Zydenbos vs. Rajaram: a Case Study in Aryan Invasion Polemic

Dr. Koenraad Elst

A Primer in AIT polemic

For a case study in anti-AIT polemic, I have chosen the article "An obscurantist argument" by the Dutch-Canadian scholar Robert J. Zydenbos. (1) His bona fades is unquestionable, and he represents the majority of AIT-believing scholars in that he merely accepts the predominant opinion without having a political axe to grind, though this makes him susceptible to being influenced by AIT defenders who do have political motives. He is emphatically not a representative of the anti-Brahminism so prevalent among Western India-watchers, being in fact the author of an informed critique of this ideological distortion of much contemporary scholarship. (2) Some of the rhetoric in this article typifies the way in which certain AIT defenders in positions of authority tend to over-awe the public with references to overrated evidence, and to vilify spokesmen of the dissident non-AIT school. The piece is an attack on N. S. Rajaram, a scientist from Karnataka (in AIT parlance: a Dravidian, not an Aryan) working in the USA, who has contributed decisive insights to the AIT debate. (3) I disagree on some important points with Prof. Rajaram, most of all with his rejection of the linguistic reconstruction of an IE protolanguage; but that is no reason to dismiss his work as "a textbook example of the quasi-religious-cum-political obscurantism that is so popular among alienated Non-Resident Indians", which is moreover "out of touch with what serious scholars both in India and abroad hold at present", as Zydenbos alleges. "The linguistic evidence for the Indo-European origin of Sanskrit outside India is Overwhelming", he claims, in almost verbatim agreement with Prof. Romila Thapar, whom he defends against Rajaram's critique of her article "The Perennial Aryans". (4) Neither in his nor in Prof. Thapar's much lengthier article is even one item of this "overwhelming evidence" mentioned. However, Dr. Zydenbos can claim the merit of being one of the first (to my knowledge, the very first) among the defenders of the AIT to actually respond to the rising tide of anti-AIT argumentation.

Ethnically Pure Aryans

Zydenbos starts his crescendo of allegations by stating something Rajaram never disputed: "No scholar seriously believes that there are any 'ethnically pure' Aryans in India today (and perhaps anywhere else, either). And why should anyone care?" Actually, Rajaram himself is among those who reject the notion of 'ethnically pure Aryans', not because of the obvious fact that countless inter-ethnic marriages have taken place, but because he rejects the use of "Aryan" as an ethnic term in the first place. As he and many others have argued time and again, the Sanskrit word Arya was not an ethnic term, it is Western scholars who have turned it into one. And it is the Western participant in this duel, Dr. Zydenbos, who, even after reading Prof. Rajaram, just continues to use "Aryan" as an ethnic and even as a racial term: "Those who called themselves 'Aryan' 1000 years ago were already very different from the various Aryan tribes that came over 3500 years ago (*) This too is historical fact. One only needs to learn Sanskrit to find this out." I fear that there is something very wrong with Sanskrit courses if accomplished indologists can read Arya in a racial sense unattested in the whole of Sanskrit literature. The anti-AIT authors may nonetheless be wrong in denying an ethnic meaning to Arya altogether. While Arya was definitely never a racial or linguistic concept, it may have had a precise ethnic usage at least in some circles in one specific period. As Shrikant Talageri has shown, in the Rg-Veda, the term Arya is exclusively applied to the Puru tribe, including the Bharata clan, the community which generated the Rg-Vedic texts. Thus, when something negative is said about "Arya" people, these turn out to be non-Bharata Purus; and when the merits of a non-Puru king or sage are extolled, he may be called any term of praise but never Arya. (5) Likewise, it seems that the Iranian Avesta uses Airya in referring to a specific community, the cultivators in the Oxus river basin, contrasting it with nomadic barbarians who were similar in race and equally Iranian-speaking (generically known as Shakas/Scythians), but who were not part of the sedentary Mazdean "Airya" world. (6) The matter must be studied more closely, after freeing ourselves from the AIT-related misconceptions. For now, I speculate that the term Arya spread over the Hindu world, which included many non-Vedic Indo-Aryan-speaking tribes (Aikshvaku, Yadava, Pramshava, etc. ), along with the Vedic tradition which was originally the exclusively local tradition of the Paurava tribe and Bharata clan settled on the banks of the Saraswati river. And that it originally had an ethnic connotation, something like "the Puru tradition", even when used as the name of a religious tradition and civilizational standard, viz. the Vedic culture, somewhat like the ethno-geographical term Roman came to mean "Catholic". At any rate, in classical Sanskrit, Arya means "civilized", specifically "following the norms of Vedic civilization", and this might imply a reference to the ancient situation when Vedic culture typified the metropolis, the Saraswati region (well-attested as being the centre of both the Rg-Vedic world and Harappan civilization), which the provinces tried to emulate. In the ShAstras and in literary works, the term Arya typically takes the place which would nowadays be filled by the term Hindu, or of "the Hindu ideal", Hindu in a normative rather than in a descriptive sense. It is in this (by that time definitely the usual) sense that the Buddha used the term Arya, as in the catvAri-Arya-satyAni, "the four noble truths", and the Arya-ashtANgika-mArga, "the noble eightfold path", meaning that his way (more than the petty magic with which many Veda-reciting priests made a living) fulfilled the old ideals of Vedic civilization. It is with a similar intention that the modern Veda revivalists of the Arya Samaj chose the name of their organization. While conceptions may differ concerning what the real essence of the Vedic worldview was, there has been a wide pan-Indian agreement for at least 3,000 years that Arya means a standard of civilization, regardless of language, race or even ethnicity.