ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF VEDIC STUDIES (EJVS) Vol. 7 (2001), issue 2 (March 31) ========================================================================= (©) ISSN 1084-7561 CONTENTS EDITOR'S NOTE REVIEW ARTICLE (Saavadhaanapattra no. 2): Michael Witzel WESTWARD HO ! The Incredible Wanderlust of the Rgvedic Tribes Exposed by S. Talageri A Review of: Shrikant G. Talageri, The Rigveda. A historical analysis. ========================================================================= EDITOR'S NOTE In certain Internet circles, S. Talageri's The Rigveda. A historical analysis, is being lauded as "rational," "logical," "solid," "groundbreaking," and so on. Any new study of the Rgveda is welcome, since the impression is common that little historical information can be found in the oldest Indian text. I already emphasized this in articles published in 1989 and 1995, and the situation is still basically the same: No detailed study of the Rgvedic data has been published for a long time. Therefore, one might expect Talageri's 500-page book to be of great relevance for Vedic studies and for Indian history in general. Unfortunately, however, the attached review suggests that Talageri's "historical analysis" is far less significant than what is being claimed for it over the Internet. Let readers see for themselves! Perhaps one should not have been surprised by this conclusion. Talageri's most vocal supporters include the same people who ecstatically welcomed Rajaram and Jha's "definitive decipherment" of the Indus script and supposed discovery of a Harappan "horse seal" -- at least until those claims were demolished in two articles that Steve Farmer and I wrote for Frontline, with supporting contributions from Romila Thapar, Richard Meadow, Iravatham Mahadevan, and Asko Parpola (Frontline, Oct-Nov. 2000). After the Frontline articles went to press, public claims of Rajaram's Harappan "decipherment" and fraudulent "horse seal" rapidly disappeared. As Rajaram's star dimmed, however, renewed beating began of a much more ancient dead horse -- the Aryan Invasion Theory ("AIT") -- of which, 50 years after the theory's heyday, I am fantasized by Rajaram et al. as the archetypal Western champion. Early praisers of Talageri's book include many familiar characters: Perennial Out-of-India advocate K. Elst, the Pan-Austric proponent P. Manansala, and a list of Indian superpatriots (most choosing to live abroad!) well-known to those acquainted with the myriad Hindutva websites financed in the U.S. They shall remain unnamed here. In the last decade, this same group of people has regularly denounced a long string of academic Indologists -- any, in fact, who point out the obvious differences between scholarly research and nationalistic propaganda -- as "Eurocentric," "unscientific," "racist," or worse. These denunciations must be pointed out and characterized in detail. In my case, the personal attacks began a half decade ago with an anonymous "review" of a paper I published in 1995 on the formation of the Rgveda. The paper clashed in obvious ways with the Westward Ho! mentality of Out-of-India advocates like Rajaram and Talageri, who like to imagine India as the Mother Civilization. The attacks have increased since in intensity, reaching new heights following publication of the Frontline articles; those attacks are in many ways typified by a long and confused "analysis" in Talageri's book of my same 1995 paper. More violent polemics (but often written in amusing English) can be found directed against me now almost daily on the Internet. Recently I have been labeled "the High Priest on Divinity Avenue," seconded by my "alter boy" (sic!) S. Farmer -- whom N.S. Rajaram recently styles in the far-right Organiser as my "cohorts" in writing the Frontline articles. (For this political article, I assume, Rajaram was paid more than "one Rupees.") More recently, my patriot-expatriot critics have split me as well into multiple selves, referring to my solo review of M. Mishra, EJVS 7-1, as the work of "Witzel and co." (One Atmans, one wonders, or more?) Even more comic is N.S. Rajaram's delightful syncretic cartouche that pictures me as a "German Romantic Missionary Colonialist Racist Communist." The farce continues. S. Talageri, during Rajaram's recent "Naimisha Vedic Workshop," held in March 2001 at the Mythic Society, Bangalore, is reported to have angrily denounced me as a "Germo-centric Racist." (O grammatica, o mores!) More recent online demands call for a Big Brother operation to monitor what I teach in class. And still more recently, some have even tried to exert more direct pressure and have sought to denounce me with University authorities, badly misjudging the nature of unhindered academic research and of free speech in 'western' style societies. For their edification: Harvard's Motto is veritas, Latin for 'truth.' satyam eva! Such is the price paid by those who publicly criticize resurgent mythological trends in studies of ancient India -- criticisms that are equivalent to "denigrating Hinduism," according to of one of my patriotic-expatriate online critics. ("Hinduism," pray tell, in 2600 BCE or even 1200 BCE?) All this would be cause for no more than amusement, if such thinking were not doing so much damage to legitimate research involving ancient India -- and if the political motives underlying such fantasies were not so ugly. More on this as we continue. *** Between giving lectures in my recent month-long stay at the centuries-old College de France, in the thought-inspiring city of Paris, I found time to wade through Talageri's 544-page book systematically and to take some notes. Some of those notes are provided below. In the copious ones given here I deal only with the core of Talageri's book, found in chapters 1-5 (pp. 1-160), where he gives his views of the formation of the Rgveda. The rest of his book, including his angry assault on my 1995 paper, depends on the views found in these opening chapters, and can thankfully be passed over here. If needed, detailed analysis of those sections can be presented, at leisure, on some future occasion. I will refer here only summarily to those chapters, which repeat much that he already said in a much-criticized 1993 book. The new picture of Rgvedic history painted by Talageri may in one sense be "logical," as his supporters claim, but only if we accept the unreliable traditional sources, described below, that Talageri depends on in this book and its 1993 predecessor -- which tried to teach us that "India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages" and the Mother of All Civilizations. Talageri's current book is rich in similar fantasies but low on method and rigor, linguistic and historical knowledge, depending totally on Griffith's badly outdated English translation (1889) of the RV. A revolution in world history, based on a reinterpretation of the RV, written by someone incapable of reading the original text? Such absurdities are only possible in the current intellectual climate of some sections of Indian society. Similar fantasies show up in the works of other revisers of Indian history and/or Hindutva proponents -- by Danino, Elst, Feuerstein, Frawley (aka Vedacharya Vamadeva Shastri), Kak, Kalyanaraman, Klostermaier, Rajaram, Ushanas Richter, etc. The works of these writers, who imagine themselves at the vanguard of a vast "paradigm change" in history, will be be discussed in an EJVS article scheduled as the next issue. How many more failed attempts of a reconstruction of oldest Indian history will it take the internet Elsts, Kalyanaramans, Rajarams and Talageris to finally realize that all such Aryan fantasies are just that -- a patriotic or chauvinistic, ultimately pre-enlightenment enterprise, and not the so much hoped for "paradigm change"? A balanced account of ancient-most India can only emerge from a rigorous examination of ancient Vedic sources studied on their own terms and counterbalanced by other scientific evidence. Such an account cannot arise from analysis of the RV or related sources viewed through purANic filters, nationalistic or Hindutva myths, or 'popular' Victorian translations that are already over a century out of date. MW ============================================================================== © ISSN 1084-7561 REVIEW ARTICLE Michael Witzel Harvard University WESTWARD HO ! The Incredible Wanderlust of the Rgvedic Tribes Exposed by S.Talageri (Saavadhaanapattra no. 2) Review of: Shrikant G. Talageri, The Rigveda. A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000, pp. xxiv, 520. ISBN 81-7742-0s10-0. Rs. 750; http://voi.org/books/rig/ Any new study of the historical content of the Rgveda is very welcome since the impression is common that little historical information can be found in the oldest Indian texts (Witzel 1989, 1995, 1997). One could therefore hope that Talageri's 500-page discussion would be of great relevance for Vedic Studies and for Indian prehistory in general. Any fresh evaluation of the data and of previous conclusions (including those of the present writer) could be expected to further advance Vedic studies. It is with high hopes, thus, that one opens Talageri's long and diligent study. It is a great disappointment that any close review of Talageri's "historical analysis" refuses to yield positive results. What does Talageri (T.) want to achieve with this book? The study claims to present an unbiased, text-internal analysis of the historical data in India's oldest text. The book's claims are characterized by the blurb on the book's jacket (T.'s own words?), which accurately summarizes the tenor of the book. Talageri, we are told: "... has gone directly to the primary sources without any preconceived notions, and examined as well as analysed the available information with the help of traditional tools of interpretation. ... he has elaborated a historical analysis of the Rigveda on the basis of genealogies of composers of the hymns preserved in the anukramaNIs or indices of the Rigveda. The Rigveda consists of ten maNDalas, each representing a different era of history. The interrelations between composers within the hymns, the references to Kings and RSis, the family structure of the maNDalas, and system of ascription of hymns in the maNDalas, go to show that the serial order in which the maNDalas are arranged bears no relationship with their chronological order. As a first step, therefore, Talageri has established the internal chronology of the Rigveda by classifying the maNDalas as Early, Middle and Late. Next, he presents the geographical picture which emerges from the chronologically arranged maNDalas, particularly the evidence of river-names, place-names and animal-names. The combined evidence gives a single unanimous verdict -- the Indo-Aryans were inhabitants of the interior of India, and their direction of expansion was from the east to the west and the northwest. Finally, he ... concludes that it was the Indo-Aryans who migrated to all lands covered by speakers of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European languages..." Talageri sums up his views further in his Preface (p. xviii), where he ties the aims of this book closely to his 1993 study: "...the Vedic Aryans were the pUrus of traditional history. ... the Rigveda narrows down the identity of the particular Vedic Aryans of the Rigvedic period to a section from among the pUrus - the bharatas. This book ... shows that a detailed analysis of the Rigveda, far from weakening our [earlier 1993] theory, only makes it invincible." There is enough evidence even here to demonstrate the frustrating contradictions in Talageri's book. Thus after being told that he goes "directly to the primary sources without any preconceived notions," we find that Talageri's analysis is made "with the help of traditional tools of interpretation" like the anukramaNIs -- which (unknown to Talageri) have been recognized since the days of Macdonell (1886) at best as compositions of the late-Vedic period. (The text of the anukramaNIs that Talageri himself uses was actually redacted in the medieval period, as we will see infra!) Talageri's 1993 book was rightly criticized for its heavy dependence on traditional sources like the purANas. T. acknowledges that problem at the beginning of his new book (p. xvi) -- clearly suggesting that the same problem will not be found here -- only to tell us two pages later (xix) that his RV analysis depends on "indispensable and unassailable traditional information contained in certain basic texts" like the anukramaNIs, which reflect the same purANic ideas found in his 1993 book! (He also slips a lot of purANic materials in the backdoor in this work, as we shall see below.) Talageri's reliance on traditional, post-Rgvedic sources in interpreting the RV, despite his claims to the contrary, is only the first of the countless errors that doom his endeavor from the start. Below I discuss a small cross-section of those errors. I begin with a summary of the ten main sections in my critique. For resilient readers wishing more data, further evidence on each of these points is given in the main body of the critique, drawn quickly from the notes on Talageri's book that I made in Paris. CRITIQUE SUMMARY §1 Stratification of the Rgveda. In his book, Talageri develops a transparently false stratification of the 1028 hymns of the RV, contradicting well-known evidence by claiming that composition of each of the 10 maNDalas (including the so-called family books) originated in its own unique time period -- one succeeding the other in tidy historical steps as the Vedic tribes supposedly marched Westwards. (He makes an exception of maNDala 1, whose hymns he distributes to three different periods; his march Westwards also involves a specific rearrangement of the 10 books; for details, see the web chart at the link given in §6, below.) Talageri does not acknowledge known details involving the redaction history of the family books, each of which contains late as well as early hymns. Nor does he mention known complications in the codification of the RV ascribed to zAkalya, made sometime near the middle of the first millennium BCE. (These issues are discussed in extenso in Oldenberg 1888, whose general position has been accepted by every serious RV scholar ever since.) Leaving aside his citations of a handful of studies available in English, Talageri does not mention any of the vast scholarly literature from the past 150 years that discusses the redaction of the RV; nor does he know of Oldenberg. Ignorance may be bliss, but not when it comes to revolutionizing current views of India's oldest text -- and much of ancient Eurasian history to boot. §2 The anukramaNIs: Garbage in, Garbage out. As suggested earlier, in his "analysis" of the RV, Talageri depends heavily on the anukramaNIs -- late- and post-Vedic lists of RV poets (many of them clearly fictional), deities, and meters. These lists are closely related to other later and traditional sources, including the purANas. The most common versions of them, including the one used by Talageri, were still being revised in the early Middle Ages. Given Talageri's dependence on such sources, the venerable computer motto, "garbage in, garbage out," clearly applies to his book. Talageri begins his analysis with post-Rgvedic conceptions of RV chieftains, priests/poets, and the like, drawn from the anukramaNIs and (surreptitiously) the purANas. Not surprisingly, this leads him to propose views of the historical contents of the RV that themselves reflect post-Rgvedic traditions. T. not only seems oblivious to these facts, but is unaware as well that competing versions of the anukramaNIs exist. Indeed, he makes the startling claim at the beginning of his book (p. 7) that "the anukramaNIs were part and parcel of the Rigvedic text from the most ancient times" -- claiming further that these lists must lie at the grounds of any serious analysis of the text. Amateurish errors like this are compounded by the fact that the version of these lists that Talageri (unknowingly) depends on -- an early medieval redaction of late-Vedic kAtyAyana's sarvAnukramaNI -- views things from the East, which was a prime area of late Vedic ritual reform and canonization (see Witzel 1997). The result is that T.'s claim that early RV books originated in the East and later ones in the West -- the grounds of his imaginary Aryan march to the West -- is bolstered by his unsuspected dependence on post-RV Eastern sources. In short, Talageri's new book, like his old one, is a purANa-like fantasy, deriving from the same confusion of ancient and not-so-ancient sources that doomed his heavily criticized 1993 effort. §3 Victorian Sanskrit? At no point in Talageri's book do we find any suggestions that he has a genuine working knowledge of Sanskrit -- let alone of the obscure Old Vedic forms of the RV. As noted earlier, Talageri relies throughout on Griffith's outdated Victorian translation (1889), which even in its own day was aimed at a popular (and not scholarly) audience. The translation is also marred by its heavy dependence on sAyaNa's late-medieval scholastic commentary (cf. Griffith's preface to the first edition). Obviously anticipating heavy criticism for his dependence on Griffith, Talageri testily defends the accuracy of the translation, taking potshots at me in the process. He does not reveal what philological criteria he used in judging the translation, since it is clear from Sanskrit errors in the text (discussed infra) that he cannot read the original on his own. The RV is one of the most obscure and problematic ancient texts known. It is not too much to ask that those who claim to reinterpret it radically -- and to reinterpret much of world history along with it -- be capable of reading it in its original form. At a minimum, one would expect Talageri to consult one or more of the modern scholarly translations, accompanied by critical philological notes, produced in the 20th century by Geldner (German), Renou (French), or Elizarenkova (Russian). But Talageri, who cannot read any modern scholarly language besides English, does not leave a clue that he is aware that these works exist. §4 Failures in the 'Petty Conjectural Pseudo-Science' of Linguistics. Unlike his colleague and sometimes supporter, N.S. Rajaram, Talageri does not reject the results of what Rajaram styles "the petty conjectural pseudo-science" of linguistics. Indeed, the final chapters of Talageri's book haphazardly draw from a handful of linguistic works. Despite his scholarly pretensions, however, nothing in his book or its 1993 predecessor suggests that T. can claim anything approaching a serious grasp of the subject. His lack of philological knowledge deprives him of useful tools that he would need (if he could in fact read Old Vedic) in interpreting key items of pre-pANinean grammar and of disputed Rgvedic words. Proper use of linguistics would also have helped him harness his undisciplined etymologizing, which results in his countless false deductions concerning pre-RV history; on all these points, see below. §5 Trita's View From Inside the Well? Other Missing Sciences. Other humanistic and scientific fields critical to RV scholarship are neglected by Talageri as well, even though he has the rich resources of the Bombay University Library close at hand. Consulting a few standard scholarly resources would have saved T. from the myriad of factual errors that litter his book. Talageri demonstrates little knowledge of the realia of the RV period, displaying ignorance of the workings of tribal societies, early states, the habitat of the Gangetic dolphin, and many similar items noted in the following extended discussion. §6 Mythological Chronologies: RSis of the Kali Yuga? Due to the methodological problems noted above, one can hardly expect to find many reliable conclusions in Talageri's book. Some of his most ridiculous claims lie in his chronologies -- an old story to anyone acquainted with the works of other nationalistic "revisionist" historians. Talageri imagines that the whole of the RV took a minimum of 2000 years to compose, extending from roughly 3500-1500 BCE. (For an overview of Talageri's timeline, see the chart from his book, with critical notes by S. Farmer, posted at http://www.safarmer.com/pico/talageri.html). Talageri's impossible chronological ideas are tied to a number of obvious anachronisms. Thus in Talageri's historical fantasy we find purANa-inspired Eastern Rgvedic "dynasties" and "kingdoms" in the Gangetic Plain, which was inhabited at the time in question only by Neolithic hunter-gatherers and early chalcolithic farmers; we discover fast Rgvedic horses-and-chariots nearly two millennia before any reputable archaeologist would place them there; and so on. Again, all this is familiar territory for Indologists acquainted with the works of Frawley, Rajaram, Kak, Kalyanaraman, and so on. §7 Talageri's Geography: A Moveable Feast. Talageri's RV geography is similar skewed by purANa-inspired fictions. A combination of bad RV stratigraphy, ignorance of Old Vedic, a neglect of standard scholarly research, an inadequate grasp of South Asian zoological facts, and a naive confusion of mythological and historical RV references help Talageri deliver the desired locations, rivers, and peoples required in his imaginary march of Vedic tribes to the West. §8 Have Words, Will Travel! Free-form etymologizing worthy of the Indian nationalist P. N. Oak lets Talageri interpret the names of persons, tribes, and local animals as "Aryan" or "Eastern" (as his model requires) when the linguistic evidence points squarely elsewhere -- often to pre-Indo-Aryan substrates. Talageri's embarrassing lack of scholarly linguistic and philological skills leaves him oblivious to these errors, some of which I discuss below. §9 Westward Ho! Talageri the Patriot. The confidently asserted ("invincible") revolutionary conclusions that Talageri draws concerning the Westward drift of Vedic tribes -- which imagines them moving from the Gangetic Motherland into the Panjab, and from the Panjab to Iran and to Europe -- are familiar Hindutva fantasies. The expert knowledge of Old Vedic, Old Iranian, and other ancient Indo-European languages that would be needed to prove such surprising conclusions are not, as earlier suggested, the kinds of linguistic skills displayed in Talageri's work. Instead, he contents himself with citing a hodgepodge of linguistic facts (and fictions) -- often out of context -- from whatever studies in English happen to fall in his hands. All these are raised to back his fantastic claims that Vedic civilization was the "original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages" and ultimately of all Indo-European mythology and culture. This, of course, is an exact reverse of the long-accepted view, supported by over a century and a half of research, that an Indo-Aryan migration, whose specific nature is still being studied, took place into the subcontinent. No matter that T.'s revolutionary insights are contradicted by a myriad of well-known linguistic, zoological and archaeological data: Westward ho! All these fantasies are driven by the perceived need to prove the "hoariness" of ancient Bharata, supposedly represented by unbroken traditions reaching way back to pre-Harappan times -- that is to 7th millennium Baluchistan(!). This, of course, would make them the oldest traditions on the planet: The RV, as Talageri declares on p. xix, "is the oldest and hoariest religious text of the oldest living religion in the world today: Hinduism." Underlying these claims is the familiar Hindutva agenda that suggests that all non-Hindus are ultimately "foreign" peoples in India, and a blot on the body politic. bhArata ueber alles! In short, T.'s book is driven by current political realities in India and not by a l'art pour l'art search for truth. This standpoint is reinforced by the uniformly bellicose style of the book, which throughout illustrates some of the least attractive aspects of pANDita style. Talageri, like the medieval debater, is eager everywhere to score points for his thesis. Nowhere are obvious counter-arguments to his views seriously entertained. §10 Marching Backwards into History. As I emphasized in the paper that initially triggered Talageri's polemics (Witzel 1995), reconstruction of the historical data locked in the RV demands the systematic collection and analysis of many diverse types of data scattered in the text. One powerful way to promote this end is to generate multidimensional computational grids, analyzable through sophisticated software, of all useful data concerning poets, chieftains, geographical locations, linguistic and dialectical variants, meters, substrate words, grammatical innovations, linguistic archaisms, and so on, found in different strata of the work. Points of convergence, divergence, and overlap in these multidimensional RV "maps" suggest new and reliable ways to stratify the text and to uncover the historical data locked in it. Researchers from all over the world have been invited to join in perfecting these tools, which have already begun to throw new light on the early history of (Rg)Vedic peoples. Ironically, in his new book Talageri has adopted something crudely approximating the methods first suggested in my 1995 paper, though not using computer programs. But he has approached the job without the requisite language skills, scholarly acumen, or historical and political objectivity to do a credible job. Moreover, rather than basing his analysis strictly on RV data, as he pretends he does, his analysis repeatedly confuses late-Vedic redactions and interpretations with what is found in the original RV text. The result is that his book manages at best to reassert familiar Hindutva myths using obfuscating claims about "new" methods, all of which is, as expected, uniformly praised by the "usual suspects" active in the Hindutva Cottage Industry. The methodological and factual absurdities in Talageri's book will be obvious to any serious Vedic scholar once he or she tediously identifies the late- and post-Vedic origins or the data populating the morass of unverified charts and lists dotting the book. It will not at all be obvious to less specialized readers, including the Indian lay persons constituting Talageri's main audience. On this point, Talageri's book and the writings of other rightwing Indian propagandists like Rajaram perfectly coincide. Serious attempts to understand ancient Indian history are unncessarily but tediously diverted by the intellectual detours we are sent on in books like Talageri's. Solid reconstruction of the history hidden in the RV demands linguistic rigor, independence from purANic-like worldviews, and above all a kind of political integrity not evident anywhere in Talageri's book. DETAILED DISCUSSION (continued with 2 more parts) ======================================================== Michael Witzel Department of Sanskrit & Indian Studies, Harvard University 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge MA 02138, USA ph. 1- 617-496 2990 (also messages) home page: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm Elect. Journ. of Vedic Studies: http://www1.shore.net/~india/ejvs