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Scientific Racism

Western Romantic Fantasy?

Charles Kingsley (1819 – 75) displayed a marked Anglo-Saxon racism was blended into his “defense of Christianity, home, family, womanhood, monarch, and empire.” 

In his lecture in Cambridge in 1864 Kingsley argued that the Teutonic race was fitted by God to be the ruling race of the world, thus pre-empting the Nazi philosophy by several decades. The welfare of the Teutonic race was supposed to be the welfare of the world. It was the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic Christians to establish world peace, order and morality in the world, exterminating, if necessary, the inferior races.  He also wrote: ‘the welfare of the white race is the welfare of the world and “degenerate races” [non-whites] were better off dead’.

At the end of her concise discourse on The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800 – 1960, Nancy Stepan argues that the long-lasting tradition of scientific racism from the early 19^th century until the end of the Second World War if not later “testifies to the deep psychological need Western Europeans, scientists among them, seem to have felt to divide and rank human groups, and to measure them negatively against an idealized, romanticized picture of themselves.” 

(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti  p. 78 - 85 and The roots of racism. Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

This was one of the main ideological weapon in support of the White colonial domination of the world, the main way of colonizing the mind of the ruled. 

The British philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was convinced that  

"there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white." 

Robert Knox (1791-1862) anatomist, whose writings can still shock by the ferocity and directness of their racist assertions, was in his day a pivotal figure of British science. He stated his conviction that "in human history race is everything." As far as the black men are concerned, they suffer from " a physical and consequently, a psychological inferiority." They should also know their place: "since the earliest times.. the dark races have been the slaves of their fairer brethren. In some case, as in Tasmania, it is their destiny to be cleared out by the Anglo-Saxon. Australia, is too large, but by shooting the natives as freely as we do crows in other countries, the population must become thin and scarce in time.." The Saxon race, by which he means the Europeans and the White Americans, "hopes ultimately to be the masters of the world." 

Charles Kingsley (1819-75) Clergyman, teacher, writer and naturalist, the Christian socialist. There was " a marked Anglo-Saxon racism" was blended into his "defense of Christianity, home, family, womanhood, monarchy, and empire." In his lecture in Cambridge in 1864 Kingsley argued that the Teutonic race was fitted by God to be the ruling race of the world, thus pre-empting the Nazi philosophy by several decades. It was the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic Christians to establish world peace, order and morality in the world, exterminating, if necessary, the inferior races. 

(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti p. 66-85).

For Christian Europe, long uncomfortable with what it thought to be a Hebrew ancestry, was eager to find for itself an identity distinct from the Jewish; the sudden appearance of the Aryan race out of the misty plateaus of Central Asia was seen as god-send, especially in the strongly anti-Semitic atmosphere of the 19th century. Ernest Renan (1823-1892) the French historian of religion, wrote in 1860: " The Semites are incapable of doing that which is essential. Let us remain Germans and Celts; let us keep our 'eternal gospel,' Christianity....(After) the Semitic race declined, the Aryan race alone was left to lead the march of human destiny." 

(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 29-30). 

Amaury de Riencourt (1918 - ) was born in Orleans, France. He received his B.A. from the Sorbonne and his M.A. from the University of Algiers. He is author of several books including The American empire and The Soul of India.

He writes that philosophers Hegel and Schelling and historians such as Schlegel and Herder acclaimed the discovery of India as the Home of Universal Religion…of all literature and philosophy invited opposition from the missionaries. 

Indians were allowed to possess the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Aryans, but the Aryans themselves were made to migrate, this time from Europe to India, as conquerors.  

The 19^th century European scholars tried to find a home for the Aryan race outside India. After considerable speculation they preferred Central Asia for the Aryan Hittites as well as the Vedic Aryans of India. After the discovery of Harappa, Mohenjodaro and other sites of the Indus Valley Civilization in the twenties of this century the Aryans were made the conquerors of Indus cities. 

This theory of Aryan invasion and expulsion of the Indus people to the south had its impact in the political field giving rise to North-South conflict in India. The recent excavations by Dales (1965, 1982, 1984) at Harappa, Mohenja-daro, the two major cities of the Indus Civilization, have revealed that there was no invasion by foreigners and the so-called massacre of the people of Mohenja-daro by the invading foreigners was purely imaginary. 

(source: The Lost City of Dvaraka - S. R. Rao p. 2). 

Max Muller was responsible for giving the word "Aryan" a racial meaning. Yet nothing resembling a racial definition is in the original Sanskrit. Like Richard Burton (and Lawrence of Arabia in the next century). Muller was an agent of the British government. He was paid to advance its colonial interests. Muller was told that the East India Company would be prepared to fund him to the tune of one lakh rupees - about 10,000 pounds, then an enormous sum - to translate the Rg Veda in a way that would destroy the belief of newly English educated Hindus in their ancient scriptures. For an impoverished foreign scholar who had already been working on the Rg Veda for several years, this was a godsend. This is no way to diminish his contribution. 

Muller saw his scholarly work as part of a mission to convert India to Christianity. When writing to his wife in 1866 about his translation of the Rg Veda, he observed:

"This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years." 

(source: The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, edited by his wife. Longmans, London, 1902, Volume I, p. 328) Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization - By N. S. Rajaram & David Frawley p. 10). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.

Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.

Schlegel became an anthropologist and boldly portrayed columns of masterful men marching down from the roof of the world, founding empires and civilizing the west. The term Aryan reputedly gained widespread authority with support of Schlegel in 1819. Further more, The idea of an Egyptian and/or Phoenician influence on ancient Greece was "incompatible with the paradigms of race and progress of the early 19th century. 

(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti p. 70).

Dilip K. Chakrabarti states: 

"The impact of the Aryan image was manifold and has been partly traced by Joan Leopold (1974). In Max Muller's parlance "a native writer" exclaimed in Indian Mirror, Calcutta, of 20 September, 1874: 

"we were niggers at one time. We now become brethen."  

On the British side, it was like going back after many centuries to claim their share in the long-lost inheritance, as it were, with the added task of re-educating the now-degenerate brothers or cousins or, in a different and certainly more widely acceptable perspective, the British appeared at the end of a long line of invaders of the land, beginning with the Aryans."

Anwar Shaikh has commented: 

"The Europeans did agree to the intellectual, rational and cultural splendor of the Rgveda, a product of the Aryan mind but refused to accept that the Aryans were Indians. It was a device to deny the beneficence which India had bestowed on the European civilization and many other cultures. The inferiority-complex which the Indians had come to inherit generation after generation, exerted its evil influence once again; to overcome their psychological compulsions, they felt elated when they heard the news that they were racially as good as the Europeans because the Aryans were Europeans who invaded India. India is the home of the Aryans who civilized the West: the migration is from India to Europe, and many eastern countries, and not the other way round. Once we know this truth, we realize that wherever the Indians (Aryans) want, they took with them the Rgveda, which influenced the new lands of the Aryan settlements. "

(source: The Wonders of Rgveda: Who were the Aryans? - By Anwar Shaikh).

Cinderella of the Ancient World

History begins at Sumer was the title of S. N. Kramer's major work (1965) which reflects the prevalent view fostered by the West, that civilization – life in cities – first began in Mesopotamia. Over three decades later in BBC's superb TV series LEGACY [1997] Michael Wood put forward the same idea: the first city in the world was Eridu in Sumer. As though the Harappa Culture had not happened! No wonder Geoffrey Bibby in his Looking for Dilmun described the Indus Valley civilization as "the Cinderella of the ancient world".

(source: Cinderella of the Ancient World - By Pradip Bhattacharya International HRD Fellow (Manchester) Author of the entry on the Indus Civilization in the Dravidian Encyclopaedia August 12, 200. groups.yahoo.com).

The Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon 

And few other spurious "truths" have been so insidious -- or so destructive. Responsible for subjugation of millions of Indians under British rule, Aryan Race Theory continued its wretched legacy well into the twentieth century, mutating into the horrific pseudo-science that rationalized Hitler's Final Solution, and lingering in the bloody ethnic convulsions of modern Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and other troubled areas of the post-colonial world.

Far from being merely an academic exercise, though, Aryan Race Theory is in fact the brainchild of Christian evangelist-scholars, fashioned and tempered in the nineteenth century as a weapon for European expansionism in India. Promulgated to generations of Indian children in British-created schools, it created, like so many other Western creeds and dogmas, social divisions where none had hitherto existed, resulting in jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion among communities where peaceful coexistence had been the norm. This theory, which posits the invasion of ancient India by a white-skinned race (the "Aryans") who conquer an indigenous, dark-skinned population, therefore worked ingeniously with the British divide-and-conquer strategy for rule in India. The theory and its variants continue to be used today by the Vatican and other Christian enterprises in their campaign to "harvest" tribals and other vulnerable communities of Hindus. For these spiritual imperialists, spurious racial theories still hold their divide-and-conquer appeal.

Racial theories and pseudo-science continue to be vigorously employed today by the Vatican and other Western evangelist enterprises in their ongoing campaign to harvest souls for Christianity. But it is not only in the remote corners of the Third World where the unexamined "truths" of Max Muller and his missionary-scholar contemporaries are still used as weapons of propaganda.

(source: The Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon - By Aravindan Neelakandan. S).

Role in Imperialism and Nazism 

The theory that the original Aryans were northern Europeans who had migrated into India was used by some British imperialists as an ideological justification for British control of India, on the grounds that the founders of Indian culture were of the same race as the Anglo-Saxon invaders who established the British Raj.

The most notorious appropriation of the Nordic theory was that of the Nazis who adopted the swastika design from Indian culture as an "Aryan" badge. The Nazi race-theorist Alfred Rosenberg argued in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) that the Vedas were written by a superior Nordic master race who had invaded and occupied India in ancient times. These people had later become corrupted because they had lost contact with their "racial soul" due to their involvement with subordinated non-Aryans. For the Nazis, the Aryan invasion of India served as an allegory of the dangers of racial mixing. This argument was later repeated by other white supremacists such as the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke 

After Indian independence, Socialist and Marxist accounts of history proliferated in Indian universities. Opponents of the invasion theory contend that Marxists promoted the theory because its model of invasion and subordination corresponded to Marxist concepts of class struggle and ideology. Some modern opponents of the Aryan-Vedic continuity in India, like Romila Thapar, are Marxist

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_invasion_theory).

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Dr. David Gray, Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Center for the Study of Cultures, has taught courses on Asian religions at Rice, Columbia, and Princeton universities has written:

"The Aryan Invasion theory was first propounded when linguistic similarities between Sanskrit and the major European languages were discovered by European scholars during the colonial era. In an atmosphere of raging Eurocentricism, it was inevitable that any explanation of this seemingly inexplicable discovery would taken on racial and ideological overtones, 

Colonial expositions of the Aryan Invasion Theory

British intellectuals were particularly nonplussed by this apparent link between the languages of the conquerors and the conquered. In the earliest phases of British rule in India, the East India Company proceeded largely unconsciously - without moral dilemmas and without overt recourse to ideological or racial superiority. But as the rule of the East India Company expanded, and battles became more hard fought and the resistance to British occupation in India grew, the ideology of European racial superiority became almost essential in justifying British presence in India - not only to assuage British conscience, but also to convince the Indian people that the British were not mere colonial conquerors but a superior race on a noble civilizational mission.

Uniquely Indian Aspects of Vedic Literature

The grammar of Sanskrit and it's highly systematized alphabet also had little to do with any "Aryan" invasion.  Sanskrit is a highly structured and methodical language, optimized for engaging in rational debates and expressing mathematical formulas. And it's skillfully organized alphabet bears little resemblance to the rather random and arbitrary alphabet of it's European cousins.  Much of it's vocabulary and syntax developed long after any supposed  invasion, and although the structure of the South Indian languages may differ from those of the North, the majority of India's languages (both Northern and Southern) share a large base of a common Sanskrit-derived vocabulary. It is therefore ironic how much is made of the "Indo-European" classification.

(source: The Aryan Invasion: theories, counter-theories and historical significance - By David Grey).

Western opponents cry,  “Foul play – Hindu Nationalism/Saffronization.”  
Into India, Out from India, or Both? 

“Aryan Comings and Goings” is now the biggest football game in Indology town. Scholars line up on both sides of the divide: Aryans into India or Aryans out. Western Indologists predominantly defend the “into-India” goal. Some Indian Indologists vehemently defend the “out-from-India” goal. Most Indian scholars, however, just want to shut down the West’s dominance of the tourney – or at least establish a level playing field.  

Now the Indian scholars are hungry for an upset – they want to take possession of the game. After all, most popular books on India written for educated people imply that blue-eyed warriors from near Europe conquered the South Asian region and then mixed with the backward natives to create the Vedic tradition and modern India.   

Attempts by Indian scholars to establish the so-called indigenous-Aryan paradigm set off a mighty uproar in Western arenas. 

Immediately the Western opponents cry, “Foul play – nationalism.” 

Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

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The Western titans shoot back that it is highly probable, if not almost certain, that the Aryans were coming in – even if we do not know when, how or why. Any other view, they feel, has to reek of contemporary South Asian nationalism, and politics. Most of the Indian scholars simply feel that there is no evidence that the Indo-Aryans pushed their way into the subcontinent from outside.  

Understandably, they wonder why they should uncritically inherit a version of their remote antiquity assembled for them by their former colonial lords. They want to erect ac post-colonial era of Indian scholarship, unencumbered by excess baggage from the British Raj. Hence, Indian brains feel the need to reclaim their intellectual sovereignty, so to speak.  

Attempts by Indian scholars to establish the so-called indigenous-Aryan paradigm set off a mighty uproar in Western arenas. Immediately the Western opponents cry, “Foul play – nationalism.” Unfortunately, sometimes even moderate attempts just to question the incumbent Aryan immigration model – not replace it – risk swift chastisement.  

Western Indologists bristle at the thought that their Indian counterparts may see them as neo-colonists. Nevertheless, decreasing numbers of Western scholars are willing to deny that what we now call India’s ancient history was largely the product of the 19^th century climate of European politics and religion. 

The British regime had a huge stake in the Aryan notion. By asserting that the Ancient Aryans intruded into India from Europe or nearby, the British arrival could be seen as the modern reenactment of an ancient drama. Instead of colonialism, Indians were witnessing the natural return of long-lost Aryan brothers. Indologists have tacitly clung to the Aryan-entrace idea in the same way biologist seem to hold tight to Darwinism.    

(source: Searching for Vedic India – By Devamrita Swami  p. 60 – 64). Refer to Quotes from The American Taliban and Christian Fundamentalists to Push Bible as Classroom "Knowledge" and Bush, the Neocons and Evangelical Christian Fiction: America "Left Behind" - By Hugh Urban and The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy - publiceye.org).

Refer to Michael Witzel and pals to target BBC next after CA textbook debacle and Aryan Invasion Theory and Christian Supremacism in Academia - By Arvind Kumar and Witzel's vanishing ocean and Scholarship of Equine Posteriors– Har(vard)appa Style – By Narayanan Komerath.

Mohenjo Daro – An Ancient Feat of Civil Engineering

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about 4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary, baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks. The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built with well-engineered drainage channels.

A Computer-generated reconstruction has brought a small area of Mohenjodaro back to life. 
(source: Lost Civilizations - By Austen Atkinson p. 179 - 188).

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment.

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

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Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40 feet The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment. We need to address the following question to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro?

2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when 99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labelling pottery shards and other artefacts. 

We have been and are being overly indulgent with our "soft sciences" regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers?

Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

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These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labeling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and are being overly indulgent with our "soft sciences" regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers? Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilization that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries. 

(source: Mohenjo Daro – Civil Engineering).

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No sense of History or Colonial theology?

The idea that Indians have no sense of history is a European conceit not any Indian view'. 

It was Karl Marx, not any ancient Indian sage who insisted that India had no history, and what is called history is simply a record of successive intruders. This has now become the central dogma of the Marxist school as indeed it has for the inheritors of the Eurocentric colonial thinking like Michael Witzel. This is what brings together the Indian Marxists and some Western Indologists on the issue of the Aryan invasion (or migration).

Setting aside such absurdities, what is really at issue is the teaching of history and creating suitable methodology for the study of ancient India. The Vedas are part of Indian history and this history cannot be based on wild speculation in the name of cosmology or twisted in response to cries of ‘saffronization' The last few decades have thrown up new data from diverse sources that pose a major challenge to historians and old theories. In order to preserve historical methods that some scholars are comfortable with, there are continuing attempts to negate data that contradict existing theories; Michael Witzel, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib are among prime exponents of such negationism.

(source: Indology: Skeletons in the closet - By N S Rajaram - hvk.org). Also refer to Zydenbos vs. Rajaram: a Case Study in Aryan Invasion Polemic - By Koenraad Elst). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel

Michel Danino (1956 - ) Born in 1956 at Honfleur (France) into a Jewish family recently emigrated from Morocco, from the age of fifteen Michel Danino was drawn to India. he is the convener of the International Forum for India's Heritage says:

"Missionaries and others who have recourse to such perverse arguments really belong to the colonial dark ages -- for massive evidence from archaeology, anthropology and other sciences, piling up in recent decades, has thoroughly disproved the theory of an Aryan invasion of India. It simply never took place, nor was there ever any Aryan race or any Dravidian race."

" It is time these crude and unscientific distortions of India's past are laid to rest forever; they have done enough harm to the Indian people as it is. Do we really have to blindly perpetuate colonial myths in this 'scientific era'? "

(source: Divide and Convert; Divide and Rule - By Michel Danino rediff.com).  

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Indology and Racism – Fabrication of the narrative of Aryan invasion of the 2^nd millennium BC. 
The Hegemonic Circle - Defenders of the invasion theory hits out at critics 

All evidence we have goes against it: There is biological continuity in the skeletal record for 4500-800 BC; the archaeological record has been seen to belong to the same cultural tradition from 7000 BC to historical times; the literary texts know of no other geography but that of India; and so on.

So what should we do if some textbooks continue to repeat this fabrication?

It is bad enough if a fabrication – a story – is palmed off as the truth, but what if the fabrication is driven not just by poor logic but by racism?

Ten years ago, the distinguished British anthropologist, Edmund Leach (1910–1989) wrote a famous essay on this problem titled “Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia”. Published in a book called Culture Through Time (edited by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), this essay exposed the racist basis of the 19^th century construction of Indian prehistory and, perhaps more important to us, it showed how racism persists in the academic approach to the study of India. The implication of Leach’s charge is that many of the assumptions at the basis of the academic study of Indian social organization, language development, and evolution of religion are simply wrong! Here are some excerpts from this essay:

“ Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?….Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?…

Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population!

The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework…Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan Invasion…QED.

The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but morally corrupt) kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasion of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization need a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial expansion.

The Hegemonic Circle

One example of this phenomenon is the interesting strategy devised by the defenders of the invasion theory to beat back criticism. They say: The critics are mainly Hindu nationalists motivated by political consideration.  

One example of this phenomenon is the interesting strategy devised by the defenders of the invasion theory to beat back criticism. They say: The critics are mainly Hindu nationalists motivated by political consideration. The invasion/migration theory has been criticized by scholars from all parts of the world, working in different fields of Indic Studies. Edmund Leach was not a Hindu nationalist. Neither are Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein.

Watch video - The Myth of Aryan invasion theory - Part I and Part II and Part III and Myth of Aryan Dravidian Divide and Dwaraka - A Lost City of Lord Sri Krishna. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

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This is nonsense. The invasion/migration theory has been criticized by scholars from all parts of the world, working in different fields of Indic Studies. Edmund Leach was not a Hindu nationalist. Neither are Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, perhaps the most modern scholars of Indian prehistory, who write in a recent essay:

“The South Asian archaeological record reviewed here does not support…any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis….

Another archaeologist, Mark Kenoyer, has this to say in his recent book Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization:

“There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historical period around 600 BC.”

Those within the hegemonic circles are rendered blind to facts that are inconvenient.

(source: Edmund Leach on Racism & Indology - By S Kak and The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak  p. 23 - 27).

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Now, Imagining Europeans in China

The recent enthusiastic quest for Celtic and other Western Indo-European people and cultural influences in northwest China strongly echoes earlier European fascination with the dissemination of supposedly "Aryan" culture and ethics in India and Europe. But more generally the explosion of interest in the attempt to make big history--evidence for cultural and genetic connections between "West" and "East" how scholarly work gets distorted by racial myths and assumptions about essentialized identities. 

"The desolate wastes of the Takla Makan Desert, at the heart  of central Asia, are haunted by an ancient mystery. It was here, long ago, that East and West--two of the greatest  civilizations on earth--made imperceptible contact.  And here the faint traces of ancient life have long pressed a deep and vexing enigma. Did the civilization of ancient China arise in isolation? Or was there an unremembered link with the cultures of the West?"

Thus begins the NOVA/WGBH documentary The Mysterious Mummies of China. This film purports to prove that that the people who developed the oasis civilizations of northwest China were an "ethnically European people" who were related to Celts and Germans, and who "breached China's fabled isolation 1000 years earlier than previously thought." But it does this by sleight of hand, through insinuation and conflation and denial of the richness of the cultural and historical facts.

(source: Hidden Discourses of Race: Imagining Europeans in China - By Nathan Light).

Also refer to Aryans: Culture Bearers to China - New Evidence Of Ancient European Migration to the Orient - by Mark Deavin.

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Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI

Former director-general of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)  B.B. Lal on Saturday dubbed the hypothesis of “Aryan invasion of India” a myth. He alleged that it was still accepted for reasons other than historical.

“The theory that there was an Aryan invasion of India is completely wrong,” Lal stressed in a seminar in New Delhi and alleged that political reasons were behind its being in the textbooks.

The dating of the Vedas to 1200 BC by Max Muller was ad hoc and even he confessed it to his colleagues, Lal claimed and argued that the Rig Veda could not be later than 2000 BC. He also discounted the discovery of skeletons at Mohenjodaro site, the basis for hypothesising an invasion and said, “the hard fact is that these came from various levels, some from the middle and some from the late, and some were found in deposits after the site was abandoned”. There were no remains of weapons and material culture of the invaders at the site, the former director-general said.

He also came down on those historians who assert that the 'Dravidians' are descendants of Harappans who dispersed after the 'Aryan invasion'. None of the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala has any Harappan sites, but sites of Neolithic culture, Lal said. “Do the proponents of this theory expect us to believe that urban Harappans, on being sent away to south India, shed overnight their urban characteristics and took to a stone age way of living?" asks Lal.

(source: Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI - indianexpress.com).  

B B (Braj Basi) Lal (1921- ) On joining the Archaeological Survey in January 1946, he held charge of the Excavations Branch and participated with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavations at Harappa, now in Pakistan. In 1951 he was deputed for advanced studies at the Institute of Archaeology, London. In 1961, under a UNESCO project, he conducted excavations in Nubia, Egypt, and brought to light valuable evidence relating to prehistoric and proto historic periods of that country.

He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972. He writes:

Speaking about the River Saraswati, he writes:

"Western linguists and historians and their, more vociferous, Indian counterparts claim that the Rigvedic Sarasvati was the Helmand of Afghanistan. The Rigvedic Saraswati, according to what is stated in the Rig Veda (RV. 10. 75. 5) itself lay between the Yamuna on the one hand and the Sutlej on the other. These two rivers do not exist in Afghanistan.

(source:  The Saraswati Flows on: The Continuity of Indian Culture - By B. B. Lal. p. Chapter V p. 136).

Lal is critical of ‘‘Western scholars and their Indian followers’’ for not accepting the unity between the Indus Valley and Vedic Civilizations.

‘‘Most likely, the authors of the Indus valley civilization were the Sanskrit-speaking Vedic Aryans,’’ Lal asserted. Lal invoked the Rig Veda to prove his thesis. “To say the Vedic people were nomads is either ignorance or due to a willful twisting of facts,” he alleged.

(source: Times of India 12/26/02). 

He has dubbed the hypothesis of “Aryan invasion of India” a myth. He alleged that it was still accepted for reasons other than historical.

“The theory that there was an Aryan invasion of India is completely wrong,” Lal stressed in a seminar in New Delhi and alleged that political reasons were behind its being in the textbooks. “Do the proponents of this theory expect us to believe that urban Harappans, on being sent away to south India, shed overnight their urban characteristics and took to a stone age way of living?" asks Lal.

(source: Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI - indianexpress.com).

Even as political parties debate whether India is "shining," a momentous-though unreported- international academic consensus has established that there was no Aryan invasion of India. This intellectual breakthrough has staggering implications for us as a nation. Not only has a colonial falsehood been overturned, but the origins of a corrosive divide in our political, cultural and emotional life stand exposed.  

Hopefully, our Leftist (read anti-Hindu) historians will accept the truth and help in re-writing true history for new generations, so they may enjoy legitimate pride in their heritage. The Aryan invasion theory (modified to Aryan migration theory) did grave damage to the Hindu psyche and to national unity.  

As Hindus are both the native and the majority community of India, this colonial canard wrought terrible havoc upon the nation. Its foremost manifestation was the North-South divide, engineered by Sir William Jones when he invented the fair-skinned Aryan "race" that drove native dark-skinned Dravidians southwards after seizing their lands. The archaeological evidence for this claim was sketchy even at the time, and was challenged by qualified Indians, but colonial intellectual monopoly triumphed. This mischief, many will remember, triggered Tamil separatism, even though Tamil Nadu has long been an outstanding centre of classical Hindu erudition and cultural accomplishment. Sadly, the post-Independence intellectual tradition fostered by Jawaharlal Nehru was obdurately anti-Hindu. The Aligarh School took advantage of this environment to forge an alliance with Leftist historians and promote a supercilious history wherein India was ever subjected to foreign rule and conquest; that this was its true historical tradition; that contemporary Indians (read Hindus) had no right to regard Arab-Turk-Afghan rule as foreign; or currently, to object to the possible reign of Ms Sonia Gandhi! The British were outsiders because they disrupted the glory of India's Islamic rulers.

(source: India shining: Aryans are Hindu - By Sandhya Jain - dailypioneer.com - March 5 2004).

Vedic River Saraswati is real now

Marxist-Secularist dominated establishment to deny the existence of Saraswati River

Vedic River Saraswati is real now. Replying to a question by Prakash Javadekar, MP, in parliament, the government admitted that scientists have discovered water channels indicating "beyond doubt" the existence of the "Vedic Saraswati" citing conclusions of a study jointly conducted by scientists of ISRO, Jodhpur and the Rajasthan Government's Ground Water Department, published in the Journal of Indian Society of Remote Sensing. The study reports "clear signals of palaeo-channels on the satellite imagery in the form of a strong and powerful continuous drainage system in the North-West region and occurrence of archaeological sites of pre-Harappan, Harappan and post-Harappan ages beyond doubt indicate the existence of a mighty palaeo-drainage system of the Vedic Saraswati river in this region... The description and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the river Saraswati described in the Vedic literature." It is a significant shift of the government from its earlier position since UPA assumed power at the centre. The UPA government had earlier maintained that there was no trace of lost Vedic Saraswati River .

There have been consistent attempts by the Marxist-Secularist dominated establishment to deny the existence of Saraswati River attempting to dissociate Harappan civilization from mainstream Indian culture. Three years ago, senior CPI(M) leader and Politburo member Sitaram Yechury slammed the ASI for its efforts. A Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, which he headed in 2006, said, "The ASI has deviated in its working and has failed in spearheading a scientific discipline of archaeology. A scientific institution like the ASI did not proceed correctly in this matter." The NDA government in June 2002 had announced excavations to trace the river's course which was vehemently criticized by the Marxist-Secularist academicians. Such approach is evident in almost every matter related to India 's glorious past wherein Marxist-Secularist camp tries to deprive India of its contribution to the world while seeking to perpetuate myths like Aryan-Dravidian divide to keep Indian society divided. Although the government admitting the existence of Vedic Saraswati River might be causing a lot of heartburn but faced with the facts Saraswati is now real for them too.

(source: Vedic River Saraswati is real now - voi.org).

***

How to have your Aryan Invasion and not admit it

The answer is that the Vedic peoples are referred to repeatedly in the Rig as the ‘Aryas’ and that from this is a great and sustained error of orthodox historical scholarship was spawned. Even though the adjective ‘Aryan’ in ancient Sanskrit actually means ‘noble’ or ‘cultured’ – and therefore the Aryas are essentially the “noble” or cultured” folk’, and thus as easily a religious cult as an ethnic group – it was assumed by historians and archaeologists that they were a race and that they had invaded India around 1500 BC. Known as the ‘Aryan invasion theory’, this error was only brought to light and dropped from official curricula during the last quarter of the 20^th century. Because it has far-reaching implications, and requires the wholesale rewriting of canonical academic texts and standard works of reference, it is the kind of error that historians are not normally eager to admit.  

The Aryan Invasion theory can itself be traced back to an idea that had already planted roots by the beginning of the 19^th century. It was then that a number of Western scholars began to notice that Sanskrit, the classical language in which the Vedas are written, and its modern relatives have close affinities with modern and ancient European languages, such as Latin, Greek, English, Norwegian and German. Fairly soon a predictable doctrine began to take form. 

‘This explains, Gregory Possehl, had to do with the Aryan race, proposed to be the people who spoke the language of the Indo-European family. European intellectuals and moral superiority was a foregone conclusion to most savants of the 19^th and early 20^th century. The success of European Imperialism, Christianity and the Industrial Revolution proved that. Like all resilient bad ideas, the Aryan invasion theory survived what should have been critical evidence against it by adapting. Although the chronology had to be increasingly stretched to fit in with the new archaeological discoveries, historians were for a long while able to cling on to the notion of an invasion by ‘Aryan’ hordes in the second millennium BC. 

Gregory Possehl was able to write the definitive obituary to the Aryan invasion hypothesis in his massive tome Indus Age: 

“In the end there is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed of a coherent or well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.”

Outside the cozy Pall Mall club of Western scholarship, Indian academics have been forthright in contemplating direct links between the Indus-Sarasvati civilization and the Vedic texts. 

(source:  Underground: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization – By Graham Hancock   p. 94 - 102)

***

DNA study: European Genes went from India

More nails in the coffin of the Aryan invasion fairy-tale. how ironically appropriate that it should be a Macaulay.

By studying the DNA of an ancient people in Malaysia, a team of geneticists says it has illuminated many aspects of how modern humans migrated from Africa.

The geneticists say there was only one migration of modern humans out of Africa; that it took a southern route to India, Southeast Asia and Australia; and that it consisted of a single band of hunter-gatherers, probably just a few hundred people strong. Because these events occurred in the last Ice Age, when Europe was at first too cold for human habitation, the researchers say, it was populated only later, not directly from Africa but as an offshoot of the southern migration. The people of this offshoot would presumably have trekked back through the lands that are now India and Iran to reach the Near East and Europe. The findings depend on analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a type of genetic material inherited solely through the female line. They are reported today in Science by a team of geneticists led by Dr. Vincent Macaulay of the University of Glasgow.

(source:  DNA Study Yields Clues on First Migration of Early Humans - nytimes.com May 13, 2005, Friday).

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