132 (Husky):
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->History, like the people who make it, bespeaks of many inexplicable events and motivations that we can't begin to guess at if we don't have any tangible communications preserved from those times to go by.
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This reminds me of my long time favourite short story from Malgudi Days of R K Narayan. I forgot the title, but it was my favourite for a long time in the school days (until I was exposed to Yogendra Choudhury's Hindi translation of Satyajit Ray's Bangla short stories). I am sure you must have read this, but here is the gist - some details may be far from original, as memory serves.
It was about certain junior history-reasearch scholar from Madras University, who came to Malgudi in some connection. Once while taking bath in a pond, he hits upon a stone statue of a soldier. The statue seemed to be of antiquity, and very interesting by its appearance - one foot broken, an eye blackened, sword drawn etc. He does a lot of research, publishes several scholarly papers, submits a highly celebrated thesis, gets invited to foreign universities to deliver lectures, and within a couple of years, becomes famous for discovering the ancient Roman connections with Malgudi.
Having become a celebrity history scholar, he comes back to Malgudi a few years later, just to spend a vacation there. He goes back to the pond where he had found the statue. A drunkard meets him there and by some stroke of chance a strage conversation begins. Some remarks lead the preofessor to put it point-blank to the drukard, 'I am the one who discovered the Roman soldier of Malgudi'. One thing led to the other, and the drunkard starts asking him some trivial questions about the soldier. Did you find the soldier at 'this' spot, asks the drunk, showing the exact spot where he had actually found the statue. Bewildered, professor asks how he knew. Drunkard then leads him to a nearby small and out-of-repair temple, and narrates his own story.
The temple used to be a flourishing one, decades back, and the drunk used to be its priest. The then young priest somehow got into the drinking trait, and used to even come to the temple drunk. On the door, there were two stone dwaar-paalas on the either side of the entrance. In his guilt, he used to feel that one of them used to stare at him, point his sword at him and threaten him for drinking. One day, being angered, he took out a hammer and damaged the statue. Then, panicked that the villagers will catch him, he dragged the statue to the pond and buried it underneath - the dwarpaal was lost forever - of course after decades, the roman soldier was discovered. (To the professor's ultimate misery, he shows him the remaining intact dwaar-paala). I don't remember how Narayan closes the story, but the soldier continued to be the Roman connection of Malgudi, and the dwaarpaala was lost forever. <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo-->
I am not sure if Narayan was telling something about History-writing or it was just another great stroke of his fertile imagination. But really, that is many times the case. Unfortunately, we dont 'know' about history with 100% accuracy - and probably never shall - unless we can learn to travel back in time.
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Philology is not a science in the strictest sense of the definition. Like any other humanity, therefore, this discipline will also remain susceptible to political motivations. Aren't literature, or economics, or philosophy, or law, or political science, or any other social sciences - full of political bias? Can they ever be freed from biases? Probably not. Indian (and western) universities, in each of these fields today, are loaded and dominated by lefties and sickoolars by and large. Don't we see the output from these fields, attest to this bias? Potentially they can never be freed or purged of bias - one way or the other.
But because they can not be freed from the political biases ever - does not belittle those disciplines from being important areas of "truth"exploration, and we can not abandon those. These discipline themselves would continue to be crucial - we like it or we don't.
We shall not be able to get away from the discipline itself, by showing the existing unjust or unfair or inaccurate methodologies. If we have to counter these, we have to enter these fields, and develop better methodologies, and take the existing ones head-on.
*************
Language is a crucial link. We got to have convincing answers to show how languages spread without any AIT, and how AIT is NOT the right explanation of the language relationships. To over-simplify, S L G A have ancient connections - and very deep connections. Trade, neighbourly influnce are important, but in my opinion not enough to explain the depth of the 'influence'.
Tell me, can a trade relationship ever influence the pronouns of a language? I am saying pronouns, since nouns and verbs can, given the influence be replaced by a foreign prevailing language. But pronouns? Very hard. Look at our own languages today. We have borrowed foreign nouns and verbs, but have our languages borrowed pronouns? Take Hindi for example, which has continuousely been influenced by so many foreign languages and continues to be, or draviD languages. They have continued to use indigenous root words for pronouns.
But consider these:
S saa - E she
S tat - E that
S id - E it
S may - E me
S vaya - E we
S mam - E mine
S te - E they
S taan - E them
S twa - E thou
Trade-based influence is not a convincing answer. Above can only come from organic relationships of languages (imo).
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My un-scholarly but considered opinion is this. Bhasha-Vigyan is one field related to Indology, where we are still far behind the western Indologists. I think we have caught with westerns in other disciplines enough, and surpassed them in some, but catching up needs to be done in this one field. Morever, even at home, connections of different Indic languages themselves, still need a lot of research. Not just AIT, but development of Indic internally itself - Bhasha-Vigyan will play a crucial hand.
My opinion is that we should not neglecting this gold-mine field that has potential to turn tables on AIT. We should learn those languages, and our own, very well, and develop altogether new methods, completely fair and just, rewrite altogether new frameworks of philology.
It would still not be science, will still not claim to "answer for the history", but it will still be able to unfold several missing pieces and mightily supplement other disciplines of AIT-busting (or truth finding).
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->History, like the people who make it, bespeaks of many inexplicable events and motivations that we can't begin to guess at if we don't have any tangible communications preserved from those times to go by.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> This reminds me of my long time favourite short story from Malgudi Days of R K Narayan. I forgot the title, but it was my favourite for a long time in the school days (until I was exposed to Yogendra Choudhury's Hindi translation of Satyajit Ray's Bangla short stories). I am sure you must have read this, but here is the gist - some details may be far from original, as memory serves.
It was about certain junior history-reasearch scholar from Madras University, who came to Malgudi in some connection. Once while taking bath in a pond, he hits upon a stone statue of a soldier. The statue seemed to be of antiquity, and very interesting by its appearance - one foot broken, an eye blackened, sword drawn etc. He does a lot of research, publishes several scholarly papers, submits a highly celebrated thesis, gets invited to foreign universities to deliver lectures, and within a couple of years, becomes famous for discovering the ancient Roman connections with Malgudi.
Having become a celebrity history scholar, he comes back to Malgudi a few years later, just to spend a vacation there. He goes back to the pond where he had found the statue. A drunkard meets him there and by some stroke of chance a strage conversation begins. Some remarks lead the preofessor to put it point-blank to the drukard, 'I am the one who discovered the Roman soldier of Malgudi'. One thing led to the other, and the drunkard starts asking him some trivial questions about the soldier. Did you find the soldier at 'this' spot, asks the drunk, showing the exact spot where he had actually found the statue. Bewildered, professor asks how he knew. Drunkard then leads him to a nearby small and out-of-repair temple, and narrates his own story.
The temple used to be a flourishing one, decades back, and the drunk used to be its priest. The then young priest somehow got into the drinking trait, and used to even come to the temple drunk. On the door, there were two stone dwaar-paalas on the either side of the entrance. In his guilt, he used to feel that one of them used to stare at him, point his sword at him and threaten him for drinking. One day, being angered, he took out a hammer and damaged the statue. Then, panicked that the villagers will catch him, he dragged the statue to the pond and buried it underneath - the dwarpaal was lost forever - of course after decades, the roman soldier was discovered. (To the professor's ultimate misery, he shows him the remaining intact dwaar-paala). I don't remember how Narayan closes the story, but the soldier continued to be the Roman connection of Malgudi, and the dwaarpaala was lost forever. <!--emo&
--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif' /><!--endemo--> I am not sure if Narayan was telling something about History-writing or it was just another great stroke of his fertile imagination. But really, that is many times the case. Unfortunately, we dont 'know' about history with 100% accuracy - and probably never shall - unless we can learn to travel back in time.
************
Philology is not a science in the strictest sense of the definition. Like any other humanity, therefore, this discipline will also remain susceptible to political motivations. Aren't literature, or economics, or philosophy, or law, or political science, or any other social sciences - full of political bias? Can they ever be freed from biases? Probably not. Indian (and western) universities, in each of these fields today, are loaded and dominated by lefties and sickoolars by and large. Don't we see the output from these fields, attest to this bias? Potentially they can never be freed or purged of bias - one way or the other.
But because they can not be freed from the political biases ever - does not belittle those disciplines from being important areas of "truth"exploration, and we can not abandon those. These discipline themselves would continue to be crucial - we like it or we don't.
We shall not be able to get away from the discipline itself, by showing the existing unjust or unfair or inaccurate methodologies. If we have to counter these, we have to enter these fields, and develop better methodologies, and take the existing ones head-on.
*************
Language is a crucial link. We got to have convincing answers to show how languages spread without any AIT, and how AIT is NOT the right explanation of the language relationships. To over-simplify, S L G A have ancient connections - and very deep connections. Trade, neighbourly influnce are important, but in my opinion not enough to explain the depth of the 'influence'.
Tell me, can a trade relationship ever influence the pronouns of a language? I am saying pronouns, since nouns and verbs can, given the influence be replaced by a foreign prevailing language. But pronouns? Very hard. Look at our own languages today. We have borrowed foreign nouns and verbs, but have our languages borrowed pronouns? Take Hindi for example, which has continuousely been influenced by so many foreign languages and continues to be, or draviD languages. They have continued to use indigenous root words for pronouns.
But consider these:
S saa - E she
S tat - E that
S id - E it
S may - E me
S vaya - E we
S mam - E mine
S te - E they
S taan - E them
S twa - E thou
Trade-based influence is not a convincing answer. Above can only come from organic relationships of languages (imo).
*************
My un-scholarly but considered opinion is this. Bhasha-Vigyan is one field related to Indology, where we are still far behind the western Indologists. I think we have caught with westerns in other disciplines enough, and surpassed them in some, but catching up needs to be done in this one field. Morever, even at home, connections of different Indic languages themselves, still need a lot of research. Not just AIT, but development of Indic internally itself - Bhasha-Vigyan will play a crucial hand.
My opinion is that we should not neglecting this gold-mine field that has potential to turn tables on AIT. We should learn those languages, and our own, very well, and develop altogether new methods, completely fair and just, rewrite altogether new frameworks of philology.
It would still not be science, will still not claim to "answer for the history", but it will still be able to unfold several missing pieces and mightily supplement other disciplines of AIT-busting (or truth finding).