The OIT state of the art

I have received a mail about counter-arguments to the AIT,
I made the following answer,
Some of you may be tired of the OIT
but it's worth going thru the arguments.

Actually, the case for the AIT is very strong.

Aryan Race Politics
The invention of the Aryan race was another political play. This was a
product of the 19th century imperialistic British mind.
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Answer :
The concept of Indo-European proto-language is a modernized version of the
Japhetic and Scythic hypotheses that go back to the XVI and XVII century.
The racialization of this linguistic concept was done by the Germans in the
second half of the XIX century.
The statement that the British invented PIE as a by-product of colonialism
is just absurd.
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This theory was:
The fair skinned nomads of the Aryan race, arrived in their horse chariots.
(Horse chariots are the vehicles of the plains not of nomads traveling along
untreaded paths in high mountains.)
Aryans invaded the far advanced Indus civilization.
(How, without the superior technology of the Indus people? It is not a small
island, to invade and conquer, but a densely populated area of 1.5 million
square kilometers! )
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Answer :
The invaders were the Indian branch of the Indo-European diaspora. They
cannot be described as the "Aryan race", whatever that might mean.
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The invasion theory suggests that the Vedic Aryans destroyed the Dravidian
Indus townships.
(Sculptures, paintings, and texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia clearly
illustrate battles between cities and wars of conquest. But the SS
civilization does not depict a military act, of taking prisoners, or of
human killings. None of the cities show signs of battle damage to buildings
or city walls, and very few weapons have been recovered. Human remains show
no signs of violence either. The bones from excavated burials show few signs
of disease or malnourishment. Where is the evidence of this distruction?)
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Answer :
The Indus Civilisation was not "destroyed". Urbanisation stopped
around -2100 BC and that civilization receded into a countryside
"back-burner" form.
There are two comparable examples of that kind of historical process :
1. France.
The Greco-Gallo-Roman civilisation crumbled around 500 AD. It receded into a
countryside feodal system and this process took place when Germanic people
were invading the place and occupying the upper-layer of society. A new
synthesis emerged about 6 centuries later. Germanic people were already
present in Roman society and were employed as mercenaries.
2. Greece
The Cretan civilisation crumbled around 1200 BC. A new synthesis took place
after 700 BC. Greek speakers probably started migrating into Greece and
Anatolia as early as -2000 BC. They either caused or profited by the
crumbling of the previous civilisation. Greek finally emerged as the
predominant language.
India is another example of language and upper-class replacement.
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Aryans pushed the dark people of Dravid race to the south.
(And who did the Dravidians conquer and displace?)
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Answer :
The claim that the previous inhabitants of the northern part of the
peninsula were Dravidians is unsupported and most probably wrong.
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White Aryans enslaved the dark Dravidians, by imposing the caste system.
(British got this idea from their peers. The White skinned Europeans had
enslaved the dark skinned Africans. Hindus do not know of slavery. Ancient
Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese built monuments, palaces, walls and
pyramids with slavery. NOT THE HINDU.)
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Answer :
India currently has about 20 million children held in slavery. About one
third of the population is underdogs. All this is justified by the Hinduist
caste system.
The suggestion that Hinduism is a better embodiment of the western values of
freedom, democracy and human rights than the West itself is plainly absurd.
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Aryans established the superior white and inferior black school of thought.
(As a matter of fact, Aryan heroes are black. Ram, Krishna, Draupadi, Seeta,
Damayanti, Rukmini ... all are black. Dravidian Ravana, on the other hand,
the villian of Ramayan is fair!)
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Answer :
What is important is the dichotomy between :
- the upper-class Brahmanic system inherited by the Indic invaders,
- the popular forms of religion that are in continuity with what can be
archeologically retrieved from the Indus Civilisation.
The structure of religious activities in India bears the trace of a
clear-cut dichotomy between two populations : the Indic invaders and the
conquered autochthonous. These two forms of religious activities never
fused.
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Aryans then settled on the banks of river Sarasvati in 1500BC.
(Archeology has proved that Sarasvati had ceased to flow long before, at
least 400 years before 1500 BC.)
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Answer :
This does not seem to be a claim of the AIT nor to have whatever importance.
The earliest components of RgVeda were probably composed around -1500.
The narration of fights between Indic people and the Dasa is already
mythologized, so that we can assume that these fights happened much earlier
than -1500.
The towns of the Indus Civilisation are described as ruins inhabited by
ghosts by the RgVeda. This is coherent with the Indus civilisation receding
in the country-side around -1800 and the progressive immigration of Indic
speakers around that time.
Linguistic and archeological data make a clean historical scenario.
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Aryans brought the Proto Indo-European language with them from which
Sanskrit developed. The Hittite, Greek etc also developed from the Proto
Indo-European.
(Linguistic changes are more rapid in unsettled communities than in more
settled communities. Thus the language of the invading and unsettled Aryans
should have changed a lot from the IE; more than Hittite changed from IE.
But, Vedic is the least altered language. Thus the Aryans were certainly a
very much settled community of India, and not nomadic invaders as pictured
by AIT.) [3]
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Answer :
Indic invaders brought the Indic branch of lndo-European languages.
The claim that Vedic is the least altered language is absurd. Greek or
Baltic probably make a better candidate for this claim.
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In the following 1000 years, by the birth of Buddha, Aryans developed
Sanskrit language, invented writing script, created the 6 philosophies, 4
Veda in numerous sakhas or recensions, so many Upanishads, Sutras, Ramayan,
Mahabharat, Smrutis, some Puraans etc.
(That is faster than light! For comparison it took 1500 years to create the
Bible, which is 1/4th the size of Mahabharat. Obviously a lot more than a
1000 years had gone by to develop Veda, Upanishad, Ramayan, Mahabharat etc.)
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Answer :
Indian people have not invented writing script.
Most of what Indians have written is highly repetitive. So the sheer amount
of documents does not mean anything.
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Aryans renamed all the landscape formations in Sanskrit.
(So many provinces and rivers of the USA retain their Red-Indian names, even
after the European invasion has nearly wiped out the Red-Indian
civilization. Where are the pre-Aryan names?)
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Answer :
The word 'Indus' itself is not Indo-European.
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Aryans wrote tons of literature.
(Surprisingly, nowhere they mention their original land, or the invasion /
migration.)
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Answer :
Absentia is not proof.
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According to AIT, the people of the Indus Valley are not the ancestors of
the people that live in the Punjab, Sindh, Rajasthan and Gujrat today.
(Interstingly, skeletal remains found in the Harappan sites show the same
genetic attributes as that of people the of Punjab and Gujarat today.)
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Answer :
The AIT does not make that claim.
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AIT proposes: The Aryans and their gods arrived after the demise of Indus
civilization.
(Then why do the seals of Indus depict mother goddess, Pashupati,
Shiva-linga, Shaligram, fire altars, and swastik seals?)
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Answer :
This is the Indus component delivered by the autochthonous conquered people
to the present-day synthesis of India. It was not destroyed but subdued.
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AIT proposes: The Dravidians were supressed by the Aryans.
(Fact remains that all major Hindu revivers, definers and pillars are so
called Dravidians. Adi Shankaracharya, Madhavacharya, Ramanujam to name a
few.)
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Answer :
The AIT does not make that claim.
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According to AIT, the illiterate Aryans soon after the invasion, produced
the Vedic literature of high philosophical, and spiritual value. But the
literate, archeologically attested native culture left behind nothing but
some seals. This is a ridiculous proposition.
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Answer :
The Indic invaders were illiterate but they were not a cultural white page.
They were heirs to the PIE culture. And the native Indus people also had
their own culture.
It probably took about one millennium from -2000 to -1000 to create a new
cultural synthesis.
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Last but not the least, the mitochondrial DNA extracted from the bones of
Neanderthal people indicate that they are not related to modern Europeans or
any other living humans (Krings et al., 1997 , Ovchinnikov et al., 2000 ).
Thus the modern people of Europe all immigrated from elsewhere. Thus the
Aryan Invasion / Migration more likely happened not from West to East, but
from East to West, from India to the Europe!
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Answer :
Nice try or nice joke.
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'Arya' is a term similar in meaning to the Sanskrit word Sri. We could
equate it with the English word Sir. On the Aryan Race lines we can conclude
that, a race of men named 'sir' took over England in the Middle Ages and
dominated the natives, because most of the people in power in the country
were called sir. - David Frawley
Every Indian needs to be educated of the foul play in the Aryan theory. One
must have this background before one blindly accepts this idea, and tries to
divide the Hindu on the basis of the Aryan and Dravidian lines.
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Answer :
No comments
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