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Implication of Aryan Invasion Theory

According to Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst (1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven, Belgium:

 "The Aryan invasion theory was used to prove that Hindus were ultimately foreigners, exactly like their "Aryan cousins" the British. This alleged foreign origin of Hinduism is widely used to delegitimize the Hindu claim on India, and back then it was also used by the British and by their Indian loyalists to justify colonization. By showing that the Hindus are mere upstarts and squatters on the land (as they themselves are in America, Australia and other places), they can set up their own claim. For then neither the Hindus nor the Europeans are indigenous and as to who should possess this land, becomes merely a matter of superior might..

For the British, it seems illogical that a backward country like India, badly in need of the White Man's civilizing mission could have brought forth the superior European culture. "Decidedly, the English did not want to affiliate themselves to "Mother India."

In this period, race theories conquered the intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark haired Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.

British colonialism immediately put the emerging Aryan vision at the service of its propaganda, viz to tell the Indians that colonization by the British Aryans was but a second instance of the Aryan invasion which had made India into what it was; and that the Raj was nothing but a reunification of the oldest and the brightest branch of the Aryan family. Thus in his famous speech in 1862, Samuel Laing, Finance Minister of the Government of India, rejoiced that "the two races so long separated meet once more", though now "the younger brother has become the stronger, and takes his place as the head and protector of the family", coming to India "on a sacred mission, to stretch out the right hand of aid to our weaker brother, who once far out-stripped us, but has now fallen behind in the race."

While on one hand wooing the upper castes and North Indians with this Aryan rhetoric, the British along with the Christian missionaries also used the Aryan theory to pit the lower castes and South Indians, supposedly the progeny of the victimized non-Aryan natives, against their "Aryan fellow-countrymen. Contrary to the freedom movement, the anti-Brahmin and Dravidian movements were the fruits of British patronage. "

(source: The Saffron Swastika - By Koenraad Elst  Voice of India ISBN 8185990697 p.166 and 243-246). Refer to Petty Professorial Politicking in The Indo-Aryan Controversy - By Koenraad Elst.  Refer to Out of India Theory - wikipedia.org

Michael Witzel does mention the ethnonyms of the enemies of the Vedic Aryans, the Dasas (Iranian Daha, known to Greco-Roman authors as Daai, Dahae), Dasyus (Iranian Dahyu, “tribe”, esp. hostile nomadic tribe) and Panis (Greek Parnoi), as unmistakably the names of Iranian tribes. The identification of these tribes as Iranian has been elaborated by Asko Parpola (“The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in Erdosy: op.cit., p.367), and is now well- established, a development which should at least put an end to the talk of the Dasas being “the dark-skinned aboriginals enslaved by the Aryan invaders”. 

"Far from attesting an eastward movement into India, this text actually speaks of a westward movement towards Central Asia, coupled with a symmetrical eastward movement from India's demographic centre around the Saraswati basin towards the Ganga basin." 

Shrikant Talageri’s survey of the relative chronology of all Ŗgvedic kings and poets, (refer to Shrikant Talageri: The Ŗgveda, a Historical Analysis) yields a completely consistent chronology. Its main finding is that the geographical gradient of Vedic Aryan culture in its Ŗgvedic stage is from East to West. "It is easy to establish on the basis of internal evidence (the genealogy of the composers and of the kings they mention) that the 8th mandala of the Rgveda is one of the younger parts of the book. It is there (RV 8:5, 8:46, 8:56) that we find clear reference to the material culture and fauna of Afghanistan, including camels. ...What we now have is an indication that the movement went from inside India to the northwest.

(source:
The Vedic Experience: The Vedic Corpus provides no evidence for the so called “Aryan Invasion” of India - By Koenraad Elst).  Refer to Romila Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com

James Dwight Dana (1813-1895) American geologist, mineralogist, and naturalist, in his book - Manual of Geology in 1862, wrote:

"The Orient has always been the continent of progress. It is therefore in accordance with all past analogies that man should have originated on some part of the great Orient and no spot would seem to have been better fitted for man's self-distribution and self-development, than South West Asia, the center from which the three great continental divisions of Europe, Asia and Africa, radiate."

This is strengthened by the conclusions of Lord Curzon "I venture to affirm they (all languages) have sprung from Vaidik Sanskrit. The peculiarly primitive tongue of the Aryan race."

Curzon and Professor Roth further amplified this view. They hold that: "I venture to affirm that the Zend, Greek, Latin, Gothic etc. have all sprung at different periods from the Sanskrit."

Isaac Taylor ((1829-1901) English clergyman, antiquarian, and author, chiefly noted for researches in philology. In 1885, Taylor became canon of York. Taylor's Origin of the Aryans (1890) challenged the theory of Max Müller, then generally accepted, that central Asia was the cradle of the Indo-European peoples. He says on p. 39:

"The cradle of Aryans must have been in the region where Sanskrit and Zend were spoken." 

Prof. A H Keane author of Man, past and present has observed: "Man originated in the East and migrated thence to Europe."

(source: Hinduism in The Space Age - By E. Vedavyas p. 82-85).

 

 

Most archaeologists in India like Braj Basi Lal, S P Gupta or S R Rao have argued against the Aryan invasion theory.

The Aryan invasion theory has been used to promote various political agendas. British, Communist, Dravidian and dalit groups have all used it to their advantage, as have Muslim and Christian missionaries portraying the invading Aryans as the bad guys.

Refer to Romila Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com. Refer to Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture - By Michel Danino. Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna. Watch Lost / Submerged city of DwarakaThe Learning Channel video. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. Watch The Saraswati River - youtube.comWatch New Discoveries on India 's History

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Most archaeologists in India like Braj Basi Lal, S P Gupta or S R Rao have argued similar points for several years. B B Lal  joined the Archaeological Survey in January 1946, he held charge of the Excavations Branch and participated with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavations at Harappa.

At a recent conference in Los Angeles in August, sponsored by the World Association for Vedic Studies (WAVES), Lal argued convincingly the same points in an excellent paper called the 'Myth of the Aryan Invasion: Some Reflections on the Authorship of the Harappan Culture'. Unfortunately, Indian Leftists called B B Lal's recent book The Oldest Civilisation in South Asia as "academically weak and unscholarly," though he is only relating the implications of the latest archaeology. How many of these people ever read Lal's book or the related archaeological studies is debatable. 

Yet even a Communist historian in India like Romila Thapar, who previously endorsed the invasion theory has been forced to backtrack and no longer emphasises it. She recently notes in a Frontline interview: "Introducing archaeological data into historical studies also forces historians to think along interdisciplinary lines. The decline of the Indus cities is attributed to a range of causes, of which ecological change is among the major ones."

The Aryan invasion theory has been used to promote various political agendas. British, Communist, Dravidian and Dalit groups have all used it to their advantage, as have Muslim and Christian missionaries portraying the invading Aryans as the bad guys and the invasion as the source of all social, political and religious problems in the country. No other theory of ancient history has been used for so much modern political and religious mileage. That such groups are blaming Hindus for politicising the issue now that it is turning against them is only hypocrisy.

(source: Indian history revisited - Rediff interview with David Frawley). Refer to chapter on First Indologists and European Imperialism.

History as a Political Tool

 

Modern scientific tools had shown that the mighty river Saraswati existed and was not a mythical one as had been claimed. So also the river Rishadvati. 

Similar was the fallacy that the people of the Harappan civilization were unaware of maritime life. In fact, there were 150 references to the ocean in the Rigveda alone.

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David Frawley ( ? ) also known as Pandit Vamadeva Shastri the American eminent teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine has said that: 

"The Aryan Invasion Theory was propounded before archaeological excavations were carried out in undivided India. Modern scientific tools had shown that the mighty river Saraswati existed and was not a mythical one as had been claimed. So also the river Rishadvati. Similar was the fallacy that the people of the Harappan civilization were unaware of maritime life. In fact, there were 150 references to the ocean in the Rigveda alone, and these could not be dismissed as poetic imagery or symbolism. Dr. Frawley said archaeological excavations were throwing up new information, and one should not swear by what was in the textbooks written 30 or 40 years ago. The theory was imposed by Western scholars to show that India was always ruled by invaders. The fact was to the contrary. There was movement of people from India to outside, and even today, there was archaeological and linguistic evidence to show Indian influence in countries such as Iran and Central Asia, he added.

(source: India, the only former colony not to rewrite history - The Hindu). For more refer to David Frawley's article Witzel's Vanishing Ocean - How to read Vedic texts any way you like). 

Refer to Out of India Theory - wikipedia.org

Indians are not descendants of Aryans: Study

A new study led by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, says there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago.

Widely believed theory of Indo-Aryan invasion, often used to explain early settlements in the Indian subcontinent is a myth, a new study by Indian geneticists says.
The origin of genetic diversity found in South Asia is much older than 3,500 years when the Indo-Aryans were supposed to have migrated to India, a new study led by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, says. The study appeared in American Journal of Human Genetics on Friday.

The theory of Indo-Aryan migration was proposed in mid-19th century by German linguist and Sanskrit scholar
Max Muller.
He had suggested that 3,500 years ago, a dramatic migration of Indo-European speakers from Central Asia played a key role in shaping contemporary South Asian populations and this was responsible for introduction of the Indo-European language family and the caste system in India.

"Our study clearly shows that there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago," said Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, who led the research team, which included scientists from the University of Tartu, Estonia, Chettinad Academy of Research and Education, Chennai and Banaras Hindu University.

"It is high time we re-write India's prehistory based on scientific evidence," said Dr Lalji Singh, former director of CCMB. "There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans invaded or migrated to India or even something such as Aryans existed". Singh, vice-chancellor of BHU, is a coauthor.

Researchers analysed some six lakh bits of genetic information in the form of SNPs drawn from DNA of over 1,300 individuals from 112 populations including 30 ethnic groups in India. The comparison of this data with genetic data of other populations showed that South Asia harbours two major ancestry components. One is spread in populations of South and West Asia, Middle East, Near East and the Caucasus. The second component is more restricted to South Asia and accounts for more than 50 per cent of the ancestry in Indian populations.

"Both the ancestry components that dominate genetic variation in South Asia demonstrate much greater diversity than those that predominate West Eurasia. This is indicative of a more ancient demographic history and a higher long-term effective population size underlying South Asian genome variation compared to that of West Eurasia," researchers said.

"The genetic component which spread beyond India is significantly higher in India than in any other part of world. This implies that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and Caucasus," said Gyaneshwar Chaube of University of Tartu, Estonia.

If any migration from Central Asia to South Asia took place, the study says, it should have introduced apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India. "Because this ancestry component is absent from the region, we have to conclude that if such an event indeed took place, it occurred before the East Asian ancestry component reached central Asia," it said.

(source: Indians are not descendants of Aryans: Study - indiatoday.com).

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Arya and Swastika 

A very crude kind of anti-Hindu propaganda, sometimes used by American Protestant sects in “warning” the youth against the dangers of Hare Krishna etc., points out that Hinduism and Nazism have a central symbol in common: the swastika. 

I have also heard the comparison from Ambedkarites who, taking V T Rajshekhar’s lead, systematically refer to Hindus as “Hindu Nazis.” 

It may of interest to know that the swastika is just as much a central symbol in Buddhism, Ambedkar’s chosen religion. In China, the swastika is known as a Buddhist symbol. The swastika is quite a Santana symbol, not bound up with any nation or ideology. It is also found among people outside the Hindu sphere of influence. 

The word swastika comes from su-asti, “it is good”, as in the Sanskrit greeting Pratah Swasti, “good morning”. So swastika means “auspicious maker” or “sign of auspiciouness”. What the swastika visually depicts, is the solar cycle, be it during the day or during the year. It shows the circular movement at the four cardinal points: sunrise, sunset, midnight; or spring equinox, summer solstice, autumn equinox, winter solstice. As such it is shorthand for the Zodiac as well as for all macrocosmic and microcosmic cycles. It signifies the completeness as well as the dynamics of the Whole. Being primarily a solar symbol, it is normally painted in solar colors, like red, saffron or gold; while the Nazi swastika was black. 

Like the swastika, the term Arya, which is rather central in Hindu tradition and more so in Nazism, is in need of rehabilitation. Of course, the term does not indicate a race, but a quality of character. When Gautam Buddha gives a short formulation of his teachings, he calls it the Arya Satyani, the four “Noble” Truths. 

If the secularist have been inhibited about the use of the word “Arya” as proving the “fascist” character of Hinduism, it is partly because of this terminology used by Buddha, the hero of their mythical anti-Brahmin revolution. 

(source: Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society - By Koenraad Elst  p. 260 - 262). Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com.

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Politics of History - India's past has been held hostage by Marxists

"You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall."  ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

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Subramanian Swamy (1939 -  )  He is also a reputed economist and worked as Assistant Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat, New York in 1963. He worked with two Nobel laureates, Simon Kuznets and Paul A. Samuelson for his doctorate in economics at the Harvard University, awarded in 1965. He was a faculty at Harvard in 1964 and has been teaching there off and on for 12 years with the latest stint completed in 2005. He is acknowledged as an authority on comparative studies of India and China. He is also well-versed in the Mandarin Chinese (Hanyu) language. He was Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi from 1969.

He is the President of the Janata Party has recently challenged Romila Thapar

"While denying that she ever argued that Aryan was a racial term, she goes on to say that it was the language of those who migrated to India from abroad in a "graduated" way. Who were they? Is she arguing that they were racially the same as Indians or different? And who graduated the migration? ? She should be explicit. 

Obviously that is not being taught at JNU. Aryan is a German version of the Sanskrit word "Arya," which means a gentleman, while Dravida is a word coined by Adi Shankara while at Varanasi to mean a person from the south."

(source: Swamy's reply - hindu.com - March 24 2004). Refer to Distortion of Indian History and School Textbooks.  Refer to Out of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

 

Britannia, a lion at her feet, examines a string of pearls she has taken from a cushion held up by an Indian woman.

Soon India would be depicted as a naked black female submissively offering her rich jewels to Britannia.

  India now entered in the cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact – the era of colonialism. The Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest civilizations were treated like children by people who thought themselves as superior race.

(image source: British Library. Refer to India: Empire of the Spirit - By Michael Wood).

  Refer to Defaming of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.comFor more on Christian Intolerance refer to chapters on The Goa Inquisition, European Imperialism, Conversion, and First Indologists Refer to What Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British - www.larouchepac.com. Refer to Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee.

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To undermine the corporate Hindu identity the theory was first concocted by the British Imperialists and then taught for decades after Independence to captive students by Romila Thapar and her cohorts.

But the media has been manipulated in India to permit Thapar now to somersault and to maintain that she had never believed in the theory or in similar junk she had taught such as that Samrat Asoka was the grandson of a Greek woman and hence he had inherited as a little boy his iconoclast temper from lessons learnt on his grandma’s lap! But she and her ilk have not been made accountable despite being discovered.

(source: Media is a tool of anti-Hindu conspiracy - By Subramanian Swamy).
Also refer to ‘Aryan invasion theory is British-created falsehood’ - sify.com.

Refer to Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud is a book by Arun Shourie. - The book explains how a group of academic historians, of Marxist persuasion, has been tweaking Indian history and also lining its own pockets in the process.

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Immaculate Deception?

Appointment of a Marxist historian to Kluge Chair - Playing to the Western gallery?

"Indian intellectuals look to the West with and adulation that is often blind, if not obsequious."

                              - observes David Frawley the American teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine.

According to a petition started by B. Parker:  "It is a great travesty that Romila Thapar has been appointed the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress. In regards to India, she is an avowed antagonist of India's Hindu civilization. As a well-known Marxist, she represents a completely Euro-centric world view.

 

Writing politically correct history - Getting awards from America

Evangelical West's Neo colonial Sepoys

Stalinist hatchet job of disinformation on Indian History

This award will satisfy the evangelical constituency that wishes to extirpate Hinduism and the Islamic Jihadists who assert historical legitimacy for their claims to imperial dominion over India and regularly pursue it by murderous ventures that emulate Nazi pogroms against Jews and Slavs.

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Romila Thapar a well-known Indian historian and staunch believer in the Aryan invasion theory represents a completely Euro-centric world view of Indian history.

"Whites appoint Indian proxies to let them pull strings from behind the scenes, but through such intermediaries, they impose their epistemologies, institutional controls, awards and rewards, all in the name of universal thought."

Refer to Dialog on Whiteness Studies - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.comRefer to Romila Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com

Note: Romila Thapar loftily declined the native Padma Bhusan, but a million dollar prize, effectively the same kind of state award she found unpalatable, from the racist sponsors of mass murder is apparently another matter.  It is no surprise to see that Romila Thaper recieved a Kluge prize for her work which undermines Hindu Civilization. The library of Congress librarian, James H. Billington has impeccable evangelical credentials and he had the final say in choosing the awardee. Billington is on the Board of the Center for Theological Inquiry (Theology Today) and was long time advisor for Theology Today. Instead of getting awed by these awards these awardees should be looked at as neo colonial sepoys. Romilla Thapar received the American kluge prize for study of humanity - She is credited with creating a new pluralistic view of the Indian civilization ?  Refer to the chapter on Glimpses XXII and Islamic Onslaught

Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser. Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge. Watch The Saraswati River - youtube.com. Refer to Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee. Watch video - Intellectual Terrorism and Subversion in polity – By Radha Rajan. Refer to Be wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel  

Refer to Michael Witzel: rattled rat at IIC  - By Bhagwan Singh

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She completely disavows that India ever had a history. Just as the Europeans discredited the American Indian's land claims by ignoring that they represented a unique civilization with a wholesome variety of distinct linguistic and cultural traits, Thapar has long expounded the same ignorant view of India's unique history and civilization. Romila Thapar claims to be an expert on Vedic India; when she does not know a single word of Sanskrit.  It is certainly absurd that she was made a professor of ancient Indian history at JNU

Why waste our American resources on a Marxist ideological assault on Hindu civilization? Hinduism is the world's most ancient, ongoing and largest cultural phenomenon. Such a long lived civilization surely has a lot to teach the world. So why support its denigration?" It is ironic as well as disturbing that a movement which still swears by Lenin and Stalin, is hailed in Western universities as the guardian of a civil polity against the encroaching barbarism of Hindu revivalism."

(source: http://www.petitiononline.com/108india/petition.html). Refer to A Dictionary of Marxist Thought - By Tom Bottomore. Also refer to Communismwatch and cpmterror.

Secular Politics Communal Agenda
Writing Politically correct Histories?

The Indian history writing has never been an easy task because the beginning itself was motivated by the political considerations and religious constraints, rather than driven by the principles of historiography.  This necessarily encouraged historians to distort the history of India so as to fit in certain ideological and religious framework.  Entire history written by colonial, ideologically and politically motivated historians is witness to it and victim of it.  Since the independence of India a new approach has become fashionable i.e. writing of 'politically correct history'.  The entire history wiring has now been reduced to 'secular' history and 'communal' history.  In the process, the sacredness of primary evidence and importance of original sources have become a major casualty.  To push their agenda and to write 'politically correct history', historians have resorted to hiding away the facts, ignoring the facts.  Their sole agenda is to prove their viewpoint wedded to their political ideology and its usefulness in the immediate battle in politics.  This approach is as visible as daylight in the writings dealing with almost all periods of history, including the freedom struggle and the partition of the country.  The last sixty years history of independent India has been dealt with even more callously. 

(source: Secular Politics Communal Agenda: A History of Politics in India from 1860 to 1953 - By Prof Makkhan Lal). Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

"Anything but Sarasvati please!"

"What Thapar fails to mention, rather conveniently, is that large sections of very influential Hindus of that period, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo for example, as well as several academics like A. C. Das, had opposed AIT. 

Today, several archeological excavations have established that there has been no Aryan invasion or break in India's civilization. Yet, it is the historians of the Marxist school of India, like Thapar, who still continue to propagate the myth of AIT. The discovery of numerous archeological sites on the banks of the erstwhile Sarasvati, about which the Vedas talk in glorious terms doesn't merit any attention in her book. There is no mention about such things as the mapping of the paleo channels of the Vedic Sarasvati.

 

Dried bed of the mighty Saraswati river.

Yet, it is the historians of the Marxist school of India, like Thapar, who still continue to propagate the myth of AIT. 

The discovery of numerous archeological sites on the banks of the erstwhile Sarasvati, about which the Vedas talk in glorious terms doesn't merit any attention in her book. There is no mention about such things as the mapping of the paleo channels of the Vedic Sarasvati.

Watch New Discoveries on India 's History

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Kot Diji belonged to the Regionalization Era[27] of IVC/SSC. This phase was the final critical one that led to the formation of urban centers. This phase thrived between 3300 BCE and 2600 BCE. Assuming that the invading Aryans were the destroyers, as Thapar implies, one must then accept the presence of the Aryans in IVC/SSC even before its Mature [i.e. urban] Phase had started. The Marxist historians defiantly claim that the Aryans invaded India only towards the end of the Mature Phase of IVC, which is around 1900 BCE.[29] If that were the case, how could the Aryans have been the destroyers of the Kot Diji settlement?"

(source: Romila Thapar's 'Ancient India' [2002] – A Review by Kalavai Venkat - indiastar.com).  

Far from being merely an academic exercise, though, Aryan Race Theory is in fact the brainchild of Christian evangelist-scholars, fashioned and tempered in the nineteenth century as a weapon for European expansionism in India. Promulgated to generations of Indian children in British-created schools, it created, like so many other Western creeds and dogmas, social divisions where none had hitherto existed, resulting in jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion among communities where peaceful coexistence had been the norm. This theory, which posits the invasion of ancient India by a white-skinned race (the "Aryans") who conquer an indigenous, dark-skinned population, therefore worked ingeniously with the British divide-and-conquer strategy for rule in India. The theory and its variants continue to be used today by the Vatican and other Christian enterprises in their campaign to "harvest" tribals and other vulnerable communities of Hindus. For these spiritual imperialists, spurious racial theories still hold their divide-and-conquer appeal. 

(source: The Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon- By Aravindan Neelakandan.S).  

Our Voice in History

Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games

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We don’t quite get it, the first globalized civilization was in India .

“The Indus Valley civilization dwarfed Egypt and Mesopotamia in area and population, surpassed them in many areas of engineering and was aggressive in globalization 5000 years back.” 

These are words from Andrew Lawler’s lead article in the June 2008 issue of Science magazine which had Indus Civilization as the cover story .

Previously archaeologists believed that Indus people got their ideas from Mesopotamia and was a civilization without deep roots, but as per new evidence, Indus evolved from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan . Archaeology has also found evidence of occupation in Harappa dating to 3700 B.C.E and in Farmana in India to 3500 B.C.E.

Writing about the religious beliefs of the Indus people, Lawler mentions that the proto-Shiva seal has fuelled speculation that the religious tradition of Indus helped lay the basis for Hinduism. While there are questions to be answered on their language, religion and form of government, decades of archaeology has changed the image of Indus from a xenophobic and egalitarian society to one which was vibrant and complex.

Though the article was fairly balanced covering excavations in Harappa, Baluchistan, and Kot Diji in Pakistan and Farmana, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan in India , it had the usual western hatchet job, blaming Indian archaeologists for using Hindu texts as a guide. This is a no-no, we are told, because (a) it is inflammatory to the Pakistanis and (b) India has a large Muslim population.

The article has other issues too. Drought, as a reason for the demise of Indus , is scoffed at while many other reasons, including “change in a society that they say emphasized water-related rituals” is offered as an alternative. The western scholars quoted in the article themselves admit their theories are pure speculation, but the drying up of Ghaggar-Hakra around 1900 B.C.E is ignored, since it would involve a reference to the Rig Veda.

As Western scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games — a very different one from that practised in their own research centers — we need to evaluate what can be done. Whining about unfairness can be cathartic, but it does not solve the problem.

Different Standards and Inept Government

We too should not indulge in speculative archaeology, but first Indian archaeologists and scholars need to be unapologetic about knowing the scriptures and using them for clues.

Sadly this attitude cannot be taken by people who work for government funded institutions like the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and Universities. The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. 

(If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia).

Recently the Government of India cut funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools because - it is getting tad repetitive - India has a large Muslim population and there was a fear that it would instill religious and cultural pride among students. In such an atmosphere, it would be naive to expect the government to lead the battle in understanding our history. Instead of wasting time writing letters to ministers, we might be better off digging in our own backyard for Painted Grey Ware.  


C
olonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.  

 

An Inept Indian government - The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization. 

If these people were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian civilization by many millennia. 

Refer to Conference on Sindhu-Saraswati civilization and Nalanda International

Watch New Discoveries on India 's History

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The second problem is mentioned in the Lawler’s article itself. Indian archaeologists have done excellent work, like R. S. Bisht in Dholavira and Vasant Shinde in Farmana, but they are slow to publish and collaborate. Bisht’s work has revealed “monumental and aesthetic architecture, a large stadium and an efficient water-management system”, but has largely been unpublished. The lack of data from people who had first access to the location helps in sustaining myths about the civilization.

Solutions

There is an urgent need to create institutions where scholarship is free of bureaucracy and political interference. One such institution — the Indus Heritage Center — funded by the Global Heritage Fund is coming up in Vadodara. Besides starting a Smithsonian class center in India , the center also plans to popularize the findings of Deccan College , the Department of Archaeology of Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda and the Archaeological Survey of India.

There have been xenophobic comments regarding this institution due to the involvement of western professors, even though the professors don’t believe in the Aryan Invasion theory. The fear is that they will be applying western frameworks on our history resulting in misinterpretation.

But instead of complaining about west, it is time we adopted some of their techniques for popularizing history. Building a Smithsonian style museum is an insuperable problem for the cash strapped ASI which can barely manage the monuments under its care. The Indus Heritage Center model where private donors in association with various colleges build research centers in which native interpretation of history can happen should be considered. Right now there are few sincere individuals who are involved in correcting Western biases; their efforts are exemplary but not sufficient to make an impact.

Past many decades of research have found no archaeological evidence for the Aryan Invasion theory. It has been discredited through genetic research as well. The demise of Indus valley is understood to be due to hydrological changes.

Still, pick up a book like Karen Armstrong (1946 - ) The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, which is used as text book in graduate courses, and you will find that colonial politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as nationalism.

One Indus Heritage Center cannot change such entrenched ideas. To give the megaphone to differing voices, more Indus Heritage Centers which are financially secure are required. This dovetails into the larger debate about the need to free higher education and research from government control and facilitate an atmosphere where private capital can provide funding. With such freedom, scholars would be able to delve into research as they see fit, instead of surrendering to artificial political fears.

Five thousand years back our ancestor living in the Indus Valley sailed across the vast Arabian sea in reed boats with cotton sails and made the best of the Bronze age globalized world. It would be a shame, if we did not show even a fraction of their ingenuity in making our voice heard in a debate about our history.

(source: Our Voice in History - By Jayakrishnan Nair - varnam.org).

World Owes Its Religions, Science And Culture,To The Vedas

Author Joy Sen, senior teacher (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur), in the institute’s architecture department, has challenged the theory that the Indian civilisation started with the Indus Valley age, and said it actually began with the Vedic age (read Aryans).

“It was the Aryans who moved to Persia, from there went to Turkey and finally were the first citizens of Greece.’’ 

The celebrated philosopher Plato and mathematician Pythagoras were actually of Aryan origin. The latter even came to India to learn Vedic concepts of numbers that we know as Vedic mathematics today,’’ Sen told TOI. “The numerals zero and one have come from the Vedic concepts of ‘sunya’ and ‘adwaita’. Not only numbers, even computational mathematics that the world follows today owes its origin to India. The words algebra, geometry and trigonometry are derived from Vedic mathematical concepts of ‘aljabura’, ‘trikonomatra’ and ‘jyamity’,’’ the book says.

(source:
World Owes Its Religions, Science And Culture,To The Vedas - By Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey). Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the last 30 years studying Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra and Mantra practices.  For the last 15 years he has been a corporate executive and speaker for Fortune 500 companies. He has degrees in Psychology, Literature and Comparative Religion. He has written:

"Thirty years ago, when I began my spiritual journey, I was studying English literature, and if you study English literature you will be taught that English and all of the romance languages of Europe can be traced back to the Latin, and then from the Latin back to the Greek.  Modern Western history teaches us that the trail mysteriously stops at that point in time, although it is a well-known fact that the ancient Greeks sat at the feet of the Egyptians and the BabyloniansSo when India was discovered by the West a few centuries ago there was a clash of cultures over the origins of human civilisation.  The West held a viewpoint of time that ended with the Greeks whereas the East, and India in particular, spoke of a time span of well over fifty thousand years. The Western vision simply could not accommodate this understanding.  So they made up a story to explain away this anomaly.  When people from the West colonized India and began to study the Indian culture, they established a chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University called the Boden chair. The main function of the Boden chair of Sanskrit was to translate the Bible into Sanskrit.

The people who studied Sanskrit then went to India and occupied various ministerial posts within the British Government, and they began to study the Vedas.  As they began studying, they discovered that Sanskrit was the mother language for both Greek and for Latin and, in fact, for all the romance languages of Europe. This discovery gave rise to the modern science of Linguistics.  The classification of modern languages was only made possible by an understanding of Sanskrit.

This revelation caused a problem because at that time India was a colony of the British.  As one of my professors used to say, 

“You refer to India as the sub-continent, but could you tell me exactly what it is sub too?”  Of course, the saying was intended to imply subordinate to Her Majesty the Queen.  It was a bit of an embarrassment to run into a culture that not only claimed that its history went back fifty or sixty thousand years, but that it was also the basis for your own language and literature!  The British couldn’t accept this and so the scholars of the time made up a theory, which said that there was a group of people called the Aryans, who lived in the Steppes of Russia, and this horseback riding people rode into India one thousand five hundred years ago with these books called the Vedas under their arms.  Unfortunately, what they did not take into account was the fact that the Vedas contained astronomical calculations that went back seven thousand years!  Now there is no instance or evidence of a horseback riding culture having observatories who watched the stars over a period of seven thousand years.  Nevertheless, Western scholars overlooked this inconsistency and believed the theory that the Aryans came riding into India and conquered the dark skinned Dravidians with their superior technology and their superior wisdom. "

(source: The Greatness of the Vedas - by Jeffrey Armstrong). Refer to Out of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to chapter on First Indologists and European Imperialism

Decline of the West

"Barely seven years after Prof BB Lal penned The Sarasvati Flows On: The Continuity of Indian Culture (2002), the defiantly-in-denial UPA government has been forced to admit the existence of the Vedic Saraswati. In response to a parliamentary question, the Government revealed that a study by scientists of ISRO, Jodhpur, and the Rajasthan Government’s Ground Water Department has found irrefutable evidence of palaeo-channels and archaeological sites of pre-Harappan, Harappan and post-Harappan ages, indicating the existence of a mighty river matching descriptions of the Saraswati in Vedic literature.

It is now conclusively established that there was no Aryan invasion, or even migration (the current theory). What does remain, however, is a West-led mental resistance to accepting the indigenous origins of the Vedic (Hindu) religion, culture, and civilisation. But the time for intellectual arguments is over; it will take a further economic and military decline of the West to eclipse this denial."

(source: Rediscovering the real India – By Sandhya Jain - folk.co.in).

Unsettling for Europeans?

It is unsettling for Europeans to consider that a predominately dark-skinned Asian community could have preceeded the west and established the basic fundamentals of organized society. The birthplace of writing, forever tied with cuneiform script found on clay tablets in Mesopotamia, may have proved to be an ingenious copy of another, far earlier innovation. The archaeological evidence for an ancient civilization of far antiquity, and a stupendous level of sophistication is clearly at hand here. There is no doubt in this author’s mind that further revelations await archaeologists in the not so distant future.

(source: Beyond the Holy Land - Indus Valley - By Patrick C. Chouinard - Christianarchaeology. com Sunday, July 22, 2007). Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

Deffronization or Secular Obscurantism?  

" Anybody Questioning the validity of Aryan Invasion theory is randomly dubbed as a “Hindu Nationalist"

***

N. S. Rajaram (1943 - ) is a mathematician, computer scientist and linguist and historian of science. He has taught in several universities in the United States. Since 1984 he has been an advisor to the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA). He has written:

"History texts, like all textbooks, should be periodically updated. But discredited old models should not be revived behind slogans.

‘Saffronization’ has no meaning
.

There is now a heated outcry — it can’t really be called a debate — by some eminent historiansfor desaffronizing history textbooks written under the previous administration. Supposedly, the NCERT texts written when Dr Murli Manohar Joshi was the HRD Minister give an overly Hindu perspective on history. This is what these eminent historians are calling “saffronization,” which they want eliminated. Does this charge have any substance? I cannot speak for medieval or modern history, but as far as ancient Indian civilization goes, the term “saffronization” is meaningless, because Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma (and its offshoots like Buddhism) is the only source we have to serve as framework for interpreting ancient texts and archaeology.. 

To “desaffronize”, are we to read the Vedas as Christian scripture or treat Harappan remains as Islamic monuments?

This is the kind of absurdity we land into when we substitute slogans for facts and reason. A more subtle example is the misrepresentation of the word Arya and the nature of the Aryan civilization. These eminent historians, led by Irfan Habib, charge that suggesting an indigenous origin for the Aryan civilization somehow constitutes “saffronization.” So, according to this eminent historian, and others of his school, we should attribute the Aryan civilization — which is more properly called the Vedic civilization (including its offshoots) — to foreign migrants

This is nothing but the revival of the discredited, divisive colonial model based on the infamous Aryan invasion theory. This colonial offspring is now the favored child of the Secularist brigade."

Hidden motives

This gives a clue to the real motive behind the cry for “desaffronization”: to revive the discredited old model of the Aryan invasion, now being repackage as Aryan migration. The goal is the same— to make the Vedic civilization non-Indian in origin and keep it separated from Harappan archaeology. These ‘eminent historians’ hide the fact that this division— attributing the Harappan civilization to the Dravidians and the Vedic language and literature to the invading Aryans served British colonial interests. 

In fact, the British made no secret of their goal to present themselves as the later and “better” brothers of the original Aryans who invaded India. 

Here is what Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain, once said in the House of Commons (1929):

“Ages and ages ago, there sat, side by side, the ancestors of the English, Rajputs and Brahmins. Now, after ages, …the two branches of the great Aryan ancestry have again been brought together by Providence…. By establishing British rule in India, God said to the British, ‘I have brought you and the Indians together after a long separation, not in order that you should lord over them, or that you should exploit them, but in order that should recognize your kinship with them…. It is your duty to raise them to their own level as quickly as possible, and work together; brothers as you are, for the evolution of humanity….’ ”

Needless to say the Aryan civilization of ancient India is not the same as the ‘Aryan civilization’ concocted by such characters, any more than of the Nazis who also claimed to be Aryans. India’s ‘eminent historians’ who came to dominate the scene after Independence rarely took issue with this disgraceful chapter in Indian historiography. And now they are raising the cry of “saffronization,” as a new generation of scholars has gone on to rubbish this European fabrication still favored by Secularist worthies, especially the ‘eminent historians.’

(source: 
Deffronization or Secular Obscurantism? - By N.S. Rajaram - hinduunity.com). Refer to The Real Eve : Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa -  By Stephen Oppenheimer.

Refer to Out of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to chapters on First Indologists and European Imperialism. Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Watch An Invasion through Conversion - videoyahoo.com.

 

 

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