PurvaPaksha1607NaziIndology.docx

A Response to Roberto Calasso, Indian Classics: The Big New Vision; http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/sep/24/indian-classics-big-new-vision/.

2019

Whether posited as an invasion by or migration of Aryans, these variant forms—of an into-India hypothesis (supposed movement into India around the second millennium BCE)—are underpinned by one constant: the consequence that the earliest forms of Vedic culture and Sanskrit are not indigenous to India. Written in 2017, this paper examines, in three dimensions, whether such a hypothesis, given its startling consequence to Indic history, can remain a preserve of only one domain (linguistics) before demonstrating not only an absence of proof for such a consequence, amongst other related questions, in key Indic texts through a study of the terms ārya and drāviḍa but also specific problematics in the development of this hypothesis in historical linguistics.

Review of Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, Archives of Origins: Sanskrit, Philology, Anthropology in 19th Century Germany

Historiographia Linguistica, 2003

Economic & Political Weekly, 2017

2005

A conference of over 300 Indologists here has rejected the Aryan Invasion Theory. The conference on “Revisiting Indus-Saraswati Age and Ancient India,” attended by scholars all over the world, was aimed at correcting the “distorted Hindu history,” according to Ms Reeta Singh, one of the organisers. “Recent archaeological discoveries have fully established that there was a continuous evolution of civilization on the Indian subcontinent from about 5000 BC, which remained uninterrupted through 1000 BC. This leaves no scope whatsoever to support an Aryan invasion theory,” a resolution at the conference said. It explained that the term Arya in Indian literature has no racial or linguistic connotations. It was used in the noble sense. (The Economic Times, October 16, 1996)

In: Politeja. The Journal of the Faculty of International and Political Studies of the Jagiellonian University 40,1 (2016) (= Czekalska, Renata; Kuczkiewicz-Fraś, Agnieszka (eds) 2016: Modern South Asia: A Space of Intercultural Dialogue. Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka): 85-104.

Imaginations of India have been an important ingredient of the German literary and media landscape since the end of the 18th century. Though they are highly diverse, these images are equally often emotionally charged and situated somewhere between euphoric glorifications and deprecating condemnations. When Germany and India were celebrating the 60th anniversary of their diplomatic relations, the time had come to investigate why Germans until today, even in the so-called age of information, have so diverse perceptions of India. By reference to the three dominant German images of India, this article seeks to understand the various factors that influence our perception of another culture.

Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society, 2007

This volume highlights some of the ways in which questions on origins challenge historical reconstructions. The debate on Indo Aryan, a linguistic phenomenon, revolves around two opposing views. One, that its initial presence within north-west South Asia can be verified only from the second millennium BC onwards, and the other, that it was native to the region. Those who now support the first view do not offer explanations that are based on the Aryan invasion theories of the nineteenth-and the early-twentieth centuries. Rather, they perceive the possibility of small-scale migrations of Indo Aryan speakers into Punjab and Northwest India. In contrast, the indigenists (see Bryant's definition, p. 468) who propose the origins of the 'Indo-Aryans' in South Asia locate the validity of their premise mainly through the archaeological record of the Greater Indus Valley, which provides no traces of large-scale dramatic invasions, or smaller groups of people migrating into this region during the second millennium BC. The theoretical slippage that recurs in historicising a linguistic phenomenon through its speakers stokes a controversial debate at present, which resonates on the appropriation of an academic exercise for conjuring a primordial Hindu nationhood for India (but Bryant, p. 471). Both, the research methods of the indigenists, and the kinds of evidence they promote as scientific and valid, are controversial. As the volume reminds us, it is the historicity of the speakers of Indo Aryan, a subject of more than a century-long research that continues to stage discussions regarding what ought to be a 'true story' of 'origins'.

The paper presents two contradictory views accounting for the origin of the Aryans – The Standard view - the immigrant Aryan position and the Alternative view - the Indigenous Aryan position. It carefully examines the ongoing debate by presenting all of the relevant philological, archaeological, linguistic, and historiographical data, and showing how they have been interpreted both to support the theory of Aryan migration and to challenge it. Most of the evidence that has been adduced to locate the geography of the Vedic people (Aryans) have come from two disciplines - linguistics and archaeology. The difficulty in settling this debate arises because there continues to remain irreconcilable contradictions between the linguistic and archaeological accounts. The paper tries to discuss the various interpretations of evidence by proponents of both sides and also mentions that the decipherment of the Indus script could shine fresh light on the contours of the Aryan debate. The paper also disproves "The Aryan Invasion Theory".