Why Indo-Europeanists have a duty to face the Out-of-India Theory

(Pragyata [on-line magazine from Delhi], 21 September 2022) Last week, after years of Corona intermezzo, the Indogermanische Gesellschaft (German: “Indo-European Society”) reconvened for a working conference in the charming Dutch city of Leiden, since long reputed for its Oriental Studies. It was sharply focused, no parallel sessions and all papers dealing somehow with the conference theme: the “Secondary Homelands of Indo-European”. This was indeed worth a brainstorming session bringing together the best minds in the field. Further, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (“German Orientalist Society”) has resumed its regular conferences, so after five years it is holding its Orientalist Conference right now in Berlin, which is where I am writing this article. It includes numerous parallel sessions on all parts of Asia and the Islamic World, among them a long session on Indo-European linguistics. Here there is no thematic focus, but something useful may still come out of it. Debating the homeland Thus far, the debate had concerned the Primary Homeland, or simply the Homeland. When the India-based Jesuit missionary Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux sent his memorandum on the kinship of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek from India to the Academy in Paris in 1767, the Indo-European language family was born (later made known in India by William Jones in 1786), and the hunt for its homeland could take off. The Bible-thumpers insisted on Armenia. That is where Noah’s Ark had landed, and the Indo-Europeans were taken to be the descendents of Jafeth, one of Noah’s sons. But the role of the discovery of Sanskrit in the realization of its kinship with (and the mutual kinship of) most European languages was widely taken to indicate India. Sanskrit was apparently the oldest form of Indo-European, with e.g. 8 cases of the noun instead of 5 in Greek and 6 in Latin, or 3 numbers instead of 2, with Latin and Greek having only a few relics of the missing locative and instrumental cases and of the dual number. Modern linguists would therefore call it an elder sister of the other languages, back then people concluded that Sanskrit had to be the mother of the others, the origin. The French freethinker Voltaire was among the leading European minds who welcomed the idea of an Indian origin for European culture, if only because as an ex-Christian he wanted to diminish the Church’s claim on Europe. Though the term “Out-of-India Theory” (OIT) was only coined ca. 1997 (by the American Indologist Edwin Bryant), the idea had been launched by Europeans some 250 years ago. For about sixty years, India remained the favourite among the possible homelands. The tilting point came in the 1830s, esp. after August Schlegel had proposed the Caucasus area. The nail in the Indocentric hypothesis’ coffin came with the launch of Linguistic Paleontology ca. 1860, which located the homeland in a colder zone and to the west (on the assumption that words for cold-climate flora and fauna pointed this way, whereas in fact, India too has islands of cold climate near the mountains, and has bears, wolves, otters and birch trees too); and by the discovery of war episodes in the Rg-Veda which were interpreted as depicting white invaders subduing the dark natives (see below). In India this choice for a peri-Caucasian homeland necessitated a later influx into India, which became known as the Aryan invasion (hence Aryan Invasion Theory, AIT). Nowadays many philologists squeamishly insist on calling it an “immigration”, as if a change in language and religion of the then-largest human civilization could have come about (as the excavations indicate) without power struggle. Well, suit yourselves: after all, an invasion is also a form of immigration, so no objection to reading “AIT” as “Aryan Immigration Theory”. Some Indians saw the bright side: the AIT upgraded them from colonial underlings to the cousins of their British overlords. In the USA, some Hindu immigrants even used it in Court to upgrade themselves from the “Coloured” to the “White” category. But still it became most popular among those Indian communities most loyal to the colonial power, most anti-nationalist, like on the one hand the Sikhs (who identified themselves with the Aryan invaders, even physically looking like how we imagine the Vedic sages), on the other the Dravidianists and the Christianized tribals (who identified themselves as the non-Aryan natives entitled to compensatory privileges). The second, anti-Aryan tendency has gained strength after Independence, while the pro-Aryan tendency has withered away, in parallel with the post-Nazi opinion shift in the West. Many Indians remained skeptical of such an invasion (though without developing a theory of how the other Indo-European languages ended up in Europe, such as the OIT), e.g. Aurobindo Ghose and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, but this was henceforth kept out of public debate. Meanwhile many English-speaking Indians accepted it, mostly out of awe for Western scholarship which had proven itself path-breaking in many fields. This included even anti-colonial champions such as Congress president Bal Gangadhar Tilak (who thought up his own version in his 1903 book Arctic Home in the Vedas) and chief Hindu Nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his still-influential manifesto Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1924). It may be needed to emphasize this, as misinformed Westerners have been tutored to identify the rejection of the AIT with Hindu nationalism. In 2015, Mallikarjuna Kharge, parliamentary leader of the oppositional Congress Party, scolded some high-caste North-Indian adversaries: “You Aryans don’t belong in India”, a very common rhetoric. It is often sharpened for use against the Brahman caste: Brāhmaṇ sālā, deś choḍo! (“Brahmin brother-in-law [a common term of abuse, implying: ‘I slept with your sister’], leave the country”), with anti-Brahmanism having become in many details the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism. While European scholars have delinked Indo-European history from all possible political connotations (at least consciously), in India the political misuse of the AIT has continued till today. Political dimension It is because of this divisive use of the AIT that when scholars ca. 1990 started challenging the AIT, the Hindu nationalist movement jumped on the bandwagon. As a result of this political embrace of the non-AIT (which need not imply the OIT), Western scholars have developed the reprehensible habit of referring to the non-AIT spokesmen and even the OIT defenders (they don’t know the difference) as “Hindu nationalists”. Thus, in an incident between Hans Hock and Shrikant Talageri which I greatly deplore, Hock, who had distinguished himself by his scholarly engagement with the OIT, scolded Talageri as, of course, a “Hindu nationalist”, as if that made his newer arguments unworthy of dealing with. It so happens that I have written my PhD dissertation and several books about religio-politics in India, and dare to claim some expertise in the matter. The difference between the realities on the ground and the Hindu nationalist movement’s international reputation is breath-taking and certain to become a case study in academic malpractice once the power equation that has made this possible, changes. Thus, when in the mid-1990s the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bhāratīya Janatā Party, “Indian People’s Party”) threatened to come to power, terrible predictions were made about what it would do, like “throwing all Muslims into the ocean”. But in 14 years of being in Government (1998-2004 and 2014-present) nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, the hard figures about victims of religious violence, as opposed to the swollen media rhetoric, shows that the Muslims are far safer in India today than under anti-Hindu-nationalist Prime Ministers like Indira Gandhi (and a hundred times safer than Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh). But no fulminator against “Hindu fascism” is known to have retracted his assessment even after having been proved wrong. Apart from stating that much here, I will leave this topic for a different occasion. It is only relevant here to explain how non-specialists in Indian religio-politics, such as the Indo-European linguists, are massively falling for a distorted view of it, with implications for their own choices within their field of expertise, i.c. boycotting the OIT. There are a few problems with this boycott, though. Firstly the identification of the non-AIT (and a fortiori the OIT) with Hindu nationalism is not true, a consideration that ought to count for something among scholars. There is at most an overlap between the historiographical and the political position, but with many exceptions on both sides. Thus, one of the anti-AIT pioneers, Bhagwan Singh (The Vedic Harappans, 1995), was a Marxist, and the whole rejection of the AIT has an obvious anticolonial dimension. Oh, and speaking for myself: I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. At any rate the OIT predated any use by any political movement. Admittedly there is this bizarre conspiracy theory abroad (equally among the rank-and-file of India’s anti-AIT camp as in the OIT camp) that a politician sits down to contemplate how to pester his opponents, and then – eureka! – comes up with the plan of concocting a scholarly theory, which moreover manages to fool and instrumentalize the legitimate scholars of the field. Perhaps academics feel themselves far above such a conspiracy theory, yet that is what they are guilty of when identifying the OIT with one of India’s political currents. Secondly it is not relevant. Whether a position is correct or not is independent of who utters it. It is unbecoming for a scholar to attack the person behind an argument and pretend that he thereby has debunked the argument. Indeed, that is the AIT camp’s own position: they defend the AIT (that’s what they implicitly do by espousing any of the peri-Caucasian homeland theories) eventhough it was espoused and ideologically instrumentalized by both the British colonialists and the Nazis. After all, on the abstruse homeland question these worthies might have been right for once. So for what we can see, the AIT party doesn’t seem to be troubled by the political associations of the AIT, and never even to think of them. If some Indo-Europeanists misinformedly declare that the OIT is too politically tainted for their tender attention, let them reflect on the more far-reaching political uses of the AIT which they embrace without a second thought. There is also a non-political reason for boycotting the OIT. In her review of the only book ever that brought together pro-AIT and pro-OIT viewpoints, The Indo-Aryan Controversy by Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton (eds., 2005), Stephanie Jamison lambasts the very idea of a debate: it wrongly gives a platform to a superstitious theory comparable to Biblical Creationism, the OIT camp are flat-earthers which a scholar can only ignore. This shameless advocacy of cancel culture, moreover for a theory that was long the most accepted one, is an attitude that has gained ground among professional Indo-Europeanists, as I have had to personally find out many times. A consequence is for instance that Joanna Nichols and Claus Peter Zoller have, after Shrikant Talageri pointed out the pro-OIT implications of their findings (that the pattern of lexical borrowing in West-Asian languages from Indo-European indicated that this family came from the east, Bactria or so; c.q. that the Bangani dialect in North India shows a substrate of a kentum Indo-European language similar to the family’s westernmost branches), declared that their findings remain valid but not these pro-OIT implications. In India this is being laughed at as an Inquisition-like or Stalinist-like recanting. Europeans in India The Indian homeland theory is not a recent “concoction by Hindu nationalists”, as ignorant opinion-makers tend to claim. It was a European invention cherished by many Europeans for linguistic and sometimes also ideological reasons. Among them, the pioneers had been Europeans living in India (Coeurdoux, Jones), a significant detail. In Europe before 1800, India was a mystery land in the distance, not yet demoted to a mere colony, but not figuring in people’s everyday consciousness either. In the popular Mercator projection of world maps, India looks smaller than Scandinavia, though in both surface and population it is larger than Europe as a whole. It was easy to side-line and ignore India, except for those living there. Once the OIT lost ground to the peri-Caucasian Homeland theories, it was still Europeans living in India who came to its defence (most prominently Mountstuart Elphinstone, 1841). And after the OIT was revived in the 1980s, it was again Westerners living part-time or full-time in India who elaborated it, but this time along with native Indians. This European phenomenon of “forgetting India” (as the French scholar Roger-Pol Droit calls it is his book title L’Oubli de l’Inde), even among experts of a language family that is half-Indian, was much in evidence at the Leiden conference. It was only discussed in the last 3 papers (of 30), after the actual Homeland discussions had focused on the choice between Armenia and the Yamnaya culture of the steppes. Only in the final lecture was the OIT even mentioned, but at least this mention was fair and objective. Why the OIT was revived It fell to Prof. Martin Kümmel, the leading light in the Indo-Iranian section of Indo-European Studies, to present an overview of the state of the art. He explained the OIT cursorily as mainly stemming from an absence of evidence for an invasion, but noted that most linguists reject the theory. This is in general accurate. The OIT became viable again when ca. 1990 leading Indian archaeologists (and a few non-Indian ones like Jim Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein) went public with their finding that Northwest India, where they were excavating the Harappan cities, showed no trace whatsoever of a foreign influx, neither in the form of the battles most likely to make such a huge take-over possible, and not even by a peaceful discontinuity in material or religious culture, esp. one traceable through Central Asia. This may be contrasted with the well-attested Aryan invasion of Europe, where the influx of the cattle-raising and presumably IE-speaking populations from the steppe is marked by new pottery, burial styles and other archaeological evidence. The dean of Indian archaeology, Braj Basi Lal (deceased last week at 101), who had supported the AIT for decades, changed his mind: he started declaring the Harappan landscape and Vedic literature to be “two sides of the same coin”. Contrary to common opinion, he found numerous similarities between the archaeological testimony from Harappa and Vedic culture. At any rate, these AIT rejecters are people of the same academic rank as the Western linguists who scorn their position; it will not do to “pull rank”. But note that only few of these AIT-skeptical archaeologists took the next step: from negatively denying an immigration into India to positively affirming an emigration. For many Indians, their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass: they are not interested in whether anyone came from outside or went outside. Indeed, many mistrust the emigration theory as a Western ploy to somehow, even after having to give up the immigration scenario, still have a connection with India: the “foreign hand”! Most of them don’t really care; it’s just that on their home turf, they find no trace of the Indo-Aryan invasion that the Westerners are so sure about. Most of the archaeologists, including the naturalized Frenchman Michel Danino, happen to work on the already very extensive topic of the Subcontinent’s archaeology and won’t speak out about what lies outside their expertise. They are satisfied to see the greatness and creativity of India getting ever more recognition at the expense of scenarios of foreign importation. Rejecters of the AIT may be counted in many millions, and some, like the late physicist Navaratna Rajaram, have unchained a titanic rhetoric in the effort, with lots of perceived colonial racism and Biblical superstition conspiring to deny Indians their homeland; even with a show of contempt for the idea itself of a homeland or a language family. They found an ally in the AIT-skeptical Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach who highlighted the colonialist background of the AIT, and more recently the Indian adaptation of the Woke wave is put to use to ideologically criminalize the AIT. Even so, Out-of-India theorists are only a handful. For some twenty years after the turning-point of the early 1990s, the late linguist Satya Swarup Misra and the “bank clerk” and self-taught Vedic philologist Shrikant Talageri were the only Indians to develop an Out-of-India scenario. Talageri was not only to intervene in linguistic debates, lacking in specialism but making a rarely effective use of his common sense; he also, and most uniquely, made his mark by presenting the literary testimony of the RgVeda. He showed something that the Indo-Europeanists had deemed impossible, viz. that the later stages of the dispersal from the Indo-European homeland were not separated from history by a millennial abyss, but were actually described by eye-witnesses in human language. No indirect evidence from linguistics, archaeology or genetics, as others have developed, but an explicit mention by human beings like us. While many Hindu traditionalists see the Vedas as eternal and beyond history, an actual lecture of the Vedic hymns teaches that they are very human literature, complete with intertextuality, language evolution, man addressing the gods (as opposed to the Quran or the Biblical Ten Commandments, where it is God addressing men), discernable temporal layers, and numerous references to material circumstances, wars, weddings, genealogies and the rest. They are not history books but nonetheless contain a lot of historical information. The Orientalists Edward Hopkins and Hermann Oldenburg had mapped out the layeredness of the Rg-Veda, and Talageri takes this further. Among the few, exceedingly nit-picking attempts to counter him, the pride of place is invariably for the allegation that he is but an “amateur”. Well, those who want to lambast his reconstruction of Vedic history will first have to prove the top-ranking professionals Hopkins and Oldenburg wrong. In an extremely detailed reading of the Rg-Veda which I cannot hope to summarize here, he manages to decipher numerous aspects of Vedic tradition, such as the lexical and other linguistic changes over time, or the sequence in geographical shift. Thus, the oldest books are familiar with the Ganga in Inner India, but know nothing about Afghanistan, while the later books show a westward shift in perspective. This is the very opposite of what the AIT would make you expect. Most linguists don’t accept the OIT, as Kümmel correctly reports. But then, most linguists by far don’t know the OIT. They rely on vague hearsay, mostly from hostile sources. The minimum that they could do is familiarize themselves with Talageri’s path-breaking work. This starts with his books The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis (2000) and The Rigveda and the Avesta: the Final Evidence (2008); but poverty-stricken or niggardly scholars can now download most of his updated or newer work from his academia.edu page (https://independent.academia.edu/ShrikantTalageri) or his blog spot (https://talageri.blogspot.com). We can have a more in-depth discussion once this essential preliminary has been fulfilled. It is only in the last decade that Talageri is getting a few followers. Often these are academics from wildly different fields who started out by ludicrously misunderstanding the stakes of the controversy, but who have grown during the debate, e.g. the physicists Raj Vedam and Abhijit Chavda, retired bureaucrat Sanjay Dixit, or bio-medical scientist Premendra Priyadarshi. Other pioneers of the revived OIT have been Westerners, principally retired Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas from Greece. There are no departments of Indo-European Linguistics in Indian universities, and no Indian seems to have been motivated to master the subject himself, so that those who do want to speak out on the linguistic aspects often make fools of themselves. But the entry of genetics into the debate has provided a more welcoming atmosphere for the more science-savvy Indians. The contribution of genetics The star guest at the Leiden conference was David Reich, the pioneering geneticist from Harvard. Indians may know him from his book Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018) and its claim that an influx of genetically distinct people entered India from the northwest in 2000-1500 BC, seemingly an independent and unexpected confirmation of the extant AIT. This prestigious book was politically instrumentalized for an attack on Hindu nationalism by journalist Tony Joseph in Early Indians (2018), itself the object of a rebuttal by Shrikant Talageri: Genetics and the Aryan Debate (2019, with foreword by the present writer). Mind you, David Reich need not have been wrong. Having now met him for a few conversations, I certainly wouldn’t suspect him either of prejudice or of incompetence; it will take a very thorough job to find him wrong. But like Martin Kümmel on Indo-European linguistics, his fault may lie in what he does not address. His Indian critics mainly hold it against him that the genes characteristic of the Yamnaya population have been found at an earlier date and in greater variety in India. (Against this, it is argued that this is true for the overarching R1a haplogroup, emerging 22,000 years ago probably in India, while the more specific R1a1 emerged outside India; I leave it to the legitimate geneticists to fight this out.) Secondly, there may well have been a foreign influx, as there have been many in Indian history, such as the Scythians, Greeks, Huns, Kushanas and Turks. But all of them (and the Syrian-Christian and Parsi refugee communities) have linguistically assimilated, even when retaining their separateness in religion. None of them kept its language, let alone impose it on the natives. So invasionists have some explaining to do about what made these Aryan invaders so dramatically different. Anyway, one invasion more or less won’t make the difference, for the influx of a language clearly does not follow from the influx of a genetically definable human community. And there is a third problem with the support for the Aryan Invasion Theory from genetics. We will discuss it separately at the end. In Leiden, Reich presented more recent work, pertaining to a debate between several peri-Caucasian homelands. He sees the Yamnaya culture, generally considered the Indo-European homeland, as only a “secondary homeland”. For those who read carefully, he had cursorily already said so in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Yamnaya was a settlement for people coming from south of the Caucasus, Armenia or even northern Iran. At the 2017 German Orientalist Conference in Jena, linguist Paul Heggarty had already made a similar suggestion, though he thought more of Anatolia as the ultimate homeland. It just goes to show how even linguists are not too sure of their linguistically-derived homeland theories, easily disagreeing, changing their minds or giving in the non-linguistic innovative hypotheses. (The homeland of the Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan and Uralic families are also still in dispute; about the latter, a speaker in Leiden defended the Ob basin in Siberia as the homeland.) The OIT, of course, had always thought of Yamnaya as but a secondary homeland, consisting of locals mixed with immigrants from India (or from a linguistically Indianized territory to the east, esp. Bactria); but nobody here took this possibility in consideration. The finding that made waves this time was that genetically, the Anatolians (Hittites, Luwians) proved to be related to the Armenia-based people of some 5500 years ago, but not to the Yamnaya people. So these Armenians may have moved to both Anatolia and the steppes, and in the latter mixed with locals and produced the ultimate Yamnaya type that was to invade Europe. So the Yamnayans were only a subsection of the Indo-Europeans, distinct from at least the Anatolian branch. Many papers at the Leiden conference (less in Berlin, where the focus remained purely linguistic) took the genetic findings concerning the local populations of their topic into account. Thus, a paper on the Indo-Europeanization or Celticization of the British Islands acknowledged that linguists over generations had reconstructed a Hamito-Semitic substrate influence in island-Celtic: immigrants from North Africa or traders from Phoenicia had settled in (or remained in contact with) the British Islands, and imparted some of their language to incoming Celtic. But this was wiped off the table: no more Hamito-Semitic influence, not because those linguists had been proven wrong, but because its presence is not confirmed (yet) by the newest genetic date, which show no Mediterranean genes. Here we wonder if linguists are not going too far in subordinating their own discipline to the “harder” discipline of genetics. After all, genes don’t speak, and gene-carrying people are known to have changed language. After 1945, all courses on Indo-European Linguistics have emphatically warned against identifying languages with physical traits. A century ago, the confusing notion of the “Aryan skull type” misled people, and after 1945 a sharp distinction between Linguistics and Physical Anthropology was maintained. But today this has resurfaced as the “Aryan gene” – that’s what Indian papers on the pro-AIT side called the Yamnaya-associated R1A1 gene during the 2018 debate over Tony Joseph’s version of David Reich’s findings. In their ivory towers Western scholars think the political misuse of the AIT is a thing of the pre-war past, but in India it certainly isn’t. Linguists bending over backwards to please the physical anthropologists in 1900 or the geneticists today are only a particular case of a more general problem of research method. When two bodies of evidence, generated by different disciplines, point in different directions, the solution is not to suppress one type of evidence in favour of the other. It is not to make one discipline crawl and swallow its own conclusions to appease the other. All while rechecking both types of evidence to make sure that they really constitute evidence, the scholarly mind will endeavour to do justice to both and to reconcile them. If this means conceding that we aren’t there yet, and that against our grain we have yet a lot of work to do, then so be it. The testimony of the RgVeda In contrast with the linguists’ enthusiasm for the new science of genetics, and already longer for European archaeology, we notice a radical disinterest in several other relevant disciplines. Some Indian archaeology has been used in the past, particularly the seeming contrast of the excavated Harappan cities with Vedic culture. But more recent archaeological developments are being completely ignored. The principal one is the absence of archaeological traces of the invasion. Certainly there are no signs of a military conquest, which is why some scholars wax indignant when others describe their position as an Aryan “Invasion” Theory. But the word “invasion” does not pertain to the manner of a take-over by foreigners, but to the very fact of the take-over. The Indo-European invaders are thought to have imposed their language and religion on the largest conglomeration of people at that time: such a feat deserves the term “invasion”. At any rate, the archaeologists find no trace of it. Even anti-OIT champion Michael Witzel admits that there is no archaeological evidence for it “yet”. The evolution of a single person’s view on this proves important, too. Prof. BB Lal, who died last week aged 101, was the only archaeologist ever who could be cited as furnishing proof of the “Aryans” in India. In the 1950s he had explained the Painted Grey Ware that he had dug up in post-Harappan cities of Northwest India as characteristic of the Aryan invaders on their way deeper into India. Around 1990, as the rejection of the AIT became more common around him, he rethought his findings and concluded that he had only tailored (not to say force-fitted) his findings to the AIT paradigm he had interiorized from his mentor, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He had applied the reigning paradigm but not proven it. Ever since, a number of publications of his, culminating in his book The Rigvedic People (2015), have documented the essential oneness of the archaeologically attested Harappan cities and literarily attested Vedic culture: “Harappa and the Vedas are but two sides of the same coin.” Earlier the Indo-Europeanists considered the Rg-Veda as a goldmine of relevant historical information. Though hymns to the gods, the Vedic texts contain much historical information in passing, such as the level of technology and the surrounding natural data suggesting to place them in Bronze Age (3300-1500 BC) Northwest India. In particular, they describe several battles, and these teach us about the ethnic landscape. The early translations suggested that these battles pitted white invaders, naturally victorious, against the dark aboriginals. This became one of the nails in the coffin of the original OIT: if the linguistic evidence was non-committal on the homeland question and allowed for an Indian homeland, it nonetheless became untenable to insist on this Indian homeland if the Indians themselves testified that they had come as invaders. But at least, the indubitably good side here is that it proves the early Indo-Europeanists to be interdisciplinary: they took extra-linguistic (i.c. literary) data seriously. But that was not the case in every relevant respect, and today less so than in the 19th century. Thus, no translator back then or today has accounted for the repeated presence of the Iranians in the Rg-Veda, esp. in the Battle of the Ten Kings and the Vārṣāgira battle. The unmistakably Iranian names of the hostile kings and tribes and the unmistakably Zoroastrian references in the description of their religion make you wonder how a whole series of translators has been able to pigeonhole them as “black aboriginals”. Even within the invasionist paradigm with its likeness to the then-ongoing colonization, scholars should have thought of the fact that the colonial powers fought each other as often as they fought the natives, so that here the enemies of the Vedic section of the supposed Aryan invaders could have been an adjoining section of the same invader group, such as the Iranians. (And incidentally, this Vedic mention also revolutionizes our insight into the role of Zarathuštra Spitama within Zoroastrian history: not the great reformer who created the distinctive Mazdean doctrine but the hereditary court priest of king Vištāspa’s Kavi dynasty, who inherited an anti-Deva, anti-Indra and without-yajña tradition already several generations old, but who became famous by first putting it into hymns.) This complements the Avestan data about 16 Iranian countries: these are the different regions of present-day Tajikistan and Afghanistan, plus as the second Hapta-Hendū, Sanskrit Sapta-Sindhū i.e. present-day Panjab, and as the first Airyānam Vaēja, “expanse of the Aryans”. There is no mystery about this, it is Kashmir. The Avesta describes Hapta-Hendu as too hot, and after the Sahara desert, Panjab in the dry season is indeed the hottest region in the world; while Kashmir is called too cold, and for South-Asians Kashmir is indeed unusually chilly. In Vedic literature, while the Vedic Paurava tribe lives in Haryana, their Ānava sister tribe lives in Kashmir; and after their joint and successful counter-attack against the Druhyu tribe located in Panjab, it is the Ānavas who take over Panjab, chasing the Druhyus to Afghanistan. But as the Paurava-Bhārata king Sudās encroaches on Panjab, it is these Ānavas or proto-Iranians who unite to throw him back, but are defeated in the Battle of the Ten Kings and chased in their turn to Afghanistan. Here you see two literarily attested phases of emigration from India, arguably part of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European unity. When I confronted Prof. Kümmel with this perpetuation of the “black aboriginals” scenario, he simply denied this. In India they would now lambast him as an incorrigible racist and all that, but I sensed this was based on something real. To be sure, in India’s Reich-triggered debate of 2018-19 I have seen numerous times how the hostile Dāsas and Dasyus (both Sanskrit versions of Iranian terms) of the Battle of the Ten Kings were still identified as the dark aboriginals. In Western popular and second-hand literature this continuation of imagery from the 19th and 20th century is also still common, and where the enemies are not identified, at least no acknowledgment or correction of the old translators’ consequential error is forthcoming. Yet there is indeed one important break-away from this old consensus within the scholarly world. In Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton’s 2014 RgVeda translation, the recentmost of its kind, this notion of black opponents is preserved, but with reference to Hans Hock’s 1999 paper on the Vedic use of colours (a rare instance of the genuine AIT-vs.-OIT debate that took place around the turn of the millennium), the authors specify that this doesn’t refer to skin colour. As Hock points out, “black” is very commonly said of enemies. Thus, in World War II the British called the Indian freedom fighter and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose “a black”. So it constitutes progress if the enemies are no longer describes as “black-skinned”. But the result of all these obsolete “white conquers black” translations has not been corrected, in fact it has gone completely unchallenged. It served as proof from the horse’s mouth for the Aryan invasion when that hypothesis was still in the process of being established, and now that this proof has fallen away, the Aryan invasion still goes unquestioned. Moreover, in the specific episode of the Battle of the Ten Kings, even this correction of the meaning of “black” isn’t good enough. Here the description of the enemies as “black people” (janāḥ-asiknīḥ, RV 7:5:3) is a pun referring to the river basin where they come from: as “people from the Black River”. Asiknī is the Vedic name of the Chenab in present-day Pakistani Panjab, the river just west of the Paruṣṇī, present-day Ravi, where the battle takes place, with the Vedic Bhārata tribe coming from Haryana in the east. The mistranslation as “black aboriginals” for what is really the “proto-Iranian tribal coalition” is, given the career of the Aryan invasion of India as the paradigm of the racist worldview (explicitly espoused by Adolf Hitler in his 1920 booklet Warum Sind Wir Antisemiten?), one of the most consequential mistranslations in history. Vedic chronology A non-linguistic type of information full of consequence for the homeland question is Vedic chronology. Every Indo-Europeanist wanting to give an opinion on how North India “became” Indo-European ought to familiarize himself with it. Here it is well worth reviewing how Friedrich Max Müller’s estimate of 1500 BC for the fabled Aryan invasion into India succeeded in becoming the orthodoxy. It was at once criticized by Max Müller’s own pupil Moriz Winternitz, who judged it unrealistic to cram the entire cultural and philosophical evolution from early Vedic to the Buddha in a few centuries. Max Müller himself ended up admitting that it really was only a guess, and even threw his arms up in the air to muse that we would never know the date. We are skeptical of such premature pessimism, but strongly agree that 1500 BC was only a baseless guess. Yet for lack of a systematized alternative, it became the orthodoxy, and still is. There was no relevant archaeology then, but here science has advanced. Spoked-wheeled chariots have been discovered in Sanauli near Delhi, and dated to ca. 2000 BC. They are mentioned in the Rg-Veda, but only in its latest, tenth book, which is centuries younger than the other books, quite distinct in language and worldview. The earlier books know of the slow (and often large) ox-drawn carts, but the swift horse-drawn chariot is confined to the youngest layer. So: much of the Rg-Veda can be dated to the early 3rd millennium, only the 10th book near its end. The drying-up of the Saraswati river, since then a seasonal rivulet named Ghaggar, has been dated by geologists to 1900 BC. In the post-Vedic Mahābhārata epic, we see it in this rivulet state, with one of the heroes going on pilgrimage to the site where it definitively dries up in the desert. As a consequence of the Saraswati's dessiccation, many people have moved to the east (Greater Magadha), the west and even far west (furnishing the Sanskrit elements in the Kassite and the Mitannic language) and locally upland to smaller rivers, where they had newly founded the cities central to the epic: Hastināpura, Soniprastha, Indraprastha etc. In the Rg-Veda, by contrast, the Saraswati is still an ocean-going river, the life-artery of the Vedic civilization, praised as the river par excellence; clearly well before 1900 BC. (The treatment of the Saraswati evidence forms an interesting case study in the stonewalling of putative pro-OIT evidence by AIT militants, typically outsiders to Indo-European studies such as comparative historian Steve Farmer: they lambast the equating of the Vedic Saraswati with today’s Ghaggar as a paranoid Hindu-nationalist concoction, when actually it was established by a string of Western scholars since the 1850s, in tempore non suspecto. A case study in how this debate has been poisoned by endless political imputations.) A really objective measuring rod for Vedic chronology is provided by astronomy. True, archaeo-astronomical data are often injudiciously used by an intellectual fringe, e.g. the description of an eclipse would apply quite regularly, so the claim that it points to a particular date only betrays ignorance or over-enthusiasm. This is why the Indian debates about the Mahābhārata war’s astro-dating are hilarious to watch. But there is one very big hand on the cosmic clock that offers a reliable though vague chronology: the precession of the equinoxes. The equinoxes move through the constellations (or vice-versa: the stars move past the equinoxes) at the rate of 1° per ca. 71 years, full circle in ca. 25,772 years. When an equinoctial or solstitial point coincides with a particular star, it won’t do so again for the next 25 millennia. The later Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas, decidedly a younger corpus than the Ṛg-Veda, contain several references to the Pleiades constellation on the Equinoctial axis (Atharva-Veda 19:7, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4:4:10, Maitrāyaṇi Saṁhitā 2:13:20, Kathaka Saṁhitā 39:13, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 2:1:2:3), which took place in the 23rd century BC. The Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa 19:3 indicates the same period by means of a different astronomical pointer, viz. the star Regulus on the summer solstice point. An ancillary work of the Vedas, the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa (“Veda-Ancillary of Stellar Science”, at that time meaning astronomy though nowadays used to refer to astrology), conventionally dated to 500-200 BCE, actually dates itself twice to ca. 1350 BCE, viz. by explicitating which stars are on the winter solstice and spring equinox points: Dhaniṣṭha solstitial, Bharaṇī equinoctial. Note that the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa is a manual of observational astronomy, drawing attention to phenomena your eyes can see and which have a role in the ritual you are setting up. It definitely doesn’t deal in reminiscences, as opponents have argued; moreover, a reminiscence bridging the centuries between the Vedic and the conventional Max Müller dates would point to a great astronomical acumen that would in turn support the astro-information they recorded. This is an explicitly post-Vedic and very post-Rg-Vedic text, so the Vedic corpus was already complete by the time, some 1500 BC, when the Aryan Invasion Theory has the Aryans only arrive in India. It is one of more than a dozen precessional pointers in Vedic literature broadly defined, which prove completely consistent: the absolute-chronological astro-sequence never violates the known relative-chronological literary sequence. (Next, they also get coordinated with archaeological data like the appearance of chariots and of iron implements, two types of evidence that happen to be in flux due to new discoveries, unlike the precessional data.) Moreover, not one of them supports Max Müllers widely-accepted chronology. We have derived some amusement from reading the mental and verbal acrobatics which conformistic scholars try out to neutralize this inconvenient evidence. The frantic attempts by leading Indian historians like Romila Thapar to refute or cancel this astronomical evidence at least shows that they realize its importance and understand the threat it poses to the conventional chronology. By contrast, Western scholars have so far preferred to ignore this pertinent evidence. Well, not all of them. In a book that every Indology student gets to read, the Vedic Index by AB Keith & AA MacDonnell, 1912, the authors acknowledge that locating the star Maghā/Regulus on the Solstice, as the Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa does, strictly refers to ca. 2300 BC, where indeed it belongs, but in their conclusions shift it to 800 BC, fully 1500 years later than what the Brāhmaṇa text and elementary astronomy tell us. Me thinks it is unbecoming of scholars to cavalierly shift an attested date around like this. Likewise, David Pingree, who counts as an authority on ancient astronomy, moves the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa down from 1350 BC to 500 BC or even 200 BCE, pleading that the evolution rate of language necessitates this denial of the astronomical information. So this is the ignore-the-evidence mentality that we are up against. But the astronomical data from the source text fails to support the scholars’ low and AIT-friendly estimate. Suppose the rate of linguistic change does indeed point the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa to a date no less than a millennium later than its own chronological self-testimony. Then the scholarly attitude is to acknowledge that different types of evidence are in conflict; that the supposed linguistic evidence contradicts the astronomical evidence. Let this sink in, and next you can explore ways to either falsify one of them or to reconcile them at a higher level of understanding yet to be reached. What is not acceptable is to simply suppress one type of evidence and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Yet that is what has been done for more than a century to protect the low invasionist chronology. Against this we find that, as historical evidence goes, it provides strong support to Shrikant Talageri’s higher chronological estimate. A consequence of this higher Vedic chronology concerns David Reich’s claim that there was a genetically identifiable influx from Eastern Europe into India in ca. 1700 BC. I know that some Indian geneticists dispute this, but not being competent in genetics, I will not press this point. Let there have been an influx. Through the Khyber Pass, so many invasions (all in the nature of military conquest) have taken place since; no big deal if one more can be identified. Note that all of them have linguistically assimilated, even when preserving their religious separateness. They lost their mother tongue, and a fortiori, they failed to impose it on the natives, quite in contrast with what the Aryans are claimed to have done. At any rate, we don’t mind an influx of people ca. 1700 BC. But one thing we know for sure (and this is the third problem for Reich’s theory): this influx was not what brought the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European into India. With the RgVeda having been composed inside India starting more than a thousand years earlier, 1700 BC was simply too late for an Indo-Europeanization. If this comes as a shock to all those who had thought that the AIT has now finally been proved by genetics, they have the option of proving all the evidence for a higher Vedic chronology wrong. But this they will only be able to do after familiarizing themselves with this part of the OIT. Conclusion It is possible to pull a horse towards a pond, but not to make the horse drink. The Indo-Europeanists who have ignored the OIT challenge for decades are at liberty to continue doing so. There is no punishment even if they end up being proven wrong: the pro-geocentric near-consensus that stalled the Copernican revolution towards heliocentrism was never punished either. At most the die-hard geocentrists live on in our memory as misguided; and hardly even that, for no one ever thinks of them. No one with what the Indian Constitution calls the “scientific temper” would want them to suddenly drop their AIT certainties and adopt the new line of the OIT. No, the invitation is for them to study the evidence for the OIT themselves and form their own judgment.
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Genetic proof for the AIT? Look again.

Authorities on science and the scientific temper very wisely teach students never to use Wikipedia as a source: it is often amateurish and incomplete, and on any controversial subject (not just politics) it is invariably partisan, with one of the contending parties having captured the "encyclopedia" entry and preventing  the other parties from entering corrections or their own versions. And yet, it is while browsing through a reference that turned out to lead to a Wikipedia page, that I found the following quotation by Harvard geneticist David Reich that had escaped my notice during the whole hullabaloo triggered by India's anti-Hindu crowd that finally, "genetics has proven the Aryan Invasion Theory". Here goes:

"Ancient DNA available from this time in Anatolia shows no evidence of steppe ancestry similar to that in the Yamnaya (although the evidence here is circumstantial as no ancient DNA from the Hittites themselves has yet been published). This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right the population sent one branch up into the steppe-mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as described earlier- and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite."  (Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. By David Reich. New York: Pantheon, 2018)

His putative Proto-Indo-European Homeland lies neither in the Yamna area of the Pontic steppes, the great favourite, nor in Anatolia, the little favourite, but in a third region, tentatively indicated as "Iran or Armenia", south of the Caspian Sea. That region equally lies outside India and therefore necessitates an immigration or invasion into India in order to explain the presence of a branch of Indo-European there. That is all that interested the anti-Hindu section in India: in order to spite the Hindus, it wants to be able to say to them that they are invaders. The implication would be that they can be divided into "aboriginal" and "invader" communities, and that they have no right to chide the Muslims or the Christian missionaries for having entered India as invaders. 

But us scholars, we know that the hypothetical Aryan Invasion was not some generic invasion from just anywhere as long as it wasn't India. No, it had a specific Homeland, and a lot of effort has already gone into elaborating the archaeology and genetics of the Pontic area in order to correlate these with a linguistic scenario, viz. the disintegration of the ancestral Proto-Indo-European language into its several branches, from Celtic and Germanic to Tocharian and Indo-Aryan.

Now, what Reich says here, is that the Pontic area was not the Homeland. He adds the detail that at least the arrival of the Anatolian branch of Indo-European into Anatolia does not correspond to a gene flow from the Pontic area. So, exit the Pontic area as a candidate for Homeland status? I already thought so for several other reasons, starting with the common-sense observation that this thinly populated region does not support the kind of demographic heavyweight to displace or radically transform the demographic powerhouse of the Harappan civilization. To conquer and transform Europe was possible, especially if you kill off much of the male population, as indicated by the genetic record for the -3rd millennium. There is plenty of evidence tracing the population and culture of Europe back to the Pontic area, so to that it was a Homeland,-- but only a secondary Homeland. As one of the leading Indo-Europeanists, Paul Heggarty from Leipzig University, said at the German Orientalist conference of 2017: the Pontic Yamna ("pit-grave") culture came too late to be the ultimate Homeland. It was a secondary Homeland, itself already a settlement area for immigrants from elsewhere.

According to the Out-of-India Theory, that ultimate primary Homeland was North India. Reich, who isn't too sure of his case, sees it in Armenia (already proposed as a Homeland by Thomas Gamkrelidze & Vyacheslav Ivanov) or Iran. That discussion of where exactly can be left for another occasion. The message to take home for now is that even David Reich, celebrated by India's Aryan Invasion champions, as also by New-Rightist Euro-Nationalists, locates the Homeland outside Europe and helps to disprove the really existing invasionist Homeland theory, viz. with the Pontic steppes as Homeland.

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Genetics and the Aryan invasion debate

Pragyata, 24 June 2017

After some fifteen years, we may be witnessing a revival in the debate between the Aryan Invasion Theory (OIT) and the Out-of-India Theory (OIT). The AIT camp has been completely stonewalling any attempt at debate from the OIT camp for years now, though in the late 1990s some of its tenors did briefly try to refute the pro-OIT arguments then doing the rounds on the brand-new internet forums. But it went into smug hibernation, having decided that on second thought, the whole OIT was too flaky and too politically tainted (even more than the colonialist-cum-Nazi-tainted AIT) to dirty its hands on. Meanwhile, save for a handful of busy bees, the OIT camp was equally smug, deluding itself that it had disproven the AIT long ago. 

Now however, one Tony Joseph, veteran business journalist, gate-crashes into the Aryan origins debate via an article in The Hindu: “How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate” (16 June 2017) This in turn is an interpretation of the impact of a scientific paper by Marina Silva et al.: “A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals” (Evolutionary Biology BMC, March, 2017; the team was led by Prof. Martin Richards). Joseph claims that the AIT was put in doubt by earlier genetic studies but that this paper and other recent findings have firmly decided the debate in favour of an invasion. (Well, he uses the weasel word “migration”, like most AIT champions who lack the courage of their conviction; but like most “migrationists”, he turns out to mean not a migration of families in wagons, but an entry of all-male bands of warriors who end up fathering plenty of children upon native women; a scenario ordinarily known as an “invasion”.)

The Aryan invasion question is correctly formulated as: “Did IE language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India some time in 2000-1500 BC?” Joseph’s triumphal answer is: “Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.”

The strictly genetical parts of his thesis, I will leave to legitimate geneticists to answer. For starters, two excellent rebuttals have come to my notice: by Anil Kumar Suri (https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/genetics-might-be-settling-the-aryan-migration-debate-but-not-how-left-liberals-believe) and by AL Chavda (http://indiafacts.org/propagandizing-aryan-invasion-debate-rebuttal-tony-joseph/#). In the present article, I have mainly tried to put the highly partisan piece by Joseph in the context of the broader Aryan origins debate and of India’s culture wars.

Linguistic or racial invasion?

As a reader of internet media, much lambasted by the mainstream media, I am aware of the genetic studies in recent years that were welcomed as disproving the AIT. I was sceptical: the initial generation of genetic studies had to be taken with a big pinch of salt because it suffered of childhood diseases. More fundamentally, genes, much like archaeological findings, don’t speak. You cannot tell from genes, nor from excavated artefacts, what language the people concerned spoke. I frowned when I saw genetic findings being mustered as proof against the linguistic AIT.

Confusing language movements with demographic movements was a childhood disease of Indo-European linguistics before 1945. Especially after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), race thinking came to dominate the Humanities. There were warnings from Indo-Europeanists, including the much-maligned Friedrich Max Müller, to maintain the distinction, but the public and many professionals started speaking of “the Aryan race”, not in the vague sense common earlier (race = any group of hereditary belonging, from family to nation and race to humanity, Sanskrit jāti), but in the biological sense. After 1945, this went completely out of fashion in the West, but in India, not encumbered with the guilt about Nazi racism, time has stood still.

That is why Joseph can assert that a genetic study has disproven a linguistic theory. Strictly speaking, that alone should stamp him incompetent for the Aryan debate. Then again, let us face the fact that among Indians, this confusion is also quite common, as it was among Europeans of an earlier generation. In principle this makes sense: you continue both the genes and the language inherited from your parents. But while your genes can’t be traded in for others, people do change language in the course of their lives, not as a rule but as a sufficiently frequent exception. Before the colonial age, which imparted European languages to a number of colonial populations, white Europe and brown India represented about a half each of the Indo-European-speaking population, thus vividly demonstrating that their language had crossed a racial frontier: either brown to white or white to brown. So, genes and language are different thing, partly related and partly not.

For an invasion as dramatic and rich in consequences as the Aryan influx is deemed to be, with a complete switch in language and culture of a highly civilized and densely populated country, it is nonetheless unlikely that it would leave no traces at all. In those days, there were no internet courses that allowed you to learn a language spoken at a great distance; for imparting a language to foreigners, it was necessary to go to their country. There must have been some kind of sizeable migration demonstrable in the archaeological and genetic record. In this respect, archaeology is completely disappointing the AIT party, for it consistently refuses to throw up any trace of this fabled Aryan invasion. But they have their hopes up anew: perhaps the genetic record can fill in the blanks?

Given that pattern of expectation, studies refuting the invasion theory, for whatever they were worth, were very welcome. They dampened the usual arrogance of the AIT camp,-- at least to the extent that people heard of them. The dominant media largely kept the lid on them. If they reported them, it was in measured, or what Joseph calls “nuanced”, tones; nothing like the triumphalism with which he himself claims that genetics has proven the AIT.

Now that at least one scientific paper has been presented as supporting the AIT, the reaction among activist Hindus was initially one of unpleasant surprise, sometimes panic, for many of them had always harboured a secret fear: “What if the scholars do manage to prove the AIT?” But this was followed by a resolve among some of them to revisit the evidence and get serious about the debate again.

Other activist Hindus, by contrast, feel vindicated in their long-standing support for the AIT. Indeed, there exists a casteist-racist fringe among Brahmins who feel flattered by the claim that they descend from foreign conquerors and that they imposed the caste system as a racial Apartheid system. Outsiders including Joseph may not know about this, but any defence of the AIT plays into the hand of the most regressive elements of Hindu society. In the West too, the AIT is not only an unassailable orthodoxy in academe, it also serves as ideological backbone for some remaining racist ideologues.

Apart from those fringes, the healthy reaction among more sober Hindu activists is the resolve that they, or at least those among them who are equipped for it, should return to the Aryan debate and win it once and for all. This promises to be an interesting cup final, for the opposing camp is self-assured and in no mind to give in.  

How does a language invade?

The origin of the Indo-European languages in India, starring Sanskrit, is principally a linguistic scenario, which must have come about on the waves of historical developments, and these may have left traces in the genetic record. Joseph is neither a linguist nor a historian nor even a geneticist, and in my quarter-century in the thick of the Aryan debate, I have never encountered his name. That need not be an obstacle, for by their own effort, people can become self-taught experts in a specialism in which they have no degree, even after a career in a different field, including business journalism. But they still have to satisfy the same criteria as the certified scholars or scientists whose equal they aspire to be. This, then, is what is missing in this article. Joseph doesn’t have a grasp of some basic issues in this debate.

This is not so exceptional. Many geneticists themselves don’t properly understand the Aryan debate, already two centuries old before genetics became a useful instrument in reconstructing migrations in history. The first studies in this field, finding e.g. that some genes were strikingly common between North India and Eastern Europe, contained conclusions that were at best not in conflict with the Aryan invasion scenario but did not prove it at all. In casu, they may at that stage have shown up grounds for either an India-to-Europe movement or a Europe-to-India movement without being able to decide between the two. Yet, they concluded in favour of the AIT because they retrofitted their own newfound data into the theory that, they heard, had already been proven by the linguists.

This is the so-called “circular argument of authority”: first you feed an expert a story, then he himself comes out with that same story, and then you can claim that your own little story has been confirmed by a world expert, thus giving it more authority. For example, when Indian “secularists” invoke the positions of Western India-watchers (about Kashmir, the supposedly secular Constitution, Hindutva etc.), the latter invariably turn out to have first swallowed the biases of their Indian “secularist” sources. So the Indian secularists are really only quoting themselves, though embellished with the academic jargon that Western graduates are so good at.

In the Aryan debate, the same thing has happened: the AIT viewpoint is first fed to experts from other fields, such as genetics, and then these view the data in their own field through the glasses which their partisan friends have put on their noses. The geneticists quoted here, both in their original papers and in the quotes from interviews, clearly have no independent grasp of the Aryan debate.

Thus, the quoted paper by Silva et al. states: “Indo-European has been frequently connected to the so-called ‘Indo-Aryan invasion’ from Central Asia ca. 3,5 ka, and the establishment of the caste system.” There never follows a critical second thought about this received wisdom. Not having studied this debate, they fall back on hearsay from their Orientalist colleagues, who all teach the AIT. What other influence would they have? Those capable of situating and defending the OIT can literally be counted on your fingers; none of them has functioned as an information source for geneticists. Though the geneticists certainly live up to the scientific method when it comes to handling genetic data; when they approach the AIT as possible explanation, they become mere followers of convention. 

Nevertheless, we should not use this circumstance as an escape clause from the debate. For meanwhile, Joseph does report on a development among geneticists that may well prove as important as he asserts.

Invaders

Joseph claims he is part of a bold dislodging of an established orthodoxy: “The dominant narrative in recent years has been that genetics research had thoroughly disproved the Aryan migration theory.”

Oh yes? Where are the schools and institutes that teach the demise of the AIT? The truth is that these studies never made a dent in the pro-AIT orthodoxy. The mainstream media chose to talk about them only minimally, the textbooks never mention them at all. The only people excited about these findings were the OIT adherents, and if you listened in on them, you might have gottenthe impression that the time was ripe for the acceptance of the OIT.

What has suddenly happened, according to Joseph, is this: “Until recently, only data on mtDNA (or matrilineal DNA, transmitted only from mother to daughter) were available and that seemed to suggest there was little external infusion into the Indian gene pool over the last 12,500 years or so. New Y-DNA data has turned that conclusion upside down, with strong evidence of external infusion of genes into the Indian male lineage during the period in question.”

In itself, it is no big deal that Joseph misinterprets the “mt” as “matrilineal” instead of “mitochondrial”, but again it suggests he is unfamiliar with his chosen topic. In journalism you often have to deal with unfamiliar subjects, but relative to the tall claims he makes in this article, he ought to have done his homework better. Nonetheless, he whets our curiosity for his evidence on the Y-chromosome data.

“The reason for the difference in mtDNA and Y-DNA data is obvious in hindsight: there was strong sex bias in Bronze Age migrations. In other words, those who migrated were predominantly male and, therefore, those gene flows do not really show up in the mtDNA data. On the other hand, they do show up in the Y-DNA data: specifically, about 17.5% of Indian male lineage has been found to belong to haplogroup R1a (haplogroups identify a single line of descent), which is today spread across Central Asia, Europe and South Asia. Pontic-Caspian Steppe is seen as the region from where R1a spread both west and east, splitting into different sub-branches along the way.”

Note the AIT-serving claim, appearing out of the blue, that the Pontic-Caspian steppe “is seen as” the region of origin. This expression is a sure give-away of hearsay, of a borrowed opinion. It is not based on the geneticists’ R1a research.

Frankly, I had understood that the jury is still out concerning the origin of R1A, and that it is strikingly in evidence among some “aboriginal” Indian tribes. But not being a geneticist, I will not argue too forcefully about that. At any rate, the paper by Silva et al. does not say that it found earlier studies to have been mistaken about this, and is altogether more nuanced and temperate than the tall and abrasive claims by Joseph.

In that paper, “16 scientists led by Prof. Martin P. Richards of the University of Huddersfield, U.K., concluded: ‘Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages… across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago’.”

That is something else altogether. Their evidence concerning an origin in “the Pontic-Caspian region” will have to be studied, of course. But note that the scientists admit that they have not studied the link between their genetic data and the identification of the purported migrants as Indo-European: this is only “attributed” and “inferred”, meaning “borrowed on trust from our Indo-Europeanist informers”, all of them wedded to the AIT. They do not make a professional claim for the AIT, that is only a speculative afterthought, merely for genetically attested movements.

“In an email exchange”, of which doesn’t tell us the leading questions, “Prof. Richards said the prevalence of R1a in India was ‘very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to India’.”

Their identification as Indo-European is, in his mouth, not more than hearsay, by definition not corroborated by genetic data, nor by the archaeological data, which show up no such dramatic discontinuity, as even AIT partisans admit. “Bronze Age” is also but a vague name for a long and ill-defined period. But we retain that, if rendered correctly, he does insist on a real influx from Central Asia still showing up in 17,5% of the Indian Y-chromosomes.

Central-Asian invaders in Hindu historiography

If this claim proves correct, there are a number of other explanations. An influx from Central Asia is roundly admitted by Indian tradition. Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas came in the historical period, just before and just after the time of Christ. Long before that, since the onset of the Ice Age, many northerners escaped the barren north and migrated south, hence e.g. the many blondes described by the Egyptians among their western neighbours; India too must have been among their destinations. And between those chronological extremes, there must have been more. 

Though their incursion was considered dramatic at the time, with Vikramaditya of Ujjain hailed by Indians as the defeater of the Shaka invaders, it remained inconsequential culturally, as these invaders dissolved in the Indian population and assimilated the language and religion of their hosts. Only their genes remained, till recently in hiding, but now accessible. Today they must form part of those 17.5%.

A second consideration is that an inflow does not prevent a movement in the other direction. If the Silva paper is sensational, it might be because of passages like this one, about the Bronze Age: “Gene flow at this time was clearly bi-directional, as seen in the expansion west of lineages M5a2a4, U2c1b + 146 and M3a1b + 13105. This is reflected in the genome-wide ADMIXTURE analysis (…), where the autochthonous South Asian component (…) appears at low levels in Iran.”

For readers of The Hindu (please note, foreigners, that this name is a historical relic, and that since decades it is a left-wing anti-Hindu paper), it may come as a surprise that a paper claimed to prove the AIT actually documents a bit of OIT. Others will be less surprised by this confirmation of the emigrations from India, in line with extant archaeological findings and with the general drift of earlier genetic studies,-- which Joseph’s article was meant to counter.

Another possibility, tailor-made for the Hindu reader, is a compromise. Come to think of it, it is surprising that none of those synthesis-enamoured Gandhians raised this possibility before: a scenario that approximately satisfies both the AIT and the OIT camps. Here, there was an influx from Central Asia, which with the help of linguistics we could pinpoint to ca. 4000 BC, the farthest estimate of the fragmentation of Proto-Indo-European. Only, this influx did not bring Indo-Aryan, the exclusively Indian branch of Indo-European (distinct from other branches such as Greek, Celtic, Slavic etc., that “remained” in the west), as the AIT holds, but all of the branches, still united in their foremother, Proto-Indo-European.

As Shrikant Talageri has shown, Hindu tradition envisages all of “Aryan” history as the life and times of the descendents of Manu, the founder-king who landed with his Flood-survival ship in Manali and set up his court in Ayodhya. A descendent of his was Yayati, whose sons Druhyu and Anu must have been the ancestors of the non-Indian branches of Indo-European, destined to leave India in the pre-Vedic period c.q. in the middle Vedic period. Greek ambassadors after Alexander reported a Hindu tradition that Manu had come into India from the west. Like their estimate that Manu was crowned in precisely -6776, this may be a garbled reconstruction of hazy traditions; but for what it is worth, it might correspond to the alleged genetic findings of an early influx. After all, though India may be the cradle of all branches of Indo-European (exactly the OIT), nothing has been claimed about where the Proto-Indo-Europeans originate. It could be outside India, all while leaving the OIT untouched.

As even Silva et al. acknowledge, “genetic data have provided no clear evidence for the ‘Indo-Aryan invasions’ so far, and their very existence is challenged by many archaeologists.” Tony Joseph has a long way to go before the AIT can be accepted as proven.

Globalization

In spite of the foregoing, let us appreciate why got Joseph so enthused about recent developments in genetics: “The robust conclusions of Professor Richards and his team rest on their own substantive research as well as a vast trove of new data and findings that have become available in recent years, through the work of genetic scientists around the world.”

That is not true for the identification as Indo-European, which would at best be plausible, but otherwise I acknowledge Richards must be a pioneering scientist in a fast-progressing research field. The argument of authority implied in “around the world” is also exaggerated, for the really pioneering genetic research is confined to a few countries. China has recently joined the front group, and India is catching up, but if you see exotic names among the authors, they are mostly at American or European universities; witness all the Portuguese names under the quoted research paper produced in the UK. But this much is true: whereas the Indo-European origins question holds a certain fascination for people of European descent, the new research yields very similar new insights in the demographic history of other cultures.   

Joseph quotes David Reich, geneticist and professor, Harvard Medical School: “What’s happened very rapidly, dramatically, and powerfully in the last few years has been the explosion of genome-wide studies of human history based on modern and ancient DNA, and that’s been enabled by the technology of genomics and the technology of ancient DNA. Basically, it’s a gold rush right now; it’s a new technology and that technology is being applied to everything we can apply it to, and there are many low-hanging fruits, many gold nuggets strewn on the ground that are being picked up very rapidly.”

Thus: “(…) many studies mentioned in this piece are global in scale, both in terms of the questions they address and in terms of the sampling and research methodology. For example, the Poznik study [David Poznik, cfr. infra] that arrived at 4,000-4,500 years ago as the dating for the splintering of the R1a Z93 lineage, looked at major Y-DNA expansions not just in India, but in four other continental populations. In the Americas, the study proved the expansion of haplogrop Q1a-M3 around 15,000 years ago, which fits in with the generally accepted time for the initial colonisation of the continent. So the pieces that are falling in place are not merely in India, but all across the globe. The more the global migration picture gets filled in, the more difficult it will be to overturn the consensus that is forming on how the world got populated.”

About that, we can only rejoice and join Joseph in his enthusiasm. And we may at once point out that a vaguely similar though more gradual development is taking place in the highly relevant field of linguistics, with the increasing sérieux of the once-flaky subdiscipline of megacomparatism. So far, Indo-European studies including the Aryan origins debate focused on what happened after Proto-Indo-European, once the fragmentation had set in. But now we can look beyond that, and explain the long-existing suspicions of a kinship with Semitic, or the newly-realized kinship with Dravidian. This too is a heady evolution, though encumbered by the 19^th-century impression of bookishness when genetics has all the glitter of futuristic science.

R1a

More controversial is another big name he invokes: “Peter Underhill, scientist at the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of those at the centre of the action. Three years ago, a team of 32 scientists he led published a massive study mapping the distribution and linkages of R1a. It used a panel of 16,244 male subjects from 126 populations across Eurasia. Dr. Underhill’s research found that R1a had two sub-haplogroups, one found primarily in Europe and the other confined to Central and South Asia. Ninety-six per cent of the R1a samples in Europe belonged to sub-haplogroup Z282, while 98.4% of the Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to sub-haplogroup Z93. The two groups diverged from each other only about 5,800 years ago.”

Note that 5,800 years ago is about the time estimated by legitimate experts in linguistics for the initial fragmentation of Proto-Indo-European. It could for instance be the time when an Indo-European-speaking population left its Indian homeland.

“Dr. Underhill’s research showed that within the Z93 that is predominant in India, there is a further splintering into multiple branches. The paper found this ‘star-like branching’ indicative of rapid growth and dispersal. So if you want to know the approximate period when Indo-European language speakers came and rapidly spread across India, you need to discover the date when Z93 splintered into its own various subgroups or lineages.”

From these data about Z93, it does not follow that “Indo-European language speakers came” to India. Here you see a vivid illustration of how the interpretative framework in terms of an Aryan invasion is merely borrowed on trust from people whose bias the geneticists don’t even realize.

Nonetheless, Joseph takes this as a sufficiently strong launching-pad for an unwarranted jump: “This clear picture of the distribution of R1a has finally put paid to an earlier hypothesis that this haplogroup perhaps originated in India and then spread outwards.”

This is not the expert speaking. Note indeed that in spite of Joseph wanting Dr. Underhill to say that, and no doubt trying to make him say it, the professor is not quoted as saying it. All that the quoted text says, is that these genes have a common origin, and that they split up when spread over sizable distances. The OIT has no quarrel with that. Then, he adds the AIT as possibly explaining his findings, but that part is not his expertise as a geneticist speaking. His findings are just as compatible with the OIT, but that is just not part of his mental horizon.

According to Joseph: “This hypothesis was based on the erroneous assumption that R1a lineages in India had huge diversity compared to other regions, which could be indicative of its origin here. As Prof. Richards puts it, ‘the idea that R1a is very diverse in India, which was largely based on fuzzy microsatellite data, has been laid to rest’ thanks to the arrival of large numbers of genomic Y-chromosome data.”

But even with the data now claimed, R1a is still more diverse in India than in Central Asia and Europe. If the former is therefore incapable of being the homeland, so are the latter. Nonetheless, our AIT activist goes full steam ahead:

“Now that we know that there WAS indeed a significant inflow of genes from Central Asia into India in the Bronze Age, can we get a better fix on the timing, especially the splintering of Z93 into its own sub-lineages? Yes, we can; the research paper that answers this question was published just last year, in April 2016, titled: ‘Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences.’ This paper, which looked at major expansions of Y-DNA haplogroups within five continental populations, was lead-authored by David Poznik of the Stanford University, with Dr. Underhill as one of the 42 co-authors. The study found ‘the most striking expansions within Z93 occurring approximately 4,000 to 4,500 years ago’.”

Here we see no link with an immigration, perfectly unnecessary for a genetic differentiation. And if there was one, it apparently took place 4,500 years ago, still a thousand years before the established Aryan invasion scenario.

But at least we note with satisfaction that Joseph has belatedly accepted that nothing points to the once-orthodox scenario of the Aryan plunderers ruining the Harappan civilization: “This is remarkable, because roughly 4,000 years ago is when the Indus Valley civilization began falling apart. (There is no evidence so far, archaeologically or otherwise, to suggest that one caused the other; it is quite possible that the two events happened to coincide.)”

Then, Joseph makes another jump: “The avalanche of new data has been so overwhelming that many scientists who were either sceptical or neutral about significant Bronze Age migrations into India have changed their opinions. Dr. Underhill himself is one of them.”

If true, such conversion among experts would count as prized secondary evidence. Thus, leading archaeology professor BB Lal’s and Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas’ conversion from AIT to OIT have been functioning as serious arguments of authority, especially in the absence of such conversions in the opposite direction. But let us look more closely:

“In a 2010 paper, for example, he had written that there was evidence ‘against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including to India’ in the last five or six millennia. Today, Dr. Underhill says there is no comparison between the kind of data available in 2010 and now. ‘Then, it was like looking into a darkened room from the outside through a keyhole with a little torch in hand; you could see some corners but not all, and not the whole picture. With whole genome sequencing, we can now see nearly the entire room, in clearer light.’”

Impressive progress, yet that does not make Underhill find genes moving into India. Though certainly trying hard, Joseph has not managed to extract a statement from Underhill that his earlier research was wrong.

Joseph is very good at making the most of what comes under his hand, and of shading over nuanced expert findings into his own blatantly partisan narrative. However, our interest is not in finding fault with Joseph; indeed we thank him for drawing our attention to this new scientific development. Our interest is in what genetics really has to say on the Aryan origins question.

North-South divide

Joseph claims another convert from OIT to AIT: “David Reich, geneticist and professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, is another one, even though he was very cautious in his older papers. The best example is a study lead-authored by Reich in 2009, titled ‘Reconstructing Indian Population History’ and published in Nature. This study used the theoretical construct of ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI) and ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI) to discover the genetic substructure of the Indian population. The study proved that ANI are ‘genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans’, while the ASI were unique to India. The study also proved that most groups in India today can be approximated as a mixture of these two populations, (…)”

Westerners will only be mildly excited by this, but in India, the racial interpretation of the linguistic division between Indo-Aryans and Dravidians is so vividly kept alive by Dravidianists, Ambedkarites and their missionary shepherds, that others there will heave a sigh of relief at news of the “admixture” between the two populations.

In the same vein, Indian patriots rejoiced that the study found “the ANI ancestry higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers”.

Well of course: speakers of Indo-Aryans live predominantly in the north, so they have a higher incidence of northern genes. As for the higher castes, it doesn’t take any invasion scenario to understand that they must be more from the north, as per the written Hindu tradition. Especially in Tamil Nadu, hotbed of Dravidianism, this is striking, with Bania castes originating in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Brahmins imported from the north by kings who wanted to endow their dynasties with Vedic prestige. So obviously, in Dravidian areas, upper castes will stand out by their more northern genes. But only gradually, for even here there is an “admixture”.

Hence this comment quoted from a prominent Indian researcher involved in this study, geneticist Lalji Singh: “But at some point in time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. (…) This paper rewrites history (…) there is no north-south divide”! A newspaper headline made it even more sensational: “Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study”.

(The linguistic state of the art on this is that Dravidian is related to Elamite in Southwestern Iran, a reasonable theory insufficiently verified but largely based on trust in the very few scholars who have investigated these data. An anti-India bias predictably deduces from this that Dravidian must have come from Elam, not the other way around. And then, after having entered India and developed in Gujarat, Dravidian expanded to the south, where a more primitive native population adopted the language. To the dismay of Dravidian chauvinists and separatists, this means that Dravidian is not native to South India, but that it is native to India. The political unit they ought to be defending is not “Dravidasthan”, but India. Moreover, Dravidian is related to Indo-European on a par with Uralic, Semitic et al., descending from a common grandmother-language some 15,000 years ago, “Nostratic”, as distinct from more distant languages like Munda, Tibetan, Andamanese etc.)

ANI and populations to the west

Joseph’s misunderstanding of the whole Aryan issue is again clear from this claim: “By itself, the study didn’t disprove the arrival of Indo-European language speakers; if anything, it suggested the opposite, by pointing to the genetic linkage of ANI to Central Asians.”

That North-Indians and Central-Asians are related, as the genetic linkage between them implies, is true in any serious scenario, certainly also in the OIT. Being closer to Central Asia, it is perfectly normal for the ANI to have more in common with it than the ASI. The only narrative that throws up a problem here is not the OIT, with speakers of Indo-Europeans streaming out of India into Central Asia and thence into Europe, but a purely reactive alternative to the AIT, viz. the non-migration scenario. When Europeans first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is described in scripture.

No, but the Rg-Veda and the Puranas do describe a hoary emigration from India, viz. of the Druhyu and Anu tribes. Therefore, knowledgeable Indians have adopted the OIT, which necessitates commonalities between India, Central Asia and Europe as much as the AIT does.

But I have no doubt that Joseph’s dialogue partners in Aryan origins discussions included many who saw no need to explain the linguistic commonalities between Indo-Aryan and the languages further west, and simply settled for the static and unimaginative non-migration narrative. Those people reject the very concept of an Indo-European language: to them, Greek, Germanic and other European languages are not related to Sanskrit, and so there is no need for any migration either way to explain how they came to be in their present habitat. If at all you confront them with similarities, they make bold that these are just loanwords.  

This is part of a larger problem, that explains why the OIT has made no headway at all in terms of international acceptance. Most Indians don’t have their heart in the OIT, a non-Indian term launched by the American Hare Krishna follower Dr. Edwin Bryant ca. 1996. In describing the Aryan debate, he took ample account of a vocal Indian vanguard that understands the basics of the Indo-European question, viz. that one language straddles the Hindu Kush, and that therefore half its speakers must have crossed this border either in eastern or in western direction (AIT c.q. OIT). But far more weighty and numerous in India are those who merely want to be left alone, who don’t want to be bothered with the AIT and all its concomitant politics (colonialist, Nazi, Dravidianist, Dalit). They simply have no specific theory about the non-Indian Indo-Europeans: these are simply not within their mental horizon, which stops at the Khyber Pass. The question whether they migrated, and whether they really speak a cognate language, is simply of no interest to these AIT-rejecting laymen.

Western participants in the debate may have debated some OIT sophisticates from a distance, but they have also interacted with Indian-born colleagues from, say, the Medical or Engineering Department of their university, who are bright but have never studied the Aryan question. These far more representative Indians often have strong opinions about the “breaking India” implications of an Aryan invasion but not the necessary knowledge to argue this point, often even rejecting the whole notion of an Indo-European family. They are “under-informed but over-opinionated”. Meeting such people makes Western Indo-Europeanists sceptical of any Indian contribution to this debate, and by extension of any pro-OIT contribution even by Western colleagues. Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists.

Genetics and linguistics

Now, Tony Joseph is going to teach us reason: “However, this theoretical structure was stretched beyond reason and was used to argue that these two groups came to India tens of thousands of years ago, long before the migration of Indo-European language speakers that is supposed to have happened only about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago.”

For that, no “stretch beyond reason” is necessary, for the two phenomena, the genetic division in ANI and ASI and the linguistic division in Indo-European, Dravidian and others, are unrelated. Even if the ANI people came from outside, any “reasonable” scenario has them mingle with natives and take in lots of their genetic heritage, rather than commit genocide on them and replace them wholesale with a different genetic type. Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that accompanied their Christianization.

If I have understood anything of these genetic discussions, it is that chronological estimations of genetic events are possible (much as in historical linguistics, though this “glottochronology” is in fact highly controversial). Apparently, the split of the Indian people in a northern ANI and a southern ASI dates a lot deeper into the past than the fragmentation of Indo-European and than the “Bronze Age migration” discussed in Silva et al.’s paper, and need not even result from a migration, as Joseph had assumed. And if there was a migration at all, it may not have been the Aryan invasion, or may have nothing to do (causally nor chronologically) with the division of Indo-European.

The concepts of ANI and ASI were developed by geneticists untrained in linguistics and never visibly bothering about a coordination between their own data and those of historical linguistics. So, it is not so scandalous if the two sets of data are greatly at variance.

Conspiracy by association

In some reactions, Tony Joseph has been attacked on account of the company he keeps. Look whom he quotes: “In his column for Discover magazine, geneticist Razib Khan said this about the media coverage of the study: ‘But in the quotes in the media the other authors (other than Reich that is -- TJ) seem to be leading you to totally different conclusions from this. Instead of leaning toward ANI being proto-Indo-European, they deny that it is.”

Contentswise, we have a repeat of Joseph’s just-discussed mistakes: (1) he identifies the genesis of ANI with an immigration, as if such genetic development could not originate in a vast area like the subcontinent; and (2) he identifies this unsubstantiated migration with the supposed Indo-European migration. But the interesting thing here is not what Khan says, but who he is.

It is rumoured, in some reactions below Joseph’s article as well as elsewhere, that Khan is a right-winger, has published on the “race-realist” website Vdare (after Virginia Dare, the first white person born on American soil), and has been sacked as a columnist by the New York Times. This is “guilt by association”: Joseph’s position is blackened by association with the company he keeps, and Khan’s position on Indian genetics is blackened by association with his writing outlets. This type of gossip is very popular among illiterates who lack the habit of serious debate on issues, and of seasoned debaters who realize that in a given case, no argument ad rem will succeed, and who therefore resort to an argument ad hominem.

A quotation that deserves repetition in almost every debate on the Aryan question, and many other debates besides, is: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” It is often flatteringly ascribed to Eleanore Roosevelt but is traceable farther back, at least to Theology professor Samuel Miller in 1827. It contains part of the reason why AIT skepticism has made no headway.

A few of us have tried to present the arguments for the OIT, but our discourse was drowned out by the shouting and cackling of numerous vocal Hindus against famous upholders of the AIT: “The British concocted the AIT as part of their divide-and-rule policy!”, “William Jones was a colonial agent!”, “Friedrich Max Müller was a missionary agent!”, “Michael Witzel is a professor of Harvard, started as a theology school!” This has greatly put off serious scholars who didn’t know better than the AIT and would have given a fair hearing to the OIT if it had not been associated with this miserable conspiracy discourse (as well as with Hindu Nationalism).

Not that their camp is much better. There too we have “guilt by association” thinking. AIT pamphlets often contain phrases like: “The OIT is defended by people like PN Oak, NS Rajaram, Koenraad Elst…” (This, incidentally, is untrue: the late PN Oak deduced everything everywhere from India or Hinduism, with no special role for Indo-European, and NS Rajaram rejected the AIT but equally pooh-poohed the OIT and any other concern about any non-Indians, including the claim that they came from India.) This is mere juxtaposition, but in the real world it functions as association and achieves the target of putting all the people mentioned outside of polite society.  

All these associators on the anti-AIT side can shout all they want, because they only speak to their own side, never interact with the AIT camp and never suffer any (healthily correcting) consequences. The consequences are for us, who live in the real world and interact with real opponents. I have been disinvited at several conferences (and no doubt silently excluded from speaking there at many more) because, though my abstract was judged interesting enough, someone up there was briefed about my views and associations, and intervened to my detriment.

Another aspect of the backbiting against Razib Khan concerns its relevance. Those who cite the incriminating opinions about him, should tell us what difference such contemporary facts make to the truth or otherwise of the AIT, which pertains to events that took place thousands of years ago. It is irrelevant chronologically. At least if your goal is not to win an ongoing debate with Joseph by making him look bad, but to disprove the AIT. I guess small minds don’t aim that high.

It is also irrelevant logically. The truth of a proposition is independent of its formulator’s record or character. Surely you can find writing-pads from Adolf Hitler’s childhood in which the devil himself writes: “1 + 1 = 2”. Does this suddenly become untrue just because an unsavoury character agreed with it?

As an extra, I would like to learn whether the purported boycot of this alleged brown racist is a policy that our AIT disbelievers advocate. Attempts to shut down debate and impose left-wing control are as much a problem in Berkeley as in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The people who call this Khan a “right-winger” are the same who attack Hindus with the same allegation. Hinduism is deemed a racist religion, with Brahmin Aryan invaders oppressing the native Dalits and Dravidians. American liberals, in this case strange bedfellows with the Evangelists, consider the struggle against caste and untouchability and against its justifying ideology, Hinduism, as a noble and necessary struggle, a new frontline now that slavery has been abolished elsewhere.

So, this Razib Khan may have unsavoury opinions or associations, and he may be downright wrong about the AIT, but he is entitled to having his comments on a genetics debate discussed in an Indian left-wing paper. To that extent, he deserves our support.

 Symmetrical migration

Let us return to genetics and quote Joseph again: “Let’s (…) ask what Reich says now, when so much new data have become available? In an interview with Edge in February last year, while talking about the thesis that Indo-European languages originated in the Steppes and then spread to both Europe and South Asia, he said: “The genetics is tending to support the Steppe hypothesis because in the last year, we have identified a very strong pattern that this ancient North Eurasian ancestry that you see in Europe today, we now know when it arrived in Europe. It arrived 4500 years ago from the East from the Steppe...”

Yes, there was an Aryan invasion, but it was not the one usually meant. In Central Europe in the -3^rd millennium, the material culture changed drastically. In some areas, the population was entirely replaced by newcomers, in others too the percentage of newcomers was sizeable. By culture and physical type (now mapped and understood more precisely thanks to genetics), they were the same people later identified as Celts, Germans, Romans. There, in Europe, we really have an invasion of Aryans moving in from the east. And now that we know what a real Aryan invasion looks like, we note that it is completely missing in India.

Speaking of which: “About India, he said: ‘In India, you can see, for example, that there is this profound population mixture event that happens between 2000 to 4000 years ago. It corresponds to the time of the composition of the Rigveda, the oldest Hindu religious text, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world, which describes a mixed society...’ In essence, according to Reich, in broadly the same time frame, we see Indo-European language speakers spreading out both to Europe and to South Asia, causing major population upheavals.”

Note that Reich doesn’t describe an invasion, at least not in the passage Joseph chooses to quote here. He describes an admixture of different populations, something that can easily be imagined as internal to a large territory such as India, not needing foreign immigrations. Instead, it could have to do with the migrations triggered by the dessiccation of the Saraswati basin, for instance. It is only Joseph himself who interprets Reich’s statement as “in essence” a matter of Aryan invasions.

Also note that Joseph has “the Indo-European language speakers” spread from the steppes to “both Europe and South Asia”. While this is not impossible, it rarely happens. Migrations are mostly very asymmetrical because the reasons why humans migrate are rarely symmetrical.

Thus, the Bantu languages were carried forward by the Neolithic innovation, agriculture, and ended up being dominant in half of Africa, all starting from somewhere in sub-Saharan West-Africa. Why did they only expand in a southeastern direction, and not north? Because you cannot practise agriculture in the desert.

Similarly, Austronesian has spread south from Southeast China, not north, because to their north was a numerous and well-ordered society that would assimilate any immigrants; southwards, they could find a niche in Malaysia and Indonesia, and virgin territory in islands from Madagascar to New Zealand and Hawaii. For the same reason, Russian could expand eastwards all the way to Alaska, but not westwards. In the case of Arabic, no such reason can immediately be identified (Iran could just as well have been arabicized as Egypt), yet fact remains: Arabic spread from Arabia westwards all the way to Morocco, and not eastwards at all.

Also, the steppe does not support large populations, whereas India was a demographic heavyweight, then already. It is not impossible for (all-male) bands of steppe warriors to conquer centres of civilization, but leaving a lasting imprint is rarer. The Huns invaded China, India and Europe and did not leave their language anywhere; in fact, we are not even sure which it was (Attila was a Gothic nickname; after much research, the dominant estimate now is that they spoke Chuvash, a para-Turkic language marginally surviving in Russia). The Mongols invaded Central and Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and China, yet except for marginal Kalmukkia, they did not leave their language anywhere. And such invaders should have completely changed the linguistic and cultural landscape of mighty India?

Parting shot

The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness:

“What is abundantly clear is that we are a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories.”

This is a phrase absolutely no one will disagree with; though it conceals the more pressing question how weighty the different contributions are, and the false implication that these are all equal. Yet, it is here for a reason, part of The Hindu’s editorial line: it is meant as a punch in the face of the Hindu Nationalists, who stress unity. Not racial unity, as is here falsely intimated, but still some kind of pan-Indian sense of national unity, translating today in e.g. the conviction that Kashmir belongs with India. Therefore, among secularists, it is always welcomed if an anti-unity statement of any kind is smuggled in.

“The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless explorers who discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population”.

That “bedrock of the population” phrase may not be so innocent, as it is probably meant to exclude the Brahmins and thus forms part of the dominant anti-Brahmin discourse. But it is not said in so many words, so let that pass. Anyway, Joseph already refrains from saying that Indian indigenousness is confined to the tribals (some 8%), whom the missionaries ca. 1930 have started flattering as Adivasis, a pseudo-traditional Sanskrit coinage meaning “aboriginals”, like the Amerindians in America.

Nevertheless, against the “Aryan invaders”, he still tries to affirm their superiority by calling their entry from Africa more than 50,000 years ago “fearless”. Exchanging lion territory for tiger territory must indeed be courageous and certainly “pioneering”, but peopling an empty land is not braver than invading a human habitat. The Aryan invaders may never have existed, but if you do postulate them, as Joseph does, you have to at least credit them with the bravery required for defeating a vastly more numerous native population. If you care to look at the details, his bias is showing.

“[T]hose who arrived later with a package of farming techniques and built the Indus Valley civilization whose cultural ideas and practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today”.

Here we get the bulwark part of the secularist view of ancient India: the Harappan population spoke a different language than the Northwest-Indian population today, mostly taken to be Dravidian; and their civilizational innovations starting with agriculture had been borrowed from abroad, viz. from West Asia. This latter point is important to stress, as Hindu Nationalists might get the pretentious idea that some inventions had been done in India and even by Indians; Allah forbid!

But at least Joseph recognizes that the Harappans, deemed non-Aryans, “arrived” from somewhere else. We are talking of what was then the largest demographic concentration on earth, so it is hard to imagine how they all came from the surrounding mountains and deserts. Nevertheless, the core of truth here is that Dravidian, deemed to have been the language of Harappa, arrived from somewhere. The aboriginality of Dravidian, which Dravidian chauvinists take for granted as a logical counterpoint to Aryan foreignness, deserves questioning.

“[T]hose who arrived from East Asia, probably bringing with them the practice of rice cultivation and all that goes with it”.

The Mundas, tribals whose language must have been spoken all around the Bay of Bengal, speak an Austro-Asiatic language related to Vietnamese. However, the jury is still out on whether their homeland (as well as the homeland of rice cultivation) was in India or in Southeast Asia.

“[T]hose who came later with a language called Sanskrit and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in fundamental ways”.

This phrase, affirming the foreign origin of Sanskrit through the Aryan Invasion Theory, is the raison d’être for this whole paragraph. Tony Joseph may not be a geneticist, nor a historian or linguist, but having been editor of the Business Standard, he is a first-class journalist. The occupational hazard of this vocation is that you have to talk about any topic that may come under your hands, often very much outside your area of expertise; such is the case in this article about the genetic evidence for an Aryan invasion. But a strength of this professional group is their mastery of simple rhetorical devices. Case in point: writing a conciliatory final paragraph full of empty phrases amounting to an all-together-now chumminess, and yet, inside it, burying a dagger aimed at your usual target: “Aryans”, Brahmins, Hindus.

“[A]nd those who came even later for trade or for conquest and chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call Indian.”

Though not the topic of the article, this phrase is nevertheless highly welcome to drive home the usual concern of any secularist paper: affirming that Muslims and Christians are equally entitled to whatever India has to offer. Note however that in crucial respects, unlike earlier immigrants such as Shakas and Hunas, who have dissolved their identities in the ambient population and culture, Muslims and Christians have not “mingled”.

“We are all migrants.”

What an enlightened phrase, meant to reassure his secularist friends of his own virtue and to exercise moral pressure on status-conscious Hindus that they should shed this backward attachment to the nationalism-infested Indian homeland theory. Yet, do you think that all the anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin activists who now go around triumphantly quoting Joseph’s article, intend to say: “We too, we are but migrants, as much as the invading Aryans”?

Conclusion

By now, Tony Joseph may wish he had never written this piece. He presents a blatantly partisan interpretation of a recent research paper in a field he visibly doesn’t master. At least he could have had it proofread by a legitimate geneticist. His bias pertains to the Aryan origins question, and that too he hasn’t thought through.

Then again, I understand that he felt the normal journalistic urge to let the world know about a new development that he considered very important. For a definitive account, you do not go to journalists, their role is not that of experts, merely of messengers: “Something is happening over there; now go see for yourself what is really is.” At the present state of the art in genetics, however, developments are not as dramatic as he seems to have thought.

Nonetheless, we had better look into them. The geneticists he has quoted here may not be the publicity-seeking types who like to make bold statements. Nonetheless, their belief in an all-male incursion into India that has left traces in the Y-genes may well have substantial ramifications for Indian history, even by implying an Aryan invasion. And while none of them has been quoted as actually having proven, through his research, an Indo-European invasion, it is still possible that some of them do think so. Or, because of the present commotion over Joseph’s article, they may step back to make up their minds, now with a better grasp of the Aryan origins question, and finally conclude that what they have proven, does imply the Aryan invasion. It will take argumentative acumen and a serious research effort to convince them otherwise.

Hindus have long acted as if it is enough to convince yourself in order to be entitled to declaring yourself as winner of the debate. In fact, it is necessary to convince others before you can rest on your laurels. Therefore, we must thank Joseph for spurring us into more and better research. After two centuries, let’s get this invasion nuisance over and done with.

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