Napoleon, New Orleans and British in India

Colonial empires in 1800 (via Wikipedia)

By the 1800s, the British had occupied Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, and Northern Circars with the noble goal of personal enrichment. Large parts of the country still lay outside British control with the Marathas, the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan. There was a nominal Mughal emperor who ruled over a vastly shrunk empire. Once forces under Arthur Wellesley, the man who would defeat Napoleon years later, eliminated Tipu Sultan in 1799, it opened up the path for British supremacy in India. While all of these was happening in India, another geopolitical game was being played in the Western hemisphere involving a Spanish playboy, a French emperor, an enlightened American President who kept slaves and actual slaves who defeated two empires. A fortuitous turn of events changed the history of United States and the colonial European powers shifted their gaze to the East.

Political Map of India 1805 (via Wikipedia)

When Napoleon evaluated the French position towards the end of the 18th century, it looked terrible. The Egyptian invasion had failed, so had the creation of the Mediterranean empire. The French position in India did not look promising and they had already lost the vast territories of Canada to the British. But much more important was the development in their colony Saint-Domingue — the richest colony in the Western hemisphere — where the slaves had revolted. The Austrians and the Russians formed an alliance to stop France and war was happening in Switzerland and Germany. From these data points he decided what had to be done: France needs to reclaim Saint-Domingue as well as create an empire in United States.
In 1800, Spain controlled a vast amount of territory which included large parts of what is now United States (Florida, Louisiana), Mexico, Central America, Cuba, and the entire Western and North parts of South America. In spite of this, Spain was seen as a weak empire due to misrule by Charles IV, who did not want to govern and was happy to delegate the responsibility to someone else. That someone was Manuel de Godoy who became the Prime Minister mostly because he was the Queen’s lover and thus was able to quickly become powerful and influence the King.

Map of the course, watershed, and major tributaries of the Mississippi River (via Wikipedia)

Among all the possessions of Spain, the port of New Orleans, was of special interest to Napoleon. During that period, when the United States did not have highways or railroads to transport goods across the nation, but they had rivers. American agricultural goods like wheat, corn and cattle were transported down Ohio river and the Mississippi to the port of New Orleans. At the port, the goods were moved to bigger ships and taken to the East Coast as well as to other countries across the Atlantic. Even though the port was under Spanish control, they had a relatively peaceful policy towards American shipping. No tariff duties had to be paid to Spain before the goods were moved to larger ships. Napoleon knew that if he controlled New Orleans with his new army, he could choke United States and control its fate.
To realize his vision, Napoleon came up with a three point plan.

Make peace with Austria and Britain. He had problems with Britain during the Egyptian invasion and if he made peace with them, his fleet could cross the Atlantic without collateral damage.
Create secret deal with Spain
Assemble a large expeditionary force with hundreds of ships for the conquest of Saint-Domingue and holding on to New Orleans.

Everything went as planned. He made peace with Austria and Britain. Godoy wanted some property in Tuscany and in return he was willing to give Louisiana to the French. The Third Treaty of San Ildefonso was made in secret exactly as Napoleon wanted. The large force was assembled and Napoleon was ready to execute his vision. The United States under Thomas Jefferson was shocked as the country did not have an army to fight Bonaparte. Even though New Orleans was under the control of Spain, Jefferson was sure that he would not have the same business relation with a French controlled New Orleans.
Two events saved United States. First Thomas Jefferson threatened France that if such an event happened, they would join forces with Britain. This was a particularly bold statement because Britain and United States were fighting a war just more than a decade back. Maybe , he was borrowing the enemy of my enemy concept from Chanakya. Then Jefferson had no other choice; he had an army of 1500 men, an unreliable militia, and a navy which was no match against the French. For the security of the nation, he had to align himself with a bigger power.

Toussaint L'Ouverture (1802) (via Wikipedia) — Toussaint L’Ouverture (1802) (via Wikipedia)

Second and probably what sealed the fate of the French invasion were guns, germs, steel and something Jared Diamond would not have written about: slaves. When a 10,000 strong French army, under the leadership of Napoleon’s brother-in-law arrived at Saint-Domingue, the slaves gave them a good fight. Napoleon wanted to establish slavery in the colonies and for the slaves, it was a battle for their future. L’Ouverture, the slave leader, was captured through trickery and sent to France where he died in prison. But soon yellow fever stuck and the French army never recovered from it. Those who survived the machetes fell to the germs. Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, too died from the disease.
This was unexpected and Napoleon fell into despair. He had to make a critical decision. Should he proceed to the American mainland or does he withdraw back to Europe? Some of his advisors suggested that he go forward with his plans, but he decided to go back to Europe and continue his wars against the British there. If the United States aligned with the British, that would be a formidable power and in case there was such a battle, he could lose his Caribbean possessions.
What was surprising was another decision he made: he decided to sell Louisiana to the United States at a cheap price of 3 cents per acre. He could have returned it back to Spain, but instead he decided to sell it to the country he was coming to build his empire. There were few reasons for this strange decision. First, the secret deal he made with Spain got bogged down over details. Second, Godoy fell out of favor with the Emperor and compared to this fool, Napoleon found the Americans more palatable because New Orleans would make America more powerful and a powerful America would keep the British busy to his favor. Third, he needed money for his wars in Europe.
This turned out to be a blessing for the Americans. This video shows the population growth of United States through that period; with New Orleans secure, the country started moving from the Atlantic border to the West and the future of North America changed.
A decade earlier the British had made a bid to conquer Saint-Domingue, but they were defeated by the slaves and yellow fever. Then they tried to conquer Buenos Aires and that costly expedition failed as well. The retreat of the French, the stability of United States and Wellesley’s growing Indian empire made the British pay more attention to the East and shift the base of their operations. They would still fight the Americans in the War of 1812, but their shift to India paid rich dividends for them. Following the defeat of the Marathas, they had much of India under their control.
References

Lecture titled “The Lucky Americans” by Prof. Philip D. Zelikow at the University of Virginia
Lectures by Prof. Michael Parrish at UC San Diego on America and the World
Keay, John. India: A History. Grove Press, 2001.
Sivers, Peter von, Charles A. Desnoyers, and George B. Stow. Patterns of World History: Since 1750. 1st ed. Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.

Origins of Indian traditions

Slate has an expanded article based on last year’s discovery of “curry” in Farmana. It has details on the technical advances that made this discovery possible.

Archaeologists have long known how to spot some ancient leftovers. The biggest breakthrough came in the 1960s, when excavators began to drop soil from their sites—particularly from places where food likely was prepared—onto mesh screens. The scientists then washed the earth away with water, leaving behind little bits of stone, animal bones, and tiny seeds of wheat, barley, millets, and beans. This flotation method allowed scientists to piece together a rough picture of an ancient diet. “But spices are absent in macro-botanical record,” says archaeologist Arunima Kashyap at Washington State University Vancouver, who, along with Steve Weber, made the recent proto-curry discovery.*
Examining the human teeth and the residue from the cooking pots, Kashyap spotted the telltale signs of turmeric and ginger, two key ingredients, even today, of a typical curry. This marked the first time researchers had found unmistakable traces of the spices in the Indus civilization. Wanting to be sure, she and Weber took to their kitchens in Vancouver, Washington. “We got traditional recipes, cooked dishes, then examined the residues to see how the structures broke down,” Weber recalls. The results matched what they had unearthed in the field. “Then we knew we had the oldest record of ginger and turmeric.” Dated to between 2500 and 2200 B.C., the finds are the first time either spice has been identified in the Indus. They also found a carbonized clove of garlic, a plant that was used in this era by cooks from Egypt to China.[The Mystery of Curry]

As you read the article you find that our food habits (rice with curry, tandoori chicken), the ingredients used in our food (ginger, turmeric), culture of leaving food for animals and treating cows as sacred animals have not changed in the past four millennia.

Those peaceful Minoans

Fresco of an acrobat on a bull with two female acrobats on either side. — Minoan fresco of an acrobat on a bull with two female acrobats on either side.

Minoans, who lived on the island of Crete, were contemporaries of the Harappans. But unlike the Harappans, they were known more for their monumental palaces and mansions. The civilization came to an end by fire, ash or flooding when the volcano on the Greek island of Santorini blew up. Till recently, it was believed that this civilization was devoid of war and now new evidence suggests it was not so.

“The study shows that the activities of warriors included such diverse things as public displays of bull-leaping, boxing contests, wrestling, hunting, sparring and duelling. Ideologies of war are shown to have permeated religion, art, industry, politics and trade, and the social practices surrounding martial traditions were demonstrably a structural part of how this society evolved and how they saw themselves.”
Molloy found a “staggering” amount of violence in the symbolic grammar and material remains from prehistoric Crete. Weapons and warrior culture were materialised variously in sanctuaries, graves, domestic units and hoards. It could also be found in portable media intended for use during social interactions, for example, administration, feasting, or personal adornment. “There were few spheres of interaction in Crete that did not have a martial component, right down to the symbols used in their written scripts.” said Dr Molloy.

This is interesting because the Harappan civilization is also considered to be a peaceful one; you do not find glorified rulers, or depiction of conquest or warfare. There are no jars or seals depicting battle and no trace of armed conflict. It remains a mystery as to how such a vast domain was governed. One theory is that trade and religion were the instruments of authority and not warfare. But then as Michel Danino writes in The Lost River, only less than 10 per cent of the 1140 Mature Harappan sites have been excavated. The buried ones may have a different story to tell.

Decoding Neanderthals (NOVA)

As humans left Africa and reached Europe, they found another hominid species which had left Africa much earlier — 800,000 years back — and had colonized specific parts of Europe. For about 10,000 years, humans and the Neanderthals co-existed; the magnificent Chauvet caves were built during this period. Then they just disappeared from the face of earth. Thus a species, which had survived for so long battling against an unforgiving nature, simply vanished and the reason behind that remains a mystery. Was it because they were now battling for the same resources as humans and could not win? Or was it because Neanderthals, who lacked art, language and technology, were wiped out by a superior species?
The new NOVA documentary, based on evidence from archaeology and genetic studies, does an image makeover of Neanderthals based on evidence from archaeology and genetics.

It turns out that they had skills to use a set of carefully designed strikes to convert a flint stone into a flake with sharp edges. This flake could then be used to cut meat or as a weapon when attached to a pole.
For attaching the flake to a pole, they brewed their own glue from birch bark using a dry distillation process which involved controlled heating.
They had some language skills which was used to convey the above technologies to their peers.
They also interbred with humans; everyone except Africans has a percentage of Neanderthal gene in them. Italians have the most.
They had ritual, art and symbolism. They may have attempted body painting and also used grave goods as part of a burial ritual.

Since the program covered a lot of aspects of Neanderthal life, it fast-forwarded through one of the interesting questions about why they perished. One theory was offered: they were bred out by humans through interaction and absorption. Though it led to their extinction, this interbreeding might have helped us by providing with immunity to pathogens.
The entire program is available online

Watch Decoding Neanderthals on PBS. See more from NOVA.

History of Historians

The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes has some interesting musings on history in the first part where Tony Webster and his trio of book-crazy friends analyze the meaning of everything, sometimes in subtle mockery or high seriousness. In one scene, the teacher asks one of them to offer his thoughts as the Serbian gunman who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914. The boy, Finn, explains one of the central problems of history in his answer, “The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

Later, there is a more detailed discussion of exactly what history is. “History is the lies of the victors,” one replies to which the teacher retorts, “It is also the self-delusions of the defeated.” Another one has a simpler explanation, ““History is a raw onion sandwich, sir” and he explains further, “It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.” Another one has a more precise definition, “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

Some of these observations come to reality in Benjamin Schwarz’s piece which is a review of Sheldon M. Stern’s The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory in The Atlantic. For years, through books and movies, we have been fed a story about the incident and how a tough Kennedy averted a global nuclear war and forced the Soviet Union to do a U-turn without offering anything in return. It turns out that this version of history was one scripted by the Kennedy administration. It was repeated by historians and has now been proved to be the lies of the victors. According to the book, the Kennedy administration was not innocent and bore “substantial responsibility” for the crisis.

According to the new version Kennedy himself admitted that Soviet missiles in Cuba were the same as the American Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy. For him, it was not a military issue but a political one. Since he had made Cuba one of his campaign issues, he could not be seen acting soft on it. For this political reason, he had to create an image of toughness and show that he enforced a unilateral Soviet withdrawal.

Even though the crisis was averted by a mutual withdrawal of missiles, it was a different story that came out. The article explains how this story was minted

Only a handful of administration officials knew about the trade; most members of the ExComm, including Vice President Lyndon Johnson, did not. And in their effort to maintain the cover-up, a number of those who did, including McNamara and Rusk, lied to Congress. JFK and others tacitly encouraged the character assassination of Stevenson, allowing him to be portrayed as an appeaser who “wanted a Munich” for suggesting the trade—a deal that they vociferously maintained the administration would never have permitted.

He justifiably excoriates the sycophantic courtier Schlesinger, whose histories “repeatedly manipulated and obscured the facts” and whose accounts—“profoundly misleading if not out-and-out deceptive”—were written to serve not scholarship but the Kennedys.[The Real Cuban Missile Crisis]

The truth finally came out because Kennedy had secret recordings of all the deliberations and thanks to that we now have the history of the historians.

Indian History Carnival–61: Linguistics, Sernigi, Babur, Ramanujam, Thirumalapuram

Ramanujan (centre) with other scientists at Trinity College

Is English a Scandinavian or a West Germanic language? There is a debate going on this topic and it boils down to the question: do languages which are in close contact with each other borrow just words or do they borrow grammar as well.? Sally Thomason mentions an example from India

Probably the most famous case of all is Kupwar, a village in India in the border area between Indic languages in the north and Dravidian languages in the south. Morphosyntactic diffusion has been multidirectional in Kupwar, but the most extensive changes have affected the Kupwar variety of the Indic language Urdu, which has borrowed from the Dravidian language Kannada and from Marathi, the other Indic language spoken in the village. The changes include adoption of an inclusive/exclusive `we’ distinction, subject-verb agreement rules in four different constructions, word order features, and about a dozen other features (details can be found in the 1971 Gumperz & Wilson article). Another striking case was reported by Andrei Malchukov in 2002: the Tungusic language Evenki has borrowed a volitional mood suffix and an entire set of personal endings from the Turkic language Yakut. It’s worth noting that word order is the most frequently borrowed type of syntactic feature — a relevant point because two of Faarlund’s examples of Scandinavian structure in English are word order features.
Girolamo Sernigi was responsible for financing many Portuguese voyages to India and also for making Calicut popular in Europe. Maddy has a post about what Sernigi wrote about Calicut

So much for Sernigi’s letters. The full texts of those can be found online, in the first reference. What became of Sernigi? If you recall, the entry of the Florentine associations with the Portuguese broke the Venetian control of the spice trade. In fact most ships had their representatives in the ships that travelled to the Indies. Their notes of the trade and the locales as we saw from the example above provided much insight to the benign culture and conditions in Malabar, to the people of Europe and encouraged their forced entry into Malabar. According to Moacyr Scares Pereira, the first nau to return to Lisbon, Nossa Senhora Anunciada, belonged to D. Alvaro de Braganca and his associates, Italian merchants Bartolomeo Marchioni, Girolamo Sernigi and possibly Antonio Salvago. So had it not been for people like Sernigi, Gama might never have landed in Calicut.
Is this the oldest surviving Mughal document? The Mughal Indian blog at the British Library has a farman of Babur dating to 1527 CE

Very few original documents survive from Babur’s reign; S.A.I. Tirmizi (see below) lists only four. This one is particularly interesting. The early date suggests that under Mughal rule a new grant was required to confirm Jalāl al-Dīn in a post which he had probably already held under the Lodhi Sultans of Delhi. The use of the administrative unit parganah, a term fora collection of villages which had been in official use in India from the 14th century, demonstrates the Mughals’ continued use of an existing administrative structure. However, the grant itself is called a suyurghāl, a Mongol term for a hereditary grant. Other new terms used are mutavajjihāt and māl u jihāt, both names of taxes found in documents of the Turkman and Timurid dynasties which ruled much of Iran during the 15th century.
The 125th birthday of Srinivasa Ramanujam was on Dec 22, 2012. drisyadrisya writes about the media coverage

And what about the visual and the print media ? I haven’t yet come across anything significant from them either. In fact, perhaps today, this piece got an extensive space in daily mail UK and so far I haven’t seen the Indian media pick it up except for a much shortened version in “Hindu Business Line” Go through the two, and tell me, what major difference do you notice in the treatment of the subject ? True to its ‘tradition’ which is has ever made its name a misnomer the “Hindu” Business Line has completed ignored the Hindu aspect. One might say that the UK mirror was meant for an audience not-so-familiar with Ramanujam, and the HBL being an Indian publication, did not want to repeat the well known ? .. well well well … well known ? Quoting from the mirror “Ramanujan, a devout Hindu, thought these patterns were revealed to him by the goddess Namagiri” . I just wanted to pause at that statement and give it some thought … Could there have been any motive for Ramanujam to lie ? Not one that I can think off .. after all why would one give credit to someone else , even if it be a Goddess.. One potential argument that could stand logic (though not necessarily true unless proven to be so) is from Hardy – “Ramanujan’s religiousness had been romanticised by Westerners and overstated by Indian biographers”
A famous legend in Kerala is that of Peumthachan, a master sculptor who kills his talented and capable son due to jealousy. Vijay finds a similar story in Thirumalapuram

The master sculptor who was excavating the north cave had a talented son who would bring his ‘coffee’ from home every day. He would then observe his father work the stone and would go around the hill and replicate the same moves on the stone there. He took care to match the strokes with those of his father’s hammer, so that his father’s hammer strikes would mask his own. He continued in this fashion when one day, the father suddenly stopped mid stroke and heard the sound of the hammer on chisel. He immediately set off to find the source and came across a boy stooped over a stone. But since he was turned away from him, he couldn’t recognize him but seeing the work he realized that someone was copying his design. Enraged he stuck the lad on his head with his hammer and slew him on the spot. Only then he realized that it was his own son but it was too late!

If you have any links for the History Carnival, please leave a comment or send an e-mail to varnam.blog @gmail. The next carnival will be up on Feb 15th.

Jan 2013: Reference Books on my Desk

These are some of the books that I referred a lot in the past year.

Hiriyanna, M. Outlines of Indian Philosophy. Motilal Banarsidass Pub, 2009. Another excellent book is A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy by Chandradhar Sharma
Danino, Michel. Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati. 2010th ed. Penguin Books India, 2010. (my review)
Tope,Parag. Tatya Tope’s Operation Red Lotus. Rupa & Co., 2010. (my review)
Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004. If you want to understand all angles of the Indo-Aryan issue, this is an excellent introduction.
Singh, Upinder. A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century. 1st ed. Pearson Education, 2009. This has become my standard reference for Indian history.
Tignor, Robert, Jeremy Adelman, Stephen Aron, Stephen Kotkin, Suzanne Marchand, Gyan Prakash, and Michael Tsin, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the World: From 1000 CE to the Present (Third Edition) by This was my textbook for a course I did at Princeton via Coursera and is my reference for Western History.

Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam

Last week a French satirical magazine was firebombed for printing a ‘Sharia’ edition. Before that, there was the YouTube video controversy and before that there were the Swedish cartoons. There are numerous such cases where there was violence because the image of Prophet Mohammed was depicted. So film makers like Moustapha Akkad, who made the The Message (1976) on the life of Prophet Mohammed, worked around the issue by not showing him at all. At the beginning of the film, they displayed the statement, “”The makers of this film honour the Islamic tradition which holds that the impersonation of the Prophet offends against the spirituality of his message. Therefore, the person of Mohammad will not be shown.”

In his review of Aisha’s Cushion by Jamal J Elias, David Shariatmadari writes

Anyone who has a more than superficial knowledge of Muslim cultures will be aware of what can seem like a contradictory approach to the issue. There are strong theological precepts against the creation of likenesses of living things, and above all of religious figures, especially Muhammad. And yet lush vegetation in mosaic form garlands the façade of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, devotional pictures of members of the prophet’s family are common among Shias, and merchants in the Tehran bazaar sell pendants with Muhammad’s portrait on them. Animals prance across carpets, and manuscripts and miniature paintings bustle with human activity. So what’s going on – does Islam prohibit such images or not? How come the bazaaris can carry on plying their trade, while Danish newspapers get picketed?[Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception and Practice in Islam by Jamal J Elias – review]

The review page even has a Turkish miniature from the 16th century showing Muhammad and Abu Bakr. The reviewer does not have a good opinion of the book and so need to search for another one to get more clarity on this issue.

Indians in Socotra

Socotra is an island which lies to the east of the Horn of Africa and it was an important stop on the maritime trading route from India to the Middle East. A few years back Belgian speleologists found inscriptions, drawings and archaeological objects inside a huge cave and they were left by sailors who visited the island between 1st century BCE and 6th century CE.

The 1st century author of Periplus of the Erythraean Sea mentions Socotra few times. From that book we know that India exported rice to Socotra. There is also a mention of a handful of staples being imported into Socrata and they were bought by traders from the southern region of Yemen. There is also a mention of the island being leased out to Arab shippers and that Indians lived there since the 1st century CE. Now, thanks to the Belgian Socotra Karst Project, we know what those Indians wrote in both Brahmi and Kharosthi script.

Most of them wrote down their names and sometimes even their original home towns while taking their way through the almost three kilometres long cave. Sometimes we find a name written several times marking thus the whole procession from the entrance of the back part to the deepest point of the cave accessible only through a narrow passage not more than 60 cm wide.

Altogether the estimated number of Indian inscriptions amounts to more than 100 epigraphs written by charcoal, chalk or mud or scratched with a sharp instrument on the surfaces of rocks, stalactites or stalagmites. Most of them are written in a variety of early Indian scripts known as Brahmi. The Brahmi type used in Hoq cave can be compared to that attested in India herself during the 2nd to 4th centuries AD in West India. These data can now be confirmed by some newly discovered inscriptions which mention the city of Bharukaccha, one of the most important West Indian harbour towns of that period. It is also mentioned by the Periplus under the name Barygaza.

But there were also traders from other parts of India. Thus we found in January 2006 an inscription in Kharosthi, another Indian script which was used only in the North-West of ancient India, i.e. the modern Pakistan, and in Central Asia. The whole corpus of Indian inscriptions found in Hoq cave is not only an impressive witness of Socotra´s cultural past. It is as well the most western evidence of Indian writing yet known. From the texts written in several handwritings we get a unique picture of the art of writing as practiced not by specialists like in the case of many Indian religious inscriptions but by ordinary people.[OLD INDIANS ON SOCOTRA]

Reference

Casson, Lionel. The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary. Princeton University Press, 2012.

A debate over the PIE homeland

In 1668, Andreas Jager of Wittenberg proposed that there was an ancient language spoken in the Caucasus mountains which then spread throughout Europe and Asia through waves of migration. Mr. Jager did not know about Sanskrit or the similarities between Sanskrit and European languages when he wrote that. A century later, Sir William Jones discovered that similarity, thus creating the field of historical linguistics. The mother language was postulated to be proto-Indo-European and now there are differing theories on the location of that homeland. One of those theories claims that proto-Indo-European speakers were chariot driving pastoralists from above the Black Sea, who left their homeland around 4000 years back. Another theory claims that, they were from the land below the Black Sea (Anatolia) and were farmers. Along with the spread of agriculture from 9000 years back, the language also spread.
Recently a paper claimed that they had solved the homeland mystery forever.

We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory.[Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family]

Based on this paper, The New York Times had a graphic which showed the timeline for the evolution of each language tree. If you note the time for Vedic Sanskrit, it falls to around 4000 BCE, which is much earlier than the Mature Harappan Period. This violates many sacred academic lakshmana rekhas. But if you note the time frame for Romani, it is around 1500 BCE, which actually does not agree with the known history of the Romani people, who left North India much later.
Here is a video (via GeoCurrents) where a ~~two~~ Stanford ~~historical linguists~~ syntactician and historical geographer take the authors of the paper, ~~who are computational linguists,~~ among whom one is a computational linguist, to task ~~calling them “creationists”~~ but thinks this does not rise to the level of Creationism.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ?rel=0]

Another point they make is that PIE cannot be older than 3500 BCE because that was the time the wheel was invented and PIE contains words for the wheel. Obviously the language cannot contain words for things which did not exist. Now if PIE cannot be older than 3500 BCE, then Vedic Sanskrit cannot be older than that. This is an important point for dating the presence of Vedic speakers in India based on historical linguistics (and not computational linguistics)
References:

Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill, Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D. Gray, Marc A. Suchard, and Quentin D. Atkinson. “Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family.” Science 337, no. 6097 (August 24, 2012): 957–960. doi:10.1126/science.1219669.
Bryant, Edwin. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Oxford University Press, USA, 2004.