Dear Vishal,
This is becoming ridiculous. I am fully
prepared to believe that Misra is _not_ a Hindu nationalist. In fact, I simply
don't care, as I think I have said clearly enough. I am against mixing domains.
If X is a nationalist but does good science, I'll respect him as a scholar,
though I may not like him as a person. Of course a strong ideological bias may
influence the way you work as a scholar, but even then what should be
criticised in a linguistic discussion is the fellow's _scholarly_ opinions, not
his _political_ ones. Funny that you should be so concerned about branding. You
do a lot of branding in your own postings, describing various people as "white",
"European/North American", "Indian Marxists" etc.
On the other hand, the fact that anyone's
ideological credentials are impeccable says nothing about that person's
scholarly qualifications. If Misra is against nationalism, fine, so am I. Then
perhaps we'd agree politically. But it won't improve my opinion about him as a
linguist.
To my knowledge, Witzel does not claim that
Old High German is the closest thing there is to Proto-Indo-European, or that
the Nibelungenlied was composed a few thousand years earlier than other people
think it was, or even that Germany is the PIE homeland. It's easy to see that
you don't like Witzel, but what's that to me? What are those ominous past and
present reasons for which you'd like to brand him (and the Indo-Europeanists in
general) with "all kinds of epithets"?
If you want to have the last word on it, be
my guest. I've already said what I cared to say.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 3:08 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Misra, Bryant and Indigenous-Nationalist
Conflation
My point was that if this is the way people will go about
branding people from India with non-mainstream (and possibly wrong) views on IE
linguistics with various ideological affiliations, there is an even greater
reason to brand IE specialists with all kinds of epithets because of historical
AND PRESENT reasons.
The fact is the Piotr WILL NOT use the same
standards to judge Witzel as a German Nationalist or an Aryanist. Nor will
you.
Does that not say it all?