The Aryan Non-Invasion Theory

On the Indo-Eurasian Research List, a certain Touraj Daryaee announced that he was going to write something about the Iranian Homeland Theory, an idea that has reportedly been launched in the 1990s. So, he informed about what must be, according to his information, a similar development in India. I sent him, through the list, the following reply on 21 October 2013. Two days later, moderator Steve Farmer let me know that this message could, alas, not be posted.


Dear Touraj,

 

The Indian homeland theory dates back to the 18th century European Enlightenment (Kant, Voltaire) and was espoused by the first generation of Indo-Europeanists in the very early 19th century (Schlegel). But by 1830 or so, Eastern or Central Europe (and thus, as far as India was concerned, the "Aryan Invasion Theory") was near-universally accepted as homeland.

 

Immediately it was put to political use in Britain's colonial policies. It was a God-sent in justifying Britain's occupation of India, as the British were deemed only to be repeating what their Indo-Aryan cousins had done thousands of years ago. As the die-hard colonialist Winston Churchill said more than a century later: "We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except maybe the Depressed Classes who are the native stock." In India, the theory was immediately seized upon by anti-Brahmin activist Jotirao Phule, incidentally an alumnus of the missionary education system.

 

In 1916, the British authorities, in a move against the Brahmin-led Freedom Movement, patronized the founding of an anti-Brahmin and Dravidian-chauvinist party, the Justice Party. After independence and till 1962, it espoused a Dravidian (in effect, only Tamil) separatism, and more recently, it supported and aided the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. The AIT is the alpha and omega of its worldview. Idem for the Dalit movement: while its founder BR Ambedkar articulately opposed the AIT, his followers reduce every issue to Aryan upper castes vs. native Dalits. Idem for the "Other Backwards Castes" (Bahujan) or at least their Western-sponsored spokesmen. British colonial administrators also coined the pseudo-Sanskrit term Adivasi ("Aboriginal") for the tribals, projecting the American racial situation, with European invaders subjecting the natives, onto India. Till today, even scholars who ought to know better, innocently use the very word Adivasi as proof of the tribals' native and the non-tribals' invader origins. It was used on many fronts to pit variously defined "natives" against variously defined "invaders".

 

All this while, Hindu nationalists were also active, e.g. Hindu Mahasabha's founding 1922 and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's founding 1925, without ever questioning the AIT which was so massively used against them. The AIT was so unassailable, with all the prestige of the "scientific" West, that nobody dared to question it. It was e.g. roundly accepted in the 1923 book Hindutva by VD Savarkar, the very manifesto of Hindu nationalism. Cultural spokesmen often quoted by Hindu nationalists, such as AK Coomaraswamy and VS Agarwal, also presupposed it in their work. As late as the 1960, RSS leader MS Golwalkar only dared to posit an Indian homeland by crankily postulating that the poles and all other places' coordinates had shifted and that this Indian homeland was the same as the Wolga/steppe homeland that the scholars assumed.

 

So, Hindu nationalism can perfectly coexist with a foreign homeland, and it did not invent the Indian homeland theory (though the terminology you use implies otherwise). Many national myths are not based on nativeness but on their state's establishment by foreigners, e.g. the USA, of course, or Mexico, but also Romania, Russia and others. What irked Hindu nationalists about the AIT, however, was its political use to divide the Indian population, both before and after independence. (See about this Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan: *Breaking India*.) Those academics who choose to oppose the Indian homeland theory *because* of its alleged political use by the Hindu nationalists (there are of course other reasons, too), should realize that in that case, they should oppose the East-European homeland theory annex AIT a hundred times more, for it has been politically misused for a far longer time in far more countries (including Nazi Germany, which espoused and used the AIT as a perfect illustration of its racialist worldview), and from positions of power. The Indian homeland theory is the pastime of a handful of writers, while the AIT is on the Indian government website and is taught to hundreds of millions of pupils and students. We hardly have a level playing field here.

 

This much for the (necessary) background. Now to answer your question. In the 1980s (1982, from memory), a remarkable book was published by KD Sethna, the erstwhile secretary of Sri Aurobindo, and then already nearly 80 years old: Karpasa in Vedic India. It argues that the AIT cannot be true, for the Rg-Vedic culture, indubitably located in India, predates the Harappan civilization. Indeed, he argues, cotton/Karpasa does not figure in the Rg-Veda but is quite present in the Harappan cities. Other material items follow the same pattern, according to Sethna. This drew a few other writers' attention to the subject, and they then published their own (good or not-so-good) arguments for Vedic indigenousness, as well as their account of the massive political use, both in the West and in India, of the AIT. Around 1990, historiography was very much in focus, though mostly of the medieval period (due to the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy), and in that climate, the Hindu nationalist movement seized upon the Aryan non-invasion theory. But being intellectually very lazy, the movement invested nothing whatsoever in further research into Aryan origins but at once shouted victory: the AIT was declared dead.

 

Mind you: I have not used the now-common term Out-of-India Theory. To describe the Hindu position, this term is too flattering. It was coined ca. 1996 probably by Edwin Bryant, and assumes Indo-European linguistic unity from Iceland to Lanka, with India as the source of expansion. But in fact, Hindus don't look beyond the Khyber Pass: they are satisfied that e.g. no archaeological proof has ever been found for Aryans moving into India, so they conclude that no Aryan invasion has taken place, but they don't assume the burden of responsability to explain how, in that case, the Europeans have come to speak cognate languages. They don't go looking for traces of India-based tribes moving out of India and making their way to Central Asia and then to Europe. Quite a few of them put in doubt this linguistic unity, disparaging comparative-historical linguistics to be a "pseudo-science", and most don't even think of the non-Indian dimension of the homeland question. The Aryan non-Invasion Theory has millions of followers, the articulate Out-of-India Theory only a handful.

 

Always welcome if you have any further questions.

 

Kind regards,

 

Koenraad Elst



Postscript (23 October 2013): Now I remember another factor for the fairly sudden rise in Aryan Non-Invasion thinking ca. 1990: a few anti-Invasion publications by Western archaeologists such as Jim Shaffer. These emboldened a mass of Indian archaeologists to vent loudly what they had been noticing for some time: that in spite of being the official and well-funded doctrine for a century and a half, the AIT had still not yielded a single trace of the Aryans moving into India. BB Lal, routinely slandered on this list and elsewhere as a mere "Hindu nationalist", made his name as a promising top archaeologist by identifying the "Painted Grey Ware" culture with the Aryans moving deeper into India in the 50s and 60s; but he changed his mind and saw that he had merely *assumed*, not proven, the AIT. He is but one of many scholars who "converted" away from the AIT. Among Indian archaeologists, the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory is by no means a fringe opinion.