Michael Witzel Totally Explained

Everything about Michael Witzel totally explained

Michael Witzel (born July 18, 1943 at Schwiebus, Germany, now Poland) is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, United States.

Biographical information

He studied Indology in Germany under Paul Thieme, H. P. Schmidt, K. Hoffmann and J. Narten as well as in Nepal under the Mīmāmsaka Jununath Pandit. At Kathmandu (1972-1978), he led the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project and the Nepal Research Centre. He has taught at Tübingen (1972), Leiden (1978-1986), and at Harvard (since 1986) and has held visiting appointments at Kyoto, Paris (twice), and Tokyo.He has been teaching Sanskrit since 1972.
He is noted for his studies of the dialects of Vedic Sanskrit, old Indian history, the development of Vedic religion, and the linguistic prehistory of South Asia. He is editor-in-chief of the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS) and the Harvard Oriental Series. He has been president of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory (ASLIP) since 1999, and was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Research

Witzel’s early philological work deals with the oldest texts of India, the Vedas, their manuscripts and their traditional recitation; it included some editions and translations of unknown texts (1972-).
   He studied at length the various Vedic recensions (śākhā) and their importance for the geographical spread of Vedic culture across North India and beyond. This resulted in book-length investigations of Vedic dialects (1989), the development of the Vedic canon (1997), and of Old India as such (2003).
   Shorter papers provide analyses of important religious (2004) and literary concepts of the period, such as the oldest frame story (1986, 1987), prosimetric texts (1997), the Mahabarata (2005), the concept of rebirth (1984), the 'line of progeny' (2000), splitting one's head in discussion (1987), the holy cow (1991), the Milky Way (1984), the asterism of the Seven Rsis (1995, 1999), the sage Yajnavalkya (2003), the persistence of some Vedic beliefs, in modern Hinduism (1989 2002, with S. Farmer and J.B. Henderson), as well as some modern Indocentric tendencies (2001-).
   Other work (1976-) deals with the traditions of medieval and modern Nepal, including its linguistic history, Brahmins, rituals, and kingship (1987), as well as with Old Iran and the Avesta (1972-), including its homeland (2000).
   After 1987, he's increasingly focused on the localization of Vedic texts (1987) and the evidence contained in them for early Indian history, notably that of the Rgveda and the following period, represented by the Black Yajurveda Samhitas and the Brahmanas. This work has been done in close collaboration with Harvard archaeologists. Witzel aims at indicating the emergence of the Kuru tribe in the Delhi area (1989, 1995, 1997, 2003), its seminal culture and its political dominance, as well as studying the origin of late Vedic polities and the first Indian empire in eastern North India (1995, 1997, 2003).
   The linguistic aspect of earliest Indian history has been explored in a number of papers (1993, 1999, 2000, 2001) dealing with the pre-Vedic substrate languages of Northern India. These result in a substantial amount of loan words from a prefixing language similar to Austro-Asiatic (Munda, Khasi, etc.) as well as from other unidentified languages. In addition, a considerable number of Vedic and Old Iranian words are traced back to a Central Asian substrate language (1999, 2003, 2004, 2006).
   In recent years, he's explored the links between old Indian, Eurasian and other mythologies (1990, 2001, 2004-6), resulting in a new scheme of historical comparative mythology that covers most of Eurasia and the Americas ("Laurasia", cf. the related Harvard, Kyoto and Beijing conferences, 1999-2006).
   Recently, he's also published (2001-) articles criticizing what he calls "spurious interpretations" of Vedic texts and decipherments of Indus inscriptions such as that of N.S. Rajaram. At times he's questioned the linguistic nature of the so-called Indus Script (Farmer, Sproat, Witzel 2004). and at other times has suggested that para-Munda might have been the language of the Indus script.
   He has organized a number of international conferences at Harvard such as the first of the intermittent International Vedic Workshops (1989,1999,2004), the first of several annual International Conferences on Dowry and Bride-Burning in India (1995 sqq.), the yearly Round Tables on the Ethnogenesis of South and Central Asia (1999 sqq).

Criticism

Archeologist B. B. Lal, in his inaugural address delivered at the 19th International Conference on South Asian Archaeology, held at University of Bologna, Ravenna, Italy 2007, criticised linguists, including Witzel, asserting that they distorted original Sanskrit texts to suit Aryan invasion theory. He cited one such example, claiming that Witzel mistranslated a part of "Baudhayana Srautasutra" in his 1995 work "Rigvedic history: poets, chieftains and polities".
Some authors, such as David Frawley have criticized Witzel's approach to Vedic texts and history. These critics reject the account of the Indo-Aryan migration into India and subscribe to a view of Indian history that stresses a purely "indigenous Aryan" origin for the Vedas and Vedic civilization.

California textbook controversy over Hindu history

In 2005, Witzel joined other academics and activist groups to oppose changes to California state school history textbooks proposed by US-based Hindu groups, arguing that the changes were not of a scholarly but of a religious-political nature. He was appointed to an expert panel set up to review the changes and helped draft the compromise edits that were later adopted. but attracted criticism from those supporting the original changes, who questioned his expertise on the subject Rejecting criticism that he was a 'Hindu hater', Witzel said, "I hate people who misrepresent history."Further Information

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