Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia

goethean Says: June 18th, 2007 at 12:10 pm Incidentally, I recently attended a lecture by Wendy Doniger. She was asked about the asceticism and sensuality in Hindu culture and she said that it’s been a tension throughout Indian history, referring to Gandhi’s asceticism and the Upanishads on the one hand and the sculptures of Khajuraho on the other. She didn’t connect this with the North/South or Sanskrit/Dravidian division or with the Aryan migration.
Your account seems to be imputing everying admirable to the indigenous people and everything unfortunate to the late-comers (or nearly so), which strikes me as unlikely to turn out to be accurate when more evidence is in. History is rarely so black and white.
Aurobindo rejected the notion of an Aryan invasion or migration, right? And Georg Feuerstein believes that the Aryans refer to upper-class people of the same ethnic mix as the non-Aryans.
ray harris Says: June 19th, 2007 at 12:55 am Hi Goethean, I don’t mean to suggest it is B&W at all. Re the Aryan invasion. The reason that it is thought that the Aryans migrated was because of their influence outside India, notably Iran. If the Aryans were indigenous to India then how to explain Iran and the linguistic links to European languages, as well as the existance of Dravidian languages in the south of India?
goethean Says: June 19th, 2007 at 7:15 am If the Aryans were indigenous to India then how to explain Iran and the linguistic links to European languages, as well as the existance of Dravidian languages in the south of India?
Some Hindutva 'scholars’ claim that India is the original IE homeland (the “Out of India” theory), but that is a bit wacko. Feuerstein etc. believe that a migration to India occured before the Indus Valley Civilization. “the Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia, deriving their Sanskritic language from earlier Indo-European dialects.”
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