Re: Horses’ Teeth and the Indo-European Homeland

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Koenraad Elst" <koenraad.elst@...>
wrote:

>
> With "ruling class", he seems to mean the upper castes.

Yes, of course, but he's wrong.

> Till today, attempts are made to interpret the genetic studies
> as showing that the upper castes are more European than the
> lower castes; This was announced with much fanfare after the
> publication of a study by a Prof. Bamshad from Utah on the
> population of the SE-Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

Yes, I know this, and you know that I know this, so clearly
you write now for the benefit of the rest of the list.

> In fact, his results were perfectly explainable with known data
> from Indian CE history regardless of any Aryan invasion: it is
> known that in India's south and east, the Brahmin caste was
> imported from the northwest, where *all* people on average are
> more European-looking (taller, lighter-skinned, straighter-nosed)
> than in Andhra, by a natural gradient.

Makes sense to me.

> Just as people in North-Africa are more European-looking than in
> Central Africa, without therefore having immigrated from Europe.

I don't believe myself that the Aryans did immigrate from
Europe, but that they came from Central Asia. Am I really
the sole advocate of A.I.T. to think so?

The still earlier indo-europeanization of Central Asia is
another thing again.

> In colonial days, the IE kinship of Britons and Indians was
> explicitly used to justify colonization, e.g. in Viceroy Lord
> Curzon's speech ca. 1905. Race was part of this reasoning: in
> spite of their anti-miscegenation rules, the Indo-Aryans had
> mixed a bit too much with "native" Draupadis, so they lost some
> of their Aryan racial qualities and now stood in need of some
> help from their purer British cousins.

Yes, it seems we've heard about this before somewhere. :^)

> > Moreover the British aren't Aryan, certainly not genetically,
> > but not even culturally or linguistically. English isn't an
> > Indo-Iranian language.
>
> Again, "Aryan" is clearly meant in its 19th-century sense of
> "Indo-European".

It's likely, but not "clearly" meant. Torsten has some
idiosyncratic notions about Germanic being Iranian, or
certain Germans being Iranians, or something to that odd
effect, and so one can't be absolutely certain, in such
cases as when he compares Indians and Britons, that his
'Aryan' doesn't refer to Indo-Iranians.

Moreover it's 2008 now, and I normally object to anybody
using 'Aryan' in its incorrect 19th century sense.

> > Can you really look at two Indians side by side, from any two
> > castes, and find them less closely related to one another than
> > either to a typical Briton, Torsten?
>
> I'd say an average Panjabi looks more like an Englishman than
> like an Andaman islander.

I'd say you're wrong, at least in regards to an "average"
Panjabi and an "average" Briton, and while the Andamanese
islands are a territorial possesion of India, the native
people are clearly a group apart from average Indians.
Actually, I wouldn't ever refer to them as Indians myself,
for the same reason that I wouldn't start referring to
Cambodians as Indians if India were to manage to colonize
that country.

I would reject any comparisons to the mongoloid people of
India's north-east on similar bases.

> In the far northwest of the subcontinent, in some members of the
> Pakistani ruling class,

Now what is the Pakistani ruling class, certainly not in
that country brahmans? Aren't we talking now of recent
Central Asian extraction, if anything?

> you do find specimens that, if dressed in Western suit, could
> perfectly pass for Europeans.

I doubt many could pass for one of the red heads among the
English, Irish, and Scots, with their speckled pale, almost
translucent, skin, which type is common in Scandinavia too,
is it not? That type certainly doesn't come from Central
Asia, but from the cold dark north.

> > Such a conclusion is a necessary one for a nationalist only.
>
> The original version is the reverse: because they are cousins,
> the British have as much right to rule India as the Indo-
> Aryans had. This was said explicitly by Churchill: "we have
> as much right to be in india as the Indians, except perhaps
> for the depressed classes who are the native stock."

A claim so obviously stupid is his that I can't understand
why anybody feels the need to bend over backwards trying to
disprove the entry into India by Aryans from outside just
to refute it.

Do we ever really expect to be impressed by the rhetorical
gyrations gone through by a criminal attempting to justify
his crime?

Also, my understanding is that Churchill is dead and that
the British Empire has been dismantled. I wonder if we
couldn't move on.

> There is no denying at all that the AIT has been used to the hilt
> as a political tool.

I've never tried to deny that, and wasn't trying to deny it
to Torsten. I only deny that every Aryan invasion theory
is identical to Churchill's, or that all of them imply what
Torsten claimed they must all imply. Mayuresh and Torsten
both have been witness on this list, if Mayuresh reads any
other posts at all, to years of sophisticated discussion of
the entry of Indo-Aryan into India, discussion of a sort in
no way grounded upon 19th-century Aryanism or nationalism.

How nice it would be to return to those sorts of discussions
on cybalist, and to build and move forward from the best of
the ideas that arose therefrom, rather than to return again
and again and again to the 19th century and all its fools and
follies.

David