Re: Hindu noise-makers, Elst and OIT -- a review

At 6:48:15 PM on Saturday, October 19, 2013,
koenraad.elst@... wrote:

> The whole point of this discussion, as far as I am
> concerned, is to finally get some people on both sides to
> really discuss the contentious issues, those that may make
> a difference. By contrast, so far the debate has been
> cloud by all sorts of diversions. In the present case,
> questions of the degree of Sanskit knowledge in
> Talageri's, Fournet's and Witzel's case is one such
> diversion. I don't care if anyone has the right background
> or not. Even village bumpkins can say the truth once in a
> while, and even qualified people may be wrong -- that is
> why they are challenged regularly by other qualified
> people.

This truism is just a slightly more sophisticated version of
‘They laughed at <famous name> and <other famous name>, who
were later vindicated’. No one knows just how IE got to
India, but that it *did* get into India from outside is not
a contentious issue in the scholarly sense. There is of
course a host of ideologues who deny the fact, but they
aren’t doing scholarship. There are also a few fringe
iconoclasts with some scholarly credentials; on this issue I
count at least two here. Their existence does not, however,
make the issue genuinely contentious.

> Such questions are typical of both academics and Hindus:
> instead of dealing with the truth of the matter, they deal
> with the Adhikara ("entitledness") of the debaters
> concerned. Being of the anti-authoritarian generation
> (thrown out of a secondary school for growing my hair), I
> really don't care for this entitledness.

Irrelevant. I’m of the same generation as the German 68ers
-- a month younger than Joschka Fischer, in fact -- and I’ve
always gone my own way. This has not kept me from
recognizing that in any given area some people are better
qualified and more knowledgeable than others.

Brian