Ah, he was trying to humor you. Yes, Aryan heritage was saved in India because it became one with Hinduism. Equivalent of Vedic mythology are found all over Eurasia.
Nope my friend, the Lithuanians really do have a strong belief they migrated from India. It is also true out of all European languages, Lithuanian is the closest to Sanskrit(It retains 7 of 8 cases, and most of the words are identical to Sanskrit) See:
How are the Indian language Sanskrit and Lithuanian closely related?
To cut this long story short, I would just provide two eminent quotes. First,“Anyone who wants to hear the old Indo-European should go and listen to a Lithuanian farmer,” said a renowned French linguist Antoine Meillet in the end of the 19th century. And the second,“The nearest approach to Sanskrit in Europe is made by the Lithuanian language,” by Jawaharlal Nehru in his landmark book “The Discovery of India.” The linguistic proximity of Sanskrit and Lithuanian is a well-established fact.
In my pocket, I already have a list of more than 50 words which I have gathered from my daily encounters with Indians. For example: dev – dievas (god), agni – ugnis (fire), sapnā – sapnas (dream), śakha – šaka (branch), rath – ratai (chariot) and many others. These words come from different walks of life, and cover various subjects from religion and abstract things to numbers and animals and household items. And take note that we only speak of the recognizable words in modern Hindi! The comparative analysis of Lithuanian and Classical Sanskrit would produce a much longer list of commonalities, and not only in vocabularies but also in grammatical structures. In fact, the Lithuanian Language Institute is already working on a small dictionary which would reveal the striking resemblance of the two languages.
The nearest approach to Sanskrit in Europe is Lithuanian - Governance Today
And
Since the 19th century, when the similarity between Lithuanian and Sanskrit was discovered, Lithuanians have taken a particular pride in their mother tongue as the oldest living Indo-European language. To this day, to some Lithuanians their understanding of their nationality is based on their linguistic identity. It is no surprise then that they proudly quote the French linguist Antoine Meillet, who said, that anyone who wanted to hear old Indo-European should go and listen to a Lithuanian farmer. The 19th century maxim - the older the language the better - is still alive in Lithuania.
Professor Shashiprabha Kumar, and her amazing team of specialists at the Centre for Sanskrit Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, is convinced that there is a very strong connection between Old Sanskrit and Lithuanian
It is a common belief that there is a close similarity between the Lithuanian and Sanskrit languages; Lithuanian being the European language grammatically closest to Sanskrit. It is not difficult to imagine the surprise of the scholarly world when they learned that even in their time somewhere on the Nemunas River lived a people who spoke a language as archaic in many of its forms as Sanskrit itself. Although it was not exactly true that a professor of Sanskrit could talk to Lithuanian farmers in their language, coincidences between these two languages are truly amazing, for example:
SON: Sanskrit sunus - Lithuanian sunus
SHEEP: Sanskrit avis - Lithuanian avis
SOLE: Sanskrit padas - Lithuanian padas
MAN: Sanskrit viras - Lithuanian vyras
SMOKE: Sanskrit dhumas - Lithuanian dumas
These Lihuanian words have not changed their forms for the last five thousand years.
The relationship between Sanskrit and Lithuanian goes even deeper. Take, for example, the Lithuanian word 'daina' that usually is translated as 'song'. The word actually comes from an Indo-European root, meaning ‘to think, to remember, to ponder over’. This root is found in Sanskrit as dhi and dhya. The word also occurs in the Rigveda (ancient Indian sacred collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns) in the sense of ‘speech reflecting the inner thoughts of man’.
Apart from its Indo-European background as word and term, the ‘daina’ incorporates the idea of the Sun-Goddess who was married to the Moon-God, reminiscent of goddess Surya in the Rigveda.
http://vilnews.com/2011-04-incredible-indian-lithuanian-relations-2
Hence, you can see it is consistent with the OIT theory of a movement from out of India through Persia through Eastern Europe into Western Europe. The closest language to Sanskrit is Avestan, which retains all 8 cases and it is also retains the same place names Hapta-Hindu, Haptavati and retains the same Gods and the same fire sacrifice rituals the second closest is Lithuanian which retains 7 cases, retains the river names, the Gods and the fire sacrifice ritual and the third closest is Hittie which retains 6 cases, some of the God names Indra, but loses place names. The least closest is Celtic and Greek which retains only 4-5 cases and lose much of the original mythology.
There is no inferiority complex. I am calling a spade a spade. Puranas are concoctions and exaggerations, albeit for a different purpose and not history. Same with Herodotus. It is ignorance to take them as actual history. Puranas are not 7,000 year old. To say that is a bit schyzophrenic.
To be honest, I think you do a little. Of all people on this forum, the one here dutifully defending a colonial racist theory AMT which most Indians today oppose, is another Indian. Not are you only doing that, you are also piping in on behalf of other Western supporters of AMT to say "He is busy right now" like a sepoy.
Your point on the Puranas smacks of the same kind of colonial attitudes. Why are they not history? Is it because they contain mythology too? Well so does Herodotus and Megesthenes and other Greek historians e.g. Alexander born of god Zeus. You say that is not history either. Then you are obviously ignorant that Western scholarship take them to be real history and Herodotus is considered the first historian. Herodotus accounts of the Persian wars are taken to be real. Astronomical dating based on Herodotus's accounts are used to fix the date of Greek history.
You are obviously ignorant that the Puranas are also used for history of India, otherwise how would we know about Chandragupta Mauraya, Asoka, Chandragupta Gupta etc? The Puranas were taken as real history by Western scholars for the following periods:
Shishunaga dynasty
Nandas
Maurya dynasty
Shunga and Kanau dynasty
Andhra dynasty
But as I described earlier in this thread the dates for each dynasty were shortened to bring it in line with the biblical chronology. Even after shortening, they found that the other dynasties before Shishunaga, Pradyota and Brihadratha still went back to 2000BCE --- so they decided they must be mythical, because at the time Jones did not believe Indian civilisation went back further than 1500BCE. The IVC had not yet been discovered.
So they shortened the duration of each king in the dynasty to a ridiculous number, about 1-5 years each to bring it in line. The actual duration which are reasonable were 20-30 years per king.
Now we have discovered through archaeological excavations that just as the Puranas said there was continuous urban settlements in India going back to 7000 years and there is absolutely no discontinuity. In other words, the Puranas were right.
I don't think you understand this is racism. They have rejected all our records out of hand, accused us of lying and being deceitful to make ourselves look ancient and great, and forced us to accept their biblical-compatible chronology. As a result of which they have produced massive inconsistencies in our ancient history e.g. We record Shankarcharya as 500BCE, they say 700CE. We record Chandragupta Mauraya as 1500BCE, they record him as 300BCE.
You also seem to be ignorant Puranas are divided usually into 5 sections that deal with History of the cosmos, history of of Manvantaras, supernatural history and another area that deals with ordinary earth history. The earth history is not mixed with mythology.
Cont.
