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Indigenous Aryan

There is a lot of controversy concerning the category of people known as “Indo-Aryans” and their origin. Around 1500 BC, invaders called Aryans came to northern India. Since the 1800s it was believed that about this same time, tribes of people called Aryans began to move into the Indus Valley. These Aryan people came from the area around the Caspian and Black Seas. The recent archeological proofs are negating the Aryan invasion theory. The new theory suggests Aryans were not the outsiders.

The theory that the Punjab was the cradle of the Aryan race was propounded by Mr. A. Curzon in 1854 on the basis of some rather crude linguistic speculations; but it met with no acceptance and the opinion of European soholars from Von Schlegel was unanimous in favor of the foreign origin of the IndoAryans. The arguments appealed to are mainly philological. The sixteenth volume, part i., of the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," included an article under the following title: "On the Original Extension of the Sanskrit Language over certain Portions of Asia and Europe under the ancient Aryans, Indians, or Hindus of India Proper" by A. Curzon, Esq. He concluded that " ... there is no sufficient foundation for the hypothesis that the ancient Aryans, Indians, or Hindus, entered India Proper from some external region. On the contrary, the facts .. point to the conclusion that the rise, progress, advance in the arts and civilization of this remarkable people are the growth of their own land."

Curzon maintained that India was the original country of the Arian family, from which its different branches emigrated to the north-west and in other directions. The opinion that the Arians are a people of an origin foreign to the soil of India, which they are presumed to have invaded and conquered, imposing their religion and institutions on the so-called aborigines, was rejected by him as one founded on very insufficient data, and as resting on no well-established historical grounds. He argued that it was a course opposed to the evidence of facts based on the results of comparative philology to maintain that the barbarous aboriginal tribes of India, destitute of written records, traditional religious system, or well-defined institutions, can be more ancient than the Arian-Hindus, the possessors of an early civilisation. These rude tribes may, in his opinion, have sprung from some of the barbaric hordes, who, under the name of Sakas, Hunas, &C. are mentioned by Sanskrit writers as having invaded India, and who, after their defeat, may have taken refuge in the hills and forests of Hindusthan.

Reviewing the different possible suppositions as to the way in which the Arians may have entered India, Curzon inferred that they could not have entered from the west, because it is clear that the people who lived in that direction were descended from these very Arians of India, such descent being proved by the fact that the oldest forms of their language have been derived from the Sanskrit (to which they stand in a relation analogous to that in which the Pali and Prakrit stand); and by the circumstance that a portion of their mythology is borrowed from that of the IndoArians. Nor could the Arians, in his opinion, have entered India from the north or north-west, because there was no proof from history or philology that there existed any civilised nation with a language and religion resembling theirs which could have issued from either of those quarters at that early period and have created the Indo-Arian civilisation. It was equally impossible that the Arians could have arrived in India from the east, as the only people who occupied the countries lying in that direction (the Chinese) are quite different in respect of language, religion, and customs from the Indians, and have no genealogical relations with them.

In like manner Curzon inferred the Indians could not have issued from the table-land of Tibet in the north-east, as independently of the great physical barrier of the Himalaya, the same ethnical difficulty applies to this hypothesis as to that of their Chinese origin. And the Indians cannot be of Semitic or Egyptian descent, because the Sanskrit contains no words of Semitic origin and differs totally in structure from the Semitic dialects, with which on the contrary the language of Egypt appears, rather, to exhibit an affinity. And "no monuments, no records, no tradition of the Arians having ever originally occupied, as Arians, any other seat than the plains to the south-west of the Himalayan chain, bounded by the two seas denned by Manu (memorials such as exist in the histories of other nations who are known to have migrated from their primitive abodes), can be found in India." Curzon regarded as illogical the inference, that because the Arians spread at an early period to the south of India, as they did also to the west and north-west, they must have originally issued from some unknown region to invade and conquer India itself.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain could write as late as 1911 that "Far away in Asia, behind the great mountain fastnesses of India, in times so remote that even tradition and fable are silent about them, there dwelt a race of white men. They were herdsmen, shepherds, tillers of the soil, poets and thinkers. They were called Aryas—noblemen or householders—and from them are descended the dominant caste of India, the Persians, and the great nations of Europe. The history of the Aryan migrations, their dates, their causes, is lost in the clouds of a mysterious past. All that we know is that there were at least three great wanderings: two southward to India and Persia, one, or perhaps several, across the great Asiatic continent to Europe.... wherever the Aryans went they became masters. The Greek, the Latin, the Kelt, the Teuton, the Slav — all these were Aryans: of the aborigines of the countries which they overran, scarcely a trace remains. So, too, in India it was "Varna," colour, which distinguished the white conquering Arya from the defeated black man, the Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of caste. It is to the Teuton branch of the Aryan family that the first place in the world belongs, and the story of the Nineteenth Century is the story of the Teuton's triumph."

The "indigenous Aryan" idea later emerged in the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always be "children of the soil", a notion comparable to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. This idea rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism outlined above, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakashan. The out of India hypothesis of Indo-European linguistics is a priori unrelated to Aryan mysticism, but has been conflated with this pseudoscholarship.

The Janata Party government from 1977 to 1980 saw the rise of state-sponsored Hindu nationalist archaeology. In this Government, leading BJP figures Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Minister of External Affairs and Lal Krishna Advani the Minister for Home Affairs. Formerly checked by Archaeological Survey of India scholars like A. Ghosh, there was a rise in pseudo-scientific conclusions on emotional subjects like the "Archaeology of the Ramayana" by archaeologists such as B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta. After 1990, "tradition-based archaeology" intensified, with scholars such as B.B Lal, S.R. Rao and B.K. Thapar identifying excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization with the accounts of the Puranas, the Mahabharata or the Rigveda. (R.S. Sharma, Looking for the Aryans, 1995). Hindu nationalst forces began to embrace the idea of an "Aryan Harappan culture". In 1994 the Manthan magazine of Deendayal Shodh Sansthan carried an article entitled "Genesis of the Aryan Myth; A Historiographical Review".

After the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque and the ensuing "Ayodhya debate" there was a rise in exploitation of archaeology for nationalist purposes and the related demand for "proof by archaeology" of the primordiality of Hinduism. A series of "anti-invasionist" publications by Voice of India, began with the 1993 Aryan Invasion of India: The Myth and the Truth.