Indigenous Aryans


Indigenous Aryans, also known as the Out of India theory, is the idea that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. Reflecting traditional Indian views based on the Puranic chronology, the indigenist view proposes an older date than is generally accepted for the Vedic period, and argues that the Indus Valley Civilization was a Vedic civilization. In this view, "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati tradition." It is presented as an alternative to the established migration model, which proposes the Pontic steppe as the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.
The proposal is based on traditional and religious views on Indian history and identity, and plays a signifcant role in Hindutva politics. Support for this idea mostly exists among Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India, and has no support in mainstream scholarship.

Historical background

The standard view on the origins of the Indo-Aryans is the Indo-Aryan migration theory, which states that they entered north-western India at about 1500 BCE. The Puranic chronology, the timeline of events in ancient Indian history as narrated in the Mahabaratha, the Ramayana, and the Puranas, envisions a much older chronology for the Vedic culture. In this view, the Vedas were received thousands of years ago, and the start of the reign of Manu Vaivasvate, the Manu of the current kalpa and the progenitor of humanity, may be dated as far back 7350 BCE. The Kurukshetra War, the background-scene of the Baghavad Gita, which may relate historical events taking place ca. 1000 BCE at the heartland of Aryavarta, is dated in this chronology at ca. 3100 BCE.
Indigenists, reflecting traditional Indian views on history and religion, argue that the Aryans are indigenous to India, which challenges the standard view. In the 1980s and 1990s, the indigenous position has come to the foreground of the public debate.

Aryan Invasion theory

In the 1850s, Max Müller introduced the notion of two Aryan races, a western and an eastern one, who migrated from the Caucasus into Europe and India respectively. Müller dichotomized the two groups, ascribing greater prominence and value to the western branch. Nevertheless, this "eastern branch of the Aryan race was more powerful than the indigenous eastern natives, who were easy to conquer." By the 1880s, his ideas had been adapted by racist ethnologists. For example, as an exponent of race science, colonial administrator Herbert Hope Risley used the ratio of nose width to height to divide Indian people into Aryan and Dravidian races, as well as seven castes.
The idea of an Aryan "invasion" was fueled by the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which declined around the period of the Indo-Aryan migration, suggesting a destructive invasion. This argument was developed by the mid-20th century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-daro as the victims of conquests. He famously stated that the Vedic god "Indra stands accused" of the destruction of the Indus Civilisation. Scholarly critics have since argued that Wheeler misinterpreted his evidence and that the skeletons were better explained as hasty interments, not unburied victims of a massacre.

Indo-Aryan migration theory

Migrations

The Aryan Invasion theory has been discarded in mainstream scholarship since the 1980s, and replaced by more sophisticated models, referred to as the Indo-Aryan migration theory. It posits the introduction of Indo-Aryan languages into South Asia through migrations of Indo-European-speaking people from their Urheimat in the Pontic Steppes via Central Asia into the Levant, south Asia, and Inner Asia. It is part of the Kurgan-hypothesis/Revised Steppe Theory, which further describes the spread of Indo-European languages into western Europe via migrations of Indo-European speaking people.
Historical linguistics provides the main basis for the theory, analysing the development and changes of languages, and establishing relations between the various Indo-European languages, including the time frame of their development. It also provides information about shared words, and the corresponding area of the origin of Indo-European, and the specific vocabulary which is to be ascribed to specific regions. The linguistic analyses and data are supplemented with archaeological data and anthropological arguments, which together provide a coherent model that is widely accepted.
In the model, the first archaeological remains of the Indo-Europeans is the Yamna culture, which spread eastward creating the Sintashta culture, from which developed the Andronovo culture. Interaction with the BMAC produced the Indo-Iranians, which split into Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches around 1800 BCE. The Indo-Aryans migrated to the Levant, northern India, and possibly Inner Asia.

Cultural continuity and adaptation

The migration into northern India was not necessarily of a large population, but may have consisted of small groups, possibly of ethnically and genetically heterogeneous composition, who introduced their language and social system into the new territory. These were then emulated by larger groups, who adopted the new language and culture. Witzel also notes that "small-scale semi-annual
transhumance movements between the Indus plains and the Afghan and Baluchi highlands continue to this day."
Given the lack of archaeological remains of the Indo-Aryans, Jim G. Shaffer has argued for an indigenous cultural continuity between Harappan and post-Harappan times. According to Shaffer, there is no archaeological indication of an Aryan migration into northwestern India during or after the decline of the Harappan city culture. Instead, Shaffer has argued for "a series of cultural changes reflecting indigenous cultural developments." According to Shaffer, linguistic change has mistakenly been attributed to migrations of people.
While arguing for an indigenous cultural continuity, Shaffer gives two possible alternative explanations for the similarities between Sanskrit and western languages, arguing for non-Indian origins.
The first is a linguistic relationship with a "Zagrosian family of language linking Elamite and Dravidian on the Iranian Plateau," as proposed by McAlpin. According to Shaffer "linguistic similarities may have diffused west from the plateau as a result of the extensive trading networks linking cultures in the plateau with those in Mesopotamia and beyond," while also linking with the Kelteminar culture in Central Asia. Yet, Shaffer also notes that the Harappan culture was not extensively tied to this network in the third century BCE, leaving the possibility that "membership in a basic linguistic family - Zagrosian - may account for some of the linguistic similarities of later periods."
The second possibility is that "such linguistic similarities are a result of post-second millennium B.C. contacts with the west" by trade, taken over by people who also adopted a new way of societal organisation. This language was used to record the myths preserved in the Vedas. According to Shaffer, "nce codified, it was advantageous for the emerging hereditary social elites to stabilize such linguistic traits with the validity of the explanations offered in the literature enhancing their social position."
Likewise, Erdosy also notes the absence of evidence for migrations, and states that "Indo-European languages may well have spread to South Asia through migration," but that the RigVedic aryas, as a specifc ethno-linguistic tribe holding a specific set of ideas, may well have been indigenous people whose "set of ideas" soon spread over India.

Indigenous Aryanism

The "Indigenist position" started to take shape after the discovery of the Harappan Civilisation, which predates the Vedas. According to this alternative view, the Aryans are indigenous to India, the Indus Civilisation is the Vedic Civilisation, the Vedas are older than the second millennium BCE, there is no discontinuity between the Indo-European part of India and the Dravidian part, and the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations.

Puranic chronology

These ideas are based on the Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which contain lists of kings and genealogies used to construct the traditional chronology of ancient India. "Indigenists" follow a "Puranic agenda", emphasizing that these lists go back to the fourth millennium BCE. Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador to the Maurya court at Patna at 300 BCE, reported to have heard of a traditional list of 153 kings that covered 6042 years, beyond the traditional beginning of the Kaliyuga in 3102 BCE. The royal lists are based on Sūta bardic traditions, and are derived from lists which were orally transmitted and constantly reshaped.
These lists are supplemented with astronomical interpretations, which are also used to reach an earlier dating for the Rigveda. Along with this comes a redating of historical personages and events, in which the Buddha is dated to 1700 BCE or even 3139/8 BCE, and Chandragupta Maurya is replaced by Chandragupta, the Gupta king. Elst notes that:
The Vedic Foundation gives a chronology of ancient India, which starts in 3228 BCE with the descension of Bhagwan Krishna. The Mahabharata War is dated at 3139 BCE, while various dynasties are dated more than a millennium earlier, Gautama Buddha is dated at 1894-1814 BCE, and Jagadguru Shankaracharya at 509-477 BCE. These ideas claim a continuous cultural evolution of India, denying a discontinuity between the Harappan and Vedic periods. According to Kak,
The idea of "Indigenous Aryanism" fits into traditional Hindu ideas of religious history, namely that Hinduism has timeless origins, with the Vedic Aryans inhabiting India since ancient times. The Vedic Foundation states:

The Indigenist alternative

The outdated notion of an "Aryan invasion" has been used as a straw man to attack the Indo-Aryan Migration theory. According to Witzel, the invasion model was criticised by Indigenous Aryanists for its racist and colonialist undertones:
While according to Koenraad Elst, a supporter of Indigenous Aryans:

Indigenist scenarios

Indigenous Aryans scenarios

identifies three major types of "Indigenous Aryans" scenarios:
1. A "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the North-Western region of the Indian subcontinent in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda;
2. The "out of India" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland, originally proposed in the 18th century, revived by the Hindutva sympathiser Koenraad Elst, and further popularised within Hindu nationalism by Shrikant Talageri ;
3. The position that all the world's languages and civilisations derive from India, represented e.g. by David Frawley.
Kazanas adds a fourth scenario:
4.The Aryans entered the Indus Valley before 4500 BCE and got integrated with the Harappans, or might have been the Harappans.

Main arguments of the Indigenists

The idea of "Indigenous Aryans" is supported with specific interpretations of archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data, and on literary interpretations of the Rigveda. Standard arguments, both in support of the "Indigenous Aryans" theory and in opposition the mainstream Indo-Aryan Migration theory, are:
For Aurobindo, an "Aryan" was not a member of a particular race, but a person who "accepted a particular type of self-culture, of inward and outward practice, of ideality, of aspiration." Aurobindo wanted to revive India's strength by reviving Aryan traditions of strength and character. He denied the historicity of a racial division in India between "Aryan invaders" and a native dark-skinned population. Nevertheless, he did accept two kinds of culture in ancient India, namely the Aryan culture of northern and central India and Afghanistan, and the un-Aryan culture of the east, south and west. Thus, he accepted the cultural aspects of the division suggested by European historians.

Out of India model

The "Out of India theory", also known as the "Indian Urheimat theory," is the proposition that the Indo-European language family originated in Northern India and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations. It implies that the people of the Harappan civilisation were linguistically Indo-Aryans.

Theoretical overview

Koenraad Elst, in his Update in the Aryan Invasion Debate, investigates "the developing arguments concerning the Aryan Invasion Theory". Elst notes:
Edwin Bryant also notes that Elst's model is a "theoretical exercise:"
And in Indo-Aryan Controversy Bryant notes:

"The emerging alternative"

Koenraad Elst summarises "the emerging alternative to the Aryan Invasion Theory" as follows.
During the 6th millennium BCE Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Punjab region of northern India. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria as the Kambojas. The Paradas moved further and inhabited the Caspian coast and much of central Asia while the Cinas moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, forming the Tocharian group of I-E speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that region by 2000 BCE. These people took the oldest form of the Proto-Indo-European language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region, transformed it into a separate dialect. While inhabiting central Asia they discovered the uses of the horse, which they later sent back to the Urheimat. Later on during their history, they went on to occupy western Europe and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that region.
During the 4th millennium BCE, civilisation in India started evolving into what became the urban Indus Valley Civilization. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-Indo-Iranian. Some time during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas. They also expanded into parts of central Asia. By the end of this migration, India was left with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river began drying up and the remainder of the Indo-Aryans split into separate groups. Some travelled westwards and established themselves as rulers of the Hurrian Mitanni kingdom by around 1500 BCE. Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

David Frawley

In books such as The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India and In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, Frawley criticises the 19th century racial interpretations of Indian prehistory, such as the theory of conflict between invading Caucasoid Aryans and Dravidians. In the latter book, Frawley, Georg Feuerstein, and Subhash Kak reject the Aryan Invasion theory and support Out of India.
Bryant commented that Frawley's historical work is more successful as a popular work, where its impact "is by no means insignificant", rather than as an academic study,
and that Frawley "is committed to channelling a symbolic spiritual paradigm through a critical empirico rational one".
Pseudo-archaeologist Graham Hancock quotes Frawley's historical work extensively for the proposal of highly evolved ancient civilisations prior to the end of the last glacial period. including in India. Kreisburg refers to Frawley's "The Vedic Literature and Its Many Secrets".

Significance for colonial rule and Hindu politics

The Aryan Invasion theory plays an important role in Hindu nationalism, which favors Indigenous Aryanism. It has to be understood against the background of colonialism and the subsequent task of nation-building in India.

Colonial India

Curiosity and the colonial requirements of knowledge about the subject people led the officials of the East India Company to explore the history and culture of India in the late 18th century. When similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were discovered by William Jones, a suggestion of "monogenesis" was formulated for these languages as well as their speakers. In the latter part of the 19th century, it was thought that language, culture and race were inter-related, and the notion of biological race came to the forefront The presumed "Aryan race" which originated the Indo-European languages was prominent among such races, and was deduced to be further subdivided into "European Aryans" and "Asian Aryans," each with their own homelands.
Max Mueller, who translated the Rigveda during 1849–1874, postulated an original homeland for all Aryans in central Asia, from which a northern branch migrated to Europe and a southern branch to India and Iran. The Aryans were presumed to be fair-complexioned Indo-European speakers who conquered the dark-skinned dasas of India. The upper castes, particularly the Brahmins, were thought to be of Aryan descent whereas the lower castes and Dalits were thought to be the descendants of dasas.
The Aryan theory served politically to suggest a common ancestry and dignity among the colonised Indians and their British rulers. Keshab Chunder Sen saw the English rule in India as a "reunion of parted cousins." The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak endorsed the antiquity of Rigveda, dating it to 4500 BCE. He placed the homeland of the Aryans somewhere close to the North Pole. From there, Aryans were believed to have migrated south in the post-glacial age, branching into a European branch that relapsed into barbarism and an Indian branch that retained the original, superior civilisation.
However, Christian missionaries such as John Muir and John Wilson drew attention to the plight of lower castes, who they said were oppressed by the upper castes since the Aryan invasions. Jyotiba Phule argued that the dasas and sudras were indigenous people and the rightful inheritors of the land, whereas Brahmins were Aryan and alien.

Hindu revivalism and nationalism

In contrast to the mainstream views, the Hindu revivalist movements denied an external origin to Aryans. Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of the Arya Samaj, held that Vedas were the source of all knowledge and were revealed to the Aryans. The first man was created in Tibet and, after living there for some time, the Aryans came down and inhabited India, which was previously empty.
The Theosophical Society held that the Aryans were indigenous to India, but that they were also the progenitors of the European civilisation. The Society saw a dichotomy between the spiritualism of India and the materialism of Europe.
According to Romila Thapar, the Hindu nationalists, led by Savarkar and Golwalkar, eager to construct a Hindu identity for the nation, held that the original Hindus were the Aryans and that they were indigenous to India. There was no Aryan invasion and no conflict among the people of India. The Aryans spoke Sanskrit and spread the Aryan civilization from India to the west. Witzel traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Savarkar and Golwalkar. Golwalkar denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always been "children of the soil", a notion which according to Witzel is reminiscent of the blood and soil of contemporary fascism. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s.
Bergunder likewise identifies Golwalkar as the originator of the "Indigenous Aryans" notion, and Goel's Voice of India as the instrument of its rise to notability:

Present-day political significance

Lars Martin Fosse notes the political significance of "Indigenous Aryanism". He notes that "Indigenous Aryanism" has been adopted by Hindu nationalists as a part of their ideology, which makes it a political matter in addition to a scholarly problem. The proponents of Indigenous Aryanism necessarily engage in "moral disqualification" of Western Indology, which is a recurrent theme in much of the indigenist literature. The same rhetoric is being used in indigenist literature and the Hindu nationalist publications like the Organiser.
According to Abhijith Ravinutala, the indigenist position is essential for Hindutva exclusive claims on India:
Repercussions of the disagreements about Aryan origins have reached Californian courts with the Californian Hindu textbook case, where according to the Times of India historian and president of the Indian History Congress, Dwijendra Narayan Jha in a "crucial affidavit" to the Superior Court of California:

Criticism

The Indigenous Aryans theory has no support in mainstream scholarship. According to Michael Witzel, the "indigenous Aryans" position is not scholarship in the usual sense, but an "apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking":
In her review of Bryant's The Indo-Aryan Controversy, which includes chapters by Elst and other "indigenists", Stephanie Jamison comments:
Sudeshna Guha, in her review of The Indo-Aryan Controversy, notes that the book has serious methodological shortcomings, by not asking the question what exactly constitutes historical evidence. This makes the "fair and adequate representation of the differences of opinion" problematic, since it neglects "the extent to which unscholarly opportunism has motivated the rebirth of this genre of 'scholarship. Guha:
According to Bryant, OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and inconclusive, or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude and neglect significantly minimises the value of most OIT publications.
Fosse notes crucial theoretical and methodological shortcomings in the indigenist literature. Analysing the works of Sethna, Bhagwan Singh, Navaratna and Talageri, he notes that they mostly quote English literature, which is not fully explored, and omitting German and French Indology. It makes their works in various degrees underinformed, resulting in a critique that is "largely neglected by Western scholars because it is regarded as incompetent".
According to Erdosy, the indigenist position is part of a "lunatic fringe" against the mainstream migrationist model.

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