The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption which underlies the Western theory. The assumption is that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the modem representatives of the original Aryan race. ~ B.R. AmbedkarThere is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present. ~ Mountstuart ElphinstoneAn ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth. ~ B. B. LalIn the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated. ~ Jean-Paul DemouleIn the days when historians supposed that history had begun with Greece, Europe gladly believed that India had been a hotbed of barbarism until the “Aryan” cousins of the European peoples had migrated from the shores of the Caspian to bring the arts and sciences to a savage and benighted peninsula. Recent researches have marred this comforting picture. ~ Will Durant We have as good a right to be in India as anyone there except, perhaps, the Depressed Classes, who are the original stock. ~ Winston ChurchillThe Indo-Aryan problem is likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future, so we might as well attempt to address it in a cordial fashion. ~ Edwin BryantWe know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry. ~ Adolf Hitler Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances, the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadors were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. ~ Edmund Leach As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our Scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends. ~ Swami VivekanandaThere is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 B.C. and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 B.C. ~ J. M. KenoyerCertainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan. ~ Colin Renfrew A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record. ~ Jim ShafferIf the so-called “invasion” of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology, it must be stressed that such movements rarely leave clear physical traces. ~ Michael Witzel
The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future. The “Aryan” colony of India came to have a special place in this context. The scholars' racist attitude made them seek evidence in the Vedic texts that the ancient Aryan immigrants (aryas) had had a racial consciousness, and that the caste society was a kind of apartheid system from the very beginning. But reference to the higher castes as “Aryan brothers" could also be used for humanitarian aims. By referring to the relationship between Europeans and Indians, people imagined that they could more easily reform the Hindu culture and modernize or “Indo-Europeanize" Indian society.
Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 310-11
“There is not a particle of evidence suggesting the invasion of India by the Aryans from outside India… The theory of the Aryan race set up by Western writers falls to the ground at every point… the theory is based on nothing but pleasing assumptions and inferences based on such assumptions… Not one of these assumptions is borne out by facts… The assertion that the Aryans came from outside and invaded India is not proved and the premise that the Dasas and Dasyus are aboriginal tribes of India is demonstrably false… The originators of the Aryan race theory are so eager to establish their case that they have no patience to see what absurdities they land themselves in… The Aryan race theory is so absurd that it ought to have been dead long ago.”
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 7 edited by Vasant Moon, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra Publications, Mumbai, 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
“the support which this theory receives from Brahmin scholars”.... “ is a very strange phenomenon. As Hindus they should ordinarily show a dislike for the Aryan theory with its expressed avowal of the superiority of the Aryan races over the Asiatic races. but the Brahmin scholar has not only no such aversion, but he most willingly hails it. The reasons are obvious. The Brahmin… claims to be a representative of the Aryan race and he regards the rest of the Hindus as descendants of the non-Aryans. The theory helps him to establish his kinship with the European races and share their arrogance and their superiority. He likes particularly that part of the theory which makes the Aryan an invader and a conqueror of the non-Aryan races. For it helps him to maintain his overlordship over the non-Brahmins.”
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 7 edited by Vasant Moon, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra Publications, Mumbai, 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption which underlies the Western theory. The assumption is that the Indo-Germanic (sic) people are the purest of the modem representatives of the original Aryan race. Its first home is assumed to have been somewhere in Europe. These assumptions raise a question: how could the Aryan speech have come to India? This question can be answered only by the supposition that the Aryans must have come into India from outside. Hence the necessity for inventing the theory of invasion.”
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 7 edited by Vasant Moon, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra Publications, Mumbai, 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Several people who have examined Indo-European scholarship have drawn parallels between research about the Proto-Indo-European world and myths, in the sense of narratives about origin. Indo-European research has, in many ways, been an attempt to write the origin narrative of the bourgeois class - a narrative that, by talking about how things originally were, has sanctioned a certain kind of behavior, idealized a certain type of person, and affirmed certain feelings. Certainly, there have been some scholars who have not identified themselves with the Proto-Indo-Europeans, but they are few.
Arvidsson, S. (2006). Aryan idols: Indo-European mythology as ideology and science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.319-320
The hypothesis, invented to fill the gap, that these ideas were borrowed by barbarous Aryan invaders from the civilised Dravidians, is a conjecture supported only by other conjectures. It is indeed coming to be doubted whether the whole story of an Aryan invasion through the Punjab is not a myth of the philologists.
The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion. The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built seems on the mass of evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.
quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2
Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda (1971), quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2
“the bulk of the peoples now inhabiting India may have been the descendants of a new race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as argued by Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions; but there is nothing in the Veda, as there is nothing in the present ethnological features of the country, to prove that this descent took place near to the time of the Vedic hymns or was the slow penetration of a small body of fair-skinned barbarians into a civilized Dravidian peninsula.”
Sri Aurobindo. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Nevertheless a time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and third hand and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect freedom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. When that day comes we shall, I think, discover that the imposing fabric of Vedic theory is based upon nothing more sound or true than a foundation of loosely massed conjectures. We shall question many established philological myths,—the legend, for instance, of an Aryan invasion of India from the north, the artificial and inimical distinction of Aryan and Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the unity of the homogenous Indo-Afghan race; the strange dogma of a “henotheistic” Vedic naturalism; the ingenious and brilliant extravagances of the modern sun and star myth weavers. (...) Western Philology has converted it [the word arya] into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations fix different values....
Sri Aurobindo,1910-1914, quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). [1]
“Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship has completely deconstructed and exposed the colonial investment in the propagation of certain theories, the field of Indology, at least in present-day Western academic circles, has been very suspicious of these voices being raised against the theory of the Aryan invasions”
Edwin Bryant: “The Indo-Aryan invasion debate: the politics of a discourse”, WAVES conference, Los Angeles. August 1998, abstract., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
"The Indians never knew for thousands of years that there was an Aryan invasion; their sacred literature is silent about it. About the middle of the last century . . . an invasion was suggested by the Western scholars. First it was an inference, then it became a presumption, and now it has become an article of faith (Pillai 1959, 67); "Hence the theory that the Aryans came to India from Central Asia via Persia requires rethinking. For a long time Indian scholars silently followed the European line of arguments. With the expansion of Indology to higher levels Indian scholars began to doubt the wisdom of European scholarship and were compelled by reason to think of an indigenous theory of the origins of the Aryans" (Pillai 1988, 78); "There is a growing volume of opinion among Indian scholars that Harappan culture was in fact Vedic" (Mazumdar 1979, 73). "European scholars have been trying to prove that the Aryans came to India from outside and their guesses have extended to all sorts of places like Scandinavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Turkey, Central Asia and Armenia. But any of these places cannot yet be said to really be the homeland of the Aryans. We are still in the realm of speculation and are likely to remain so" (Vidyarthi 1970, 32); "Who were the progenitors [of Vedic culture], and wherefrom do they emerge in our historical view? Questions like these have been a bewildering source of controversy. . . . Some Indian scholars . . . strongly maintain that the Aryans were autoch- thons of the land" (Tripathi 1967, 26); "However it might be ... [regarding the origi- nal homeland], both those who advocate the theory that the Aryans came from outside India . . . and those who dispute the foreign theory and believe the Aryans to be au- tochthons are of the same opinion [that Punjab was the abode of the Rgvedaj" (Sastri and Srinivasat Chari 1971, 2; ). "Many scholars have advocated the theory that India has been the original home of the Aryans. The main features of the indigenous origin of the Aryans are as follows . . . [the author lists a few of the main arguments I have presented here]; various scholars have been advocating their own views about the original home of the Aryans, . . . but the Central Asian theory is the most plausible" (Luniya 1978, 72) Wherever the Aryans originated, whether their culture was a development of indigenous cultures or whether they migrated from elsewhere (Flood's Introduction to Hinduism (1996))
Various opinions quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13
During the 1935 Parliament debates on the Government of India Act, Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the following ground: 'We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes [= the SC/ STs], who are the native stock.'
We have as good a right to be in India as anyone there except, perhaps, the Depressed Classes, who are the original stock.
Winston Churchill. (According to some interpretations of the Aryan Invasion Theory, the upper castes in India are not of the native stock) Reproduced in C.H. Philips ed.: Select Documents on the History of India and Pakistan, part IV, p.315. , and quoted from Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743
In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around.
Savitri Devi, Souvernirs et Réflexions d'une Aryenne, p 273, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 561
By the time I was a junior in high school, I was convinced that racial differences are real and inherent and that the forced integration of our schools and society would have dire consequences. It seemed obvious that America would undergo a slow transformation to a racially mixed society with a corresponding demographic change similar to that of ancient Egypt and ancient India. Perhaps there was time, I thought - even if it took a few generations - to rally the EuropeanAmerican to the truth and thus prevent the looming tragedy. ... Aryans, or Indo-Europeans (Caucasians) created the great Indian, or Hindu civilization. Aryans swept over the Himalayas to the Indian sub-continent and conquered the aboriginal people... The word Aryan has an etymological origin in the word Arya from Sanskrit, meaning noble. The word also has been associated with gold, the noble metal and denoted the golden skinned invaders (as compared to the brown skinned aboriginals) from the West. Composed in about 1500 B.C., the Hindu religious texts of the Rig Veta tell the story of the long struggles between the Aryans and the aboriginal people of the Indian subcontinent. Sixteen Aryan states were partitioned by the sixth century A.D., and Brahmanism became the chief religion of India. The conquering race initiated a caste system to preserve their status and their racial identity. The Hindu word for caste is Varna, which directly translated into English, means color. Today the word is usually associated with occupation or trade; but that is because occupations evolved on the basis of skin color and ethnicity. The most pale skinned were called the Brahmin. These were the warrior-priest class, the top of the social ladder. The Untouchables (or Pariahs) were the racially mixed in the bottom caste. ... As I walked over the ancient road and through the patches of dry weeds toward the temple, I reviewed all that I had read about India and all that I had seen firsthand. I recalled the fact that the highest classes were the lightest-skinned, that nothing was more insulting to an Indian than calling him "black," that "Varna" {caste) is the Indian word for color.The original language of the ancient Aryan invaders, Sanskrit, is an ancient Indo-European language with direct links to every other European language. Ancient Sanskrit literature even has descriptions of Aryan leaders as having light eyes and hair. As I neared the temple, I thought about the splendor that once was and about the dreadful squalor I had witnessed since my arrival in the India of today. ... I noticed that the temple's dome had partially caved-in. Only two walls remained standing. Still closer, I saw thousands of pockmarks eroding the structure. Each of them had once housed a precious stone, but these had long ago been pried loose and picked clean. I wondered if all the monuments of Europe and America would eventually endure the same fate as this one. ... It was at that point that I realized who I am. I am an Aryan — a word that has evolved through the centuries to denote those of our race who are racially aware and racially committed. Before I saw that half-breed little girl in the ruins, I was a racially conscious White person. Afterward I was a White person who had become completely committed to the preservation and evolutionary advancement of his people. Not only was I awakened to the truths of race, I was awakened to the sacred purpose of all those who came before us, and those who will follow us in the unbroken spiral toward the heavens. I had become an Aryan.
David Duke, My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, 1998.
In the current state of knowledge, none of the hypotheses forwarded can be seriously demonstrated. [...] There is in fact no evidence for the gradual progression of an entire material culture from the shores of the Black Sea to those of the Atlantic or the Ganges—unless, of course, we drastically force the data.
Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West
In the days when historians supposed that history had begun with Greece, Europe gladly believed that India had been a hotbed of barbarism until the “Aryan” cousins of the European peoples had migrated from the shores of the Caspian to bring the arts and sciences to a savage and benighted peninsula. Recent researches have marred this comforting picture—as future researches will change the perspective of these pages. In India, as elsewhere, the beginnings of civilization are buried in the earth, and not all the spades of archeology will ever quite exhume them.
Durant, Will (1963). Our Oriental heritage. New York: Simon & Schuster.
At some time in the second millennium BC, probably comparatively early in the millennium, a band or bands of speakers of Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit, entered India over the northwest passes. This is our linguistic doctrine which has been held now for more than a century and a half.
Emeneau, M.B., 1980, Language and linguistic area: essays by Murray B. Emeneau selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil, Stanford University Press, p.85.
We have looked into the pro and contra of some prima facie indications for an OIT of IE expansion. Probably none of these can presently be considered as decisive evidence against the AIT. But at least it has been shown that the linguistic evidence surveyed does not necessitate the AIT either. One after another, the classical proofs of a European origin have been discredited, usually by scholars who had no knowledge of or interest in an alternative Indian homeland theory.
Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.
It is too early to say that linguistics has proven an Indian origin for the IE family. But we can assert with confidence that the oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat and for an Aryan invasion of India is wanting. We have not come across linguistic data which are incompatible with the OIT. In the absence of a final judgment by linguistics, other approaches deserve to be taken more seriously, unhindered and uninhibited by fear of that large-looming but in fact elusive “linguistic evidence for the AIT.”
Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.
We reiterate that there is no indication in the Rigveda of the Arya‘s memory of any ancestral home, and by extension, of migrations. Given the pains taken to create a distinct identity for themselves, it would be surprising if the Aryas neglected such an obvious emotive bond in reinforcing their group cohesion. Thus their silence on the subject of migrations is taken here to indicate that by the time of composition of the Rigveda, any memory of migrations, should they have taken place at all, had been erased from their consciousness.
ERDOSY 1989: Ethnicity in the Rigveda and its Bearing on the Question of Indo- European Origins. Erdosy, George. pp. 35-47 in ―South Asian Studies vol. 5. London 40-41 Quoted in Talageri, S. G. (2008). The Rigveda and the Avesta. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
One thing which keeps on astonishing me in the present debate is the complete lack of doubt in both camps. Personally, I don’t think that either theory, of Aryan invasion and of Aryan indigenousness, can claim to have been "proven" by prevalent standards of proof; even though one of the contenders is getting closer. Indeed, while I have enjoyed pointing out the flaws in the AIT statements of the politicized Indian academic establishment and its American amplifiers, I cannot rule out the possibility that the theory which they are defending may still have its merits."
Koenraad Elst, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, (1999)
A wholly different political element in Prof. Hock's contributions concerns his characterization of the non-invasionist school. He repeatedly identifies it as the “Hindu nationalist” school. But this mistakenly attributes a political identity and motive to a scholarly hypothesis about ancient Indian history. I don't call the AIT party “the European racist school” or the “Dravidian chauvinist school” eventhough those terms do explain the motives behind at least a part of the pro-AIT polemic, past or present.
Elst K. Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate (2007)
Against this background, it is not so strange anymore that Indian Marxists have become zealous defenders of a colonial-originated thesis about ethnic movements of four thousand years ago, simply because that thesis is functioning as the war-horse of the united anti-Hindu forces. The greying Indian Marxists are trying to widen their shrinking base by uniting with forces they would once have denounced as obscurantist and populist-retrograde.
Elst K. Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate (2007)
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several decades. This dominant school of thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu nationalism. On the side of the non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe to grind.
Elst K. Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate (2007)
The shift from India to Europe as the preferred Urheimat was formally due to new linguistic insights.. but it was coincidentally also well-tuned to new political concerns. Apart from rising nationalism which explains the scramble among scholars to grab the Urheimat status for their own country, the main factor was European colonialism, then at its apogee. It seemed natural that the continent whose manifest destiny was the domination of the world, had also brought forth its own proto-historic Indo-European culture and language. Conversely, it seemed illogical that a backward country like India, badly in need of the White Man's civilising mission, could have brought forth the superior European culture.... In the same period, race theories conquered the intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark-haired Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned Indians. The linguistic "aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.
Elst K. The Saffron Swastika (2001), Volume I
If IE is the basis of European identity, one can understand that a European Urheimat for IE would be preferred over an Asian one. Consequently, some of the Nouvelle Droite authors are very attached to the idea of the Aryan Invasion as a necessary implication of the presumed European character and origin of the IE family. .... As a corollary to their Eurocentric view of IE history, Nouvelle Droite authors tend to accept the AIT and, along with it, the view of the caste system as an apartheid system between IE immigrants and Indian natives.... This is the way to remain stuck in Eurocentric theories of bygone days, which is more or less the story of the whole pro-AIT argument.
Elst K. Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, (1999)
The debate on the Aryan Invasion Theory is not logically affected by the political motives of its participants, though these motives are sometimes palpable through the rhetoric used. Mapping these motives as a matter of history of ideas (and not as a way to decide the AIT question itself by means of political association) allows us to point out the following: on the pro-AIT side, justification of European colonialism, illustration of the racist worldview, delegitimation of Hinduism as India’s native religion by missionaries of foreign religions, Indian Marxist attempts to delegitimize Indian nationalism, and several separatisms in India seeking to bolster the case against Indian unity; and on the anti-AIT side, Indian nationalism seeking to make India’s civilisational unity more robust, and to score a point against the aforementioned “anti-national forces”.
Elst K. Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, (1999)
Incorporated in the theme of Aryan whiteness, the AIT became a crown piece in Adolf Hitler’s vision of white supremacy: here was the proof of both white superiority and of the need to preserve the race from admixture with inferior darker races. Had not the white Aryan invaders of India subdued the vastly more numerous brown-skinned natives, and had they not lost their superior white quality by mixing with the natives and becoming more brown themselves? In the Nazi view, the Aryan invaders had retained a relative superiority vis-à-vis the pure black natives by means of the caste system, but had been too slow in instituting this early form of Apartheid, so that their type was fatally contaminated with inferior blood. .... The subjugation of the black natives of India by the white Aryan invaders was, in the Rassenkunde (“racial science”) courses in Nazi schools, the clearest illustration of the superiority of the white and especially the Aryan race.... The “Aryan” theme failed to kindle any sympathy in Hitler for the brown Aryans of India. He spurned the collaboration offer by freedom fighter and leftist Congress leader Subhash Chandra Bose because he preferred India to be under white British domination. And he ordered the extermination of the Gypsies, Indian immigrants into Europe. Nonetheless, anti-Hindu polemicists cleverly exploit the ambiguity of the term “Aryan” to associate Hindus with Hitler. ... To quote Hindus as speaking of the “Aryan race” without explaining the semantic itinerary of the expression is tantamount to manipulating the readership into reading something into the phrase which Arya Samaj spokesmen and Aurobindo never intended. To Hindus, Arya, or “Aryan” in English texts, simply means “Hindu”, nothing more, nothing less.... As for the Nazi connection, let us at any rate be clear about an easily verifiable fact: in so far as the Nazis cared about Indian history, they favoured the AIT.... Indeed, the AIT happens to have the same historical roots as the race theories centred on white superiority which culminated in Nazi racism. in the 19th-century race theories, Indian civilization had to be the work of white people, who, like the modern Europeans, had colonized India by subjugating the dark natives; later, the mixing of the white Aryans (in spite of a belated attempt to preserve their purity through the caste system) with the dark natives caused the decline and “feminization” of the conquering Aryan culture, which invited a new conquest by Europeans taking up the “white man’s burden” of bringing order and enlightenment to the dark-skinned people living in social, intellectual and spiritual darkness. The AIT was an essential part of this view, and Nazism a slight radicalization.
Contemporary Euro-nationalists uphold the pro-invasionist tradition... Certain rightist circles, vaguely known on the Continent as the Nouvelle Droite, devote particular attention to the Indo-European heritage, invariably claiming a European homeland..... This trend has enlisted the contributions of eminent scholars, and their political views need not detract from the validity of their argumentation, but the political dimension is undeniably and explicitly present, e.g. AIT supporters Varenne and Haudry are, or were members of the Scientific Committee of the French nationalist party Front National.
Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.
By showing that the Hindus are mere upstarts and squatters on the land (as they themselves are in America, Australia and other places!), they can set up their own claim. For then neither the Hindus nor the Europeans are indigenous and as to who should possess this land becomes merely a matter of superior might. ... No, the European... will never cease duping us into believing that we have no more right to this land than he has.
Golwalkar, M.S. We, p. 7-12. also in Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". I.166
I have always felt that the idea underlying this theory has a basis other than the purely scientific or historical one.
Ganganath Jha, 1940. Quoted from B.B. Lal in : Indian History and Culture Society., Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (2012). Bias in Indian historiography. 8-9
During Gobineau's lifetime, the old theory of the Asian origin of the European languages and traditions, and of cultural movements from the East to the West, increasingly gave way to speculations on primeval movements from the West to the East, and on Aryan migrations from Europe, specifically Northern Europe, or even the North Pole, to India. According to these speculations, the European or Northern invaders gave their superior culture to the Indians and then lost their superiority through mixing with the local inhabitants and perished in a climate for which they were not suited. In 1903, E. de Michelis summarized this view by stating that Asia, and India in particular, was not the 'cradle', but the 'grave of the Aryans'.
Wilhelm Halbfass quoted in Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines
We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry.
“Wir wissen, dass die Hindu in Indien ein Volk sind, gemischt aus den hochstehenden arischen Einwanderern und der dunkelschwarzen Urbevölkerung, und dass dieses Volk heute die folgen trägt; denn es ist auch das Sklavenvolk einer Rasse, die uns in vielen Punkten nahezu als zweite Judenheit erscheinen darf.”
Adolph Hitler. Jäckel & Kuhn 1980:195, quoting Hitler 1920, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
Hitler, Adolf, 1920: Warum sind wir Antisemiten?, in Jäckel & Kuhn 1980, p.184-204. Jäckel, Eberhard, and Kuhn, Axel, eds., 1980: Hitlers sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart
"The claim that the āryas are indigenous to India can therefore be reconciled with the relationship of Indo-Aryan to the rest of Indo-European only under one of two hypotheses: Either the other Indo-European languages are descended from the earliest Indo-Aryan, identical or at least close to Vedic Sanskrit, or Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the ancestor of all the Indo-European languages, was spoken in India and (the speakers of) all the Indo-European languages other than Sanskrit/Indo-Aryan migrated out of India. For convenience, let us call the first alternative the ‘Sanskrit-origin’ hypothesis, and the second one, the ‘PIE-in-India’ hypothesis" “….the ‘Sanskrit-origin’ hypothesis runs into insurmountable difficulties, due to the irreversible nature of relevant linguistic changes [….but….] the likelihood of the ‘PIE-in-India’ hypothesis cannot be assessed on the basis of similar robust evidence” .... “The ‘PIE-in-India’ hypothesis is not as easily refuted as the ‘Sanskrit-origin’ hypothesis, since it is not based on ‘hard-core’ linguistic evidence, such as sound changes, which can be subjected to critical and definitive analysis. Its cogency can be assessed only in terms of circumstantial arguments, especially arguments based on plausibility and simplicity”
Hans Hock. HOCK 1999a: “Out of India? The linguistic evidence”, p.1-18 in “Aryan and non-Aryan in South Asia: evidence, interpretation, and ideology” 1999. (Proceedings of the International Seminar on Aryan and non-Aryan in South Asia, Univ. of Michigan, October 1996) Quoted in [2][3]
This [Aryan invasion] theory of Indian civilization is perhaps one of the most perduring and insidious themes in the historiography and archaeology of South Asia, despite accumulating evidence to the contrary.
Peter G Johansen: ‘ (Johansen 2003, p. 195). Johansen PG 2003 Recasting the foundations: new approaches to regional understandings of South Asian archaeology and the problem of culture history. Asian Perspect. 42 193–206
in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.
The invading Aryans were more advanced and referred to the conquered Indians as “Dasyu” — the “dark ones” or slaves. Indo-Aryan poetry (the Rigveda ) is full of stories of war against the Dasyu, and reflects the stark racial divisions between the conquering Aryans and the conquered Indians. The Rigveda, the original holy book of the Aryan conquerors of India, contains a great many references to the race of the conquerors and the conquered. According to this book, the leader of the Aryan invasion was one Indra, and his role in “slaying the Dasyus” (the Negroids in India) is a prominent theme.
Arthur Kemp, March of the Titans: A History of the White Race, 1999.
"This putative “Aryan invasion” was dated ca. 1500 bce, and the composition of the hymns of the Ṛgveda was fixed between 1400 and 1200 bce. The Aryan invasion theory was conceived on pure speculation on the basis of comparative philology, without any archaeological or literary evidence to support it. It was resisted as unfounded by some scholars from the very beginning. In the light of recent archaeological finds, it has become less and less tenable. Nevertheless, the Aryan invasion theory, recently downgraded to an Aryan migration theory, is still widely defended and forms part of many standard histories of Hinduism."
Klaus Klostermaier, a Western academic himself had this to say in his book - A Survey of Hinduism.
In other words, the Aryans subordinated the dasas, converted them and imposed their language in a peaceful way. How were they able to do this? What made the indigenous population of India take over an alien language, religion and social structure that made them inferior? So far, I have encountered only two scholars who have addressed this question. The first is Koenraad Elst, who answers the question negatively by saying that they could not have managed to impose their culture, language, religion and social structure on the indigenous population without conquest. Even though the different versions of the Aryan migration theories speak of an immigration, he argues, they nevertheless imply an invasion or at least the use of military force. In order to acquire a position in which they could impose their language and culture on an existing population, they would first need to become the ruling class and if they had to do this peacefully they would first have needed to become proficient in the existing languages in India, which did not happen according to the AMT. “So how”, he asks, “could these Aryan immigrants first peacefully integrate into Harappan or post-Harappan society yet preserve their language and later even impose it on their host society? Neither their numbers, relative to the very numerous natives, nor their cultural level, as illiterate cowherds relative to a literate civilization, gave them much of an edge over the natives.” According to him, “the only plausible way for them to wrest power from the natives must have been through their military superiority, tried and tested in the process of an actual conquest” (Elst 2005, 235). But then, it has been shown that an invasion could not have taken place. For him, this inconsistency is one of the reasons to reject both the AIT and the AMT and to argue that it is more plausible that the Aryans were indigenous to India.
M. Keppens, in: Martin Fárek, Dunkin Jalki, Sufiya Pathan, Prakash Shah (eds.) - Western Foundations of the Caste System-Springer International Publishing (2017) 233-4
To be sure, neither Jones nor anyone else was wrong to perceive strong and systematic similarities among Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the rest. The question is what one makes of these similarities, and one steps onto a slippery slope whenever analysis moves from the descriptive to the historic plane of linguistics. In specific, reconstructing a "protolanguage" is an exercise that invites one to imagine speakers of that protolanguage, a community of such people, then a place for that community, a time in history, distinguishing characteristics, and a set of contrastive relations with other protocommunities where other protolanguages were spoken. For all of this, need it be said, there is no sound evidentiary warrant.
Lincoln, B. (1999). Theorizing myth: Narrative, ideology, and scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.95
Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?... Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?… Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework... Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED. The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing `pure' civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but `morally corrupt') kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history. (...) Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances, the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadors were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho.
Sir Edmund Leach. "Aryan invasions over four millennia. In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 227-245.
There is no evidence to show that these Vedic Aryans were foreigners or that they migrated into Sapta-Sindhu within traditional memory... The Vedic literature is intensively Indian in tradition, technique and outlook. ... So far as is known, none of the Sanskrit books, not even the most ancient, contains any distinct reference or allusion to the foreign origin of the Indians. ... Migrating races look back to the land of their origin for centuries.... The Vedic Aryans... must have lived in the Sapta-Sindhu so many centuries before the Vedic period, that they had lost all memory of an original home.
K.M. Munshi, Quoted from B.B. Lal in : Indian History and Culture Society., Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (2012). Bias in Indian historiography. 9
In contrast to all this, Devendraswarup, (1993), touches on very different Christian appropriations of the work of the philologists and the discourse of Aryanism: "It seems that missionary scholars in India had already perceived the potential of the science of comparative philology in uprooting the hold of the Brahmins" (32). ...Other missionaries found it preferable to target the non-Aryan identity of segments of the Indian populace rather than play up the Aryan commonalty. ... Devendraswarup finds the scholarly work of missionary intellectuals such as the Reverend John James Muir and the Reverend John Stevenson readily presenting the Brahmanas as foreigners who had foisted their Vedic language and texts onto the aboriginals of India. The idea in this case was to create a sense of alienation from Brahmanical religion among the lower castes, thereby preparing them for exposure and conversion to Christianity. Thus Wilson, in a letter to his parents, noted that "the Aryan tribes in conquering India, urged by the Brahmanas, made war against the Turanian demon worship. . . . It is among the Turanian races, . . . which have no organized priest-hood and bewitching literature, that the converts to Christianity are most numerous" (quoted in Devendraswarup 1993, 35).
Devendraswarup quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1
“The Americans, English, Dutch and the Portuguese got hold of the poor Africans, and made them work hard while they lived, and their children of mixed birth were born in slavery and kept in that condition for a long period. From that wonderful example, the mind jumps back several thousand years, and fancies that the same thing happened here, and our archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came from - the Lord knows where. According to some, they came from Central Thibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia… Of late, there was an attempt being made to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our Scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends.”
Swami Vivekananda. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
“And what your European Pandits say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign land, snatching away the lands of the aborigines and settling in India by exterminating them, is all pure nonsense, foolish talk! Strange, that our Indian scholars, too, say amen to them: and all these monstrous lies are being taught to our boys! This is very bad indeed… In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild aborigines? What do you gain by talking such wild nonsense?”
Swami Vivekananda Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
[In spite of the impression created in popular literature, archaeology has by no means demonstrated that there was an Aryan immigration into India. Even the new levels in accuracy do not affect the following status quaestionis of the Aryan Invasion theory:] “The question of Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent of India can, at best, be described as enigmatic.”
David G. Zanotti: “Another Aspect of the Indo-European Question: a Response to P. Bosch Gimpera”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1975/3, p.255-270, spec. p.260., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
Boivin sums up the situation thus: ‘Archaeologists in particular have thus very much moved away from migrationist models, including the idea of Indo-Aryan invasions, as an explanation for cultural change in South Asia. And those scholars, both archaeological and otherwise, who continue to embrace an Indo-Aryan migration paradigm now generally present a very different model that sees the language change as resulting more from social processes than any substantial population movements’ (Boivin 2007: 349).
Boivin N 2007 Anthropological, historical, archaeological and genetic perspectives on the origins of caste in south Asia; in The evolution and history of human populations in south Asia: inter- disciplinary studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, linguistics and genetics (eds) MD Petraglia and B Allchin (Dordrecht: Springer) pp 341–361
in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.
This continuum of the archaeological record stretches from the seventh millennium B.C.E. right down through the Early, Mature, Late, and Post-Harappan periods. Of course, as in any cultural area over the course of time, there are regional variations and transformations, but no sudden interruptions or abrupt innovations that might alert archaeologists to an intrusive ethnic group: "There were no invasions from central or western South Asia. Rather there were several internal cultural adjustments reflecting altered ecological, social and economic conditions affecting northwestern and north-central South Asia" (Shaffer 1986, 230). More than everything else, this lack of cultural discontinuity has caused an ever-increasing number of South Asian archaeologists to question: Where are the supposedly invading Aryans in the archaeological record?
in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9
A primary reason that Indian archaeologists have become disillusioned with the whole enterprise of the Indo-Aryans is because they have been offered, and initially accepted, a progression of theories attempting to archaeologically locate the Indo-Aryans on the grounds of the philological axiom that their nature was intrusive. These theories have successively proved to be wrong or questionable. The course of scholarship in the last century has evolved from images of blond, soma-belching, Germanic supermen "riding their chariots, hooting and tooting their trumpets" as they trampled down the inferior aboriginal Dasa (Singh 1995, 56),58 through speakers of an Indo-Aryan language destroying the highly advanced civilization of the superior Dasa; to discrete trickles of Indo- Aryan speakers possibly coexisting in a neighborly fashion in the cities of the Indus Valley with the hospitable Dasa. As a result many archaeologists have become frustrated with the whole Aryan-locating enterprise and jettisoned the linguistic claims altogether. Failure to find any tangible evidence whatsoever of the Aryans has resulted in the present trend among many South Asian archaeologists, which is toward considering the indigenousness of both the Indo-Aryans and the Dasa, period. As we saw in the greater Indo- European problem among Western scholars, in India, too, there is a chasm between many archaeologists and Western historical linguists, particularly since there are so few historical linguists in India itself and so little contact with linguistic theories originating in the West. Accordingly, the debate in India has been primarily conducted among archaeologists, with a growing number rejecting the whole idea of anything but indigenous origins for the various developments of the protohistoric archaeological record.
in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9
Up until the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization in 1922, images of virile, blond, northern tribes swooping across the mountain passes on chariots and overpowering the primitive and ill-equipped natives they found on their way were presented as the standard version of the early history of the subcontinent.
in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9
Up to now, Aryans have eluded every archaeological definition. There is so far no type of artifacts or ceramics that causes their discoverer to declare, ‗The Aryans came here. Here is a typically Aryan sword or goblet!
Jean-Marie Casal, 1969. Casal, La Civilisation de l’Indus et ses énigmes, p. 205. Casal, J.-M. La Civilisation de l’Indus et ses énigmes, Paris, 1969.
The existence of a group of people called Indo-Europeans or Vedic Aryans has achieved the status of received wisdom—it has been repeated so often that it is now accepted fact, despite there being no satisfactory archaeological evidence whatsoever to support the presence of an incoming group of such numbers as historical and archaeological explanations require.
Coningham and Young, The Archaeology of South Asia, p. 85. Coningham, R. and R. Young. The Archaeology of South Asia: From the Indus to Asoka, c. 6500 BCE–200 CE, Cambridge, 2015.
Dilip Chakrabarti's comments (1986) are of relevance here: "Archaeology must take the entire basic framework of the Aryan model into consideration. It should not be a question of underlining a particular set of archaeological data and arguing that these data conform to a particular section of the Vedic literary corpus without at all trying to determine how this hypothesis will affect the other sets of the contemporary archaeological data and the other sections of the Vedic literary corpus" (74).
in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10
R. Dyson (1993) remarks, in his discussion of changes taking place in the field, that the invasion thesis "becomes a paradigm of lim- ited usefulness" (576). He proposes that "by freeing themselves from this hypothesis drawn from earlier linguistic studies, archaeologists may now focus their attention on the archaeological evidence in its own terms" (576). Commenting on the "continuing lack of agreement over the criteria by which the presence of the Indo-Aryans can be demonstrated," he outlines the alternative paradigm taking shape in the archaeology of the whole region I have been discussing: "The suggestion of an indigenous Indo-Aryan population going far back into pre-history in Northeastern Iran and nearby Turkmenia is now taken quite seriously." With this trend in mind, he finds it interesting that the discussion between contributors of Possehl's Harappan Civilization "indicated a parallel trend" (577).
Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 11
Where are the burned fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armour, the smashed chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders?... Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan invasion.
George F. Dales, “The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-daro” in Expedition (Pennsylvania University, 1964), vol. VI, p. 36-43.
quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009
The theory of large-scale invasion by Aryans is now discounted as there is no evidence to support it.
M. K. Dhavalikar, Indian Protohistory (New Delhi: Books & Books, 1997), p. 299.
quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009
George Dales (1964) pointed out the obvious: "Where are the burned for- tresses, the arrowheads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite the extensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed conquest and destruction on the scale of the Aryan invasion" (38).
in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 9
Erdosy (1995a), who is prepared to find "some support" for small-scale migrations associated with the intrusive BMAC elements noted earlier, nonetheless states: "Sev- eral cultural traits with good Vedic and Avestan parallels have been found widely dis- tributed between the southern Urals, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. However, even allowing for the uncertain chronology of Central Asian sites, few of these traits show the northwest-southeast gradient in chronology predicted by our linguistic models." Radier, in the manner of other traits commonly associated with the "Aryans" within South Asia, "diey originate in different places at different times and circulate widely, undoubtedly through the extensive interaction networks built up in the mid-3rd to early 2nd millennia B.C." The main point is that "it is impossible, thus, to regard the widespread distribution of certain beliefs and rituals, which came to be adopted by Indo-Iranian speakers, as evidence of population movements" (12).
Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 11
[the idea of an Aryan invasion of India in the second millennium BCE] has recently been challenged by archaeologists, who ― along with linguists ― are best qualified to evaluate its validity. Lack of convincing material (or osteological) traces left behind by the incoming Indo-Aryan speakers, the possibility of explaining cultural change without reference to external factors and ― above all ― an altered world-view (Shaffer 1984) have all contributed to a questioning of assumptions long taken for granted and buttressed by the accumulated weight of two centuries of scholarship.... [the perspective offered by archaeology], "that of material culture […] is in direct conflict with the findings of the other discipline claiming a key to the solution of the ‘Aryan Problem’, linguistics" ...Archaeologists and anthropologists... [like] Jim G. Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein, who “stress the indigenous development of South Asian civilization from the Neolithic onwards, and downplay the role of language in the formation of (pre-modern) ethnic identities”; J. Mark Kenoyer, who “stresses that the cultural history of South Asia in the 2nd millinnium B.C. may be explained without reference to external agents”, and Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, who concludes “that while discontinuities in physical types have certainly been found in South Asia, they are dated to the 5th/4th, and to the 1st millennium BC, respectively, too early and too late to have any connection with ‘Aryans’.”
George Erdosy, Preface, The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture and Ethnicity edited by George Erdosy, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin-New York, 1995.
The Aryan invasion of India has somehow gone missing from the archaeological record.
Koenraad Elst, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, (1999)
Many Indian archaeologists have abandoned the AIT and turned against it because after 150 years of being the official and well-funded theory it has still not been corroborated by any archaeological proof... So that is what an Aryan invasion looks like. And that precisely is what is totally missing in the archaeological record of India. As robustly as the Aryan invasion of Europe has been proven, as conspicuously absent is the evidence for an Aryan invasion of India... At a conference where India’s top archaeologists announce one after another that the excavations in the sites where they work, keep on throwing up more evidence of continuity and a glaring absence of signs of an invasion, is can safely be said that the existing invasionist hypothesis has been rendered highly improbable... So: as of 2011, after many decades of being the official and much-funded hypothesis, the Aryan Invasion Theory has still not been confirmed by even a single piece of archaeological evidence.
Elst, K. Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins (2019)
It is against the stereotype of overbearing macho invaders, but the Aryans secretively stole their way into India, careful not to leave any traces.
Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.
These trendy historians feel that a bloody military invasion is too much part of the colonial worldview and is moreover unnecessary to explain a migration; or they are troubled by the dramatic invasion scenario’s need of archaeological attestation (cfr. Europe, where a military-style Aryan invasion from the steppes to the Atlantic in the -3rd millennium has been amply attested, see Mandal 2018). Since this evidence fails to show up, they seek a less eventful scenario that could arguably have taken place underneath the archaeological radar.
Elst, K. An Appraisal of the Linguistic Evidence in Relation to the Aryan Homeland Issue (ICHR Conference, IGNCA Delhi, March 2018)
In the Indian subcontinent, the archaeological assemblages considered to reflect the coming of the Aryans by various authors (PGW, Gandhara Grave, Cemetery H, Jhukar, OCP, Pirak etc.) do not provide any stable or consistent picture.
Francfort, The Archaeology of Protohistoric Central Asia,‘ p. 154. Francfort, H.-P. The Archaeology of Protohistoric Central Asia and the Problems of Identifying Indo-European and Uralic-Speaking Populations,‘ in Christian Carpelan, et al., eds, Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, Helsinki, 2001, pp. 151–168.
These conclusions, still often ignored, destroy the historical reconstructions which, relying on texts alone, see Central Asian tribes crossing the mountains on only two occasions, the Indo-Aryans between c. 1800 and c.1400 BCE and the Sakas in the 2nd century. The chronological argument (around 1800, or around 1400?) has no more weight because it has become circular: in fact, the chronological specifications provided by the texts are imprecise, which is not abnormal, and it becomes absurd in these conditions to link these specifications to any archaeological culture because there always exists an archaeological culture in a given place and time to respond to the demand for texts that are not inclined to be interested in the materiality of things.
p. 264. Henri-Paul Francfort. La civilisation de l'Oxus et les Indo-Iraniens et Indo-Aryens en Asie centrale. 2005, in: G. Fussman, J. Kellens, H.-P. Francfort, X. Tremblay, Aryas, Ariens et Iraniens en Asie centrale
Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 19th century, Westerners have agreed to place the habitat of the p-i-e-speaking people(s) in central or eastern Europe, more rarely in Scandinavia, in any case not in Iran, nor in India... European historians, who all considered it proven that the existence of languages of i-e origin in India resulted from a movement of peoples from the North, could be content to draw large arrows on the maps representing the archaeologically empty territories where those -these had necessarily passed before crossing the Hindu-Kush barrier and penetrating into North-West India. It now appears that these territories were populated, urbanized and linked together by a complex network of commercial and cultural relations. Archaeologists then find themselves faced with the classic problem of having to correlate a material culture and a language.
p. 787, 790. Fussman G. Entre fantasmes, science et politique. L’entrée des Āryas en Inde. Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 2003;58(4):779-813.
Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research ... enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups.
quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009
Jean-François Jarrige, “Du néolithique à la civilisation de l’Inde ancienne” (Paris: Arts Asiatiques,vol. L-1995), p.24, 21
To take a single example here, some scholars decided that the Pirak culture, which emerged around 1800 BCE in the plains of Baluchistan, is the best representative of the Aryan intrusion. However, Jarrige, who directed excavations in the region, found that none of the transformations happening there in the early second millennium BCE, including the introduction of summer crops such as rice and millets (especially sorghum or jowar, in addition to the traditional winter crops of wheat and barley), ‘can be explained in the context of invasions of semi-nomadic peoples coming from the [Central Asian] steppes. … How could this series of transformations be seriously attributed to Indo-Aryan invaders? … Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research … enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups’ (Jarrige 1995, pp. 24, 21). Regrettably, such well-informed views have been brushed aside in the desperate but vain search for material traces of those ‘Aryan groups’.
Jarrige J-F 1995 Du néolithique à la civilisation de l’Inde ancienne. Arts Asiatiques L 5–29
in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.
Jarrige's study of continuity and change concludes that the people living in the Kachi plain during the second millennium B.C.E. undoubtedly experienced the major economic transformations of the time yet maintained significant elements of cultural continuity and conservatism from the early third millennium B.C.E. and earlier. He underscores the continuity aspect of the area by comparing the ancient ruins of residential buildings from the excavations at Pirak with the very recent ruins of a house deserted by Hindus at partition in the same district. The resemblance is striking, while the samples of cooking pots between the two periods seem almost identical. Regarding the transformations, he doubts whether every newly attested item in the Kachi archaeological record of the second millennium B.C.E. could be attributed to an influx of new peoples, "since the processes . . . are too complex to be attributed to the arrival of invaders who at the same time would have had to have introduced rice from the Ganges, sorghum from the Arabian Gulf, and camels and horses from Central Asia" (Jarrige 1983, 56).
Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press.
Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology, subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people. For many years, the ‘invasions’ or ‘migrations’ of these Indo-Aryan-speaking Vedic/Aryan tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the Ganga-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an uncritical reading of Vedic texts...
JM Kenoyer, quoted In The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, Edwin Bryant, 2001,p.190
There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 B.C. and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 B.C.” (Kenoyer 1998: 174)
JM Kenoyer, in The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History ed. Bryant E., L Patton
There is no case of the Aryan migration from West Asia to India in the first part of the second millennium B.C. If there is any case, the case is that of economic ties.
(Kesarwani 1982, 312). Kesarwani, Arun. 1 982. "History and Archaeology of Ethnic Movement during the Second Millennium B.C. from the Caspian Sea to the Indus Basin." in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 11
Lamberg-Karlovsky (1993) comments on the extraordinary complexity and considerable debate within the archaeological litera- ture on the issue of external versus internal "causal premises" for the origin of the Bactrian Bronze Age: "It must be admitted that within recent years there has been a penchant to emphasize the indigenous nature of social processes. While vaguely admitting to some degree of interaction archaeologists have emphasized the autochthonous nature of virtu- ally every archaeological district" (34).
Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 11
However, while Lyonnet (1994), for example, acknowledges that "both archaeologists and linguists have made attempts to find [the Indo-Aryans and Iranians] in Central Asia on the basis of bodi the precisions of the Rgveda and the Avesta, and archaeological data," she echoes the opinion of most archaeologists that none of these attempts "are entirely satisfactory either chronologically, linguistically or archaeologically" (425).
Lyonnet (1994) in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10
In any event, all three models [Anatolian Neolithic, Near Eastern, Pontic-Caspian] require some form of major language shift despite there being no credible archaeological evidence to demonstrate, through elite dominance or any other mechanism, the type of language shift required to explain, for example, the arrival and dominance of the Indo-Aryans in India.
JP Mallory, Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands, 2013, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan.
Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, p. 195
quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009
“[This] episode of elite dominance which brought the indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family to India (…) may have been as early as the floruit of the Indus civilization (…)”
C. Renfrew: “Before Babel: Speculations on the Origins of Linguistic Diversity”, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1 (1), p.3-23, spec. p.14., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
There is no indication of any invasion of Indus towns nor is any artefact attributable to the so-called ‘invaders’.
S.R. Rao, Foreword to The Aryan Invasion Theory – A Reappraisalby Shrikant Talageri, p.vi.
quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009
The Indo-Aryan invasion(s) as an academic concept in 18th- and 19th-century Europe reflected the cultural milieu of that period. Linguistic data were used to validate the concept that in turn was used to interpret archaeological and anthropological data.What was theory became unquestioned fact that was used to interpret and organise subsequent data. It is time to end the "linguistic tyranny" that has prescribed interpretative frameworks of pre- and proto-historic cultural development in South Asia.
Jim Shaffer, 1984, ‘The Indo-Aryan Invasions: Cultural Myth and Archaeological Reality’ in Lukacs JR (ed) The People of South Asia: the Biological Anthropology of India, Pakistan and Nepal, Phenum, NY. p.88.
‘A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record.‘
Shaffer (1999:245), quoted in The Languages of Harappa. Witzel, Michael. Feb. 17, 2000.
A few scholars have proposed that there is nothing in the “literature” firmly placing the Indo-Aryans . . . outside of South Asia, and now archaeological record is confirming this. . . . As data accumulate to support cultural continuity in South Asian prehistoric and historic periods, a considerable restructuring of existing interpretive paradigms must take place. We reject most strongly the simplistic historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century, that continue to be imposed on South Asian cultural history. These still prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism and antisemitism.
Jim Shaffer, (1999: 256) in The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History ed. Bryant E., L Patton
The so-called ‘invasion’ of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology.
Longer quote : If the so-called “invasion” of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology, it must be stressed that such movements rarely leave clear physical traces.
Michael Witzel (2006): “Rama’s Realm: Indocentric Rewritings of Early South Asian History”, in Garrett Fagan (ed.), Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, London - New York, Routledge. 213
So far as the Rig Veda is concerned, there is not a particle of evidence suggesting the invasion of India by the Aryans from outside India... So far as the testimony of the Vedic literature is concerned, it is against the theory that the original home of the Aryans was outside India.
B.R. Ambedkar Who were the Shudras, 1946
“whether the whole story of an Aryan invasion through the Punjab is not a myth of the philologists.”
Sri Aurobindo. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
In his Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo called on Indians not to be "haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on the modern mind." "The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of such an invasion..."
"The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion"
(Aurobindo 1971, 24); in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13
The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion. The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built seems on the mass of evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.
Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda (1971), quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2
Direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking, and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India.
A.L. Basham, Oxford History of India, [5] quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)
“The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically but it is nevertheless established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology.”
Burrow [1975:21], quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.
The race of India branched out and multiplied into that of the great Indo-European family. . . . The Aryans, at a period as yet undetermined, advanced towards and invaded the countries to the west and north- west of India, [and] conquered the various tribes who occupied the land... They must have imposed their religion, institutions, and language, which later obliterated nearly all the traces of the former non-Aryan language, or languages, of the conquered tribes.
Curzon A., quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 1
Is it legitimate . . . to infer that because the Aryans early spread to the South . . . and extended themselves over the peninsula, they also originally invaded, from some unknown region and conquered India itself? If so, the same argument might be applied to the origin and spread of the Romans, who might be presumed to have invaded Italy from some external unknown region, because they early spread their conquests to the south. . . . But we know from authentic history that the Romans arose from one city and region in Italy: that . . . they gradually extended themselves over and subjugated those territories which subsequently formed one vast empire. (189)
A. Curzon (1855) quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 3 Curzon, A. 1855. "On the Original Extension of the Sanskrit Language over Certain Portions of Asia and Europe." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 16:172-201. [6]
"No Sanskrit book or history records that the Aryas came here from Iran. . . . How then can the writings of foreigners be worth believing in the teeth of this testimony?"
(Dayananda, Sarasvati 1988 220); in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13
The notion that the Aryans had come from outside was unknown to the indigenous oral and scriptural traditions, and no traces of any foreign memories have been found in spite of a determined search. At the textual level too, the much-sought-for evidence of any Aryan invasion (or “infiltration”, or “immigration”) remains unfindable.
Elst, K. Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins (2019)
The Iranians had retained a distinct memory of the Indo-Iranian common home in their mythology but the Indo-Aryans... have nothing to say on the point. [... There is a ] distinctively Indian Rigvedic culture... a distinct product of the Indian soil.
BK Ghosh, in : The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. , quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) [7] quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)
The Aryas do not refer to any foreign country as their original home, do not refer to themselves as coming from beyond India, do not name any place in India after the names of places in their original land as conquerors and colonizers always do, but speak of them- selves exactly as sons of the soil would do. If they had been foreign invaders, it would have been humanly impossible for all memory of such invasion to have been utterly obliterated from memory in such a short time as represents the differences between the Vedic and Avestan dialects. (79-80)
Srinivas lyengar in 1914 quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 3
‘Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European’ (Kazanas 2015:43).
quoted in Elst, K. An Appraisal of the Linguistic Evidence in Relation to the Aryan Homeland Issue (ICHR Conference, IGNCA Delhi, March 2018)
“it really cannot be proved that the Vedic Aryans retained any memory of their extra-Indian associations”.
The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
The scene of traditional history opens in India [and it comprises] the whole of Northern India extending in the east upto Orissa... [There is a] total absence of extraterritorial memory in the Rig Veda... It really cannot be proved that the Vedic Aryans retained any memory of their extra-Indian associations.
A.D. Pusalker, in : The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. I: The Vedic Age edited by R.C. Majumdar, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan Publications, Mumbai, 6th edition 1996. , quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993) . quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993), 51, 180.
Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aila or Aryan invasion of India from Afghanistan, nor of any gradual advance from thence eastwards.
Ancient Indian Historical Tradition by F.E. Pargiter, Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi-Varanasi-Patna, 1962. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
When Wheeler speaks of “the Aryan invasion of the land of the seven rivers, the Punjab”, he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the seven rivers, there is nothing in them that to me implies invasion... Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization.
Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, pp 188 ff. also quoted in The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History ed. Bryant E., L Patton
We may notice a greater acquaintance with Central and Eastern India in the latter [texts], showing perhaps the shift of the seat of Vedic Civilization more inland. But such a shift would be a matter of internal history and could have no bearing on the question of the Rigvedics hailing in 1500 B.C. from beyond the Afghanistan-Punjab complex.
(Sethna 1992, 14).quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 3
No tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India.
The Oxford History of India by Vincent A. Smith, edited by Percival Spear, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 3rd edition 1970. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
I have consulted during the last ten years or so, a large number of Veda scholars of international repute such as.... and thy affirmed that there is not, in the hymns, any direct or indirect memory of a pre-Indian home in the minds of the authors!... But it is certain that by the time the hymns were composed they had lost all memory of ever having lived outside India (including eastern Afghanistan). A people who invented.... could not have in a few hundred years forgotten their earlier home.
KC Verma, , quoted in Devahuti, D., & Indian History and Culture Society. (1980). Bias in Indian historiography. Delhi: D.K. Publications. p. 50-51
"And what your European pundits say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign land . . . this I say to you—to our pundits— . . . 'You are learned men, hunt up your old books and scriptures, please, and draw your own conclusions'"
(Vivekananda 1 970-73, 534-535). in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 13
Then there is the other idea that the Shudra caste are surely the aborigines. What are they? They are slaves. They say history repeats itself. The Americans, English, Dutch, and the Portuguese got hold of the poor Africans and made them work hard while they lived, and their children of mixed birth were born in slavery and kept in that condition for a long period. From that wonderful example, the mind jumps back several thousand years and fancies that the same thing happened here, and our archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryan came from - the Lord knows where. According to some, they came from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who think that the Aryans were all red-haired. Others, according to their idea, think that they were all black-haired. If the writer happens to be a black-haired man, the Aryans were all black-haired. Of late, there was an attempt made to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryan ever came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends.
And what your European Pundits say about the Aryan's swooping down from some foreign land, snatching away the lands of the aborigines and settling in India by exterminating them, is all pure nonsense, foolish talk! Strange, that our Indian scholars, too, say amen to them; and all these monstrous lies are being taught to our boys!
Whenever the Europeans find an opportunity, they exterminate the aborigines and settle down in ease and comfort on their lands; and therefore they think the Aryans must have done the same! The Westerners would be considered wretched vagabonds if they lived in their native homes depending wholly on their own internal resources, and so they have to run wildly about the world seeking how they can feed upon the fat of the land of others by spoliation and slaughter; and therefore they conclude the Aryans must have done the same! But where is your proof? Guess-work? Then keep your fanciful guesses to yourselves!
I am an ignoramus myself; I do not pretend to any scholarship; but with the little that I understand, I strongly protested against these ideas at the Paris Congress. I have been talking with the Indian and European savants on the subject, and hope to raise many objections to this theory in detail, when time permits. And this I say to you — to our Pundits — also, "You are learned men, hunt up your old books and scriptures, please, and draw your own conclusions."
quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2
In what Veda, in what Sukta, do you find that the Aryans came into India from a foreign country? Where do you get the idea that they slaughtered the wild aborigines? What do you gain by talking such nonsense? Vain has been your study of the Ramayana; why manufacture a big fine story out of it?
_by_the_Suffrage_Atelier.jpg)
.jpg)
_(Renfrew_cropped).jpg)
