Re: Aryan invasion theory and race

Dear Koenraad,

I had written:

> > Wait a minute. Is this Dr. Michael H. Hart any representative of
> > a "trendy school of sociobiologists and evolutionary
> > psychologists", or is he merely a fringe racist scholar?
> > The second option seems to be true:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_H._Hart
> >
> > Why, Koenraad, do you cite *this* guy as a scholar who "gives
> > an explanation for [the] enigma [of language replacement in South
> > Asia]"? Is Hart's ascientific racist bias a good base for a
> > theory about language replacement in South Asia?
>
> I cite him because he does offer one answer to the question of how
> the Aryan "immigrants" could transform India so thoroughly, one
> that also takes care of explaining, at least on its own terms, an
> intellectual decline in Indian culture which some modern Indians,
> rightly or wrongly, believe in and bewail. That he has unpleasant
> political associations, which I hadn't looked up but which don't
> surprise me, need not disqualify him from scholarly debate.

I don't agree. Indeed, his pseudo-scientific racism *does* totally disqualify him from participating in scholarly debates. There is no place for such patently racist theories in the scholarly debate. We have a moral obligation to exclude racists of all sorts from participating in scholarly debates on prehistory, ancient history, ethnogenetical processes and so forth.

> And in this particular case: the more unsavoury, the better. It
> happens to fit the AIT-skeptical agenda to show that the AIT has
> been and still is associated with racism.

Your words are, once again, misleading. What you and a host of Hindutva-oriented Internet polemicists (only a handful of whom are tenured academics or, if you prefer, "recognized scholars") call "Aryan Migration Theory" is, as a matter of fact, a paradigm of South Asian pre-/proto-history accepted by, let us say, 90% of present-day scholars in that field. It currently still happens, like it has happened in a notorious past, that the latter's theoretical framework is being exploited and misused by crackpots, liars and dishonest people of all sorts to advocate the idea of a supposed "racial superiority of the Aryans" over the indigenous
"dark-skinned race" of South Asia which non-racist scholars, forming the greater part of today's scholarly community, have never defended or even suggested in their respective, often collective work on South Asian pre-/proto-history.

Of course, the Nazis did the same from the 1920s to the 1940s by identifying the "Teutonic race" as the "Aryan race" of Europe. They heavily misused the term "Aryan", which can only be referred to ancient Indo-Iranian ethnic groups and their respective languages, cultures and religions, and depicted what they called the "prehistoric Aryans" (who were actually the prehistoric Indo-European speakers) as a "race of conquerors" etc. etc. Does this imply that what you call the "Aryan Migration Theory" is associated with Nazism? (Of course, it isn't; nor is it associated with any form of racism as you suggest.)

> [E]ver since AIT proponents have tried to reduce AIT skepticism to
> a ploy of the evil demonic Hindu nationalists, AIT skeptics have
> insisted on the AIT's historical embeddedness in racial thinking.

This is a very comfortable characterization in consideration of their political goals (I am here speaking of the Hindutva-oriented, i.e. the overwhelming majority section of the "AIT-skeptic school", as you define it). They have always tried to depict mainstream scholars in South Asian pre-/proto-history as a band of racists. I myself, who have defended the said mainstream positions in many Internet discussion fora frequented by your "AIT-skeptic" Hindutva friends, have been repeatedly accused of being a racist just because I am a supporter of the thesis according to which the Indo-Aryan speakers were not native of South Asia, but immigrated there from more northerly locations (southern Central Asia and Afghanistan and, before that, the Central Asian steppes).

> [T]he de facto personal (as distinct from an intrinsic, logical)
> link between AIT and racialism just happens to be there.

But what do *you* think about this alleged ideological link?

> I am not saying anything original here: Marxists like Bruce Lincoln
> and a string of French authors have spent a lot of ink highlighting
> the political connections of IE scholars like Roger Pearson of Jean
> Haudry.

Yet such far-right scholars do not represent at all the intellectual positions of the greater part of IE scholars, nor those of the Vedic philologists and ancient Indian historians and archaeologists who are currently, in my opinion, the leading specialists in current attempts at partially reconstructing South Asia's deep past.

> In the case of India, I maintain that an "Aryan immigration theory"
> necessarily implies military conquest, that it necessarily comes
> down to an "Aryan invasion theory" even if the latter term is now
> politically unfashionable. Even emphatic immigrationists sometimes
> can't avoid conceding this in spite of themselves, e.g. Witzel's
> appraisal of the horse-drawn chariot as the Aryans' "Panzer".

You here misrepresent Witzel's words, which you and the Hindutva mob have cited endlessly on the Internet in the last ten years to suggest he thinks as a quasi-Nazi German militarist (which, I can assure you, he isn't). In fact, he wrote "tank", not "Panzer". Moreover, I won't repeat to you here what I have told you during debates we have had on other Lists, namely, that one thing is an "invasion" (involving an army, a planned political strategy, etc.), and another a "migration" (a more spontaneous and environment-determined historical phenomenon).

I wrote:

> > Why does Hart lump together such disparate "conquests" (as per
> > his own wording, which in certain cases is, however,
> > inappropriate) of non-IE-speaking peoples by IE-speaking ones
> > as the Greek takeover of Crete and the Aegean, the defeat and
> > absorption of the Etruscans by the Romans, the (partial)
> > absorption of the Elamite civilization by the Medes and Persians,
> > and the process of post-immigration elite dominance which caused
> > the spread of Indic languages over NW South Asia through language
> > replacement? These are non-comparable events, with some of them
> > pertaining to proto-history, and some others to the historical
> > period, by which time states (such as the Roman one) were already
> > in existence. The ones mentioned by Hart are, thus, totally
> > different processes.
>
> Why Hart does so, is a question for him, not me. But if I understand
> his position, the fact that these different instances of IE-ization
> are "totally different processes" is precisely the point: the one
> common factor of superior intelligence explains success in many
> different circumstances, against many different challenges. His
> point is that not circumstances but intelligence is the overriding
> factor in human success.

So let him think so, provided he does not demand to enter the scholarly debate with his ascientific racial theories. Thinking again of it, there was nothing "northern" -- viz., in Hart's theory, nothing associated with a "northern" higher I.Q. -- in the Romans who conquered Etruria more than one thousand years after they had left their supposed (by IE scholars) northern homeland, or in the Persians who conquered Elam about 1,500 years after they had left that supposed homeland, or in the Indo-Aryans who supposedly migrated into NW South Asia at least 500 years after they had left that supposed homeland. All these IE peoples had been "southerners" for centuries or even millennia when they "conquered" (to use Hart's militaristic terminology) the territories in question.

I wrote:

> > We cannot say which of the two concerned populations, the
> > immigrating IA speakers and the natives, were more "civilized".
>
> Any Harappa-like city networks in Bronze-Age Russia?

I have already told you the mainstream theory is that the immigrating IA speakers did not met the populations of the Mature Harappan civilization (c. 2600-1900 BCE), but their successors -- the tribes of the Late Harappan cultures -- instead.

To be continued (?).

Regards,
Francesco