Created at a time when there was no scientific data from any source, using tools and techniques that were the product of the same intellectual and social milieu that gave birth to comparative linguistics, the famous Aryan Invasion Theory of India has held the fort for well over a century. For the better part of this period, which conspicuously but not exclusively included the period of European colonialism, it was more or less unchallenged as the history of ancient India. It was only in the past few decades that a serious challenge to this theory was mounted. At first it was dismissed as 'Hindu chauvinism', in effect transferring to the Hindus the racist chauvinism of Western scholars and pseudo-scholars of the colonial period. But increasingly, scholars calling themselves Indologists and Indo-Europeanists are finding their scholarship and even their motives questioned by outsiders. As a result, the debate today is not merely over dry facts and academic theories, but also political and other motives. The important thing is that there is a debate. The book under review, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate by Koenraad Elst is a comprehensive account by a leading scholar who has been at the centre of this debate. In the process, he has probably written also the theory's obituary.

An important point to note is that one of the strategies of the 'invasionists', which the author exposes to telling effect, has been to avoid debate altogether by dismissing their adversaries as chauvinists and cranks. Even a decade ago, a scholar raising questions about the truth of the Aryan invasion would have been hard pressed to find an audience, much less a platform. Often their 'refutations' of challenges to the theory were little more than 'haughty dismissals' - as the American scholar A. Seidenberg put it. In addition, as the present reviewer can attest from his own experience, they took the form of personal attacks. A certain Robert Zydenbos (or his ghostwriter) compared this reviewer to Hitler for questioning the Aryan invasion, and even exhorted him to accept responsibility for the Ayodhya demolition! All this is told in fascinating detail in Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate.

Obviously, there is more to these 'debates' than meets the eye. It is not just obscure academics like Zydenbos and JNU (Leftist) propagandists like Romila Thapar and Shereen Ratnagar who have indulged in such tactics. Even a relatively high profile worker like Richard Meadow of the Peabody Museum at Harvard has allowed himself such liberties. In his preface to Johnathan Kenoyer's Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, Meadow tried to dismiss the whole of Indian scholarship by praising Kenoyer's work as being "tempered by Western academic scepticism," where one does not see "those wild flights of fancy or long leaps of faith that characterise some literature of the region [India]." Of late even the publisher Voice of India, which has specialised in bringing out important works that were kept out by the establishment dominated publishing business, has come under attack by scholars in India and the West. All this indicates some uneasiness among these scholars, suggesting they are not really sure of their ground.

To get back to the Aryan invasion, the study of ancient India, at least in the modern Western sense, may be said to have begun with Sir William Jones in the late 18th century. One of Jones's discoveries was that Indian languages - Sanskrit in particular - and European languages are related. To account for this, European scholars, the most famous of whom was F. Max Müller, proposed an invasion of 'Aryans' from the Eurasian steppes. There were other currents - like colonial politics and Christian missionary interests - that need not detain us here. He assigned a date of 1500 BC for the invasion and 1200 BC for the composition of the Rigveda. The reason for the date was his firm belief in the Biblical chronology that assigned 23 October 4004 BC for the Creation and c. 2448 for Noah's Flood, though he sought to give other - equally fanciful - explanations. Though their knowledge of the Vedas and the Sanskrit language was limited, European scholars contrived to find and interpret a few passages in the Vedas as the record of the invasion of fair skinned Aryans and their victory over the dark skinned natives. In other words, the Aryan invaders were colonisers like themselves. As often the case, such theories tell us more about the people who created them than history.

With the discovery of the Harappan Civilization in 1921 - greater in extent than ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia combined - archaeological data also became available, which could now be used in the study of ancient India. But no systematic effort was made to connect archaeological data with the ancient Indian literature. On the other hand, the entrenched Aryan invasion theory led most scholars to keep Harappan archaeology and ancient Indian literature permanently separated - a situation that persists to this day. This has created a strange situation: the Harappans, the creators of the greatest material civilisation of antiquity, have no literary or historical context. On the other hand, the Vedic Aryans, the creators of the greatest literature the world has ever known have no archaeological or even geographical existence.

As a result, after more than two centuries, the subject called Indology has no foundation to speak of; what we have instead is little more than a collection of views and ad-hoc theories that often contradict one another. When people (like the present reviewer) began applying scientific methods to the abundant data that is now available, highlighted contradictions and pointed out the limitations of comparative linguistics for technical problems like Vedic chronology and the decipherment of the Harappan script, it aroused hostile reaction. Even Bernard Sergent, whose work Mr. Elst discusses with respect, dismissed this reviewer's criticism of linguistics as being motivated by the fact that it gives results that he cannot agree with. The reviewer would like place on record that his case is exactly the opposite: these methods are so loose that any conclusion can be supported using comparative linguistics.

This brings up an important point: the needless controversy over science and humanities in the study of Vedic history. No responsible scientist can argue that the humanities have no place, but only their place is not an arena where technical problems need to be addressed. When humanities scholars enter unfamiliar territory, justification of their approach and methodology tends to become more important than searching for truth. No better example is needed than the seventy-year effort to read the Harappan script under the assumption that the Harappan language was Dravidian. Here a modern, man-made classification was imposed on a people that lived thousands of years ago. A major failing of such scholars is that they do not distinguish between scientific theories, which describe laws of nature, and their own theories that are the result of man-made classifications. This lies at the heart of the failure that continues to bedevil the advocates of the Aryan invasion, who take language morphology to be a cause-and-effect law.

This failure is reflected in the progress made in the past couple of decades by members of these two schools of thought. Scholars like Wakankar, Sethna, Frawley, Natwar Jha and others that have looked at the data from an empirical viewpoint have impressive achievements. They include the mapping of the Saraswati river, highlighting the maritime basis of Vedic society, showing mathematical and other connections between Vedic India and West Asia and Egypt, and, above all, the decipherment of the Harappan script. The last achievement, mainly the work of Jha with whom this reviewer collaborated led also to the decipherment of what has been called the 'World's oldest writing'. The result is that we now have a historical context for the Harappans linking archaeology and the Vedic literature. This leads to a quantum jump in our understanding of ancient history.

When we look at the contributions of the invasionist school, we find hardly anything that could not be - or has not been - written a century ago. Where nineteenth century scholars brought the Aryans from Eurasia or even Europe, some today bring them from Bactria or the 'Kurgan' in the Pontic region; where Bishop Caldwell a hundred years ago brought the Dravidians from Scythia, Bernard Sergent today brings them from Africa. The contrasts are equally striking when we compare the efforts to read the Indus seals. Father Heras thought it was Proto Dravidian but ended up using Tamil; so did Asko Parpola. Malati Shengde claimed it was Akkadian, from which she tried to derive Sanskrit! And yet, all of them combined could not read a syllable of the Harappan writing.

At the heart of this lies an attachment to a methodology - an unwillingness to accept failure in the face of evidence. When they run into a contradiction, they simply dismiss the evidence. Bernard Sergent, for example, dismisses evidence pointing to a major ecological catastrophe as the cause of the rapid collapse of the Harappan civilisation. Instead he opts for an economic crisis following the Aryan invasion. (A great natural calamity invariably leads to economic crisis - witness Turkey after the recent earthquake.) It is not so easy to dismiss scientific data. Since this reviewer in 1994 drew attention to the documented record of a three hundred-year drought as the possible cause of the collapse of the Harappan Civilization, more data has come to light. We now know that it was a meteor impact c. 2350 BC that was the direct cause of the drought that ended ancient civilisations. In fact, the study of such meteor impacts is leading to fuller understanding of the ending of the last Ice Age that led to the rise of civilisations. We cannot simply ignore all this and hold on forever to nineteenth century models and methods conceived at a time when none of this was known.

The author devotes a full chapter to ancient astronomical records - a source of data that is also 'haughtily dismissed' by the likes of Romila Thapar (though she ties herself into knots in trying to explain it away). There is no better source for anyone interested in a summary of ancient astronomy and its implications. The author provides a lucid summary of the salient points, while refuting the scientifically unsupportable charge of 'back calculation'. At the same time, he shows commendable restraint in pointing out the limitations of such data - data that do not allow us to draw anything more than broad conclusions. The crucial point to note is that astronomical data are systematically consistent: they do not for example place the Rigveda before the Brahmanas or Kalidasa before the Mahabharata.

All this brings us back to the status of the Aryan invasion theory and the debate surrounding it. Since its advocates can no longer avoid debate with 'haughty dismissals', and those in India at least can no longer depend on government patronage that sustained them for fifty years, it is difficult to see how they can continue monopolising the establishment. The coming generation of scholars will need to be more objective and also be willing to work with outsiders like Vedic scholars. As this reviewer can attest from his work with the Vedic scholar and paleographer Natwar Jha, such an approach can be enormously rewarding. One hopes that Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate will facilitate such constructive steps instead of unnecessary conflict.

In summary, Koenraad Elst has made an immensely valuable contribution by bringing together a vast body of data and explaining both the scholarly and the political background underlying the various issues and personalities. No one interested in the subject of Indian and Indo-European history and historiography can afford to ignore this book.