Are you Aryan and Elite?

Title: Are You Aryan and Elite?
Author: Nayanjot Lahiri
Publication: India Today
Date: November 19, 2001

The Indo-Aryans are as renowned for their physical features as they
are for the quarrels that have erupted around them. Were they fair,
blond and blue-eyed or dark and brown-haired? Can they be described as
peaceful agriculturists or were they horsebacked, aggressive
pastoralists? How, when and where did they come from? Anyone
interested in a detailed, lucid review of the sprawling controversies
that this most (in)famous colonisation saga of India has generated
will find much that is useful in this book.

Edwin Bryant's critique in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture:
The Indo-Aryan Debate has two aspects-empirical and historiographical.
The first examines the philological, linguistic and archaeological
data and how these have been interpreted both to support Aryan inroads
and to contest them. The second focuses on the ways in which the Aryan
question has been used over two centuries by various people, from
European Orientalists and First World Indologists to Indian scholars
and religious reformers.

The empirical minutiae underlines how the same "evidence" is capable
of being explained in different ways. For example, there are 35
non-Aryan names for individuals, tribes and clans in Rigvedic
vocabulary. On the one hand, this can suggest a non-Sanskritic
linguistic substratum which infiltrated into the language of the
ruling Aryan elite. On the other hand, foreign words and syntactical
features continue to be accepted into our languages today without any
foreign "linguistic substratum, so it is legitimate to ask why this
had to be the case in the protohistoric past". In which case,
non-Aryan words in Vedic texts cannot be considered as sure proof of a
linguistic "substratum" and could, instead, have been an "adstratum".

Bryant's historiographical critique is more provocative in the sense
that it proposes to mitigate "a type of Indological McCarthyism
creeping into areas of western, as well as certain Indian, academic
circles, whereby ... anyone reconsidering the status quo of Indo-Aryan
origins is instantly and a priori dubbed a nationalist, a communalist
or, even worse, a Nazi". Arguing forcefully for rigorous examination
of the arguments put forward by Indian scholars against Aryan
migrations, he believes that most Indologists in western academia
would be willing to "change their views if appealed to with informed
reason and arguments that address all the evidence".To put it most
charitably, it is naive to think that the "ignorance" in influential
western circles of indigenous writings on the Aryan question can be
made to go away simply by producing a book about such writings, which
Bryant has tried to do.

There is politics that girds academic writings which is related to
larger sociopolitical realities. First World academics frequently fail
to consider Third World scholars as "agents of knowledge" whose views
about their own history need to be taken seriously at all. Even before
the onset of globalisation, this asymmetry was there for all those who
cared to look. For instance, in a paper called "Trade Mechanisms in
Indus-Mesopotamian Interrelations", C.C. Lamberg Karlovsky (who
prominently figures in this book) examined the stimulus behind the
creation of the Harappan civilisation. Karlovsky's paper, published in
1972, did not think that such writings or issues were important to the
question of the formation of the Indus civilisation. In fact, his
citations would suggest that as far as he was concerned, there had
been no writings by Indians on the civilisation since 1949-the only
two works by Indian scholars cited there, those of Madho Sarup Vats
and M.G. Dikshit,were published before 1950.

On a lighter note, the reactions of some Indians to the idea that they
belonged the same Aryan lineage as the Europeans make for hilarious
reading. Of all of them, the most ingenious seems to have been Pandit
Visnu Sakharam who in 1920, filed an immigration court case in America
on the plea that he was a Brahmin and therefore an Aryan/European.
Apparently, the argument was entertained for a while, until a court in
California ruled that "the Aryan invasion theory was precisely that:
just a theory, and therefore not citable as credible proof for
immigration purposes".

If scholarship had also treated the "presence" of the Aryans in the
same way as the California court, perhaps, a more inclusive,
multilineal story of ancient India may have been in place, instead of
the same old saga of Indian history through the Aryan prism.