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Implication
of Aryan Invasion Theory
 According to Belgian scholar
Koenraad
Elst (1959 -) Dutch historian, born in Leuven,
Belgium:
"The Aryan invasion theory was used to prove that Hindus
were ultimately foreigners, exactly like their "Aryan cousins" the
British. This alleged foreign origin of Hinduism is widely used to delegitimize
the Hindu claim on India, and back then it was also used by the British and by
their Indian loyalists to justify colonization. By showing that the Hindus are
mere upstarts and squatters on the land (as they themselves are in America,
Australia and other places), they can set up their own claim. For then neither
the Hindus nor the Europeans are indigenous and as to who should possess this
land, becomes merely a matter of superior might..
For the British, it seems
illogical that a backward country like India, badly in need of the White Man's
civilizing mission could have brought forth the superior European culture.
"Decidedly, the English did not want to affiliate themselves to
"Mother India."
In this period, race theories conquered the
intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the
spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white
Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and
technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark haired
Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned invaders from Europe formed a
complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.
British colonialism immediately put the emerging
Aryan vision at the service of its propaganda, viz to tell the Indians that
colonization by the British Aryans was but a second instance of the Aryan
invasion which had made India into what it was; and that the Raj was nothing but
a reunification of the oldest and the brightest branch of the Aryan family. Thus
in his famous speech in 1862, Samuel Laing, Finance Minister of the Government
of India, rejoiced that "the two races so long separated meet once
more", though now "the younger brother has become the stronger, and
takes his place as the head and protector of the family", coming to India
"on a sacred mission, to stretch out the right hand of aid to our weaker
brother, who once far out-stripped us, but has now fallen behind in the
race."
While on one hand wooing the upper castes and
North Indians with this Aryan rhetoric, the British
along with the Christian missionaries also used the Aryan theory to pit the
lower castes and South Indians, supposedly the progeny of the victimized
non-Aryan natives, against their "Aryan fellow-countrymen. Contrary to the
freedom movement, the anti-Brahmin and Dravidian movements were the fruits of
British patronage. "
(source: The
Saffron Swastika - By Koenraad Elst Voice of India ISBN
8185990697 p.166
and 243-246). Refer to Petty
Professorial Politicking in The Indo-Aryan Controversy - By Koenraad Elst.
Refer to Out
of India Theory - wikipedia.org
Michael Witzel does mention the ethnonyms of the
enemies of the Vedic Aryans, the Dasas (Iranian Daha, known to Greco-Roman
authors as Daai, Dahae), Dasyus (Iranian Dahyu, “tribe”, esp. hostile
nomadic tribe) and Panis (Greek Parnoi), as unmistakably the names of Iranian
tribes. The identification of these tribes as Iranian has been elaborated by
Asko Parpola (“The problem of the Aryans and the Soma”, in Erdosy: op.cit.,
p.367), and is now well- established, a development which should at least put
an end to the talk of the Dasas being “the dark-skinned aboriginals enslaved
by the Aryan invaders”.
"Far
from attesting an eastward movement into India, this text actually speaks of a
westward movement towards Central Asia, coupled with a symmetrical eastward
movement from India's demographic centre around the Saraswati basin towards the
Ganga basin."
Shrikant Talageri’s
survey of the relative chronology of all Ŗgvedic kings and poets,
(refer to Shrikant Talageri: The
Ŗgveda, a Historical Analysis) yields a completely consistent
chronology. Its main finding is that the geographical gradient of Vedic Aryan
culture in its Ŗgvedic stage is from East to West. "It is easy to
establish on the basis of internal evidence (the genealogy of
the composers and of the kings they mention) that the 8th mandala of the Rgveda
is one of the younger parts of the book. It is there (RV 8:5, 8:46, 8:56) that
we find clear reference to the material culture and fauna of Afghanistan,
including camels. ...What we now have is an indication that the movement went
from inside India to the northwest.
(source: The
Vedic Experience: The Vedic Corpus provides no evidence for the so called
“Aryan Invasion” of India - By Koenraad Elst). Refer
to Romila
Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com
 James
Dwight Dana (1813-1895) American geologist, mineralogist, and
naturalist, in his book - Manual
of Geology in 1862, wrote:
"The Orient has always
been the continent of progress. It is therefore in
accordance with all past analogies that man should have originated on some part
of the great Orient and no spot would
seem to have been better fitted for man's self-distribution and
self-development, than South West Asia, the center from which the three great
continental divisions of Europe, Asia and Africa, radiate."
This is strengthened by the conclusions of Lord
Curzon "I venture to affirm they (all languages) have sprung
from Vaidik Sanskrit. The peculiarly
primitive tongue of the Aryan race."
Curzon and Professor Roth further
amplified this view. They hold that: "I venture to affirm that the Zend,
Greek, Latin, Gothic etc. have all sprung at different periods from the
Sanskrit."
Isaac Taylor
((1829-1901) English clergyman, antiquarian, and author, chiefly noted for
researches in philology. In 1885, Taylor became canon of York. Taylor's Origin
of the Aryans (1890) challenged the theory of Max Müller, then
generally accepted, that central Asia was the cradle of the Indo-European
peoples. He says on p. 39:
"The cradle of
Aryans must have been in the region where Sanskrit and Zend were
spoken."
Prof. A H Keane author
of Man,
past and present has observed:
"Man originated in the East and migrated thence to Europe."
(source: Hinduism
in The Space Age - By E. Vedavyas p. 82-85).
Most archaeologists in India like
Braj
Basi Lal, S P Gupta or S R Rao have
argued against the Aryan invasion theory.
The Aryan invasion
theory has been used to promote various political agendas. British, Communist,
Dravidian and dalit groups have all used it to their advantage, as have Muslim
and Christian missionaries portraying the invading Aryans as the bad guys.
Refer
to Romila
Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com. Refer to
Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
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
Lost
/ Submerged city of
Dwaraka
– The Learning
Channel video. Watch
Scientific
verification of Vedic knowledge.
Watch The
Saraswati River
- youtube.com. Watch
New
Discoveries on
India
's History
***
Most archaeologists in India like Braj
Basi Lal, S P Gupta or
S R Rao have
argued similar points for several years. B B Lal joined the Archaeological
Survey in January 1946, he held charge of the Excavations Branch and
participated with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavations at Harappa.
At a recent conference in Los Angeles
in August, sponsored by the World Association for Vedic Studies (WAVES), Lal
argued convincingly the same points in an excellent paper called the 'Myth of
the Aryan Invasion: Some Reflections on the Authorship of the Harappan Culture'.
Unfortunately, Indian Leftists called B B Lal's recent book The
Oldest Civilisation in South Asia as "academically weak and
unscholarly," though he is only relating the implications of the latest
archaeology. How many of these people ever read Lal's book or the related
archaeological studies is debatable.
 Yet even a Communist historian
in India
like Romila Thapar, who previously endorsed the invasion theory has been forced
to backtrack and no longer emphasises it. She recently notes in a Frontline
interview:
"Introducing archaeological data into historical studies also forces
historians to think along interdisciplinary lines. The decline of the Indus
cities is attributed to a range of causes, of which ecological change is among
the major ones."
The Aryan invasion
theory has been used to promote various political agendas. British, Communist,
Dravidian and Dalit groups have all used it to their advantage, as have Muslim
and Christian missionaries portraying the invading Aryans as the bad guys
and the invasion as the source of all social, political and religious problems
in the country. No other theory of ancient history has been used for so much
modern political and religious mileage. That such groups are blaming Hindus for
politicising the issue now that it is turning against them is only hypocrisy.
(source: Indian
history revisited - Rediff interview with David Frawley). Refer to chapter on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism.
History as a
Political Tool
Modern scientific tools had
shown that the mighty river Saraswati existed and was not a mythical one as had
been claimed. So also the river Rishadvati.
Similar was the fallacy that
the
people of the Harappan civilization were unaware of maritime life. In fact,
there were 150 references to the ocean in the Rigveda alone.
***
 David
Frawley
( ? ) also known as Pandit Vamadeva
Shastri the
American eminent teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine has said that:
"The Aryan Invasion Theory was propounded before archaeological
excavations were carried out in undivided India. Modern scientific tools had
shown that the mighty river Saraswati existed and was not a mythical one as had
been claimed. So also the river Rishadvati. Similar was the fallacy that the
people of the Harappan civilization were unaware of maritime life. In fact,
there were 150 references to the ocean in the Rigveda alone, and
these could not be dismissed as poetic imagery or symbolism. Dr. Frawley said
archaeological excavations were throwing up new information, and one should not
swear by what was in the textbooks written 30 or 40 years ago. The theory was
imposed by Western scholars to show that India was always ruled by invaders. The
fact was to the contrary. There was movement of people from India to outside,
and even today, there was archaeological and linguistic evidence to show Indian
influence in countries such as Iran and Central Asia, he added.
(source:
India,
the only former colony not to rewrite history - The
Hindu). For more refer to David Frawley's article
Witzel's
Vanishing Ocean - How to read Vedic texts any way you like).
Refer to Out
of India Theory - wikipedia.org
Indians are not descendants of Aryans: Study
A new study led
by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and
Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, says there was no genetic influx 3,500
years ago.
Widely believed theory of Indo-Aryan invasion, often used to explain early
settlements in the Indian subcontinent is a
myth,
a new study by Indian geneticists says.
The origin of genetic diversity found in South Asia is much older than 3,500
years when the Indo-Aryans were supposed to have migrated to India, a new study
led by scientists from the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB),
Hyderabad, says. The study appeared in American Journal of Human Genetics on
Friday.
The theory of Indo-Aryan migration was proposed in mid-19th century by German
linguist and Sanskrit scholar
Max Muller.
He had suggested that 3,500 years ago, a dramatic migration of Indo-European
speakers from Central Asia played a key role in shaping contemporary South Asian
populations and this was responsible for introduction of the Indo-European
language family and the caste system in India.
"Our study clearly shows that there was no genetic influx 3,500 years ago," said
Dr Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB, who led the research team, which included
scientists from the University of Tartu, Estonia, Chettinad Academy of Research
and Education, Chennai and Banaras Hindu University.
"It is high
time we re-write India's prehistory based on scientific evidence," said Dr Lalji
Singh, former director of CCMB. "There is no genetic evidence that Indo-Aryans
invaded or migrated to India or even something such as Aryans existed". Singh,
vice-chancellor of BHU, is a coauthor.
Researchers analysed some six lakh bits of genetic information in the form of
SNPs drawn from DNA of over 1,300 individuals from 112 populations including 30
ethnic groups in India. The comparison of this data with genetic data of other
populations showed that South Asia harbours two major ancestry components. One
is spread in populations of South and West Asia, Middle East, Near East and the
Caucasus. The second component is more restricted to South Asia and accounts for
more than 50 per cent of the ancestry in Indian populations.
"Both the ancestry components that dominate genetic variation in South Asia
demonstrate much greater diversity than those that predominate West Eurasia.
This is indicative of a more ancient demographic history and a higher long-term
effective population size underlying South Asian genome variation compared to
that of West Eurasia," researchers said.
"The genetic component which spread beyond India is significantly higher in
India than in any other part of world.
This implies
that this genetic component originated in India and then spread to West Asia and
Caucasus,"
said Gyaneshwar Chaube of University of Tartu, Estonia.
If any migration from Central Asia to South Asia took place, the study says, it
should have introduced apparent signals of East Asian ancestry into India.
"Because this ancestry component is absent from the region, we have to conclude
that if such an event indeed took place, it occurred before the East Asian
ancestry component reached central Asia," it said.
(source:
Indians are not descendants of Aryans: Study -
indiatoday.com).
***
Arya and Swastika
 A very crude kind of anti-Hindu
propaganda, sometimes used by American Protestant
sects in “warning” the youth against the
dangers of Hare Krishna etc., points out that Hinduism and Nazism have a central
symbol in common: the swastika.
I have also heard the comparison from Ambedkarites
who, taking V
T Rajshekhar’s lead, systematically refer to Hindus as “Hindu
Nazis.”
It may of interest to know that the swastika is just as
much a central symbol in Buddhism, Ambedkar’s chosen religion. In China, the
swastika is known as a Buddhist symbol. The swastika is quite a Santana symbol,
not bound up with any nation or ideology. It is also found among people outside
the Hindu sphere of influence.
The word swastika comes from su-asti, “it is good”, as
in the Sanskrit greeting Pratah Swasti,
“good morning”. So swastika means “auspicious maker” or “sign of
auspiciouness”. What the swastika visually depicts, is the solar cycle, be it
during the day or during the year. It shows the circular movement at the four
cardinal points: sunrise, sunset, midnight; or spring equinox, summer
solstice, autumn equinox, winter solstice. As such it is shorthand for the
Zodiac as well as for all macrocosmic and microcosmic cycles. It signifies the
completeness as well as the dynamics of the Whole. Being primarily a solar
symbol, it is normally painted in solar colors, like red, saffron or gold; while
the Nazi swastika was black.
 Like
the swastika, the term Arya, which is rather central in Hindu tradition and more
so in Nazism, is in need of rehabilitation. Of course, the term does not
indicate a race, but a quality of character. When Gautam
Buddha gives a short formulation
of his teachings, he calls it the Arya Satyani,
the four “Noble” Truths.
If the secularist have been
inhibited about the use of the word “Arya” as proving the “fascist”
character of Hinduism, it is partly because of this terminology used by Buddha,
the hero of their mythical anti-Brahmin revolution.
(source:
Ayodhya
and After: Issues Before Hindu Society -
By Koenraad Elst p.
260 - 262). Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
***
Politics
of History - India's
past has been held hostage by Marxists
"You don't change the course of
history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall." ~
Jawaharlal Nehru
***
 Subramanian
Swamy (1939 - ) He is also a reputed economist and
worked as Assistant Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat, New
York in 1963. He worked with two Nobel laureates, Simon Kuznets and Paul A.
Samuelson for his doctorate in economics at the Harvard
University, awarded in 1965. He was a faculty at Harvard in 1964 and has
been teaching there off and on for 12 years with the latest stint completed in
2005. He is acknowledged as an authority on comparative studies of India and
China. He is also well-versed in the Mandarin Chinese (Hanyu) language. He was
Professor of Economics at the Indian
Institute of Technology, Delhi from 1969.
He is the
President of the Janata Party has recently challenged Romila
Thapar:
"While denying that she ever argued that Aryan was a racial term,
she goes on to say that it was the language of those who migrated to India from
abroad in a "graduated" way. Who were they? Is she arguing that they
were racially the same as Indians or different? And who graduated the migration?
? She should be explicit.
Obviously that is not being
taught at JNU. Aryan is a German version of
the Sanskrit word "Arya," which means a gentleman, while Dravida is a
word coined by Adi Shankara while at Varanasi to mean a person from the
south."
(source:
Swamy's
reply
- hindu.com - March 24 2004). Refer
to Distortion
of Indian History and School Textbooks. Refer
to Out
of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
Britannia,
a lion at her feet, examines a string of pearls she has taken from a cushion
held up by an Indian woman.
Soon
India
would be depicted as a naked black female submissively offering her rich jewels
to Britannia.
India
now entered in the
cataclysmic epoch which has left few native cultures of the world intact – the
era of colonialism. The Indians, bearers of the world’s oldest civilizations
were treated like children by people who thought themselves as superior race.
(image
source: British
Library. Refer to India:
Empire of the Spirit - By Michael Wood).
Refer
to Defaming
of Hinduism-I – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com and Defaming
of Hinduism-II – By V Sundaram – newstodaynet.com. For
more on Christian Intolerance refer to chapters on The
Goa Inquisition, European
Imperialism, Conversion,
and First Indologists.
Refer to What
Every "Ugly American" Must Know about the "Civilized British
- www.larouchepac.com.
Refer
to Invading
the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America
- By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi
Banerjee.
***
To undermine the corporate
Hindu identity the theory was first concocted by the British Imperialists and
then taught for decades after Independence to captive students by Romila
Thapar and her cohorts.
But the media has been manipulated in India to permit Thapar now to somersault
and to maintain that she had never believed in the theory or in similar junk she
had taught such as that Samrat Asoka was the grandson of a Greek woman and hence
he had inherited as a little boy his iconoclast temper from lessons learnt on
his grandma’s lap! But she and her ilk have not been
made accountable despite being discovered.
(source: Media
is a tool of anti-Hindu conspiracy - By
Subramanian Swamy). Also
refer
to ‘Aryan
invasion theory is British-created falsehood’
- sify.com.
Refer to Eminent
Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud
is a book by Arun
Shourie. - The book explains how a group of academic historians, of
Marxist persuasion, has been tweaking Indian history and also lining its own
pockets in the process.
***
Immaculate Deception?
Appointment of a Marxist historian to Kluge Chair - Playing to the Western gallery?
"Indian
intellectuals look to the West with and adulation that is often blind, if not
obsequious."
- observes David Frawley the
American teacher and practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine.
According to a petition started
by B. Parker:
"It is a great travesty that
Romila Thapar
has been appointed the first holder of the Kluge Chair in
Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress.
In regards to India, she is an avowed antagonist of India's
Hindu civilization. As a well-known Marxist, she represents a
completely Euro-centric world view.
Writing
politically correct history - Getting awards from America
Evangelical
West's
Neo colonial Sepoys
Stalinist
hatchet job of disinformation on Indian History
This
award will satisfy the evangelical constituency that wishes to
extirpate Hinduism and the Islamic Jihadists who assert historical
legitimacy for their claims to imperial dominion over India and
regularly pursue it by murderous ventures that emulate Nazi
pogroms against Jews and Slavs.
***
Romila Thapar a well-known
Indian historian and staunch believer in the Aryan invasion
theory represents a
completely Euro-centric world view of Indian history.
"Whites
appoint Indian proxies to let them pull strings from behind the scenes, but
through such intermediaries, they impose their epistemologies, institutional
controls, awards and rewards, all in the name of universal thought."
Refer to Dialog
on Whiteness Studies - By Rajiv Malhotra - sulekha.com. Refer
to Romila
Thapar’s Kluge Prize – By Dr. Gautam Sen - vigilonline.com
Note: Romila
Thapar loftily declined the native Padma Bhusan,
but a million dollar prize, effectively the same kind of state award she found
unpalatable, from the racist sponsors of mass murder is apparently another
matter. It
is no surprise to see that Romila Thaper recieved a Kluge prize
for her work which undermines Hindu Civilization. The
library of Congress librarian, James H. Billington
has impeccable evangelical
credentials
and he had the final say in choosing the awardee. Billington is on
the Board of the Center for
Theological Inquiry (Theology
Today)
and was long time advisor for Theology Today. Instead of getting
awed by these awards these awardees should be looked at as neo
colonial sepoys.
Romilla Thapar received the American
kluge prize for study of humanity - She is
credited with creating a new pluralistic view of the
Indian civilization ? Refer to the chapter on Glimpses
XXII and Islamic
Onslaught
Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
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.
Watch The
Saraswati River
- youtube.com.
Refer
to Invading
the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America
- By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi
Banerjee.
Watch video - Intellectual
Terrorism and Subversion in polity – By Radha Rajan. Refer
to Be
wary of English translations of Hindu scriptures - By Sheena Patel
Refer
to Michael
Witzel: rattled rat at IIC
- By Bhagwan Singh
***
She completely disavows that India
ever had a history. Just as the Europeans discredited the
American Indian's land claims by ignoring that they represented
a unique civilization with a wholesome variety of distinct
linguistic and cultural traits, Thapar has
long expounded the same ignorant view of India's unique history
and civilization. Romila Thapar claims to be an
expert on Vedic India;
when she does not know a single word of Sanskrit.
It is certainly absurd that she was made a professor of ancient
Indian history at JNU.
Why waste our American resources on
a Marxist ideological assault on Hindu civilization? Hinduism is
the world's most ancient,
ongoing and largest cultural phenomenon. Such a long lived
civilization surely has a lot to teach the world. So why support
its denigration?" It is ironic as
well as disturbing that a movement which still swears by Lenin
and Stalin, is hailed in Western universities as the guardian of
a civil polity against the encroaching barbarism of Hindu
revivalism."
(source: http://www.petitiononline.com/108india/petition.html).
Refer to
A
Dictionary of Marxist Thought - By Tom Bottomore. Also
refer to Communismwatch
and cpmterror.
Secular
Politics Communal Agenda
Writing Politically correct Histories?
The Indian history writing has never been an easy task
because the beginning itself was motivated by the political considerations and
religious constraints, rather than driven by the principles of historiography.
This necessarily encouraged historians to distort the history of
India
so as to fit in certain ideological and religious framework. Entire
history written by colonial, ideologically and politically motivated historians
is witness to it and victim of it. Since the independence of
India
a new approach has become fashionable i.e. writing of 'politically correct
history'. The entire history wiring has now been reduced to 'secular'
history and 'communal'
history. In the process, the sacredness of
primary evidence and importance of original sources have become a major
casualty. To push their agenda and to write 'politically correct history',
historians have resorted to hiding away the facts, ignoring the facts.
Their sole agenda is to prove their viewpoint wedded to their political ideology
and its usefulness in the immediate battle in politics. This approach is
as visible as daylight in the writings dealing with almost all periods of
history, including the freedom struggle and the partition of the country.
The last sixty years history of independent
India
has been dealt with even more callously.
(source: Secular
Politics Communal Agenda: A History of Politics in
India
from 1860 to 1953 - By Prof Makkhan Lal). Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
"Anything
but Sarasvati please!"
"What
Thapar fails to mention, rather conveniently, is that large
sections of very influential Hindus of that period, Swami Vivekananda
and Sri
Aurobindo for example, as well as several academics like A. C. Das, had opposed
AIT.
Today, several archeological excavations have established that
there has been no Aryan invasion or break in India's civilization. Yet, it is
the historians of the Marxist school of India, like
Thapar, who still continue to propagate the myth of AIT. The
discovery of numerous archeological sites on the banks of the erstwhile
Sarasvati, about which the Vedas talk in glorious terms doesn't merit any
attention in her book. There is no mention about such things as the mapping of
the paleo channels of the Vedic Sarasvati.
Dried bed of the mighty
Saraswati river.
Yet, it is
the historians of the Marxist school of India, like
Thapar, who still continue to propagate the myth of AIT.
The
discovery of numerous archeological sites on the banks of the erstwhile
Sarasvati, about which the Vedas talk in glorious terms doesn't merit any
attention in her book. There is no mention about such things as the mapping of
the paleo channels of the Vedic Sarasvati.
Watch
New
Discoveries on
India
's History
***
Kot
Diji belonged to the Regionalization Era[27] of IVC/SSC. This phase was the
final critical one that led to the formation of urban centers. This phase
thrived between 3300 BCE and 2600 BCE. Assuming that the invading Aryans were
the destroyers, as Thapar implies, one must then accept the presence of the
Aryans in IVC/SSC even before its Mature [i.e. urban] Phase had started. The
Marxist historians defiantly claim that the Aryans invaded India only towards
the end of the Mature Phase of IVC, which is around 1900 BCE.[29] If that were
the case, how could the Aryans have been the destroyers
of the Kot Diji settlement?"
(source:
Romila
Thapar's 'Ancient India' [2002] – A Review
by Kalavai
Venkat - indiastar.com).
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.
(source: The
Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon-
By
Aravindan Neelakandan.S).
Our
Voice in History
Western
scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games
***
We
don’t quite get it, the first globalized civilization was in
India
.
 “The
Indus
Valley
civilization dwarfed
Egypt
and
Mesopotamia
in area and population, surpassed them in many areas of
engineering and was aggressive in globalization 5000 years
back.”
These are words from Andrew
Lawler’s lead article in the June 2008 issue of Science
magazine which had Indus Civilization as
the cover story
.
Previously archaeologists
believed that Indus people got their ideas from Mesopotamia and
was a civilization without deep roots, but as per new evidence,
Indus evolved from the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh in
Baluchistan
. Archaeology has also found evidence of occupation in Harappa
dating to 3700 B.C.E and in Farmana in
India
to 3500 B.C.E.
Writing about the religious
beliefs of the Indus people, Lawler mentions that the proto-Shiva
seal has fuelled speculation that the religious tradition of
Indus
helped lay the basis for Hinduism. While there are questions to be
answered on their language, religion and form of government,
decades of archaeology has changed the image of
Indus
from a xenophobic and egalitarian society to one which was vibrant
and complex.
Though the article was fairly
balanced covering excavations in Harappa, Baluchistan, and Kot
Diji in
Pakistan
and Farmana, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan in
India
, it had the usual western hatchet job, blaming Indian
archaeologists for using Hindu texts as a guide. This is a no-no,
we are told, because (a) it is inflammatory to the Pakistanis and
(b)
India
has a large Muslim population.
The article has other issues too.
Drought, as a reason for the demise of
Indus
, is scoffed at while many other reasons, including “change in a
society that they say emphasized water-related rituals” is
offered as an alternative. The western scholars quoted in the
article themselves admit their theories are pure speculation, but
the drying up of Ghaggar-Hakra around 1900 B.C.E
is ignored, since it would involve a reference to the Rig
Veda.
As Western
scholars condescendingly set the rules of the games —
a very different one from that practised in their own research
centers — we need to evaluate what can be done. Whining about
unfairness can be cathartic, but it does not solve the problem.
Different
Standards and Inept Government
We too should
not indulge in speculative archaeology, but first Indian
archaeologists and scholars need to be unapologetic about knowing
the scriptures and using them for clues.
Sadly this attitude cannot be
taken by people who work for government funded institutions like
the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)
and Universities. The Saraswati Heritage Project was
canned by the government since it was seen
as an attempt to push the antiquity of Indian civilization.
(If
these people were around in 1921, they would have halted
archaeology at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity
of Indian civilization by many millennia).
Recently the Government
of India cut funding for a major Sanskrit program in schools
because - it is getting tad repetitive -
India
has a large Muslim population and there was a fear that it would
instill religious and cultural pride among students. In
such an atmosphere, it would be naive to
expect the government to lead the battle in
understanding our history. Instead of wasting time writing letters
to ministers, we might be better off digging in our own backyard
for Painted Grey Ware.
Colonial
politics is still alive and any divarication is branded as
nationalism.
An Inept Indian
government - The Saraswati Heritage Project was canned by the
government since it was seen as an attempt to push the antiquity
of Indian civilization.
If these people
were around in 1921, they would have halted archaeology at
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa which pushed the antiquity of Indian
civilization by many millennia.
Refer to Conference
on Sindhu-Saraswati civilization
and Nalanda
International.
Watch
New
Discoveries on
India
's History
***
The second problem is mentioned
in the Lawler’s article itself. Indian archaeologists have done
excellent work, like R.
S. Bisht
in Dholavira and Vasant
Shinde in Farmana, but they are slow to publish and
collaborate. Bisht’s work has revealed “monumental and
aesthetic architecture, a large stadium and an efficient
water-management system”, but has largely been unpublished. The
lack of data from people who had first access to the location
helps in sustaining myths about the civilization.
Solutions
There is an urgent need to create
institutions where scholarship is free of bureaucracy and
political interference. One such institution — the Indus
Heritage Center — funded by the Global
Heritage Fund is coming up in Vadodara. Besides starting a
Smithsonian class center in
India
, the center also plans to popularize the findings of
Deccan
College
, the Department of Archaeology of Maharaja Sayajirao University
of Baroda and the Archaeological Survey of India.
There have been xenophobic
comments regarding this institution due to the involvement of
western professors, even though the professors don’t believe in
the Aryan Invasion theory. The fear is that they will be applying
western frameworks on our history resulting in misinterpretation.
But instead of complaining about
west, it is time we adopted some of their techniques for
popularizing history. Building a Smithsonian style museum is an
insuperable problem for the cash strapped ASI which
can barely manage the monuments under its care. The
Indus
Heritage
Center
model where private donors in association with various colleges
build research centers in which native interpretation of history
can happen should be considered. Right now there are few sincere
individuals who are involved in correcting Western biases; their
efforts are exemplary but not sufficient to make an impact.
 Past
many decades of research have found no archaeological evidence for
the Aryan Invasion theory. It has been discredited through genetic
research as well. The demise of
Indus
valley is understood to be due to hydrological changes.
Still, pick up
a book like Karen Armstrong (1946
- ) The
Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions,
which is used as text book in graduate courses, and you will find
that colonial politics is still alive and
any divarication is branded as nationalism.
One
Indus
Heritage
Center
cannot change such entrenched ideas. To give the megaphone to
differing voices, more Indus Heritage Centers which are
financially secure are required. This dovetails into the larger
debate about the need to free higher education and research from
government control and facilitate an atmosphere where private
capital can provide funding. With such freedom, scholars would be
able to delve into research as they see fit, instead of
surrendering to artificial political fears.
Five
thousand years back our ancestor living in the
Indus
Valley
sailed across the vast
Arabian sea
in reed boats with cotton sails and made the best of the Bronze
age globalized world. It would be a shame, if we did not show even
a fraction of their ingenuity in making our voice heard in a
debate about our history.
(source: Our
Voice in History - By
Jayakrishnan Nair - varnam.org).
World
Owes Its Religions, Science And Culture,To The Vedas
 Author
Joy
Sen, senior teacher (Indian
Institute of Technology, Kharagpur), in the institute’s architecture department, has
challenged the theory that the Indian civilisation started with the Indus Valley
age, and said it actually began with the Vedic age (read Aryans).
“It was the Aryans who moved
to Persia, from there went to Turkey and finally were the first citizens of
Greece.’’
“The celebrated
philosopher Plato and mathematician Pythagoras were actually of Aryan origin.
The latter even came to India to learn Vedic concepts of numbers that we know as
Vedic mathematics today,’’ Sen told TOI. “The numerals zero and one have
come from the Vedic concepts of ‘sunya’ and ‘adwaita’. Not only numbers,
even computational mathematics that the world follows today owes its origin to
India. The words algebra, geometry and trigonometry are derived from Vedic
mathematical concepts of ‘aljabura’, ‘trikonomatra’ and ‘jyamity’,’’
the book says.
(source: World
Owes Its Religions, Science And Culture,To The Vedas
- By Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey).
Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
 Jeffrey
Armstrong has
spent the last 30 years studying Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra and Mantra practices.
For the last 15 years he has been a corporate executive and speaker for Fortune
500 companies. He has degrees in Psychology, Literature and Comparative
Religion. He has written:
"Thirty years ago,
when I began my spiritual journey, I was studying English literature, and if you
study English literature you will be taught that English and all of the romance
languages of Europe can be traced back to the Latin, and then from the Latin
back to the Greek. Modern Western history teaches us that the trail
mysteriously stops at that point in time, although it is a well-known fact that
the ancient Greeks sat at the feet of the Egyptians and the Babylonians.
So when India was discovered by the West a few centuries
ago there was a clash of cultures over the origins of human civilisation.
The West held a viewpoint of time that ended with the Greeks whereas the East,
and India in particular, spoke of a time span of well over fifty thousand years.
The Western vision simply could not accommodate this understanding. So
they made up a story to explain away this anomaly.
When people from the West colonized India and began to study the Indian culture,
they established a chair of Sanskrit at Oxford University called the Boden
chair. The main function of the Boden chair of Sanskrit was to translate the
Bible into Sanskrit.
The
people who studied Sanskrit then went to India and occupied various ministerial
posts within the British Government, and they began to study the Vedas. As
they began studying, they discovered that Sanskrit was the mother language for
both Greek and for Latin and, in fact, for all the romance languages of Europe.
This discovery gave rise to the modern science of Linguistics. The
classification of modern languages was only made possible by an understanding of
Sanskrit.
This
revelation caused a problem because at that time India was a colony of the
British. As one of my professors used to say,
“You
refer to India as the sub-continent, but could you tell me exactly what it is
sub too?” Of course, the saying was intended to imply subordinate to Her
Majesty the Queen. It was a bit of an embarrassment to run into a culture
that not only claimed that its history went back fifty or sixty thousand years,
but that it was also the basis for your own language and literature! The
British couldn’t accept this and so the scholars of the time made up a theory,
which said that there was a group of people called the Aryans, who lived in the
Steppes of Russia, and this horseback riding people rode into India one thousand
five hundred years ago with these books called the Vedas under their arms.
Unfortunately, what they did not take into account was
the fact that the Vedas contained astronomical calculations that went back seven
thousand years! Now there is no instance or evidence of a horseback riding
culture having observatories who watched the stars over a period of seven
thousand years. Nevertheless, Western scholars overlooked this
inconsistency and believed the theory that the Aryans came riding into India and
conquered the dark skinned Dravidians with their superior technology and their
superior wisdom. "
(source: The
Greatness of the Vedas - by Jeffrey Armstrong).
Refer to Out
of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to chapter on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism
Decline
of the West
"Barely seven years after
Prof BB Lal penned
The Sarasvati Flows On: The Continuity of Indian Culture (2002),
the defiantly-in-denial UPA government has
been forced to admit the existence of the Vedic Saraswati.
In response to a parliamentary question, the Government revealed that a study by
scientists of ISRO, Jodhpur, and the Rajasthan Government’s Ground Water
Department has found irrefutable evidence of palaeo-channels and archaeological
sites of pre-Harappan,
Harappan and post-Harappan ages, indicating the existence of a mighty river
matching descriptions of the Saraswati in Vedic literature.
It is now conclusively established that there was no Aryan
invasion, or even migration (the current theory). What does remain, however, is
a West-led mental resistance to accepting the indigenous origins of the Vedic
(Hindu) religion, culture, and civilisation. But
the time for intellectual arguments is over; it will take a further economic and
military decline of the West to eclipse this denial."
(source:
Rediscovering the real India – By Sandhya Jain - folk.co.in).
Unsettling
for Europeans?
It
is unsettling for Europeans to consider that a predominately dark-skinned Asian
community could have preceeded the west and established the basic fundamentals
of organized society. The birthplace of writing, forever tied with cuneiform
script found on clay tablets in Mesopotamia, may have proved to be an ingenious
copy of another, far earlier innovation. The
archaeological evidence for an ancient civilization of far antiquity, and a
stupendous level of sophistication is clearly at hand here. There is no doubt in
this author’s mind that further revelations await archaeologists in the not so
distant future.
(source: Beyond
the Holy Land -
Indus
Valley
- By Patrick C. Chouinard
- Christianarchaeology. com Sunday, July 22, 2007). Refer to Communist
Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette
Rosser.
Deffronization
or Secular Obscurantism?
"
Anybody Questioning the validity of Aryan Invasion theory is
randomly dubbed as a “Hindu
Nationalist"
***
 N.
S.
Rajaram (1943
- ) is a mathematician, computer scientist and linguist and
historian of science. He has taught in several universities in the
United States. Since 1984 he has been an advisor to the National
Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA). He has written:
"History texts, like all textbooks, should
be periodically updated. But discredited old models should not be
revived behind slogans.
‘Saffronization’ has no meaning.
There
is now a heated outcry — it can’t really be called a debate —
by some “eminent historians” for
desaffronizing history textbooks written under the previous
administration. Supposedly, the NCERT texts written when Dr Murli
Manohar Joshi was the HRD Minister give an overly Hindu perspective
on history. This is what these eminent historians are calling “saffronization,”
which they want eliminated. Does this charge have any substance? I
cannot speak for medieval or modern history, but as far as ancient
Indian civilization goes, the term “saffronization” is
meaningless, because Hinduism or Sanatana
Dharma (and its offshoots like Buddhism) is the only source we have
to serve as framework for interpreting ancient texts and
archaeology..
To “desaffronize”, are we to read the Vedas as
Christian scripture or treat Harappan remains as Islamic monuments?
This is the kind of absurdity we land into when we substitute
slogans for facts and reason. A more subtle example is the
misrepresentation of the word Arya and the nature of the Aryan
civilization. These eminent historians, led
by Irfan Habib,
charge that suggesting an indigenous origin for the
Aryan civilization somehow constitutes “saffronization.” So,
according to this eminent historian, and others of his school, we
should attribute the Aryan civilization — which is more properly
called the Vedic civilization (including its offshoots) — to
foreign migrants.
This is nothing but the revival of the
discredited, divisive colonial model based on the infamous Aryan
invasion theory. This colonial offspring is now the favored child of
the Secularist brigade."
Hidden motives
 This
gives a clue to the real motive behind the cry for “desaffronization”:
to revive the discredited old model of the Aryan invasion, now being
repackage as Aryan migration. The goal is the same— to
make the Vedic civilization non-Indian in origin and keep it
separated from Harappan archaeology. These ‘eminent historians’
hide the fact that this division— attributing the Harappan
civilization to the Dravidians and the Vedic language and literature
to the invading Aryans served British colonial interests.
In
fact, the British made no secret of their goal to present themselves
as the later and “better” brothers of the original Aryans who
invaded India.
Here
is what Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of
Great Britain, once said in the House of Commons (1929):
“Ages and ages ago, there sat, side by side, the ancestors of the
English, Rajputs and Brahmins. Now, after ages, …the two branches
of the great Aryan ancestry have again been brought together by
Providence…. By establishing British rule
in India, God said to the British, ‘I have brought you
and the Indians together after a long separation, not in order that
you should lord over them, or that you should exploit them, but in
order that should recognize your kinship with them…. It is your
duty to raise them to their own level as quickly as possible, and
work together; brothers as you are, for the evolution of
humanity….’ ”
Needless to say the
Aryan civilization of ancient India is not the same as the ‘Aryan
civilization’ concocted by such characters, any more than of the
Nazis who also claimed to be Aryans. India’s ‘eminent
historians’ who came to dominate the scene after Independence
rarely took issue with this disgraceful chapter in Indian
historiography. And now they are raising
the cry of “saffronization,” as a new generation of scholars has
gone on to rubbish this European fabrication still favored by
Secularist worthies, especially the ‘eminent historians.’
(source: Deffronization
or Secular Obscurantism?
- By N.S.
Rajaram
-
hinduunity.com). Refer to The
Real Eve : Modern Man's Journey Out of Africa - By Stephen
Oppenheimer.
Refer to Out
of India Theory - wikipedia.org. Refer to chapters on First
Indologists and European
Imperialism. Refer to Jesus
Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Watch
An
Invasion through Conversion
- videoyahoo.com.
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