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Chapter 9 (Appendix 2)
Michael Witzel - An Examination Of Western Vedic Scholarship
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The question of the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages is a purely academic subject, although discourse on the subject, particularly in India, has been highly politicized.
We have already examined, in Appendix I, the various aspects of this politicization.
But while the most vocal and extremist supporters of the theory (that the Indoaryan languages spoken in most parts of India were originally brought into South Asia by invaders or immigrants in the second millennium BC) are undoubtedly politically motivated, the theory is generally accepted by most academic scholars as well, purely on the ground that it represents the general consensus in the international academic world.
The question, therefore, is: how far can we rely on the objectivity and sincerity of world scholarship?
We have, in our earlier book, presented a new theory which answers the problem of the original Indo-European homeland more effectively than the generally accepted theory. In this present book, we have shown that the Rigveda confirms our theory with evidence which, at least so far as the literary aspect of the debate is concerned, is practically unanswer-able.
A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies.
However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book.
The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place.
And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.
Thus, Bernard Sergent, a French scholar, in his book Genèse de l’Inde (Bibliothèque Scientifique Payot, Paris, 1997) has the following (roughly translated into English by us) to say about these scholars:
Author : Shrikant G. Talageri
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