Scholarship or prejudice?
By David Frawley
http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/op/stories/2003030400010200.htm
India
does not need people like Witzel to save its soul, any more than it needs
Christian missionaries to do so. It doesn't need them to teach it what dharma,
truth or civilisation really are. Similarly, the world of Vedic scholarship does
not require them to explain the secrets of the Vedas, which clearly they don't
even suspect, much less know.
MICHAEL
WITZEL predictably attacks anyone who suggests any greatness for Vedic culture
or any connection between it and the Harappan civilisation. The number of such
Vedic scholars East and West that he has made personal diatribes against is now
over a dozen, though to his lament, he has still not succeeded in reducing their
numbers or weakening the appeal of their ideas.
Strange
views
Yet
Witzel's own views, which he seldom highlights, are much stranger. He has not
only proposed an Aryan invasion/migration into ancient India in the post-Harappan
era (after 1500 BCE) through the Panjab going east, he has similarly detailed a
Dravidian invasion/migration of India about the same time through Sind but going
south. Yet he is fair in his judgment of the Aryans and Dravidians, he regards
both peoples as equally primitive and as not having even developed agriculture
much less any civilisation of their own.
He has
stated that both Vasishta and Agastya, the two greatest Vedic sages of north and
south India, were in fact Iranians. Now he is also proposing that Buddha, called
Shakyamuni, was a descendant of recent Shaka (Scythian) migrants to Bihar from
Iran around 600 BCE and suggests that Buddhism itself might even be an Iranian
heresy, not anything really Indian. Influenced by the story of how Biblical
Moses led the Jews out of Egypt into Israel, Witzel has written that Vasishta
brought King Bharata (who gave his name to the land of India) out of Eastern
Iran into India! Of course, while the Bible remembers such an exodus no such
Vedic or Puranic records exist, but that does not slow him down.
Instead
of either the Aryans or Dravidians as the authors of the great Harappan culture
Witzel has proposed the Mundas or aborigines. While he claims I have offended
the Mundas and other aboriginals for questioning their ability to create the
Harappan civilisation, he doesn't seem to find any problem in offending both the
Aryans and the Dravidians by finding them both quite incapable of its creation
(in spite of their literary and historical records of great antiquity for which
the Mundas have nothing comparable). Yet he also suggests that the Mundas
themselves could just as well be migrants into the region from the southeast,
completing his scenario that people and culture must come to India from the
outside, regardless of how many peoples and cultures India is able to produce.
Such
views are much stranger than suggesting that the Vedic literature, the largest
remaining literature of the ancient world, may actually be related to the
Harappan/Sarasvati civilisation, the largest urban civilisation of the ancient
world, particularly since both reflect the same geographical region. Such
scholars ignore the great Sarasvati river and its many archaeological sites that
number in the hundreds. They would place the original Vedic Sarasvati river in
Afghanistan and have the Vedic Aryans strangely ascribe this name of their
holiest river to a dried up stream in India on which Harappan culture had
coincidently once been centred, as if the Vedic people had some intuition of the
river's former greatness long before they arrived! They would equate the
sophisticated and advanced Vedic literature with the compositions of uncivilised,
primitive nomadic tribes, though it has managed to leave its mark on the culture
of the entire subcontinent, and no other earlier literature has survived.
When I
recently suggested in an article about the ecology of ancient India (which
doesn't even mention his name), that India provided the ideal subtropical river
system for developing civilisation, Witzel now adds that India is also an
unsuitable place to live, quoting how people from the Iranians to the Moguls
found the climate too hot for them to stay. I don't know if he ever counted the
number of people able to live on these hot north Indian rivers compared to the
deserts of Iran and Central Asia. Even in Harappan and post-Harappan times,
North India was densely populated and could easily support a great civilisation
and maintain its continuity through the ages.
Battle
for the soul of India
Witzel's
background is purely as a linguist. He does not claim a deeper study of Indian
philosophy, yoga, or spirituality, for which he has never expressed any regard.
So when he speaks now of the soul of India one has to wonder what he is talking
about. Nor has he ever written about Indian culture or Bharatiya samskriti
in a positive light or as a real entity in its own right.
His
`love' for India is so well known to the Indian community in the U.S. that there
is hardly an internet discussion list maintained by them where his rigid
anti-Hindu and anti-India views have not been noted. Witzel's name is commonly
mentioned along with Dan Burton and other India-bashers. A simple search on the
Internet will reveal numerous contemptuous remarks that Witzel makes against
Indians, Hindus, India and the Indian government. His open support for the
Marxist historians of India is also well known. Many people have started seeing
through his misrepresentations, abuse and vitriol, disguised as `scholarship.'
The reader may himself refer to reviews of his writings at http://www.bharatvani.org/indology.html,
including articles that question Witzel's knowledge of the Sanskrit language.
Odd
endeavour
Witzel
has even recently done some articles on the Vedic religion, as he claims, to
show what it really was and to counter the many distortions about it that exist
today (probably made by Hindus!). This is a rather odd endeavour for someone who
neither believes in nor practises the Vedic religion, nor has ever shown any
respect for its great ancient or modern teachers, much less sought to be a
disciple in any Vedic tradition or lineage. It reminds one of the atheists on
temple boards that have occurred in Kerala.
Yet for
perhaps the first time, Witzel suggests in his latest response that he really
honours the great civilisation of India after all, but leaves us guessing in
exactly what way. Perhaps he hasn't quite figured it out yet. In any case he has
not referred to which of his papers actually say this.
No, India
does not need people like Witzel to save its soul, any more than it needs
Christian missionaries to do so. It doesn't need them to teach it what dharma,
truth or civilisation really are. Similarly, the world of Vedic scholarship does
not require them to explain the secrets of the Vedas, which clearly they don't
even suspect, much less know. In fact if Witzel is truly interested in real
spirituality, which is the true soul of India and of the Vedas, India can
provide him with quite enough teachers and teachings to keep him quiet for a
long time.
DAVID
FRAWLEY
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