N. S. Rajaram

Navaratna Srinivasa Rajaram (22 September 1943 – 11 December 2019) was an Indian academic.

Quotes

• Eminent Historians makes for depressing reading. It leaves one wondering as to what must be stirring in the minds and souls of these ‘eminent historians’, to make them sink to such depths of intellectual and moral degradation as would place them in the company of Lysenko and Goebbels... their disloyalty to the nation and the culture that has sustained and nourished them, and without which they would be nothing. Unlike Indian scientists and technologists who are recognized everywhere, in the world of humanities, these ‘eminent historians’ are utter nonentities, little more than crooked reflections of colonial stereotypes.
  • Eminent historians or criminals in scholars’ robes? Dr. NS Rajaram, FOLKS Magazine, 14 June 2012 .Quoted in S. Balakrishna, Seventy years of secularism. 2018.

• “This is not true, but it doesn’t matter. The great mathematician Ramanujan was a clerk in the Madras port, while Einstein himself was serving as a clerk in the Swiss patent office when he discovered Relativity. (…) The idea of objectivity is beyond such minds; status means everything.”
  • N.S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, p.12.

• “Indian Marxists in particular are singularly touchy about the whole thing and hate to be reminded that their pet dogma of the non-indigenous origin of the Vedic Aryan civilization is an offshoot of the same race theories that gave rise to Nazism.”
  • N.S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, p.98.

• “what the history establishment has done through the models it has proposed for both the ancient and the medieval periods is to exactly reverse the historical picture”.
  • N.S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore 1997, p.6;

• “fabricating astronomical data going back thousands of years calls for knowledge of Newton’s Law of Gravitation and the ability to solve differential equations.”
  • N.S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, p.47.

• This observation is puzzling, to say the least, and it is not at all clear what any of it has to do with ancient history. The first part about class and caste is standard Marxist fare. But Thapar's foray into futurology, the prediction that an "Aryan nation" could emerge from the discovery that the "Aryans" are native to India, is irrelevant to the history of India. It is relevant, however, to modern politics. The dreaded "Aryan nation" . . . was a European invention. Are we to discard evidence and cling to the Aryan-invasion theory because of a perceived political threat . . . ? (Rajaram and Frawley 1995, 15)
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13

• Thapar's comments are portrayed as "vintage Marxist rhetoric," which has "gratuitously drag[ed] in the bogey of the 'Aryan nation' . . . [as] a blatant attempt aimed at divert- ing attention away from the real issue" (Rajaram 1993, 33).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13

• "English translations of the Rigveda . . . represent a massive misinterpretation built on the preconception that the Vedas are the primitive poetry of nomadic barbarians. Nothing could be further from the truth" (Rajaram 1995, xvi).
  • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13

Quotes about Rajaram

• Both of them (Witzel and Rajaram), probably very surprised to find each other in the same bed, assert that the Aryan debate is over and has been definitively decided. Both think that this debate only shows signs of life once in a while because of its political interest and in spite of its scholarly resolution. Only, Witzel thinks that the AIT has won the debate and its denial only survives because it is politically useful to the Hindutva forces, while Rajaram thinks the AIT has been refuted and only survives because it is politically useful to anti-Hindu forces as well as to various other political movements, including racism. It is this motive that he also discovers in Witzel...
  Rajaram presents Witzel as “more activist than scholar”, and lists as proofs his interventions to thwart Hindu proposals to eliminate the Aryan invasion theory from the chapter on Hindu history in California schoolbooks, and to ban Dr. Subramanian Swamy, after the latter’s anti-Muslim utterances, from teaching economics at Harvard. ...
  His scholarly contributions confine themselves to refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory, without proposing an alternative explanation for a linguistic kinship that he rejects. In this respect, his discovery of the relevance of the Seidenberg findings about the anteriority of Baudhayana’s mathematics to Babylonian mathematics (which dates Baudhayana’s late-Vedic writings dramatically earlier than hitherto assumed) remains pivotal in the Aryan debate. But for a presentation of the whole Aryan problem, he simply and willfully lacks the knowledge.
  • Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N. S. Rajaram... who ship their ideas to India from U.S. shores.
  • About Indians criticising the theory of Aryan invasions or migrations.
  • Witzel, Michael and Steve Farmer. 2000. Horseplay in Harappa Frontline, 17(20), September 30-October 13.