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An Indian grammar for International Studies
Amitabh Mattoo
The HinduExploring our rich past can offer a vocabulary to understand the world in nuanced ways that go beyond the western constructs of realism and liberalism
A little over three years ago I wrote in The Hindu that at a time when interest in India and India’s interest in the world are arguably at their highest, Indian scholarship on global issues is showing few signs of responding to this challenge and that this could well stunt India’s ability to influence the international system.
As we meet here now, at the first real convention of scholars (and practitioners) of International Studies from throughout India, we can take some comfort. A quick, albeit anecdotal, audit of the study of International Studies would suggest that the last three years have been unusually productive. So much so, that we are now, I believe, at a veritable “tipping point” in our emergence as an intellectual power in the discipline.
Stanley Hoffman, Professor of International Relations (IR) at Harvard, once famously remarked that IR was an American social science. The blinding nexus between knowledge and power (particularly stark in the case of IR in the United States) perhaps made him forget that while the first modern IR departments were created in Aberystwyth and in Geneva, thinking on international relations went back, in the case of the Indian, Chinese and other great civilizations, to well before the West even began to think of the world outside their living space.
Having absorbed the grammar of Western international relations, and transited to a phase of greater self-confidence, it is now opportune for us to also use the vocabulary of our past as a guide to the future.
2011 survey
Recovery of these Indian ideas should not be seen as part of a revivalist project or as an exercise that seeks to reify so-called Indian exceptionalism. Rather, interrogating our rich past with its deeply argumentative tradition is, as Amartya Sen put it, “partly a celebration, partly an invitation to criticality, partly a reason for further exploration, and partly also an incitement to get more people into the argument.” In the context of international relations it offers the intellectual promise of going beyond the Manichean opposition between power and principle; and between the world of ideas and norms on the one hand, and that of statecraft and even machtpolitik, on the other.
In doing so we are not being particularly subversive. A 2011 survey of American IR scholars by Foreign Policy found that 22 per cent adopted a Constructivist approach (with its privileging of ideas and identity in shaping state preferences and international outcomes), 21 per cent adopted a Liberal approach, only 16 per cent a Realist approach, and a tiny two per cent a Marxist approach. When academics were asked to “list their peers who have had the greatest influence on them and the discipline,” the most influential was Alexander Wendt, the Constructivist, and neither the Liberal, Robert Koehane, nor the Realists, Kenneth Waltz or James Mearisheimer.
Mohandas Gandhi once said that “if all the Upanishads and all the other scriptures happened all of a sudden to be reduced to ashes, and if only the first verse in the Ishopanishad were left in the memory of the Hindus, Hinduism would live forever.” Let me make what may seem like another astounding claim, and which I hope, in the best argumentative tradition, will be heavily contested. If all the books on war and peace were to suddenly disappear from the world, and only the Mahabharata remained, it would be good enough to capture almost all the possible debates on order, justice, force and the moral dilemmas associated with choices that are made on these issues within the realm of international politics.
Uncertainty in the region
Beyond theory, we are faced with a period of extraordinary uncertainty in the international system and in our region. Multilateralism is in serious crisis. While the U.N. Security Council remains deadlocked on key issues, there is little progress on most other issues of global concern, be it trade, sustainable development or climate change. As academics, we cannot remain unconcerned about these critical failures.
Our continent is being defined and redefined over time. Regions are, after all, as much shaped by the powerful whose interests they seek to advance as by any objective reality. Whatever nomenclature we adopt, and whatever definition we accept, we are faced with, what Evan Feigenbaum and Robert Manning described as two Asias: the ‘Economic Asia’ whose $19 trillion regional economy drives global growth; the “Security Asia,” a “dysfunctional region of mistrustful powers, prone to nationalism and irredentism, escalating their territorial disputes over tiny rocks and shoals, and arming for conflict.”
The Asian Development Bank says that by nearly doubling its share of global GDP to 52 per cent by 2050, Asia could regain the dominant economic position it held 300 years ago. Yet, as several academics have pointed out “it is beset by interstate rivalries that resemble 19th century Europe,” as well the new challenges of the 21st century: environmental catastrophes, natural disasters, climate change, terrorism, cyber security and maritime issues. An increasingly assertive China that has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy of hiding its light and keeping its head low, adds to the uncertainty of the prevailing strategic environment.
India’s military and economic prowess are greater than ever before, yet its ability to influence South Asian countries is less than what it was, say, 30 years ago. An unstable Nepal with widespread anti-India sentiment, a triumphalist Sri Lanka where Sinhalese chauvinism shows no signs of accommodating legitimate Tamil aspirations, a chaotic Pakistan unwilling to even reassure New Delhi on future terrorist strikes, are symptomatic of a region being pulled in different directions.
Can our thinking from the past help us navigate through this troubled present? Pankaj Mishra, in his brilliant book, From the Ruins of Empire: the Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, describes how three 19th century thinkers, the Persian Jamal-al Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao from China and India’s Rabindranath Tagore, navigated through Eastern tradition and the Western onslaught to think of creative ways to strike a balance and find harmony. In many ways, these ideas remain relevant today as well. For if Asia merely mimics the West in its quest for economic growth and conspicuous consumption, and the attendant conflict over economic resources and military prowess, the “revenge of the East” in the Asian century and “all its victories” will remain “truly Pyrrhic.”
(Professor Amitabh Mattoo is President of the Indian Association of International Studies. This is an edited version of his presidential address to the Annual Convention of the Association in New Delhi on December 10, 2012.)
http://www.thehindu.com/
History reborn
History reborn
SATURDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2012 17:34 NS RAJARAM
A gene mutation 80,000 years ago and a super-volcano 73,000 years ago led to the birth of civilisation as we know it today. All non-African humans and their languages can be traced to a thousand individuals in India 60,000 years ago
Ever since Sir William Jones in 1786 found remarkable similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, the question of how people from Sri Lanka and Assam to Ireland and Iceland happen to speak languages clearly related to one another has remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of history. The usual explanation, at least in India, is the Aryan invasion theory. It claims that bands of invading ‘Aryan’ tribes brought both the ancestor of the Sanskrit language and the Vedic literature from somewhere in Eurasia or even Europe.
This was the result of scholars assuming that the ancestors of Indians and Europeans must at one time have lived in a common place speaking a common language before they spread across Asia, Eurasia and Europe carrying their language which later split into different languages. They called these speakers Indo-Europeans and their languages — from north India to Europe — the Indo-European family. They called the original language Proto-Indo-European, a term sometimes applied to its speakers also.
European linguists soon followed up on these ideas but in their newfound enthusiasm committed two egregious blunders. First, they borrowed the Sanskrit word Arya, which only means civilised, and turned it into a geographical and then a racial term by applying it to the people and languages of north India. (The correct term for north India is Gauda, just as Dravida refers to the south.) Next, they placed south Indian languages in a totally different category called the Dravidian family, excluding them from nearly all discourse about Indo-Europeans. In reality, south Indian languages are much closer to Sanskrit in both grammar and vocabulary, whereas with European languages it is limited to vocabulary.
For nearly a century, until archaeologists discovered the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilisation, the Aryan invasion theory was taught as the beginning of history in India. It continues to be taught in one form or another in spite of the many contradictions highlighted by archaeologists like Jim Shaeffer and BB Lal as well as natural scientists like Sir Julian Huxley, L Cavalli-Sforza and others. Politics and entrenched academic interests have succeeded in keeping alive this 200-year-old ad hoc hypothesis but science may have finally put an end to its survival while at the same time opening a vast new window on the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans. Recent discoveries in natural history and population genetics, especially in the past two decades, have changed our understanding of Indo-European origins in ways that were totally unexpected. The picture, still a bit hazy, highlights the fact that our theories like the Aryan invasion theory are naïve and simplistic. They greatly underestimate the time horizons involved and also ignore the revolutionary impact of natural history on human beings in the past hundred thousand years.
volcano and gene mutation
Our story takes us to Africa some hundred thousand years ago. Our ancestors, called ‘anatomically modern humans’, have been located in fossils in East Africa dating to about that time or a bit earlier. We were not the only humans then: There were several other ‘humanoid’ species in Asia and Africa among which the now extinct Neanderthals are the best known. What separates us from them is we have survived and they have not. In addition, we are a speaking species with language without which civilisation as we know it is inconceivable. This means, before speaking of Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European or any other language, we must ask ourselves when did humans begin to speak and why? The answer to it is provided by the discovery of the mutation of a gene knows as FOXP2. It is a complex gene that controls both verbalisation and grammar. The time when the mutation occurred cannot be pinpointed but based on the evidence of the extinction of all other human species following the Toba super-volcanic eruption about 73,000 years ago, we may place it around 80,000 years before present. The Toba explosion was a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra. It is the greatest volcanic explosion known, nearly 3,000-times the 1980 Mount St Helen’s explosion. It resulted in a 6,000-year long freeze causing the extinction of all the human species on the planet except a few thousand of our ancestors in Africa and the Neanderthals. In particular, all non-speaking humanoids in Asia became extinct. (Neanderthals became extinct 30,000 years ago.) This means all of us are descended from this small group of Africans capable of speech.
Indo-Europeans, two waves
This was the situation until about 65,000 years ago when small groups of our African ancestors made their way to South Asia travelling along the Arabian coast. All non-Africans living today have descended from these one thousand or so original settlers in South Asia. They flourished in a small area for some 10,000 years in south-central India. Their small number in a small area meant a single language would have sufficed. This was the primordial language of our ancestors. My colleagues and I call it Proto-Afro-Indian. No trace of it has survived. For the next 10,000 years these people survived precariously by hunting and gathering. About 52,000 years ago there was a dramatic warming in climate. This led to increase in both population and territory. It was followed by a mass extinction of animals probably due to over-hunting. Shortly after this, about 45,000 years ago or so, small groups left the Indian subcontinent in search of better hunting territory and made their way to Eurasia and Europe. These are the first Indo-Europeans. The language they took with them, possibly more than one, descended from the primordial Afro-Indian and became the first Indo-European. We have no idea what it was like.
All this took place during the last Ice Age or what scientists call the Pleistocene. Towards the end of the Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago, agriculture originating in India and Southeast Asia replaced hunting-gathering, leading to much larger populations. Important domestic animals, including the horse, were also domesticated in the region (There is no truth to the claim that horses were unknown in India before the Aryan invaders brought them.) There were now several languages in north and south India which my colleagues and I call Gauda and Dravida languages. (Arya means civilised and is inappropriate for region or language.) There were two major developments during the Holocene or the period after the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. First, there was intense activity leading eventually to the creation of the Vedas and the language that became Sanskrit by incorporating features found in both northern (Gauda) and southern (Dravida) sources.
This accounts for the so-called Dravidian features found in the Vedas as well as the closeness of Dravidian grammars to Sanskrit grammar. The other was a second wave of people out of India who took with them both Sanskrit-related languages and agricultural skills along with domestic animals, including rats and mice! This accounts for the closeness of Sanskrit to European languages, in vocabulary if not grammar.
This means there were two waves of Indo-Europeans, both out of India going north and west. We know of the first (c 45,000 BCE) only from genetic studies of modern populations around the world. We have no idea what their languages were like. The second, much more recent, occurred at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition some 10,000 years ago. It has left many traces in archaeology, culture and, above all, in the Sanskritic imprint on the languages of Europe and Eurasia. The picture given here is by no means definitive but decidedly more in agreement with scientific data and the fossil record than linguistic theories like the Aryan invasion theory. Any new theory must account for scientific data and take also into account the vast time scales involved. Such momentous developments as the evolution and spread of languages over half the world cannot be squeezed into a few thousand years like the Biblical account of creation in 4004 BC on which Aryan invasion theory was based.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/
History reborn
SATURDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2012 17:34 NS RAJARAM
A gene mutation 80,000 years ago and a super-volcano 73,000 years ago led to the birth of civilisation as we know it today. All non-African humans and their languages can be traced to a thousand individuals in India 60,000 years ago
Ever since Sir William Jones in 1786 found remarkable similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, the question of how people from Sri Lanka and Assam to Ireland and Iceland happen to speak languages clearly related to one another has remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of history. The usual explanation, at least in India, is the Aryan invasion theory. It claims that bands of invading ‘Aryan’ tribes brought both the ancestor of the Sanskrit language and the Vedic literature from somewhere in Eurasia or even Europe.
This was the result of scholars assuming that the ancestors of Indians and Europeans must at one time have lived in a common place speaking a common language before they spread across Asia, Eurasia and Europe carrying their language which later split into different languages. They called these speakers Indo-Europeans and their languages — from north India to Europe — the Indo-European family. They called the original language Proto-Indo-European, a term sometimes applied to its speakers also.
European linguists soon followed up on these ideas but in their newfound enthusiasm committed two egregious blunders. First, they borrowed the Sanskrit word Arya, which only means civilised, and turned it into a geographical and then a racial term by applying it to the people and languages of north India. (The correct term for north India is Gauda, just as Dravida refers to the south.) Next, they placed south Indian languages in a totally different category called the Dravidian family, excluding them from nearly all discourse about Indo-Europeans. In reality, south Indian languages are much closer to Sanskrit in both grammar and vocabulary, whereas with European languages it is limited to vocabulary.
For nearly a century, until archaeologists discovered the Harappan or the Indus Valley civilisation, the Aryan invasion theory was taught as the beginning of history in India. It continues to be taught in one form or another in spite of the many contradictions highlighted by archaeologists like Jim Shaeffer and BB Lal as well as natural scientists like Sir Julian Huxley, L Cavalli-Sforza and others. Politics and entrenched academic interests have succeeded in keeping alive this 200-year-old ad hoc hypothesis but science may have finally put an end to its survival while at the same time opening a vast new window on the origin and spread of Indo-Europeans. Recent discoveries in natural history and population genetics, especially in the past two decades, have changed our understanding of Indo-European origins in ways that were totally unexpected. The picture, still a bit hazy, highlights the fact that our theories like the Aryan invasion theory are naïve and simplistic. They greatly underestimate the time horizons involved and also ignore the revolutionary impact of natural history on human beings in the past hundred thousand years.
volcano and gene mutation
Our story takes us to Africa some hundred thousand years ago. Our ancestors, called ‘anatomically modern humans’, have been located in fossils in East Africa dating to about that time or a bit earlier. We were not the only humans then: There were several other ‘humanoid’ species in Asia and Africa among which the now extinct Neanderthals are the best known. What separates us from them is we have survived and they have not. In addition, we are a speaking species with language without which civilisation as we know it is inconceivable. This means, before speaking of Indo-European, Proto-Indo-European or any other language, we must ask ourselves when did humans begin to speak and why? The answer to it is provided by the discovery of the mutation of a gene knows as FOXP2. It is a complex gene that controls both verbalisation and grammar. The time when the mutation occurred cannot be pinpointed but based on the evidence of the extinction of all other human species following the Toba super-volcanic eruption about 73,000 years ago, we may place it around 80,000 years before present. The Toba explosion was a massive volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra. It is the greatest volcanic explosion known, nearly 3,000-times the 1980 Mount St Helen’s explosion. It resulted in a 6,000-year long freeze causing the extinction of all the human species on the planet except a few thousand of our ancestors in Africa and the Neanderthals. In particular, all non-speaking humanoids in Asia became extinct. (Neanderthals became extinct 30,000 years ago.) This means all of us are descended from this small group of Africans capable of speech.
Indo-Europeans, two waves
This was the situation until about 65,000 years ago when small groups of our African ancestors made their way to South Asia travelling along the Arabian coast. All non-Africans living today have descended from these one thousand or so original settlers in South Asia. They flourished in a small area for some 10,000 years in south-central India. Their small number in a small area meant a single language would have sufficed. This was the primordial language of our ancestors. My colleagues and I call it Proto-Afro-Indian. No trace of it has survived. For the next 10,000 years these people survived precariously by hunting and gathering. About 52,000 years ago there was a dramatic warming in climate. This led to increase in both population and territory. It was followed by a mass extinction of animals probably due to over-hunting. Shortly after this, about 45,000 years ago or so, small groups left the Indian subcontinent in search of better hunting territory and made their way to Eurasia and Europe. These are the first Indo-Europeans. The language they took with them, possibly more than one, descended from the primordial Afro-Indian and became the first Indo-European. We have no idea what it was like.
All this took place during the last Ice Age or what scientists call the Pleistocene. Towards the end of the Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago, agriculture originating in India and Southeast Asia replaced hunting-gathering, leading to much larger populations. Important domestic animals, including the horse, were also domesticated in the region (There is no truth to the claim that horses were unknown in India before the Aryan invaders brought them.) There were now several languages in north and south India which my colleagues and I call Gauda and Dravida languages. (Arya means civilised and is inappropriate for region or language.) There were two major developments during the Holocene or the period after the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. First, there was intense activity leading eventually to the creation of the Vedas and the language that became Sanskrit by incorporating features found in both northern (Gauda) and southern (Dravida) sources.
This accounts for the so-called Dravidian features found in the Vedas as well as the closeness of Dravidian grammars to Sanskrit grammar. The other was a second wave of people out of India who took with them both Sanskrit-related languages and agricultural skills along with domestic animals, including rats and mice! This accounts for the closeness of Sanskrit to European languages, in vocabulary if not grammar.
This means there were two waves of Indo-Europeans, both out of India going north and west. We know of the first (c 45,000 BCE) only from genetic studies of modern populations around the world. We have no idea what their languages were like. The second, much more recent, occurred at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition some 10,000 years ago. It has left many traces in archaeology, culture and, above all, in the Sanskritic imprint on the languages of Europe and Eurasia. The picture given here is by no means definitive but decidedly more in agreement with scientific data and the fossil record than linguistic theories like the Aryan invasion theory. Any new theory must account for scientific data and take also into account the vast time scales involved. Such momentous developments as the evolution and spread of languages over half the world cannot be squeezed into a few thousand years like the Biblical account of creation in 4004 BC on which Aryan invasion theory was based.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/
Samantha Murphy
2012-12-15 22:47:18 UTC
Worried the end of the world is coming on Friday? A new video from NASA will calm your fears, citing "the whole thing is a misconception from the very beginning."
According to news reports circulating for years, an ancient Mayan prophecy named Friday, Dec. 21 2012 as the day the world would come to an end. The NASA video says one cycle of the Mayan ends on this day, but that doesn't mean the Earth will cease to exist.
"Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012," NASA said in a statement on its webpage dedicated to questions about Dec. 21. "This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar."
The video comes shortly after NASA held a Google+ Hangout to discuss the topic. NASA scientist Don Yeamans stated no known asteroids, comets or rogue planets are headed toward the Earth. (If this was the case, we would already be able to see it in the sky). And the sun isn't a threat now either.
"The world will not end in 2012," NASA said. "Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012."
The video, called "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday," was likely supposed to be released on Dec. 22 and hit the web early. We're not complaining though -- we feel better now.