This post is essentially a collection of excerpts from three recent articles/reports on the Saraswati-Sindhu civilisation beginning with a list of five questions that were asked of Prof. Michael Witzel.

Many of you must be aware of the recent controversy around Prof Michael Witzel’s visit to India. I received this email/ list of questions from a google group that I am subscribed to. It is worth reproducing in full (I have taken out email addresses to protect privacy). The questions explore the issue of scholarship with particular reference to Ancient Indian History, the biases evident in certain analyses and the apparent refusal of certain “experts” to entertain alternative viewpoints. Pl. read on.

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From: *Thamizh Chelvan* Date: Wed, Jul 8, 2009

Subject: A few questions for you

To: witzel AT harvard; Cc: tamizh.hindu AT email

Dear Mr.Witzel

I have met you this afternoon at the Madras University, after your presentation and a very short question session, and before the group photograph session. I introduced myself as a freelance writer and as you were proceeding for lunch ‘hurriedly’, I couldn’t spend even a couple of minutes with you.

Anyway, I would like to bring to your notice that the ‘Editorial Team’ of a Tamil website by name www.tamilhindu.com has posed some questions to you. As a contributor to that website, I wanted to handover a sheet of paper with those questions to you personally, so that you could send your answers before leaving Chennai. But unfortunately situation was not conducive enough for you to spend a few more minutes with the little audience present there.

Even now it is not too late. We would appreciate and be thankful, if you could send your candid answers for those questions before leaving India. The questions are given below. I also have a question from my side. If I am not inquisitive, May I know why you are here in India, particularly Chennai? How long you will be touring India?

Thanks and Warm Regards

Thamizhchelvan

Chennai.

*Question 1:* You will agree that no culture or civilization is perfect, and we Indians are quite aware of the imperfections of our society. At the same time, most of us are proud of belonging to this land. Many Western thinkers and Indologists have also expressed great admiration for Indian culture and for India’s intellectual heritage in particular. You must have seen testimonies by people like Emerson, Thoreau, Durant, Toynbee, Renou, Filliozat or Kramrish. How is it that, by contrast, you do not seem to find anything good to say about Indian culture, and have often hinted, especially on Internet lists, that it is something barbaric or primitive? Would you not like to spend some time travelling through India, since you are now among us, so as to judge this culture firsthand and decide?

*Question 2*: In the recent noisy controversy over history textbooks prepared by the California State Board of Education, and in Internet debates, it is often made out that those opposing the teaching of the theory of an Aryan invasion of, or migration into, India are a bunch of dangerous “Hindutva” fanatics. This completely eclipses the fact that the strongest opponents of this theory have been Western scholars: U.S. archaeologists George Dales, Jim Shaffer, U.S. anthropologist K.A.R. Kennedy, British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, French archaeologists Jean-Paul Demoule, Jean-François Jarrige, Henri-Paul Francfort, Estonian biologist Toomas Kivisild, and many more. Why is this never openly acknowledged and debated in a fair and civilized manner?

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*Question 3:* Why is, instead, the Aryan invasion or migration theory pushed down the throats of Indian schoolchildren (and now U.S. ones!), even as everyone knows fully well that this colonial theory was used to divide Indian society, leaving wounds that have remained unhealed to this day? What do learned scholars like yourself gain by perpetuating the colonial game of
division and demonizing those who oppose this theory as “Hindutva” propagandists?

*Question 4:* In a 1995 paper, you wrote: “The first appearance of [the invading Aryans’] thundering chariots must have stricken the local population with a terror similar to that experienced by the Aztecs and Incas upon the arrival of the iron-clad, horse-riding Spaniards.” [*1] That is exactly the colonial paradigm of the invasion theory in all its military
splendour. Yet in 2001, you wrote, “Why, then, should all immigration, or even mere transhumance trickling in, be excluded in the single case of the Indo-Aryans … ? Just one ‘Afghan’ Indo-Aryan tribe that did not return to the highlands but stayed in their Panjab winter quarters in spring was needed to set off a wave of acculturation in the plains, by transmitting its
’status kit’ … to its neighbors.” [*2] It is the complete absence of archaeological, anthropological and genetic evidence for the “hard” version of the Aryan invasion which forced you to dilute it to a mere “trickling in”? And is it conceivable that a single overstaying Afghan tribe could have set off a process of radical linguistic and cultural change over the whole of North India?

[*1] – Michael Witzel, “Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres,” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), p. 114.

[*2] – Michael Witzel, “Autochthonous Aryans ? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts”, Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 7 (2001), issue 3 (May 25).

*Question 5:* In a 1995 paper,[*3] in an attempt to find evidence for the Aryan migration theory in Sanskrit literature, you quoted an excerpt of the Baudhâyana Shrauta Sûtra in your own translation. This translation was proved wrong (by Koenraad Elst in 1999, more recently by Prof. B.B. Lal), and the mistranslation was no accident, since it figured in an earlier paper of yours.[*4] We all know, of course, that the best scholars are not immune from error, and this is true of all disciplines. Yet you did not have the grace to acknowledge your error and retract the mistranslation. Instead, we have since seen historians (for instance Romila Thapar,[*5] R.S. Sharma [*6]) quote this mistranslation in support of the Aryan migration theory.
Would you kindly issue a statement to stop such misuse of your mistranslation?

[*3] – Michael Witzel, “Rgvedic history: poets, chieftains and polities,” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), pp. 320-321.

[*4] – Michael Witzel, “Tracing the Vedic Dialects”. In Dialectes dans les littératures indo-aryennes, Publications de l’Institut de civilisation indienne, Série in-8, Fascicule 55, ed. by C. Caillat (Diffusion de Boccard:Paris 1989).

[*5] – Romila Thapar’s lecture titled “The Aryan Question Revisited”, available online at http://members.tripod.com/ascjnu/aryan.html

[*6] – R.S. Sharma, Advent of the Aryans in India (Manohar: New Delhi, 1999), pp. 87-89.

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Next, a brief excerpts from a recent seminar at New Delhi where Prof Witzel did not quite redeem his reputation (from Michael Witzel: rattled rat at IIC by Prof Bhagwan Singh).

…The occasion was a lecture on the Rgveda by Prof. Michael Witzel, at the India International Centre, on 10 July 2009. Presided over by Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan, it was attended by scholars of different hues and expectations. No one suspected that Witzel with his claim to be a ranking Vedic scholar knew so little that he could not answer a single query. Indeed, he appeared blank as far as the Rgveda was concerned. He rose nervously to speak on the Veda, but actually spoke on the Aryan migration from Afghanistan to Punjab!

…Many archaeologists and professors of history attended the lecture, including your writer, Vedic scholar Bhagwan Singh. When the floor was thrown open for discussions, Bhagwan Singh introduced himself as the author of The Vedic Harappans, and said that his data contradicted each and every statement made by Witzel; he sought permission to exchange notes on a few issues. With the Chair’s permission, Singh said:

- You have reordered the Rgvedic strata, rating IV and VI to be the oldest and the rest belonging to intermediate and late stages. I have no objection to your sequence, but find your chronology miserably on the lower side. There is a reference to white pottery in one verse in Book IV (4.27.5). White pottery is a distinctive feature of Hakra Ware dated to 3000 BC. This goes against your dating of 1500-1250 BC for the Rgveda.

Witzel was dumbstruck. He murmured something inaudible, avoiding the audience, looking sideways. He tried to explain that the sequence arranged by him was based on the number of verses in a book, the smallest being the oldest. It caused Kapila ji and others to smile openly. I could not make out the reason and reminded him that Book IV is shorter than Book VI; but the shortest book is Book II! So here again, he was caught on the wrong foot.

He hesitantly managed, “There is no evidence of chariot or horse in India earlier than the mid-second millennium.”

- You say that the wheel and chariot were invented by Aryans when they were in Central Asia, but in the Book IV itself, Bhr.gus are given the credit for manufacturing wheels (4.16.20). Chariot and wheel was therefore not Aryan, but a Dravidian invention.

Witzel pretended that the inventors might have been Aryans and manufacturers Dravidians! He now forgot the antiquity of Book IV, which according to his suggestion, could have been written in Central Asia, older even than Book VI, composed entirely in Northern Afghanistan; Dravidian speakers must have been there as well.

And finally, excerpts From Indus to India by Dilip K Chakrabarti which makes the case that the Saraswati Sindhu script does have “statistical regularities which are in line with other natural languages”.

…The basic problem, however, lies elsewhere. There is a conscious attempt in certain quarters to disassociate this civilisation from the later mainstream tradition of Indian/ Vedic culture.

…The current attempts to disassociate the Indus civilisation from the mainstream Indian tradition has assumed many forms. The term ‘Indus valley civilisation’, which is being increasingly common, suggests that this civilisation was primarily a product of the Indus valley alone, which is far from being the case. The civilisation is also bandied about as the product of what is dubiously dubbed as the ‘middle Asian interaction sphere’ and not as a product of a vast region of the sub-continent. Its chronology has been needlessly shortened, suppressing a long and continuous developmental span of about 2500 years in the modern Indian section of its distribution area. The civilisation is also visualised at the end of a straight arrow-line of wheat-barley-based development beginning in Baluchistan at c.7000 BC, completely ignoring the contribution which came from the east — from the early farming and metallurgical developments in the Aravallis or from the rice-cultivating tradition that began in the Ganga plain and its Vindhyan periphery in the seventh millennium BC.

The famous Sramana image from Mohenjodaro, which shows the bust of a shawl-wearing man with a meditative expression, is now advocated as belonging to an artistic tradition of north Afghanistan and beyond. Notorious Hindu-baiters are aghast at the thought that anything related to Hinduism could occur in that civilisation, whereas the first excavators’ frame of reference for the study of the religion of this civilisation was Hinduism. That Siva was worshipped in this civilisation is proved not merely by the phallus-shaped stone objects found at Mohenjodaro and Dholavira but also by the find of an indisputedly Sivalinga set in a Yonipatta at Kalibangan. If anybody is interested, Bhang and Dhatura , both favourites with a class of Siva-worshippers, occur in the Indus civilisation.

…The opinions which we have noted above and which try to disassociate the Indus civilisation from the mainstream Indian tradition are endemic in modern First World archaeological literature on the subject and its followers in India. First World Archaeology, as my long familiarity with it tells me, suffers from a sense of inordinate superiority in relation to the archaeologists of the Third World. By allowing it to enjoy a free run in the country as the present archaeological policy of the government does and by allowing it to set up ‘Indus Centres’ in Vadodara or Pune, grievous damage is being caused to national archaeological scholarship in India.

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Related Posts: “The Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence” – A blurb

Additional Reading: An Aryan invader from America