I. A Detailed Reply to a Joker’ (Arnaud Fournet)'s “Review” of my Book.Shrikant G Talageri19/5/2010.[Foreword: I wrote my third book book, "The Rigveda and the Avesta―The Final Evidence" in 2008. Arnaud Fournet, one of the most third-grade "scholars" I have ever encountered, wrote a "review" of the book. This man, by his own testimony, received my book for review from Koenraad Elst on 18/5/2009. Within four days, he had "read" the whole book, written and completed a cheap and abusive "review" of the book, consulted with Elst, and then posted it on the internet on 22/5/2009. This third-rate person makes it clear that he had not read any of my earlier books, knew nothing whatsoever about Indo-Iranian studies or the Rigveda before this, had never heard about the OIT, and yet (in spite of the clear evidence that he had not bothered to read the book under "review" either) he managed to produce and post this "review" in four days!This whole exchange had five parts:1. His "review" on 22/5/2009.2. My reply to it on 19/5/2010: "A Detailed Reply to a Joker (Arnaud Fournet)'s 'Review' of My Book". 3. His "review 2" on 29/5/2010: "Review of Talageri 2 Unassailable".4. My reply to his "Review 2" on 1/6/2010: "More Jokes from Fournet".5. His post on Indology List dt. 11/6/2010 and my post dt. 12/6/2010.The whole exchange, started by him, is tedious, ugly and messy. I am posting nos. 2, 4 and 5 above, today on 6/5/2020, since I see that my posts are completely missing on the internet while his posts are very much there. It is not pleasant or very readable, but it is necessary that my replies to his bile should also be on record].Niraj Mohanka has, on 10th April 2010, sent me, presumably to elicit some reaction from me, the following comments by Arnaud Fournet made during the course of a discussion on an internet discussion site IndiaArchaeology@yahoogroups.com.:“This book proves nothing but that Talageri still has a very long way to go before he understands what the issues are about and how to write a book…. I suggest you read again the review I wrote nearly one year ago. I read it again recently and I see little to change… For the time being, nobody addressed the real issues contained in the review and keeps on dreaming on never-exist fairytales”. Fournet refers here to a “review” he had published on www.scribd.comon 22nd May 2009 ─ that is nearly a year ago, of my third book “The Rigveda and the Avesta ─ The Final Evidence” (Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2008). I had read this “review” at that time itself; but, after the initial reactive indignation that I naturally felt after reading a pointless and pompous diatribe against my book written in a jeering and sneering tone, I soon realized that there was really nothing to “reply” to in that “review”: it was so utterly pointless and irrelevant. [Later, I was informed that another, even more vicious and vindictive, review had been written in a Bangalore journal by an Indian writer who has had his knife in me since quite some time. I did not think that other review even worth procuring and reading]. I decided at that time that I really could not waste my time replying to every Tom, Dick and Harry of a writer who chose to vent his spite and venom on my book or on myself just to satisfy his itching fingers, unless he really had something concrete to say about the data, facts and evidence contained in my book. Sad to say, Fournet’s review had nothing concrete at all to say about my book, and did not really merit any serious reply.But it appears Fournet is under the impression that his “review” has silenced me and others like me who choose to keep on “dreaming on never-exist [sic] fairytales”. And perhaps friendly readers would like or expect me to give some reply. So I am writing this “reply” in order to clarify once and for all as to what would constitute a genuine review of my book which would merit a reply from me; and the best way of doing this is by giving a counter-review of Fournet’s “review” of my book, to demonstrate how there are absolutely no“real issues” at all “contained in the review”, however fondly Fournet, egged on by the Farmer-Witzel pack of jokers, may be under the impression that he has managed to fool everyone into believing that there are. In fact, Fournet’s review really shows him up as being a joker par excellence.First, let me clarify what my book is all about. The core heart of this book is the first section which presents absolutely new and absolutely conclusive evidence about the chronology (relative, internal and absolute) and the geography of the Rigveda and the Avesta. This evidence itself is enough to smash the AIT into smithereens and to prove the OIT; or, at the very least, to make it clear that it would require complete and extremely radical amendments to the AIT to produce a new version of an AIT which would try to accommodate all these chronological and geographical factors into a non-Indian homeland theory. The second section of the book only dots all the “i”s and crosses all the “t”s (often repeating material from my second book along with an array of new evidence and logical arguments) in order to show how the OIT alone fulfils all the requirements and solves all the problems of the IE Homeland question. Any discussion on the second section can only follow a discussion on the first section of my book. The first section of my book proves beyond the shadow of any doubt that 1) the period of composition of the latest parts of the Rigveda (latest not only according to my criteria but according to the internal chronology accepted by consensus among western academicians) goes back into the late third millennium BCE at the latest, 2) that the proto-Iranians and the proto-Mitanni emigrated from India during the period of composition of these latest parts, and 3) that the proto-Iranians and the pre-Mitanni Indo-Aryans, in the periods preceding this late period, i.e. in the periods preceding the late third millennium BCE at the latest, were inhabitants of areas to the east of the Sapta Sindhava region with little or no prior acquaintance with areas to the west.This is proved, not on the basis of empty rhetoric of the kind which characterizes Fournet’s pathetic “review”, but on the basis of pages and pages and pagesof detailed and complete (i.e. non-partisan) data, facts and evidence ─ concrete evidence which can be verified or else can be exposed if false.Only and only after this evidence in the first section of my book is discussed, and either conclusively proved wrong (with the help of an alternate, and equally detailed and complete, analysis of the chronological and geographical data in the Rigveda and the Avesta), or accepted but within an attempted alternate AIT hypothesis, can any discussion spill over into the second section of the book.This reply to Fournet’s “review” of my book will have three sections: I. The Real Issues contained in the first section of my book.II. The “Real Issues” in Fournet’s “review”.III. Postscript: How to write a review.First, let us see how Fournet deals with the core “real issues” contained in my book.I. The Real Issues contained in the first section of my book.The first section of my book is loaded with detailed masses of concrete data covering all the possible occurrences of a large number of categories of words in the Rigveda, relevant to the historical analysis of the Rigveda and the Avesta, complete with hymn and verse numbers. This is solid data, arranged systematically in tables, charts and lists, the veracity of which can be verified or disproved with very little effort. The text of the chapters very systematically explains the logical significance of the detailed charts and lists, and the very precise conclusions that can be drawn from this data. This data, and the conclusions which automatically and logically flow out from it, constitute the crux of the first section of the book, but Fournet totally fails or refuses to even glance at this data and evidence: in fact, he finds that there are “frequent interruptions of the text by copious references to the hymns and verses of the Rig-Veda and by lists of names or nouns. Many of these references should have been preferably dealt with otherwise, so that the reasoning and the text of the author would not be constantly chopped […] All these textual and typographic features are hindrances for the reader to understand what the writer wants to say and sometimes to find the text itself amidst the references” (notwithstanding that “the reasoning and the text of the author” and “what the writer wants to say” are based solely on these copious references and wordlists rather than on empty rhetoric!). And, again, about chapter 1, “About half the pages are references which could be synthesized and organized otherwise as annexes”, and about chapter 2, “Most of this part is references or tables”. But, in spite of having all these concrete masses of references and data, along with detailed explanations about their meaning and import, virtually thrust on him in the main body of the text rather than in extraneous and avoidable annexes, Fournet resolutely ignores it all, and sums up his conclusions about the chapters on the basis of vague, impressionistic and opinionated comments which totally fail to make even the pretence of an examination of any part of the data or even to take it into consideration: Chapter 1 gives a complete analysis of the names and name elements common to the Rigveda and the Avesta, and shows how the major body of these names and name elements (and, incidentally, even various categories of compound word types which form these name elements), which form the common cultural elements in the two books, are found right from the earliest hymns of the Avesta (the Gathas) but are found in the Rigveda onlyin the Late Books and hymns: precisely, in 386 hymns in the LateBooks I, V, VIII-X, but in only 8 hymns in the Early and Middle Books II-IV, VI-VII (all 8 of which are classified by the western scholars as Late hymns within these earlier books!). Fournet sweeps aside this overpowering data, without examination, with the remark: “We have no particular opinion about the conclusion and the method used to reach it. We tend to think that this point is not as crucial as the author seems to believe”; Chapter 2 gives a complete typological analysis of all the meters used in the Rigveda, along with an analysis of the chronological evolution of the meters, and shows how the meters used in the Gathas, the earliest part of the Avesta, are meters which in the Rigveda had evolved only by the time of the Late Books of the Rigveda. Fournet, again sweeps aside this concrete data, without examination, with the remark: “This chapter is abstruse and it is hard to figure what these statistics actually prove”. Chapter 3 examines the geographical data in the Rigveda in complete detail, and shows how the Vedic Aryans in the periods of the Early and Middle Books of the Rigveda, i.e. in the periods before the development of the common Indo-Iranian culture which took place in the period of the Late Books of the Rigveda, were located to the east of the Punjab, with little, if any, knowledge of areas to the west. Again, without examining any of the copious data given, Fournet dismisses the inevitable conclusions arising from this data with the evasive remark: “Ultimately, the conclusions drawn from the Rig-Veda depend on the relative chronology chosen or determined for the books. Circularity is a permanent risk”.Thus, Fournet sweepingly dismisses the copious data in chapters 1 and 2, without examination, on the ground that it is not “crucial” or that it is “hard to figure out”.Worse, he dismisses the copious data in chapters 1, 2 and 3 on the additional ground that the conclusions drawn are not acceptable since the veracity of these conclusions “depend on the relative chronology chosen and determined for the books”, and that different scholars have proposed different chronological orders for books II-VII from the one proposed by me in my books (which is VI, III, VII, IV, II, V). Fournet simply refuses to examine, or even to consider, all that copious data, and simply dismisses my conclusions with a contemptuous Gallic shrug, and the escapist remarks: “We do not have the expertise to determine which order (or if another one) should be preferred.[….] These philological technicalities should be addressed and discussed by competent specialists of the field”, Here, he deliberately ignores the fact that Chapter 4 of my book makes it very clear that the veracity of the conclusions drawn by me in the first section of my book does not in any way depend on my own chronological order for books II-VII. The conclusions actually stand confirmed purely on the basis of the consensusamong academic scholars (the “competent specialists of the field”) that the family books II-VII are older than the non-family books I VIII IX X, and that, of books II-VII, book V is closer to books I VIII IX X than to the other family books, so that we get twodistinct groups of books on the basis of a near consensus among academic scholars: an earlier group consisting of books II III IV VI VII and a latergroup consisting of books V I VIII IX X. Fournet himself confirms the major part of this consensus classification: “All agree that the books I VIII IX X are the most recent and disagree about the order of the other six ones, admittedly the oldest”. And the fact is that all the “copious references to the hymns and verses of the Rig-Veda” and all the “lists of names or nouns” which Fournet regards as “frequent interruptions of the text” in my book, and as data to be ignored or dismissed, fall into two distinct and clear cut categories in their patterns of distribution in the Rigveda in line with these very two groups of books. Therefore, even without the help of “competent specialists of the field”, even Fournet should have been able to verify whether my conclusions are right or wrong by simply checking the veracity of my data. Fournet’s remarks on Chapter 5 are even more surprising. In Chapter 5, I have clearly shown how all the Mitanni name types are found only and exclusively in the later group of books (V I VIII IX X in 112 hymns) and missing in the earliergroup of books (II III IV VI VII, except in 1 hymn classified by western academic scholars as a late hymn in these earlier books). Fournet does not just find my conclusion (that the data shows that the Mitanni IA language is younger than the earlier parts of the Rigveda) unconvincing, but he finds that “If any conclusion can be drawn out of these data, we would conclude that they prove the Rig-Veda, as a whole, is younger than this Mitanni Indo-Aryan-oid language, contrary to the author’s claim”! How on earth, given that even he accepts that “all agree” that books I VIII IX X are “the most recent”, does he find that “these data” ─ which clearly show that the “Mitanni Indo-Aryan-oid” names are found only in this “most recent” group of books, and are totally missing in the books which are “admittedly the oldest” ─ without any examination to disprove the veracity of the data, lead to the conclusion that “the Rig-Veda, as a whole, is younger than this Mitanni Indo-Aryan-oid language, contrary to the author’s claim”? Just how does this joker’s brain function?So far, discussions on the Indo-European question have been based only on rhetoric and airy assumptions. When references from the Rigveda have formed any part of the evidence presented by either the OIT side or the AIT side, they have consisted mainly of stray references picked up from the text, interpreted by adding all kinds of values absent in the actual words, and made the starting points or first links of chains of similar interpretations one leading to the other and ending in momentous conclusions which bear no direct connection with the original references cited. Many of the astronomical interpretations of Vedic references cited by OIT writers fall in this category. The textual “evidence” for the AIT as a whole is almost entirely based on such interpretations: the most telling example is the way one stray word, anās, occurring just once in the whole of the Rigveda and never again after that in any other text, was taken as a-nās rather than an-ās which it actually was, translated as “nose-less” and further interpreted as “snub-nosed”, and consequently treated in countless scholarly works over two centuries of western Vedic scholarship as evidence that the alleged native non-Aryan Indians, whom the alleged Aryan invaders/immigrants encountered when they allegedly entered India, were “snub-nosed”. The data and statistics which fill the first section of my book to the overflowing ― the “copious references to the hymns and verses of the Rig-Veda” and all the “lists of names or nouns” which Fournet regards as “frequent interruptions of the text” in my book ― form the very crux of my book and of the evidence presented by me. They consist of complete lists of concretewords (i.e. words taken in their accepted literal meanings, rather than with symbolic or value-added meanings) of different categories (including personal names, and names of animals, rivers, etc.), and the particular picture consistently depicted by the very regularpattern of distribution itself, of these words (as also of other data like meters), forms the crux of the evidence. The summary of this evidence is spelt out so clearly (in the section entitled “What the Evidence Shows”, pp. 43-49 of my book) that even a half-witted person, if he took care to actually read the section instead of writing an abusive “review” based only on his predetermined agenda, should have been able to understand it. And the inevitability of the conclusions drawn by me from this evidence is also spelt out so clearly (in the section entitled “Can this Evidence be refuted?” on pp.135-142 of my book) that any reviewer without sand in his brains (if, of course, he had bothered to read and understand what I have written) would have thought ten times before being so summary in his dismissal of the evidence without examination. There is only one Rigveda (as there is only one Avesta, and one known and limited treasury of Mitanni words), so it is not really possible to challenge this evidence by citing alternativeequally complete lists of words showing a differentregular pattern and therefore a different picture; but a genuine critic would have examined the actual lists given by me in detail to check the extent to which they are genuine and complete, and to which they do indeed show the pattern of distribution claimed by me and justify the historical and geographical conclusions reached by me, and would have based any criticism on such an examination. However, Fournet completely shuns examining this copious data which conclusively establishes the chronology of the composition of the Rigveda as going back into the late third millennium BCE and beyond for the beginnings of the latest parts, and, almost like a joke, merely reiterates the incredible (in view of all the data in the first section of my book) proposition: “The standard traditional time bracket from -1500 to -1000 BC for the composition of the Rig-Veda disqualifies the OIT as constructed by the author”!Fournet, like Witzel before him in his criticism of my earlier book, shows the same utter contempt for concrete references, data and statistics, and the same total reliance on mockery and on empty rhetoric. What Fournet proves in this review, as we shall see in detail, is that the onlyway in which writers like him, including Witzel before him and other likely critics after him, can afford or dareto deal with my book is by completely ignoring the copious references, data, statistics, and other hard evidence actually presented by me, and the conclusions which unavoidably proceed from this material, and by substituting jeering rhetoric for analytical reasoning. The fact is not that “nobody addressed the real issues contained in the review”; the fact (to put it crudely but accurately) is that polemicists like Fournet and Witzel just simply do not have the guts in their balls to address the “real issues” in my book.Any review which steadfastly avoids dealing with the concrete data overflowing on every page of the first section of my book ─ avoids examining all the data and either showing that significant portions of that data are false, or showing convincingly that the data leads to conclusions other than those drawn by me ─ is a Big Zero, howsoever much the reviewer may pat himself on the back (and have his back patted by like-minded jokers) that he has effectively made mincemeat of my book merely on the basis of a barrage of rhetoric, polemics and derision. Fournet’s “review” is nothing but a joke played by a sick joker to win the gleeful applause of other like-minded jokers.It is up to the reader to read both my book (the reading of which Fournet claims his review renders unnecessary) as well as Fournet’s “review” and to decide for himself:a) what exactly the “real issues contained in the review” are, and whether they really require to be addressed at all; and also whether or not Fournet himself has in fact addressed the very real issues in my book in his “review”, andb) whether it is I who do not understand “how to write a book” (and have to learn “how to write a book” from this joker), or whether it is Fournet who does not understand how to read a book, or how to understand what he is reading even when it is set out in plain English.II. The “Real Issues” in Fournet’s “review”.Fournet steadfastly refuses to examine the masses and masses of concrete, complete and verifiable data in the form of references, data, facts, statistics and evidence given in the first section of my book, presumably on the ground that they do not constitute “real issues”. So what exactly are the “real issues” he is “reviewing” in his “review”?The “real issues” in Fournet’s “review” are all purely pedantic and polemicalissues, and the review by and large consists of a series of monologues consisting of long, convoluted and extremely confused polemical discussions on different subjects: e.g. the phrases “AIT” and “OIT”, the concept of “Indo-Iranian”, the concept of “Indo-European”, the phrase “develop”, and the concept of cultural change and transformation. The rest of the “review” is devoted to a pedantic criticism of the book as a whole. The monologues, as well as the rest of the “review”, consist mainly of detailed semantic discussions on the meanings of different words and concepts and Freudian psycho-analyses of my alleged basic misuse or misunderstanding of these words and concepts. Before examining the “real issues” raised by Fournet, it is necessary to understand two very basic aspects of Fournet’s “review” which become clear from every word and line written by him:First of all, it is clear that Fournet’s “review” is not written with the intention of seriously examining what I have written in my book: it is written with the sole and only aim of sneering and jeering at anything and everything written in the book, and ridiculing and deriding my hypothesis and my person. This will become clear as we proceed with our examination.Secondly, it is also clear that Fournet’s “review” is based on the principle that “ignorance is bliss”; or rather, that “ignorance is power”, since it removes all ethical, moral and logical inhibitions and constraints in criticizing and deriding. Thus, Fournet sees no need to acquaint himself with any of the basic background material behind the book, and proudly proclaims his ignorance almost as a qualification: to begin with, he has not only not read my earlier books, but he finds that “The book does not require any prior reading of the two other books by the same author, which were on the same topic”. In the same vein: “We are not a specialist in Vedic or Indo-Iranian studies”; “Before reading the book, we had about no expertise on the OIT, apart from the vague idea that the OIT tries to promote India as a possible homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language”; “we would have appreciated to see what evidence in the Rig-Veda substantiates the claim of ‘a mighty Sarasvatī in full powerful flow’. Be it right or wrong, and we have no opinion, such a claim requires to be duly documented and proved by a philological analysis, and this analysis is lacking”; “the tribe names, Druhyus, Anus and Pūrus ― we have not checked that point ― […] The pages (258-273) are dedicated to an outpour of considerations on typically Indian cultural items, among which the Druhyus, Anus and Pūrus ‘tribal conglomerates’. We are not familiar with these items and we cannot describe what added value this section of the book might bring.”; “The book ends with the evocation of the ‘Battle of the Ten Kings’ (p.370). We must confess to having never read or heard what this epical event is”. Can a person who has not read the two earlier books “on the same topic” by me, who knows little about Vedic or Indo-Iranian studies, who knows virtually nothing about the OIT, who knows so little about the Rigveda that he does not know that the Rigveda speaks of a mighty Sarasvatī in full powerful flow, and has never heard about Druhyus, Anus and Pūrus, or about the Battle of the Ten Kings, presume to write a review of my third book which claims to be the Final Evidence on the subject of Vedic and Indo-Iranian history (within four days of receipt of the book: he received it on 18/5/2009, while the “review” was first posted on 22/05/2009) ― a “review” claiming to be so accurate (“accurate enough for people to assess what the book is, when they have not read it themselves”) that it can eliminate the need for his reader to expect anything more substantial or illuminating from a direct perusal of the book? As we proceed with our examination of his critique, it will be clear from his criticism not only a) that he is proudly ignorant about all the background issues which form the topic of my three books, b) that he has not read what I have written in my two earlier books with which this third book forms a continuum, and c) that, even as far as this third book itself is concerned, he has completely ignored all the masses of “frequent interruptions of the text” in the form of references, data and statistics; but also, d) that he has not bothered or seen the need to really read even the “text” of this third book, beyond searching for passages for quotation, or scouring the text to count the number of times I have used certain words, or checking out which words are “missing” in my book, or hunting out words which he can subject to a long discussion in order to allege a semantically wrong use of those words by me ─ the most telling testimony to this is the fact that he comes across any reference to the Battle of the Ten Kings for the first and last time only in the last paragraph of my book (p.370)! e) that even the portions he has quoted often include only parts of sentences, wherein his criticism shows that he has not read the other parts of the very sentences that he is actually quoting, and f) that even when he quotes full sentences, he is not able to understand what he has read and quoted. All this makes it all the more of a joke when he tries to copy Witzel’s tactic of listing out things which I “do not know” and “have not mentioned” in order to show my alleged ignorance about the subject or my alleged failure to understand the issues involved. Now an examination of Fournet’s “real issues”, which will help us to understand his agenda and his methods, as also to comprehend the psychological and intellectual level of his “review”:1. The smell and colour of my book: The first “real issue” for Fournet, is the smell and colour of my book: “The first contact with the book has reminded us of a Sanskrit grammar we bought in China some years ago and which is our main source on that language: Fan Yu KeBen. The size, the smell, the pages, both whitish and yellowish, have kindled the same impression”. The smell and colour of the book (which I at least do not find notably different from the smell and colour of the books published by any normal western publishing house: if anything, Aditya Prakashan books are notably better than most of them) are obviously “real issues” more worthy of notice and comment than the copious “interruptions” in the form of references, data and statistics.2. Review-politics: Even the very fact that the book was sent to him for review by Koenraad Elst is a “real issue” worthy of snide comment. Fournet takes care to inform us at the very outset of the “review” that the book has been reviewed more or less as a favour to Koenraad Elst: “The copy, received 05/18/2009, was sent by Koenraad Elst, a personal friend of the author, after we accepted his proposal to (try to) review it. For the sake of courtesy, we had proposed that our review could be read by the author before being made public, but this proposal has been rejected by K. Elst. We have never had direct contact with the author.” Fournet ends his “review” with the remark: “We are still wondering why K. Elst has proposed that we (try to) make a review of Mr. Shrikant Talageri’s book. We are not sure that our review is what they have expected.”Koenraad Elst, at my own general request in the first flush of publication of the book, proposed sending my book for possible review to various people. That is the standard procedure when a new book is published, when a debate or discussion is sought to be initiated on the contents of the book. The proposed reviewer, naturally, always has the right, for whatever reason or even without assigning any reason, to refuse to review the book; or, if he reviews it, to criticize it in all legitimate terms (and even, I suppose, if that is his nature, in illegitimate terms). What distinguishes Fournet is his unique and peculiar code of “courtesy” whereby he reviews the book, but at the same time takes care to suggest in the body of his review a) that the review is more or less being undertaken almost as a favour, b) that the author was indirectly offered the chance to read the review before it was made public (perhaps in the expectation that the author would be so terrified on reading his devastating critique that he would desperately plead for a kinder review, and this plea could also then be jeeringly publicized in the body of the “review” when finally published?), c) that the author and his friend confidently expected a glowingly favourable review and would probably be embarrassed at it turning out to be a critical one after all, and d) that he himself is ultimately mystified as to why he was ever approached at all to do the review (but not, apparently, about why he did ultimately review it!). In truth, I am equally mystified on this point. On being asked, Koenraad told me that Fournet was a writer with “unconventional” ideas, and therefore he (Koenraad) felt that he would be more receptive to “new ideas”. Apparently Koenraad felt that having “unconventional” ideas was a qualification of an open and honest mind, and also that this assumed qualification was sufficient to automatically eliminate the need to have the ability to read and the brains to understand what one is reading!3. Fournet’s mental trauma: The tumultuous emotions that raced through Fournet’s breast as he ploughed his way through the book is also another “real issue” eloquently placed before the readers. A sample: “[…] In the course of reviewing the book, in the middle of the reading of section 2, we realized that the self-imposed goal of remaining neutral made increasingly no sense. We erased neutral and chose empathetic, because this word expresses open-mindedness without hostility or assent. After that, a deeper understanding of the way the author uses some key words and of their real meanings and implicit presuppositions made it clear that the word empathetic may be misinterpreted as a kind of implicit assent. We then opted from the somehow psychoanalytical anamnetic, which expresses our distantiated conviction that we have reached deeper and deeper layers of the mental construction of the author’s OIT: the explicit contents, the implicit framework, the key words and the political vested interests. During that process of anamnesis of the author’s version of the OIT, we have been successively disconcerted, assiduous, amazed and frightened [...]”. The above, incidentally, is a representative sample of the style of the entire review, like that of an essay written by a school student for an elocution competition: pedantic and flowery language, with verbose and pompous words, phrases and sentences to be delivered with the right melodramatic pauses, intonations, expressions and gestures.4. Pedantry in academic writing: After his outpourings on his feelings while reading my book, Fournet turns to my bibliography, followed by my preface. A little later, he turns to the textual organization of the book and the fonts used by me. Still later, he refers to the maps in my book. At the end of his review, he refers to my index. We will take up these issues here ─ bibliography, preface, textual organization, fonts, maps and index ─ as they all fall in one broad category of incidental aspects of the book as distinct from the direct subject matter of the book in the form of data, facts, evidence and conclusions. Since the facts, data, statistics and evidence given by me are to be ignored as non-issues, these become the “real issues” in his review. As in Witzel’s “review” of my second book, every failure on my part to follow the reviewer’s views on the proper table manners and etiquette of academic writing (i.e. academic equivalences, in my writing, to a failure to use the right knife, fork or spoon while eating different dishes, to keep the cutlery and napkin in the right place, to start and to stop eating a particular course at the correct moment, to open and close my mouth in the right manner while eating, to chew the food the requisite number of times, to follow the correct rules of table conversation, to sit in the right position and at the correct angle, etc.) becomes a major “real issue”, and every comment by the “reviewer” on each of these “failures” becomes a devastating indictment of my book, of my theory, of the evidence presented by me, and of the OIT itself. It shows not only that I do not know “how to write a book”, but automatically also that I do not “understand what the issues are about”!Since the criticisms are mainly pedantic or polemical, my reply to them will be on the same level: My bibliography: Fournet begins by noting that the bibliography is “very short for such an issue as the PIE homeland”. This comment is superfluous since I have made the following clear statement in the preface: “I have not adopted, and will never adopt, the fraudulent system of providing long bibliographies containing the name of every single book ever read by me (not to mention books not read by me but culled from the bibliographies of other books). The only books in my bibliography are those books actually quoted by me, and those referred to in any significant context”. Fournet quotes only the last part of this statement, and takes comfort in thinking he has discovered the following which gives the lie to my claim: “It must nevertheless be noted that Oldenberg. 1888. Prolegomena, are discussed and cited in the chapter 4 but do not appear in the bibliography”. While it is true that Oldenberg’s Prolegomena not being included in the bibliography is an omission, it does not really give the lie to my claim: if Fournet had understood English, he would have realized that what would have given the lie to my claim is not omissions, but inclusions in my bibliography of books neither actually quoted by me nor referred to in any significant context. Fournet continues: “it contains very few works with a real linguistic content. Paradoxically, (historical) linguistics is nearly completely absent in a book that claims to deal with the issue of the PIE homeland”. Here we see the familiar tactic of continuously demanding what is not in the book instead of examining what is actually there! Fournet shows clearly that he has totally failed to understand what my book is all about: the very title of the book indicates that the central topic of the book is a textual exegesis of the Rigveda and the Avesta, and this is the subject matter of the first section, which constitutes the bulk of my book. There is hardly any place for general linguistic discussions in this section. The second section of my book also has little place for books containing general discussions on linguistics, even Indo-European linguistics (indeed, the writings on every single technical aspect, and item of data, concerning every single branch of study of Indo-European linguistics, could fill out a number of encyclopaediac volumes or even a small library), except where they contained data, discussions or arguments pertaining to the debate on the geographical location of the Indo-European homeland, and relevant to the subjects under discussion. So, in view of my ethical refusal to fraudulently list out in my bibliography long lists of books read and unread just to show my erudition (take any article or paper by Witzel, for example, and see how many of the endless number of books listed in the bibliography really have any place in the concerned article), my bibliography contains just the right number of books dealing with (the relevant aspects of) linguistics.After a critical reference to the book by Chang, 1988, quoted by me, Fournet resorts to the following year-wise analysis of the books in my bibliography: “the years of publication of the 73 references listed in the bibliography are: before 1906 7 books, between 1907 and 1985 14, after 1986 52. We cannot believe that so little worth quoting has been written during the 80 years from 1906 to 1986 on the issue of the PIE homeland. What is more, 23 out of the 52 modern references are from Talageri himself or from Witzel”. Fournet clearly has no idea at all what my book is about, not having seen the need to read it before reviewing it. Naturally, the majority of the books quoted are after 1986, since it is in the last twenty years that the Indo-European homeland question has hotted up, and all the various pros and cons of the AIT-vs.-OIT debate have been vigorously debated (and the linguistic aspects mainly by Witzel and myself, and also Hock as quoted in my book), including points and arguments made in earlier publications. The early foundations of Indological study go back mainly into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so again some books of that period are likely to be quoted. Given the subject matter of this book, very little indeed “worth quoting has been written during the 80 years from 1906 to 1986 on the issue of the PIE homeland”. In any case, I was not aware that scholarly etiquette demands that when quoting from different books, a writer is supposed to meticulously allot an impartial quota of an equal number of books for every year or decade! Further: “some books have been selected and quoted more or less extensively because they agree with the author. From the textual and argumentative point of view, this practice adds nothing real and could be avoided. It amounts to pro domo propaganda”. Nothing exposes the bias and hostility behind this fake “review” more than these comments. To begin with, not one single OIT writer has been quoted by me throughout the entire book: all the quotations without exception are from the scholarly writings of AIT scholars i.e. scholars who would implicitly or explicitly be on the AIT side in any debate (although I have given due credit to two OIT supporting writers, on pp.102 and 338, when I have made certain points; but I have not actually quoted these two writers, both of whom are non-Indian and both hostile to me, and nor are they a part of the bibliography under criticism). If the writings of these AIT scholars “agree with the author”, surely it is something for Fournet to ponder over seriously instead of branding it as “propaganda”. But these “agreeable” quotations are not the only ones quoted by me: I have also quoted and exposed the fallacy of almost as many AIT arguments which do not “agree with” me (Witzel, Hock, Lubotsky, etc.). All this is apart from the fact that the overwhelmingly largest number of references in my book are not from any writers, AIT or OIT, but directly from the original sources: the Rigveda and the Avesta ─ and it is these original references that polemicists like Fournet and Witzel dread the most and avoid like the plague.My preface: The first thing Fournet points out about the preface is the following: “The Preface (21 p) actually starts on page XVIII and not XV as indicated in the contents”. Obviously, I cannot answer for this printer’s or publisher’s error.He then notes: “the preface includes a listing of ‘errors’ and ‘mistakes’ made in the author’s previous works […] This could have been preferably located somewhere else, after the bibliography for example”. So far, this criticism is legitimate: I, in hindsight, would go further and say that this list of errors was really an unnecessary “interruption” not only in the preface but in the book itself, and could even have been dispensed with altogether. But Fournet does not stop here; he goes on to make the following pointless and petty comment: “The meaning of these errata in the preface seems to be that the author has made his own mea culpa and that other people, presumably non OIT supporters, should do the same”! Freud? Holmes? No, it’s Hercule Fournet! [Fournet tells us a little later on that the book “can be read in a [sic] several ways: a surface reading of what the writer writes explicitly and deeper readings of what he assumes and thinks but does not write”. Clearly, this master psychologist cum detective has no place for the explicit data given on the “surface” and his whole “review” is based on these brilliant “deeper” pieces of Hercule Fournetian mind-reading, as we will see many times in his review!]. About my claim in the preface that my book would prove conclusively that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages, Fournet makes the following profound observation: “It can be underlined that the wording is ‘homeland of the Indo-European family of languages’ and not ‘(Proto-)Indo-European homeland’”! In continuation of this diversionary play on words, Fournet continues: “The author mentions the word ‘Proto-Indo-European’ only once, when referring to Hock’s works: ‘the Proto-Indo-European language (as much ancestral to Vedic as to the other ancient Indo-European languages)’ (p.210). This hapax word is not listed in the index. The author claims to have found the location of something that he about never describes by its name” (note again the profundity of the last sentence!). Apart from scouring my book to find out which words are missing in my book which he feels should have been there, or in examining the semantic sense in which I have in his opinion misused certain other words, one more aspect of Fournet’s “review” consists in counting the number of times I have used certain words. But he does not seem to have been very meticulous even in this utterly pointless venture: the phrase “Proto-Indo-European” is found at least 25 times in my book in this full form, and at least 40 times in the form PIE, and the word “Indo-European homeland” is found at least 8 times (notably even in the very title of the second section of the book)! Fournet’s criticism of my preface also includes a polemical monologue on the phrases AIT and OIT, apparently provoked by my references to the AIT-vs.-OIT debate in my preface. This we will examine separately. The textual organization of my book: Fournet tells us at the very beginning of his review: “The book does not have an explicit conclusion”. Later, he goes into more details about how “the textual organization of the book is unusual and defective”: “There is no explicit conclusion, the preface includes errata for previous books and transliteration conventions. The section 1 includes subchapters with titles like Appendix 1 and 2 and Footnote that are in fact incorporated in the body of the text. […] The book does not begin with a programmatic presentation of what the author plans to state or prove in the section 1. […] The multiple goals, compounded with the defective textual organization of the book, contribute to the opacity and lack of fluidity of the section”He writes that it is difficult to know “what the author plans to state or prove in the [sic] section 1” since I do not “begin with a programmatic presentation” of it, but immediately tells us that his own “understanding is that he wants to clear several issues at the same time: one is the relative chronology of the books and hymns of the Rig-Veda, another is their absolute chronology, another is the relative chronology of the Rig-Veda and the Avesta, another is to argument [sic] in favor of the supposed westward movements of the Rig-Vedic Indo-Aryans, one more is to expose the perceived fraudulences of the so-called Western scholarship, as exemplified by Witzel”. Now obviously Fournet does notget all this “understanding” from his brilliant detective abilities but from the very title of the section itself, as well as from the titles of the chapters and sub-chapters and headings and sub-headings, quite apart from the fact that the first few paragraphs of every chapter state very clearlywhat “the author plans to state or prove” in that chapter, and the conclusions arising from the data in each chapter and sub-chapter are repeatedly hammered into the readers’ attention throughout the concerned chapters and sub-chapters. Each chapter is a step-by-step progression from one point to the next: the first two chapters show that the common “Indo-Iranian” culture originated in the Late Rigvedic period; the third shows us where the Indo-Aryans and proto-Iranians were (i.e. deeper inside India, and not in Central Asia) in the period precedingthis period of development of a common culture; and the fourth clarifies how the chronological basis behind all these conclusions is not just the internal chronology of the books postulated by me but the one agreed upon by a consensus of western scholars from Oldenberg through Witzel to Proferes. The fifth chapter analyses the Mitanni Indo-Aryan names and shows how this analysis parallels the analysis of Avestan names in chapter one; and the sixth one shows how this Mitanni data now allows us to arrive at a rough absolute chronology for the Late books of the Rigveda. And, as Fournet himself puts it, “repetitions and refinements of some key points provide a helpful guideline as to where the author is ultimately going”. Obviously, no amount of (more) spoon-feeding could have sufficed to prevent these determinedly querulous complaints.About my preface, yes, I could have included the transliteration conventions elsewhere, and, as already stated, dispensed altogether with the errata. But, my inclusion of a Footnote as a subchapter in chapter one, and Appendices 1 and 2 as subchapters in chapters 3 and 4, was very logical: those subchapters pertained only to the particular chapters concerned and not to the section as a whole. And yet, they needed to be distinguished from the main point of the chapters concerned: e.g. the main point of chapter 4 was that the internal chronology of the Rigveda, on the basis of which one inevitably arrives at the conclusions reached in the other chapters of section 1, is based on the consensus of western scholars, and that these conclusions simply cannot be rejected without rejecting altogether this consensus of two centuries. The matter in the appendices consisted merely of additional discussions on this internal chronology, so they were distinguished as appendices. The failure of a pedantic critic to understand this logic cannot be construed as a failure or shortcoming on my part. The fonts used by me: “another feature is the letter fonts, sizes and cases which often vary within any given page.” This is counted as “one of the hindrances for the reader to understand what the author wants to say”. Now, Fournet cannot be referring here to the “fonts” used for writing Vedic and Avestan words, since those are absolutely essential. He is therefore obviously referring to my use of italics and bold letters. I have used bold letters only in titles and sub-titles and also in two special circumstances: one, in every quotation from other writers, to distinguish what is being quoted from what I myself am writing, and two, in distinguishing the hymn number from the verse number in giving references from the Rigveda. Also, in chapter one, they are statedly used to highlight names common to the Rigveda and the Avesta. I think all these uses of bold letters should in fact be useful in helping the reader to understand better what I want to say. Likewise, the different “sizes” of the fonts are also used only in titles and sub-titles; and as for “cases”, capital letters are likewise used in titles and sub-titles, and in giving references of books, e.g. WITZEL 1995b:35. Italics are also often used for specific purposes: in chapter one, they are used to distinguish the common (to the Rigveda and the Avesta) half of the names from the other parts. Again, all this should be useful to readers, rather than a “hindrance”. In the case of italics, perhaps I have the habit of using them a bit too much to emphasize words (apart from the fact that the printers have wrongly used italics in subtitles in chapters 2 and 3 where I had indicated bold letters), but that happens to be my style of writing, and I think, like every other writer, I too have the right to my own way of writing. Some of it may be very irritating to many readers; but if any of this actually prevents the reader from understanding what I want to say, it can only be if the reader, like Fournet, has set out determined not to understand what I want to say. My maps: About the maps in my book: “the pages (p.213-258) are dedicated to a detailed description of the scenario proposed by the author, with 6 maps and their related comments. At the first look, we have not been able to understand what the area on the low-quality maps was. The maps are centered on Afghanistan with present-day borders of the different states surrounding Afghanistan”.To begin with, if he is able to immediately tell us that the “maps are centered on Afghanistan with present-day borders of the different states surrounding Afghanistan”, what was the need to first claim that he was not able to understand what the area on the maps was? He describes the functional maps as “low-quality”, and earlier in his review, he jibes that “a map like the one Talageri’s book displays on p.226 could have been printed in Pictet’s book in 1859”. (Complete with the borders of post-1947 India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and with the inclusion of Anatolian and Tocharian, both identified as Indo-European only in the early twentieth century)? The above comments are not only cheap, they are also cowardly: would Fournet have had the guts to say the same thing about, for example, the map depicted on pps.294-295 of H. H. Hock’s article “Historical Interpretation of the Vedic Texts”, in the Volume “The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history”, Routledge, London and New York (Indian edition), 2005? They are not only as functional (“low-quality”) as my own maps, they are also much, much less accurate: in the maps, the Indus throughout seems to flow from well within the borders of present-day India before flowing out through Gujarat, to the east and south of the gulf of Kutch, rather than through Pakistan and out through Sind. Further, Fournet complains: “The borders of the former Soviet republics (Uzbekistan, Kirghiztan, Kazakhstan) are missing” on my map. All borders are missing in Hock’s map, including those of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.My index: “The Index is divided in two: a General Index and a Sanskrit Word Index. Some words are conspicuously absent from the index: AIT (but not OIT), PIE, proto-language, PreRigVedic (but not PostRigVedic). K.Elst is cited in the index in bold type with no page number.” Criticisms of structural things, like the preface, bibliography, maps, fonts, index, and the names and arrangements of the chapters and sub-chapters (sections) of a book, must, in general, necessarily be subjective, since in most of these matters the author must be the natural person to decide what is best suited for his purpose in each of these respects. Moreover, such criticism is always grossly disproportionate and dishonest (besides being totally inadequate as a substitute for criticizing the actual data and logic presented in the book). About his petty criticism of my index: I can genuinely say my index is the most complete index possible necessary for any analytical study of the material presented in my book, unlike my two earlier books whose indices had not been prepared by me and in which many key words in those books are missing in the index. Of course words like “AIT (but not OIT), PIE, proto-language, PreRigVedic (but not PostRigVedic)” are absent from the index, but so are words like Aryan (but not ārya), Indo-European, Rigveda and Rigvedic, and most of the (Rigvedic and Avestan) personal names in the book except those discussed or mentioned in the book in a distinctive or important context. Words which refer to the central theme of the entire book and are therefore not reference-specific, as well as words not mentioned in my book in any important quotable or referable context, are obviously excluded from my index. Such criticism for the sake of criticism can be made of any book: I challenge Fournet to send me a complete book written by him, and I will produce a long, and much more relevant (than the words cited by him) list of words from his book which are “conspicuously absent from the index”. [Incidentally, Elst in the index in bold type with no page number is a printer’s or publisher’s error for which I am not answerable].5. AIT-vs.-OIT: Included in the preface is a polemical monologue on the terms AIT and OIT which contains many profound gems. But first, a look at two instances in this monologue where Fournet tries to show up my ignorance, by citing things of which I am supposed to be “unaware”, and only ends up showing his own ignorance:One: “[…] there are several competing theories about the PIE homeland, other than the OIT, which differ both in datation (from the Paleolithic to the early Neolithic to the late Neolithic) and in location (from the North Pole to the Balkans to Southern Russia to Anatolia). What the author (and presumably the other OIT supporters) calls the AIT is to be understood as one of the mainstream theories: the one which describes a homeland in the Pontico-Caspian area in Southern Russia and a dispersal of the original community around -4000 BC. The bibliography includes two books: from Mallory, who supports this Pontico-Caspian homeland, and from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, who support Eastern Anatolia as original homeland. Talageri seems to be unaware that his short bibliography includes two works proposing two theories”. If Fournet had done his homework, he would have seen repeated references in this book, as well as in my second one, to Gamkrelidze’s Anatolian homeland theory as a distinct one from the Pontic-Caspian homeland theory: in this very book, notably on p. 222-23 (where in fact, in a sense, the Anatolian theory is even bracketed together with the OIT rather than with the Pontic-Caspian theory!) and on p.246. This is apart from the different homeland theories referred to in my first book, and the detailed analysis of Tilak’s Arctic theory in my second one. Two: “The author seems to be unaware that the OIT has nothing revolutionary at all and that the OIT theory is one of the first theories developed by European scholars in the XIXth century and one of the first to have been dismissed”. Again, if Fournet had done his homework, he would have known that this fact, that the Indian Homeland theory was one of the earliest theories which was later dismissed, is one of the favourite talking points for those writers from the OIT side who, like Fournet from the AIT side, concentrate only on polemics and rhetoric, and therefore only a particularly naïve or stupid person would assume that I could be “unaware” of it. It is, moreover, referred to by me in my first book which discusses the history of the homeland debate. As for the word “revolutionary”, it does not simply mean “new” or “for the first time”; it means “something which introduces radical change”, even if it is the revival of an old idea or system; and the OIT, when it is accepted, will certainly introduce a radical change in the writing of world history. Fournet objects to the word “revolutionary” above, and later on also to the phrase “new hypothesis”: “the OIT is not a ‘new hypothesis’ (p.XIX) but one of the oldest theories dismissed more than a century ago”, and even quotes in detail two eighteenth-nineteenth century European writers who need not concern us here (incidentally, for some unknown reason he chooses to quote a writer who advocates the “vast plateau of Iran” rather than India as the homeland!). Here Fournet deliberately obfuscates the meaning of what I have written: I have not claimed that the OIT itself is a “new hypothesis” but that the particular OIT hypothesis presented in my book is one: the full sentence used by me on p.XIX, which Fournet does not quote, is as follows: “it is easier to attack the nonsensical notions and wishful writings of more casual or biased OIT writers than to deal with a logical and unassailable new hypothesis backed by a solid phalanx of facts and data”. My hypothesis (as opposed to the “Sanskrit-origin” hypotheses of most OIT writers) is a new “PIE-in-India” hypothesis backed by a completely new and unassailable range of data, evidence and arguments.The monologue on AIT-vs.-OIT contains many such “time pass” comments and objections [It also contains a longish illustration of the writings of some eighteenth century French writer, which we can safely ignore]:Fournet basically objects to the very terms OIT and AIT. He attributes this “creation of an alternative between OIT or AIT” to the OIT writers: he calls the AIT a label “created by the OIT supporters”, and refers to the OIT as “what is called the ‘Out of India Theory’ by the author and the other OIT supporters. It can be added that the same name is used by the non supporters to describe the OIT”. So far as the term OIT is concerned, it was actually coined by the AIT writers themselves (perhaps to rhyme with AIT): it was not used by me even once in my two earlier books. So I cannot answer for this term.But, the phrase “Aryan Invasion Theory” ─ shortened to AIT again by the AIT writers themselves ─ was first used, in the present debate, by me in the title of my first book in 1993, “The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism”. So let us see Fournet’s querulous objections to this term:Firstly, Fournet objects to this alternative between OIT and AIT since it lumps together all the other homeland theories other than the Indian homeland theory “as if there were only one non Out-of-India Theory”, clearly because it gives the Indian homeland theory a special position vis-à-vis the other homeland theories. But he deduces the answer to this objection himself in his Hercule Fournetian manner: “A plausible explanation is that the author lumps together all these divergent theories into ‘the AIT side’ because they all share the feature of having Vedic and its present day daughter languages come from somewhere else than the present-day borders of India”. Fournet does not realize how valid this explanation is (although his use of the phrase “daughter languages” shows he has not read pp.281-288 of my book, and is unaware of or oblivious to the complexities of so-called “Indo-Aryan” linguistics): while the homeland debate on the linguistic side is primarily concerned with linguistic change and development and not with geography-specific data, the debate on the textual and inscriptional side is based primarily on the data in the Indo-Aryan Rigveda and the Iranian Avesta and secondarily on the data in the Hittite and (again Indo-Aryan) Mitanni-Kassite records, all of which are geography-specific. The Rigveda has been interpreted throughout as the record of the Vedic Aryans moving into the Vedic territory from the northwest/north/west. In this alleged movement, whether they originally, before they allegedly entered this territory from the northwest/north/west, came from South Russia, Anatolia, Eastern Europe or the North Pole, or somewhere else, is a negligible point in the data analysis, so all these homeland theories fall in one category. But if it is shown that they actually moved into this territory from the east/southeast, then the only homeland theory indicated, i.e. the Indian homeland theory, or OIT, obviously falls into a distinctly second alternative category.But Fournet also objects to the term AIT because of the word “invasion” inherent in it. He tells us the AIT label “created by the OIT supporters” is “not far from being a libel” when it is “used to describe present day scholarship”, since “this kind of invasionist schemes was very much fashionable in the good old days of European colonialism […] it has become unpalatable to everybody at the beginning of XXIst century”. This kind of objection is only to be expected from Fournet, who has clearly not read the numerous internet debates in which the tendency of AIT writers to use terms like “migration” and “trickling-in”, even while they describe blatantly invasionist scenarios in detail, has been repeatedly exposed. He could read pps.317-322 of my book, for starters, very, very carefully ─ particularly p.322.Like a naïve child, Fournet also puts forward this objection: “India did not exist thousands of years ago as a state and did not have (its present-day) borders”, so we cannot describe an invasion “of India” in that remote period, nor perhaps talk of an “Indian” homeland. So until we can specify with documentary proof what exactly every place in the world was named in the remote period under discussion, every geographical statement by us about that period using present-day geographical terms becomes redundant and wrong! If we prove that the original homeland was within India, we are of course wrong because there was no “India” with “(its present-day) borders” at that time. Of course, when Fournet talks about “Southern Russia”, “Anatolia”, “Balkans”, and so on, all these territories existed since eternity with their “present-day” borders and names! Fournet further fine-hones his objection: “the concept of invasion, i.e. an instantaneous and conscious trespassing of an established state border, is absurd when dealing with Vedic times and the Antiquity (of whatever place)”. How innocent and idyllic! Fournet is of course, unaware that the recorded history of West Asia ─ even before the date of 1500 BCE postulated for the alleged Aryan invasion ─ is full of descriptions of established states (Egypt, Assyria, Persia, etc.) invading the territories of other established states. Or of the detailed descriptions in the Bible of the Jews coming from Egypt and invading established states in Palestine. And, certainly, of the fact that the Rigveda itself, in the description of the battle of the ten kings (which Fournet only encounters on the last page of my book), describes Sudas’ invasion of the established states of the Anus. The city-states of the Indus Valley, whatever their identity, were certainly “established states” before 1500 BCE, and it is their alleged invasion that the AIT definitely describes.Fournet uses the word “libel” to describe the use of the term AIT by the OIT writers; but indul......