[Y-Indology] Conference on Indus Valley/Saraswati

[Guest guest]

Dear Misraji,

 

I have nothing but admiration for efforts like your Shishubharati

and I hope more such cultural schools are opened up to give our

younger generation in the US some sense of their cultural background.

All the same, among the weddings that I have attended in the past

few years in the Marathi immigrant community in Michigan, more than

half are weddings between Hindu children with white christian

Americans, some with Hindus from other caste and regional backgrounds,

a few with Indian christians and muslims as well, and a tiny

proportion of weddings in the typical traditional Indian fashion of

the bride and groom being from exactly the same community. Perhaps

unlike the NRI community that you know, the community that I know best

is facing this changing environment and is making adjustments

sometimes successfully and happily and sometimes not so successfully.

One of my friend's daughter refused to undergo the ceremony of

kanyaadaana, claiming that she was not her father's property to be

given away. In another case, I had to help out a friend in designing

a ceremony in which the Indian Hindu parents of the bride had to

figure out how to deal with the divorced parents of the American

groom, both whom had new spouses and all wanted to be present at the

wedding. I hope you will agree that we all as NRI community members

have diverse life-experiences, and face these changing circumstances

differently. I am glad that people like you, though groups like

Shishubharati, are making valiant efforts to provide a cultural

understanding to the younger generation. I hope it will prepare them

to deal with this complicated environment with greater

self-confidence. I don't know what any of this has to do with the

Indus conference in California, but I thought you brought up some

important issues. Best wishes,

 

Madhav Deshpande

 

INDOLOGY, Bijoy Misra <bmisra@f...> wrote:

>

> Dear Madhavji,

> This is a very poor description of NRIs and their behavior.

> I would doubt your sample and reach. Every Sunday we run

> an Indian cultural school here in Boston (www.shishubharati.org)

> and about four hundred persons gather. The outlook is

> very different that you present and so is in the Temple.

> Indian identity is different than a Hindu identity.

> I don't know much about fanatic Hindutvas and I realize

> some small sector is available. Hindu is a poor substitute

> for the traditions of India.

>

> One could debate what could pass as India Studies and

> how much bias and political thought could be ignored.

> The threshold on this is reducig and I think it's a good

> sign. For a long time arbitrary materials have been

> produced in the name of scholarship and those have been

> disservice to generations of students where our own

> education was affected. Presently also there is

> missionary media on "dalit", "untouchable", "caste"

> and "dowry" as though Indian society is collapsing

> and a "savior" is called for. This attentions makes

> some defensive. People like you and others in the field

> should help steer new research and more openminded analysis

> on Indian thoughts and traditions. They must dispel

> the falsehoods in the propaganda machine. The political

> views of Hindutva are useless and have no scholarly value.

>

> Best regards,

>

> Bijoy Misra

[Guest guest]

Naga Ganesan writes:

>

>> ... Prof Kenoyer contacted publishers of school textbooks

>> in New York to revise the issue of the Aryans and

>> Vedic-Harappan culture in American school textbooks.

>> In fact, the conference organisers have written to

>> school level educational institutions ...

>

As already noted on this List, the claims that the conference

organizers have "written to school level educational institutions" to

ask them to change Indian textbooks isn't true. Coinicidentally, the

main organizer wrote me this Saturday to say that he had just heard

about the _Pioneer_ story on the Long Beach Conference, and he is as

mystified by the article as everyone else. What was reported in that

article has nothing to do with what happened at the conference.

 

Ganesan writes further:

 

> Will be interested to read Prof. Kenoyer's writings

> in the Conference proceedings.

 

There have never been any plans to publish proceedings from this

conference. This was again already noted on this List.

 

> In his book, Kenoyer

> mentions a possibility by some Indologists.

> JMK, Ancient cities of the Indus valley civilization,

> p. 78, "At present, no modern language can be directly

> traced to the Indus script, but most scholars agree

> that it belongs to the Dravidian langauge family."

 

Kenoyer's book was published in 1998 and was written several years

earlier. It certainly can't be claimed in 2004 that "most scholars

agree" that (1) the language of the Indus Valley (why just one

language??) was Dravidian or (2) that the so-called Indus script

encoded Dravidian.

 

Against the first claim, there is the evidence much discussed after

Kenoyer's book was published that early strata of the Rgveda don't

contain significant numbers of Dravidian loan words, which at a minimum

undercuts claims that Dravidian was widely spoken in NW India by the

end of the second millennium BCE. See, e.g., Witzel PDFs #70 & 71 at:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwbib.htm . The first of

those papers was also reprinted in the _International Journal of

Dravidian Linguistics_ in 2001.

 

Against the second claim, arguments have also emerged since Kenoyer's

book was published that the so-called Indus script didn't encode

extended speech, relegating 130 years of debates about "the language of

the script" to the realm of historical farse. This evidence rests among

many other things on the unreasonably low sign-repetition rates found

in the inscriptions, which clashes with the fact that the Indus corpus

as a whole is dominated by a handful of high-frequency signs. The

failure of even the highest frequency signs to repeat except in special

cases in single inscriptions is a good sign that you aren't looking at

phonetic encoding. (You can't evoke Chinese-style scripts as a

counterexample, due in part again to the small number of signs that

dominate in the Indus corpus.) In any event, nowhere in Indus

inscriptions do we find the kinds of quasi-random repetitions of

individual signs that is a key marker of phonetic encoding in true

scripts of the same period (Akkadian cuneiform, linear Elamite,

Egyptian hieroglyphics and demotic, etc.). Go compare linear Elamite

inscriptions sometime with Indus inscriptions and you'll see what I

mean.

 

However you view these arguments, it can't be claimed that the

situation in 2004 is the same as in 1998, when Kenoyer wrote his book.

 

Ganesan continues to quote Kenoyer, who summarizes claims in Parpola

1994:

 

> p. 78-79, "Proto-Dravidian root words were originally

> monosyllabic. Using the rebus approach, scholars

> have identified key words that may represent the

> general meaning of specific Indus signs. The most

> convincinge example is the fish sign. The dravidian

> root for fish is "min" and the same word means

> "to glitter, flash or shine."

 

The old story about the fish/star homonym in Dravidian was first put

forward by Heras in the 1940s, was rehashed by Knorozov, Mahadevan, and

Parpola in the late 1960s, and has been repeated by other so-called

'Dravidianists' ever since. But as one linguist wrote the other day, it

certainly would be odd to find people drawing fish every time they

wanted to depict stars in the Indus Valley, especially since throughout

the Middle East and W. Iran whenever they wanted to depict a star they

drew something simpler that looked (umm) like a star!

 

Ancient scripts did heavily lean on rebus equations, but this isn't the

way they normally used them. In all other pictographic scripts, rebus

equations typically had two uses. Please note the three following

points:

 

1. In one form of rebus equation, a concrete symbol of something that

was easy to draw was used to stand for some abstract concept that could

NOT be easily drawn (say, a picture of a mountain standing for a

foreigner or enemy). Call this very common type of rebus a concrete

sign --> abstract sign rebus.

 

2. In the second form of rebus equation, a concrete symbol that was

easy to draw was employed for its pure sound value in an evolving

phonetic script. Call this a concrete sign --> phonetic sign rebus. We

find many examples of this in early scripts.

 

3. In no examples known to me do we ever find cases in which something

easy to draw (like a star) was ever replaced by the picture of

something more difficult to draw (like a fish). Call this a concrete

sign --> concrete sign rebus.

 

You do find something like rebus type #3 employed in early Christian

traditions and other mystery religions for esoteric reasons. Sticking

here with fish symbols, think of how fish symbols stood for Jesus in

antiquity -- or in George Bush's equally primitive America, for that

matter: see http://www.meangene.com/darwin/ . But unless you want to

claim that the Harappans were prisci theologi who anticipated

Christianity, you are on shaky grounds. :^)

 

In all, early scripts put a premium on efficiency, and unnecessary

rebus equations of this sort would be a highly inefficient method of

putting an idea across, unless you were constructing rebus puzzles

purely for obscurity's sake. (And, for a Dravidian speaker, it is

difficult to believe that the fish/star equation would be all that

obscure). In any case, you would have to come up with some

cross-cultural examples of uses of rebus equations like this if you

wanted Heras' fish/star equation to be taken seriously.

 

In any event, Ganesan, how many times have you trotted out this same

claim on different Lists??

 

The fact that fish signs are prominent in the Indus Valley is not very

difficult to explain, in any event, given the fact that this was a

society that depended heavily on fishing (and apparently sacrificed

lots of fish to boot). For discussion and lots of bibliography, see

William Belcher, "Fish Exploitation of the Indus Valley Tradition," in

Weber and Belcher, _Indus Ethnobiology_ 2003, 95-174.

 

Even the so-called "ligatured" fish Parpola makes much of in the

inscriptions actually look a lot like the pictures of fish we find

painted on Indus pottery. See the illustrations on the slides entitled

"Fishy Story" in the first and second slide sets given on my download

page.

 

The old "fish"/"star" homonym comes in handy if, like Ganesan and the

Tamil nationalists, you have a personal interest in arguing that

everything early in India was Dravidian. But that is a politicallyand

not scientifically driven point of view, which from a methodological

standpoint isn't all that different from Hindutva manipulations of

history.

 

Sometimes things that look simple -- like fish symbols -- may just be

simple.

 

Best,

Steve

http://www.safarmer.com/downloads

 

On Sunday, April 18, 2004, at 07:18 PM, naga_ganesan wrote:

 

> INDOLOGY, "mkelkar2003" <smykelkar@c...> wrote:

>> ... Prof Kenoyer contacted publishers of school textbooks

>> in New York to revise the issue of the Aryans and

>> Vedic-Harappan culture in American school textbooks.

>> In fact, the conference organisers have written to

>> school level educational institutions ...

>

>

>

> The fish sign combined

> with six single strokes is very common in the Indus

> writing, and it could be translated as "aru min" or

> Six Stars, which would represent the constellation

> Pleiades. Another common occurrence is the fish sign

> with seven stars. In Dravidian this would translate as

> "elu-min" or Seven Stars, which is the name for the

> constellation of Seven Sages (Ursa Major or the Big Dipper)."

>

> Perhaps, Kenoyer uses well known arguments for

> the Indus fish sign such as

> ""Father Heras compared the sequence of '6' + 'fish' to the

> Old Tamil name of the Pleiades, aRu-mI_n, literally '6 stars'.

> Dr. Nikita Gurov proposed to read '3' + 'fish' as mum-mIn,

> which is the Old Tamil name of the M.rga'sIr.sa constellation.

> And I pointed out that '7' + 'fish' corresponds to the old Tamil

> name of the Big Dipper, e_lu-mIn. This sequence forms

> the enire inscription in one large seal from Harappa (fig. 20).

> These astral readings are based on the homophony between

> the Tamil and Proto-Drav. words, mii_n 'fish' and mii_n 'star'

> (fig. 21). This linguistic association seems to be reflected

> even on Harappan painted pottery from Amri, where the

> motifs of 'fish' and 'star' co-occur (fig. 22)."

> (A. Parpola. Deciphering the Indus script: methods and select

> interpretations. Keynote address delivered at the 25th annual

> south asia conference, Madison, WI, Oct. 1996.)

>

> N. Ganesan

>

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