Edmund Leach Quotes

The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework. Just as each member of the total family of Indo-European languages is lineally descended from one or another of a number of extinct “protolanguages,” so also are the speakers of these languages; hence the people who speak any particular language constitute an independent racial stock.

Yet here is precisely where anthropologists might make a useful contribution, if only their scholarly associates would stop thinking of the Rig Veda as a garbled history book.

The history of European colonialism covers many centuries and takes diverse forms, but whereas the European explorers and conquerors of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania usually took it for granted that the local inhabitants could be enslaved or butchered or driven into the hinterland at the whim of the invaders, the literate nations of Asia were initially treated as peoples toward whom the courtesies of European diplomacy should be applied. At the end of the day these Asian civilizations were likewise mostly subdued by force of arms, but such conquest needed some kind of moral justification, a mythical charter. The Rig Veda as interpreted by Max Müller and his contemporaries provided just such a myth.

Time, as we experience it, is continuous; it contains no discrete “events.” The events are put there by reflection on the past. As the past becomes more remote the remembered events become fewer in num­ ber and more limited in kind. It is for psychologists to say just why we remember this and forget that, but at the end of the day, the remembered past reflects our interests. It makes us what we are now.

In other words, the prominent place given to horses and chariots in the Rig Veda can tell us virtually nothing that might distinguish any real society for which the Rig Veda might provide a partial cosmology. If anything, it suggests that in the real society (as opposed to its mythological counterpart), horses and chariots were a rarity, ownership of which was a mark of aristocratic or kingly distinction.

...nothing in the archeological record suggests that the Ganges plain society was radically discontinuous from its Indus predecessor. Nor is there any independent archeological evidence for a massive intrusion of foreigners from the northwest. The suggestion in parts of the recent archeological literature that such evidence does exist is quite misleading. The “Painted Grey Ware Culture” of these writers would never have been interpreted as such if they had not started out by treating the Rig Veda as a history book.

Records are preserved because they provide a charter for what historians believe about the present. Different historians may believe different things, and the records are interpreted (and modified) accordingly.