The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian
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THE INDO-ARYAN CONTROVERSY For the first time in a single volume, this book presents the various arguments in the Indo-Aryan controversy by some of the principal scholars in this field of study. Its essays provide a template for the basic issues involved in the debates by addressing four major areas. First, archaeologists consider some of the recent findings and interpretations of the archaeological record, focusing particularly on the issue of the relationship between the Indus Valley archaeological complex and the culture of the Indo-Aryans as expressed in the Vedic texts. These chapters consider whether there was more continuity between the two civilizations than has been assumed in earlier works, and evaluate whether there is enough evidence to establish a definitive scholarly consensus as to whether or not the Indus civilization was actually Indo-Aryan. Second, scholars take on some of the linguistic issues in the debate, particularly the relationship between Indo-Aryan and its parent language Indo-European, as well as the linguistic borrowings between languages and language families. The discussion here rests on whether the traditional rules of linguistic derivation for Indo-European languages allow for the possibility that the origins of the Indo-Aryan languages developed in India itself. Additionally, authors debate whether contact between Indo-Aryan and non-Indo-Aryan languages (such as Dravidian or Munda) is the result of Indo-Aryan as a language intruding into the subcontinent, or whether other types of mutual interactions between those languages can account for such contacts. Third, philological scholars sieve through the Vedic texts to find clues that might situate the Vedic Aryans in space and time by correlating them with the archaeological record. Different scholars examine references to items associated with the Indo-Aryans such as iron, the horse, and chariot, as well as astronomical data, to consider the implication such references have for the dating of the Veda, a crucial issue in this debate, and the geography of its horizons. Finally, historians contribute historiographical contexts for the debates, stressing the ways in which positions on this issue might be influenced by socio-political or ideological currents, both in the early debates in the nineteenth century as well as today. Edwin F. Bryant received his doctorate from Columbia University in 1997, where he taught Sanskrit and Hindi. He was the Lecturer in Hinduism at Harvard University for three years, and is presently Associate Professor in Hinduism at Rutgers University, New Jersey. His publications include books on the Indo-Aryan invasion debate and on the Krishna tradition. He is presently working on a translation of the Yoga Sutras and its commentaries. Laurie L. Patton is Professor of Early Indian Religions at Emory University and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities. She is the author of two books and twenty-five articles on early Indian myth and poetry, as well as a book of poetry, Fire’s Goal: Poems from a Hindu Year. She is presently completing a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Her current book project is a collection and analysis of a series of life histories of women Sanskritists in India. THE INDO-ARYAN CONTROVERSY Evidence and inference in Indian history Edited by Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 editorial matter and selection, Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L. Patton; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-64188-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-67837-0 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–700–71462–6 (hbk) ISBN 0–700–71463–4 (pbk) CONTENTS List of contributors vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 LAURIE L. PATTON PART I Archaeology 19 1 Culture change during the Late Harappan period at Harappa: new insights on Vedic Aryan issues 21 JONATHAN MARK KENOYER 2 Aryan invasion of India: perpetuation of a myth 50 B. B. LAL 3 South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions 75 JIM G. SHAFFER AND DIANE A. LICHTENSTEIN PART II Archaeology and linguistics 105 4 The cultural counterparts to Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic and Proto-Aryan: matching the dispersal and contact patterns in the linguistic and archaeological record 107 ASKO PARPOLA AND CHRISTIAN CARPELAN v CONTENTS 5 Archaeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians 142 CARL C. LAMBERG-KARLOVSKY PART III Philology and linguistics 179 6 The date of the Rigveda and the Aryan migration: fresh linguistic evidence 181 SATYA SWARUP MISRA 7 Linguistic aspects of the Aryan non-invasion theory 234 KOENRAAD ELST 8 Philology and the historical interpretation of the Vedic texts 282 HANS HENRICH HOCK 9 Vedic astronomy and early Indian chronology 309 SUBHASH KAK 10 The textual evidence: the Rigveda as a source of Indo-European history 332 SHRIKANT G. TALAGERI 11 Indocentrism: autochthonous visions of ancient India 341 MICHAEL WITZEL PART IV Historiography 405 12 Aryan origins: arguments from the nineteenth-century Maharashtra 407 MADHAV M. DESHPANDE 13 Aryan past and post-colonial present: the polemics and politics of indigenous Aryanism 434 LARS MARTIN FOSSE 14 Concluding remarks 468 EDWIN F. BRYANT Index 507 vi CONTRIBUTORS Edwin F. Bryant is Associate Professor of Hinduism at Rutgers University, where he teaches Hindu religion and philosophy. His publications include The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (2001). He is translator of Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God, Srimad Bhagavata Purana Book Ten (2004). He is also editor of Sources of the Krishna Tradition (in press) and with Maria Ekstrand, of The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (2004). Bryant is currently at work on a translation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and its commentaries. Christian Carpelan is Researcher at the Department of Archaeology at the University of Helsinki. His special field is archaeology of northern and east- ern Europe. He has presented papers on the early contacts between Uralic and Indo-European in a number of international settings. He is the co-editor (with Tony Hackens and Hagne Jungner) of Time and Environment: A PACT Seminar (1992) and Early Contacts Between Uralic and Indo-European: Archaeological and Linguistic Considerations (2001). Madhav M. Deshpande received his MA (1968) at the University of Pune in India and his PhD (1972) at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1972 he joined the University of Michigan where he is currently Professor of Sanskrit and Linguistics. He has published several books and hundreds of articles on Indo-Aryan and Paninian linguistics, religion, and philosophy. Koenraad Elst earned MA degrees in Philosophy, Chinese Studies and Indo- Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His PhD dissertation on Hindu nationalism, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, became a best-seller in India. Making his living mostly by journalism, he has been active as an independent scholar in the fields of comparative religion and philosophy and of the history of India. Among twenty published titles, most attention has been drawn by his Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate; Gandhi and Godse (a close discussion of the apology of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse); The Saffron Swastika: The Notion of “Hindu Fascism”; and Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple. vii CONTRIBUTORS Lars Martin Fosse is an independent scholar with a doctorate in Sanskrit. He has also studied Hindi and Middle Indic languages, as well as Greek and Latin, at the Universities of Oslo, Heidelberg, and Bonn. His research interests involve stylometry (statistical analysis of the language and style of Sanskrit texts) as well as Vedic and epic studies. In addition to authoring several articles in these areas, he has taught at the University of Oslo in Sanskrit, linguistic statistics, and Hinduism. Hans Henrich Hock is Professor of Linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Illinois Urbana. His research interests include Sanskrit linguistics, especially with an emphasis on phonology, syntax, and sociolinguistics. He has written extensively on historical Indo-Aryan linguistics and the Indo-Iranian and com- parative Indo-European backgrounds of Sanskrit. Among other works, he is the author of Principles of Historical Linguistics (1991), senior author (with Brian D. Joseph) of Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship (1996), Editor of Studies in Sanskrit Syntax (1991) and of Historical, Indo-European, and Lexicographical Studies: A Festschrift for Ladislav Zgusta on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday (1997). Subhash Kak is the Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor in the Asian Studies Program at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His research interests include foundations of physics and infor- mation, cognitive science, history of science, and Vedic studies. His recent books are The Astronomical Code of the Rgveda, The Wishing Tree, The Gods Within, and The Architecture of Knowledge. He has also published several books of poems.