Why the Aryans Still Matter - History, Historiography and Politics

What are the prehistoric sources of Brahminic Hinduism and Ancient Indian Civilization? The attempts to answer this question have given rise to the fractious debates of what's called 'The Aryan Controversy,' in which' Western scholars argue that Brahminic Hinduism is a result of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan (RVIA) conquest of the Indus Valley civilization (IVC), while Indigenist Indian intellectuals argue that Brahminic Hinduism, like the Sanskrit language and the Rig Veda, is a indigenous creation of the Harappan culture. Following Asko Parpola's 'The Roots of Hinduism,' this review essay argues that both the Rig Vedic-Indo Aryans and the Harappans played a significant role in the establishment of Brahminic Hinduism, and explores the diverse theories that have been devised to account for the world-historical dialectical relationship between the RVIA culture and the Harappan population. Although the IVC certainly predates the RVIA migrations from Central Asia by several millennia, the IVC was already in drastic decline by the second millennia BCE, when the RVIA tribes arrived in the Punjab; and the RVIA invasion of the Indus Valley resulted in a drastic transformation of the Harappan culture, whereby Brahminic Vedic sacrificial ritualism and the Sanskrit language were imposed upon the Harappan population. But the RVIA tribes were a small elite minority among the Harappan population, and within another thousand years, the Harappan population had swamped the RVIA invaders, resulting in the reemergence of the Pre-Rig Vedic Mesopotamian and Harappan elements which make up the greater part of 'village Hinduism.' After many thousand years of conquests of the Indian subcontinent by the RVIAs, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Mughals, and the British Empire, contemporary Hinduism thus testifies to the survival of Harappan (IVC) culture in the 21st Century Republic of India (est. 1947-1950).

Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society, 2007

This volume highlights some of the ways in which questions on origins challenge historical reconstructions. The debate on Indo Aryan, a linguistic phenomenon, revolves around two opposing views. One, that its initial presence within north-west South Asia can be verified only from the second millennium BC onwards, and the other, that it was native to the region. Those who now support the first view do not offer explanations that are based on the Aryan invasion theories of the nineteenth-and the early-twentieth centuries. Rather, they perceive the possibility of small-scale migrations of Indo Aryan speakers into Punjab and Northwest India. In contrast, the indigenists (see Bryant's definition, p. 468) who propose the origins of the 'Indo-Aryans' in South Asia locate the validity of their premise mainly through the archaeological record of the Greater Indus Valley, which provides no traces of large-scale dramatic invasions, or smaller groups of people migrating into this region during the second millennium BC. The theoretical slippage that recurs in historicising a linguistic phenomenon through its speakers stokes a controversial debate at present, which resonates on the appropriation of an academic exercise for conjuring a primordial Hindu nationhood for India (but Bryant, p. 471). Both, the research methods of the indigenists, and the kinds of evidence they promote as scientific and valid, are controversial. As the volume reminds us, it is the historicity of the speakers of Indo Aryan, a subject of more than a century-long research that continues to stage discussions regarding what ought to be a 'true story' of 'origins'.

The origion of Aryans and their advance into India, 2019

The paper is dedicated to the so-called Aryan problem in contemporary science, i.e. the issue of the ancestral homeland of the ancient Aryans. Main hypotheses are introduced here.

2005

A conference of over 300 Indologists here has rejected the Aryan Invasion Theory. The conference on “Revisiting Indus-Saraswati Age and Ancient India,” attended by scholars all over the world, was aimed at correcting the “distorted Hindu history,” according to Ms Reeta Singh, one of the organisers. “Recent archaeological discoveries have fully established that there was a continuous evolution of civilization on the Indian subcontinent from about 5000 BC, which remained uninterrupted through 1000 BC. This leaves no scope whatsoever to support an Aryan invasion theory,” a resolution at the conference said. It explained that the term Arya in Indian literature has no racial or linguistic connotations. It was used in the noble sense. (The Economic Times, October 16, 1996)

The paper presents two contradictory views accounting for the origin of the Aryans – The Standard view - the immigrant Aryan position and the Alternative view - the Indigenous Aryan position. It carefully examines the ongoing debate by presenting all of the relevant philological, archaeological, linguistic, and historiographical data, and showing how they have been interpreted both to support the theory of Aryan migration and to challenge it. Most of the evidence that has been adduced to locate the geography of the Vedic people (Aryans) have come from two disciplines - linguistics and archaeology. The difficulty in settling this debate arises because there continues to remain irreconcilable contradictions between the linguistic and archaeological accounts. The paper tries to discuss the various interpretations of evidence by proponents of both sides and also mentions that the decipherment of the Indus script could shine fresh light on the contours of the Aryan debate. The paper also disproves "The Aryan Invasion Theory".

2019

The term Aryan holds variegated meanings today. The term has undergone a huge transition from being Rigvedic times and its unique construct and appropriation in colonial and post colonial studies. The political appropriation was not only restricted to the subcontinent but elsewhere in parts of Europe during the period of enlightenment. Apart from dealing with multiple interpretations we shall also make an attempt to debunk the myths that surround the term such as debate over origins, question of language and cultural exchange.

My attention has been drawn to an article published by Tony Joseph in The Hindu, dated June 17, 2017, which, in essence, tries to say that The Vedic Aryans came to India from outside. I would like to apprise the readers of the reality of the situation. I have published many books on the subject, each one dealing with a specific aspect of the issue. The latest book, The Rigvedic People: Invaders?, Immigrants? Or Indigenous?, published in 2015 by Aryan Books International, New Delhi clearly explains, using evidence of archaeology, hydrology, C-14 dating and literature, why the Aryans were neither Invaders nor slow Immigrants, but were indigenous. I present here my arguments, as briefly as possible. At the root of the trouble lies the dating of the Vedas to 1200 BCE by the German Scholar Max Muller. He did it on a very ad hoc basis and when his contemporaries, such as Goldstucker, Whitney and Wilson, challenged his methodology, he surrendered by saying, “Whether the Vedas were composed in 1000 or 2000 or 3000 BC no one on earth can ever determine.” The pity is that in spite of such a candid confession by Max Muller himself many of his followers even today stick to this date, or at the most give concession to 1500 BCE. In 1920s the Harappan Civilization was discovered and dated to the 3rd millennium BCE on the basis of the occurrence of many Indus objects in the already dated archaeological contexts in Mesopotamia. This led to the immediate conclusion that since, according to Max Muller, the Vedas were not earlier than 1200 BCE, the Harappan Civilization could not have been the creation of the Vedic people. In 1946 Mortimer Wheeler (later knighted) excavated Harappa and discovered a fort over there. On learning that in the Vedic texts Indra has been described as puramdara i.e. ‘destroyer of forts’, he jumped to the conclusion that the Vedic Aryans, represented by Indra, invaded India and destroyed the Harappan Civilization. But, it must be stressed that there no evidence of any kind of destruction at Harappa. In support of his Invasion thesis, however, Wheeler referred to some skeletons at Mohenjo-daro which he said represent the people massacred by the Invading Aryans. But the fact is that these skeletons had been found in different stratigraphic contexts, some in the Middle levels, some in the Late and some in the debris which accumulated after the desertion of the site. Thus, these cannot be ascribed to a single event, much less to an Aryan Invasion. The ghost of ‘Invasion’ re-appeared in a new avatara, namely that of ‘Immigration’.Said Romila Thapar in 1991: “If invasion is discarded then the mechanism of migration and occasional contacts come into sharper focus. These migrations appear to have been of pastoral cattle breeders who are prominent in the Avesta and Rigveda.” Faithfully following her, R. S. Sharma elaborated: “The pastoralists who moved to the Indian borderland came from Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or BMAC which saw the genesis of the culture of the Rigveda.” These assertions of Thapar and Sharma are baseless. In the first place, the BMAC is not a product of nomads. It has fortified settlements and elaborate temple-complexes. It has yielded a very rich harvest of antiquities which include silver axes, highly ornamented human and animal figurines and excellently carved seals. But what is more important is that no element of the BMAC has ever been found east of the Indus which was the area occupied by the Vedic people. So there is no case whatsoever for the BMAC people having migrated into India. Now, if there was no Aryan Invasion or an Aryan Immigration, were the Vedic people indigenous? To answer this question we must first find out the correct chronological horizon of theRigveda. It refers to the river Sarasvati nearly seventy times. The river dried up before the composition of the Panchavimsa Brahmana, as this text avers. Today this dry river is identifiable with the Ghaggar in Haryana and Rajasthan. On its bank stands Kalibangan, a site of the Harappan Civilization. An Indo-Italian team, under the leadership of Robert Raikes, bore holes in the dry bed to find out its history. Raikes wrote an article in Antiquity (UK), captioning it: ‘Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes.’ C-14 dates show that the flourishing settlement was suddenly abandoned because of the drying up of the Sarasvati around 2000 BCE. What are the implications of this discovery? Since the Sarasvati was a mighty flowing river during the Rigvedic times, the Rigvedahas got to be earlier than that date. Thus, at least a 3rd millennium-BCE horizon is indicated for theRigveda.

2020

is well known for his books on the history of ancient India, among them The History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas, Studies in Indian History and Culture, and above all The Wonder That Was India. He has recently edited A Cultural History of India. The holder of a Ph.D. from the University of London, he was professor of the history of South Asia in the School of Oriental and African Studies of that university for many years. He is now professor and chairman of the Department of Asian Civilizations at the Australian National University.

Western Foundations of the Caste System, 2017

Over the last century or two, the dominant accounts of the caste system have looked for its roots in the ancient history of India. The story told about the rise of this social system begins in the era when an alien people called the Aryans is supposed to have invaded the Subcontinent. The standard version of this history tells us that a people called 'the Aryans' invaded India around 1500 BC, conquered the indigenous Dravidians and imposed their culture, language and religion on the latter. They are said to have brought the Vedic religion, which later developed into Hinduism and to have instituted the religiously founded caste system. In this account the idea of the caste system as an intrinsic part of Hinduism was not only reinforced, the idea of an institutionalized form of discrimination along racial lines was also added to it. The account about the Aryan invasion originated in the nineteenth century European descriptions of India and has generally been accepted as a fact about India for the last 200 years. Even though this standard account has met with severe criticisms (as we will see further), most contemporary textbooks on Indian history still begin with a section on the Aryans and their invasion (or immigration) into India. Likewise, standard descriptions of the caste system still include the idea of a segregation between the Aryans and the Dravidians. Given the centrality of the Aryans in the descriptions of the caste system, one would expect there to be a vast amount of literature on how they invaded India, how they conquered the indigenous population, how they established their authority, how the acculturation process took place, how they managed to keep the caste system in place and how they managed to convert the existing population to their religion. Answers to these questions would not only be of interest to historians. They would give us insight into the core aspects of the Indian culture and, more generally, into aspects of the interaction between different peoples which result in acculturation or in inducing changes in a culture or even change of one culture into another. If it would turn out that no answers are to be found to these questions, however, a different question arises. In that case we need to understand what makes the account about the Aryan invasion appear plausible enough to be reproduced for more than 200 years. In order to get an idea about whether or not these questions have been answered in the course of the last 200 years, we will take a look at some recent introductions to Indian culture by authorities in the domain of Indology. The Aryan impact on India In the most recent edition of his book India, Stanley Wolpert tells us that "between about 1500 and 1000 B.C., Aryan tribes conquered the remaining pre-Aryan dasas throughout the Indus Valley and Punjab". The latter, he says, were "enslaved" by the Aryans (Wolpert 2009, 28). Wolpert does not tell us much about how this happened, except for mentioning some of the weapons and other military equipment (the horse and chariot) used in this warfare. The relevance of the piece on the Aryan conquest of the pre-Aryan dasas becomes clear later in the book when Wolpert speaks of the caste system. This system, or the 'fourvarna hierarchy', he tells us, consists of four groups of which the shudras form the lowest rung. The latter he describes as the "original serfs of the three-class Aryan tribal conquerors of North India" who "may well have been dasas, pre-Aryan slaves". "Subsequent expansion of Aryan civilization", he continues, "brought more 'primitive' peoples into the fold, who were so 'barbaric' or 'polluted' as to be added much beneath the varna hierarchy as 'fifths' (panchamas), later known as Untouchables and now generally called Dalits, meaning oppressed people" (ibid., 112). While Wolpert maintains that all of this happened, he does not speak about how the Aryan conquest occurred, what allowed for the conquest or even how it was sustained. Let us, therefore, see what follows from the course of events sketched by Wolpert. If what he says is true, we can conclude that: (1) Ancient India knew of at least three groups of people: conquering Aryan tribes, pre-Aryan dasas and even 'more primitive' peoples. (2) The dasas were enslaved by the Aryans. (3) The contemporary shudras are the descendants of the dasaserfs of the Aryan conquerors. (4) At the time of the conquest the latter were organized in a three-class system, which was the bearer of a civilization. (5) The ancestors of the shudras did not belong to this Aryan civilization. The fact that the dasas were conquered and enslaved shows that they were in one way or another not strong enough to resist the Aryansin number, or with regard to military organization, kind of weapons, or otherwise. As Wolpert mentions, the Aryans brought the horse to India and their horse-drawn chariots and their archery (and axes) helped them to defeat all who confronted them. Thus, we can conclude that the weakness of the dasas to resist conquest is to be located partially in the absence of such military equipment. But he also mentions another kind of weakness, one that allowed the Aryans to sustain their position without military intervention for millennia: the low level of their civilization. The soon-to-be outcasts, he says, thanked their place outside the system to their "primitive" and "barbaric" status because of which they were placed beneath the four varna hierarchy as the "fifths" (panchamas) and thus "polluted". The shudras, who are just above them on the social ladder, are also primitive, barbaric and polluted but only less so than the outcasts. As such Wolpert

Man and Environment, 2003

Because of the Aryan invasion theory, the Harappan civilization was initially assumed to have had no direct relation with later historical India. Yet archaeological evidence has increasingly shown its numerous connections with the subcontinent's later developments in the fields of science and technology, agriculture, town-planning, art and craft, religion and culture. The last two are of special importance not only in refuting the unscientific Aryan invasion theory, but also in understanding the overall continuity of Indian civilization. The Harappan heritage is a cultural continuum and not a cultural hiatus.