Nicholas Kazanas

Nicholas Kazanas (born 1939) is a Greek Indologist. Kazanas has been Director of Omilos Meleton Cultural Institute and he is on the Editorial Board of Adyar Library Bulettin (Chennai).

Kazanas was honored by the Government of India with the Padma Shri award in 2021 under the Literature and Education field.

Quotes

2000s

• I have seriously changed my mind on this subject; I have no axe to grind, as it were, no position or reputation to maintain; I can and shall change my mind again if strong and sufficient evidence emerges. Prof Witzel raises many points for discussion - some useful, some wasteful - but offers no evidence other than conjecture. Conjecture or hypothesis is not admissible as evidence in any impartial Court of Law.
  • The RV Date - a Postscript (ca. 2000)

• The Aryans, even according to the AIT, moved not into a vacuum but a region thickly populated by a people who may have been on the decline and moving eastward but who were also more numerous, more advanced in urbanized civilization and literate. Now, would the immigrants be in a position to give new names and would the natives accept them for their rivers? … I doubt it. When thousands of Greeks were forced out of Turkey in the early 1920s and immigrated into the Greek islands and the mainland, they formed new communities and often gave to these the names of their former habitats (eg New Ionia, New Smyrna, New Halkidona etc). This is as far as their “nostalgia” went. They did not rechristen nearby mountains, plains or rivers, but accepted the existing geographical nomenclature.
  • The AIT and scholarship 2001

• Neither the AIT, nor the invasionists’ or non-invasionists’ views, nor IE reconstructions, nor philological, archeological etc pursuits, hold much interest for me. What essentially concerns me is the subject of Ethics (in Scholarship and daily life) because this will determine how we meet death. Everything else in the world can be avoided, hoodwinked etc, but not death. Ethics also infuses communal life with the quality of excellence.
  • Addendum to ‘AIT and Scholarship’: reply to Prof Witzel.

• So sarcasm should be aimed at in that direction also - unless W practises discriminatory self-restraint... the isoglosses - an area full of quick-sand uncertainties.
  • Addendum to ‘AIT and Scholarship’: reply to Prof Witzel.

• Such were the motives of the mainstream pundits who were also pillars of the Church: to preserve their own power. Why today all this feverish fight against the indigenists? I don’t believe it is racist as many Indians think, nor any noble motive to keep Indological studies “scholarly”as W claims, though neither need be ruled out altogether. I think it is mainly the most shameful of all motives – to be on top and keep control of others. As soon as a Head of Dept or Professor feels strong (and rich) enough, they launch a Journal (with other people’s money) to promote their own pet theories, acquire kudos, confound opposition and control thinking thus perpetuating their own power and all the advantages this entails. And to this referred E Leach in a quotation I gave fully in AS ¨ 19, very end, which W presented in a truncated form omitting the sentences saying that IE scholars did not scrap their theories because “vested interests and academic posts were involved”. I added “They still are”. And W ought to know because like Leach he has been up to his ears in the game for many years. (Sweeping the dirt under the doormat will not make it disappear.)
  • Addendum to ‘AIT and Scholarship’: reply to Prof Witzel.

• And in case these academics wonder, yes, I would allow a dissenting view if I edited a Journal: I am not afraid of truth and I have no position, no reputation and no income to maintain.
  • Addendum to ‘AIT and Scholarship’: reply to Prof Witzel.

• Why does he attack this group of Indians and allies himself to a group of marxists, like the editors of Frontline? A Professor of his standing ought to be publishing his scholarly papers in the most prestigious academic Journals (like ABORI), not lend status to such popular magazines. Marxists of this sort have caused untold damage to every country – whether they usurped power (as in Czechoslovakia) or failed to do so (as in Greece).
  • Addendum to ‘AIT and Scholarship’: reply to Prof Witzel.

• The odd thing about this story is that the heliocentric view was known in Europe long before Copernicus but, for various reasons, was totally ignored by the "established" dogma... All this time all kinds of absurdities were written about the heavens, the celestial spheres, the Empyrean and so on, which constituted the “established” view. And all the time the real knowledge was there and all those schoolmen, could, with some practical observation and sensible application of Mathematics, have found out that the Ptolemaic system was not true. But they did not: they preferred to argue about such weighty matters as how many angles could sit on the point of a pin. And when the proofs were presented to them in black and white, hard and irrefutable mathematical demonstrations, they still rejected them preferring the comforts of the ‘‘established” dogma. Theology (and Church interests) decided what was acceptable, not Mathematics.
  • "ESTABLISHMENT" OF A VIEW Author(s): N. Kazanas Source: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 83 (2002), pp. 179-182

• The situation whereby the Aryans are indigenous and compose the bulk of the [Rg Veda] in the 4th millennium in Saptasindhu is a very simple one and in harmony with the archaeological data in the region. Scholars who think that this simple situation is at odds with their linguistic theories need do no more than reexamine these theories, which necessitate the further theory of the Aryan immigration, which theory generates complexities and problems and is in conflict with the data of archaeology. After all it is not as though these linguistic theories are without problems of their own or that in their present form they harmonize with archaeological data anywhere else in the Eurasian belt involved....Instead of emitting such strident emotional cries and witch- hunt slogans, Prof Witzel and his followers had better re-examine their unfounded linguistic assumptions and recall the words of Edmund Leach [published in 1990], who was neither an Indian nationalist technocrat, nor a New-Age writer, but a solid, mainstream pillar of the academic establishment...
  • “The RV Date = a Postscript” an answer to Michael Witzel’s comments about the Aryan Invasion and the Indus Valley Civilization. [1]

• The all-inclusiveness of the RV in the realm of mythology is also observable in the sphere of poetics. There is hardly a major poetic device in the various IE branches that is not present in the RV. A significant aspect, for example, is that in early Greek poetry (epics of Homer and Hesiod, and some epigraphic material) the fairly strict syllabic meter (the hexameter with its dactylic, iambic and other variants) is preponderant with only traces of alliteration; in Germanic poetry alliteration prevails while the syllabic meter is very loose: both are present in the RV. ...Early Irish poetry (6th century CE) has both meter and alliteration (and rhyme) but this hardly counts since the Irish poets knew these poetic devices “from Vergil and Ovid” and, of course, the Romans developed them from the Greek tradition.
  • "Indo-European Deities and the Rigveda," JIES 29 (2001), p. 257.

• Frankly, his strident obsession with New-Age/Hindutva/Right-wing recalls right-winger MacCarthy who thought he saw in every closet conspiring communists, or left-winger Stalin hounding Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, revisionists and other “enemies of the State”.
  • Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.

• Furthermore, if W had examined his last reference with only a fraction of the assiduity he uses to witch-hunt New-Age/Hindutva/Right-wing people he would have noticed... If we reject every ancient source (even if not Indian) because it does not suit our theory, we may as well end the pretence of discussion.
  • Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.

Indo-Aryan origins and other Vedic issues, 2009

• First, it is the function of scholarship to establish and promote true knowledge so that our life be regulated by this – not prejudices, partisan views (even patriotic but false) or pet theories. Second, Indian (proto-)history must be restored and revalued in a correct time-frame.
  • ch 9

Chapter 1

Kazanas, N. (2002). Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 30(3-4), 275-334. Also republished in chapter 1, Kazanas, N. (2009). Indo-Aryan origins and other Vedic issues

• Subsequently I taught the AIT with the South Russian Steppe as the locus of dispersal of the Indo-Europeans (IE hereafter) for 18 years and I wrote a Course of Sanskrit (in Md Greek) in which I actually concocted fictitious passages about the Aryans invading with chariots and subduing the natives who thought it prudent to accept them and cooperate! In 1987, I began to wonder about the AIT. In the same year I went to India and collected much material which took a few years to sort out and digest, since I had little acquaintance with Indian archaeology and early history. What became abundantly clear in the early 1990s (and filled me with incredulity) was the fact that there was no evidence whatever for any invasion (which by that time was becoming “migration”).
  • Italics in original

• Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system of Ptolemy (which held sway for some 1500 years) and, against an oppressive and repressive mainstream opinion (and officialdom), reinstated—with improvements—the heliocentric system of Aristarchos of Samos (3rd cent BCE).

• M. Witzel attacked several scholars who since the early 1990s manifested support for the Indian Indigenous Origin (IIO hereafter); amid various criticisms he used the term “revisionists”, ignoring obviously that in the early 19th century many European scholars took India, on the strength of Sanskrit, to be the original homeland... The term “revisonist” is therefore inapplicable. Witzel ignores also that Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo were ‘revisionists’ in rejecting the geocentric system...

• In summing up his extended survey of linguistic evidence Witzel tells us that the mode of the IA entry is "archaeologically still little traced"; it is, he states, securely traced in the texts (horses, chariots, religion etc) and from linguistics and possibly from future studies of the male Y chromosome (2001: 55-56). Here we have an attempt at falsification ("little" when in fact it is none) and wishful thinking. Neither horses and chariots nor linguistic phenomena, such as Witzel provides, prove any entry. They are interpretations of facts by a mind already colored by the AIT.

• In this study Witzel talks of a peaceful immigration but also uses the terms "battles" and "campaigns" (324), "initial conquest" (326) and "frequent warfare" (339) thus indicating that beneath the lipservice to "migration" (which became fashionable) lurks the notion of invasion.

• That most mainstream philologists will react unfavourably to this thesis I take for granted. I know well in myself the force of habit and of attachment to deep-rooted notions that reacts more through emotional outbursts than cool rationality. I repeat that the issue of origins, of when and how, is one not for philologists but for archaeologists and experts in related fields. We owe it, other than to the peoples of India who, I think, have long been wronged (by their own faults no less than foreign influences), to truth itself, which is the primary concern of all of us, to consider this thesis without prejudice.
  • Italics in original

2010s

• Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland.
  • N. Kazanas, Coherence and preservation in Sanskrit N. Kazanas , Athens, June 2006 (updated February 2012) quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• Now in Avestan ‘lake/pool’ is vairi-. In fact Avestan has no verb or nouns cognate to the Sanskrit ones √sṛ >sar-. The only cognation is harah- in the name of the river harahvaiti – nothing else. But S √sṛ >sar- is a perfectly PIE morpheme appearing in Tocharian B sal-ate, Gk hiallō/hallomai and Latin salire all implying ‘moving, jumping’. Avestan somehow lost this root and its derivatives. So, how did the Iranians manage to concoct this name Harahvaiti, that sounds so exactly like a transliteration of the Vedic Sarasvatī , when they had no words from √sṛ > sar-? Adherents of the AIT offer no rational answers. (For full discussion see Kazanas 2004b, Prabhakar 1994/1995.) There is only one possible explanation. The Iranians, having lived in Saptasindhu moved to Iran (retaining the memory of the place as Haptahәndu); on meeting an amenable river there they gave it the name of the river they had formerly known – Sarasvati > Harahvaiti. The AIT can in no way, except by violating rationality, explain the two Avestan names Haptahәndu and Harahvaiti. This, if nothing else, should have alerted the AIT adherents to the possibility that there is something very seriously wrong in their migrationist scenario. Moreover, it is part of the general linguistic theory that the Avestan h derives from PIE s: so, it is again extremely difficult to see how the IAs who moved further southeast, retained the original s (in saras and saptasindhu) while the Iranians changed it to h.
  • Indo-Aryan indigenism and the Aryan Invasion Theory arguments (refuted). N Kazanas, Omilos Meleton, Athens, January 2006.

Vedic and Indo European Studies, 2015

• From a very long experience of reading, studying and teaching, of participating in Conferences and, in recent years, of editing articles for Journals (and, of course, private contacts and exchanges with scholars in many fields) I acquired the certainty that very few academics use their reason to the full and even fewer are, despite their vociferous protestations to the contrary, interested in truth.
  • Introduction

• This, then, is the basis for the mainstream chronology of ancient Indian literature and the AIT. It is not based on linguistic evidence as is generally and vaguely but vociferously claimed but on a ghost story composed 2500 years after the alleged Aryan invasion (which initially was Egyptian and Mesopotamian) and on a Christian ecclesiastic myth: in other words, on two fictions!
  • Introduction

• How did the Indoaryans manage to maintain an oral tradition of such quality that their culture retained more cultural elements (eg names of deities) and many more lexical items (and grammatical features as any text on IE philology testifies? The only explanation I can think of regarding the superiority in retentions of Sanskrit is that the Indoaryans moved very little or not at all.
  • chapter 2

• It could be argued that the IAs developed their complex but secure system of oral transmission while on the move. ... But, if that were so, what would the IAs (or Indo- Iranians, since they were one people, according to the AIT) be transmitting and thus preserving? Their sacred RV was composed in the Saptasindhu. If they had developed their superb system while on the move, then they would have at least a few tales of their adventurous trekking and these would have been embodied in the hymns of the RV.
  • chapter 2

• Rather, the Iranians left the region of the 7 rivers and held the name in their memory. Something very similar happens with the V river-name Sarasvat/ and Av Harahvaiti-. Avestan has no other cogn with harah- whereas S has sr > sarati/sisarti, sarana, saras, sarit, etc, etc and of course cognates are found in other IE branches: here again it is the Iranians that took with them the memory of the Indic river and gave it to a river in their new habitat... Moreover, Vedic retains the PIE s but this becomes h in Avestan. All this actual linguistic evidence and the conclusion it forces upon us has some archaeological/geographical support. G Gnoli, who is a normal AIT adherent and by no means an indigenist, showed very clearly that the early portions of the Avesta hardly know northern and western Iran and he analyses migrations there from south to north and east to west but not north- west down to south-east (1980). Thus while the conjectural Indo-Iranian movement south-eastward contains many anomalies, the Iranian movement from Saptasindhu north-westward accommodates all facts.
  • chapter 2

• Saptasindhu as the name of the ancient region of the Seven Rivers in N-W India and Pakistan - countries which did not exist at that period. I use it as a bahuvrīhi, as many others have done before me, although in the RV we find references only to the Seven Rivers saptá síndhavaḥ (and different oblique cases of the plural). Now (e6) Avestan has the name Haptahǝndu as a place, like Airyana Vaējah, Raŋhā, Haetumant, etc, from which the Iranians had passed before settling down in eastern Iran, then spreading west and north. But what is this name? Yes, hapta- is the numeral ‘seven’ but what of hǝndhu? It is a fairly obvious Avestan correspondence to the Sanskrit síndhu. Now hǝndu is an isolated occurrence. The stem does not otherwise exist in Avestan. Hindu appears in Old Persian indicating the Indian province under the Achaemenids, and that is all. The interpretation ‘seven rivers’ comes from the Sanskrit collocation. But the Avestan for river is usually θraotah- (=S srotas) and raodah-.... Surely nobody would be so foolhardy as to suggest that the IAs took this otherwise unattested stem from Iranian and used it so commonly and productively.
  • chapter 4

• But what of the Iranian name Haraxvaiti? This name appears in the first chapter of the Vidēvdād along with placenames Haetumant (=Helmand), Māuru or Margu (= Margiana), Bāxδī or dhri (=Bactria) etc and, of course, Haptahǝndu. Haraxvaiti means simply ‘one who has harah-’. But Harah̦ - or Harax- is a stem entirely isolated in Avestan: it has no cognates, no other related lexemes.... But nothing, not one cognate, in Avestan other than the lonely and pitiful *harah̦ -! Observe now two absurdities implicit in the Doctrine. The Iranians who stayed put in Iran lost their own root *har/*hǝrᵊ- or whatever and all derivatives, while the IAs who moved further away retained this thoroughbred IE root and all its ramifications. And then they gave the name Sarasvatī (with the change of ha > sa) not to a large river like the Indus but to a dried-up stream in memory of the Haraxvaiti in Arachosia!
  • chapter 4

• I find it very difficult to think that I am dealing with a science fully grounded in the realities of language as we ordinarily know and use it. All these specialized terms, the artificial models, the reconstructions that exist in no known texts and cannot be verified and the endless hypotheses — they all seem to belong to a world of airy-fairy speculation.
  • chapter Indo-European isoglosses.

2020s

• I start with some literary evidence. RV 4.1.13 & 4. 2.16 the Angirases declare that their ancestors made sacrifices “here” atra, ie in Saptasindhu. 3.53.11 Sudās fought enemies prāk ‘east’, apāk ‘west’ and udāk ‘north’ only, but not south. So we have no Indoaryans coming from the north and driving natives southward. The movement here is from east westward (apāk) and from south northword (udāk)! M6.61.9,12: Sarasvatī, the Rivergoddess, spread all five tribes beyond the other seven sister-rivers as the sun spreads out the days – again, days and sunlight from the east! 7.6.3 Agni turned the unholy Dasyus from east to west –pūrvaś cakāra áparām! Notice – NOT SOUTH (avāk or nyāk).
  • Importance of Ṛgveda. N. Kazanas, 10/3/21.

Quotes about Nicholas Kazanas

• All in all, I cannot fault Kazanas for feeling the need to undertake a critique of the evidence supporting the Aryan Migration hypothesis. In my view, the Indo-Aryan invasion/migration theory, at least in its present forms, as well as the dating of the Vedic texts, remain unresolved issues that invite unbiased fresh scrutiny.
  • Edwin Bryant quoted from Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.

• I agree that a plausible explanation has yet to be given as to how the newcomers could have completely eradicated the pre-existing language of the entire North of the subcontinent in the short interval normally allotted between their arrival and the composition of the Rg Veda, in which the local topography is Indo-Aryan. ... Kazanas has a right to wonder how and why would the Indus Valley dwellers have so thoroughly and completely adopted the language of these illiterate herdsmen if the latter were not invaders – a status denied them by archaeology?
  • Edwin Bryant quoted from Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.

• I do believe, though, that Kazanas is doing a great service to Indology in campaigning to change the mindset of how academia an interested intelligent people all over look at the dating of the early Indian tradition. While my disagreements with Kazanas are significant, they pale when it is taken into consideration that we both agree that there is no reasonable reason for the usual present Western academic dating of the Vedic tradition, and that this tradition is to be dated much earlier.
  • Levitt, S. H. (2012). Vedic-ancient Mesopotamian interconnections and the dating of the Indian tradition. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 93, 137-192.

• ... the changing perception of the chronology of the Indian proto-history (see "The Rgveda and the Indo-Europeans" by Nicholas Kazanas, ABORI vol. 80, 1999, pp. 15-42) has not been taken into account. If it gets well-established, a fresh thinking on this subject may be necessary.
  • A. B. Marathe. ABORI (2001, vol 82) A. B. Marathe. quoted in "ESTABLISHMENT" OF A VIEW Author(s): N. Kazanas Source: Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 83 (2002), pp. 179-182

• Kazanas is heavily influenced here by Frawley’s most amazing paradox.
  • Michael Witzel quoted from Kazanas, N. (2003). Final reply: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European studies, 31(1-2), 187-240.

External links

• Omilos Meleton