39 | State of the art in the “Aryan” debate | Koenraad Elst скачать в хорошем качестве

39 | State of the art in the “Aryan” debate | Koenraad Elst

International Colloquium on the Emerging Perspectives of the Harappan Civilization | February 10 - 12, 2023 Talk 39: State of the art in the “Aryan” debate Abstract: Indians in large numbers assume that the argument against the Aryan Immigration / Invasion Theory (AIT) has won, so that the AIT is a thing of the past. True, the argument against the AIT has by now become impressive, but it will only be victorious once the pro-AIT establishment concedes. This is not the case at all: an established Indo-Europeanist who even knows what the rival Out-of-India Theory (OIT) actually says, is hard to find. For them, any Homeland debate is between various sites around the Black Sea. So, let us take stock of what much debate with the OIT has actually taken place, and deduce which steps to take next. Speaker: Koenraad Elst Speaker's Profile: Koenraad Elst was born in a Catholic family in Leuven, Belgium, in 1959. He earned M.A. degrees in Sinology, Indology, and Philosophy. While starting a family of four, he built a precarious professional existence as a foreign affairs journalist and columnist, mostly freelance (punctuated by stints as an assistant in the Belgian Senate and as a guest professor in two Indian universities), keeping his hands as free as possible for Orientalist research. His then-dissident findings on Ayodhya made him a target of cancel culture but also opened the doors of many stalwarts of Hindu assertion. This made possible a Ph.D. dissertation packed with original information about a topic usually monopolized by “underinformed but overopinionated” academics. It was made available to the public as two books, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind and Who Is a Hindu? By then, he had already published a critique of this same movement: BJP vs. Hindu Resurgence*. In contrast, his verification of the common allegation of “Hindu Fascism” through *The Saffron Swastika and its sequel are read as a defence of this movement against slander. Presently his focus is more on Hinduism itself than on the Hindutva movement, in keeping with the emancipation of a Hindu intellectual ecosystem from the latter, as in *Hindu Dharma and the Culture Wars*. But he has also written on very different themes, altogether 30 books and numerous papers and contributions to collective research volumes, also in his Dutch mother tongue. Most conspicuous here is his pioneering role in the “Aryan” Homeland debate.