What if India — not the Eurasian steppe — is the true cradle of European languages? Scholar Dr. Koenraad Elst traces the deeply politicised origins of Indo-European linguistics in this wide-ranging conversation.The talk journeys from the 18th-century European traders who first noticed Sanskrit’s kinship with Italian and Greek, to Voltaire’s strategic use of the Indo-European thesis to undermine the Church, to Max Müller’s career-defining — and widely ignored — retractions. Elst reveals how the Out of India theory predates Hindu nationalism by two centuries, and why archaeologist B.B. Lal eventually abandoned the Aryan invasion paradigm he once supported. The conversation also unpacks why race and language are fundamentally separate categories — a distinction that 19th-century Social Darwinism and Disraeli-era politics deliberately blurred — and why Müller’s offhand guess of 1500 BC for the Vedas continues to haunt textbooks despite never being substantiated.A nuanced, historically grounded primer for anyone seeking to understand the ideological layers buried inside the homeland debate.
About the speaker:
Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian Indologist with Master’s degrees in Indology, Sinology, and Philosophy, followed by original fieldwork at BHU and a doctorate on Hindu nationalism. He is known as an oriental philologist and historian, as well as an independent researcher. One of the few Westerners actively defending Hinduism, he is known for his blunt and objective views, with a dissertation (prepared without any funding) on the ideological development of Hindu revivalism in India. He earned his Master’s degrees in Chinese Studies, Indo-Iranian Studies, and Philosophy at KU Leuven. He completed one year of postgraduate research in Indian philosophy at Banaras Hindu University and was accepted for a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies. He completed a doctorate in 1998 in Asian Studies.
Dr. Ramakrishnan Sitaraman is a microbiologist by training, with research interests in microbial pathogenesis, gene regulation, and science education. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (U.S.A.) and conducted post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health (U.S.A.) and Vanderbilt University (U.S.A.). Currently, he is a faculty member in the Department of Biotechnology at the TERI School of Advanced Studies, New Delhi, India.
