Post – 2018-08-07

Genesis of Indo-European
(A request: I avoid writing even an application in English so English is both a foreign and strange language for me. Those of you who have some fluency in the language may suggest amendments generously.)

When we try to simplify a complex problem, we, even without intending so, make the problem more complicated than it earlier was. This is the shared handicap of specialized approaches, trying to accommodate the prevailing opinions on the assumption that they may be based on some other specialized study, they go amiss. At the worst, they avoid the academic brawls in order to preserve the purity of their discipline. A specialist has to be rigorous in collecting, sampling and analyzing the data, specific to his field. But after he has reached a definite conclusion, it must either be consistent with the prevailing views of the fact and factors involving that fact, or be able to shake, displace or terminate our notions of other factors. In case of its failure to do so, it is a futile exercise.

This is going to be the foundation of our analysis, so we must reiterate that:
i. A fact or phenomenon is changeless and interminable.
ii. It involves numerous factors, some of which are perceptible to us, on the basis of which we claim to know them.
iii, It is our perception or knowledge of the fact which is either true or false, complete or incomplete, i.e. which is subjected to scrutiny and therefore changes or gets modified with every genuine research.
iv. Truth or falsehood of our perception or knowledge depends on the consistency of our knowledge of the factors involved.
v. All claims to the knowledge of the factors not tested or proven within their own domain, in absence of which it is not knowledge, are simply a notion or surmise.
vi. A notion has no locus, no innate proof, but shifts the burden of proof on some other factor which again is unproven but commonly shared by a number of people, while surmise is temporary flicker.

Most of our opinions are untested, unproven and notional, a few mere surmises, but they serve those in power and control of the instruments of noise-making, so they keep circulating even after they are debunked. A patent case for me is the fact that after my work which pulverised the prevailing notions made part of the school text-books, concerning the Vedic and Harappan phase have resurfaced after a period of lull and are being revived on evasive pretentions.

I had no intention to start my discussion with a controversial issue but now, I think that it may be an opportunity for me to submit that although I am not a linguist buy training, nor a historian by profession, my knowledge of Sanskrit is inadequate in my own reckoning and my familiarity with archaeology is limited to sundry literature that came handy to me yet my general awareness of all the disciplines not excluding anthropology and ancient texts, literary criticism having direct bearing on the subject is sounder than any other scholar known to me. That may be one reason that I could see through the loops and lapses common in pedantic and specialised studies.l Lament that I could not learn any of the South Indian languages so as to be able to read and write fluently, but my knowledge of the scripts, basic grammatical features, possession of a meagre vocabulary and ability to consult dictionaries of all the languages of the subcontinent enables me to compare and cross check the shortcomings in eminent scholars who are blindly relied upon by most of the scholars.

The method adopted by me is simple. I go by the findings of specialists so long as they are confined to the area of their competence and correlate them with similar studies in other areas, as well as the conclusions arrived at by me in the area of my interest. It is interesting that I did not find any contradiction or conflict of ideas. They mutually support and consolidate each other. Contradictions of gravest sort surface when the specialists make compromises to accommodate notions unsupported by evidence, some of which even defy commonsense.

I raised this topic because, three days earlier when l made a statement that I would spend a few months reshaping and editing the material shared by me with my friends, including one on the Genesis of Language, a facebook friend posted a news-article on the recent-most genetic studies conducted by a large team of experts at Rakhi Gadhi, the largest and the oldest urban settlement of the Harappan civilization.

The finding of this study support my thesis in minutest details, despite the fact that none of the experts might have read anything written by me or be aware of my published articles on those aspects. But the moment they pick up circular issues, they lose the immunities enjoyed by them, and unhappily fall prey to the academic brawl. I hope that this might be an error committed by the authors of the article (Sunil Menon and Siddharth Mishra) who appear a bit flamboyant as the title of the article suggests, “We are all Harappans” which vitiates the demographic picture of its time as well as later days. In effect they wanted to claim that the Harappans were Indians, not foreign settlers. But even this is denied in the same article.

Let us present the thesis in nutshell in their own words:
The Rakhigarhi samples have a significant amount of ‘Iranian farmer’ ancestry.
“We aren’t getting any Central Asian gene flow in Rakhigarhi. Comparing Rakhigarhi with data from modern Indian populations, we have concluded that they have more of an affinity with the Ancestral South Indian tribal population compared to the north Indian population.”
Iranian farmer? Yes, this nomenclature owes to studies of early Neolithic farming in the Zagros mountains of Iran—one of the sites in the Fertile Crescent where humanity is said to have first farmed and domesticated animals. At least that’s what the scholarly consensus seems to be. An eastward expansion is then cited as having brought farming and animal domestication to the Indian subcontinent. Along with the people who brought them—a ‘demic’ flow, as they call it—and then proceeded to interbreed with local hunter-gatherer populations to produce the ‘Ancestral South Indian’ type.
And then: “Central Asian mixing happened only when the Indus Valley collapsed.”

Now, let us elaborate the correspondece in our findings one by one..

The researchers detect two genetic links connecting the Harappan denizens with Jagros hills, part of the fertile crescent.
Those of you who might have read my posts consistently may recall the earliest stage of slash and burn or the so called shift agriculture, which created such animosity among the hunters and gatherers who attempted to eliminate the pioneers of agriculture leading to proverbial bloodsheds and repeated conflicts depicted in Dewasur conflicts. The early farmers were tormented and chased out the moment they suspected their designs and as a result they ran in every direction until ultimately they settled in the northeast. I had observed that (a) there is no such tradition in the so called fertile crescent as such the some band of the initial farmers might have strayed as far as northern Iran and Turkey and have practiced farming there. I had, at that time, no other support for my contention which was partly based on recorded Indian tradition and partly on the fact that the northern foragers followed a beat extending upto the Mediterranean Sea.
Intra Indian elements traceable to South India have mbeen constantly hammered by me in defining the composition of the urban gentry of Harappan cities which I claimed to be of three strains, only one of which was the so-called Aryan component.
This complexity was missed by those who made superficial observation declaring the Harappans to be either Aryan or Dravidian or Mundaries according to their need and convenience.
3. The third connection based on genetic similarities with Central Asians was uncalled for, as this component is not coeval with Rakhi Gardhians as admitted by the authors. They, according to their reckoning enter Indian subcontinent from 1500 BC onward. It was a sure bait for them to derail into the grooves created through the noise of two centuries and lo! the Aryan problem is respired to the demise of their own findings.

No one can question the correspondence in genome patterns. They are unassailable facts, to be examined and explained. The third conjecture has been harped with such a regularity and high pitch as to leave one deaf. But no one tried to examine the issue and few of you might have appreciated my elaborate thesis that It was a case of Indians colonising Central Asia and making their hunting ground for some six to eight centuries and ultimately coming back to their homeland tormented by the climatic change which dried most of the water bodies in Iran and Central Asia. Writing on the history of disdain for Hindutva (हिन्दुत्व से घृणा का इतिहास-5-7) on my wall dated 7 January 2017 to nineth January I had described the entire story part of which l shall be posting tomorrow.