Lies with Long Legs. Prodosh Aich
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and were therefore conquered? In spite of a vast majority of “Dravidian” people? Which question is more relevant, the numerical ratios or physical features? And how could those “modern scientists” determine the appearance of people of those “two races” who lived 3500 years ago? Is there any comprehensible method for that? Can there be a method to that purpose?
Obviously the designers of the “theory of two races” and their descendants do not only sympathise with the “Aryans”, but they also admire them and identify themselves with “Aryans” and their assumed physical attributes. It goes with it that these features rank higher and their evaluation is also internalised. These designers projected their own physical appearance to the assumed superior “Aryans” and developed with it a common “we-consciousness” vis-à-vis the “others”, whoever these others might have been. There are just the “others”. And the “others” were by no means tall, strong, fair skinned, fair haired, blue or grey-eyed. What is not wished to be, cannot be.
After the construction of the “we-feeling” the individual features develop independently. We don’t have to remember the impressive meeting of Hitler and Mussolini in the movie “The great dictator” by Charles Chaplin, to understand the massive thrust behind the internalised value, for instance, that large is equal to great. The two dictators were sitting, as we all may recall, on swivel chairs and during their conversation continuously tried to sit higher than the other. Charles Chaplin took resort to this dramatically comic device in order to bring out that inferiority complex of dictators in general. Fortunately we were born later. We can observe on television or in magazines that celebrities with shorter stature are always presented from the frog’s eye view. We may not elaborate on the process of how camera people internalise this rule that celebrities should be tall. If they are not tall enough, why not make look tall?
We will leave it at the indication that every ”we-feeling” presupposes actual or pretended positive qualities which “the others”, of course, don’t possess. It does not matter at all whether scientists, publicists or journalists or others are concerned. Whether they write or not write something like, ‘in the context of the early Indian history it appears to be appropriate, to speak of ‘Aryas’ in the German language, to distinguish the mythical primary race of Indo-Europeans of Northwest India more clearly from the ideological construct ‘Arier’ of recent times’. The ascribed physical features and their valuations, which are imagined and internalised to assume magnificence and superiority, are reflected in their minds and emotions.
The massage to be transported is that the “short-statured” persons are not just “not tall”, but they are also “incalculable and mischievous”; dark-skinned people are in fact “shady customers”, not so frank and open as fair skinned people. And if they have dark eyes in addition, who would like to encounter them? Being citizens or not, who would seriously think about integrating them into the “we-group”? A culture, which has generated the consciousness of superiority of the „blond-blue-eyed-white“ people for centuries, must also be named accordingly, and we should not any longer accept that “experts on culture ” confuse us by inventing new labels for this culture. The “Aryans” could not have been Christians. Christianity emerged later. But who are the “Indo-Europeans”? Are they only the Christian descendants of the “Aryans” or also products of the blond-blue-eyed-white-Christian culture? Are they not more civilised than the “Indo-Aryans”? And a little superior too?
And superiority is not superiority if it is not constantly scrutinised and being evidenced. This can be observed when physical violence is used against those fellow-habitants in Europe, in “America”, in “Australia”, in "New Zealand", who obviously do not belong to the “blond-blue-eyed-white-Christian” culture. And in Germany, of course. Why do we have the public appeals of the celebrities against the infringements? Is it more than just “celebrating”? It should be added that all pioneers of this culture have not necessarily to be “blond-blue eyed-white-Christian”. We have not forgotten yet that Adolf Hitler or Josef Goebbels were the prototype of Nordic “Aryans” in Germany for a “thousand years”. There should not be any misunderstanding. We, the authors, also belong to this culture, although we lack those basic features; but we cannot extinguish the internalised “values” either.
But let’s get back to the original “Aryans” who are supposed to have instigated the whole affair. They were rather simpletons, who ‘were warriors of a youthful group of herdsmen, who did already some farming, but knew nothing of town planning and of fine artistic work’, but nonetheless ‘immigrated through the mountain route of the Northwest into the watershed of Indus and subjugated in continuous fight the prior residents of the north-west corner of India in the 2nd millennium BC’. They just ‘were warriors of a youthful group of herdsmen’. That was it. We wanted to know in which period all these things happened. But there is no concrete evidence. And what about the expansion of this culture up to the utmost southern part of this area? When did it happen? Since the time of Vardhamana, the first Mahavira of the Jainic teaching and Siddhartha Gautama, the later Buddha, the history of India is well documented. There is no evidence of any “Aryan” invasion, occupation and spreading of the culture into the diminished “land of the Dravidians” in the south of India. Apparently this must then have occurred in the period between the 15th and 7th century BC. Why it was not reported in the extensive literature of the “Sanskrit-Aryans”? There is not even the smallest reference.
Even if we bought the story of the “population explosion” among the grazing nomads, we should have to wonder about the section of population which would be ready for a collective emigration: The “well established” ones or the “inferior” ones? Let's consider this dichotomy of the entire population for a while. Which of these two parts would foster the common language better: the established ones or the inferior ones? Who is inclined to emigrate? If, therefore, the “Aryans” brought “Protosanskrit” to India, must we not assume that those remaining at home spoke the same “Protosanskrit”? If the “Aryans” abroad produced that abundance of Sanskrit literature, shouldn’t the same “breed” also have produced literature at home? May be not in abundance and in good quality? But some literature anyhow? Where is the literature of the “Aryans” at home? Where is their history? And why didn’t the other “Aryan” emigrants, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans and the Celts, produce literature similar in quality to “Sanskrit literature”?
Then we would like to know how “modern historians” were able to acquire their knowledge. What were the sources of all these stories which are being ladled out even today? In that exemplary German “standard history book” of 1998 we get a hint about the quality of their sources on page 49: “The dating of the texts and the cultures that produced them was vigorously disputed for quite a long time also among western Indologists. Based on astronomical information the famous Indian freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak has published in his book «The Arctic Home in the Vedas» at the beginning of this century his belief that the origin of the Vedas was to be backdated to the 5th and 6th millennium BC. The German Indologist H. Jacobi came independently to similar conclusions and dated the beginning of the Vedic period in the middle of the 5th millennium. Mostly one followed, however, the dating set by the famous German Indologist Max Mueller who taught in Cambridge in the late 19th century. Setting out from the lifetime of the Buddha around 500 BC he dated the origin of the Upanishads in the centuries from 800 to 600 BC as the philosophy in them had originated before Buddha’s deeds. The Brahmana– and Mantra texts preceded these in the centuries from 1000 to 800 respectively from 1200 to 1000 BC. Today one dates the oldest Vedic text, that of Rigveda, into the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Since the Vedas soon after this genesis as a divine manifestation were not allowed to be changed anymore and handed down to our contemporary time by priest families verbally in an unbelievably precise manner, they can now be considered, after their dating can be regarded as being fixed at least in specific centuries, as historical sources of first rank for the history of the vedic society in northern India.”
Isn’t it impressive, the sheer style of this writing? The section: “Immigration and Settlement of Aryas”, yes, in fact the whole book is written in the same impressive style. And it is so convincing! It has exemplary “scientific” quality. Each sentence, each paragraph is convincingly presented.