Academics From England

"(Tove) Jansson was an upper-middle-class bohemian lesbian, living on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland (Klovharu). I was a suburban scouser on a new-build housing estate. It felt as though she was writing just for me."

"Yet wherever one looks, in non-specialist guides, or in holiday brochures, one reads about the 'mysterious' Etruscans; hidden Etruria; underground Etruria — as if the culture is somehow concealed from us. It is a sales gimmick which has been very useful and profitable, but it is also misleading. (...) The Etruscans were no more more mysterious than most other peoples of archaic Italy."

"Each flag will have its own particular symbols like the chakra-dhavaja, or wheel, in the Indian flag, or the Protestant orange and Catholic green in the flag of Eire. Even as a flag indicates particularity, with its own particularity, with its own individual patterns (whether the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Tricolor or whatever), it also flags its own universality. Each flag, by its conventional rectangular pattern, announces itself to be an element of an established, recognizable series, in which all the flags are essentially similar in their conventions of difference. The odd exception, like the pennant-shaped flag of Nepal, only serves to confirm the general rule. New nations, in designing their flags, tend to follow heraldic convention of colour as well as shape: they avoid certain shades like shocking pink and kingfisher blue (Firth, 1973). The hoisting of the newly designed flag indicates that another nation has joined the club of nations: 'we' have become like 'you' (no longer 'them'); 'we' are all nations, with 'our' flags and 'our' anthems, 'our' seats in the United Nations, and 'our' participation, with appropriately designed vests at Olympic Games and World Cups."

"Nationalism does not provide a single way of talking about the world."

"A national anthem is a universal sign of particularity. The conventions of the oeuvre demand that the uniqueness of the nation be celebrated in a universally stylized manner. National anthems not only fit a common pattern, but it is part of their symbolism that they are seen to do so. They flag the nation as a nation among nations, as flags themselves do."

"For example, each nation is expected to have its own flag and national anthem."

"In this way it might be argued that, from the very earliest farming times, as represented by Mehrgarh and by other sites later, an early; lndo-European language was spoken in the Indus valley and in areas to the north and west."

"Despite Wheeler's comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization, which on this hypothesis would be speaking the Indo-European ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit. Certainly there are elements of continuity from the Indus Civilization onto its aftermath. The main disruption was the ending of urban life, but as Raymond Allchin has emphasized, the rural life of northern India, and what is now Pakistan, carried on little changed."

"It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization."

"This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley civilization."

"Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan."

"As far as I can see there is nothing in the Hymns of the Rig Veda which demonstrates that the Vedic-speaking population were intrusive to the area: this comes rather from a historical assumption of the "coming of the Indo-Europeans." .. Nothing implies that the Aryans were strangers there."

"When Wheeler speaks of “the Aryan invasion of the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjab,” he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the seven rivers, there is nothing in any of them that to me implies an invasion. . . . Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley."

"There are, in particular, some suggestions that the religion practised in the Indus valley may have had its effect on the later Hindu religion. The 'great bath' at Mohenjo-daro may well have had ritual purposes,' which reminds us today of the various Hindu ceremonies of purification. Among the few major stone objects from the Indus valley sites are shaped stones, which many observers have pointed out may hold a phallic significance,4 but they also resemble quite closely the lingam, the sacred stone dedicated to the Lord Shiva in modem Hindu practice. There arc other indications, for instance the seated figure, in yoga po&tion, seen on an Indus valley sealstone· has been equated by some with representations of the Lord Shiva himself. Of course, continuity of cult need not indicate continuity of language, but there is no inherent reason why the people of the Indus valley Civilization should not already have been speaking an Indo-European language, the ancestor of the Rigveda."

"This area [east Macedonia], although firmly now part of Greece, has sometimes been a marginal one, and may at times have owed allegiance in different directions through a process of boundary displacement. It was indeed occupied in early classical times by Thracian tribes, barbarians who did not speak the Greek language. No doubt they did indeed speak a Thracian language akin to that in what is now Bulgaria, whose origins were suggested earlier."

"As Renfrew put it in his archly-titled review of Mallory’s book – ‘They ride horses, don’t they?’ – the horse has assumed “an almost mythical significance in traditional Indo-European studies” (1989: 845)."

"The book encapsulating it was Centuries of Darkness in 1991. The authors were not fringe mavericks. Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University wrote in the book’s Forword, ‘They [the authors]indicate that the chronology for the time period in question, the so called “Third Intermediate Period”, is altogether shaky. They show that there are problems with the historical chronology of the Near East. And the sad fact is that the historical chronology for the rest of the Mediterranean until well after 700 BC rests on these. It is already widely known that the chronology for early Italy, during the Iron Age period, down to and including the foundation of Rome, is a complete shambles.’ He concluded, ‘I feel their critical analysis is right and that a chronological revolution is on the way.’"

"Why, beyond reasons of scientific curiosity, do we want to know about the past? And whose past is it anyway? …the past is big business…the past is politically highly charged, ideologically powerful and significant."

"Many linguists have commented that these proposed dates of separation are 'too early,' but how . . . do they know this, or judge this?"

"“[This] episode of elite dominance which brought the indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family to India (…) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus civilization (…)”"

"In the Indo-European field, linguists have been willing to follow the archaeological orthodoxy of nearly a century ago, while archaeologists have taken the conclusions of the historical linguists at their face value, failing to realize that they were themselves based upon archaeological assumptions which had not been questioned, yet which were not, in some cases, justifiable."

"We should, in other words, seriously consider the possibility that the new religious and cultural synthesis, represented by the Rigveda was essentially a product of the soil of India and Pakistan, and that it was not imported, ready-made, on the back of the steeds of the Indo-Aryans. Of course, it evolved while in contact with the developing cultures of other lands, most notably Iran, so that by a process of peer polity interaction, cultures and ideologies emerged which in many ways resembled each other. It is not necessary to suggest that one was borrowed, as it were, directly from the other."

"The significance of the horse for the understanding of the distribution of early Indo-European has been much exaggerated."

"This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium ec has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages of Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early Neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley Civilization~ point that Jarrige has recently stressed. Moreover the continuity is seen to follow unbroken from that time across the Dark Age succeeding the collapse of the urban centres of the Indus Valley, so that features of that urban civilization persist, across a series of transformations, to form the basis for later Indian civilization. A number of scholars have previously developed these ideas of continuity."

"The balance of the evidence, as recently usefully reviewed by Shaffer, is in favour of the presence of an Indo-European speaking population during the Harappan civilization, and not exclusively later. At the same time, the strong continuities between that Harappan civilization and its antecedents, right back to the earlier Neolithic, are becoming more and more evident."

"[Supporters of Renfrew’s theory] “have tried to render the Indo-Iranian problem moot. They argue that the Indo-Iranian branch was somehow divided from the main body of Proto-Indo-European before the colonists brought agriculture to the Balkans. Greek and Indic are thus separated by millenniums of linguistic change - despite the close grammatical correspondences between them (... these correspondences probably represent shared innovations from the last stage of PIE).”"

"The linguistic designation of a category of “Indo-European/Aryan” languages is not the question here. However, the historical, and prevailing, use of the language designation is the issue. For two centuries, scholars concentrating on the South Asian data have described an Indo-European/Aryan migration/invasion into South Asia to explain the formation of Indian civilization. The conflating of language, people/culture, “race” to maintain the “myth of the Aryan invasion” continues, perhaps, as Leach so cogently notes, due to the academic prestige at stake. The distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it. Failing to identify archaeological evidence for such a migration in the European post-Neolithic periods, Renfrew argues instead for an Indo-European/Aryan human migration associated with the spread of food production economies from Anatolia. In doing so, he ignores critical archaeological data from Southwest Asia and South Asia. The South Asian archaeological data reviewed here does not support Renfrew’s position nor any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis describing western population movement into South Asia. Rather, the physical distribution of prehistoric sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radio- metric dates, and geological data describing the prehistoric/proto-historic environment perhaps can account, in some degree, for the Vedic oral tradition describing a cultural discontinuity of what was an indigenous population movement in the Indo-Gangetic region."

"“All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”"

"Medieval Indian mathematicians, such as Brahmagupta (7th century), Mahavira (9th century) and Bhüskara (19th century), made several discoveries which in Europe were not known until the Renaissance or later, They understood the import of positive and negative quantities, evolved sound systems of extracting square and cube roots, and could solve quadratic and certain types of indeterminate equations."

"Through the necessity of accurately laying out the open-air site of a sacrifice Indians very early evolved a simple system of geometry, but in the sphere of practical knowledge the-world owes most to India in the realm of mathematics, which were developed in Gupta times to a stage more advanced than that reached by any other nation of antiquity. ‘The success of Indian mathematics was mainly due to the fact that the Indians had a clear conception of abstract number, as distinct from numerical quantity of objects or spatial extension. While Greek mathematical science was largely based on mensuration and geometry, India transcended these conceptions quite early, and, with the aid of a simple numeral notation, devised a rudimentary algebra which allowed more complicated calculations than were possible to the Greeks, and led to the study of number for its own sake."

"Direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking, and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India."

"The capitals of Asoka's columns, some of which were perhaps made before his reign, are the earliest important sculptures after those of the Indus cities."

"In one respect the Harappa people were technically in advance of their contemporaries - they had devised a saw with undulating teeth , which allowed the dust to escape freely from the cut, and much simplified the carpenter's task. From this we may assume that they had particular skill in carpentry."

"In A Cultural History of India, A.L. Basham notes that “[by] the fifth century CE, Indianised states, that is to say states organised along the traditional lines of Indian political theory and following the Buddhist or Hindu religions, had established themselves in many regions of Burma, Thailand, Indo-China, Malaysia, and Indonesia”."

"The famous lions of the Sarnath column and the less famous but more beautiful bull of the column of Rampurva are the work of realistic sculptors, owing something to Iranian and Hellenist tradition... Yet, if we did not know that the possibility of Western influence existed , we might suggest that the animal sculptures of the columns were those of a school directly de- scended from the engravers of the Indus seals , which show a realistic treatment very unusual for so early a civilization."

"...His greatest legacy was his vast body of images of ways of life that were vanishing. These were all donated to the archives in Oxford and form a unique body of work. Thesiger carried his Leica in a goatskin bag and never, ever took more than a single shot of each subject, which often came out perfectly. After my father died, I moved briefly to London and I used to love talking to Thesiger in . By that time he was reluctant to leave his flat except for a nearby restaurant called . In Britain, stay in London and never visit the countryside, was his advice. If you leave London, go somewhere remote. He hated modernity and blamed the ‘motor car’ for destroying the planet. In time Thesiger’s friends moved him to an old people’s home in . On my last visit to Wilfred, I found him sitting alone in his room. We went to lunch in the canteen where they served institutional food with sweet orange squash. ‘Nobody knows who I am,’ said Wilfred. ‘I wish I could have stayed in .’ I said perhaps his friends had moved him to England because they thought the were exploiting him for his money. Wilfred struck the dining table with his fist and said: ‘How I wish I could have stayed! I so liked being exploited!’"

"Your picture of W.T. [Thesiger] is very accurate. He now realizes he is a misfit, but a misfit only in a Government and owing to excess of certain ancient virtues and not because of any vices - a brave, awkward, attractive creature."

"He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing."

"I agree about Wilfred Thesiger. I know him fairly well, from and common friends. He is either half naked in Kenya, surrounded by assegai-weilding Masai even nakeder, or pacing along in glittering , dog skin gloves, a stiff collar with an old Etonian tie, bamboo-handled umbrella tightly rolled, and a , staring down dead straight over a nose like a beak, scowling and glowering eyes, and clenched teeth. He really is very extraordinary. There's a very nice glimpse of him which you must know at the end of the Short Walk in the Hindu Kush."

"Though its fame is much restricted by its specialized nature, there is no doubt that Panini's grammar is one of the greatest intellectual achievements of any ancient civilization, and the most detailed and scientific grammar composed before the 19th century in any part of the world."

"In July 1969 I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the 'Wazungu' - as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man. Even as a boy I recognized that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled."

"I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills."

"I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today."

"Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep."

"More important, something decisive in my life, he [Guy Moore] taught me to feel affection for tribesmen. Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me, rather than places. I have never craved magnificent scenery or opportunities for sport in the way that I have longed to be with certain tribes and, above all, certain individuals among them."

"It is difficult to analyse the motive that induced me to make those journeys, or the satisfaction I derived from such a life. There was of course the lure of the unknown; there was the constant test of resolution and endurance. Yet those travels in the Empty Quarter would have been for me a pointless penance but for the comradeship of my Bedu companions. All they possessed were their camels and saddlery, their rifles and daggers, some waterskins and cooking pots and bowls, and the very clothes they wore; few of them even owned a blanket. They possessed, however, a freedom which we, with all our craving for possessions, cannot experience. Any of them could have found a job in the towns and villages of the Hadhramaut; but all would have rejected that easier life of lesser men. They met every challenge, every hardship, with the proud boast: We are Bedu."

"I also questioned whether it was right to try to impose on the Sudanese the conventions and values of our utterly alien civilization, and sometimes expressed these doubts in letters to my mother. I could not help feeling that other races were entitled to their own customs and moral standards, however much these might differ from ours."

"The age in which true history appeared in India was one of great intellectual and spiritual ferment. Mystics and sophists of all kinds roamed through the Ganga Valley, all advocating some form of mental discipline and asceticism as a means to salvation; but the age of the Buddha, when many of the best minds were abandoning their homes and professions for a life of asceticism, was also a time of advance in commerce and politics. It produced not only philosophers and ascetics, but also merchant princes and men of action."

"[re Danakil country] I was among a savage, good-looking people with a dangerous reputation. I was travelling with camels in hot, arid country under testing conditions where, if things went wrong, I could get no help and where men's lives depended on my judgement."

"I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been."