“Indian culture being the greatest and richest is not a narrow or chauvinistic idea; it is a demonstrable fact. It would be chauvinistic if it acquir… - Shrikant G. Talageri

How does Witzel get a chronological order so completely different from our own (which is VI, III, VII, IV, II, V, VIII)?.. The answer is very simple: although Witzel postulates the establishment of a chronological grid “on the strength of a few pedigrees of chiefs and poets available from the hymns,” he does not establish any such grid.

Does it appear that the Rigveda could be the end-product of a long process of migration in which the Indoaryans not only lost contact with the other Indo-European branches countless generations earlier in extremely distant regions, and then migrated over long periods through different areas, and finally settled down for so long a period in the area of composition of the Rigveda that even Witzel admits that “in contrast to its close relatives in Iran (Avestan, Old Persian), Vedic Sanskrit is already an Indian language”; but in which the people who composed the Rigveda were in fact not the original Indoaryans at all, but a completely new set of people who bore no racial connections at all with the original Indoaryans, and were merely the last in a long line of racial groups in a “gradual and complex” process in which the Vedic language and culture was passed from one completely different racial group to another completely different racial group like a baton in an “Aryanising” relay race from South Russia to India?

To see some really “inconsistent statements” and “cavalier” establishment of “divisions” of the composer families of the RV, the reader should read Witzel’s 1995 papers, where Witzel shows himself to be completely and (as his present statements show) irretrievably lost at sea (see pp. 446-449 OF MY BOOK): there, at one point, he “wants to limit the clans involved in the composition of the Rgvedic hymns” to only three families, the Vishvamitras, the Atris and the Angirases (in the third of which, he includes all the other Rishis); and, at another point, his broom sweeps all the Rishis in Mandala 8 into two “divisions”, the Kanva and the Angiras. At another, he counts the Vishvamitras in the Bhrgu family, and then goes on (in the absence of even the faintest hint to this effect anywhere in the RV, or even in any subsequent text) to place Vishvamitra at the head of the coalition against Sudas in the Dasharajna battle (not to mention minor(?) slip-ups like treating the Shaunakas as non-Bhargavas, and Ghora as a son or descendant of Kanva)!