Re: [tied] Re: Why India?

----- Original Message -----

From: michael_donne

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 3:30 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Why India?

> 1) First of all, as I've mentioned before, the vast majority of South Asian archaeologists now reject migrations in favor of indigenous origins. I believe it was Renfrew who said: It's hard to see what's not Vedic about the Indus Valley Civilization.  There is a huge amount of evidence that points to continuity in Vedic and Hindu practices beginning from 5000 BC until today.

 

Even if the Indus Valley Civilisation (I leave aside the 5000 BC dating) were "Vedic" in the sense that many elements of its culture were eventually inherited by the Vedic Indo-Aryans, that would not mean it was _linguistically_ Indo-Aryan. Anti-migrationism (as a reaction to migrationism) is a common attitude among archaeologists, not only those working in South Asia; and yet the linguistic evidence shows unambiguously that languages must have migrated in the past.

 

> 2) The Rig Veda refers to the Saraswati river as flowing to the sea which is something they could not have known about if they migrated in around 1200 BC (or even 1900 BC). 3) The texts also refer to astronomical and other events dated much earlier.

 

These questions have been addressed by critics (including Witzel) to my satisfaction, if apparently not to yours.

 

> 4) With the exception of Meadows, there are a large numbers of qualified excavators who have located horse bones in India during Harappan times.

 

Even if they find a whole horse there, that still won't prove that Harappa was Indo-Aryan speaking. I for one do not insist that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had the monopoly of horse-breeding. Linguistic palaeontology only shows that they (or at least the non-Anatolian part of the family) were familiar with horses, not necessarily that they were the earliest (or only) domesticators of horses. The pattern of borrowing suggests that the domestic horse and the techniques of horse-training and chariotry were introduced in some parts (especially in the Middle East) mainly by Indo-Iranian speakers. The importance of the horse in the culture of both the Iranians and the Vedic Indo-Aryans suggests that they were indeed horse experts. But if horses were bred in Central Asia during the early second millennium BC, they may have been imported by the Harappans even before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans.

> 5) All of the 'negative evidence' can be refuted.

 

I was asking about "positive evidence" ("Why India?", not "Why not India?"), without which you can't make your point even if you were really able to refute all the negative evidence.  

> These are all contested but what isn't contested in this area? My friend is dealing with all of these, and much more, in detail. He says that there is no conclusive evidence but the evidence is very very strong -- at least enough to consider it a valid alternative.

 

A valid alternative to what? Any discussion of India as a possible homeland turns into discussing the relative merits of "Out of India" versus "Into India" (a.k.a. AMT), as if the Indian question were central to the understanding of the general problem of the spread of Indo-European. Well, it isn't. "Out of India" is put forward as a theory of IE origins, but "Into India" is no such thing. It refers to just one event in the spread of the family -- a marginal one, in fact. There is no single "Into India" hypothesis, since "Into India" is merely the logically inevitable consequence of _any_ homeland proposal that doesn't locate PIE in India. What we really have to explain is how the IE languages managed to spread all over Europe and much of Central Asia, the Middle East, Anatolia and (without special emphasis) the Indian subcontinent. Unless the Indian origins theory throws some radically new light on this big question (rather than concentrate on purely local affairs), it has nothing attractive to offer from the point of view of IE studies. Suppose that someone sudenly proposed Denmark as the IE homeland, pointing to the continuity of local cultural developments since the Neolithic and the difficulty of identifying the exact moment when IE speakers reached the place. Should we then reclassify all homeland hypotheses as "Out of Denmark" versus "Into Denmark"? I'm afraid that no-one would buy such a theory in the first place unless it offered a visible explanatory advantage vis-à-vis other current proposals.

> The only problem is linguistics. No western linguists have seriously tried to investigate this.

 

They have, back in the nineteenth century.

 

> Misra is the only qualified Indian but his work is flawed. There is a growing awareness of this problem and eventually someone will look into it even though it involves
rethinking the foundations of 130 years of linguistics.

 

The linguistic question is not much of a problem for anybody except the proponents of the "Out of India" scenario. Are you suggesting that instead of the most natural and generally accepted interpretation of the facts we need to "rethink" them so as to make them fit your favourite hypothesis? That would be self-defeating in the long run, since it would mean that the facts can be "rethought" once again in order to please someone else. Those who advocate other homeland proposals at least accept the standard model of IE linguistics and don't manipulate it to suit their needs. Well, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov do something of the sort, but they have been criticised for that. The linguistic question is autonomous: we use only _linguistic_ data, not genetic or archaeological evidence, to determine the structure of the family tree.

> Let me ask you to answer this just as a hypothesis: assume that tomorrow the Indus Script was found to be IndoAryan, incontrovertible proof of horse bones were found in the Mature Harappan, and geologists determined without question that the Saraswati river flowed during a very early Vedic time.

 

On the "Sarasvati river" and horse bones, see above.

 

> How would you rewrite linguistics to deal with this? This is not an improbable scenario. Just as a hypothesis, I'd like to hear your thinking on this.

 

For the moment, I have no reason to worry, since the Indus Valley script has not been found to be Indo-Aryan yet. I think it _highly_ improbable that it will ever be found to be Indo-Aryan, so I'm not rewriting linguistics yet. I'm not concerned with "ifs". Questions like "What would you say if tomorrow demonstrably PIE inscriptions were discovered in Mexico?" are not conducive to a sound discussion.

 

Piotr