California Schools reject Harvard Professor's meddling

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California Schools reject Harvard Professor's meddling

 

Harvard Indologist's campaign to have his Aryan theories taught in

California schools ends in fiasco.

 

N.S. Rajaram

 

In what could prove to be a major embarrassment to Harvard

niversity, California educational authorities rejected the recommendations

made by the Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel. The commission of experts

advising the California Board of Education rebuffed his efforts to

have his

theories on Aryans and the Aryan invasion included in the school

curriculum

on India and Hinduism.

 

The German-born Michael Witzel is known in India for his media

campaigns in favor of the discredited Aryan invasion (which he now calls

migration) and his crusade against scholars who oppose his theories

claiming

Indian civilization to be seeded by an "Aryan invasion". Mr. Witzel, a

linguist, not a historian or archaeologist is better known for his

publicity

campaigns than any contribution to Sanskrit literature or history.

 

Harvard greatly cherishes its liberal tradition. This has taken

a beating in recent months following Harvard President Dr. Lawrence

Summers's comments suggesting that women scientists are less

industrious and

dedicated than their male counterparts. Mr. Witzel's high profile

propaganda

campaign peddling his Aryan theories in the ethnically sensitive

California

schools is unlikely to add luster to Harvard's liberal image.

 

Theories based on the so-called Aryan race were widely

popular in

nineteenth century Europe leading to Nazism and Hitler. Because of this

association, Western scholars studiously avoid any reference to Aryans and

Nazi era theories associated with race. But Mr. Witzel, who seems to have

imbibed these ideas while growing up in his native Germany in the

1940s and

the 50s has emerged as the leader of a small group of Western

academics who

aggressively propagate theories based on them.

 

What made Mr. Witzel jump into California school politics that

led to this fiasco is a matter of conjecture; but this much is known.

California, home to America's largest and ethnically most diverse school

system has a significant number of students of Indian origin. Their

parents

felt that the California school curriculum contained descriptions of India

and Indian religions, especially of Hinduism and Sikhism that were

inaccurate and insensitive.

 

To address their concern, the California Board of Education

appointed a Commission to revise the curriculum by removing offending

passages and obsolete material. The Commission submitted the changes

to the

California Board in early November. One of the sections that came

under the

scanner was the Aryan invasion theory, dear to Mr. Witzel's heart.

 

It was at this point that Mr. Witzel jumped into the fray

as the

head a panel of 'International experts' on India and Hinduism. In a letter

written on the imposing official Harvard letterhead, Mr. Witzel

charged that

 

the recommended changes were motivated by 'Hindutva' forces and would

"lead

without fail to an international educational scandal if they are

accepted by

the California's State Board of Education."

 

The panel met with some initial success, with the California Board and its

appointed Commission taking Mr. Witzel's charges in good faith. But soon

things began to go wrong. Some academics on the Commission saw that

arrayed

behind Mr. Witzel's Harvard professor façade-and Harvard stationery-were

some questionable individuals and outfits with political agendas. These

included self-appointed 'Indologists' like Steve Farmer, Marxist historian

Romila Thapar, Islamic groups and even the Communist Party of India, whose

magazine Frontline has carried their articles.

 

The Commission members seem also to have been put off by Mr. Witzel's

condescending attitude and the shoddy manner in which his panel made its

recommendation, often without reading what the Commission had to say. They

saw it is as little more than a gratuitous attempt to peddle their own

prejudices in the guise of 'scholarly consensus.'

 

Dr. Metzenberg, a California biologist, minced no words when he

rejected Mr.

Witzel's claims with pointed reference to his Aryan theories: "I've read

the DNA research and there was no Aryan migration. I believe the hard

evidence of DNA more than I believe historians." He also described Mr.

Witzel's portrayal of Hinduism as 'insensitive' and something that Hindus

themselves would be unable to recognize.

 

In the end the California Board of Education threw out almost all of Mr.

Witzel's recommendations except for some cosmetic changes to save his

face.This fiasco is likely to hurt not only Mr. Witzel's dwindling

credibility

but also Harvard's liberal image.

 

Behind this surreal political drama is the harsh truth that Western

Indology

today is a dying discipline. The so-called Sanskrit Department where Mr.

Witzel teaches is having difficulty attracting students. The quality is so

pathetic that most of his graduate students would have difficulty

passing a

Sanskrit course in an Indian high school. Mr. Witzel often teaches summer

courses in Sanskrit to visiting Japanese students who learn little more

than the Sanskrit alphabet.

 

Indology took root and flourished in the West under the patronage of

German

nationalists and British colonial authorities. The BBC, in a recent

program

admitted as much. Even the position Mr. Witzel holds at Harvard, the

Prince

of Wales Professor of Sanskrit, is a colonial anachronism. The large and

affluent Indian population in the West has no use for this 'Indology.'

Hence

the campaign to impose it on their unwitting children.

 

The truth of the matter is that the brand of Indology that Mr. Witzel and

his group represent has outlived its purpose and is on its way to

extinction. Desperate campaigns of the kind that led to the recent fiasco

are unlikely to reverse it.

 

____

 

ANNEXURE ON THE ARYANS: SCIENCE, HISTORY AND POLITICS

 

By

 

Dr. N.S. Rajaram

 

Background

 

The recent controversy surrounding the curriculum revision in

California schools, particularly with regard to Harvard linguist Michael

Witzel's attempts to influence the curriculum has created the need for a

proper understanding of the issues involved. The present document

summarizes

different aspects of the issue- the latest scientific evidence and the

historical position.

 

The author of this report is not associated with any group or

institution. He is a former U.S. academic with more than twenty years

experience as a faculty member and administrator in Indiana, Ohio and

Texas.

He is currently an independent researcher and author on the ancient world

including India.

 

Scientific evidence

 

Before we go into the history and the politics of the

controversy

that let to Mr. Witzel insist on his 'Aryan' version of the history being

included in the California school curriculum, it is useful to have an

idea

of what science has to say about Aryans and the Aryan invasion (or

migration). It essentially boils down to the following two questions:

 

1. Was the civilization of India, the Vedic

civilization in

particular, the result of an 'Aryan invasion' (or migration) in

secondmillennium B.C.?

 

2. Is there such a human group identifiable as 'Aryan'?

 

The answer to both these questions is an emphatic NO.

 

Taking up the first question, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Emeritus

Professor

at Stanford University and widely regarded as the world's foremost

population geneticist, notes that the people of India, whatever their

present ethnic identity, are largely of indigenous origin, going back

to the

Pleistocene, or the last Ice Age. The exact words used by

Cavalli-Sforza and

his colleagues in a recent paper are:

 

Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic

heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have

receivedlimited

gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.

 

In non-technical language, this means their current genetic heritage

goes back to the Ice Age (Pleistocene), or more than 50,000 years.

Further,

they have received limited external gene flow since the Holocene meaning

they are not the result of any major invasion or migration since the

Ice Age

ended more than 10,000 years ago.

 

This is what Dr. Metzenberg, who served on the Commission appointed by the

California's State Board of education, was referring to when he said:

"I've

read the DNA research and there was no Aryan migration. I believe the hard

evidence of DNA more than I believe historians."

 

Similar views have been expressed by many others like the geneticist

Stephen

Oppenheimer of Green's College at Oxford University. This, and not

Mr.Witzel's Aryan theories, represents the scientific consensus today.

 

In the face of this overwhelming evidence, it is presumptuous to say the

least for Mr. Witzel or anyone else to claim that the exclusion of his

favorite Aryan theories would "lead without fail to an international

educational scandal if they [curriculum changes] are accepted by the

California's State Board of Education."

 

Next, is there an Aryan race, or, does such a thing as race exist at all?

Again, the answer of science is a resounding NO. Here is what Sir Julian

Huxley, one of the great biologists of the twentieth century had to say as

far back as 1939:

 

In England and America the phrase 'Aryan race' has quite ceased

to be

used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears

occasionally in

political and propagandist literature.. In Germany, the idea of the

'Aryan race' received no more scientific support than in England.

Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who

made

it appear very flattering to local vanity. It therefore steadily spread,

fostered by special conditions.

 

In other words, the whole idea of 'Aryan' is a myth. The

passage

cited above sheds light on two factors (shown in italics) that have kept

this discredited and indefensible idea alive, especially in academia: (1)

political and propagandist interests; and (2) special conditions. This is

what is examined next.

 

 

The Aryan myth fostered in 'special conditions'

 

Having looked at the so-called Aryan problem from the

scientific

angle, we may next take a brief look at the 'special conditions' (as

Huxley

called it) that led to this scholarly pathology being foisted as a central

dogma of ancient historiography. These conditions grew out of

nineteenth and

twentieth century political currents arising out of German nationalism and

British imperial needs.

 

The notion that Indians are one branch of a common stock of people who

lived

originally in Central Asia or in the Eurasian steppes arose in the late

eighteenth century. It began as a linguistic theory to account for

similarities between Sanskrit and classical European languages like Greek

and Latin. From this modest beginning it soon acquired a life of its own

when scholars, especially in Germany, concluded that Europeans and ancient

Indians were two branches of a people they called Aryans and later as

Indo-Europeans. A whole new academic discipline called Indo-European

studies

came into existence whose very survival is now at stake following

scientific

discoveries.

 

The Aryan theory, which began life as a linguistic theory soon

acquired a biological form. Scholars, mostly linguists, began to talk

about

not just Aryan languages, but also an Aryan race. Since Indology had its

greatest flowering in nineteenth century Germany, it is not surprising

that

racial ideas that shaped German nationalism should have found their

way into

scholarly discourse on India. The Indo-European hypothesis and its

offshoot

of the Aryan invasion (or migration) theory came to dominate this

discourse

for over a century.

 

It is important to recognize that the people who created this

theory were, and are today, linguists (like Michael Witzel), not

biologists. We have already seen that scientists, including German

scientists, have no

use for it. Its perpetuation then and its survival today is the result of

'special conditions.'

 

These 'special conditions' were the rise of Nazism in Germany

and British imperial needs in India. While both Germany and Britain

took to

the idea of the Aryan race, its fate in the two countries was somewhat

different. Its perversion in Germany leading eventually to Nazism and its

horrors is too well known to be repeated here. The British, however,

put it

to more creative use for imperial purposes, especially as a tool in making

their rule acceptable to Indians. A recent BBC report admitted as much

(October 6, 2005):

 

It [the Aryan invasion theory] gave a historical precedent to justify the

role and status of the British Raj, who could argue that they were

transforming India for the better in the same way that the Aryans had done

thousands of years earlier.

 

That is to say, the British presented themselves as a 'new and

improved brand of Aryans' who were only completing the work left undone by

their ancestors in the hoary past. This is how the British Prime Minister

Stanley Baldwin put it in the House of Commons in 1929:

 

Now, after ages, .the two branches of the great Aryan ancestry have

again been brought together by Providence. By establishing British rule in

India, God said to the British, "I have brought you and the Indians

together

after a long separation, .it is your duty to raise them to their own level

as quickly as possible .brothers as you are."

 

After this, nothing needs to be said. Today it is sustained by

other 'special conditions', like vested interests in the survival of

Indo-European studies in Western academia. It is only a matter of time

before this vestige of colonial politics disappears from the scene making

way for a more enlightened approach to the study of ancient India.

 

Mr. Witzel's campaign to have his Aryan theories made part of

the California school curriculum is simply a last ditch effort to keep

alive

his academic discipline from sinking into oblivion under the impact of

science.

 

The 'scholarship' that is being put forward in its cause

is little more than "political and propagandist literature" (as Huxley put

it) dressed up in academic jargon.

 

In drawing lessons from this distasteful episode, it is

necessary

to go beyond the immediate causes and effects of Mr. Witzel's campaign by

placing it in the proper moral and ethical context. When we do

so, one fact stands out above all: Mr. Witzel's reckless disregard for the

sensitivities of young minds in his effort to use them to serve his

personal

interests. Can there be education without human feeling?

 

The California State Board of Education has done the right thing in not

giving in to the lobbying pressure from Mr. Witzel and his group.

_______________

 

Dr. N.S Rajaram, formerly a U.S. academic, is the author of several

books on

ancient history. He is currently working on Mekong to Indus: A natural

history of the Vedic Age.

 

 

 

 

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