Two men wrote saying that while Prof Witzel deserved the lashing he got in my Open Letter to him (4/2/10), I went perhaps too far in my accusations of dishonest scholarship.

I don't doubt at all that W knows Vedic and the RV. I have made this plain in other earlier writings. Moreover, I accept that he, like all of us, makes inadvertent mistakes and, whenever I met such, I (corrected them silently and ) bypassed them. I too make errors. Some years back, I wrote that Whitney translated the word rathavāhana as ‘chariot-frame' and not as ‘a platform upon which is transported the chariot'. I was right in that he had used the compound ‘chariot-frame' (i.e. box of the cart) but in a subsequent note, which I had missed in my first reading, he explained that he meant the ‘platform'. In a different paper I took the phrase brahmā́yám to mean ‘this Spirit absolute' ignoring the first accent which suggests ‘this brahmin priest' or, at best, ‘sanctity, the soul of the world'. The term ‘Spirit absolute' would have the accent on the first syllable bráhma-n. And more recently I wrote the Modern Greek name Dēmētra instead of the classical Dēmētēr !

We all make such errors; most of us are prepared to acknowledge them and are grateful to have them pointed out. Not so Witzel. He does not acknowledge mistakes and, if they are spotted, he marshals all kinds of excuses to justify them, or attacks the other writer in most vulgar, insulting or derisive terms. Thus he accused Talageri, among other unjustifiable criticisms, of ignorance of linguistics and zoology (!) in their 2000-2001 altercation. Talageri had written in his 2000 publication that Jahnāvī in the RV is, of course, the river Ganges (post-rigvedic jāhnavī) and that śiṃśumāra is the Gangetic dolphin. W wrote that Jahnāvī is the wife of Jahnu and the dolphin is that of the Indus. T replied cogently that no Jahnu is mentioned in the RV while the context justifies the river-name and śiṃśumāra was said by W himself to be the Gangetic dolphin in his own EJVS 1999! Indeed on p 465 of his book, T cites the whole passage from W's publication. W then replied with vague generalities and accused T of employing unreliable texts! Such is W's scholarly style of arguing and "deconstructing" opponents - a term that both W and his henchman S. Farmer are fond of using.

In 2003, in his comments (‘Ein Fremdling im Ṛgveda' , i.e. a stranger in the RV) on my paper ‘Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Ṛgveda' (2000), W, in one of his many incoherent fault-findings, criticized me for using mythological, not realistic data in my treatment of the chariot. This of course is his usual diabolic distorting demeanour, because where I used mythological details, as with the Aśvin's car, I said so; furthermore I included realistic data like the types of wood (i.e. śalmali, khadira etc) used in constructing chariots and also the only real-life race of Mudgala/Mudgalānī in RV 10.102. In this race the car is magically and perversely transformed into a chariot which is pulled by a bull, not horses (Kazanas 2002, §VII, 1). Then W gave his own "realistic" details to show the differences between ratha (i.e. light two-spaced chariot for race or war) and anas (heavy cart/wagon for transport). Thus: "spokes ... surrounded by wooden rim... bent by the carpenter ... made of suitable wood ..." and so on. These descriptions are solemnly presented by W as features specific to chariots!