Indo-european Quotes
The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past.
Madison Grant
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.
Shrikant Talageri
At the turn of the [20th] century, of course, the Armenian people were subject to extremely heavy oppression by the Ottoman sultan. Entertaining tragically misguided hopes of being aided by the European powers, some inexperienced and naive Armenian leaders embraced a very regrettable strategy-one which even more regrettably has not been abandoned to this day: they attempted to enlist the imperialist powers to intervene on behalf of the w:Armenians... In an almost pathetic attempt to establish such a common ground, some Armenian intellectuals pulled religion and linguistics out of their hat... Well, subsequent events-and one and one-half million martyrs-show how convincing this line of argument was for our "Indo-European brothers."
Monte Melkonian
Interiorizing this notion, Tilak then went on to develop fanciful interpretations of Vedic verses so as to make them fit the scenario of a non-Indian, indeed Arctic setting of the oldest layer of Vedic literature. Perfectly innocuous verses about the dawn or the seasons, always read in their natural meaning by one or two hundred generations of Brahmins, were suddenly contrived to reveal references to the Arctic. It is this highly artificial and totally untraditional reading of the Vedic hymns which became and remains the sheet-anchor of Aryan invasion lore in European far-rightist and new-rightist circles. Tilak was no authority on Indo-European expansion history...
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
The prevailing attitude (which is gradually losing its grip) may be described as the tacit assumption that ancient Israel and Greece are two water-tight compartments... One is said to be sacred; the other, profane; one, Semitic; the other, Indo-European. One, Asiatic and Oriental; the other, European and Occidental. But the fact is that both flourished during the same centuries, in the same East Mediterranean corner of the globe, with both ethnic groups in contact with each other from the start.
Cyrus H. Gordon
It is imperative, from the Indian side, that the powers that be in Indian universities must recognize the need for historical Indo-European linguistics in their humanities departments if they are to make significant contributions to the protohistory of their subcontinent. Indo-European studies should, if anything, be an Indian forte, not exclusively a European one; many Indian scholars have a distinct head start due to their advanced knowledge of Sanskrit, which still plays a fundamental and extensive role in this field. In particular, it is simply unacceptable that research into substratum influence in Sanskrit texts has primarily been the preserve of a dozen or so Western scholars, however qualified.
Edwin Bryant
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.
Koenraad Elst
Pollock's attempt to even link the Out-of-India Theory with the Nazi worldview is the diametrical opposite of the truth; it was the rivalling Aryan Invasion Theory (which Pollock himself upholds) that formed the cornerstone and perfect illustration of the Nazi worldview. This linking could only pass peer review because of the general animus against Hinduism and Indo-European indigenism in American academe. The whole forced attempt to associate Hinduism with National-Socialism suggests a rare animosity against Hinduism.
Koenraad Elst
On the other hand, northern India is the only place where place-names and river-names are Indo-European right from the period of the Rigveda (a text which Max Müller refers to as "the first word spoken by the Aryan man”) with no traces of any alleged earlier non-Indo-European names.
Shrikant Talageri
And, on this principle, Witzel's papers themselves are "devoid of scholarly value”, since he is also "motivated” by the desire to counter the Indian homeland theory. Erdosy testifies that "the principal concern” of scholars (like Witzel) studying South Asian linguistics is to find "evidence for the external origins - and likely arrival in the 2nd millennium BC - of Indo-Aryan languages”; and Witzel himself admits that his historical analysis of the Rigveda is motivated by the desire to counter "recent attempts (Biswas 1990, Shaffer 1984) to deny that any movement of Indo-European into South Asia has occured.”.
Shrikant Talageri
The Harappan civilization is situated deep within Indo-European ("Indo-Aryan") territory. The closest non-Indo-European families are at some distance:... There is no linguistic, archaeological or anthropological evidence indicating that the Harappan civilization was supplanted by a linguistically different race of people: on the contrary, archaeologists and anthropologists insist on continuity in the anthropological situation from Harappan times well into post- Vedic times. In these circumstances, the Harappan civilization should have been assumed to be Indo-European until proved otherwise. However, in gross violation of normal scholarly practice, it has been assumed to be non-Indo-European.
Shrikant Talageri
"The modern Indo-Aryan languages are not descendants of the Rigvedic dialects, but of other dialects which were contemporaneous with the Rigvedic dialects, but which belonged to a different section of Indo-European speech (the Inner Indo-European section). The Vedic dialects died away in the course of time, and their speech area [....] was taken over by the Inner Indo-European dialects. But long before they died away, the Vedic dialects had set in motion a powerful wave of a cult movement which covered the entire nation in its sweep. This Vedic cult also finally gave way to the local pan-Indian religion of the Inner-Indo-Europeans and Dravidian-language speakers, but continued to remain in force as the elite layer of this pan-Indian religion” (TALAGERI 1993a:230).
Shrikant Talageri
