"B.B. Lal made his name as an archaeologist in the 1950s and 60s by exploring the Painted Grey Ware culture, which he then identified as the Aryan invader culture during its expansion from the Panjab border zone deeper into India; but along the way he realized that his data offered no support to the AIT which he had been using as a prism through which to interpret the data... Especially in his case, this latter fact is remarkable. It was he who, as a young archaeologist in the 1950s, made his name by finally digging up the long-awaited proof of an Aryan invasion. He had identified a pottery style, the Painted Grey Ware (1200-800), as typifying the Aryans penetrating deeper into India. That is what was taught to us in university, and even recently-published books upholding the Aryan Invasion Theory cite this finding as “proof”. But Lal himself has grown away from it. At the time, he had simply applied the reigning invasionist framework, until he understood that this was but a hypothetical construct unsupported by hard findings. ... Thus, the anti-invasionist case put forward by the archaeologists like B.B. Lal and the late S.P. Gupta has often been dismissed without further ado “because they are, not coincidentally, the same ones who claim to have discovered pillar-bases underneath the Babri mosque in Ayodhya and thus supported the Hindu claim to the site”. Of course, this finding on Hindu-Muslim relations in medieval history wouldn’t make any difference to their case on the Aryan question in ancient history, at least not to scientists. ... But in this case there is an even more pertinent fact: the finding of the pillar-bases, ridiculed by self-appointed “experts” and their foreign dupes, has been confirmed. Both the Archaeological Survey of India and the Allahabad High Court have, after gathering solid evidence during thorough excavations as well as questioning many “experts” (whose performance under oath was extremely embarrassing, undercutting whatever credibility they had been credited with, see Jain 2013:201-273), ruled that there had indeed been a Hindu temple until it was demolished and its foundation (“pillar-bases”) reused to underpin a mosque. These archaeologists were lambasted worldwide for upholding a case that has ultimately been proven correct.... On the Aryan question too, they may well end up being proven correct. Conversely, the anti-Hindu academics worldwide who parroted the “experts” and expressed seething (though borrowed) hatred for the temple party, have been shown to have been babes in the wood, led by the nose by political agitators using the aura of the academic positions they had cornered to promote a very artificial lie, launched in the late 1980s against what had been a consensus about a pre-existing temple among all concerned parties. (see Elst 2011) On the Aryan question too, they might end up finding that they had safely chosen the side of a dominant opinion fated to be proven wrong... In our midst is the nonagenarian dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. B.B. Lal. I first heard from him in the 1980s at university in Leuven, Belgium, where Prof. Pierre Eggermont taught us that Lal had at last identified the Aryans on their way deeper into India, viz. through the Painted Grey Ware. That is how Lal first made his name: by identifying the theoretically deduced Aryan invasion with something tangible. Indeed, that is how Pradhan (2014:67) cites him even now: “Lal considered Painted Grey Ware to be intrusive”. Yet, Lal has later described that identification as false and written books denying an invasion, e.g. Lal 2002. Like most Indian archaeologists, he has had to face the fact that all attempts to find traces of the Aryan invaders had proved erroneous. You all have heard him say it right here: “Vedic culture and the Harappan cities are but the two sides of the same coin.”"