It Is Official Now - Romila Thapar Defends The Aryan Invasion Theory!

The Vedic peoples discriminated against the Dasa, a group of people who spoke a different language that did not sound at all like Sanskrit. The Brahmins sometimes made fun of the Dasa and said that they spoke as if they had no noses. (Pinch your nose and see what you would sound like.) The Dasa had wide flat noses and long curly black hair, and the Brahmins claimed that they had darker skin and called them uncivilized barbarians, who didn?t know how to behave.?

The Oxford University Press text titled ?The Ancient South Asian World? authored by two scholars including the renowned Harappan archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer has the following gems:

 Page 81: ?The Vedic peoples discriminated against the Dasa, a group of people who spoke a different language that did not sound at all like Sanskrit. The Brahmins sometimes made fun of the Dasa and said that they spoke as if they had no noses. (Pinch your nose and see what you would sound like.)  The Dasa had wide flat noses and long curly black hair, and the Brahmins claimed that they had darker skin and called them uncivilized barbarians, who didn?t know how to behave.?

COMMENT: Though the authors reject the Aryan Invasion Theory in the earlier pages, they seem to hold on to part of it?the so-called ?Aryan? or ?Indo-Aryan? people and their language, Sanskrit without providing any rationale for it. From chapter 11, some of the South Asians are referred to as Indo-Aryans to set them apart from the native inhabitants of ancient India who are identified as Dasa. There is no conclusive evidence proving that the Aryans and Dasa were racially distinct. The invitation to students to imitate the alleged speech pattern of the Dasa  is uncalled for. The statement ?Pinch your noses?? is frivolous.

The statement that Dasas were insulted by Brahmins as dark skinned etc. is based on 19th century racist and colonial interpretations of the Hindu texts, something that even Indologists[1] and Indo-European linguists dismiss today[2].

Regarding the description ?flat nosed? which presumably refers to the word ?anas? in Vedic texts, numerous scholarly publications[1] that explains the word in a different way.

In short, the authors have reproduced 19th century prejudiced Eurocentric scholarship of colonial historians. But apparently the eminent historian Romila Thapar agrees with this state-of-the-art colonial Indology.

Page 81: ?The Dasa had, in reality lived  in the region for hundreds of years. Their ancestors in the Indus Valley were the Harappans who had named the rivers and mountains, and had built the cities that now lay abandoned.?

COMMENT: There are no surviving names of rivers and mountains that were given by these imagined Dasas. The statement is a figment of imagination. Thus, like many other textbooks, this one also first casts a doubt on the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) but nevertheless proceeds to construct Indian past and religion on the basis of this baseless theory.

Page 87: ?The monkey king Hanuman loved Rama so much that it is said that he is present every time the Ramayana is told. So look around?see any monkeys??

COMMENT: Hanuman is not the monkey ?king?. The king was Sugriva. Students in class might use such an exercise to tease or ridicule their Hindu class mates and call them monkeys.  The text has many more such frivolous statements.

The book abounds in many such statements that are erroneous or could promote prejudice. Thus, on page 155, it is said that ??most Nepalese are Buddhist? when in reality almost 80% people of Nepal are Hindus. Likewise, on page 157, the festival of Onam is confused with Diwali in the following description- ?But in southern India, Divali is the time for worshipping a demon king. According to local traditions, Vishnu conquered the local demon king Bali, and then banished him from his kingdom forever in the netherworld. Bali begged Vishnu.??especially new clothes.?