Arguments For Aryan Invasion Theory

I always find history interesting, and I'm therefore delighted to see the article by Sameer (Arguments Against Aryan Invasion Theory).

However, accuracy and scholarship matter as much as enthusiasm, and I'm afraid that Sameer doesn't list any of his sources, but just strings together a bunch of bald assertions and very confused arguments. This results in a misleading and in many ways completely false outline of the subject.

To anyone who is confused by the whole Aryan invasion theory issue, or wonders why they should care, or what it's all about: if you're only going to read one book about the subject, that book should be "In Search of the Indo-Europeans", by J.P. Mallory (Thames and Hudson, 1989). That book covers the current state of modern scholarship from the points of view of archaeology, philology and linguistics (which are all crucial to the understanding of the question of South Asian origins, and in many ways are competing as well as complementary disciplines).

If you're going further, there are two scholarly collections that are also of great interest:

1. Erdosy, George ed., The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia:

Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity (Berlin, New York: de

Gruyter, 1995).

2. Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia, Evidence, Interpretation and

Ideology, Ed. Johannes Bronkhorst and Madhav M. Deshpande, Harvard

Oriental Series, Opera Minora, Volume 3, 1999.

These two may be hard to find in regular bookstores, but www.southasiabooks.com should be able to find them for you.

The great weakness of many of the South Asian books on the subject is that they largely have no understanding of modern historical and Indo-European linguistics as it has developed during the 20th century, and most of them base their arguments on Max Mueller (which is as absurd as attacking modern physics on the basis of Aristotle).

Indo-European linguistics, incidentally, is one of the greatest unsuspected surprises ever uncovered by scientific research. Who would ever have thought that languages so widely separated by geography as (say) Bengali and Welsh are actually descended from a relatively recent common ancestor? Certainly no historian; there is not and has never been any current of historical thought, prior to the discovery of the Indo-European language family solely through linguistic research, that links the ultimate origins of the languages and cultures of Europe, Iran and South Asia together. A seventeenth-century historian would have laughed at the idea.

You don't have to be a linguist to appreciate the correspondences between the numbers one to ten in Bengali and Welsh, which I chose just because they are at opposite ends of the distribution of the Indo-European languages around the globe in historical times:

Bengali: ek, dui, tin, car, panc, choy, sat, at, noy, dosh.

Welsh: un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump, chwech, saith, wyth, naw, deg.

(By comparison, there are no correspondences with unrelated languages even when those languages are geographically close to Bengali or Welsh: for example, Tamil or Basque.)

It should be mentioned that Colin Renfrew, who is a very fine and well respected archaeologist, makes several forays into linguistics in his book "Archaeology and Language". His scholarship is sound, but not outside his field: and professional linguists generally dismiss many of his assumptions about linguistics in that book as simply in conflict with basic facts. Mallory discusses this subject in detail in his book.

Let me now address a few of the points Sameer brings up.

Sameer is absolutely right to point out that "Aryan" refers to language, not race. The word was lifted out of the Rig Veda and the Zend Avesta (the ancient Indian and Iranian epics, respectively) first to describe the original language that gave rise to the closely related family of languages containing: Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Italic, Baltic and Indo-Iranian, plus other minor and extinct branches.

Later, when "Aryan" got lifted by the racial theorists of Europe, scholars started using "Indo-European" to describe this family, but they maintained the term "Indo-Aryan" to refer to just the Indic branch of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family. That's why the word "Aryan" is still in the discussion at all, and given that the major source for ancient Indic languages (the Rig Veda) is the primary source for the word "Arya", that is quite appropriate.

Let me go now go through Sameer's point-by-point refutation.

1. Yes, large-scale migrations are not the only mechanism of language

transfer. Diffusion and language transfer can carry loan-words,

linguistic features, etc. However, the correspondence between Rig

Vedic Sanskrit and the other ancient Indo-European languages, most

closely Old Avestan (Persian), and also Latin, Old Slavonic,

etc. is so close, down to all the basic features of the language,

declensions, etc. that professional linguists completely discount

any possibility that they were not spoken by speakers of the same

languages that had drifted apart through distance and dialect

variation. For example, Mallory cites this translation between

the Avesta and the Rig Veda:

Avestan: Tem amavantem yazatem surem damohu sevistem mithrem yazai zaothrobyo.

Sanskrit: Tam amavantam yajatam suram dhamasu savistham mitram yajai hotrabhyah.

These are sister languages. Like French and Spanish diverging

from their common ancestory, Latin, they share the same ancestry.

There is no professional linguist in the world who would claim

that these are languages of different origins that have converged

through borrowing and proximity.

2. It is true that there is no archaeological evidence of the

movement of Indo-Aryan speaking people into the subcontinent, but

that is not an argument against such a movement. Many major

migrations that are historically documented have left no

particular traces in the historical record, such as:

-- The migration of Goths and Huns into Western Europe, destroying

the Roman Empire

-- The migration of Turkish speakers from the region of the Altai

mountains in Asia all the way to present-day Turkey.

It is not, as Sameer puts it "impossible for small bands of

invaders" to establish dominance over large populations. The

Roman legions are known to have done that in Western Europe,

permanently changing the linguistic map of France and Spain from

Celtic to Italic. The Conquistadors are known to have done that

in South America, again changing the linguistic map to Italic from

Mayan/Aztec etc. These are very weighty historical precedents.

They do not establish that any invasion happened, but they do give

the lie to any argument that says that it could never have

happened.

3. Contrary to Sameer's vague statement that "links with Mesopotamian

and Anatolian civilizations during the preceding 4000 years must

have introduced horses to the Indus valley", it is well

established that there is no firm evidence of the horse in the

subcontinent before the second millennium BC, no horses on the

Indus seals, no horse bones at Harappa or Mohenjo Daro. This is

extremely problematic (in fact, it is practically an

insurmountable obstacle) for any theory which claims that

Indo-Aryan languages originated in India, because the established

age of the Greek, Anatolian, and Indo-Aryan branches (on the basis

of separate philological evidence) requires the common

Indo-European parent language to be older than that.

It is also mere muddled nonsense to argue that "In Rig-Veda, there

is no mention of Aryans or their descendants to have any memory of

their homelands outside Indian sub-continent". That proves

nothing because pre-literate societies do not necessarily maintain

such long memories. Greece, for example, is demonstrated on the

evidence of place names and Mycenaean inscriptions to be a place

where the Indo-European-speaking Greeks were intrusive; that does

not mean that we have to scour the Greek myths for memories of a

homeland outside Greece.

Most importantly, and this is the crucial point for understanding the subject, you cannot explain Indo-Aryans without explaining Indo-European. Either the whole language family originated in India, or it originated elsewhere.

And given the near-unanimous agreement among modern scholars that Indo-European languages could not have come out of India, the conclusion pretty much follows that these languages were brought to India from outside.

Some of the primary factors behind this evaluation on the part of Indo-European scholars are:

1. The horse. It is central to all the earliest known Indo-European

societies, and more particularly the Indo-Aryans. The earliest

recorded Indo-Aryans (the Mitanni of West Asia, ca. 1600 BC) left

horse-training texts; the Rig Veda abounds in horse mythology

(Ashvamedha, the Ashvins). Cognate words for the horse as well as

horse-related terminology are spread across the Indo-European

family (cognate words are those that can be demonstrated by the

internal evidence of sound shifts to have driften apart slowly as

dialects split up, and not been just borrowed quickly across large

areas). It is beyond credulous to postulate that this family of

languages developed in an area where horses are missing from the

archaeological record until well after the time when the various

(already well differentiated) ancient Indo-European languages are

recorded.

2. The close linguistic relationship between Indo-European and

Finno-Ugric. The Finno-Ugric language family, which includes

Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, and some minor languages of northern

Siberia, is (like Dravidian) a totally distinct language group

from Indo-European. However, it has internal evidence of close

contact and early borrowing from the entire Indo-European language

family. This is very distinct from the case with Dravidian, where

only the Indo-Aryan branch shows close borrowings and contact with

Dravidian, whereas other branches (even the otherwise nearly

identical Iranian branch) do not manifest such correspondences.

This is consistent with the language having spread from an area

where it was in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers, ie. somewhere

in the Eastern European steppes (which coincidentally happens to be

the native region of the horse) and then moved into the Indian

subcontinent, where only the Indo-Aryan branch came into contact

with Dravidian languages. To postulate movement in the other

direction is to flatly contradict the evidence of the linguistic map.

The first article in the Bronkhorst and Deshpande book is by a top linguist, Hans Hock, who treats the linguistic evidence on this subject in more detail. Mallory also covers it thoroughly, though he does not specifically address the "Indian-origins" hypothesis because that is not taken seriously by serious scholars, given its total and complete conflict with the available evidence.

As someone (albeit an amateur) to whom the study of history matters, I am deeply distressed at the level of nonsense put forward by the people who have made a small cottage industry out of tilting at the "Aryan Invasion Theory" windmill.

These people -- like Kak, Frawley and Rajaram -- have no background and no interest in linguistics, in history, in genuine, professional scholarship. They are cheap frauds. Their books argue at a level that would be laughed out of a first-year undergraduate history class. They proudly trot out arguments that are ridiculous nonsense.

Equally (though this of course has no bearing on the substance of their arguments) the only reason they get funding and a hearing in the first place is because fanatical Hindu nationalism needs their argument.

It needs to hear that the Rig Vedic Aryans were natives of India, because this allows it to argue that Muslims are foreign invaders.

Most normal people do not believe that medieval or ancient history has any bearing on who is a foreigner or a citizen in modern times, but RSS fanatics do believe that Hindus and Hinduism are indigenous (which of course in many senses it is) while Islam and Christianity are foreign.

That is why it is deeply troubling to them that the authors of the Rig Veda also draw the origins of their language and culture from outside India, and that is why the BJP-allied book publisher, "Voice of India", has published so many works of laughable scholarship attacking the "Aryan Invasion Theory".

I love the whole business, personally, because I am a nut for ancient history, and it gives me a chance to research deeper into it.

But I do hate it when genuine scholarship is shoved aside in favour of badly-argued, semi-literate, politically motivated, nonsense.

And that is the only way that "Anti-Aryan-Invasion-Theory" books and articles can be characterised.