Nikos Kazanas Quotes

So sarcasm should be aimed at in that direction also - unless W practises discriminatory self-restraint... the isoglosses - an area full of quick-sand uncertainties.

Frankly, his strident obsession with New-Age/Hindutva/Right-wing recalls right-winger MacCarthy who thought he saw in every closet conspiring communists, or left-winger Stalin hounding Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, revisionists and other “enemies of the State”.

This, then, is the basis for the mainstream chronology of ancient Indian literature and the AIT. It is not based on linguistic evidence as is generally and vaguely but vociferously claimed but on a ghost story composed 2500 years after the alleged Aryan invasion (which initially was Egyptian and Mesopotamian) and on a Christian ecclesiastic myth: in other words, on two fictions!

I find it very difficult to think that I am dealing with a science fully grounded in the realities of language as we ordinarily know and use it. All these specialized terms, the artificial models, the reconstructions that exist in no known texts and cannot be verified and the endless hypotheses — they all seem to belong to a world of airy-fairy speculation.

M. Witzel attacked several scholars who since the early 1990s manifested support for the Indian Indigenous Origin (IIO hereafter); amid various criticisms he used the term “revisionists”, ignoring obviously that in the early 19th century many European scholars took India, on the strength of Sanskrit, to be the original homeland... The term “revisonist” is therefore inapplicable. Witzel ignores also that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system...

Why does he attack this group of Indians and allies himself to a group of marxists, like the editors of Frontline? A Professor of his standing ought to be publishing his scholarly papers in the most prestigious academic Journals (like ABORI), not lend status to such popular magazines. Marxists of this sort have caused untold damage to every country – whether they usurped power (as in Czechoslovakia) or failed to do so (as in Greece).

Such were the motives of the mainstream pundits who were also pillars of the Church: to preserve their own power. Why today all this feverish fight against the indigenists? I don’t believe it is racist as many Indians think, nor any noble motive to keep Indological studies “scholarly”as W claims, though neither need be ruled out altogether. I think it is mainly the most shameful of all motives – to be on top and keep control of others. As soon as a Head of Dept or Professor feels strong (and rich) enough, they launch a Journal (with other people’s money) to promote their own pet theories, acquire kudos, confound opposition and control thinking thus perpetuating their own power and all the advantages this entails. And to this referred E Leach in a quotation I gave fully in AS ¨ 19, very end, which W presented in a truncated form omitting the sentences saying that IE scholars did not scrap their theories because “vested interests and academic posts were involved”. I added “They still are”. And W ought to know because like Leach he has been up to his ears in the game for many years. (Sweeping the dirt under the doormat will not make it disappear.)

But what of the Iranian name Haraxvaiti? This name appears in the first chapter of the Vidēvdād along with placenames Haetumant (=Helmand), Māuru or Margu (= Margiana), Bāxδī or dhri (=Bactria) etc and, of course, Haptahǝndu. Haraxvaiti means simply ‘one who has harah-’. But Harah̦ - or Harax- is a stem entirely isolated in Avestan: it has no cognates, no other related lexemes.... But nothing, not one cognate, in Avestan other than the lonely and pitiful *harah̦ -! Observe now two absurdities implicit in the Doctrine. The Iranians who stayed put in Iran lost their own root *har/*hǝrᵊ- or whatever and all derivatives, while the IAs who moved further away retained this thoroughbred IE root and all its ramifications. And then they gave the name Sarasvatī (with the change of ha > sa) not to a large river like the Indus but to a dried-up stream in memory of the Haraxvaiti in Arachosia!

Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system of Ptolemy (which held sway for some 1500 years) and, against an oppressive and repressive mainstream opinion (and officialdom), reinstated—with improvements—the heliocentric system of Aristarchos of Samos (3rd cent BCE).

That most mainstream philologists will react unfavourably to this thesis I take for granted. I know well in myself the force of habit and of attachment to deep-rooted notions that reacts more through emotional outbursts than cool rationality. I repeat that the issue of origins, of when and how, is one not for philologists but for archaeologists and experts in related fields. We owe it, other than to the peoples of India who, I think, have long been wronged (by their own faults no less than foreign influences), to truth itself, which is the primary concern of all of us, to consider this thesis without prejudice.

In this study Witzel talks of a peaceful immigration but also uses the terms "battles" and "campaigns" (324), "initial conquest" (326) and "frequent warfare" (339) thus indicating that beneath the lipservice to "migration" (which became fashionable) lurks the notion of invasion.

Rather, the Iranians left the region of the 7 rivers and held the name in their memory. Something very similar happens with the V river-name Sarasvat/ and Av Harahvaiti-. Avestan has no other cogn with harah- whereas S has sr > sarati/sisarti, sarana, saras, sarit, etc, etc and of course cognates are found in other IE branches: here again it is the Iranians that took with them the memory of the Indic river and gave it to a river in their new habitat... Moreover, Vedic retains the PIE s but this becomes h in Avestan. All this actual linguistic evidence and the conclusion it forces upon us has some archaeological/geographical support. G Gnoli, who is a normal AIT adherent and by no means an indigenist, showed very clearly that the early portions of the Avesta hardly know northern and western Iran and he analyses migrations there from south to north and east to west but not north- west down to south-east (1980). Thus while the conjectural Indo-Iranian movement south-eastward contains many anomalies, the Iranian movement from Saptasindhu north-westward accommodates all facts.

How did the Indoaryans manage to maintain an oral tradition of such quality that their culture retained more cultural elements (eg names of deities) and many more lexical items (and grammatical features as any text on IE philology testifies? The only explanation I can think of regarding the superiority in retentions of Sanskrit is that the Indoaryans moved very little or not at all.

The odd thing about this story is that the heliocentric view was known in Europe long before Copernicus but, for various reasons, was totally ignored by the "established" dogma... All this time all kinds of absurdities were written about the heavens, the celestial spheres, the Empyrean and so on, which constituted the “established” view. And all the time the real knowledge was there and all those schoolmen, could, with some practical observation and sensible application of Mathematics, have found out that the Ptolemaic system was not true. But they did not: they preferred to argue about such weighty matters as how many angles could sit on the point of a pin. And when the proofs were presented to them in black and white, hard and irrefutable mathematical demonstrations, they still rejected them preferring the comforts of the ‘‘established” dogma. Theology (and Church interests) decided what was acceptable, not Mathematics.

Subsequently I taught the AIT with the South Russian Steppe as the locus of dispersal of the Indo-Europeans (IE hereafter) for 18 years and I wrote a Course of Sanskrit (in Md Greek) in which I actually concocted fictitious passages about the Aryans invading with chariots and subduing the natives who thought it prudent to accept them and cooperate! In 1987, I began to wonder about the AIT. In the same year I went to India and collected much material which took a few years to sort out and digest, since I had little acquaintance with Indian archaeology and early history. What became abundantly clear in the early 1990s (and filled me with incredulity) was the fact that there was no evidence whatever for any invasion (which by that time was becoming “migration”).