?Part 2
We continue the article written by Dr Subhash Kak for the Hindu Renaissance magazine. Dr Kak is a professor of computer engineering at Louisiana State University as well as a Vedic scholar. He is well known for his contributions to the history of science and Indian studies.
He is the author of several books on Indian civilisation, including In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation which argues against the view that advanced civilisation came to India from elsewhere. Indian literature was seen to belong to two distinct layers. At the deepest level were the Vedas that represented the outpourings of the nature-worshiping pure Aryans. At the next level, weakened by an admixture with the indigenous tribes, the literature became a narrative on irrational ritual. In scientific or rational discourse the empirical data can, in principle, falsify a theory. This is why creationism, which explains the fossil record as well as evolution by assuming that it was placed there along with everything else by God when He created the universe in 4004 BC, is not a scientific theory: creationism is unfalsifiable. Building a scientific theory one must also use the Occam's razor, according to which the most economical hypotheses explaining the data is to be accepted. Bad intent should not turn anyone away form good science. Why isn't PIE (proto-Indo-Europe) good science? It looks reasonable enough: if there are biological origins then there should be linguistic origins as well. And why don't we believe that the nature of language tells us something about culture?
If Europeans have been dominant in recent history, then why don't we accept it as a characteristic of the European? If Europe was dominant in ancient times, then the origin of the PIE must be in the European sphere from where the energy of its early speakers carried them to the far corners of Asia and allowed them to impose their language on native speakers. There are several problems with the idea of PIE. First, it is based on the hypothesis that languages are defined as fixed entities and they evolve in a biological sense. In reality, a language area is a complex, graded system of several languages and dialects of a family. The degree of homogeneity in a language area is reflection of the linkages, or interaction within the area. For a language-type distributed widely in the ancient world, one would expect several related languages. There would be no standard proto-language. Second, the evolution of a language with time will not simply be a process governed by free rules so that if these rules are reversed we would arrive back at PIE. The changes in each region will reflect the interaction of the speakers with the speakers of other languages (most of which are now extinct) and various patterns of bilingualism. Third, there is no evidence that can prove or disprove such an original language. We cannot infer it with certainty since the historically attested relationship between different languages could have emerged from one of many competing models. If one considers the situation that prevailed in the New World (the "Americas") when Europeans arrived as typical, the ancient Old World (the "native Americans") had a multitude of languages.
It is from this great language diversity that a process akin to biological extinction led to the cur- rently much smaller family of languages. The metaphor of something perfect or pure leading to large diversity must be replaced by the metaphor of a web (Robb 1993). This becomes clear when we consider biological inheritance: as we go back in time we have more and more ancestors. Fourth, the postulation of PIE and a specific homeland does violence to facts. There is no evidence that the natives of India for the past 8,000 years or so have looked any different from what they look now. The internal evidence of this literature points to events that are as early as 7000 years ago (Kramrisch 1981) and its geography is squarely in the Indian region. If there was no single PIE, there was no single homeland either. The postulation of an "original home," without anchoring it to a definite time-period, is to fall in the same logical trap as in the search for invasions and immigration. Tree or animal name evidence cannot fix a homeland.
In a web of languages, different geographical areas will indicate tree or animal names that are specific to these areas. When the European side of the IE languages is examined, the tree or animal names will favour those found in its climate and when the Indian side of the languages are examined, the reference now will be to its flora and fauna. It was Bishop Caldwell (1875) who suggested that the South Indian languages of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu formed the separate Dravidian family of languages. He further suggested that the speakers of the proto-Dravidian language entered India from the northwest. Other scholars argued against this Dravidian invasion theory as another example of the preoccupation with the notion of the "Garden of Eden." The problem of identity, invasions, or immigration of the "Aryans" and their relationship to that of the "Dravidians" is outside the academic debate. The reason is that the problem of what constitutes an Aryan or a Dravidian, in the biological or cultural sense in which it is generally posed, is insoluble. The problem of Aryan and Dravidian is a conflation of many categories. Indian texts do not use the term Arya or Aryan in a linguistic sense, only in terms of culture.
�2 To be continued
�2 Satnarayan Maharaj is the
secretary general of the
Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha