Aryan myths

Which of Us are Aryans?

Rethinking the Concept of Our Origins 

Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese and Razib Khan

Aleph, Rs 499, 224 pages

A few hundred years ago, European travellers to India noticed that Indian words had something in common with their own languages. The words for integers and mother and father, for instance, and tooth (“daant”) and such other basic words seemed similar. 

Servants of the East India Company concluded that Sanskrit was part of a wider school of linked languages descended from a common origin. A little after this period came a wave of German nationalism. This was powered by the writing many hundreds years before of the Roman historian Tacitus. His work, Germania, showed the tribes of people north of Gaul that the Romans knew as Germany as being fiercely independent animists whose individualism was to be admired. A hero of theirs from the Roman era, Arminius or Hermann, was resurrected as a national symbol of a Germany that was pure of race unlike the mongrel nations of southern Europe. 

In India, the word Arya had been used in various ways, most often to denote nobleness of behaviour. It became linked to the mother language that was thought to originate some place in the Caucasus and then it was linked further to a sort of monolithic community, the Aryans. 

In the 1920s, the remains of the Indus Valley Civilisation were discovered in what is today Pakistan. The bricks of the ancient site in Harappa, which is in Pakistani Punjab, had previously been removed and used to build the railway until their antiquity was noticed. 

The placing of that Harappan civilisation’s culture to before the Rig Veda (which was written around 1,500 BCE) threw a spanner in the works. People who were thrilled by the discovery of the Indo-European and “Aryan” link had been convinced that the Vedas were the origin of Indian culture. They attempted, unsuccessfully, to connect the Rig Veda to the Harappan culture. 

The “scientific” field of archaeology and linguistics was dominated in India for a long time by well-meaning but amateur civil servants who were interested in the vast land they were administering.

A theory was developed in which Aryan invaders coming from somewhere in the north or north-west overwhelmed the original culture of the Indus Valley inhabitants. 

This division manifested itself in the caste system and produced the concept of upper and lower society, in the minds of some. In the minds of others, it explained the north-south divide of India. 

Around the same period also came the Hindu revival movement which we are still living with (the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was founded in 1925, three years after the discoveries at Harappa). The view they developed was that there was no Aryan invasion and no division between ancient and more recent inhabitants — all were Hindus. Both Madhav Golwalkar, the second head of the RSS, and Vinayak Savarkar, author of the tract Hindutva,  believed that the “Hindus” were original and any evidence of a pre-Vedic people in India could be explained away.

Then in 1965, Nirad C Chaudhuri wrote a book — The Continent of Circe  — attempting to explain why and how Indians had fallen so far from the Aryan family tree so as to be part of the conquered peoples (I think he blamed the weather).

The two ideas then prevailing — one of an invasion and overthrow of a civilisation by another, and the other of total continuity from antiquity under Vedic Hinduism — have long been discarded by the scientific community, which includes historians, linguists, archaeologists and geneticists. This book is a collection of essays by experts from various fields that bring together most of the latest thinking and discoveries in these subjects. 

The likely explanations of who we are and where we came from are today emerging with more clarity, especially because of genetics. For example, DNA taken from a village in Haryana named Rakhigarhi from 4,500 years ago has shown that the male individual it came from did not share the gene commonly associated with the Aryan pastoralists. That individual was closer to what we might refer to as being Dravidian. The Aryan invasion was actually a migration that came after the Harappan civilisation was already established. The migration of these Vedic peoples was not limited to India and traces of their language and their existence are to be found as far as Syria. 

They were pastoral, meaning that they were semi-nomadic and lived with milche cattle (one of the essays here says that the word Âryâvarta means the “turning of the Arya”). The people of the Indus Valley/Harappa culture, on the other hand, lived in advanced cities that had such things as drainage. The Aryans had the horse and chariot occupy a dominant position in their culture, which the Harappans did not. They also apparently had social intercourse with the town dwellers. The Harappan people lived mainly on the Indus plain. The pastoralists moved onwards to the Gangetic plain.

Modern South Asians are a product of a mixing of all these peoples and races and of communities more ancient that came here from many directions, some passing through and some staying back. All of us, Indians and Pakistanis, Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Christians and agnostics and tribals, have something in our gene that goes back to the people of the Harappan age, as well as, of course, to the first migrations of humans out of Africa. 

This book and the recent studies will dismay the Hindutva supporter who sees in India and its Vedic period as something pure. The reality is that our origins are messy and we are of mixed race.