Why Linguistics necessarily holds the key to the solution of the Indo-European Homeland question

Why Linguistics necessarily holds the key to the solution of the Indo-European Homeland question Dr. Koenraad Elst (read at the Saraswati Conference, hosted by the Draupadi Foundation at the India International Centre, Delhi, 26-28 March 2015) Among the many controversies in Indian history, the most consequential one, head and shoulders above all others, pertains to the officially sanctioned Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). This hypothesis posits a Homeland of the Indo-European (IE) language family outside India, necessitating an invasion to explain the presence of its Indo-Aryan branch inside India. In India, though so far rarely outside of it, this hypothesis is challenged by the rival Out-of-India Theory (OIT), which posits India itself as the Homeland. This is less the consequence of the enormously important and many-sided political abuses of the AIT, than of archaeological, genetical and textual findings. These prove to be unanimously in favour of India as Homeland, as well as fast accumulating in number. We make bold that the body of evidence is now mature enough to warrant a definitive conclusion. It could still use a little breakthrough in the fields of Linguistics and Comparative Mythology, both mostly amounting to a collation of research data already available, and then thinking their implications through. These two fields are still used to prop up the belief in a more westerly Homeland, but as we shall see, their principal conclusions are based on unwarranted or circular deductions. Upon closer inspection, the data are all compatible with an Out-of-India scenario, while a few of them cannot be reconciled with an Aryan Invasion. 1 Clearing the deadwood Unfortunately, the very promising case for the OIT has been given a bad reputation by Indian polemicists. While some AIT champions have indulged in far-fetched theorizing (see Talageri 2008:xxxiii-xxxiv), in scatology (see Talageri 2014), in bluff that has to paper over contradictions (see Talageri 2008:296, Elst 2007/2:147-167), in false allegations (what else to call e.g. the unsubstantiated accusation of “manipulations” in Sergent 1997:477 against “New Archaeologist” and invasion skeptic Jim Shaffer, also contrivedly accused of displaying a political agenda by Pradhan 2014:55?) and arguably even in fraud (see Talageri 2000:425- 476), most bystanders in the scholarly community nonetheless stand by them and have been warned off the OIT case by the uncouth and ignorant behaviour of some pro-OIT debaters, as well as by the far-fetched chronological claims made by related "history-rewriters". Contrary to the hare-brained conspiracy theories of back-biting “internet Hindus” who think that the whole world has it in for India, and that it has therefore “concocted” the AIT, that “monstrous lie”, most people including most Indo-Europeanists don't care one way or the other. They would be open to the OIT if only it was presented to them is a sober and scholarly manner. Even the distortive effect of political strings negatively affecting anyone seen in the same camp as the Hindu activists, is not absolute, nor will it last forever. It remains possible that during our research, facts will be discovered that somehow confirm the AIT anyway. That is the risk every researcher takes: he may find something else to be true than his original hypothesis. However, so far we have only been waiting for this evidence, as all recent discoveries have been pointing in the opposite sense. At a conference where India’s top archaeologists announce one after another that the excavations in the sites where they work, keep on throwing up more evidence of continuity and a glaring absence of signs of an invasion, is can safely be said that the existing invasionist hypothesis has been rendered highly improbable. But still, the outcome is uncertain till the end. This might disappoint hot- blooded polemicists, but such is the way of scholarship. However, my wager now is that a breakthrough to acceptance of the OIT is around the corner if only the correct scholarly argumentation is put forward. 2 Motives don’t matter Enough books have been written to at least provoke a debate, yet in the establishment of IE Studies the reaction has been one of disinterest and skepticism, not of engaging with its opposition. At this conference, both in the papers presented and in informal talks with the participants, I find a solid consensus that the Harappan civilization was Vedic and that there was no Aryan invasion; but at recent conferences I attended in 2013 in Leiden, Münster, Louvain-la-Neuve and Leipzig, I found that most participants were not even aware of India’s Homeland candidacy, or if they were, that they had their reasons (of which a thorough familiarity with the OIT argumentation was not one) to take it less than seriously. The stalemate in the Aryan debate is due to the unquestioning acceptance of one framework deemed above controversy, when in fact it is perfectly susceptible to questioning. This strong consensus around a more westerly Homeland, in spite of the counterarguments expressed by archaeologists and geneticists, is due to two reasons: the gap between Linguistics and the disciplines pleading in favour of a westerly Homeland; and the belief that the OIT is merely an expression of Hindu Nationalist fervour, without scholarly merit. Allow me to give three examples of the rock-solid complacency we are up against. Firstly, in Louvain-la-Neuve, September 2013, the well-known philologist Bernard Sergent, author of the influential invasionist book Genèse de l’Inde (“India’s Genesis”, excelling mainly in Comparative Mythology, hazarding a comparison with African and Southeast-Asian data), received an award and on that occasion gave a speech in which he mentioned having read a review of Michel Danino’s non-invasionist book The Lost River. He added laughingly that he would not bother to read the book itself, as “it is obviously untrue”. This was but an instance of a very general phenomenon: those who are at all aware of the OIT, look so steeply down on it that they don’t care even to inform themselves of it. Secondly, after Shrikant Talageri’s book The Rigveda and the Avesta: the Final Evidence came out, I personally handed review copies to three leading scholars in the field, who promised a review. None of them kept his promise, and when pressed to explain themselves, they cited their unfamiliarity with Talageri’s unexpected line of argumentation, and one of them was honest enough to add the expectation that an acknowledgement of Talageri’s arguments’ validity would hurt his standing among his peers. He was in no mind to be lampooned as a “believer” in the OIT. Thirdly, a publicly verifiable case concerning Talageri is his conflict with Hans Heinrich Hock. And mind you, Hock is not a proverbial hate figure for Hindu non-invasionists like Michael Witzel is. In the past, he has shown a great willingness to address the OIT on merit (e.g. Hock 1999/1) and to share specific viewpoints with the Indian non-invasionists, e.g. by explaining away the use of colour symbolism in the RṚg-Veda, which in the heyday of the race theories was falsely read as descriptions of skin colour (Hock 1999/2). In particular, he has mustered his knowledge of the isoglosses, i.e. the changes commonly affecting some IE member languages but not others, indicating that the affected languages have gone through a common development after the dispersal of the common ancestor language. In his opinion, the pattern of isoglosses is incompatible with the distribution of languages necessitated by an Indian homeland (Hock 1999/1:13-17). Talageri has responded to this argument at length (Talageri 2000:266-282, 2008:205-236), as have Kazanas (2013:110-163) and Elst (2007/2:29-35). For a man of Hock’s stature, it would have been fitting to pursue the linguistic debate at the scholarly level and sharpened his arguments – or retracted them. Instead, years after Talageri’s challenge, Hock’s website published an attack on Talageri’s bona fides (Hock 2013, response by Talageri 2014), using his alleged Hindu Nationalist affiliations to dispense with a refutation of his linguistic arguments. Yet, more than most, a scholar of his calibre ought to know that political or any other motives, if at all present, make no difference to the validity of one’s argumentation. People sometimes speak the truth for the wrong reasons, but it is still the truth. However, the AIT establishment uses these political allegations as a pretext for stonewalling the OIT argumentation. A really bad case of stonewalling, to finish my examples, is the recent Indian book The Elusive Aryans by Pradhan S.V. It is very well-informed about IE linguistics and the Homeland question, and gives plenty of references, exact quotes and sensible etymologies (quite unlike the cranky etymologies by P.N. Oak popular among Indian history-rewriters, see Elst 2012:204-213). It also correctly identifies the Dāsa enemies mentioned in many hymns of the RṚg-Veda as Iranians, fellow IE-speakers, rather than the “non-IE aboriginals” so popular in the AIT. Yet, he writes with full allegiance to the AIT, acts as if it is essentially unchallenged, doesn’t deal with the AIT and (except for Jim Shaffer, who is too much part of the academic circuit to ignore) doesn’t mention any OIT author in his bibliography. Sometimes, a reason for the stonewalling is given in a few words. Thus, the anti-invasionist case put forward by the archaeologists like B.B. Lal and the late S.P. Gupta has often been dismissed without further ado “because they are, not coincidentally, the same ones who claim to have discovered pillar-bases underneath the Babri mosque in Ayodhya and thus supported the Hindu claim to the site”. Of course, this finding on Hindu-Muslim relations in medieval history wouldn’t make any difference to their case on the Aryan question in ancient history, at least not to scientists. But in this case there is an even more pertinent fact: the finding of the pillar-bases, ridiculed by self-appointed “experts” and their foreign dupes, has been confirmed. Both the Archaeological Survey of India and the Allahabad High Court have, after gathering solid evidence during thorough excavations as well as questioning many “experts” (whose performance under oath was extremely embarrassing, undercutting whatever credibility they had been credited with, see Jain 2013:201-273), ruled that there had indeed been a Hindu temple until it was demolished and its foundation (“pillar-bases”) reused to underpin a mosque. These archaeologists were lambasted worldwide for upholding a case that has ultimately been proven correct. On the Aryan question too, they may well end up being proven correct. Conversely, the anti-Hindu academics worldwide who parroted the “experts” and expressed seething (though borrowed) hatred for the temple party, have been shown to have been babes in the wood, led by the nose by political agitators using the aura of the academic positions they had cornered to promote a very artificial lie, launched in the late 1980s against what had been a consensus about a pre-existing temple among all concerned parties. (see Elst 2011) On the Aryan question too, they might end up finding that they had safely chosen the side of a dominant opinion fated to be proven wrong. The stonewalling of the other side’s arguments is now the major problem in the Homeland debate. When rereading all the evidence that has already been compiled by AIT-skeptical writers, I still wouldn’t ask AIT believers to just capitulate, but I am forced to wonder about their scientific temper if they don’t at least feel challenged to study the anti-AIT case in more detail. On the other hand, the pro-OIT side has done its own bit by demonizing or just ignoring the linguistic evidence, the mainstay of the pro-AIT case. From the viewpoint of the researcher, the Homeland is contingent. It is an open question, and it is simply a factual mistake to pretend that it has been settled. The methodological finesse here mostly lies in knowing, and keeping in mind every step of the way, what to avoid. Whenever the Homeland is being debated, we find a lot of circular reasoning, petitio principii, and of jumping to conclusions, on both sides. (Thus, Elena Kuzmina’s bulky and influential book with the promising title The Origin of the Indo-Iranians deals exhaustively with the Russian and Central-Asian cultures, but merely labels them “the origin of the Indo-Iranians” without really proving anything about their identity or, especially, their direction of migration, merely assuming these.) We will have to force ourselves into a certain methodological asceticism: strictly refraining from inferring too much. On the one hand, we may boldly explore the possibilities opened up by new findings, but on the other, we have to stay firmly on solid ground, never assuming too quickly that something has been “proven”,-- a much overused word in this debate. 3 Political associations More than any other topic, the Aryan debate is loaded with a history of ideological abuse and consequential methodological errors. As we shall see in our overview of the state of the art, the problem lies not in the material collected, but in the prejudiced manner in which this material is interpreted. Enough has already been written on the politics of the Aryan debate (Poliakov 1971, Lincoln 1999, Talageri 2000:335-424, Vanséveren 2003, Arvidsson 2006, Elst 2007/2:71-105, 2013/2), in this context we will suffice with a single illustration: an extremely consequential mistranslation. The Rg-Veda refers to the asikni or “black” people. Some uses of colour symbolism are simply applications of the universal tendency to represent negative properties with a black colour: “When there is sufficient context for interpretation, we find that the notions can at least equally well be read as an ‘ideological’ distinction between the ‘dark/black’ world of the dāsas/dasyus and the ‘light/white’ world of the āryas.” (Hock 1995/2:154) Or they may sometimes innocently refer to natural phenomena, e.g. krsṚ Ṛn Ṛa tvac, 9:41:1: “the black cover”, is the night. Yet, the racial-invasionist reading is very common and still has academic sanction, e.g.: “Indra subjected the aboriginal tribes of the Dāsas/Dasyus to the Aryans.” (Elizarenkova 1995:36) Admittedly, a few instances do refer very clearly to a military enemy identified as asikni/“black”. These are the bedrock of the racial version of the AIT, ensuring that the other times “black” is used, it is not interpreted metaphorically but “must” refer to skin colour. That racial interpretation has largely been discarded in scholarly circles, at least consciously (though still lingering somewhat through inertia), but still very alive in certain Indian political movements. They have been used to justify the methodologically unwarranted shift from linguistic to ethnic categories. This word asikni characterizes a military enemy in the Battle of the Ten Kings (RV 7:5:3, apparently repeated in 9:73:5), and is mostly translated or explained as “the black aboriginals” (eventhough they encounter the Vedic people from the west). Moreover, the Vedic priest VasistṚ ha Ṛ is described as śvitya, “white-clad” (RV 7:33:1), which some translators render as “white-complexioned” (thus Wilson 1997). But in fact, the enemies are led into battle by a king with an Iranian name, Kavasa, Ṛ belonging to the Iranian Kavi dynasty, their tribal names and nicknames all have Iranian counterparts or are known from Iranian and Greek sources to refer to Iranian communities. Moreover, their religion is described as having the typical characteristics of Mazdeism: without Indra, without Devas, without fire-sacrifice etc.. Asiknī, “the black (river)”, is simply the Sanskrit name of the river whence they come, today the Chenab in West Panjab. Very obviously, the enemies of the Vedic people at that time, when Rg-Vedic books 7 and 4 and the contemporaneous parts of books 1 and 9 were composed, were Iranian, not “black aboriginal”. This is attested from so many angles that one tends to wonder how this mistake could have been made at all, and how the true Iranian identity of the Dāsas (Greek Dahai) could have been missed. It has, moreover, been an extremely consequential mistake. It has been taken over by numerous authors, including many who had no ideological agenda but naïvely lapped it up, e.g. Puhvel (1989:45): “the śūdras were an-ārya, ‘non-Aryan’, referring to the darker-skinned elements of the population (the Sanskrit term for ‘caste’, varn Ṛa, means ‘colour’).” (In fact, varn Ṛa means “one in a spectrum”: a colour in the visual spectrum, a class in the social spectrum, but also a letter in the sound spectrum, hence varn Ṛamāla for “alphabet”.) The whole edifice of the “racial Aryan”, notorious through its Nazi application but equally popular in British colonial discourse and its Indian copycats, was based on a simple mistranslation. Political applications include:  the colonial justification of the rule by the pure Aryans (the British) over the mixed Aryans (the upper castes) and the black Aboriginals (the lower castes);  the perfect illustration of the Nazi scheme of rule by the pure Aryan (conceived as “Nordic”) race and the degeneracy through race-mixing with a lower race;  anti-Brahminism (“Brahmins, go back to Central Asia”);  Dravidianism;  Ambedkarism (eventhough BR Ambedkar himself had opposed the AIT and had advocated Sanskrit as India’s link language);  as well as the British-cum-missionary construction of the Tribals as Ādivāsīs (“aboriginals”), an ancient-sounding neologism created in the early 20th century and pregnant with the message that the non-Tribals were invaders. (see Talageri 2015)  Even now, some marginal Western advocates of a Russian Homeland still identify PIE with the European race and attribute the successes of the language family to an intrinsic European superiority: “What then does account for the remarkable conquests of the Indo-Europeans? (…) The simplest explanation is that the original speakers of PIE possessed, on average, considerably higher intelligence than most of the people they defeated (…), all of whom had evolved in milder climates than the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans.” (Hart 2007:187; likewise Haudry 2010:170) Never in world history has a silly mistranslation been politically more consequential. The projection of 19th-century colonialism and of the earlier subjection of the Amerindians by European invaders onto ancient Indian history has provided an illustration or justification to an array of modern political ideologies, all of a more or less sinister or destructive character. If Western scholars shy away from the OIT because of vague rumours associating it with Hindu Nationalism (though its founding ideologue V.D. Savarkar was an AIT believer while another Hindu Nationalist, B.G. Tilak, even cooked up his own variation of the AIT locating the Vedic Homeland in the Arctic), they should have all the more reason to shun their own AIT. After all, the latter has had many more political ramifications, for a much longer time, in many more countries, and not as a thought experiment of ivory-tower scholars but from a position of power whence it could inform actual policies. Moreover, one of these ideologies strongly associated with the AIT is National-Socialism. In order to justify the untouchability of the OIT, invasionist polemicists often try to liken it to Nazism (e.g. Pollock 1993 and Adluri 2011, both rebutted by Grünendahl 2012), directly as well as through the identification with Hindu Nationalism. Firstly, there is nothing Nazi about Hindu Nationalism, as I have demonstrated earlier at great length (Elst 2001 and 2007/1). Secondly, if there were anything Nazi about the OIT, that would still not make it untrue: rocket science is literally a creation of the Nazis and yet the Soviet Union and other countries have profusely applied it, rather than tabooed it because of its political associations. Thirdly, and most importantly in this context, there is nothing Nazi about the OIT, on the contrary. It is the AIT that served as the perfect paradigm of the Nazi worldview, and that was taught in the history textbooks under Nazi control. The AIT defenders are in the same camp as Adolf Hitler, the OIT is the opposite camp. (But let us remain clear that the well-known Nazi use of the AIT is not in itself a reason to object to the truth claims of the AIT.) So, this mistaken force-fitting of the Rg-Vedic data into the racial paradigm should stand before us as a permanent warning of what pitfalls to avoid. Clearly, in the late 19th century, the racial paradigm was so strongly entrenched that it conditioned the minds of the translators to see racial categories where there weren’t any. Today, the dominant egalitarian paradigm tends to project the same categories onto ancient texts and history, though with the opposite valuation: now the “black aboriginals” count as the good ones, entitled to compensation, the “white invaders” as the bad ones, summoned to discharge their historical guilt. This way, the racial interpretation of the AIT serves as a poison injecting divisions and resentment into Indian society, even today. Apart from an erroneous reading of the historical facts, the really deplorable part is the projection of modern concerns and categories onto ancient history. As historians know, history is not a morality tale. What people did in some historical episode was not meant to serve as an anchor-point for modern political struggles. The treatment of the Aryan question by Hindu Nationalists is far less consequential, but shows the same tendency to use, and distort, the historical narrative. Thus, the word ārya tends to get identified with “good” (in fact in the Rg-Veda it means “compatriot”, “us”), anārya (“them”) with “bad”, and the whole Rg-Vedic “Battle of the Ten Kings” becomes a fight of good against evil (as discussed by Talageri 2000:399-412). That is not what the Vedic narrative makes of it, eventhough that version too is partisan and therefore a challenge to the historian to reconstruct “matters as they really have been” (to borrow the founding characterization of historiography by Leopold Ranke). At any rate, we have to guard mightily against the tendency, illustrated in this debate more than in any other, to reshape history so as to fit modern norms and concerns. 4 History of the debate Ever since K.D. Sethna's book Karpāsa (1982), which posited the anteriority of the RṚg-Veda vis-à-vis the Harappan cities, the Out-of-India Theory (OIT) has revived after lying dormant since ca. 1820. Contrary to what many Indian “secularists” assume, it is not a new-fangled theory propped up by Hindu political calculations, but has been around since the very beginning: “When the IE family had been discovered and scholars sought the land of origin, they initially thought of India because of Sanskrit’s ancientness”. (Beekes 1990:73) As soon as the linguistic kinship of most Indian and European languages became known through William Jones’s founding speech in Kolkata in 1786, the tacit or explicit assumption came with it that India must have been the Homeland of the newly recognized IE language family. This hypothesis, now known as the Out-of-India Theory ever since Edwin Bryant coined that term ca. 1996, will mostly remain associated with Friedrich Schlegel”s 1808 book Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (“Language and Wisdom of the Indians”). Note that a suspicion in the same direction already existed even before the official birthdate of the IE family: in a 1775 letter, Voltaire already speculated that the "dynasty of the Brahmins" taught the rest of the world: "I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges." In that same phase of intellectual-cultural development of Enlightenment Europe, Immanuel Kant suggested that “The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India.” (quoted in Hale 2004:61) And likewise, J.G. Herder and others. So, the Indomanic intellectual climate, both in circles considering themselves rational and post-Christian as well as in Christian circles (including most British colonial Orientalists), was ready for a linguistic theory tracing the European languages to India. However, it is not the ideological uses made of the Homeland speculations (e.g. the way Christian scholars tried to tie IE to the Biblical character Japheth) that would determine the further evolution of the issue, but the new-fangled science of Comparative and Historical Linguistics. By 1820, the realization that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) must have been different from Sanskrit, started translating into the conviction that the Homeland likewise had to be removed from India. Stern minds will notice the unjustified leap from linguistic distance to geographical distance: a language may perfectly stay in the same place all while changing -- compare e.g. the difference between classical Latin and current Italian. Indeed, that is precisely what happened with Sanskrit as a spoken language: in its Northwest-Indian heartland, Sanskrit has evolved to Apabhramsa, and later to Haryanvi, Konkani and other dialects. This hasty deduction that the Homeland must lie outside of India because Sanskrit differed from PIE, became the first of several unwarranted deductions about the real world from the paper world of the philologists. After India had been discarded as Homeland, Bactria remained a serious contender for another century, but the Balkans, Germany and Russia also staked their claims. From the 1920s onwards, a consensus has been emerging that the Homeland lay on the steppes to the west of the Ural mountains, i.e. on the eastern rim of Europe. From there, different IE- speaking tribes went their respective ways eastward (Tocharian, Indo-Iranian) or westward (Armenian, Anatolian, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic) during the 4th millennium BCE. An application of this view was the attempt to find mention of the Volga river in the RṚg-Veda: the Rasā (in Iranian texts more usually taken to mean the Amu Darya, in Indian ones a river in Panjab). In the 1990s, this view was briefly challenged by the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who posited a Homeland in Anatolia. Thence, the IE-speaking tribes would have spread as early as about 7000 BCE, on the strength of their mastery of agriculture. This new development allowed for a fast population growth, as illustrated by the more recent spread of the Bantu languages throughout Africa along with agriculture. His merit was that he tied the spectacular expansion of IE to a powerful mechanism, the demographically useful new technology of agriculture. However, this theory has been widely rejected as linguistically untenable and archaeologically unsupported. The targeted studies that sought to decide between the Anatolian and the Russian Homeland have generally favoured the latter option. So, more than ever, non-Indian scholars are convinced of the Russian Homeland hypothesis. Many Indians have been saying, since ca. 1995, that “the Aryan debate is finished”, meaning that the Indian Homeland hypothesis has defeated its rivals. It is an amazing feat of collective self-deception that this claim has persisted so long without being seriously challenged. Having attended a number of IE conferences (where none of these Indian polemicists had turned up) and pointedly inquired among the participants on this specific question, I can testify that many IE scholars have never even heard of the OIT. As for the others, they are not aware that there is a real debate, that there are pro-OIT arguments genuinely challenging the status-quo and thus soliciting the urgent attention of all scholars in the field. They tend to vaguely go by the rumour that only a bunch of hateful Hindu Nationalists espouse this view, hence they have not thought it worth their while to study it. (Even Hock 1999/2:162, all while producing one of the rare serious argumentations against the OIT, systematically identifies the invasion skeptics as “Hindu Nationalists”.) So, the AIT is still the official theory. Hindus who crow that "nobody believes the AIT anymore" (as in the California Textbook Affair of 2005-9, ending in total Hindu defeat, see Elst 2012:137-151), only show that they are clueless about the real state of the art. So are Hindus who mistake the voguish velvet term "Aryan Migration Theory" for a repudiation of the central point of the AIT, viz. the foreign origin of IE. Two decades of Hindu claims that the AIT has been refuted, have only rendered the scholarly consensus around the AIT in non- Indian (and still largely in Indian) academe more determined. A factor here is that established IE scholars have no dialogue partners in India. Their kind of specialism, both Historical-Comparative Linguistics and Comparative Mythology, is simply not on offer at Indian universities. And yet, the OIT has made substantial strides in other disciplines, unbeknownst to the IE philologists. We give a very brief overview. 5 Demographic common sense A first consideration that adds to the plausibility of the OIT is demographic common sense, combined with the geographical distribution of the IE speech community. India was, then even more than now, a demographic power-house, witness the size of the Harappan civilization and the number and size of its cities, dwarfing Mesopotamia and Egypt. An emigration from India, whether due to famine, climate change or defeat in war, even if involving only a small percentage of India’s population, would at once make an impressive difference in thinly-populated Central Asia. Coupled with the migrants’ cultural advantage, it would make the imparting of the Indian newcomers’ language to the natives easy and logical. By contrast, the AIT implies that an inconspicuously small number of invaders from the wilderness managed to make a huge and culturally advanced native population (some 10% of the world population) change language, to the extent of completely forgetting their native language. To be sure, it is possible for a small group of wilderness-dwellers to overpower a very large and technologically advanced part of the world, witness the spectacular Mongol conquests. But the end result was still that, except for Mongolia itself and for Kalmukkia, the Mongol language disappeared everywhere. So, while not strictly impossible, the invasionist scenario is just far less likely. It requires thinking upstream and special pleading. 6 Native vs. intrusive thought systems The very complex field of Indian intellectual history has been reduced, following the AIT, to an ethnic dualism of native vs. invader ideas and attitudes. Thus, the intrusive Vedic seers are said not to have known “native” ideas such as asceticism, reincarnation and karma, as well as the worship of the feminine (Tantra), and to have gradually borrowed these from the natives. All philosophies, starting with the Upanishads, that make up India’s major claim to fame, derive from native thought eventhough coming to us in the language of the invaders. Thus, Bronkhorst (1999:50) writes that “all important schools of Indian philosophy have one common origin. They all derive, ultimately, from those parts of the population where karma and rebirth held sway, i.e. from the non-Vedic portions of the population.” This is the academic incarnation of anti-Brahmanism, the Indian version of anti-Semitism. He hesitates whether or not to affirm that these non-Vedic people were “non-Aryan” (Bronkhorst 1999:42- 43), but that is how it is most widely understood, both in India and in the West. Though Buddhists and Jains use the term Ārya in self-reference all the time, they are considered espousing “pre-Aryan” ideas and practices. This is even more explicit in the case of Tantric and Shaktic cults with their worship of goddesses and glorification of the feminine principle: they are deemed a reassertion of pre-Aryan religion against the formalistic, male-dominated and oppressive Vedic religion. The common view underlying such speculations is: “Brahmanism bad, Buddhism good” (central to the Nehruvian worldview, even affecting India’s post-1947 state symbols and official discourse), or “Vedas bad, Tantra good”. Since the first were “Aryans” and the second traced to “non-Aryans”, the Aryans are given a very bad press, and so are the people defending these Aryans from the charge of being intruders oppressing the natives. That is part of the explanation for the heartfelt hatred for OIT defenders among AIT believers. But the OIT itself, in its mature version, recognizes important elements in Indian civilization as Non-Vedic, though not “pre-Aryan”. As asserted by Talageri (2000:419), “the Vedic Aryans were one of many groups of Aryan-language speakers who were spread out over most of northern India”, including the area of Greater Magadha were the Upanishadic seer Yājñavalkya, Jainism founder Mahāvīra and Buddhism founder Śākyamuni flourished. There were many traditions, of which Vedic Brahmanism was only one, just as there were many ancient Indo-Aryan dialects of which Vedic Sanskrit was only one. Buddhism did not come about as a “reaction against the Vedas”, as alleged by the Ambedkarites and as taught in Indian textbooks, but as a new development within the local tradition, which shared some traits with the Vedic tradition and differed from it in other respects. Yes, it is possible that an eastward migration first had to bring Yājñavalkya to Videha, eastern Gaṅgā basin, where he won a debate at king Janaka’s court, before he could assimilate local ideas about reincarnation, a concept arguably not mentioned in the RṚg-Veda. The eastern Gaṅgā basin, where reincarnation would become absolutely central to the soteriologies of Mahāvīra and the Buddha, seems to have been familiar with this doctrine since the hoary past, and seers like Yājñavalkya and Uddālaka could well have assimilated this idea there. But nothing indicates that the population of Videha was any less “Aryan” than that of Haryān Ṛā, not just because a lot of eastward migration was triggered by the desiccation of the Harappan area, but because this area may have been the eastern rim of the Indo-Aryan speech area since the beginning. The Vedic tradition evolved within the Paurava tribe based in the Sarasvatī basin, and co- existed with the proto-Mazdean tradition of the Ānavas in the northwest, with the traditions of the Yādavas (a tribe to which KrsṚ nṚ Ṛa belonged) to its southeast, and the Ayodhyā-based Aikshvākus and other related tribes to its east, all of them Indo-Aryan. Among the differences might have been the duality of belief or non-belief in reincarnation – a duality that also existed among the European branches of IE (e.g. the Romans considered the reincarnation belief among the Celts as exotic, but within their own literature, Virgil’s Aeneid also contains a classic explanation of the doctrine of rebirth). So, indeed, the traditions of the eastern Gaṅgā basin may have been non-Vedic, but without being “non-Aryan”. As for Tantra, here is what AIT believer David Gordon White, often criticized by Hindus as being anti-Hindu, has found: “The general scholarly consensus has been that the Yoginī cults so foundational to early Tantra emerged out of an autochthonous non-Vedic Indian source. (…) The point I wish to make here is that it is quite artificial to inject a distinction between ‘Vedic’ or ‘Indo-Aryan’ tradition, on the one hand, and ‘non-Vedic’ or ‘Indus Valley’ on the other. The religion and culture is already present in the Vedas, together with the more predominant Indo-Aryan material, and is no more ‘indigenous’ to the Indian subcontinent and no more ‘alien’ to the Veda than the latter. (…) It suffices to scratch the surface of the salient features of the Yoginī cults to find a vast reservoir of Vedic and classical Hindu precursors, in (1) the cults of Vedic goddesses (…); (2) the various groupings of unnumbered mother goddesses (…); and (3) in general attitudes toward women and femininity.” (White 2003:28- 29) So, while it is theoretically possible that different ethnic provenances translate into different traditions or schools of ideas, there is no evidence for such a scenario in Indian literature. Explaining religious or philosophical differences through an antagonism between natives and invaders is facile, has become popular, but is without foundation in the available data. 7 Hard sciences Developments in archaeology and genetics cannot strictly prove a Homeland hypothesis of a language family, because excavated artifacts and mapped genomes do not talk. We may have identified a community of migrants, but we don't know whether they imposed their own language on the natives they encountered, or conversely adopted the indigenous language. However, these sciences have unearthed a migration history that should surprise the votaries of the AIT, and renders it improbable. They have by now documented several emigrations from India, and have found no trace of any "Aryans" (i.e. any speakers of IE) immigrating into India. In our midst is the nonagenarian dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. B.B. Lal. I first heard from him in the 1980s at university in Leuven, Belgium, where Prof. Pierre Eggermont taught us that Lal had at last identified the Aryans on their way deeper into India, viz. through the Painted Grey Ware. That is how Lal first made his name: by identifying the theoretically deduced Aryan invasion with something tangible. Indeed, that is how Pradhan (2014:67) cites him even now: “Lal considered Painted Grey Ware to be intrusive”. Yet, Lal has later described that identification as false and written books denying an invasion, e.g. Lal 2002. Like most Indian archaeologists, he has had to face the fact that all attempts to find traces of the Aryan invaders had proved erroneous. You all have heard him say it right here: “Vedic culture and the Harappan cities are but the two sides of the same coin.” This contrasts with the situation in Europe: on the borderline between inhabitable prehistoric Europe and the steppe expanse, instances of discontinuity and unmistakable invasion from the East have been found, such as the archaeologically attested “Varna event” in Bulgaria (described and tied in with Linguistics by Harald Haarmann 2012), an unmistakable invasion from the steppe right at the time of the expansion of IE. As Fortson notes in his classical introduction to IE linguistics (2004:42-43): “But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna [= Pontic] cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe.” Starting from Russia, Europe became visibly Indo- Europeanized – precisely the kind of “clear and dramatic infusion” that scholars have been looking for in India, but never found there. Archaeological facts have been mustered, demonstrating unanimously that India shows great material and cultural continuity even in the period when an Aryan invasion with its dramatic shift in language should have caused great discontinuity. Meanwhile, the wide presence of Harappan jewelry in Central Asia and the existence of a trading outpost in Bactria (Shortugai) show the existence of Harappan trade networks there, hence a familiarity with this area which facilitated an Indian emigration. While this is not proof of an IE emigration, it does ascertain that the material conditions for such an emigration were present. In recent years, arguments from genetics have been added, showing lots of migration from India at different times, affecting both the human and numerous non-human species (even mice, see Priyadarshi 2012). They conspicuously fail to pinpoint any migration corresponding to the putative Aryan entry in India, but occasionally do show evidence of emigrations from India arguably related to the IE expansion. Thus, genetic evidence for Indian cows’ genes in Ukrainian cows shows an Indian presence on the steppes: “However, in some areas of the Eurasian continent, phenotypically humpless cattle are known to have been influenced by historical admixture from zebu cattle (...) In this study, the Ukrainian Whitehead and the Central Asian Ala-Tau breed displayed zebu-specific mtDNA haplotypes. (...) This study suggests that the Ukrainian and the Central Asian regions belong to hybrid zones where taurine-zebu crossbreds have existed.” (Kantanen 2009) So, in the company of human emigrants from India, Indian cattle migrated all the way to Ukraine. A Russian geneticist commenting on an excavation of cattle in Kaunchip, Uzbekistan, adds: “This find permits us to assume that the true zebu appeared in Central Asia during 3000 to 2500 years B.C” (Verdiev 2007),-- just when the Indo-Europeans were dispersing towards their respective historical habitats. Indologist Giacomo Benedetti (2012) comments: “Then, the presence of zebu genes and representations in Asia and Europe seem to be a promising ground of research, and certainly a confirmation that there was an important movement from South Asia to the West. It is difficult to think that this movement was only of cattle without herders, particularly where we find strong archaeological and historical signs of a common culture. (…) Actually, scholars have always thought of Indo- Europeans as the people of the horse and searched for horses in order to find Indo- Europeans. But they were also, and I would say more, the people of the cow”. The same phenomenon counts for humans. Harvard geneticists David Reich and Iosif Lazaridis and other colleagues have found two successive intrusion into Europe: some 9000 years ago, Anatolian farmers settled, pushing aside the native hunter-gatherers until these assimilated into the new economy, and some 4500 ago, a population from what are now Ukraine and Russia, arrived and practically replaced the native population of Central Europe: “Europeans today are a mixture of three very different ancestral populations: hunter-gatherers, first farmers, and a population with eastern affinities that was not yet present in Europe at the time of the first farmers. It was unclear when and how this eastern component arrived in Europe. ‘When we first looked at the new data, it was a Eureka moment,’ says Lazaridis. ‘The eastern ancestry was present in every single sample starting at around 4,500 years ago, and absent in every single one before that time.’” (Max Planck Gesellschaft 2015) This population replacement from the east during the 3rd millennium BCE must have been the decisive event in Europe’s adoption of the IE languages. Indeed, the genetics of the Corded Ware culture in Germany and Central Europe shows an intrusion from the east almost amounting to a population replacement. (Callaway 2012) That is what an “Aryan Invasion” would look like, and it is in evidence in Europe but not in India. Moreover, it supports the OIT in even more detail: “Less clear is whether all Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a subset do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He suspects that the Yamnaya [population in Russia and Ukraine] spoke a language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and other northern European tongues, but he doubts that they imported the predecessor of southern European languages such as ancient Greek, or those of eastern Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit.” (Callaway 2012) Exactly: in Talageri’s reconstruction, the languages of northern Europe derive from a first emigration from India by the Druhyu tribe (just concluded before but still remembered in the early RṚg-Veda), and this should be the population that settled in Russia and mixed with the locals or linguistically assimilated them, before intruding into Central Europe (Talageri 2000:269-282, 2008:223-225, 246-250). The Greeks, by contrast, were a peripheral group in a largely Iranian population that derived from the Ānava tribe and emigrated in a second wave (described in the RṚg-Veda, see Talageri 2000:163-231, 267-70), while the stay-behind Indo- Aryans derive from the Paurava and more easterly tribes. In spite of being the official theory for almost two centuries and capturing all funding for its material proof, the AIT has never been confirmed by any trace of the Aryans entering India. Hence most Indian archeologists, of whom the elite is gathered here, are skeptical of the AIT. Yet the kind of evidence of an invasion that they have been looking for, has nonetheless been found – but in Europe, not in India. All this is fine and confirms many Hindus in their belief that "the AIT has been refuted". But in fact, the world at large remains skeptical, and for good reason: the probabilities are only probable and fall short of certainty (“proof”), and the artifacts dug up by the archaeologists, like the genes mapped out by the geneticists, don't speak. They are mute witnesses to migrations, and say nothing about the language spoken by the migrants. Sometimes conquerors impose their own imported language, sometimes they adopt the local language, sometimes they do something in between, e.g. impose a linguistic caste system or develop a common mixed language. Material findings (except for deciphered writings) cannot decide on the language spoken. At most, they add a certain plausibility to the OIT; but for people with the scientific temper, this is not good enough. On the other hand, the hard sciences have refuted some material co-suppositions of the AIT, which still is an important contribution to the debate. While findings about migrations leave open what language the migrants spoke, the complete absence of any immigration implies that there was no one there to speak any intrusive language in the first place. Thus, while genetics has found suggestive commonalities between North-Indian and East-European genomes, these fail to prove the imaginative scenario of European invaders riding down the Khyber Pass. Both genetic and archaeological proofs of intrusions into Europe from Russia are plentiful, but in India these are significantly missing. 8 Comparative ideology Since the beginning, the mapping of the exact linguistic relations between the different IE languages and their different stages of development has gone hand in hand with the establishing of likenesses between the corresponding mythologies and systems of ideas. We refer to the work of e.g. Jaan Puhval (1989), Bruce Lincoln (1991), Shan Winn (1995), Calvin Watkins (1995), Jean Haudry (2009), or, with explicit approval, to the work on comparative mythology by our bête noire Michael Witzel (2012). The latter expands on the work of the former scholars and applies the same method to larger frameworks beyond the language families, effectively establishing the rudiments of a world-spanning comparison of myths, situating them on a global genealogical tree. Sometimes these likenesses, apparently pointing to a common origin, arguably date back even earlier than the age has of PIE, e.g. the symbol colours white, red and black, known in Indian philosophy as representing the wise/transparent, the forceful/passionate and the productive/inertial quality, and therefore also the knowledge-oriented, power-oriented and production-oriented classes in society, also appear in Germanic mythology with the latter meaning, and even in Turkic mythology with the related meaning of fortunate/happy, moderately fortunate/hopeful (and thus motivated to try harder), and unfortunate/desperate. (Klerk 2003:155, myth of Boğac Han) The myth of the Dragon-slayer has an even wider spread, known from Sumerian, Semitic, Turkic and other sources as well as throughout the IE world. But for now, let us settle for correspondences between mythical motifs within the IE family. Thus, remark the similarity when the heroes Duryodhana, Achilles and Baldr are rendered invulnerable by their mothers except for one body part, in which they are eventually mortally wounded. Or, both the Rāmāyan Ṛa and the Iliad are about wars triggered by the abduction of a wife. There are hundreds of such similarities. Thus, both Iḻā and Teiresias have a history of sex changes and thus are able from experience to assert that women have a more exciting sex life, enjoying the sex act nine times more. Themes and characters with consequential traits known from Indian narratives appear in recognizable form in European variations, not because “the Rāmāyan Ṛa has influenced the Iliad”, but because the themes were already part of PIE heritage and later found their classical expressions in both the Rāmāyan Ṛa and the Iliad. Each of them may have had a historical core but was beautified with ancient motifs deemed fitting in great narratives. One point that readily becomes obvious once you pay attention to it, is the greater ancientness of the Indian version. As Allen (2015) says, “much of the narrative heritage of India and Greece goes back to shared ancestral narratives told in early IE times – to ‘protonarratives’. (…) the Greek tradition quite often fuses or amalgamates traditions that were separate in the protonarrative and remain separate in the Sanskrit.” While not excluding other explanations, this suggests the explanation that the Greek version has been modified more, both by a longer passage of time and by the disorganizing effect of migration. The myth under consideration (Cyavana helps the Aśvins, Prometheus helps the humans), in which the said difference between the Greek and Indian version is in evidence, also shows off-hand just how numerous the similarities remain: “At first sight the similarity consists in little more than a conflict between protagonist and god, leading to a change in sacrificial practice. However, on closer inspection one can distinguish at least eighteen rapprochements.” (Allen 2015) The differences that have crept into the similarities are also instructive, e.g. the similar birth from the ocean waves of the goddesses Śrī and Aphrodite has a very characteristic difference: in Aphrodite’s story, a cruel element foreign to the Indian version has been added, viz. the sorry fate of her father Uranus. This corresponds to the more conflictual Western vision of human history as compared to India, see e.g. the Western paradigm of the “survival of the fittest” with the resultant Social Darwinism, or today, the contrast between shrill American feminism and the more down-to-earth Indian feminism. Even the caste system, for all its injustice, is a more harmonious way of solving the problem of group differences (isolated tribes were integrated, with respect for their own traditions, as castes within expanding Vedic society) than the expulsion and sheer genocide characteristic of the European colonization of America and Australia. The main hurdle for warming Indian students to Comparative Mythology, apart from the very meagre attention it receives in university programmes, is that it is perceived as threatening to belittle Hindu tradition. It shows that the Vedic tradition is only one root of Hinduism, that much of it is only a late version of an older component of pan-IE or even pre-IE tradition, and that other elements of later Hinduism have non-Vedic roots but clearly stem from pre-Vedic traditions while bypassing the Vedas themselves: “most students of the Mahābhārata would suppose that even the framework of the epic story did not exist at the time when the earliest hymns were composed. But arguments from silence – weak at the best of times – have to give way before sufficiently cogent comparisons (…) The story must have already been current in some form (…) as many have realized, the Vedic texts relate only a small part of the culture of the Vedic period. But it is much less recognized how much comparison can do to fill out the picture, and identify the material that bypassed the Vedas.” (Allen 1999:25) Where these motifs turn up in the common IE heritage but not in the Vedas, we can indeed speak of a “bypassing” of the Vedas. This “bypassing” may be resented by Veda fundamentalists who fail to understand the historicity of the Vedas, i.e. their being inscribed in a larger history older than themselves. Just as they sometimes resent that the Kun Ṛd Ṛalinī phenomenon, a manifestation of energy in the spine cultivated in Hatha Ṛ Yoga, has been documented outside India (e.g. among the San/Bushmen, as noted by Witzel 2013:367, 387). This ideological distrust of comparative studies transcending India’s boundaries is one of the reasons why pro-OIT scholars rarely if ever bring up the comparative perspective in the Aryan debate (save for Talageri 2000:477-495 and the non-Indian invasion skeptic Kazanas 2009:187-276). Yet, there is no ground for denying anymore that e.g. the motif of four world ages of descending quality is in common with Greek and Germanic traditions: the Hindu notion of Krtā, Ṛ Tretā,Ṛ Dvāpara and Kali Yuga is not substantially different from the Greek notion of a Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron age, or the Germanic notion of a Spear, Sword, Wind and Wolf Age. Even in non-IE cultures as far as Mexico, variations on this motif appear. So, Hindu civilization is challenged to come out of its cocoon and realize its specific place within the larger genealogical tree of mankind’s ideas and myths. Yet, that commonality highlights another unique merit of Hindu civilization. At least, a suspicion arises that needs to be verified further, viz. that after comparison, the myths indicate the anteriority of the Indian version. Nick Allen has repeatedly shown that in many parallel motifs in the Mahābhārata and in Homer’s epics, the Indian version contains a spiritual element lacking in the European version: “in parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative. (…) Either the proto-journey was like the Greek and contained nothing relating to yoga, in which case the yogic aspect of the Sanskrit story was an innovation that developed in the Indian branch of the tradition. Or the proto journey was like the Sanskrit and was quasi-yogic or proto-yogic in character, in which case Greek epic tradition largely or wholly eliminated that aspect of the story. I shall argue for the second scenario, claiming both that the proto-narrative shared certain features with yoga and that the telling of such a story makes it likely that there already existed ritual practices ancestral to yoga. (…) I argue that some significant and fairly precisely identifiable features of yoga go back to the culture of those who told the proto-narrative (…) may well have been proto-Indo- European speakers.” (Allen 1998:3) After closely discussing many aspects of the dozens of similarities in this extremely important paper, Allen concludes that “it is a priori quite likely that the account of the proto-hero's journey served as a myth explaining and justifying ritual practices ancestral to yoga as we know it.” (Allen 1998:17) The logical explanation, which stares him in the face but which he as an invasionist fails to draw, is that this dimension was lost in the rough and tumble of the trek westwards, since the most precious elements are the ones that get lost most easily. In that case, India was their common Homeland, but only the Indians had the comfort of a stable situation where they could preserve the most subtle layer of their stories. (The AIT explanation would be that the Aryan barbarians did not have this profound layer to their narratives, but reinterpreted these once they interiorized the native Indian tradition of yoga.) This promising first impression needs to be verified in closer research, informed by a knowledge of Indian spirituality. 9 Texts and inscriptions The most straightforward evidence would of course have been texts testifying to the IE migrations from their Homeland. At first sight, and according to the predominant consensus, however, this is a hopeless trail. The Vedic texts do not reach as far as the reconstructed PIE; and the Harappan texts, even if relevant, have not convincingly been deciphered yet. Then again, the dating of the Vedic texts is highly controversial, even if not in circles of the established Indo-Europeanists. Right now, the predominant view is that between the dispersal of the IE emigrants from the Homeland (3600 BC or so) and the first Hittite texts as well as the earliest composition of Rg-Vedic hymns, there is a gap of some two thousand years. However, a few scholars argue that the Vedas contain archaeological and astronomical data pointing to a higher chronology and incompatible with the as yet officially favoured chronology. Thus, Talageri (2008:190-191) argues that the RṚg-Veda straddles the invention or introduction of the spoked-wheeled chariot: the early parts clearly don’t know of it yet, while the later parts do. Earlier, the appearances of the spoke-wheeled chariot “in” the Rg-Veda were taken as proof that the hymn collection as a whole is younger than the chariot, but now a more sophisticated understanding of the book’s layeredness has made us realize that the oldest hymns do not mention it, indicating that the composers didn’t know of it yet. While this discussion requires our most sincere and continuing attention, we should also think through its consequences. A higher chronology for the Vedas implies that Vedic Sanskrit moves commensurately closer to the common ancestral language, PIE. This happens to be in conformity with a crucial empirical fact, viz. the greater closeness of Vedic Sanskrit to reconstructed PIE compared to all its other daughter languages: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European” (Kazanas 2015:43). For example, PIE is reconstructed as having three numbers and eight cases, which all exist in Sanskrit. Lithuanian has seven (plus three borrowed from Finnic), Latin six, Greek five, German four, Hindi two, and many modern Germanic and Romance languages have only one. Moreover, traces of the dual number or of the cases that have gone lost, still make their appearance in Greek and Latin, so we can verify that the eight cases and three numbers of Sanskrit really belong to the ancestral language from which these other languages have sprung; it is not that Greek shows the original situation while Sanskrit went on to acquire an extra number and three extra cases. The relation between PIE and Sanskrit may be likened to that between classical and medieval Latin. A modified pronunciation, in both cases a slight vowel shift and palatalization (PIE *gegoma to Sanskrit jagāma, like classical Latin caelum/ [kailum] to caelum/[celum]), the borrrowing of some foreign words and a slight regularization and simplification of the grammar. So, it stands to reason that the earliest record, the RṚg-Veda, has retained a memory of the initial dispersal. This is not necessary, as the Vedas are an incomplete record and was not even meant as a record of historical developments. But it just so happens that it furnishes enough of a glimpse in developments related to the IE dispersal. There happens to be a written record, originally versified and memorized, about early Indo- European history, viz. the Veda and the larger Vedic literature, including the historical parts of the epics. Talageri (2008:218, 246-250) has shown that there is plenty of evidence in the Vedic stories for an Indian origin and for several Vedic-age emigrations from India. Even the earliest emigration, of the Druhyu tribe defeated by the proto-Iranian Ānavas and the Vedic Pauravas with the help of Māndātr,Ṛ only happened shortly before the Vedic narrative starts and is still remembered in a few hymns (1:107:8, 6:46:8, 7:18, 8:10:5, 10:134). Even the later Purān Ṛas, a mixed and notoriously unreliable source partly building on older oral records, nonetheless contains useful genealogies, the core of what was orally preserved, and they give more detail on the history than we can glean from the early RṚg-Veda. They report that the Druhyus went west (from Panjab) and set up kingdoms there. Thus, Gandhāra in Afghanistan is said to be named after one of the Druhyu chieftains. So, if any of this is correct, the emigration of IE-speaking populations from their Indian Homeland becomes less mysterious. This is better than any scholar of IE expected: the IE dispersal is borderline-historical. It does not have to be speculatively reconstructed from scratch but is repeatedly hinted at in the texts. The later emigrations of the Iranians and the West-Asian Indo-Aryans is more fully described and leaves its traces also in features such as their naming systems and the verse forms as well as the evolving vocabulary. So far, Talageri’s findings have been ignored by the IE establishment. It would indeed be very hard to reconcile his evidence with the conventional Aryan invasion scenario. (This, incidentally, is a point which many Indian polemicists, as I have witnessed, systematically miss: that evidence should not merely make one scenario possible, but should also make the competing scenario impossible.) Yet, it is methodologically quite sound and forms an urgent appeal to all scholars of IE to either refute it or accept it, with its OIT implications. Instead, all that his evidence has encountered among opponents is stonewalling. Even if this positive textual evidence were to be flawed, the negative evidence remains standing and is even a matter of consensus (esp. since I showed, in my Ph.D. defence in 1998, that the attempt by Michael Witzel 1995:321 to make the texts speak of an Aryan invasion turned out to be a misreading, see Elst 1999:164-165 and 2007/2:165-166). The notion that the Aryans had come from outside was unknown to the indigenous oral and scriptural traditions, and no traces of any foreign memories have been found in spite of a determined search. At the textual level too, the much-sought-for evidence of any Aryan invasion (or “infiltration”, or “immigration”) remains unfindable. 10 The astronomical evidence As for the astronomical evidence, upheld by the OIT party but minimized or even ridiculed by the AIT party, the useful references are few and far between, but in the large body of Vedic literature, they are still numerous enough and already constitute a sufficient ground for doubting the established low chronology of the AIT. The later Vedas and the Brāhman Ṛas, decidedly a younger corpus than the RṚg-Veda, contain several references to the Pleiades/Krttika on the Equinoctial axis (Atharva-Veda 19:7, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4:4:10, Maitrāyan Ṛi Saṁhitā 2:13:20, Kathaka Saṁhitā 39:13, Śatapatha Brāhman Ṛa 2:1:2:3), though as the foundation of a calendar of 28 asterisms starting with Krttika, Ṛ this might indeed have lingered for some centuries, until the equinoctial place was clearly taken by the next asterism. This must be the case with the Śatapatha Brāhman Ṛa, which has the year begin at the full moon in Phālgun Ṛī, the asterism following Magha, in solstitial position (6:2:2:18, discussed in Dash 2009:49), which would be true in ca. the 15th century BCE, still ca. six centuries too high for the AIT. Very telling is the position of Regulus/Magha on the Solstitial axis (Kaus Ṛītaki Brāhman Ṛa 19:3, discussed in Dash 2009:47-48), position that obtained in ca. 2300 BCE, well before the time of the supposed Aryan invasion. Hock (1999:166-167) points out that the ritual described there can still be performed a month later; if the star were to move that much, it would make a difference of more than two thousand years – even later than the AIT would imply. But that is not what the text says: while the time of the ritual can fluctuate, the stellar position is very definite. It times the text to the late 3rd millennium, certainly not later than 2000 BC, centuries before the Aryan Invasion had yet to take place. Even the post-Vedic astronomical manual Vedāṅga JyotisaṚ dates itself in two different ways (DhanistṚ ha Ṛ solstitial, Bharan Ṛĭ equinoctial) to the 14th century BCE, the very time when the AIT still has the RṚg-Veda being composed. It would mean that the RṚg-Veda predates the Harappan high tide (2600-1900) or coincides with it, and that the Yajur and Atharva Vedas and some of the Brāhman Ṛas coincide with or immediately follow it. To be sure, the invasion theorists might yet be able to account for these inconvenient astronomical data, but so far they haven’t deigned to do so. Fact remains that these data all point to a higher Vedic chronology (3500-2000 according to the analysis by Sen 1974) incompatible with the AIT, and that they are coherent. Briefly, texts which are in a certain logical order, prove to be in the same order astro-chronologically. Likewise, the suspicion that Babylonian mathematics was indebted to Indian precedents preserved in Baudhayana's Shulba Sutra, first voiced by a historian of mathematics quite innocent of any Aryan theorizing, viz. Abraham Seidenberg (“the geometry of Babylonia is already secondary whereas in India it is primary”, 1962:515, quoted by Rajaram & Frawley 1995:85), raises the age of Vedic mathematics and its knowledge of the theorem named after Pythagoras by a thousand years or so, in turn raising the age of the Vedas beyond what is compatible with AIT chronology. This could be pertinent, or maybe there is an explanation around it, but so far, such discoveries introduce a fundamental asymmetry into the debate: the invasion theorists never come up with any such data. Thus, there simply isn’t any astronomical information that specifically supports the AIT chronology. Either it supports a high, AIT-incompatible chronology, or, according to the invasionists, it somehow manages to be empty of the factual content that it seems to contain. AIT proponents explain these astronomical data away as either just wrong and confused, or as reminiscences of past observations, indicating a much earlier period than the one at which they were composed. Not a single time (at least not according to this special pleading), not even in a practice-oriented handbook of observational astronomy, the Vedanga Jyotisha, did Indian star-gazers describe an actually observed stellar position. We don’t expect ancient civilizations to be 100 % right on any scientific subject, but 100 % wrong must also be rare; yet the AIT implies that it has discovered one such case. OIT proponents keep offering such suggestive data, but AIT adherents keep stonewalling these. The reason is that everyone in the AIT camp, both scholars and laymen (including the numerous political activists who build their analyses of Indian society on the AIT), assume that there exists another and very strong type of evidence overruling all of them. They feel they don’t need to take the textual, archaeological or genetic pointers seriously because of the supposed linguistic evidence. 11 Linguistics, the necessary key to the solution of the Aryan question Critics of the linguistic approach, like Sri Aurobindo, N.R. Waradpande, N.S. Rajaram, Subhash Kak, S. Kalyanaraman, typically contend that there are no language families, that Sanskrit is not more akin to Greek than to Dravidian, and that, if at all there are linguistic groupings, all Indian languages should together count as one, distinct from Greek and the other IE languages (e.g. Kak 1998). If there are similarities with European languages, it must be due to transmission, as if the ancient Greeks took an internet course of faraway Sanskrit and subsequently enriched their language with hundreds of regularly modified Sanskrit words. Linguists, on their part, may likewise be very cocky in internet debates, scorning any contribution by non-linguists, but the more competent ones are rather modest: “Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them.” (Beekes 1990:70) So, let alone its enemies, even its own practitioners don’t think highly of the discipline’s capacity to find the Homeland. And yet, we will argue that it is crucial. Indo-European (IE), or what the 19th-century Orientalists called "Aryan", is purely a linguistic term. Its original speakers, regardless of their physical type, either lived in India and then some of them migrated to Europe (OIT), or they lived outside India and some migrated to India (AIT). This can only be decided by linguistic analysis, unless there are written records testifying to the direction of migration. Fortunately, the dispersal of the IE languages must have taken place only centuries before the origin of writing, not far from the first centre of writing, and (as we argue) very close to the place of composition of an durable oral medium, the Vedic tradition. So the linguistic history and even the description of relevant historical events nearly reaches it and leaves only a limited need for reconstruction. The science of Historical and Comparative Linguistics, called a pseudo-science by many of its Hindu critics, has generated the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), but new insights developed within its framework may deconstruct the same. Rumours of its demise are highly exaggerated: linguistics still has a crucial role to play in pinpointing the Homeland of IE. In this matter, and for now, the road to rewriting history goes through linguistics. In showing how Linguistics neither necessitates the AIT nor precludes the OIT, we need not do anything far-fetched or revolutionary. It is not even necessary to seriously revise the linguistic mainstay of the classics written by Szemerényi (1999), Fortson (2004), Mallory & Adams (2006), Clackson (2007), Köbler (2014) etc. Indeed, our position will be that on closer analysis, though they assume a Russian Homeland, nothing factual in their works seriously militates against alternative homelands, contrary to what Indian polemicists against linguistics often assume. It was not colonial or missionary interests that “concocted” the AIT, but the evolving insights of philologists, students of the languages and the literature of the early Indo-Europeans. After the initial discovery of a linguistic unity between many South-Asian and European languages had spawned the notion of an IE language family in the late 18th century, the first hunch was that the putative ancestor-language must have been very close to Vedic Sanskrit, and that Vedic North India must have been its Homeland: “When the IE family was discovered and people sought its land of origin, they at first thought of India”. (Beekes 1990:73) The OIT is not some far-fetched novelty, but stood at the cradle of the very notion of the Indo-European language family. But by ca. 1820, the suspicion that Sanskrit nonetheless had to have evolved substantially from the ancestor-language started translating into the hypothesis that the Homeland also had to be removed from India, first to Bactria, then to Russia, the Balkans, Germany, even Atlantis, and more recently Anatolia,-- at any rate outside India. So, each of these hypotheses implied that IE had to have been established in India as the result of an invasion. Or now with a more fashionable weasel word: an “immigration”. The political abuse of this linguistic theory only came later. However, all the deductions that had to buttress any of these non-Indian Homeland hypotheses, can be shown to be either immature and superseded by newer insights or linguistically illegitimate: they combine legitimate linguistic categories with non-linguistic assumptions or leaps of faith. Thus, the linguistic distance between reconstructed Proto-Indo- European and Vedic Sanskrit, very small but not negligeable, does not imply anything firm about the geographical location of the Homeland,-- save for making close proximity to India very probable. 12 The main linguistic arguments In the past I have tried to show how various types of linguistic evidence do not have the pro- AIT value ascribed to them (Elst 2007/2:28-46, 2013/1:58-101). Now, let us focus specifically on those lines of research that have the potential of contributing to our knowledge of the early IE migrations. 12.1. Centre vs. corner A very common reason for assuming a Pontic Homeland, now almost a matter of consensus among non-Hindu scholars, is that it has the advantage of lying neatly in the middle of the Indo-European spread zone. The Volga lies about halfway between Bengal and Portugal, between Lanka and Iceland; so it is a logical centre of the linguistic spread, a natural Homeland. Well, no: that is an aestheticizing leap of faith made by linguists yet unrelated to hard linguistics. If anything, this symmetry is a reason why Russia is certainly not the Homeland, and precisely the linguists ought to be skeptical of this deduction. Most languages or language families that have spread (Amerind, Austronesian, Bantu, Arabic, Russian) have done so from a far corner of their historical speech area (Canada c.q. Taiwan, West Africa, Arabia, Ukraine); a symmetrical expansion is simply unheard of, because the reason why people or languages migrate is rarely symmetrical. Thus, Bantu expanded because of its association with the demographically empowering novelty of agriculture, and this was possible in the fertile southeast (Central and Southern Africa) but not northwards into the barren Sahara. So, it is far more logical to link the expansion of Indo-European with political or ecological crises in demographically ebullient Northwestern India, whence people fled to the neighbouring Northwestern territories they already knew through their trade networks (vide the archaeological evidence of Harappan goods in Mesopotamia and Central Asia). Benefiting from their technological superiority and their high cultural status, they could advance in stages all the way into Europe, mingling with the natives and imparting their language. 12.2. Homeland diversity Another oft-heard argument is that a Homeland typically has the greatest linguistic diversity, while a colony is linguistically more homogeneous. Though not exactly pleading for a Russian Homeland (which, limited to its IE component, has been homogenous for thousands of miles at a stretch, first Scythian and later Russian), it strongly favours a region outside India, viz. Europe (specifically the Balkans),with many branches, whereas India unites half of the IE-speaking population in a single branch, the Indo-Aryan one. But these data are in fact very compatible with an Out-of-India scenario. Firstly, Europe is geographically fragmented by its Alps, its Adriatic Sea, its English Channel etc., which facilitates its linguistic fragmentation. By contrast, India is geographically quite homogeneous from Sindh to Bengal, mostly plain and full of rivers assuring easy communication: precisely the speech area of Indo-Aryan. Secondly, IE quickly fragmented in Europe precisely because it was immigrating: in every region, it fused with a substratum made up of the local pre-IE language. This way, Germanic is the combination of IE with a substratum from non-IE pre- Germanic, spoken in Northern-Central Europe, Greek is the combination of IE with a substratum from non-IE pre-Greek spoken in the Southern Balkans, etc., yielding within an IE-speaking expansion zone the linguistic diversity characteristic of Europe. 12.3. Isoglosses Even more technical aspects of the linguistic layer of this migration process can be dealt with in a way that supports rather than refutes the Indian Homeland hypothesis. The evidence from the isoglosses (common linguistic changes between two languages indicating they shared a habitat for a while) is rather intricate and cannot seriously be dealt with here. Let us nonetheless remark, along the lines already set out by Kazanas (2013:110-163), Talageri (2000:266-282, 2008:205-236), and Elst (2007/2:29-35), that the attempts to make this body of data fit the Russian Homeland scenario are many, and are mutually contradictory. Thus, a genealogical tree of IE languages suggested by much-acclaimed AIT author David Anthony is deconstructed as “not supported by any linguistic evidence at all” by Clackson (2013:277). Other proposed family trees allotting each language its place vis-à-vis the others has typically been deconstructed as untenable by yet other rivalling linguists. Here, a fact stands out more clearly that also counts, albeit less saliently, for other aspects of the AIT: the impression that the scientific approach has generated one theory of IE origins, is false. A number of cases can be cited that would fit an Indian but not a Russian Homeland scenario. Here, we will settle for a single example: the existence of several traits common to Sanskrit, Iranian, Armenian and Greek, but absent in the other branches. Thus, the prohibitive particle mā/mè; or the augment, a prefixed vowel marking the past tense (Greek e-lipon, “I left”, e- lexa, “I said”, Sanskrit a-dhāt, “he put”, a-gamat, “he went”). The languages have this innovations in common, so somehow they should have lived together for a while, after separating from the other branches. However, from a putative Russian Homeland, Greece and India are in opposite directions. By contrast, from India it all falls into place: Greek only left after staying for a while in the vicinity of Sanskrit and Iranian after the other branches had already departed. During that intermezzo, Greek innovated, adopted mè and developed the augment, and then it could depart. The evidence of the isoglosses seems best compatible with an Indian Homeland, whereas the various ways of trying to fit a Russian Homeland into it, always run into difficulties. This is complicated material, but over all, it smiles upon the OIT. 12.4. Influence of other languages Interaction with other languages might also be a source of information, with which I have dealt earlier. (Elst 1999:133-156, 2013:58-101) The most telling here is the relation with the Uralic family, originally spoken around the Ural mountains, now mostly inside Europe. The discovery of hundreds of Indo-Iranian words in the Uralic vocabulary has been welcomed by adherents of the Russian Homeland as proving that Indo-Iranian was originally spoken in Russia, bordering on the Uralic speech area. But in fact, the Uralic connection proves just the opposite. The important and consequential detail is this: “Lexical borrowing was unidirectional, from Indo-European to Uralic.” (Haarmann 2012:84) This was a colonial situation: English has borrowed hardly a few words from Hindi (and a few philosophy terms from Sanskrit: yoga, karma, avatar), but Hindi has swallowed hundreds of English words. Likewise, the Iranian (in the event, Scythian) pioneers settled in Russia imparted a large vocabulary to their perceivedly more backward northern neighbours, the speakers of Uralic dialects, but hardly borrowed anything in return. More importantly, any words they borrowed in their Russian habitat did not affect the language of the heartland in Afghanistan and India. (Elst 1999:135- 140, Talageri 2008:273-276) So, with an Indian Homeland, we get the picture we now actually have: the Indo-Iranians were never near the Uralic Homeland, except as Scythian colonizers far from their own South-Asian land of origin. By contrast, it is another language that shows Uralic influence, a language that would be shielded from Uralic influence by more easterly dialects of PIE in case the Homeland lay west of the Urals: Germanic. (There is also some lexical penetration in Baltic and Slavic.) Most Uralic languages have the word stress on the first syllable. Unlike the other branches of IE, Germanic too has acquired this trait. (Sanders 2010:34) So, in an Indian homeland scenario, the proto-Germanic tribe perforce had to trek through the Urals. More than the proto-Baltic and proto-Slavic dialects that came later, Germanic was exposed to the maximum of Uralic influence. There is also a remarkable absence of foreign influence where the AIT would have expected it. Unlike in more westerly areas of Indo-European settlement, the geographical terms (names of rivers, lakes, mountains) in the Vedic heartland are all Indo-European rather than substratal borrowings from some native language. Borrowed vocabulary is also remarkably sparse in the Vedas (negligeable in comparison with Greek), with an initially complete absence of Dravidian, often deemed the Harappan language. This fact should moreover be seen in conjunction with the presence of the Indo-European westerly-looking kentum (non- palatalizing) language Proto-Bangani in India, coming on top of the nearby presence of the similarly “misplaced” Tocharian. Ancient Indo-Aryan has all the makings of a native language. 12.5. Linguistic paleontology The proof for the OIT from linguistic paleontology is unexpectedly promising. This sub- discipline was started in the 19th century by Adolphe Pictet with inferences that we now smile about, such as the claim that the Homeland had to be in Western Europe as the word fagus/beech is confined to the member languages spoken in that area (of course, because that is where the tree grows). The Homeland was also located in a cold area because of the presence of words for cold-climate species like bear and wolf. However, these animals historically lived in most of the IE speech area, including India, and anyway, hot countries also have island of cold climate, viz. the mountainous areas, so that Kashmir has birches and conifers. Moreover, it is just not true that hot-climate species are missing from the PIE vocabulary, witness e.g. Sanskrit prdāku, Ṛ Greek pardos, Hittite parsana, all meaning leopard; or Sanskrit kapi, Greek kepos, “monkey”. For what linguistic paleontology is worth, it does not militate against an Indian Homeland. The discipline has gone out of favour with some linguists because of the circular reasoning produced in its name, and for decades already they have been expecting its demise (e.g. Zimmer 1990). But this is mostly rated as an overreaction. In particular, IE vocabulary related to agriculture is still deemed significant for the Homeland question. In an Indo-Europeanist conference in Leipzig 2013, Talking Neolithic, the correlation between the pan-Indo-European botanical and agricultural terminology and the competing Homeland candidates was discussed. Traditionally, this body of evidence is interpreted as indicating a non-agricultural Homeland, viz. Russia, where agriculture only appeared ca. 2000. As Bomhard (2008:223) summarizes the consensus: “the Indo-Europeans were primarily mobile pastoralists and not sedentary agriculturalists”. Upon entry into Europe, they adopted the native terminology for agricultural resources and products, which is why these are in regular correspondence between the European languages but absent from the non-European branches. Likewise, upon entry into India, they adopted the agricultural terminology used by the natives. However, some evidence that came to light there is logically best explained through the rootedness of Indo-European in Northwestern India. Indeed, AIT believers unwittingly drew attention to data that in fact supported the OIT. The European vocabularies indicated a basic familiarity with agriculture but a loss of many terms which was made up for with the adoption of native European words or the agriculture- oriented reinterpretation of general words. Thus, Sanskrit ajrah simply means “a plain”, in Latin it has been agriculturized to the meaning “field”. The Sanskrit root krp-, Ṛ “to cut”, has been agriculturized to “cut fruits from a tree”, “pick (fruits)”, as in Latin carpere, or to English harvest. Sanskrit durva refers to a wild plant, “bent grass”, while Dutch tarwe refers to agricultural produce, “wheat”. However, sometimes there is a common agricultural meaning on both sides. The Sanskrit word parsa, Ṛ “sheaf”, is related to a Greek word persè, which we still see in the agricultural goddess’s name Persephonè, “she who beats the sheaves”. Related to sow < seH, we have Latin sero and Sanskrit sīra, as well as Tocharian sito, Ṛ Greek sitos and Sanskrit sītā. For “thresh”, we have Latin pinso, Sanskrit pinasti. For “chaff”, we have Latin palea, Sanskrit palāva. Latin alium, means “a kind of root” (whence “garlic”), and so did Sanskrit ālū before acquiring the modern meaning “potato”. For "grind”, we have Latin molo, Sanskrit mrnṚ Ṛāti., related to English mill. The general word for “grain”, or specialized to “barley”, is *yewo-, attested in Anatolian, Baltic, Slavic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian. The best explanation is that they practised agriculture in India, then had to do largely without it when trekking through Russia, thus losing much of the terminology which had existed in India, and finally revived it in a form adapted to the European environment, with a locally adopted terminology. In India, the Aryan debate had become dormant since ca. 2000, but was revived in Premendra Priyadarshi’s book In Quest of the Age of the Vedas (2014), which mainly addresses the new genetic evidence quite capably (he is a medical scientist) but also treats the evidence from linguistic data, particularly the botanic and agricultural terminology. This part is unfortunately rather amateurish and sure to strengthen the AIT faithful in their conviction that all OIT proponents are substandard as scholars. So, this job needs a more professional overhaul, but as a pointer to what is needed, his venture into the linguistic evidence has been valuable. 12.6. Megacomparatism Another line of proof would be furnished by megacomparatism, viz. the placement of PIE within the even larger and older structure called Nostratic, spoken during the Ice Age, perhaps 15.000 BC, somewhere is Asia. The very existence of this mega-family of languages (including Dravidian, Uralic, Transeurasiatic, Semitic and others) is in dispute, so it should not be relied upon too much. Its theorists rely on the presently prevailing assumptions about the homelands of its branches, including a westerly Homeland scenario of PIE: ”Since there is a fair amount of controversy surrounding this subject, it is necessary to survey current theories and to select the scenarios that seem most likely”. (Bomhard 2008:222) So, we are not dealing with an eccentric supporting the now-marginal OIT, but a faithful of a non-Indian Homeland. However, to the extent that the Nostratic theory is valid, it tends to support the OIT. Nostraticist Richard Bomhard follows Johanna Nichols (1997) in positing Bactria as the origin of the Indo-European expansion. Bactria is still in the steppeexpanse but is close to India and is at any rate the staging area for the emigrations from there. Following an earlier pioneer of the Nostratic theory, Aaron Dolgopolsky, Bomhard locates the Homeland of Nostratic in Syria or thereabouts, where the Neolithic Revolution was to take place. (Bomhard 2008:246) Within Nostratic, Bomhard sees a sub-grouping consisting of Indo-European, Transeurasiatic (Altaic) and Uralic, spreading out from Bactria. (Bomhard 2008:248) The PIE-speaking population expanded or migrated towards the Black Sea (in his opinion already in 5000 BC), and all the proposed evidence for a Pontic Homeland then fits in with his earlier Nostratic narrative and Bactrian Homeland. At that time, Dravidian was located nearby, in Gujarat. With PIE located just northwest of the Khyber Pass, at this time-depth they might as well have been in the vicinity on the other side of the Khyber Pass. Also, we are not sure about the ultimate location of Nostratic and the scenario of its early expansion, so a lot remains possible. At any rate, the Nostratic theory once more dashes the hopes of the AIT party to find any kind of evidence finally precluding an Indian Homeland. 12.7. Roots In my 1999 book, in a discussion of linguistic paleontology, I remarked off-hand: “Often it is only in Sanskrit that this deeper etymology is still visible”, and then gave some animal names which in Sanskrit have a non-animal etymology whereas in the other branches they only mean the animal, e.g. Celtic-Germanic mare seems related to Sanskrit marka, “swift”, and within Sanskrit, the word wolf/vrkaṚ is related to the root vrk-, Ṛ “tear”, whence vrknṚ Ṛa, “a cut”, “a wound”. Moreover: “The closeness of the animal name to its etymon in Sanskrit is also seen in the fact that one term can still denote two different animals which still have the same eponymous trait: prdāku Ṛ can mean both ‘snake’ and ‘panther’ (from their common trait ‘spotted’), whereas the Latin and Hittite equivalents have only retained the latter meaning.” (Elst 1999:132) While I left it at that and quite forgot about it, Nicholas Kazanas was working along the same lines and developed it into a very powerful type of evidence, showing the primacy of Sanskrit, or its closeness to PIE. Its anteriority to the closely-related Avestan can be demonstrated (Kazanas 2012), but its structural anteriority to other languages, including venerable Greek, is less often realized. Kazanas (2015:43-124) gives thorough proof of it, discussing 393 roots.. We have Greek pa-ter, but Sankrit pitā < *pa-tr Ṛ< pa-, “to protect”; English name, but Sanskrit nāma < nam-, namāmi, “to address, greet”; Greek thugater and English daughter but Sanskrit duhitar < dugdha, “milk” (> “milkmaid”). The rootedness of Sanskrit words where other languages only have secondary derivatives as unrooted words indicates that Sanskrit is older and more fundamental whereas other members of the family partly have the character of creole languages in which IE has mixed with local Central-Asian and Old-European languages. As Kazanas (2015:43) concludes: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland.” Whereas many Hindus wrongly assert that Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European (if not simply all) languages, it is not unreasonable to describe PIE (already without Anatolian) as pre-Vedic Sanskrit, not very different lexically and grammatically from the language attested in the Rg-Veda’s family books. A vowel conflation (e > a < o) and palatalization (k > c) may have taken place and a handful of words borrowed, but this is exactly the same difference as between classical Latin and medieval Latin (ae > e < oe, k > c, a few loanwords). 13 Conclusion Linguistics is an Indian science par excellence, and the entire modern discipline of modern linguistics in indebted to the Indian grammarians of the 1st millennium BCE. In India, it has briefly missed out on the recent innovation of comparison between seriously different languages (as opposed to dialectal differences, well-known among Indian scholars). But here too, Indians should take some pride in the official birth of IE linguistics in Kolkata 1786. A book which has played no role in the Homeland debate because it was not noticed and soon forgotten, was given to me by the chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, Prof. Y. Sudershan Rao. It has just been republished: The Aryan Home, a book from 1957 by Koppale Sivakameswara Rao. The book is remarkably good. Alas, it won't convince the IE establishment because it contains too much imputation of "concoctions" (though less so than with a few more recent ones that have badly bedeviled the OIT case by negative association), which is largely untrue and at any rate irrelevant: even people with ulterior motives may still happen to be speaking the truth and offering the right arguments. Colonial administrators and missionaries used the AIT to their advantage, but only received it ready-made from the scholars; they have not “concocted” it. Yet, its presupposed knowledge of the linguistical state of the art is remarkably sophisticated. It contains a lot of language comparison and a sense of languages' historicity (weak points of many Indian "history rewriters"). Its references to Pān Ṛini and Patañjali are very relevant though they will surprise most seasoned Homeland debaters. But then, to think that this was written in 1957, what a time has been lost since then. Had Indian AIT critics built their case on the basis of this 1957 book, if they had taken its arguments and sharpened or elaborated these, the OIT would have won the debate fair and square decades ago. Because of too much exposure to uncouth and substandard argumentations by Indian polemicists, I had been unjustifiably pessimistic about this book before I read it. But it turns out to be proof that Hindus are quite capable of linguistic scholarship. Linguistics started in Taksaśĭla Ṛ university, where Pān Ṛini taught 26 (or so) centuries ago. Indo-European linguistics started at the feet of Brahmin informers in Kolkata (as shown on a freeze in Oxford showing William Jones learning from Hindu Pandits). There is nothing un-Indian about this science, and Indians are hereby invited to take it up once more. Our own several lines of linguistic evidence (with decisive inputs by Nicholas Kazanas and Shrikant Talageri), when elaborated further, would finally settle the Aryan Homeland debate in favour of the OIT. There is thus no reason for assuming that either “linguistics is a pseudo- science” or “linguistics has proven the AIT”. Though most linguists believe in the AIT (by now more through inertia than through arguable conviction), linguistics has not proven the AIT. 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Though archaeology and genetics have by now documented several emigrations from India, and have found no trace of any "Aryans"/Indo-Europeans immigrating into India, as opposed to the well-proven immigrations into Europe from at the time of the expansion of IE, this does not amount to proof, because genes or artifacts do not speak. We may have identified a community of migrants, but we don't know whether they imposed their own language on the natives they encountered, or conversely adopted the indigenous language. The only testimony they could have left us that would count as proof, is texts testifying to a migration, but: the Vedic texts do not reach as far as the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (though they come close) and the Harappan texts have not convincingly been deciphered yet. So, by default, linguistics still has a crucial role to play in establishing the Homeland. It was not colonial or missionary interests that “concocted” the AIT, but the evolving insights of philologists, students of either the languages or the literature of the early IE-speakers. After the initial discovery of a linguistic unity between many South-Asian and European languages had spawned the notion of an IE language family in the late 18th century, the first hunch was that the putative ancestor-language must have been very close to Vedic Sanskrit, and that Vedic North India must have been its Homeland. But by ca. 1820, the suspicion that Sanskrit had to have evolved substantially from the ancestor-language started translating into the hypothesis that the Homeland also had to be removed from India, first to Bactria, then to more westerly regions,-- at any rate outside India. So, each of these hypotheses implied that IE had to have been established in India as the result of an invasion. Or now with a more fashionable weasel word: an immigration. As we will show in this paper, even more technical aspects of the linguistic layer of this migration process can be dealt with in a way that supports rather than refutes the Indian Homeland hypothesis. There is thus no reason for assuming that either 'linguistics is a pseudo- science' or 'linguistics has proven the AIT'. Though most linguists believe in the AIT (by now more through inertia than through arguable conviction), linguistics has not proven the AIT. On the contrary, the reconstruction of Proto-IE and of its expansion is far better compatible with an Indian Homeland hypothesis.