Interview with Prof Prodosh Aich

By Satish Misra

Indian Professor Prodosh Aich, calls Indologist Max Mueller a "swindler". He describes yet another Indologist William Jones a "fraud". He throws a serious challenge to Europeans scholars who wrote tomes on ancient India. In his book "Lies with long legs", Prof Aich has unraveled and exposed many such self claimed Indologists who claimed to know ancient Indian texts. Seventy two year old Indian Professor, who studied in India and Germany Sociology, Ethnology and Philosophy, came to these startling revelations accidentally as his curiosity to know about "Aryans", "Indo-Europeans and "Indo-Aryans" chanced him into new facts of the existing studies of ancient India and its people.

Question: Your book 'Lies with long legs' has recently been published. What is this about?

Answer: Whatever, we know about discoveries, scholars, scientists, are mostly not true. For example, when you get a book today there are references and these references go back 10, 20 or 30 years. They don't go back beyond that. On every page, one finds quotations but you will never find that a quotation has been challenged. One never checks whether that quotation is correct or not. It is just accepted. What ever is printed is accepted.

Q: So every word is taken as a gospel?

A: No, not as a gospel. It has been accepted in the academic world. And if you have 20 books on one subject, you can be sure that there would be another 20 books on the same subject but with almost same references. They will never go back to roots. What, I have done.  I have tried to question. I put, to start with, a simple question. "Well you are telling me this. How do you know that it is true"? Then I look into the bibliography of these books. I find lot of authors and then I make the same exercise to find out what their references have been. In that way, I find the first author who invented rather coined the words like Aryans, Indo-Germans and Indo-Europeans.

Q: So, you have done a research on India?

A: No, that is not correct. As a matter of fact, I have not done any research. I wanted to know, who are these Aryans, Indo-Europeans and Indo-Germans and then tried to find out answers in the reference books and literature. I found out that none of the answers were satisfactory. I continued my search. It was not a research. Research is what you must publish. You have to publish every year, otherwise you will vanish. That is modern research. I did not do modern research; I wanted to know where they come from.  How did they recognise these Aryans? Who did this? Then I was very astonished to see that Indo-Aryans are very young. It came in vogue in the 19th century rather was invented in the second half of the19th century.

Q: What was the purpose of inventing this word?

A:  Now, you are taking things into realm of speculation. To my mind there are two reasons. One is that in 18th and 19th century. Christians were trying to find something else as heredity then Jewish religion. It was something like anti-Semitism And at that time, there was a fancy for the Orient without knowing what Orient meant. Whether Orient was Arabia, India, Persia or China, they had no idea about it in the 18th and 19th century. Through Persian translations, they knew that there was a vast amount of literature in India.  They wanted to understand that. Portuguese were the first there and then the British, French, Dutch etc. None of them came to the idea to identify themselves with the people. But the Britishers concocted the story that Europeans and Indians were related to each other because they had the common heredity of the nomadic people coming from the area of Turkmenistan on the Chinese border. They were settled nomadic people.  They had migrated to the West and they had migrated to the South-West. They are of the same breed and stock.