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The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. By EDWIN BRYANT. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xi, 387 pp. $60.00 (cloth).
The problem of Indo-Aryan origins-the question of the internal or external origin of the Indo-Aryan speaking Vedic people-has been one of the most heated topics of scholarly and popular debate in Indological scholarship for the last hundred years. In this book, Edwin Bryant presents an overview of the central issues of this debate through an examination of the evidence used by proponents of various theories to uphold arguments about immigration or emigration of Indo-Aryan speakers into the subcontinent. The primary theme of the book is to present the Indigenous Aryanist view-"a conviction that the theory of an external origin of the Indo-Aryan speaking people on the Indian subcontinent has been constructed on flimsy evidence or false assumptions and conjectures" (p. 4). The author does not set out to solve the problem of Indo-Aryan origins but to present a threefold historiographical study of the central issues of this debate: (1) "to excavate marginalized points of view reacting against what is perceived as a flawed and biased historical construct," (2) to expose the quest for the Indo-European homeland to "critique from scholars outside the mainstream of European academic circles who do not share the same intellectual history as their Western peers," and (3) "to present a comprehensive exposition and analysis of views from within mainstream academic circles addressing the issue of Indo-Aryan...