Indo-Aryan migrations

"It is certain ... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India., .. If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river."

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

"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..."

"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."

"There [is] 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."

"The archaeological evidence for an expansion from the steppelands across historical Iran and India varies from the extremely meagre to total absence: both the Anatolian and the Kurgan theory find it extraordinarily difficult to explain the expansion of the Indo-European languages over a vast area of urbanized Asian populations, approximately the same area as that of Europe."

"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."

"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."

"Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aila or Aryan invasion of India from Afghanistan, nor of any gradual advance from thence eastwards."

"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."

"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 Rigveda to the Seven Rivers, there is nothing in any of them that to me implies invasion: the land of the Seven Rivers is the land of the Rigveda, the scene of the action. Nothing implies that the Aryas were strangers there. Nor is it implied that the inhabitants of the walled cities (including the Dasyus) were any more aboriginal than the Aryas themselves... Despite Wheeler’s comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization."

"Their oldest literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier."

"The Vedic Aryans, if at all they came from outside, ... must have lived in the Sapta-Sindhu [the region of the seven rivers in the ancient Punjab] so many centuries before the Vedic period that they had lost all memory of an original home."

"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."

"A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record."

"The current archaeological evidence suggests that the original reconstruction indicating the occurrence of an Indo-Aryan invasion mistakenly associated linguistic change with the migration of peoples. Linguistic changes and affiliations are brought about by a complex series of cultural processes, many of which do not involve the physical movements of social groups."

"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". ...Other missionaries found it preferable to target the non-Aryan identity of segments of the Indian populace rather than play up the Aryan commonalty. ..."

"No tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India."

"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."

"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 have consulted during the last ten years or so, a large number of Veda scholars of international repute.... and they affirmed that there is not, in the hymns, any direct or indirect memory of a pre-Indian home in the minds of the authors."

"It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material culture has yet been identified in India."

"The association of these groups with early bearers of the Aryan tongue is without warrant. If a word of warning is appropriate, it is on the desirability of avoiding an excessively Aryan 'preoccupation'."

"... the "invasion model" ... has been supplanted by much more sophisticated models over the past few decades... This development has not occured because Indologists were reacting, as is now frequently alleged, to current Indian criticism of the older theory. Rather, philologists first, and archaeologists somewhat later, noticed certain inconsistencies in the older theory and tried to find new explanations, a new version of the immigration theories."

"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."

"The question of Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent of India can, at best, be described as enigmatic."