Conclusion: historiography, not Indology is the answer

The rise and fall of Indology closely parallels the growth and decline of European colonialism and the Euro-centric domination of Indian intellectual life. (Marxism is the most extreme of Euro-centric doctrines - a 'Christian heresy' as Bertrand Russell called it.) The greatest failure of Indology has been its inability to evolve an objective methodology for the study of the sources. Even after two hundred years of existence, there is no common body of knowledge that can serve as foundation, or technical tools that be used in addressing specific problems. All that Indologists have given us are theories and more theories, almost all of them borrowed from other disciplines. If one went to botany to borrow tree diagrams for the study of languages, another went to psychology to study sacrificial rituals, and a third - followed by a whole battalion - borrowed the idea of the class struggle from Marx to apply to Vedic society. Not one of them stopped to think whether it would not be better to try to study the ancients through the eyes of the ancients themselves. And yet ample materials exist to follow such a course.     

With the benefit of hindsight, even setting aside irrational biases due to politics and Biblical beliefs, we can now recognize that Indology has been guilty of two fundamental methodological errors.

First, linguists have confused their theories - based on their own classifications and even whimsical assumptions - for fundamental laws of nature that reflect historical reality.

Secondly, archaeologists, at least a significant number of them, have subordinated their own interpretations to the historical, cultural, and even the chronological impositions of the linguists. (Remember the Biblical Creation in 4,004 BCE which gave this incursion in 1500 BCE!) This has resulted in a fundamental methodological error of confounding primary data from archaeology with modern impositions like the AI and other theories and even their dates.

This mixing of unlikes - further confounded by religious beliefs and political theories - is a primary source of the confusion that plagues the history and archaeology of ancient India. In their failure to investigate the sources, modern scholars - Indian scholars in particular - have much to answer for.

As an immediate consequence of this, the vast body of primary literature from the Vedic period has been completely divorced from Harappan archaeology under the dogmatic belief that the Vedas and Sanskrit came later. This has meant that this great literature and its creators have no archaeological or even geographical existence. In our view, the correct approach to breaking this deadlock is by a combination of likes - a study of primary data from archaeology alongside the primary literature from ancient periods.

This means we must be wary of modern theories intruding upon ancient data and texts. The best course is to disregard them. They have outlived their usefulness if they had any.

In the final analysis, Indology - like the Renaissance and the Romantic Movement - should be seen as part of European history. And Indologists - from Max Muller to his modern successors - have contributed no more to the study of ancient India than Herodotus. Their works tell us more about them than about India. It is time to make a new beginning. The decipherment of the Indus script - and the scientific methodology leading up to it - can herald this new beginning.