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 University, 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 facade-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 second millennium 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 received limited 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.