Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should ha… - Edmund Leach
" "Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda , who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization who were destined to subordination because of their dark skins. The Aryan invaders could still be considered the originators of Indian civilization because they wiped out by fire and slaughter whatever was there before.
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About Edmund Leach
Sir Edmund Ronald Leach, FRAI FBA (7 November 1910 – 6 January 1989) was a British social anthropologist and academic. He served as provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966 to 1979. He was also president of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 1971 to 1975.
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Edmund Ronald Leach
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E. R. Leach
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Additional quotes by Edmund Leach
In a 1967 article, “Virgin Birth,” Leach astutely foreshadowed the reflexivity of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, calling attention to the fact that anthropologists call their own practice religion but assert that other peoples practice magic. In the present volume he presents the dramatic case of the fabrication of the Aryan invasion, which shows how profoundly the seemingly objective academic endeavors are af fected by the mentalité of the culture to which they belong. Leach de scribes how cherished but erroneous assumptions in linguistics and anthropology were accepted without question. If the mentalité of the academic culture was in part responsible for the fabrication, geo politics was even more responsible for upholding the Aryan invasion as history. The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization needed a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial ex pansion. Convenient, if not consciously acknowledged, was the Aryan invasion by a fair-skinned people, speaking the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, militarily conquering the dark- skinned, peasant Dasa (Dasyu), who spoke a non-European language and with whom the conquerors lived, as Leach puts it, in a “system of sexual apartheid.” The first civilization in India, thus, was built by the Aryan invaders. A remarkable case of Orientalism indeed.
It had the following form: Away back, long before the dawn of true history, Aryan invaders (who spoke a proto-European language and were therefore close kin to the Greeks, Romans, and Persians, who were the acknowledged founders of European civilization) had brought the first civilization to India, establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy among a population of barbarian serfs. They followed the precepts of a morally pure religious system, “The Vedic Religion,” which was very different from “the modem Brahmanic religion, as founded in the Puranas and Tantras, [which] consists in a belief in Vishnu, Siva and Brahma, and manifests itself in the worship of the most hideous idols”. After many centuries, during which the high culture of these original Aryans gradually decayed into gross immorality and superstition, a new wave of Indo-Europeans was now repeating the process. Once again the conquerors were establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy under the banner of a morally pure religion (Christianity).
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