What did the postulation of AIT
accomplish
Postulated a discontinuity between the Vedics and the
Saraswathi Sindhu Civilization, and assigned a much more
recent date to the Vedics and hopelessly confused the
issue of the precedence of the Vedics.
Postulated the presence of two new races, Aryan and
Dravidian, a racial nomenclature that was custom fitted
to the Indian peninsula to suit the need of the colonial
overlord for emphasizing the diversity of ethnic and
linguistic communities in the subcontinent. When it
became unfashionable to be Aryan, especially when the
Germans, courtesy of Nietzsche and others elevated the
category to the status of a master race, the
nomenclature was changed to Indo - European and this has
since morphed into various other names. Despite the
lack of a proper definition both terms continue to be
used ad nauseum when referring to certain ethnic groups
in the Indian subcontinent and also as the defining word
in the ‘AIT’ acronym. I may be forgiven for avoiding use
of the word as much as possible, as I remain ignorant of
the defining characteristics of the Aryan people.
Ergo, the Vedics became aliens to the subcontinent and
became associated with the mythical Aryans, a noun which
is never used in the Vedas, with all its 20th century
fascist connotations. The communists in India have now
latched on to this notion of the mythical Aryans and
have decided that henceforth they will refer to any
Hindu who does not conform to their jaundiced view of
Indian history, as not only Aryan but also a fascist.
Such a notion was (and is) of course lapped up very
willingly by the western press, as the irony of a
fascist Brahmana priest performing a puja clad only in
a loin cloth was too delicious to pass up and thus was
born the nirvana, the piece de resistance of the cliché
kingdom, the ad hominem of choice, the Hindutva
fascist. So lavishly is this appellation now applied to
the millions of inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent,
creating thereby the spectacle of the first instance of
an impoverished fascist in the known galaxy and so
widespread is this outlandish and absurd notion of the
fascist Hindutva, that it has spawned at least one PhD
thesis,
more than a half a dozen books, excoriating the straw
man of a Hindu nationalist’ and is a major contributor
to the bandwidth of the internet discussions on the
sociology of India
To top it off, the caste system was now associated with
these marauding but anthropologically non-existent Aryan
people.
The conclusion was inescapable –the British were simply
a latter version of the Aryans to have conquered India
and had as much legitimacy to remain and rule India as
did the original Vedics.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, the defeated and displaced
Dravidians allegedly retreated to the south and formed
the bulk of the downtrodden castes (the castes were now
delineated and created very conveniently and
fortuitously by the colonial overlord who was never at a
loss to miss such a golden opportunity as this) of
modern India – gave rise to the plethora of Dravidian
parties in the state of Tamilnadu. So much so that today
no party can get elected in the southern state of Tamil
Nadu without the appellation of Dravidian tacked on to
its name.
To
this day many Indians remain oblivious to the glaring
fact that there is not a shred of evidence for this set
of egregious hypotheses masquerading as a theory and the
reasons for this sad state of affairs with the resulting
disastrous effects on the body politic of the Indian
Republic are too obvious to recount here. We trust we
will have the opportunity to elaborate on these
consequences in a later section, should there be need to
do so. It needs to be emphasized, if we have not done so
already that the reason we recommend discarding the AIT
is not because its implications on the body
politic are disastrous, but we do so simply because it
is false and its adoption leads to many inconsistencies
in Indic history. The notion that we have to retrofit
our history falsely in order to cater to the prevailing
dogma or theorie du jour in the west, as a way of demonstrating our commitment to diversity is
anathema to us
Why is the West so
obsessed with the notion that Aryans invaded India given
that there does not exist any race or ethnic group
termed Aryan ?
This
is what makes it so inexplicable. The obsession with
associating themselves with an Aryan race has its roots
in European history. For many centuries the semitic
speaking people in the Mediterranean from Carthage to
Tyre and Sidon were the Civilizational pace setters and
this remained so until Rome burned and destroyed
Carthage in the third Punic war. The Europeans
prided themselves on their Greek ( and Roman
Heritage) heritage , so much so that the architecture
throughout Europe and America tries to emulate that of
the Golden age of Greece. When they finally discovered
that Greece was a relative late comer on the world
scene, it was a major blow to their self image
especially after they discovered the antiquity of
Babylon and Egypt. When Sir William Jones
discovered Sanskrit, namely its antiquity and its
vocabulary cognate to that of Europe, it was even a
bigger blow to their ego. The very notion that they had
to share a common heritage with the unwashed millions of
natives in India, not to mention the very real
possibility that their language was indeed a derivative
of Sanskrit was abhorrent. So , in order to circumvent
such theories and to distance themselves as much as
possible from the Indics they posited the existence of
the proto Indo European Language and theorized that the
bulk of the European languages and their Asian siblings
(Persian, Sanskrit and the other Indic languages)
derived from a common source of language and
people whom they called Aryans ( I kid you not).
To
explain the presence of of such a highly sophisticated
Grammar and if we may quote Sir William himself,
required increasing amount of intellectual gymnastics
|
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its
antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more
perfect than the Greek, more copious than
the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than
either, yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of
verbs and in the forms of grammar, than
could possibly have been produced by
accident; so strong indeed, that no
philologer could examine them all three,
without believing them to have sprung from
some common source, which, perhaps, no
longer exists: there is a similar reason,
though not quite so forcible, for supposing
that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though
blended with a very different idiom, had the
same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old
Persian might be added to the same family,
if this were the place for discussing any
question concerning the antiquities of
Persia. |
The result of this
realization was the postulate that the newly
invented Aryans endowed with abundant nomadic
flair for destruction and mayhem invaded (the
latest version eschews the word invaded and sticks
with the politically more correct terminology of
acculturation through migration to ) India
around 1500 BCE and slowly infiltrated the country
with their language and in the process transformed
themselves from the nomads on horse drawn chariots
to a sedentary people interested more in meditation
and knowledge about the cosmos all in the space of
within 200 years at a time during 1500 BCE when the
earth as devoid of such intellectual droids
as the personal computer and equally devoid of such
compelling technologies as the email and few
were in a tearing hurry to pick up esoteric words
from a esoteric language such as sanskrit. Despite
the incredulous nature of this postulate it soon
developed a life of its own, until there was another
momentous discovery in the shape of the Indic
Saraswati civilization which was found to be
older than anything known at that time .
This put the Indologists (rhymes with entomologists
and Egyptologists) in a bind. To accommodate the new
realities, they cemented the chronology of the
Indics, so that they the Indics could never claim an
antiquity greater than that or Ancient Greece and
that for some mysterious reason were not
present in the Indian subcontinent till after the
departure of the Harappans. This new found
chronology slapped together in a very sloppy manner
thus became the official history of the Republic of
India.
