Many Indian archaeologists have abandoned the AIT and turned against it because after 150 years of being the official and well-funded theory it has s… - Koenraad Elst

In its early years, at the dawn of the Ṛg-Veda, the fledgling Vedic tradition was limited to king Bharata's Paurava tribe (descendents of Purū, himself a scion of the Lunar Dynasty) in northern Haryana, between the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī rivers. It is at his Court that priest Bharadvāja composed the first Vedic hymns. The Pauravas called the region "Ilā's footstep" (after the Lunar dynasty's foremother Ilā, daughter of patriarch Manu Vaivasvata), "the navel of the world", and "the best place on earth", true to people's universal attachment to their motherland. But compared to present-day India, it was an insignificant statelet. In its smallness it was perhaps best comparable to my own country, Belgium. But that was only the beginning. Some of Bharata's successor-kings, like Divodāsa and Sudās, conquered territory around this core area and ultimately made the Bhārata (i.e. belonging to king Bharata) territory as large as Northwestern India: from western Uttar Pradesh to the Afghan border. Sometimes even beyond, so as to include the Afghan region of Kambuja (the region from where the Vedic people imported their horses), though its population was mostly Iranian.

After the historians’ interference, the Indian mainstream politicians did not dare to go against the judgment of these authorities. The international media and India-watchers were also taken in and shared their hatred of these ugly Hindu history-falsifiers. Only, the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 have fully vindicated the old consensus: temple remains were found underneath the mosque. Moreover, the eminences asked to witness in Court had to confess their incompetence one after another (as documented by Meenakshi Jain: Rama and Ayodhya, 2013): one had never been to the site, the next one had never studied any archaeology, a third had only fallen in line with some hearsay, etc. Abroad this news has hardly been reported, and experts who know it make sure that no conclusions are drawn from it. After the false and disproven narrative of the eminent historians has reigned supreme for two decades, no one has yet bothered to demythologize their undeserved authority.

Wendy Doniger’s conception of Hinduism deserves a more thorough treatment, much of which has already been pioneered by Rajiv Malhotra. But one general observation, which counts for the whole current of psycho-analytical “deconstruction” of Hinduism, is that the clumsy Freudian concepts she uses are simply not sufficient to understand Hindu explorations of consciousness and human nature. I once heard an Indian psychologist who had guzzled down big doses of this psycho-analytical framework, pontificate that a Guru is followed because he is a “father figure”. You could see him savour this expression, as if he considered what he had said as very profound. Well, there are many types of father figure, but only few have the specific qualities needed to be a Guru; and psycho-analysis has never been able to turn anyone into a Guru in the Hindu sense. The smaller cannot contain the greater.