Indigenous Aryans

"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."

"Most of the debate is founded upon the failure to understand linguistics and on political motivations having nothing to do with linguistics or history."

"Unfortunately, the whole Indigenous Aryan position is often simplistically stereotyped, and conveniently demonized, both in India and in the West, as a discourse exclusively determined by such agendas. This bypasses other concerns also motivating such reconsideration of history: the desire of many Indian scholars to reclaim control over the reconstruction of the religious and cultural history of their country from the legacy of imperial and colonial scholarship."

"Nonetheless, a principal motive of many Indian scholars in this debate is the desire to reexamine the infrastructure of ancient history that is the legacy of the colonial period and test how secure it actually is by adopting the very tools and disciplines that had been used to construct it in the first place. The Aryan invasion theory is a major foundation stone of ancient Indian history, the "big bang," and has therefore attracted the initial attention of many Indian scholars."

"The 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."

"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."

"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?"

"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."

"It is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu], nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence."

"The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time. (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption."

"There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present."

"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.""

"The Vedas do not preserve any veneration, not even any mention, of an Urheimat. Compare this with the Thora (the first five books of the Bible): edited in about the 6th century BC, it gives a central place to Moses’ exodus from Egypt in about 1200 BC, and of Abraham from “Ur of the Chaldees” in about 1600 BC. Similarly, in the 16th century, the Aztecs in Mexico still preserved the memory of Aztlan (probably Utah), the country from which they migrated in the 12th century. Postulating that the Vedic people kept silent about a homeland which they still vividly remembered, as the invasionists imply, is not coherent with all we know about ancient peoples, who preserved such memories for many centuries."

"But it is clear that, on this point, my attitude owes a lot to acquired habits and to the fact that, for one hundred and fifty years, hundreds of European and American scientists, sometimes very brilliant, have established as a principle of interpretation of all the facts that PIE was, geographically speaking, a European language. I have no doubt that such an effort would make it possible to reinterpret all the data in a sense compatible with the thesis of the Indian origin of the PIE. The resulting diagram would undoubtedly be more complex than the diagram traditionally taught in Europe, but we know that the simplest interpretations are not necessarily those which best reflect the reality of the facts."

"In emulation of specialists such as Edwin Bryant, it seems preferable to take an agnostic position concerning the origin of Vedic culture and religion. On the basis of the present state of research, we cannot know for sure whence the rich Vedic culture and religion have their provenance and source."

"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."

"A careful study of the Vedas … reveals the fact that Vedic culture is so redolent of the Indian soil and of the Indian atmosphere that the idea of the non-Indian origin of that culture is absurd."

"Apart from the linguistic issue, however, we have here another subtle aspect. Since there are all these different claims for the Urheimat... then any one location is controversial. Why mainstream scholarship should single out and ostracize only N-W-India-and-Pakistan is incomprehensible—particularly when archaeology and anthropology since the early 1980s stressed that there was no trace of mass invasion in this area."

"An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth."