Re: AIT

--- In cybalist@..., "Mark DeFillo" <ategnatos@...> wrote:

Here are some comments by Dr. Koenraad Elst posted on another list:

[QUOTE]

> On the other hand, the extreme opposite, the "Out of India" theory
> held by some Hindu nationalists also appears inaccurate, and
contrary > to traditional literary evidence.

Which literary evidence?

You also play into the hand of the usual calumniators by equating the
rejection of the AIT with "Hindu nationalism". It has been rejected
or doubted or simply never considered by all kinds of people, from
early European OITheorists like Schlegel to recent AIT skeptics like
Edmund Leach. For your information, though I make common cause with
Hindus on some important points, and though I do not share the
hysterical hatred of nationalism currently promoted through all media
channels worldwide, I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. If there
is no hard evidence for the AIT, it requires neither Hinduness nor
nationalist convictions to doubt or reject it.

> In Europe and its colonies there are "white supremacists"
> who sometimes deny that the people of India are "real Aryans";

I could quote a big handful of those, but not of the following:

> similarly, these more extreme Hindus deny that Europeans are "real
> Aryans."

Example? I have had to distance myself from less than cool-headed
Indian OIT advocates a few times, but I have not encountered that
line yet. If *Arya* is taken in its traditional Manuwadi meaning,
*all* Hindus would agree that Europeans are not "Aryas", as they do
not practise Vedic culture. In fact, if we accept that
straightforward definition, *everyone* would agree that the term Arya
does not fit the European, unless he adopted and interiorized Vedic
culture. But this is not more extremist than stating the
truism that a Christian is not a Muslim, etc.

> They do, in fact, recognize a possible migration into India of Aryan
> culture, but far earlier, in the aftermath of the last great Ice
Age.

What may have immigrated under Ice Age climatic pressure is the
European racial type, strongly present in India's NW and more dimly
as one moves S and E. But this says little about their culture or
language, which in 10,000+ BC cannot have been PIE anyway, let alone
Indo-Aryan. Those immigrants, gradually mixing with locals, could
e.g. have spoken some unknown "Nostratic" dialect and then developed
it over millennia until in 4000 BC or so it became PIE, which then
spread from India northwestward.

Bamshad c.s. have wrongly coupled the empirical fact that lower
castes in Andhra are more local and "Asian" than the upper castes
there (perfectly explainable by known historical data of *internal*
migration from India's NW where the Euro type predominates) with a
racial immigration from C. Asia to India, which even if proven would
in turn say nothing about their language. Even now that everyone is
saying that race is not the point, we see racial connotations of PIE
reappear through the back door time and again.

K. Elst [UNQUOTE]