12-27-2008, 12:12 PM
<span style='color:red'>Hindu nationalist approaches to the Aryan invasion hypothesis</span>
<b>(1) Acceptance of the AIT</b>
A number of Hindu nationalists have accepted the AIT. Most prominent among them is Hindu nationalist seed ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In his influential booklet Hindutva ("Hinduness"), he wrote of how migrations had ?welded Aryans and non-Aryans into a common race? (1923:8) and how ?not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa? (1923:56). This way, he rejected the divisive implication of the AIT that India was composed of several distinct nations, arguing instead that they had biologically mingled and culturally fused into a single Hindu nation. Like his leftist opponent Jawaharlal Nehru, he accepted that the nation was a product of historical processes, not an age-old God-given essence. There is no organic link between Savarkar?s positions on nationalism and ancient history: as a non-specialist, he merely accepted the dominant paradigm and tried to accommodate it into his political views. But note at any rate, all you who identify OIT with Hindutva, that the founder of the Hindutva ideology was an AIT believer.
Sharply to be distinguished from Hindu nationalists, who are modernists and social reformers for the sake of national unity, there is also a dwindling school of Hindu traditionalists. Among them, you find pandits who are steeped in Sanskritic lore and have never even heard of an Aryan invasion, which is after all unattested in Vedic literature. The one traditionalist who must be mentioned here as accepting the AIT was a Western ?honorary Hindu?, the French musicologist Alain Dani鬯u (1971, 1975), companion of the traditionalist leader Swami Karpatri. Here again, there is no organic link between his Hindu-traditionalist view of society and his historical beliefs, which were borrowed wholesale from the dominant Western school of thought.
The most well-known Hindu nationalist to actively support the AIT and explore its implications was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian National Congress leader in the early 20th century. His chronology, worked out in dialogue with Hermann Jacobi (and still upheld by archaeo-astronomers, e.g. Kak 2003), was sharply incompatible with the currently dominant theory: he put the Rg-Veda ca. 4000 BC rather than 1500 BC (Tilak 1893, 1903). If the Vedas were that old, the invasion would have to be pushed back accordingly, as the Vedic geographical setting is obviously South-Asian; but Tilak solved this problem by having the Vedic seers compose their hymns far outside India, in an Indo-European homeland situated in the Arctic region. Except for a handful of European rightist non-scholars, nobody takes this eccentric scenario seriously anymore, not even the Tilak loyalists in Maharashtrian Brahmin circles which happen to be the cradle of both the Savarkarite and RSS-BJP strands within the Hindu nationalist movement. All the same, Tilak?s acceptance of a version of the AIT again disproves the identification of the OIT with Hindu nationalism.
<b>(2) Rejection of the AIT</b>
Few among the Hindu nationalists have really studied the relevant evidence. Some even reject the whole notion of historical evidence as pertinent to this question. From Jaimini's Mimansa (BCE) down to Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda's Satyartha Prakash (ca. AD 1875), a school of Vedic scholars has believed that the Vedas were not a human creation, but were created by the Gods aeons ago and then revealed in complete form to the Vedic seers. Oddly, for people who held the Vedas in such awe, their theory flies in the face of the Vedic testimony itself: unlike the Quran, the Vedas never take the form of a statement by God addressing man. Instead, they take the form of hymns in which man is addressing the Gods. The names of the seers composing the hymns are also given, and they are put in a historical context, often with their mutual relations, genealogical kinship and faction feuds detailed in the texts themselves. Moreover, a number of presumably historical events are described or alluded to, most famously the Battle of the Ten Kings. All this points to the historicity of the Vedas: they came about as a creation of human poetry in a specific society at a specific phase in its development. But Vedic enthusiasts like Dayananda and to a lesser extent Sri Aurobindo Ghose chose to disregard this information and reinterpreted all these mundane data as spiritual metaphor. Though they also happened to reject the invasion hypothesis, they excluded the Vedic information as possible source of evidence for their own indigenist position. Aurobindo?s correct observation (1971:242-251) that the Vedas contain no mention of an Aryan invasion, thereby loses its force.
After Aurobindo's death, his otherwise loyal secretary K.D. Sethna (1982, 1992) abandoned this position and started using Vedic data on material culture to argue the chronological precedence of Rg-Vedic over high Harappan culture, e.g. that the Harappan cultivation of cotton goes unmentioned in the older Vedic layers so that its early-Harappan introduction must coincide with some mid-Vedic date. More perhaps than the archaeologists? acknowledged inability to discover any remains of an Aryan invasion (Shaffer 1984, Rao 1991, Lal 1987, 2002, etc.), Sethna?s theses truly were the opening shot in the Hindu nationalist mobilization against the AIT. Within the Aurobindo circle, this work was continued by Danino & Nahar 2000.
Since Sethna?s publications, many Hindu authors of divergent levels of qualification have felt emboldened to contribute to the anti-invasionist argument. Some of them lose themselves in projects they are not up to, such as the decipherment of the Indus script, but in matters of textual interpretation and of matching archaeological and genetic data with cultural history, they are often better equipped than their invasionist opponents. Those who care to read this literature, will notice how it belies its characterization by hostile commentators as ?far-rightist? and the like. It actually taps into the discourse of anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-orientalism (e.g. Rajaram 1995, 2000), which most Westerners would spontaneously describe as leftist. A lone Indian Marxist (Singh 1995) has also contributed to the anti-invasionist argument, predictably focusing on material and economic data suggesting Harappan-Aryan continuity, and thus upholding the more usual Third World Marxist tradition of anti-colonialism as opposed to the Indian card-carrying Marxists? championing of the colonial view of history.
<b>Conclusion</b>
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India?s intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind. And even in the writings of politically motivated authors, we do come across valid argumentations. Consequently, it is best to continue this research without getting sidetracked by the real or alleged or imagined political connotations of certain scholarly lines of argument.
(from The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate By Dr. K Elst.)
<b>(1) Acceptance of the AIT</b>
A number of Hindu nationalists have accepted the AIT. Most prominent among them is Hindu nationalist seed ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In his influential booklet Hindutva ("Hinduness"), he wrote of how migrations had ?welded Aryans and non-Aryans into a common race? (1923:8) and how ?not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa? (1923:56). This way, he rejected the divisive implication of the AIT that India was composed of several distinct nations, arguing instead that they had biologically mingled and culturally fused into a single Hindu nation. Like his leftist opponent Jawaharlal Nehru, he accepted that the nation was a product of historical processes, not an age-old God-given essence. There is no organic link between Savarkar?s positions on nationalism and ancient history: as a non-specialist, he merely accepted the dominant paradigm and tried to accommodate it into his political views. But note at any rate, all you who identify OIT with Hindutva, that the founder of the Hindutva ideology was an AIT believer.
Sharply to be distinguished from Hindu nationalists, who are modernists and social reformers for the sake of national unity, there is also a dwindling school of Hindu traditionalists. Among them, you find pandits who are steeped in Sanskritic lore and have never even heard of an Aryan invasion, which is after all unattested in Vedic literature. The one traditionalist who must be mentioned here as accepting the AIT was a Western ?honorary Hindu?, the French musicologist Alain Dani鬯u (1971, 1975), companion of the traditionalist leader Swami Karpatri. Here again, there is no organic link between his Hindu-traditionalist view of society and his historical beliefs, which were borrowed wholesale from the dominant Western school of thought.
The most well-known Hindu nationalist to actively support the AIT and explore its implications was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian National Congress leader in the early 20th century. His chronology, worked out in dialogue with Hermann Jacobi (and still upheld by archaeo-astronomers, e.g. Kak 2003), was sharply incompatible with the currently dominant theory: he put the Rg-Veda ca. 4000 BC rather than 1500 BC (Tilak 1893, 1903). If the Vedas were that old, the invasion would have to be pushed back accordingly, as the Vedic geographical setting is obviously South-Asian; but Tilak solved this problem by having the Vedic seers compose their hymns far outside India, in an Indo-European homeland situated in the Arctic region. Except for a handful of European rightist non-scholars, nobody takes this eccentric scenario seriously anymore, not even the Tilak loyalists in Maharashtrian Brahmin circles which happen to be the cradle of both the Savarkarite and RSS-BJP strands within the Hindu nationalist movement. All the same, Tilak?s acceptance of a version of the AIT again disproves the identification of the OIT with Hindu nationalism.
<b>(2) Rejection of the AIT</b>
Few among the Hindu nationalists have really studied the relevant evidence. Some even reject the whole notion of historical evidence as pertinent to this question. From Jaimini's Mimansa (BCE) down to Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda's Satyartha Prakash (ca. AD 1875), a school of Vedic scholars has believed that the Vedas were not a human creation, but were created by the Gods aeons ago and then revealed in complete form to the Vedic seers. Oddly, for people who held the Vedas in such awe, their theory flies in the face of the Vedic testimony itself: unlike the Quran, the Vedas never take the form of a statement by God addressing man. Instead, they take the form of hymns in which man is addressing the Gods. The names of the seers composing the hymns are also given, and they are put in a historical context, often with their mutual relations, genealogical kinship and faction feuds detailed in the texts themselves. Moreover, a number of presumably historical events are described or alluded to, most famously the Battle of the Ten Kings. All this points to the historicity of the Vedas: they came about as a creation of human poetry in a specific society at a specific phase in its development. But Vedic enthusiasts like Dayananda and to a lesser extent Sri Aurobindo Ghose chose to disregard this information and reinterpreted all these mundane data as spiritual metaphor. Though they also happened to reject the invasion hypothesis, they excluded the Vedic information as possible source of evidence for their own indigenist position. Aurobindo?s correct observation (1971:242-251) that the Vedas contain no mention of an Aryan invasion, thereby loses its force.
After Aurobindo's death, his otherwise loyal secretary K.D. Sethna (1982, 1992) abandoned this position and started using Vedic data on material culture to argue the chronological precedence of Rg-Vedic over high Harappan culture, e.g. that the Harappan cultivation of cotton goes unmentioned in the older Vedic layers so that its early-Harappan introduction must coincide with some mid-Vedic date. More perhaps than the archaeologists? acknowledged inability to discover any remains of an Aryan invasion (Shaffer 1984, Rao 1991, Lal 1987, 2002, etc.), Sethna?s theses truly were the opening shot in the Hindu nationalist mobilization against the AIT. Within the Aurobindo circle, this work was continued by Danino & Nahar 2000.
Since Sethna?s publications, many Hindu authors of divergent levels of qualification have felt emboldened to contribute to the anti-invasionist argument. Some of them lose themselves in projects they are not up to, such as the decipherment of the Indus script, but in matters of textual interpretation and of matching archaeological and genetic data with cultural history, they are often better equipped than their invasionist opponents. Those who care to read this literature, will notice how it belies its characterization by hostile commentators as ?far-rightist? and the like. It actually taps into the discourse of anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-orientalism (e.g. Rajaram 1995, 2000), which most Westerners would spontaneously describe as leftist. A lone Indian Marxist (Singh 1995) has also contributed to the anti-invasionist argument, predictably focusing on material and economic data suggesting Harappan-Aryan continuity, and thus upholding the more usual Third World Marxist tradition of anti-colonialism as opposed to the Indian card-carrying Marxists? championing of the colonial view of history.
<b>Conclusion</b>
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India?s intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind. And even in the writings of politically motivated authors, we do come across valid argumentations. Consequently, it is best to continue this research without getting sidetracked by the real or alleged or imagined political connotations of certain scholarly lines of argument.
(from The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate By Dr. K Elst.)