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<b>HAF in America objects to ‘The Story of India’</b>
January 14, 2009

http://www.expressi ndia.com/ latest-news/ Hindu-group- in-America- objects-to- The-Story- of-India/ 410235/

Hindu group in America objects to ‘The Story of India‘
Jan 13, 2009

New York. A US-based Hindu advocacy group has taken strong objection
to historian Michael Wood’s documentary ‘The Story of India,’ being
telecast on public television, describing its presentation of the
Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) as ‘agenda driven.’

Rejecting the theory, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) said India
has always been the cradle of Hindu civilization and there is no
debate about it.

“Michael Wood clearly admires India and its people, and this shows
through in his passionate depiction of India,” said Sheetal Shah,
HAF’s Director of Development and Outreach.

“We are not seeking to discredit the ‘Story of India’ in its entirety,
but viewers should be aware that a major error was made in the
documentary that fails scrutiny and should be corrected,” she said.

The Hindu advocacy group said it has received a deluge of phone calls
protesting the presentation of the ‘now discredited’ theory, currently
being shown on television.

The AMT theorises that in 1500 BCE pastoral tribes that came to be
known as Aryans, migrated from Central Europe to Northwest India
eventually dispersing indigenous people and imposing their own
culture.

“This theory, that is not supported by archaeological evidence, was
first posited by European Indologists and British colonialists,
eventually finding support from a section of India’s politically
motivated linguists and historians such as Romila Thapar, and
famously, controversial Harvard linguist, Michael Witzel,” she said.

This theory, the HAF believes, is ‘agenda-driven’ .

In his documentary, HAF says, Wood holds that the early Hindu practice
of worshipping devas, or demigods representing elements, ’somehow
implies that these practices were imported from Central Asia.’

While referring ‘obliquely’ to the Aryan Migration Theory as
controversial, HAF said, Wood fails to present contrary evidence that
many scientists believe refutes the claim that the progenitors of
Hindu civilisation came from west of the Hindu Kush mountains of
Afghanistan.

“There is no debate that India was always the cradle of Hindu
civilisation, and the Vedas, the Hindu’s holiest scriptures, are the
recorded history of our ancestors,” said Suhag Shukla, HAF’s Managing
Director.

“We strongly oppose the insulting theory–advanced by agenda-driven
activist historians — that our rishis, the great sages who composed
the Vedas, were foreign to India, and Wood does viewers a disservice
in not presenting both sides of the coin, in an otherwise admirable
work,” he said.

The AMT is reviled by many Hindus, he said, due to its implicit
proposition that a tribe of ‘Aryans’ migrated into the Indian
subcontinent, subjugated an indigenous people dispersing them to South
India and established a caste system where the highest castes are
comprised of ‘Aryans’ in an ethno-religious apartheid system.

This ‘explosive theory’ that narrates that Aryans were only the first
colonizers — followed by Greeks, Mongols, Turks, Persians — was used
by European historians to justify the last foreign claim on India, the
British Raj, he added.

However, he asserted, it is the latest genetic evidence, based on
chromosomal and DNA analysis, that scientists believe definitively
discredits the AMT.