Aryan invasion etc.

An Interview With Koenraad Elst By Dr. Ramesh Rao

[The interview first appeared in sulekha.com on 19 August 2002]

I’ve always disliked Sri Aurobindo’s symbolic interpretation of the Vedas, and he was an AIT critic but now the same stratospheric approach is taken by the AIT defenders! At any rate, people can only think up a metaphorical ocean after they have seen the real thing, so either way the Vedic people were not cowherds belonging to a landlocked Central-Asian habitat. In my reading, the Vedas contain plenty of down-to-earth historical information, and it includes familiarity with seafaring as well as a movement from India to Afghanistan, not the reverse. That information obviously argues against the AIT, but not definitively: it could still be compatible with an Aryan invasion at an earlier date, or perhaps another as yet unsuspected scenario. From the beginning, I have been puzzled by the immense certainty on both sides of the debate. To me, it’s an open-ended search...

In my book Gandhi and Godse, I have shown how most of the arguments against Gandhi given by Godse in his speech in court were in fact very common in his day. Gandhi’s erratic policies were criticized by his contemporaries like Annie Besant, Sri Aurobindo, Bhimrao Ambedkar, and many others. And none of them went out to kill Gandhi, so there is nothing murderous about these arguments per se. They correctly predicted that under his irrational leadership, the strategy of mass mobilization and “non-violence” would yield very bitter fruits, as it did during the Khilafat riots circa 1922 and again during the Partition. Indologists like Alain Daniélou and historians like Paul Johnson have also demythologized the Mahatma. One of the perverse effects of the murder was precisely that in India this criticism of Gandhi suddenly became taboo, and that the myth of his centrality in the achievement of independence became unassailable.