The Politics around Aryan Invasion Theory: A History of History

 

The nineteenth Century West was a civilization deeply interested in history. Having conquered the rest of the world, now the white man wished to understand what explained his successes. What accounted for the fact that within a span of two centuries the West had left the rest of the world behind in almost all areas of human endeavor and progress? The answer was sought in history, sociology, economics, anthropology and even biology - every stream of social sciences and humanities came to be imbued with this looming question. Simultaneously, the rest of the world was assigned to a proverbial waiting room of history. The West’s present became the future that the East ought to aspire to; and this aspiration was imbibed by literate natives, educated in Western universities. The East was now recast ideologically as what the West was not. ‘They’ came to be described as those other people who are not like ‘Us’ Europeans.

Within this intellectual milieu, ‘race’ emerged as an object of study. The category of ‘race’ and ‘racial studies’ is a nineteenth-century European invention that drew from a wide variety of contemporary disciplines- modern philology (study of languages), history, Linnaeus’s theories of evolution, Spencer’s Social Darwinism and a good measure of white triumphalism.

The term ‘race’ defies a precise definition due to the wide range of meanings and connotations attached to it. But in general, it conveys a belief that some groups of humans are biologically and culturally superior to the rest.

Racialized social sciences tended to see race everywhere. Early colonial historians came to look upon ruling aristocracies of historical eras as people belonging to superior races. Such transposition of white man’s racial attitude onto history writing, as we would see in the following, permanently recast how the native educated class came to understand its own past.

F Max Muller was an avid nineteenth-century Sanskritist, Vedic scholar and a lover of India. He was a critic of Western civilization and tended to see in India everything that the West was not. Though he never visited India, in his books he painted it as an idyllic land of gentle and peace-loving people who spent their days meditating and speculating over metaphysical questions. His books like India, What it can teach us? and Biographies of Words and the Home of Arayas, present the passive East as an antidote to the aggressive and materialistic West. Max Muller’s studies of the Vedas gradually gave shape to the concept of an Aryan race that built an unspoiled ancient civilization superior to the decadent, money-grubbing and machinist West.

While Max Muller and his fellow nineteenth-century Indologists were discovering the ‘spiritual Occident’, philologists like William Jones were making stunning new discoveries about the origins of classical ancient European languages like Greek and Latin. It could be established beyond doubt that these, along with modern European languages like English, French, German, Italian etc had a common origin. Further, linguistic evidence suggested that they had all descended from an ancestral language that was also the origin of Rig Vedic Sanskrit. This primordial common language was named Indo-European. It was not a real language, but a hypothetical one, reconstructed from known languages that were related to each other within a structure of linguistic rules. What stuck out was the fact that Rig Vedic Sanskrit was older than all ancient European languages.

Racial politics made its entry with the gradual and casual equation of ancient Indo-European language speakers with a distinct race, now referred to as Aryans. Gobineau, a French novelist in the later half of the nineteenth century, authored a series of essays and novels about the imaginary exploits of ancient Aryans- a superior race of men, whom he referred to as the ‘master race’, that spread out from its ancient Central Asian homelands to the rest of the world, conquering and subjugating inferior native races.

These ideas were uncritically picked up by a late nineteenth-century Dalit activist Jyotiba Phule, who deployed them like an intellectual arsenal in his fight against the horrid untouchability prevalent in contemporary Maharashtra. He cited European authorities to argue that Sanskrit-speaking Brahmins were the descendants of conquering Aryans, who were alien invaders. The conflict of castes was recast as a struggle between an alien invading race and the ‘original inhabitants’ subjugated in their own homeland.

This narrative suited those working on Dravidian languages. It was now argued that the Dravidian language corresponded to a distinct Dravidian race twice subjugated- first, by ancient Aryans from the north, and then by their British cousins in the modern era.

Like Indo-European, a linguistically constructed hypothetical proto-Dravidian language was portrayed as the original tongue of the ancient Dravidian race, ‘the original inhabitants’ of these lands. Proto-Dravidian language came to be erroneously equated with ancient Tamil. Erroneous because Proto-Dravidian, like Indo-European, is a hypothetical language reconstructed from the existing Dravidian languages, of which Tamil is one. There is no solid evidence to back the belief that classical Tamil has a stronger claim of affinity or inheritance over Proto-Dravidian than any other existing Dravidian language.

At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum lay the theorists of Hindu nationalism, who shared an ideological affinity with a tendency in Europe known as the Theosophists. A well-known early Theosophist was Colonel Olcott. He propounded the theory that India was the cradle of all civilization. According to this view Aryans were indigenous to India, as was the Indo-European language, and that the Vedic corpus was the foundation of all languages and all religions in the world. Theosophical views attracted the interest of Arya Samajis and by the first half of twentieth century fused with rising nationalist sentiments. Gandhi and Nehru had both come under the influence of Theosophist ideas in their youth, and it became a sort of ‘common-sense' during the period of Indian freedom struggle to refer to India as the ‘cradle of civilization'. This theory was periodically buttressed by Europeans who loved India and were sympathetic to the Indian nationalist movement.

Max Muller's scholarly position had been that the earliest Indo-European-speaking tribes may have lived in Central Asia. Subsequent migrations took some branches to Europe and some to Iran. Then some groups may have gradually crossed over into the Indian subcontinent. Max Muller dated the composition of the Rig Veda, which is the earliest composition of Vedic Sanskrit speaking people in India, to about 1200 BC. Being a believer in the Aryan invasion theory, he surmised that Aryans must have invaded in huge numbers and subjugated the indigenous people of India. Being the conquering race, their language became the primary language of India and their culture the foundation of Indian civilization. He further conjectured that since a mechanism for racial segregation was required, caste was invented to maintain the purity of bloodlines. He backed this racial reading of history by citing the contrasting physical descriptions of aryas and dasas in the Rig Veda- a dasa is frequently described as being dark-skinned. In his reading, the four main varnas represented distinct racial groups.

The fallacy of equating a linguistic-cultural group with a race was admitted by Max Muller. But the word ‘Aryan’ gradually came to be referred to as a race in popular literature. Curiously, there is little justification for such an equation in ancient texts since the word ‘Aryan’ is merely used to refer to a person who speaks Sanskrit and observes the rules of his Varna.

There is linguistic evidence to suggest that modern European and north-Indian languages share a common origin, and there is a strong likelihood that tribal groups speaking Rig Vedic Sanskrit gradually began to percolate into South Asia after 1500 BC. But, there is no evidence to suggest an invasion or even conquest. The picture that has emerged through archaeological excavations is that of the Vedic people’s gradual progress into the Indian heartland from the northwest over a course of centuries.

By the time Rig Veda was composed more than three hundred years would have passed since Vedic people first settled in India. By then they would have intermarried and mingled with the indigenous people. The varna hierarchy did not emerge and solidify for another three-four hundred years. Therefore, it appears highly unlikely that varnas represent distinct racial or cultural groups.

However, it would be assuming too much to conjecture that Indo-European speakers migrated to Iran, Central Asia and subsequently Europe from India. The rural agrarian-pastoralist and tribal society reflected in the Rig Veda presents a stark contrast to the urban Indus valley civilization. The current academic consensus is that the people who built the Indus Valley Civilization were culturally distinct. Recent excavations reveal a centuries-long period of co-existence between the remnants of the Indus people and early Vedic settlers, suggesting co-existence and inter-mingling. Conflicts may have occurred, but no solid proof for it is forthcoming.

If early Vedic people were not the same as Indus Valley people then where lay their origins? While some might insist on arguing that the Vedic people were indigenous to India, and their culture grew parallelly to that of Indus cities, archaeological evidence from Asia Minor, and independent genetic studies seem to lend credence to the theory that early Vedic people migrated to India some centuries after the decline of the Indus Valley Civilization.

‘Out from India’ to the rest of the world theory seems unlikely also because such mass migrations from the Indian subcontinent towards Central Asia have not occurred at any other period in history. There is only one instance of an army from India crossing across Afghanistan- Shahjahan’s Balkh-Badakhshan campaign in Central Asia in 1646-47. The conquest had been relatively easy but holding these lands proved to be counter-productive as the cost of maintaining the garrisons was higher than the revenue generated from the countryside. Historically, there has been little incentive for people from South Asia to move across Afghanistan. However, a steady train of immigrants has kept arriving from Central Asia throughout the history of India. Every major crisis of grazing lands in Central Asia has given rise to a mass exodus of horse-based tribal communities towards India. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that early Vedic people arrived from Central Asia in the same manner as other tribal pastoralist groups from Central Asia like the Scythians, Parthians, Huns, and later Turks.

History has been deployed as an intellectual weapon by every major political tendency in India- each group tries to paint itself as the original inhabitant and its enemies as alien invaders. And perhaps such political abuse of history is inevitable too. However, a neutral reader desirous of knowing what really happened in history would be best advised to keep in mind that historical actors seldom acted with motivations similar to ours.

Gene pool studies conducted in recent years have all given one unequivocal result- that cutting across castes, regions, and religions, we have intermingled.