.'" (The Secret of the Veda, op. cit., p 193).

Danino continues: "Taking a straight look at the original text, with no preconception, no a priori theory, Sri Aurobindo observed, 'it did not take long to see that the Vedic indications of a racial division between Aryans and Dasyus and the identification of the latter with the indigenous Indians were of a far flimsier character than I had supposed.'" (ref: Ibid., p 36). 'This division was "a conjecture supported only by other conjectures ...... a myth of the philologists". (ref: Ibid., p 40). "Sri Aurobindo added. 'The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of such an invasion'" (ref: Ibid., p. 24). "Above
all, he wanted the Indians to develop their own independent judgment: 'A time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third rank and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. When that day comes, we shall ..... question many established philological myths; the legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion of India from the north, the artificial and inimical distinction of Aryan and Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogeneous Indo-Afghan race ....(India's Rebirth, Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives, 1993 , p 91-92) '".

Continues Danino: "Some eighty years later, we know that the 'wedge', driven now not only by scholars but also by politicians, has only gone absurdly deeper. Yet Sri Aurobindo's study of Tamil, which he did with the help of Subramania Bharati (the national poet of Tamil Nadu), led him to discover that the 'original connection between the Sanskrit and Tamil tongues' was 'far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed' and that they were 'two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue'". (Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, op. cit., p 36). "The division between Indo-European and Dravidian languages had collapsed: 'My first study of Tamil words had brought me to what seemed a clue to the very origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue.'" (ref: Ibid., p 46).

"Sri Aurobindo's study, however, led him to far more momentous results, for he recovered the long lost symbolism of the Veda, and brought to light the Rishis' extraordinary experience." These results, however, are of far greater value to living practitioners of Indian Yoga, than to academics, and recourse must be had to the major portion of Sri Aurobindo's "Secret of the Veda" for that purpose.

I make no apologies for continuing with quotes from Danina, for The good reason that they cannot be improved upon. He next writes: "The Question we should now ask is: Are our latter day historians, who still swear by Marx or Max Muller, or both, and often have a poor knowledge of Sanskrit and India's traditions, better equipped than a Swami Vivekananda or a Sri Aurobindo, with their depth of understanding and erudition, to tell us what the meaning of the Veda is and the conclusions we are to draw from it?...Yet it is not as if there were no scholars in India to agree with these great seers. We will cite here only two of these striking examples of genuine but ignored Indian scholarship.

"Some ten years after the serialization of the Sri Aurobindo's 'Secret of the Veda', R. Swaminatha Aiyar, a Tamil administrator, linguist and mathematician, carried out extensive research on the so-called Dravidian languages, but not 'without previously disposing of a large number of misconceptions and untenable theories about Dravidian languages and Dravidian culture, which have come into existence since the publication of Bishop Caldwell's 'Dravidian Grammar'. (Ref: R. Swaminatha Aiyar, Dravidian Theories (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas, 1987). "After a thorough scrutiny of the grammar and roots of these languages, his conclusions confirmed Sri Aurobindo's own findings on the deep connection between Tamil and Sanskrit. Swaminatha Aiyar found most Dravidian verb forms of 'Indo-Aryan origin,' and that 'the basic portion of Dravidian vocabularies consists of words of Indo-Aryan origin though ..... these words have been greatly corrupted and are very difficult of recognition.' As N.S. Rajaram, also a mathematician and linguist from South India, remarks in a recent study, 'Dravidian languages are strongly inflected like Sanskrit, and cases and declensions
are also quite similar.... In some ways these so-called Dravidian languages have preserved ancient forms and usages from Sanskrit better than North Indian languages like Hindi.'" (N.S. Rajaram, The Politics of History, op. cit., p 175).

To continue with Danino. "B.R. Ambedkar is our second example. Known in India chiefly for his campaign in support of the lower castes (he himself was a Harijan) and his work on the Indian Constitution, it is often overlooked that in order to find out the truth of the European
Theories about Aryans and non-Aryans, high and low caste, he did precisely what Sri Aurobindo exhorted Indians to do: he went to the source, and studied the Veda for himself, with an open mind. His conclusions are unequivocal, though regrettably they are largely ignored by those who profess to follow his lead and who more often than not make a strident use of the very theories he sought to demolish: 'The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the modern representatives of the original Aryan race. The theory is based on nothing but pleasing assumptions, and inferences based on such assumptions. The theory is a perversion of scientific investigation. It is not allowed to evolve out of facts. On the contrary, the theory is preconceived and facts are selected to prove it. It falls to the ground at every point.' (ref: B. R. Ambedkar, quoted by D.B. Thengadi in The Perspective [Sahitya Sindhu Prakashan]).

My conclusions are:

1. The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race.
2. There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of India by the Aryan race and it having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus supposed to be the natives of India.
3. There is no evidence to show that the distinction between Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction.
4. The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryans were different in colour from the Dasas and Dasyus.....If anthropometry is a science which can be depended upon to determine the race of a people..... (then its) measurements establish that the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians, the Untouchables are also Dravidians.....' (B. R. Ambedkar, 'Writings and Speeches' [Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1986-1990], Vol. 7, p. 85 and 302-303, quoted in Koenraad Elst's Indigneous Indians, Agastya to Ambedkar, op. cit., p.410-411).

Danino completes this particular chapter of his book, thus: "Despite these remarkable protests, none listened; we Indians have long had the inexplicable habit of accepting change only if comes to us from the West. Yet in recent years, some voices have begun to be heard, both in the West and in India, asserting that the time has come to chuck out this worm-eaten theory once and for all. The cumulative evidence from all scientific branches of knowledge, especially archaeology, has become simply too overwhelming to be ignored, except for historians with dubious motives."

Voila! as the French would say. I have done my bit of 'nishkama karma' (desireless action) for your more than worthwhile cause in respect of at least the demolition of the fictitious Aryan/Dravidian divide Indian politicians and a good number of India's leading academics continue to subscribe to. There is no such thing as an "immortal bubble". This bubble too will one day burst for good and be seen no more.

You have other challenges to meet head on, by way of dissemination Of your objectives to opinion in India itself, but also among the Indian diaspora in the West, particularly in the USA. In the psychological field, as in the study of yet another speculative discipline like Indology, Ken Wilber and his undoubted intellect may be safely left to the attention of formidable Indian and non-Indian practitioners of Indian spiritual practices (these, incidentally, are not speculative, but experiential disciplines in which seekers consciously ascend and descend what Sri Aurobindo called the "ladder of consciousness"). Don Salmon, for instance, is himself a master in the same field as Wilber. But he also possesses an additional SOMETHING ELSE of one who devotedly treads the path of the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. Be assured that Mr. Wilber will by no means arrive at the stature of an Avatar. No barefaced plagiarist of ideas and conceptions ever did.

Warm regards and best wishes,

C. V. Devan Nair

Link

Sanskrit and Lithuanian

One of the most important stimuli for the emergence of historical-comparative linguistics was the acquaintance of Europeans with Sanskrit, the old language of India. Europeans believed that a Sanskrit scholar could understand and be understood by a Lithuanian farmer.

In 1786, William Jones (1746-1794), an English Justice of the Supreme Court of Judicature in Calcutta, read a paper before the Asiatic Society, founded by himself, in which he proclaimed that Sanskrit, this "wonderfully structured old language of India" is derived from the same source as Greek, Latin, and perhaps even Gothic and Celtic. This was a very bold idea, which produced a veritable revolution in linguistics.

European scholars turned their attention to Sanskrit, and started with old European languages. They created precise methodology which enabled them to understand phonetic changes and distinguish original words from loans. They taught themselves through the comparison of related words in different languages to reconstruct the extinct forms, which were very often similar or even identical with Sanskrit forms.

Linguists believed that comparative linguistics without Sanskrit is like astronomy without mathematics.

It is not difficult therefore to imagine the surprise of the scholarly world when they learned that even in their time somewhere on the Nemunas River lived a people who spoke a language as archaic in many of its forms as Sanskrit itself. Although it was not exactly true that a professor of Sanskrit could talk to Lithuanian farmers in their language, coincidences between these two languages were truly amazing, for example:

Sanskrit sunus son - Lith. sunus;
Sanskrit viras man - Lith. vyras;
Sanskrit avis sheep - Lith. avis;
Sanskrit dhumas smoke - Lith. dumas;
Sanskrit padas sole - Lith. padas.

We can be safe in asserting that these Lithuanian words have not changed their forms for the last five thousand years.

The most prominent European linguists visited Lithuania in order to learn this archaic language from the lips of Lithuanians themselves, which helped them investigate the history of other Indo-European languages.

Today, there is no doubt that Lithuanian has retained many ancient Indo-European forms. It is hard to say whether it was due to the character of the Lithuanians or of geographic position that their language has changed so little in the course of several thousand years. Scholars often make references to the Lithuanian language when conducting research on the history of other languages.


From "Lithuania in the World", 1996 No1.

Lithuanian words similar or exact to Sanskrit

• Lithuanian du/dvi, Sanskrit dvi/dve, Greek duo/dwo/tyu, Latin duo ("two")
• Lithuanian trys, Sanskrit tri/traya, Greek trios/tria/treis, Latin tres ("three")
• Lithuanian penki(os), Sanskrit páñcan, Greek pente/pende(cis) ("five")
• Lithuanian šeši(os), Sanskrit sas, Greek heks/hecs/hex, Latin secs/sex ("six")
• Lithuanian septyni(os), Sanskrit saptahn/sapta, Greek hepta(cis)/septa, Latin septem ("seven")
• Lithuanian aštuoni(os), Sanskrit ashtan/ashta, Greek akto/okto/oktu(cis), Latin octo ("eight")
• Lithuanian dešimt(is), Sanskrit dasham, Greek deka/deca(cis), Latin deci/decem ("ten")
• Lithuanian žiema, Sanskrit hima ("winter")
• Lithuanian derva/darva, Sanskrit druma/taru ("tree")
• Lithuanian vilkas, Sanskrit vrika ("wolf")

• Lith. and Skt. sūnus (son)
• Lith. and Skt. avis and Lat. ovis (sheep)
• Lith. dūmas and Skt. dhumas and Lat. fumus (smoke)
• Lith. antras and Skt. antaras (second, the other)
• Lith. vilkas and Skt. vrkas and Lat. lupus (wolf)
• Lith. ratas and Lat. rota (wheel) and Skt. rathah (carriage).
• Lith. senis and Lat. senex (an old man) and Skt. sanah (old).
• Lith. vyras and Lat. vir (a man) and Skt. vira (man, hero).
• Lith. angis and Lat. anguis (a snake in Latin, a species of snakes in Lithuanian)
• Lith. linas and Lat. linum (flax, compare with English 'linen')
• Lith. ariu and Lat. aro (I plow)
• Lith. jungiu and Lat. iungeo (I join)
• Lith. gentys and Lat. gentes (tribes) and Skt. jánas (genus, race).
• Lith. mėnesis and Lat. mensis and Skt masa (month)
• Lith. dantys and Lat. dentes and Skt dantas (teeth)
• Lith. naktys and Lat. noctes and Skt. nakt (night)
• Lith. sėdime and Lat. sedemus (we sit) and Skt. siedati (sits).

New paper on Indian Population History - "No Truth to the Aryan-Dravidian Theory"

For the last couple of days many euro-centric bloggers assumed this study 'proves' that North Indians came from Europe via the alleged Aryan Invasion a few thousand years ago. Check out Dienekes blog for instance. Well, co-authors of the study say something else:

Times of India
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/india/Aryan-Dravidian-divide-a-myth-Study/articleshow/5053274.cms

HYDERABAD: The great Indian divide along north-south lines now stands blurred. A pathbreaking study by Harvard and indigenous researchers on
ancestral Indian populations says there is a genetic relationship between all Indians and more importantly, the hitherto believed ``fact'' that Aryans and Dravidians signify the ancestry of north and south Indians might after all, be a myth.

``This paper rewrites history... there is no north-south divide,'' Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference here on Thursday.

Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.

The study analysed 500,000 genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups from 13 states. All the individuals were from six-language families and traditionally ``upper'' and ``lower'' castes and tribal groups. ``The genetics proves that castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of the Indian society,'' the study said. Thangarajan noted that it was impossible to distinguish between castes and tribes since their genetics proved they were not systematically different.

The study was conducted by CCMB scientists in collaboration with researchers at Harvard Medical School,
Harvard School of Public Health and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. It reveals that the present-day Indian population is a mix of ancient north and south bearing the genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations - the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) and the Ancestral South Indian (ASI).

``The initial settlement took place 65,000 years ago in the Andamans and in ancient south India around the same time, which led to population growth in this part,'' said Thangarajan. He added, ``At a later stage, 40,000 years ago, the ancient north Indians emerged which in turn led to rise in numbers here. But at some point of time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. And that is the population which exists now and there is a genetic relationship between the population within India.''

The study also helps understand why the incidence of genetic diseases among Indians is different from the rest of the world. Singh said that 70% of Indians were burdened with genetic disorders and the study could help answer why certain conditions restricted themselves to one population. For instance, breast cancer among Parsi women, motor neuron diseases among residents of Tirupati and Chittoor, or sickle cell anaemia among certain tribes in central India and the North-East can now be understood better, said researchers.

The researchers, who are now keen on exploring whether Eurasians descended from ANI, find in their study that ANIs are related to western Eurasians, while the ASIs do not share any similarity with any other population across the world. However, researchers said there was no scientific proof of whether Indians went to Europe first or the other way round.

Migratory route of Africans

Between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago, the East-African droughts shrunk the water volume of the lake Malawi by at least 95%, causing migration out of Africa. Which route did they take? Researchers say their study of the tribes of Andaman and Nicobar islands using complete mitochondrial DNA sequences and its comparison those of world populations has led to the theory of a ``southern coastal route'' of migration from East Africa through India.

This finding is against the prevailing view of a northern route of migration via Middle East, Europe, south-east Asia, Australia and then to India.

I guess that as time goes by Aryan Invasion theorists will whittle down their 'theory' to "White Caucasian  Horse Riding  Proto-Indo-European Language Teacher That Digs Black Indian Aboroginal Chicks Changes The Indian Genetic Landscape Theory". :)

The Aryan Invasion Myth - an article by N.S. Rajaram.

DECLINE OF INDOLOGY IN THE WEST

Indology, which is the study of Indian history and culture from a Western perspective, is rapidly declining in the West under the impact of science and changed global conditions. Just as Max Müller represented Indology at its height, Michael Witzel symbolizes its current decadent state.

N.S. Rajaram

ABSTRACT

  Indology may be defined as the study of Indian culture and history from a Western, particularly European perspective. The earliest Westerner to show an interest in India was the Greek historian Herodotus, followed by his successors like Megasthenes, Arrian, Strabo and others. This was followed by missionaries, traders and diplomats, often one and the same. With the beginning of European colonialism, Indology underwent a qualitative change, with what was primarily of trade and missionary interest to becoming a political and administrative tool. Some of the early Indologists like William Jones, H.T. Colebrook and others were employed by the East India Company, and later the British Government. Even academics like F. Max Müller were dependent on colonial governments and the support of missionaries. From the second half of the 19th century to the end of the Second World War, German nationalism played a major role in the shaping of Indological scholarship.

  Much of the literature in Indology carries this politico-social baggage including colonial attitudes and stereotypes. The end of the Second World War saw also the end of European colonialism, beginning with India. Indology however was slow to change, and with minor modifications like seemingly dissociating itself from its racial legacy, the same theories and conclusions continued to be presented by Western Indologists. Towards the close of the twentieth century, first science and then globalization dealt serious blows to the discipline and its offshoots like Indo European Studies. This is reflected in the closure of established Indology programs in the West and the rise of new programs within and without academic centers driven mainly by science and primary literature.

  The article will trace the origins, evolution and the devolution of Indology and the main contribution of the field and some of its key personalities.


Background: Historiography

  One of the striking features of the first decade of the present century (and millennium) is the precipitous decline of Indology and the associated field of Indo-European Studies. Within the last three years, the Sanskrit Department at Cambridge University and the Berlin Institute of Indology, two of the oldest and most prestigious Indology centers in the West, have shut down. The reason cited is lack of interest. At Cambridge, not a single student had enrolled for its Sanskrit or Hindi course.

  Other universities in Europe and America are facing similar problems. The Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, long a leader in Oriental Studies, is drastically cutting down on its programs. Even the Sanskrit Department at Harvard, one of the oldest and most prestigious in America, shut down its summer program of teaching Sanskrit to foreign students. It may be a harbinger of things to come that Francis X. Clooney and Anne E. Monius, both theologians with the Harvard Divinity School, are teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in the Sanskrit Department. More seriously, they are also advising doctoral candidates.

  Does this mean that the Harvard Sanskrit Department may eventually be absorbed into the Divinity School and lose its secular character? In striking contrast, the Classics Department which teaches Greek and Latin has no association with the Divinity School, despite the fact that Biblical studies can hardly exist without Greek and Latin. It serves to highlight the fact that Sanskrit is not and can never be as central to the Western Canon as Greek and Latin. It also means that Sanskrit Studies, or Indology, or whatever one may call it must seek an identity that is free of its colonial trappings. It was this colonial patronage in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries that sustained these programs. Their slide into the fringes of academia is a reflection of the changed conditions following the end of colonialism.

  Coming at a time when worldwide interest in India is the highest in memory, it points to structural problems in Indology and related fields like Indo-European Studies. Also, the magnitude of the crisis suggests that the problems are fundamental and just not a transient phenomenon. What is striking is the contrast between this gloomy academic scene and the outside world. During my lecture tours in Europe, Australia and the United States, I found no lack of interest, especially among the youth. Only they are getting what they want from programs outside academic departments, in cultural centers like the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, temples, and short courses and seminars conducted by visiting lecturers (like this writer).

  This means the demand is there, but academic departments are being bypassed. Even for learning Sanskrit, there are now innovative programs like those offered by Samskrita Bharati that teach in ten intensive yet lively sessions more than what students learn in a semester of dry lectures. The same is true of other topics related to India— history, yoga, philosophy and others. And this interest is by no means limited to persons of Indian origin. What has gone wrong with academic Indology, and can it be reversed?

  To understand the problem today it is necessary to visit its peculiar origins. Modern Indology began with Sir William Jones’s observation in 1784 that Sanskrit and European languages were related. Jones was a useful linguist but his main job was to interpret Indian law and customs to his employers, the British East India Company. This dual role of Indologists as scholars as well as interpreters of India continued well into the twentieth century. Many Indologists, including such eminent figures as H.H. Wilson and F. Max Müller sought and enjoyed the patronage of the ruling powers.

  Indologists’ role as interpreters of India ended with independence in 1947, but many Indologists, especially in the West failed to see the writing on the wall. They continued to get students from India, which seems to have lulled them into believing that it would be business as usual. But today, six decades later, Indian immigrants and persons of Indian origin occupy influential positions in business, industry and now the government in the United States and Britain. They are now part of the establishment in their adopted lands. No one in the West today looks to Indology departments for advice on matters relating to India when they can get it from their next door neighbor or an office colleague. In this era of globalization, India and Indians are not the exotic creatures they were once seen to be.

  This means the Indologist’s position as interpreter of India to the West, and sometimes even to Indians, is gone for good. But this alone cannot explain why their Sanskrit and related programs are also folding. To understand this we need to look further and recognize that new scientific discoveries are impacting Indology in ways that could not be imagined even twenty years ago. This is nothing new. For more than a century, the foundation of Indology had been linguistics, particularly Sanskrit and Indo-European languages. While archaeological discoveries of the Harappan civilization forced Indologists to take this hard data also into their discipline, they continued to use their linguistic theories in interpreting new data. In effect, empirical data became subordinate to theory, the exact reverse of the scientific approach.

  These often forced interpretations of hard data from archaeology and even literature were far from convincing and undermined the whole field including linguistics of which Sanskrit studies was seen as a part. The following examples highlight the mismatch between their theories and data. Scholars ignored obvious Vedic symbols like: svasti and the om sign found in Harappan archaeology; the clear match between descriptions of flora and fauna in the Vedic literature and their depictions in Harappan iconography; and also clear references to maritime activity and the oceans in the Vedic literature while their theories claimed that the Vedic people who composed the literature were from a land-locked region and totally ignorant of the ocean. Such glaring contradictions between their theories and empirical data could not but undermine the credibility of the whole field.

  All this didn’t happen overnight: Harappan archaeology posed challenges to colonial Indological model of ancient India, built around the Aryan invasion model nearly a century ago. But the challenge was ignored because the political authority that supported Western Indologists and their theories did not disappear until 1950, while its academic influence lingered on for several more decades. It is only now, long after the disappearance of colonial rule that academic departments in the West are beginning to feel the heat.

Colonial Indology

  Modern Indology may be said to have begun with Sir William Jones, a Calcutta judge in the service of the East India Company. One can almost date the birth of Indology to February 12, 1784, the day on which Jones observed:

  The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source…

  With this superficial, yet influential observation, Jones launched two fields of study in Western academics— philology (comparative linguistics) and Indo-European Studies including Indology. The ‘common source,’ variously called Indo-European, Proto Indo-European, Indo-Germanische and so forth has been the Holy Grail of philologists. The search for the common source has occupied philologists for the greater part of two hundred years, but the goal has remained elusive, more of which later.

  Jones was a linguist with scholarly inclinations but his job was to interpret Indian law and customs to his employer— the British East India Company in its task of administering its growing Indian territories. In fact, this was what led to his study of Sanskrit and its classics. This dual role of Indologists as scholars as well as official interpreters of India to the ruling authorities continued well into the twentieth century. Many Indologists, including such highly regarded figures as H.H. Wilson and F. Max Müller enjoyed the support and sponsorship of the ruling powers. It was their means of livelihood and they had to ensure that their masters were kept happy.

  Though Jones was the pioneer, the dominant figure of colonial Indology was Max Müller, an impoverished German who found fame and fortune in England. While a scholar of great if undisciplined imagination, his lasting legacy has been the confusion he created by conflating race with language. He created the mythical Aryans that Indologists have been fighting over ever since. Scientists repeatedly denounced it, but Indologists were, and some still are, loathe to let go of it. As far back as 1939, Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great biologists of the twentieth century summed up the situation from a scientific point of view:

  In 1848 the young German scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823 – 1900) settled in Oxford where he remained for the rest of his life… About 1853 he introduced into English usage the unlucky term Aryan, as applied to a large group of languages. His use of this Sanskrit word contains in itself two assumptions— one linguistic,… the other geographical. Of these the first is now known to be erroneous and the second now regarded as probably erroneous. [Sic: Now known to be definitely wrong.] Nevertheless, around each of these two assumptions a whole library of literature has arisen.

  Moreover, Max Müller threw another apple of discord. He introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its descendants, but also of a corresponding ‘Aryan race’. The idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in England…

  In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature… In Germany, the idea of the ‘Aryan race’ received no more scientific support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to local vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special conditions. (Emphasis added.)

  These ‘special conditions’ were the rise of Nazism in Germany and British imperial interests in India. Its perversion in Germany leading eventually to Nazi horrors is well known. The less known fact is how the British turned it into a political and propaganda tool to make Indians accept British rule. A recent BBC report acknowledged as much (October 6, 2005):

It [Aryan invasion theory] gave a historical precedent to justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years earlier.

  That is to say, the British presented themselves as ‘new and improved Aryans’ that were in India only to complete the work left undone by their ancestors in the hoary past. This is how the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin put it in the House of Commons in 1929:

  Now, after ages, …the two branches of the great Aryan ancestry have again been brought together by Providence… By establishing British rule in India, God said to the British, “I have brought you and the Indians together after a long separation, …it is your duty to raise them to their own level as quickly as possible …brothers as you are…”

  Baldwin was only borrowing a page from the Jesuit missionary Robert de Nobili (1577 - 1656) who presented Christianity as a purer form of the Vedic religion to attract Hindu converts. Now, 300 years later, Baldwin and the British were telling Indians: “We are both Aryans but you have fallen from your high state, and we, the British are here to lift you from your fallen condition.” It is surprising that few historians seem to have noticed the obvious similarity.

  In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that many of the ‘scholars’ of Indology should have had missionary links. In fact, one Colonel Boden even endowed a Sanskrit professorship at Oxford to facilitate the conversion of the natives to Christianity. (H.H. Wilson was the first Boden Professor followed by Monier Williams. Max Müller who coveted the position never got it. He remained bitter about it to the end of his life.)

  It is widely held that Max Müller turned his back on his race theories when he began to insist that Aryan refers to language and never a race. The basis for this belief is the following famous statement he made in 1888.

I have declared again and again that if I say Aryan, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor skull nor hair; I mean simply those who speak the Aryan language. … To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan blood, Aryan race, Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.

  What lay behind this extraordinary vehemence from a man noted for his mild language? Was there something behind this echo of the Shakespearean “Methinks the lady doth protest too much”?

  Huxley attributes Max Müller’s change of heart to the advice of his scientist friends. This is unlikely. To begin with, the science needed to refute his racial ideas did not exist at the time. Moreover, Max Müller didn’t know enough science to understand it even if it were explained it to him. The reasons for his flip flop, as always with him, were political followed by concern for his position in England, not necessarily in that order.

  A closer examination of the record shows that Max Müller made the switch from race to language not in 1888 but in 1871. That incidentally was the year of German unification following Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War. Thereby hangs a tale.1

  For more than twenty years, from 1848 to 1871, Max Müller had been a staunch German nationalist arguing for German unification. He was fond of publicity and made no secret of his political leanings in numerous letters and articles in British and European publications. German nationalists of course had embraced the notion of the Aryan nation and looked to scholars like Max Müller to provide intellectual justification. He was more than willing to cooperate.

  Things changed almost overnight when Prussia defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War leading to German unification under the Prussian banner. From a fragmented landscape of petty principalities, Germany became the largest and most powerful country in Europe and Britain’s strongest adversary. There was near hysteria in British Indian circles that Sanskrit studies had brought about German unification as the mighty ‘Aryan Nation’. Sir Henry Maine, a member of the Viceroy’s Council went so far as so claim “A nation has been born out of Sanskrit!”

  The implication was clear, what happened in Germany could happen also in India, leading to a repeat of 1857 but with possibly a different result. All this was hysteria of the moment, but Max Müller the Aryan Sage, and outspoken German Nationalist faced a more immediate problem: how to save his position at Oxford? He had to shed his political baggage associated with the Aryan race and the Aryan Nation to escape any unfriendly scrutiny by his British patrons.

  He could of course have gone along quietly but Max Müller being Max Müller, he had to strike a dramatic pose and display his new avatar as a staunch opponent of Aryan theories. In any event he was too much of a celebrity to escape unnoticed, any more than Michael Witzel or Romila Thapar could in our own time. So, within months of the proclamation of the German Empire (18 January 1871) Friedrich Max Müller marched into a university in Strasburg in German occupied France (Alsace) and dramatically denounced what he claimed were distortions of his old theories. He insisted that they were about languages and race had nothing to do with them.

  He may have rejected his errors, but his followers, including many quacks and crackpots kept invoking his name in support of their own ideas. The climate in Oxford turned unfriendly and many former friends began to view him with suspicion. In fact, the situation became so bad that in 1875, he seriously contemplated resigning his position at Oxford and returning to Germany. Though there have been claims that this was because he was upset over the award of an honorary degree to his rival Monier-Williams, the more probable explanation is the discomfort resulting from his German nationalist past in the context of the changed situation following German unification.

  The specter of Max Müller looms large over the colonial period of Indology though he is unknown in Germany today and all but forgotten in England. In fact his father Wilhem Müller, a very minor German poet is better known: a few of his poems were set to music by the great composer Franz Schubert. In his own time, Germans despised him for having turned his back on the ‘Aryan race’ to please his British masters. Indians though still revere him though no one today takes his theories seriously. One can get and idea of how he was seen by his contemporaries and immediate successors from the entry in the eleventh edition (1911) of the Encyclopædia Britannica:

  Though undoubtedly a great scholar, Max Müller did not so much represent scholarship pure and simple as her hybrid types— the scholar-author and the scholar-courtier. In the former capacity, though manifesting little of the originality of genius, he rendered vast service by popularizing high truths among high minds [and among the highly placed]. …There were drawbacks in both respects: the author was too prone to build on insecure foundations, and the man of the world incurred censure for failings which may perhaps be best indicated by the remark that he seemed too much of a diplomatist.

  His contemporaries were less charitable. They charged that Max Müller had an eye “only for crowned heads.” His acquaintances included a large number of princes and potentates—with little claim to scholarship—with a maharaja or two thrown in. He was fortunate that the British monarchy was of German origin (Hanoverian) and Queen Victoria’s husband a German prince (Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha). It was these more than fellow scholars that he cultivated. It proved valuable for his career, if not scholarship, for he had little difficulty in getting sponsors for his ambitious projects. He lived and died a rich man, drawing from his rival William Dwight Whitney the following envious if tasteless remark: 2

He has had his reward. No man was before ever so lavishly paid, in money and in fame, even for the most unexceptional performance of such a task. For personal gratitude in addition, there is not the slightest call. If Müller had never put his hand to the Veda, his fellow-students would have had the material they needed perhaps ten years earlier, and Vedic studies would be at the present moment proportionately advanced. …The original honorarium, of about £500 a volume, is well-nigh or quite unprecedented in the history of purely scholarly enterprises; and the grounds on which the final additional gift of £2000 was bestowed have never been made public.

  Max Müller’s career illustrates how Indology and Sanskrit studies in the West have always been associated with politics at all levels. He was by no means the only ‘diplomatist’ scholar gracing colonial Indology, only the most successful. It is remarkable that though his contributions are all but forgotten, his political legacy endures. His successors in Europe and America have been reduced to play politics at a much lower level, but in India, his theories have had unexpected fallout in the rise of Dravidian politics. It is entirely proper that while his scholarly works (save for translations) have been consigned to the dustbin of history, his legacy endures in politics. This may prove to be true of Indology as a whole as an academic discipline.

Post colonial scene: passing of the Aryan gods

  The post colonial era may conveniently be dated to 1950. In 1947 India became free and the great Aryan ‘Thousand Year Reich’ lay in ashes. In Europe at least the word Aryan came to acquire an infamy comparable to the word Jihadi today. Europeans, Germans in particular, were anxious to dissociate themselves from it. But there remained a residue of pre-war Indology (and associated race theories) that in various guises succeeded in establishing itself in academic centers mainly in the United States. Its most visible spokesman in recent times has been one Michael Witzel, a German expatriate like Max Müller, teaching in the Sanskrit Department at Harvard University in the United States. In an extraordinary replay of Max Müller’s political flip-flops Witzel too is better known for his political and propaganda activities than any scholarly contributions. Witzel’s recent campaigns, from attempts to introduce Aryan theories in California schools to his ill-fated tour of India where his scholarly deficiencies were exposed in public highlight the dependence of Indology on politics.

  While the field of Indo-European Studies has been struggling to survive on the fringes of academia, lately it has become the subject critical analysis by scholars in Europe and America. Unlike Indians who treat the field and its practitioners with a degree of respect, European scholars have not hesitated to call a spade a spade, treating it as a case of pathological scholarship with racist links to Nazi ideology. This may be attributed to the fact that Europeans have seen and experienced its horrors while Indians have only read about it.

  In a remarkable article, “Aryan Mythology As Science And Ideology” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion1999; 67: 327-354) the Swedish scholar Stefan Arvidsson raises the question: “Today it is disputed whether or not the downfall of the Third Reich brought about a sobering among scholars working with 'Aryan' religions.” We may rephrase the question: “Did the end of the Nazi regime put an end to race based theories in academia?”

  An examination of several humanities departments in the West suggests otherwise: following the end of Nazism, academic racism may have undergone a mutation but did not entirely disappear. Ideas central to the Aryan myth resurfaced in various guises under labels like Indology and Indo-European Studies. This is clear from recent political, social and academic episodes in places as far apart as Harvard University and the California State Board of Education. But there was an interregnum of sorts before Aryan theories again raised their heads in West.

  Two decades after the end of the Nazi regime, racism underwent another mutation as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, Americans were made to feel guilty about their racist past and the indefensible treatment of African Americans. U.S. academia also changed accordingly and any discourse based on racial stereotyping became taboo. Soon this taboo came to be extended to Native Americans, Eskimos and other ethnic groups.

  In this climate of seeming liberal enlightenment, one race theory continued to flourish as if nothing had changed. Theories based on the Aryan myth that formed the core of Nazi ideology continued in various guises, as previously noted, in Indology and Indo-European Studies. Though given a linguistic and sometimes a cultural veneer, these racially sourced ideas continue to enjoy academic respectability in such prestigious centers as Harvard and Chicago.

  Being a European transplant, its historical trajectory was different from the one followed by American racism. Further, unlike the Civil Rights Movement, which had mass support, academic racism remained largely confined to academia. This allowed it to escape public scrutiny for several decades until it clashed with the growing Hindu presence in the United States. Indians, Hindus in particular saw Western Indology and Indo-European Studies as a perversion of their history and religion and a thinly disguised attempt to prejudice the American public, especially the youth, against India and Hinduism to serve their academic interests.

  The fact that Americans of Indian origin are among the most educated group ensured that their objections could not be brushed away by ‘haughty dismissals’ as the late historian of science Abraham Seidenberg put it. Nonetheless, scholars tried to use academic prestige as a bludgeon in forestalling debate, by denouncing their adversaries as ignorant chauvinists and bigots unworthy of debate. But increasingly, hard evidence from archaeology, natural history and genetics made it impossible to ignore the objections of their opponents, many of whom (like this writer) were scientists. But in November 2005, there came a dramatic denouement, in, of all places, California schools. Academics suddenly found it necessary to leave their ivory towers and fight it out in the open, in full media glare— and under court scrutiny.

  It is unnecessary to go into the details of the now discredited campaign by Michael Witzel and his associates trying to stop the removal of references to the Aryans and their invasion from California school books. What is remarkable is that a senior tenured professor at Harvard of German origin should concern himself with how Hinduism is taught to children in California. Witzel is a linguist, but he presumed to tell California schools how Hinduism should be taught to children. It turned out that Hinduism was only a cover, and his concern was saving the Aryan myth from being erased from books.

  Ever since he moved to Harvard from Germany, Witzel has seen the fortunes of his department and his field, gradually sink into irrelevance. Problems at Harvard are part of a wider problem in Western academia in the field of Indo-European Studies. As previously noted, several ‘Indology’ departments—as they are sometimes called—are shutting down across Europe. One of the oldest and most prestigious, at Cambridge University in England, has just closed down. This was followed by the closure of the equally prestigious Berlin Institute of Indology founded way back in 1821. Positions like the one Witzel holds (Wales Professor of Sanskrit) were created during the colonial era to serve as interpreters of India. They have lost their relevance and are disappearing from academia. This was the real story, not teaching Hinduism to California children.

  Witzel’s California misadventure appears to have been an attempt to somehow save his pet Aryan theories from oblivion by making it part of Indian history and civilization in the school curriculum. Otherwise, it is hard to see why a senior, tenured professor at Harvard should go to all this trouble, lobbying California school officials to have its Grade VI curriculum changed to reflect his views.

  To follow this it is necessary to go beyond personalities and understand the importance of the Aryan myth to Indo-European Studies. The Aryan myth is a European creation. It has nothing to do with Hinduism. The campaign against Hinduism was a red herring to divert attention from the real agenda, which was and remains saving the Aryan myth. Collapse of the Aryan myth means the collapse of Indo-European studies. This is what Witzel and his colleagues are trying to avert. For them it is an existential struggle.

  Americans and even Indians for the most part are unaware of the enormous influence of the Aryan myth on European history and imagination. Central to Indo-European Studies is the belief—it is no more than a belief—that Indian civilization was created by an invading race of ‘Aryans’ from an original homeland somewhere in Eurasia or Europe. This is the Aryan invasion theory dear to Witzel and his European colleagues, and essential for their survival. According to this theory there was no civilization in India before the Aryan invaders brought it— a view increasingly in conflict with hard evidence from archaeology and natural history.

  In this academic and political conundrum it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the Aryan myth is a modern European creation. It has little to do with ancient India. The word Arya appears for the first time in the Rig Veda, India’s oldest text. Its meaning is obscure but it seems to refer to members of a settled agricultural community. It later became an honorific and a form of address, something like ‘Gentleman’ in English or ‘Monsieur’ in French. Also, it was nowhere as important in India as it came to be in Europe. In the whole the Rig Veda, in all of its ten books, the word Arya appears only about forty times. In contrast, Hitler’s Mein Kampf uses the term Arya and Aryan many times more. Hitler did not invent it. The idea of Aryans as a superior race was already in the air— in Europe, not India.3

  It is interesting to contrast Witzel’s political campaigns against Max Müller’s. Where Max Müller hobnobbed with Indian and European aristocracy including princes and Maharajas, Witzel has had to content himself waiting on California schoolteachers and bureaucrats. These were his masters who held the keys to his career and reputation. It may be no more than a reflection of changed circumstances and the loss of power and prestige of the aristocracy but the contrasts are nonetheless striking.

  No less striking is the contrast between their legacy and reputation. While we may look at Max Müller’s foibles and failures with amused tolerance and appreciate his monumental work in compiling the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East, Witzel’s name is unlikely to command any respect much less affection. In addition to his support for the Aryan theories and the California campaign, Witzel is known for his association with the notorious Indo-Eurasian Research (IER), which has been accused of a hate campaign against the Hindus.

  An article that appeared the New Delhi daily The Pioneer (December 25, 2005) began: “Boorish comments denigrating India, Hindus and Hinduism by a self-proclaimed ‘Indologist’ who is on the faculty of Harvard University has unleashed a fierce debate over the increasing political activism of ’scholars’ who teach at this prestigious American university. Prof Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard, is in the centre of the storm because he tried to prevent the removal of references to India, Hinduism and Sikhism in the curriculum followed by schools in California which parents of Indian origin found to be inadequate, inaccurate or just outright insensitive.”

  The author of The Pioneer article (Kanchan Gupta) went on to observe: “Witzel declared Hindu-Americans to be "lost" or "abandoned", parroting anti-Semite slurs against Jewish people. Coincidence or symptom? Witzel's fantasies are ominously reminiscent of WWII German genocide. He says that 'Since they won't be returning to India, [Hindu immigrants to the USA] have begun building crematoria as well. … Witzel demeans the daughters of Indian-American parents, who take the trouble to learn their heritage through traditional art forms. In the worst of racist slander, Witzel claims that Indian classical music and dance reflect low moral standards.”

  One cannot imagine any publication today, let alone in India, write in this vein about Max Müller, whatever one may feel about his politics and scholarship. Nor can one imagine Max Müller write in the style of Witzel about India or anyone else.

  It must be recorded that Max Müller was emphatically not a racist. He was also a man of exemplary humility in dealing with fellow scholars. In a letter to the Nepalese scholar and Sanskrit poet Pandit Chavilal (undated but written probably just before 1900) Max Müller wrote:

  I am surprised at your familiarity with Sanskrit. We [Europeans] have to read but never to write Sanskrit. To you it seems as easy as English or Latin to us… We can admire all the more because we cannot rival, and I certainly was filled with admiration when I read but a few pages of your Sundara Charita.

  This reflects great credit on Max Müller as a scholar. One has to wonder if his present day counterparts are capable of such exemplary humility. Certainly none was in evidence during Michael Witzel’s recent disastrous lecture tour of India where he was severely embarrassed by schoolchildren and scholars alike, where he was shown to be completely at sea with basic rules of Sanskrit grammar. More than a hundred years ago, Max Müller declined invitations to visit India probably because he sensed that a similar fate awaited him. He chose discretion over bravado.

  The decline from Max Müller to Witzel serves as a metaphor for the decline of Indology itself in our time.

State of Sanskrit studies in the West

  In recent months there have been cries of ‘Sanskrit in danger of disappearing’ from Sanskrit professors and other Indologists in Western academia. This is certainly true in their own case, but their next claim that they need more funding (what else?) to reverse the decline must be taken with a large grain of salt. Sanskrit existed and flourished for thousands of years before Indology and Indologists came into existence, and will no doubt continue to exist without them. If Sanskrit ever faces extinction, it will be for reasons of social and political developments in India and not due to lack of funds for Indologists in the West. They can no more save Sanskrit than Indian scholars can save classical Greek.

  We may now take a moment to assess the contribution of Western Sanskritists from an Indian perspective. For those who believe that Western scholarship has made a major contribution to Sanskrit, such people are not limited to the West, here is an objective measure to consider: Indians began studying English (and other European languages) about the same time that Europeans began their study of Sanskrit. Many Indians have attained distinction as writers in English. But there is not a single piece in Sanskrit—not even a shloka (verse)—by a Western Sanskritist that has found a place in any anthology. This was acknowledged by no less an authority than Max Müller in passage quoted at the end of the previous section.

  These are not the people who can ‘save’ Sanskrit, even if it needs to be saved. Sanskrit is India’s responsibility just as Greek and Latin are Europe’s. Let them study Sanskrit just as Indians should study Greek, but it is too much to expect a few sanctuaries in the West protect and nurture a great and ancient tradition when they are having a hard time saving themselves.

  The principal contribution of the West has been in bringing out editions of ancient works like the Rigveda and translations like Max Müller’s monumental fifty volume Sacred Books of the East. These too have their limitations.

Summary and conclusions

  We may now conclude that that Western Indology is in steep decline and may well become extinct in a generation. The questions though go beyond Indology. Sanskrit is the foundation of Indo-European Studies. If Sanskrit departments close, what will take their place? Will these departments now teach Icelandic, Old Norse or reconstructed Proto Indo-European? Will they attract students? Can Indo-European Studies survive without Sanskrit? A more sensible course would be for Indian and Western scholars to collaborate and build an empirically based study of ancient Indian and European languages— free of dogma and free of politics.

  A basic problem is that for reasons that have little to do with objective scholarship, Indologists have been trying to remove Sanskrit from the special space it occupies in the study of Indo-European languages and replace it something called Proto-Indo-European of PIE. This is like replacing Hebrew with a hypothetical Proto-Semitic language in Biblical Studies. This PIE has literally proven to be a pie in the sky and the whole field is now on the verge of collapse. The resulting vacuum has to be filled by a scholarship that is both sound and empirical, based on existing languages like Sanskrit, Greek and the like. Additionally, Indian scholars will have look more to the east and search for linguistic and other links to the countries and cultures of Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam and others that have historic ties to India of untold antiquity.

NOTES AND REFERENCES
This is explained in more detail in this writer’s The Politics of History and also in Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization, Third Edition, by Navaratna Rajaram and David Frawley, both published by Voice of India, New Delhi. Some recent developments may be found in Sarasvati River and the Vedic Civilization by N.S. Rajaram, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi. For the record the full name of Max Müller was Friedrich Maximillian Müller, but he is better known as Max Müller, the name used also by his descendants.

Max Müller’s aristocratic Indian friends included the Raja of Venkatagiri (who partly financed his edition of the Rigveda) as well as Dwarakanath Tagore, the grandfather of the Nobel laureate Rabindranath. When Max Müller was a struggling scholar in Paris, Tagore helped him with Sanskrit as well as financially. He knew also British and European nobility having met Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In his early years his patrons included Dwarakanath Tagore and Baron Bunsen, the Prussian Ambassador to Britain. It is a tribute to Max Müller’s personality and liberal character that he could attract the friendship of such a wide range of people.

3. It should be noted that the Nazis appropriated their ideas and symbols from European mythology, not India. Hitler’s Aryans worshipped Apollo and Odin, not Vedic deities like Indra and Varuna. His Swastika was also the European ‘Hakenkreuz’ or hooked cross and not the Indian svasti symbol. It was seen in Germany for the first time when General von Luttwitz’s notorious Erhardt Brigade marched into Berlin from Lithuania in support of the abortive Kapp Putsch of 1920. The Erhardt Brigade was one of several freebooting private armies during the years following Germany’s defeat in World War I. They had the covert support of the Wehrmacht (Army headquarters).

New paper on Indian Population History

Reconstructing Indian population history
David Reich, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Nick Patterson, Alkes L. Price & Lalji Singh

"India has been underrepresented in genome-wide surveys of human variation. We analyse 25 diverse groups in India to provide strong evidence for two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the 'Ancestral North Indians' (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the 'Ancestral South Indians' (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other. By introducing methods that can estimate ancestry without accurate ancestral populations, we show that ANI ancestry ranges from 39–71% in most Indian groups, and is higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers. Groups with only ASI ancestry may no longer exist in mainland India. However, the indigenous Andaman Islanders are unique in being ASI-related groups without ANI ancestry. Allele frequency differences between groups in India are larger than in Europe, reflecting strong founder effects whose signatures have been maintained for thousands of years owing to endogamy. We therefore predict that there will be an excess of recessive diseases in India, which should be possible to screen and map genetically."

Editor's Summary

24 September 2009

Meet the ancestors: Indian population history from gene screening

Analysis of genetic variation in 132 individuals from 25 diverse groups in India reveals that two ancient, genetically divergent populations are ancestral to most Indians today. One lineage, termed Ancestral North Indian, is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians and Europeans. The other, Ancestral South Indian, is not close to any group outside the subcontinent. The answers to several long-standing questions emerge from this work. It seems that 'caste' has been a powerful force shaping marriage in India for thousands of years — some anthropologists argued that its current strength was a product of British colonialism. And the enigmatic 'Negritos' of the Andaman Islands are identified as an ancient isolate from the Ancestral South Indian population. Allele frequency differences between population groups are high, in part due to the custom of within-group marriages, so it is likely that there is an excess of recessive diseases in India that can be screened for and mapped genetically.

 

 

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/nature08365.html