Horseplay
at Harward
By Vasant Sharma
Publication: The Organiser
Date: April 1, 2001
http://www.hvk.org/
Most readers may be aware that the Aryan
Invasion Theory (AIT) and its Siamese twin the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) have
been deep-sixed for good. Yet many academics in the West continue to recycle
material from hundred-year-old books under the exalted title of "Western
Indological Researches". Witzel of Harward University is the chief purveyor
of old rubbish. Despite his prestigious university position he is a marginal
figure quoted only for his blunders in Sanskrit grammar. His retractions forced
by Peer criticism of his own translations highlight his deficiencies in
Sanskrit. He writes about the Vedic civilization without studying the primary
sources. His training is in the speculative science known as comparative
linguistics. Readers are referred to a recent article "Horseplay in Harappa"
he wrote and which was published in the Indian magazine Frontline (September
30-October 13, 2000, available online in the magazine section at samachar.com).
German by birth, among Western Indologists he is one of the most fanatical
propagandists of AIT The bigger, the more preposterous the lie, the more it will
be believed. The proof of this successful propaganda technique is the AIT itself
which had a run of more than a hundred years until its relatively recent demise.
With AIT and AMT gone, the reports are that he now has the answer to how the
Vedic civilization developed through a new research tool called
"sophisticated acculturation models". Do not be taken in by the
high-sounding description. This jumbled, hodgepodge acculturation
"research" has one aim: to obscure the truth. It is just more of the
same, another attempt to mislead and deceive. Like the AIT and AMT, this
specious simulation too has nothing to do with the Vedic civilization, its
creators, the origins of Sanskrit or anything else connected with ancient India.
Witzel's
collaborator on the Frontline article is one Steve Farmer. He is a computer
programmer who live in California. At various times he has claimed to be a
Sinologist, a comparative historian, a geneticist, a historian of science and
just in time for the Frontline article it seems that he became an Indologist
after only two months. While Witzel keeps struggling with Sanskrit, Farmer has
no such language problem. For not only does he not know Sanskrit, he does not
know any other Indian, language also.
Parpola
is another contributor to Frontline. He has earned some renown for two volumes
he co-edited with Jagat Joshi and Sayid Shah known as the Corpus of Indus Seals
and Inscriptions. Often simply called the Corpus, this world-class photographic
collection is highly prized and considered an indispensable reference resource
by scholars in the field. But in the difficult and the hard world of scholarship
meant only for the very best, Parpola measures not at all. In his Frontline
article he comes across like a dim bulb with a broken filament unable to emit
any light popping off irrationally extreme speculations as scholarship. This is
how he and others in the AIT brigade write: personal attacks after personal
attacks; speculations piled upon speculations; not a single new insight; not one
new discovery; not one illuminating interpretation. Complete disdain for
independent scholars and writers outside the establishment who are in fact doing
all the trailblazing work in the field.
In thirty
years of "research" on the Indus script and several volumes, he has
not read a single seal correctly, Parpola's only contribution to scholarship is
his claim dim "min" means both "fish" and "star"
in Tamil and therefore the fish sign is used also as the star. The truth is that
"mina” means fish in Sanskrit also and his argument works for Sanskrit as
well - making his claim a total failure.
The
oxygen, the lifeblood and the whole sustenance of AIT has been the false claim
that horses were unknown in India until they were brought in by invading
light-skinned Aryan nomads from somewhere in Central Asia their exact location
known only to these peddlers of AIT. It is also fraudulently claimed that they
spoke some early from of Sanskrit in which they later composed the Rigveda.
In the
Ashvamedha or The Great Horse Sacrifice, the Rig describes the Indian horse with
34 ribs or 17 pairs. Here is a verse from the Rig: "The axe cuts through
the thirty-four ribs of the thoroughbred who is the mount and the companion of
the gods." Of these thirty-four, one is offered to the sun, one to the
moon, five to the planets and twenty-seven are dedicated to the constellations.
The Central Asian breed by comparison has thirty-six or eighteen pairs of ribs.
The Vedic horse is thus the native Indian horse. It did not come in with
fictitious nomads from Central Asia as invasionist scholars have been telling
the world for more than a hundred years. This fact alone should prompt many
establishment Western professors in the field to consider retraining for jobs in
other occupations like horse training or horse breeding. Their Indology careers
are over. In fact, Western Indology is itself on its death bed.
Immediately
below is a search for an answer. It is an attempt to explain the near-absence of
horse seals and the relative paucity of images of the horse on other artefacts
discovered so far at Vedic sites. Because of the prominence of the horse in the
Rigveda, it is reasonable to say that many people had expected to see more horse
seals and artefacts than have been found so far. At the same time, it is
affirmed and reaffirmed here that both horse remains and horse artefacts have
been found at Vedic archaeological sites. Maybe not quite as many as some would
have liked.
Finding
more horse seals and horse artefacts is not a central issue any longer. But it
is interesting to explore the question why excavations have not turned up more
of them so far. To sum up: we have found them, but why have we not found a lot
more of them?
The horse
figures very prominently in the Rigveda in a number of different roles:
domesticated animal, war-horse, racing thoroughbred, mythic mount and companion
of the gods, and most important to our discussion the sacrificial stallion.
Also, the Sanskrit word for the horse, ashva has other abstract meanings such as
power, energy, heat or vitality depending on the context. Many Western Sanskrit
scholars have tended to translate ashva to mean the domesticated animal every
time in every context without a knowledge of its many contextual meanings. These
translations have often provoked laughter.
The horse
sacrifice is a solemn, funereal event conducted with the utmost gravity.
Interestingly, the horse is not thought to have died at all during the
sacrifice. The Rigveda says: "You are not harmed, you do not really die
through this. You will be on a pleasant journey to the abode of the gods."
The departed earthly horse becomes a celestial equine with extraordinary powers
to protect and to shower material blessings upon the worshippers.
The
people probably felt that these hallowed horses of heaven, formerly their
earthly companions, were more close, more personal, more generous in their
blessings and more protective than the other great gods of heaven whom they
found too remote and impersonal. The divine horses occupied the same place as
personal gods. The people seemed to be more comfortable with the idea of a
personal divine guardian than a distant god of theology. They also believed that
their earthly existence and well-being were closely bound and subject to the
powers of these consecrated creatures now residing in heaven. In this aspect,
the horse indeed enjoyed a supremely exalted status in the lives of the Vedic
people.
This
might have led to a ban on the use of horse images on seals and other everyday
objects by religious officials to preserve its lofty and noble status as the
consecrated sacrificial victim and now their divine protector. Images on
everyday objects would have been demeaning if not sacrilegious. Or the people
may have recognized this on their own and may have chosen not to use horse
images- voluntary, self-imposed ban. No ban can be expected to be total and
complete in a civilization covering more than 300,000 square miles. This may
explain why seals or other objects bearing horse images have been scarce at
Vedic archaeological sites. Like all bans, official or voluntary, this one too
may have broken down over time. So more seals or other items with horse images
may still be found but perhaps not in great numbers.
Readers
may find it interesting to know that Buddha gave specific instructions to his
disciples that after his death his physical likeness should not be represented
in any visual art form and he should be represented in art as the Bodhi tree,
the Tree of Wisdom, under which he had attained Enlightenment. For more than
three hundred years the Buddhists respected the Master's wishes. During the time
of Ashoka, a typical representation of Buddha was the Bodhi tree recalling his
Enlightenment at Bodh-Gaya. There was not a single image of big anywhere. Images
of Buddha began to appear after his teachings and philosophy spread beyond India
and began to take hold in other countries. The images we see today are intensely
contrary to his stated wishes and everything he taught and did.
With
respect to the Vedic horse, its near-absence on seals and the relative scarcity
of other horse artefacts raise the suspicion that there might have been some
kind of taboo or prohibition in effect against using horse images. The ban was
probably prompted by its status as a consecrated sacrificial victim and angelic,
divine guardian and to prevent profanation of this status.
Mythological
works describe demons and evil characters as having red hair or gold-yellow eyes
but the Indian traditions uniformly describe Rama and Krishna as pleasingly dark
in color. The most dominant rishis of the Rigveda-the
Angiras-are described as dark or coal- black and a prominent figure in the
Rigveda is described as brown. These authentic descriptions in the ancient texts
are completely harmonius with a tropical and sub-tropical India which receives
large amount of ultraviolet A and B radiations from the sun. This was also a
pristine India several thousand years before the invasions and attacks upon its
land by the Greeks, the Turks, the Persians and an assortment of Europeans like
the pork-chu-geese, the French fries and the English muffins.
Invasions
and occupations have had very little impact on the physical characteristics of
the people except in border states like Punjab and Kashmir and provinces in the
north-west now in Pakistan. Nationwide, less than one in two hundred perhaps
shows any foreign traces and almost all such people are from the border regions
or people who have settled in other parts of the country from those areas. Most
relevant to the topic under discussion is that occupations by foreign armies
took place some two thousand years or more following the Vedic age in its
original purity.
A bronze
sculpture dating back to the Vedic age has been identified as depicting the
famous Vedic rishi Vashishtha. Exactly matching its description in the Vedas,
the sculpture displays a unique hairstyle oiled and coiled in a tuft to the
right (In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, pp. 70-71). The finely chiseled
nose, the large, black and piercing eyes and other features on the face make the
sculpture look like a quintessential Indian priest.
Another
Vedic-age figurine depicts a svelte and beautiful woman who is clearly black.
The graceful nude model may have been the prototype of the Devadasis or Temple
Virgins of later India. A torso is all that has survived from Vedic times of a
splendidly crafted sculpture of a male in the nude. An interesting fact about
these artefacts is that not only the celebration of sex as exemplified in
Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra but also the celebration of the artistic beauty of the
human form has its origins in ancient India. Despite its current problems, an
India of the future, modem and prosperous, must reconnect itself with the Vedic
love and passion for life and establish a pervasive physical culture throughout
the subcontinent.
Now we
have not only a proven description of Vedic horse anatomy but also descriptions
of the most powerful rishis of the Rigveda including a bronze sculpture of one
of them. This along with a crushing mass of other evidence forcibly confirms the
purely indigenous lineage of our great rishis.
One old
game Western Indologists still play is proposing an "original
homeland" outside India for everything Indian. The current favourite seems
to be the steppes of southern Russia. Another is Central Asia. Of these, one is
grasslands and other a patch of earth inhabited by people who never created
anything. According to Western fantasies, perhaps pharmaceutically induced,
nomadic barbarians popped out of these places and went on to write something as
grand and vast as the Vedas in language of their own in which they were
illiterate. Let us review some facts. The four Vedas are in poetic form. They
are a work of high literary sophistication using as many as 15 distinct metres.
They consist of 20,358 verses. They are far more extensive than the much later
literary works like Homer's epics or the Bible. They are a work of literary art
created by master wordsmiths. The entire body of literature that may have been
produced in the last 6,000 years in the Russian grasslands and in Central Asia
would be trivial and puny compared to the timeless majesty of the Vedas.
A
fictitious invasion by illiterate nomads is hardly the kind of event that will
lead to the development of the world's greatest civilization and its greatest
body of literature. The simple fact is that to set up a culture or transplant a
civilization elsewhere you have to proceed from an already advanced one. Even
so, you need brilliant people to do it, not illiterate nomads. And you need
ongoing communication links with and prolonged support from your original
homeland including a steady flow of people from all walks of life - from the
home country to the new land over many generations. As the world's great
civilizations go, the Russian Steppes and Central Asia are little more than
compost heaps. They have no relevance in any discussion about the Vedic
civilization or the origin of Sanskrit.
The
reports are that the quest for the "original homeland of the Indo-European
speakers" continues unabated. Supposedly, at present, "excellent
cases" are being made by "scholars" for some new place-to he
anointed as the original homeland. It seems that this is about the only thing
going on now. If you get the drift, Western Indology is already a dead
discipline.
The other
game is “reconstructing" a fiction called "the proto language”. It
goes something like this: Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have strikingly close
affinities. Therefore they must have all come from an older "proto
language” from a conveniently "assumed" place like Central Asia
which is the cradle of all civilization. The proto-Sanskrit speaking Aryans came
out of there. Their charging war horses came out of there. Last but not least
fantasizing, yam-spinning Western Indologists also came out of there. If you
said, hey, wait a minute. None of this makes any sense. Sanskrit is not an
Indo-European language. It is Indian. Nothing Indo-European about it. All its
antecedents are in India. The many Prakrits, the numerous dialects, the works.
It is very old. Probably as old as the air we breathe. Greek and Latin are far
too junior to it. Now that would turn everything upside down and force a
complete rewriting of ancient history and potentially bring down Western
civilization along with Christ and his kingdom to boot. As long as the place of
origin is not India, their mission is accomplished which is to deny India's
great antiquity, to deny the primacy of Sanskrit and India's supremacy as the
greatest civilizing force in the world through the millennia. The pathology
underlying this compulsion to falsify history is sustained by a toxic mixture of
race, politics and missionizing Christianity the last more harmful than all the
world's industrial pollutants.
Making no
assumptions, relying on no speculations and introducing no extraneous material
from other sources, Shrikant Talageri has thoroughly studied and analyzed the
extensive ancient sources of India such as the Vedas, the Puranas and other
historical literature to give us an accurate picture of our ancient history.
Western Indology, a sick-house built on lies, fraud and speculations and
sustained by money and Missionary propaganda simply does not have the
background, the skills, the honesty and the integrity necessary to undertake an
exhaustive study of the primary sources.
Thanks to
Talageri's work, the distribution of various groups of people during the
pre-Vedic and Vedic periods looks as shown in the box. The readers are reminded
that this is an India of some six or seven thousand years ago. The population if
extrapolated backwards would be only a small fraction of what it is today. Some
estimates put India’s population in minus 4000 (early Rigvedic period) at one
million and in minus 2000 (late Vedic or Harappan) at five million. Therefore,
the information may not quite correspond to the distribution of various groups
across the country as we know it today. Also the information presented in the h
ox is only what is clearly stated and described in the ancient documents.
It is the
Purus who created the Vedic civilization in Punjab. They are the movers and
shakers the kings, the priests, the poets: the power and the brains, the heart
and the soul. It is they who wrote the Vedas. It is they who coined the word
Arya.
There
were no nomads in Vedic India from Central Asia or the Russian Steppes or any
other blinking place. Let it be said here and now: The Vedic horse is our own.
The Sanskrit language is our own. Our rishis are our own-born and bred right
here in this Sacred Land of the Aryas.
Compare
all this with the malevolent and thoroughly bogus "light-skinned nomadic
Aryans" from Central Asia-read "white niggers" or "wiggers"
trumpeted by Western Indologists for more than a century as real poets of the
Rigveda.
In the
face of megatons of mounting evidence from multiple disciplines Witzel, Parpola
and others like them are beginning to look more and more like a retarded bunch.
They have been left behind by new discoveries and have reduced themselves to a
nuisance and a sideshow. Their whole discipline created by Christian
missionaries and colonial agents has collapsed. They should make a graceful exit
and leave the field.
The
truth will out sooner or later. This is a natural law. Scholarship must be
responsible, objective and reflect the latest discoveries that many have
dedicated their whole lives to make. Establishment
Western Indology, however, still lives in the nineteenth century ignoring all
new evidence and continues to keep its sinking, ship of AIT afloat, but the
water is rushing in from everywhere taking it down and all aboard with it.
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