Re: AIT

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:

The points are also being debated on another yahoogroup
(IndianCivilization); here are some comments by Dr. Koenraad Elst:

[Quote]
>A few points should be made clear. I don't believe in an "Aryan
Invasion" as a sweeping military conquest. Who does, after all?
The "famous AIT" is _not_ a fair representation of any serious modern
scholar's opinions -- it's only a man of straw that Hindutva
nationalist "scholars" can conveniently knock down.<

Scratch an "immigrationist" and you'll find an invasionist. A
foreign group can become the elite in an established civilization by
first of all assimilating at least linguistically (which clearly did
not happen in the case of the Aryan "immigrants" in India), or by
conquest. This conquest may have been less than "sweeping",
sometimes though rarely a single battle suffices to yield an enormous
prize; but it would require *some* military confrontation at some
point. Further, "invasion" isn't necessarily a military affair.
What distinguishes invasion from immigration is that immigrants leave
the established system in place, while invaders replace it with their
own. It is in the latter sense that French politicians like Valery
Giscard d'Estaing have described Muslim immigration (obviously non-
military) as essentially an invasion. The point here is not whether
they are right or wrong, merely that it reveals the meaning of the
word "invasion". And even if all scholars had dropped the notion of
Aryan invasion altogether, it would still not be a "straw man", for
obviously it has very genuinely been the dominant theory for many
decades.

>For one thing, the collapse of the Indus Valley civilisation took
place a couple of centuries too early for Indo-Aryan-speakers to have
conceivably played a significant role in it. On the other hand, the
_linguistic_ evidence is clear and incontrovertible: the Indo-Aryan
languages cannot be "autochthonous" in the sense of having been
spoken in India since the end of the last Ice Age, but must have been
brought there from the Middle East during the 2nd millennium BC.<

Always interesting to see how every new generation of academics makes
the same old mistake of assuming that every important thing is known,
even "incontrovertible".

>The fast and effective expansion of a minority language at the
expense of the local majority languages is possible through the
acculturation of a foreign élite.<

And how does that foreign group become the elite?

> I fail to see why the idea that some of those elements derive from
external sources -- I mean in particular the Old Indo-Aryan language -
- should seem subversive, except to a blinkered fundamentalist mind.<

Assuming that Piotr really doesn't see it, this just goes to show how
people can meddle in the debate on the political abuse of ancient
Indian history and yet be ignorant of the systematic subversive abuse
of the theory of "Aryans as foreigners" by Christians, Muslims,
Communists, through numerous channels including academic forums for
decades on end. We already saw Michael Witzel plead his heartfelt
concern about the supposed Hindutva abuse of the Aryan debate after a
long academic career in IE and Indian studies in which he never
whispered about the screaming and variegated political abuse of his
study object going on around him.

> Cultural purists ("one nation, one homeland, one blood, one linear
tradition, one faith, one bla-blah ...") are dangerous fools -- and
that applies to anyone anywhere, in India, Britain, Poland or Peru.<

It is true that nationalism becomes foolish when it assumes the
monotheistic mould.
KE [Unquote]