Other scholars, when they deign to notice the evidence in the PurANas in respect of the indigenous origin of the Aryans and their expansion outside I… - Shrikant G. Talageri

"Muslims and Christians are not 'foreigners' in India. Muslim and Christian fundamentalists may identify wholly with their foreign brethren, and some Muslims may even gloat at the idea that they are the descendants of Islamic heroes who 'conquered and ruled' a land teeming with kāfirs, but the fact remains that they are all Indians as much as the Hindus (including the 'Aryans'). At a certain point of time, their ancestors were the more helpless among the Hindus who were forcibly converted to Islam. […] in historic times there were invasions of India by Persians, Greeks, Scythians, Kushans and Huns. Many of the invaders stayed in India and got integrated into the population. Today some anthropologist may manage to dig out material and claim that some community or other constitutes the descendants of one or the other of those invaders. But who would treat such a claim, even if it were proved beyond doubt, as the basis for branding that community as a 'foreign' community? […] every single foreign community entering India, right from ancient times, has been completely absorbed into the Indian identity […] and according to the Aryan invasion theory itself, this happened in the case of the 'Aryans' as well […] Hindu nationalism has nothing to do with the childish, petty and ridiculous idea of dividing Indians into 'outsiders' and 'insiders' on the basis of whether or not their ancestors, actually or supposedly, came from outside." (TALAGERI 1993:46-47).

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?

(Witzel's) review should logically have consisted of two parts: 1. A rebuttal of chapter 9 of my book (my critique of WITZEL 1995a, 1995b)... This chapter of my book shows Professor Witzel inventing evidence, suppressing inconvenient data, following an inconsistent methodology, retrofitting data into pre-conceived notions, contradicting himself again and again, and using misleading language. 2. A review of my own theory and conclusions.