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Swamy's reply

Sir, — I write with reference to Dr. Romila Thapar's rebuttal of my remarks (Letters, The Hindu, March 22) about her propagation of Aryan as a race in her past writings. She wonders what they taught me at Harvard. What they taught me and what I have taught at Harvard is that if you make an argument in rebuttal, do not contradict yourself in that argument. But this is what precisely Dr. Thapar has done. While denying that she ever argued that Aryan was a racial term, she goes on to say that it was the language of those who migrated to India from abroad in a "graduated" way. Who were they? Is she arguing that they were racially the same as Indians or different? And who graduated the migration? She should be explicit. Never obfuscate — Harvard teaches that too. Obviously that is not being taught at JNU. Aryan is a German version of the Sanskrit word "Arya," which means a gentleman, while Dravida is a word coined by Adi Shankara while at Varanasi to mean a person from the south. I am ready to debate Dr. Thapar on this issue publicly.

Subramanian Swamy,
Madurai, T.N.

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