Source: TW
Between 1870-80 CE a V1 from the marahaTTa country named Mahadev Kunte was among the 1st group of Indians to appreciate the historical significance of the IE theory. From today’s vantage a self-aware H (leaving aside the willful celebrators of counter-factual delusions) would see him with v.mixed feelings. On one hand he had internalized the humiliating rout of the marahaTTa host in the 1st war of independence; thus, in some ways, like the va~NgIya Vankimchandra, he felt that the intercourse with the ascendant Occident will revive in India a glorious IE civilization. He wrote this cringe-worthy eulogy to please his English overlords, particularly JB Peile whom he saw as a benevolent patron of the H.
There is a glorious future before the Âryas in India, now that their activities, dormant for centuries and threatening to become petrified, are likely to be revived and quickened by the ennobling and elevating many-sided civlisation which the Western Âryas have developed, and which is brought to bear upon thom.
Hence, it would not be a great surprise if many of his coethnics, some of whose recent ancestors had perished in the attempt to overthrow the English yoke, view him with disdain. Others were still struggling.
Nevertheless, we cannot deny that he was many with scholar intent, who with limited access to literature wrote voluminously on reconstructing the history of the Indo-Europeans & the Indo-Aryans
While his work is replete with flawed inferences of IE etymological cognates and reconstructed proto-forms, we can still say he had the right “spirit” working in the backwaters of the world intellectual system just a short distance from where I spent my days as a kid. All this notwithstanding, he correctly apprehended something which I too convergently arrived at, and still remains a desideratum in comparative IE studies (I don’t think it is more important compared to myth/philology). We’ll simply place some of his words in this regard.
comparison of religious institutions such as sacrifices and offerings to manes, a science or a system which has not as yet secured for itself a recognized name-a fact which demonstrates that historians or philologers have not devoted sufficient time or attention to the interesting branch. We will call it Comparative Sphagiology, which investigates religious institutions such as sacrifices. We believe that this is an important branch, more important than Comparative Philology or Comparative Mythology.
An illustration will explain easily what we have to say. In a judicial court, the evidence of witnesses is given. Their statements are compared, and sifted, and a point at issue is decided. But in the meantime documentary evidence is discovered and is produced in court. The latter throws new light, and the original decision is reversed. But the point at issue happens to be about a boundary line. While the documentary evidence is sifted and interpreted, a third kind of evidence is discovered - strong masonry-wall buried underground, and intended to fix the boundary line. This evidence, though opposed to the statements of witnesses or to the documents already produced before the court, reverses the conclusion built upon them. The wall will never lie, never change its position and never forget to serve its purpose and can never prevaricate or be ambiguous.
Comparative Philology corresponds to the oral statements made by witnesses before a judicial court which is as if empowered by the tribunal of scientific men to take evidence on oath.
Comparative Mythology corresponds to documentary evidence which involves the application of the correct principles of interpretation.
Comparative Sphagiology gives the evidence of the same kind as that of the wall.Hence we attach special importance to the sacrificial system of the ancient Aryas. But it is to be specially observed that the three systems of evidence point to the same conclusion that the different Indo-Germanic nationalities belonged to the same Aryan race. The exact place …
philology. The analysis of the explanatory stories or myths and the philosophy of their origin constitute mythology. If the original names of the plants and animals had been preserved, their analysis and explanation would have developed a science corresponding to philology, If some explanation or a history of the animals and plants had been preserved from time immemorial, it would have constituted the basis of a science corresponding to mythology. But neither the names nor the stories can be called fossils, the investigation of which is the proper function of Paleontology.
In like manner, the social fossils are not the words or the myths: they are the religious or social rites performed by a nation: they are the sacrifices or yajnas, a perfect record of which has been preserved only by the Indian Aryas. The investigation of these is to be made : the science is yet to be named: the rites are yet to be accurately described. Maps or plans representing the construction of the altars are yet to be drawn : the instruments or tools used by different nations in performing their sacrifices are yet to be collected and analysed; in one word, the subject of Comparative Sphagiology is yet to constitute an important department of human knowledge, a department which cannot but materially help the science of Sociology of which history, as it is written and studied at present, is only the means of a kind.