Jump to content

Indigenous Aryanism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sbhushan (talk | contribs) at 15:10, 10 April 2007 (deleted California controversy section as Wikipedia is not tabloid publication. One controversy is not all political debate and the section was not NPOV.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The hypothesis of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are "indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent. The hypothesis is that the Vedic and pre-Vedic language evolved out of an earlier stage in situ, somewhere in Northern India. The "Indigenous Aryans" position may entail an Indian origin of Indo-European languages,[1] and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "Out of India" origin of the Indo-European language family, a theory which has virtually no support in mainstream scholarship. This contrasts with the mainstream model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India.

(Witzel 2006, pp. 217) identifies three major types of revisionist scenario:

  1. a "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the Punjab in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda;
  2. the "out of India" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland;
  3. the position that all the world's languages and civilizations derive from India, represented e.g. by David Frawley or Graham Hancock

Historiographical Context

Indigenous Aryans is usually taken to imply that the people of the Harappan civilization were linguistically Indo-Aryans.[1] In any Indigenous Aryan scenario, speakers of Iranian languages must have left India at some point prior to the 10th century BC, when first mention of Iranian peoples is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the Yaz culture which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.[2]

Proponents of indigenous Aryan scenarios typically base their understanding on interpretations of the Rigveda, the oldest surviving Indo-Aryan text, which they date to the 3rd millennium BC (in some cases much earlier), in particular based on arguments in involving the Sarasvati River, and sometimes archaeoastronomy.[3]

Pseudoscience and Postmodernism

Further information: Hindutva and Integral humanism

(Nanda 2003) argues that the pseudoscience at the core of Hindu nationalism was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science" (Sokal 2006, pp. 32). (Nanda 2003, pp. 72) explains how this relativization of "science" was employed by Hindutva ideologues during the 1998 to 2004 reign of the BJP:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honoric of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.

Criticism of the irrationality of such "Vedic science" is brushed aside by the notion that

The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since ‘Modern Science’ arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion.(Mukhyananda 1997, pp. 94)

(Witzel 2006, pp. 204) traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always be "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakasha.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b Bryant, Edwin (2001). "The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate". Oxford University Press: 6. ISBN 0195137779. It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. ^ See, e.g., Roman Ghirshman, L'Iran et la migration des Indo-aryens et des Iraniens (Leiden 1977). Cited by Carl .C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Archeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians, in Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (Routledge 2005), p.162.
  3. ^ B.B. Lal (07 January 2002). "The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture: Some Thoughts". Delhi: Indian Council for Historical Research. The shift of the "original homeland" from Sogdiana to a few hundred miles to the south - i.e. to the region now comprising eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India should not upset anyone, since the archaeological-cum-literary evidence from this area is more positive than that from Sogdiana. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

Literature

  • Template:Harvard reference
  • Bryant, Edwin, The indigenous Aryan debate, diss. Columbia University (1997). (abstract)
  • Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India Quest Books (IL) (October, 1995) ISBN 0-8356-0720-8
  • Kazanas, Nicholas (2001b). "Indigenous Indoaryans and the Rgveda". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 29: 257–93. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)
  • D. N. Jha, Against Communalising History, Social Scientist (1998).
  • S. Guha, Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology, and the Indus Civilization, Modern Asian Studies 39.2, Cambridge University Press (2005), 399-426.
  • Lal, B. B., The Sarasvati flows on: The continuity of Indian culture, Aryan Books International (2002), ISBN 8173052026.
  • Mallory, JP. 1998. "A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia". In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Ed. Mair. Washingion DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
  • Mukhyananda (1997), Vedanta: In the context of modern science : a comparative study, ASIN: B0000CPAAF {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help)
  • Nanda, Meera (2003), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0813533589
  • Nanda, Meera (January - March, 2005). "Response to my critics" (PDF). Social Epistemology (1). {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Text "pages 147-191" ignored (help); Unknown parameter |Volume= ignored (|volume= suggested) (help)
  • Template:Harvard reference
  • N. S. Rajaram, The politics of history : Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) ISBN 81-85990-28-X.
  • Talageri, S. G., The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0 [1]
  • Sokal, Alan (2006), Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers? in Fagan, Garrett (Ed.) (2006), Archaeolological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, Routledge, ISBN 0415305926
  • Stephanie Jamison, Review of Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. (2005), Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 34 (2006) copy courtesy of editor of JIES
  • Witzel, Michael (2006), Rama's realm: Indocentric rewritings of early South Asian History, in Fagan, Garrett (Ed.) (2006), Archaeolological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, Routledge, ISBN 0415305926
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Indigenous_Aryanism&oldid=121689530"