Philologists

"A Muslim is a person who has dedicated his worship exclusively to God, for just as we say in Arabic that something is ‘salima’ to a person, meaning that it became solely his own, so in the same way ‘Islām’ means making one's religion and faith God's alone."

"However, until before the bhakti trend set in, before the so-called 'dark ages', in the Tamil classical age, in the age of Murugan, the Tamil man seems to have had a clear, optimistic, rather simple, very secular view of life, in a heroic age of meat-eating and wine-drinking pre-feudal society, with relatively simple but meaningful religious conceptions."

"the pitfall of the simplistic view of Indian cultural development, which reduces everything to the tension between autochthonous features (primarily Dravidian) and imported Indo-Aryan traits. ... [the indigenous Tamil framework] was invaded, partly violated and raped, partly adopted and adapted, by the attempts of later commentators to force Tamil ideology into the procrustean mould of the Brahminic-Sanskritic models."

"As Wheeler pointed out long ago, Harappan civilization is the most spatially extensive of all the early civilizations we know."

"Tamilnadu has known no "real" [R]enaissance-like development . . . there was no development comparable to the European rinascimento of the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, to European rationalism of the seventeen–eighteenth centuries or to European empiricism and positivism of the nineteenth century."

"It IS an undeniable fact that no philosophy outside India makes such a varied and manifold use of[spiritual] instruction in order to visualize the supreme Truth. It is the very metaphysical bent of Hindu thought which makes room for practical educational training."

"For wrongs like these we have no redress whatever. We have no protection from the law."

"The people who were once owners of this soil ask you for their liberty, and law is liberty."

"Another time a man of our tribe went to a settlement about ten miles distant from our reserve to sell potatoes. While he stood sorting them out two young men came along.-they were white men, and one of them had just arrived from the East; he said to his companion, "I should like to shoot that Indian, just to say that I had shot one." His companion badgered him to do it. He raised his revolver and shot him."

"The whole Ponca tribe were rapidly advancing in civilization; cultivated their farms, and their schoolhouses and churches were well filled, when suddenly they were informed that the government required their removal to Indian Territory."

"The tribe has been robbed of thousands of dollars' worth of property, and the government shows no disposition to return what belongs to them."

"It seems to us sometimes that the government treats us with less consideration than it does even the dogs."

"It crushed our hearts when we saw a little handful of poor, ignorant, helpless, but peaceful people, such as the Poncas were, oppressed by a mighty nation, a nation so powerful that it could well have afforded to show justice and humanity if it only would. It was so hard to feel how powerless we were to help those we loved so dearly when we saw our relatives forced from their homes and compelled to go to a strange country at the point of the bayonet."

"The legislation of the government has been directed rather to the protection of the rights of money and property than to the best good of the citizen."

"A struggle for existence is not a decent living. A man or woman or child may die of starvation in a city teeming with plenty. Only human life is concerned."

"Peaceful revolutions are slow but sure. It takes time to leaven a great unwieldy mass like this nation with the leavening ideas of justice and liberty, but the evolution is all the more certain in its results because it is so slow."

"For the past hundred years the Indians have had none to tell the story of their wrongs. If a white man did an injury to an Indian he had to suffer in silence, or being exasperated into revenge, the act of revenge has been spread abroad through the newspapers of the land as a causeless act, perpetrated on the whites just because the Indian delighted in being savage. It is because I know that a majority of the whites have not known of the cruelty practiced by the "Indian ring" on a handful of oppressed, helpless and conquered people, that I have the courage and confidence to appeal to the people of the United States."

"We are human beings; God made us as well as you"

"So many seem to think that Indians fight because they delight in being savage and are bloodthirsty."

"Because of its very personal influence men of action as far back as Cicero have proclaimed that there can be no more distinguished calling than that of instructing youth."

"I am distressed that there are so few who indulge in the ecstacy of even a humble translation, and still fewer who attain the worthy translation."

"I come here as your friend, your co-worker. Not to look on from the outside, but to stand shoulder to shoulder with you always. If you need a mother, my heart is ready to respond to that call; if you need a sister, a friend, a comrade in pleasure, that is what I want to be — what I am here to be. Everything that concerns you concerns me — your work, your pleasures, your difficulties. Nothing that affects you is too trivial to claim my interest, my sympathy. Whatever the limitations and deficiencies I bring to my work as your dean, I can promise a deep and unfailing sympathy."

"It is as stupid to oust ancient history from the schools in favor of American and modern European history as it would be to knock out the first two stories of a skyscraper and expect the structure to stand."

"The simple life of our grandmothers is a thing of the past. For the woman of to-day each year life grows more complex, and we all know that the more complex the machinery the more competent must be those who run it. Does this not lead to a conclusion in perfect accord with the spirit of the age?"

"I have a problem in living which century I live. When I read those manuscripts, I'm taken away there. Sometimes I'm totally taken with them, with the monks and the ancient libraries and the ancient monasteries and then, when someone passes by me in their office and speaks English, I say, "What?" But then I realize I am in an English-speaking world."

"One has only to read Manu after a bit of Kant to be struck by the former's extraordinary lack of universality. He seems to have no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees like 'Man shall not kill', or 'Man shall not tell an untruth'. One is aware of no notion of a 'state', no unitary law of all men … The main tradition of Judeo-Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalisation. Manu will not understand such a premise. To be moral, for Manu, is to particularise – to ask who did what, to whom and when … Each class (jati) of man has his own laws, his own proper ethic, not to be universalised."

"Cultures may be said to have overall tendencies to idealize, and think in terms of, either the context-free or the context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behavior may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding the behavior. In cultures like India's, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation."

"Various taxonomies of season, landscape, times, gunas or qualities (and their material bases), tastes, characters, emotions, essences (rasas), etc., are basic to the thought-work of Hindu medicine and poetry, cooking and religion, erotics and magic. Each jati or class defines a context, a structure of relevance, a rule of permissible combinations, a frame of reference, a meta-communication of what is and can be done … Even the Kama-Sutra is literally a grammar of love, which declines and conjugates men and women as one would nouns and verbs in different genders, voices, moods and aspects. Genders are genres. Different body-types and character-types obey different rules, respond to different scents and beckonings."

"Whatever his context — birth, class, gender, age, place, rank, etc. — a man is a man for all that. Technology, with its modules and interchangeable parts, and the post-Renaissance sciences, with their quest for universal laws (and 'facts') across contexts, intensify the bias towards the context-free.'"

"The invaders were few and the country was too large and too populous. The waves of immigration from Turan were few and far between, and deposited on Indian soil adventurers, warriors, and learned men, rather than artisans and colonists. Hence the Muhammadans depended upon the Hindoos for labour of every kind, from architecture down to agriculture and the supply of servants. Many branches they had to learn from the Hindoos, as, for example, the cultivation of indigeneous produce, irrigation, coinage, medicine, the building of houses, and weaving of stuffs suitable for the climate, the management of elephants, and so forth."

"Islam has no state clergy, but we find a counterpart to our hierarchical bodies in the Ulemas about the court from whom the Sadrs of the provinces, the Mir Adls, Muftis and Qazis were appointed. At Delhi and Agra, the body of the learned had always consisted of staunch Sunnis, who believed it their duty to keep the kings straight. How great their influence was, may be seen from the fact that of all Muhammadan emperors only Akbar, and perhaps Alauddin Khalji, succeeded in putting down this haughty sect."

"It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumézil supported Action française and wrote for its journals. It was also during this period that he began to develop his own theories about Indo-European mythology. Is it possible that Dumézil used the ancient Indo-Europeans in the same way that the Nazi scholars did (albeit with an entirely different level of scientific accuracy and methodological acuteness)—to give historical legitimacy to a Fascist movement? Did Action française perhaps receive a mythology of origin, a narrative that ascribes such a fundamental meaning to certain ideas and norms that they seem natural and eternal, through the work of Georges Dumézil?"

"During the postwar (post 1945 CE) period, these two theories (Father Wilhelm Schmidt and Father Wilhelm Kopper's theory of primal cultures, and Georges Dumezil's theory of Indo-European mythology) have completely dominated research about Indo-European religion and culture—in spite of the fact that they arose in an ideological atmosphere that did not differ much from the Nazi one (Arvidsson 2006, p. 239, parentheses added)."

"Georges Dumézil (1898-1986) is among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline, and even outside the academy. For half a century—from the 1930s up until his death—Dumézil was one of the foremost humanists in France, a status which was confirmed at the Panthéon in 1979 when he was welcomed into the Académie Française by Claude Lévi-Strauss as one of the “Forty Immortals.“ The scholarly work that had led Dumézil to this position was based on a wide-ranging hypothesis that all peoples who spoke Indo-European, or, as they were sometimes called even as late as the i960s, "Aryan“ languages had also inherited a common ideology. In the course of his historical and philological research, Dumézil had found traces of this ideology in Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns, and Old Norse saga literature. The ideology was characterized by a special three-part structure that organized distinct cultural fields. This structure above all guided the pantheon and the social order, but also such things as the classification of various kinds of heroic types, punishments, and taxes. At the highest level in this “Indo-European" tripartite structure was the "function“ of the sovereign holders of power—the priests, lawmakers, and kings; below it, that of the warriors; and at the bottom, the function of the people, or producers."

"Lincoln argues that Dumézil was, on the contrary, deeply anchored in a Germanophobie French Fascism."

"The debate about Dumézil is still far from resolved. At its core is the question of whether it was only the Nazis who used the historical writing about "Aryans," "Indo-Europeans," or, as the Germans say, “Indo-Germans” for political aims. Did Dumézil, and perhaps other researchers who were active during the 1930s and 1940s, do so as well? If that is the case, what does this entail for the postwar scholarship, which has largely followed the guiding principles of Dumézil? On a more general level, the debate is about whether there is something in the nature of research about Indo-Europeans that makes it especially prone to ideological abuse—perhaps something related to the fact that for the past two centuries, the majority of the scholars who have done research on the Indo-Europeans have considered themselves descendants of this mythical race.(3)"

"Assuming that I am completely wrong, my Indo-Europeans would be like the geometries of Riemann and Lobatchevski: constructions outside of reality. It is already not that bad. I will just have to switch shelves in the library. I will move to the “fiction” section."

"Through Eribon’s defense, it has nevertheless been shown that Dumézil really did support the French Fascist organization Action française during the 1930s, and that he wrote articles, under a pseudonym, in which he praised Mussolini."

"Dumezil was an entirely different sort of person from Pearson, Haudry, and de Benoist, infinitely more intelligent, decent, and much, much less crude. To the best of my knowledge, he had no dealings with Pearson, and over the years he maintained a cautiously ambiguous relation with the two others, both of whom courted him avidly ."

"“Greece chose, as always, the best part: instead of the ready-made reflections, the pre-established relationships of people and things that the heritage of its northern ancestors offered it, Greece preferred the risks and opportunities offered by criticism and observation—it regarded humanity, society and the world with new eyes.”"

"Without exaggeration and in a definitive reply to Momigliano (who paradoxically was a member of the Italian Fascist Party before having to flee Mussolini’s anti-Semitic laws) and Ginzburg, we can state that Dumézil was not a Nazi supporter in the 1930s. He was, however, a fascist in the precise meaning of the term."

"In other cases, this suspicion is quite misplaced, e.g. in the case of Georges Dumézil, actually a critic of Nazism, cautious in public but quite outspoken in his minor writings and private communications. It is true that Dumézil sympathized with Italian Fascism, but Fascism stricto sensu contrasted with Nazism in very important respects, esp. in not being racist (the Communist-imposed usage of “fascism” as a generic term or as a synonym of National-Socialism, resulting from Stalin’s desire to avoid staining the term “socialism” with Hitlerian associations, obscures the contrast between the two systems). It has been shown that Dumézil’s sympathy for Fascism and contempt for Nazism may have influenced his views of ancient Germanic religion, which he contrasted unfavourably with ancient Roman religion. In Dumézil’s studies ca. 1940, Germanic religion is criticized as a defective evolute of IE religion, having lost the spiritual and overemphasized the martial function: this was at least partly a projection onto the past of the militarization of Germany in Dumézil’s own day."

"“I would have been horrified by what I perceive in the Indo-European world. . . . To live in a trifunctional system would give me the impression of living in a prison. Therefore, I study the three functions, I explore this prison, but I would never want to have lived there. If I was visiting cannibals, I would seek to know as much as possible about them but I would stay well away from the cauldron.”"

"[l]anguage, albeit an abstraction, is yet a more subtle and pervasive criterion of individuality than the culture-group formed by comparing flints and potsherds or the “races” of the skull-measurer. . . . they [the Aryans] must have possessed a certain spiritual unity reflected in and conditioned by their community of speech. To their linguistic heirs they bequeathed, if not skull types and bodily characteristics, at least something of this more subtle and precious, spiritual identity. . . . The Indo-European languages and their presumed parent-speech have been throughout exceptionally delicate and flexible instruments of thought. They were almost unique, for instance, in possessing a substantive verb and at least a rudimentary machinery for building subordinate clauses that might express conceptual relations in a chain of ratiocination. It follows then that the Aryans must have been gifted with exceptional mental endowments, if not in enjoyment of a high material culture. (p. 4)"

"(The Hittite language) cannot be accepted without qualification as Aryan. ... The deviations in the inflection are puzzlingly numerous. ... Again the number of Indo-European words and stems identified in the vocabulary is but small. Finally, the syntax remains essentially un- Aryan... Now if these documents dated from the 14th century AD, few would hesitate to declare that they were written in an Indo-European language and explain the discrepancies as due to the familiar phenomena of decay, assimilation of forms, and foreign borrowing. But the texts... are many centuries older than the oldest written memorials of Sanskrit or Greek. Yet their language diverges from the hypothetical original Aryan tongue far more than Greek or Sanskrit differs from the parent speech or from one another. It is a fact impossible to believe that a truly Indo-European language would look so odd in the 14th century before our era."

"How precisely did the Aryans achieve all this? It was not through the superiority of their material culture. We have rejected the idea that a particular genius resided in the conformation of Nordic skulls. We do so with all the more confidence that, by the time the Aryan genius found its true expression in Greece and Rome, the pure Nordic strain had been for the most part absorbed in the Mediterranean substratum: the lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither a higher material culture nor a superior physique, but that which we mentioned in the first chapter—a more excellent language and the mentality it generated. . . . At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by the bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type has almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language. (pp. 211–212)"

"These [Mitanni] numerals and divine and personal names are the oldest actual specimens of any Aryan speech which we possess. The forms deserve special attention. They are already quite distinctly Satem forms ; in fact, they are very nearly pure Indic. Certainly they are much more nearly akin to Sanskrit than to any of the Iranian dialects that later constituted the western wing of the Indo-Iranian family. Thus among the deities Nasatya is the Sanskrit form as opposed to the Zend Naonhaitya and all the four gods are prominent in the oldest Veda, while in the Iranian Avesta they have been degraded to secondary rank (Mithra), converted into demons (Indra) or renamed (Varuna =Ahura Mazda). The numerals are distinctively Indic not Iranian ; aika is identical with the Sanskrit eka while ' one ’ in Zend is aeva. So the s is preserved in Satta where it becomes h in Iranian (hapta) and the exact form is found, not indeed in Sanskrit, but in the Prakrits which were supposed to be post-Vedic. Even the personal names look Indic rather than Iranian. Thus Biridaswa has been plausibly compared with the Sanskrit Brhadasva (owning a great horse). If this be right the second element, asva, horse, is in contrast to the Iranian form aspa seen in Old Persian and Zend. ... Finally we know that there existed among the Mitanni at this time a class of warriors styled maryanni which has suggested comparison with the Sanskrit marya young men, heroes."

"No multiplication of weapons of war and battle‐scenes attests futile conflicts between city‐ states as in Babylonia nor yet the force whereby a single king, as in Egypt, achieved by conquest internal peace and warded off jealous nomads by constant preparedness … The visitor inevitably gets an impression of a democratic bourgeois economy, as in Crete, in contrast to the obviously centralized theocracies and monarchies hitherto described. (Childe, quoted in Wheeler, 1955: 191)"

"Not only are they (the theories of racial anthropology] worthless; they are mischievous. They have induced their votaries to postulate all sorts of migrations, for which there are as yet not a particle of evidence. To but­ tress the Nordic s claim to be the ruling race p a r excellence, attempts have been made, and are still being made, to prove that the earliest dynasties of China, Sumer, and Egypt were established by invaders from Europe and even today the vision of certain prehistorians is absolutely distorted by this preconception. Such misdirected enthusiasm also injures science in another way. The apotheosis of the Nordics has been linked to the policies of imperialism and world domination: the word "Aryan” has become the watchword of dangerous factions and especially of the more brutal and blatant forms of anti-Semitism. Indeed the neglect and discredit into which the study of Indo-European philology has fallen in England are very largely attributable to a legitimate reaction against the extravagancies of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and his ilk, and the gravest objection to the word Aryan is its association with pogroms.(287)"

"By the end of the fourth millennium B.C. the material culture of Abydos, Ur, or Mohenjo-daro would stand comparison with that of Periclean Athens or of any medieval town. . . . Judging by the domestic architecture, the seal-cutting, and the grace of the pottery, the Indus civilization was ahead of the Babylonian at the beginning of the third millennium (ca. 3000 B.C.). But that was a late phase of the Indian culture; it may have enjoyed no less lead in earlier times. Were then the innovations and discoveries that characterize proto-Sumerian civilization not native developments on Babylonian soil, but the results of Indian inspiration? If so, had the Sumerians themselves come from the Indus, or at least from regions in its immediate sphere of influence?”"