ABSTRACT
The solution to the Indo-European problem has been one of the most captivating intellectual projects of the last two centuries, and the problem has resulted in a massive amount of scholarship – the vast majority of which has been produced by European and American scholars – attempting to reconstruct the proto-language of the Indo-European speakers, locate the original homeland where it was spoken, and conjecture on the social and cultural life of the proto-speakers. Naturally, the pursuit of the origins of Western civilization has caused scholars to attempt to reconstruct the proto-histories of non-European countries that happen to partake of the Indo-European language family, such as India – indeed, the discovery of the Indo-Aryan side of the family was especially relevant, or, more precisely, foundational, to the whole endeavor. Not surprisingly, and as has become unavoidably evident of late to anyone in the field of South Asian studies, the reconstruction of the history of the Vedic and pre-Vedic Indo-Aryan speakers is not just of relevance to the field of Indo-European studies, but also of intense interest to many scholars in the modern day, postcolonial context of ancient Indian historical reconstruction. In India, in particular, many scholars understandably are committed to exerting a major role on the construction and representation of the history of South Asia, and this to a great extent involves revisiting and scrutinizing the versions of history inherited from the colonial period.
