In these circumstances, writers, particularly Indian ones, who stake claims for India only arouse his contempt. By and large, he would prefer to igno… - Shrikant G. Talageri

“The earliest form of Indo-European speech (proto-proto-Indo-European) was spoken in the interior of India, and in late prehistoric times, it spread out as far north and west as Kashmir and Afghanistan” (TALAGERI 1993:229). It developed into different dialects or languages, of which the outermost ones (i.e. the dialects of the Druhyu and Anu) “spread out of India into Europe, West Asia and Chinese Turkestan […] The modern Indo-Aryan languages are not descendants of the Rigvedic dialects [i.e. the Pūru dialects], but of other dialects which were contemporaneous with the Rigvedic dialects [i.e. the dialects of the Ikṣvāku, Yadu, Turvasu, etc.], but which belonged to a different section of Indo-European speech (the Inner Indo-European section) […] The Vedic dialects remained the vehicles of the Vedic literature that followed the Rigvcda; but soon the ‘Classical Sanskrit’ language was artificially created by the ancient Indian grammarians (Panini was preceded by hundreds of other linguists and grammarians, many of whom are named by him in his Ashtadhyayi) in order to achieve a refined via-medium between the Vedic language and the Inner Indo-European dialects (which had developed conjointly with the Dravidian languages over the course of millenniums, and were therefore structurally different from Vedic, and also had their own roots and words). Later, the ‘Prakrits’ (which were also not fully natural forms of speech, but which successively approximated, to a greater and greater degree, the Inner dialects) came into vogue. Finally, the Inner dialects came into their own in the form of the ‘New Indo-Aryan’ languages, as heavily Sanskritised as the Dravidian languages. During the course of the millenniums, up to the present day, the various ‘Indo-Aryan’ […] dialects and languages influenced each other in innumerable ways, too complicated to be analysed here” (TALAGERI 1993:230).

MaNDala III mentions KIkaTa in Bihar, the easternmost location named in the Rigveda. Witzel, naturally, finds such an eastern location difficult to swallow, and asserts that the KIkaTas are “still frequently misplaced in Magadha (McDonell and Keith, 1912, Schwartzberg, 1975) even though their territory is clearly described as being to the south of KurukSetra, in eastern Rajasthan or western Madhya Pradesh, and Magadha is beyond the geographical horizon of the Rigveda.”... Here, incidentally, Witzel indulges not just in manipulation, but in outright misrepresentation: nowhere are the KIkaTas described, clearly or otherwise, as being to the south of KurukSetra.

But Witzel, desperate to send my present book hurtling to its “doom” (to the fate he fondly and wishfully assumes overtook my “heavily criticized earlier effort”) finds a persistent “purANic mindset” in my book which reminds him of “the popular comic books, Amar Chitra Katha” (§8)! Well, we find a Biblical mindset in his depiction of Vasistha (Moses) leading an exodus of the Bharatas (Jews) from Iran (Egypt), across the mountains of Afghanistan (Sinai), and finally entering, occupying and transforming the face of the Punjab (Palestine).