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 … - Nikos Kazanas

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”).

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!

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.