“In South Asia, relatively few pre-Indo-Aryan place-names survive in the North; however, many more in central and southern India. Indo-Aryan place-names are generally not very old, since the towns themselves are relatively late.”

p 104
Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

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Michael Witzel13

German-American philologist 1943

Jim G. Shaffer (1944) American archaeologist

Source: Shaffer (1999:245), quoted in The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000.

“The Indo-Aryan influence, whether due to actual settlement, acculturation, or, if one prefers, the substitution of Indo-Aryan names for local ones, was powerful enough from early on to replace local names, in spite of the well-known conservatism of river-names. This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus civilization, where one would have expected the survival of earlier names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England, with the name of the State of Massachussetts next to the Charles River formerly called the Massachussetts River, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc. next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri. The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

p 107
Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

“The name "Aryan race" must also be frankly discarded as a term of racial significance. It is today purely linguistic, although there was at one time, of course, an identity between the original Aryan mother tongue and the race that first spoke and developed it. In short there is not now, and there never was either a Caucasian or an Indo-European race, but there was once, thousands of years ago, an Aryan race now long since vanished into dim memories of the past.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 62.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

“But the post-Rigvedic texts contain no reference whatsoever to the migration of the Aryans from the Punjab to the plains and plateaus of North and Central India, or to their interaction, or conflicts, with the non-Aryan inhabitants of these areas, or to the en masse adoption by these non-Aryans of completely new and unfamiliar Aryan speech-forms.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 8 : Misinterpretations of Rigvedic History

“The Rgvedic texts were read in the political context of nineteenth-century philology, which has been outlined in chapter 1. This certainly influenced the choice of possible inter- pretations placed on such words as andsa and on the battles of the Aryas and the Dasas. The racial interpretations extrapolated from the texts to support an Aryan migration have been justly challenged by both Indian and, albeit after the lag of a century, Western scholars. Their place in serious discussions of the Indo-Aryan problem is highly questionnable.”

Edwin Bryant book The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture

“This leads to the conclusion that the Indo-Aryan influence, … was powerful enough from early on to replace local names, in spite of the well-known conservatism of river names. This is especially surprising in the area once occupied by the Indus Civilisation where one would have expected the survival of older names, as has been the case in Europe and the Near East. At the least, one would expect a palimpsest, as found in New England with the name of the state of Massachussetts next to the Charles river, formerly called the Massachussetts river, and such new adaptations as Stony Brook, Muddy Creek, Red River, etc., next to the adaptations of Indian names such as the Mississippi and the Missouri.”

Michael Witzel (1943) German-American philologist

Early Indian history: Linguistic and textual parametres

“Now it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles and he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Naulahka http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/Naulahka/index.html, ch. 5 (1892). <br class="br">Other works

“A few decades ago there was much talk of the English officer and the Hindu in the ranks being of the same Aryan blood, because they both spoke widely diverse forms of the great group of Aryan languages. This, of course, did not imply the slightest trace of blood relationship — the Aryan speech of the Hindu had been imposed upon him by his conquerors from the north. Such fallacies were common a generation ago.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

“In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around.”

Savitri Devi (1905–1982) Greek–French writer

Savitri Devi, Souvernirs et Réflexions d'une Aryenne, p 273, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 561

“She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.”

Pat Conroy book The Prince of Tides

Source: The Prince of Tides

“In South Asia, relatively few pre-Indo-Aryan place-names survive in the North; however, many more in central and southern India. Indo-Aryan place-names are generally not very old, since the towns themselves are relatively late.”

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Michael Witzel13

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