Thread by @blog_supplement

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 1 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. 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 the com myth/philology). We'll simply place some of his words in this regard.