The Problem: Its Indian Implications -the Historical Questions Involved*
In India the problem of Aryan origins has not only a bearing on the remote past. It has also a relevance to the immediate present. Ever since Western historians pronounced, and the historians of our country concurred, that a Dravidian India had been invaded by the Aryans of the Rigveda in the second millennium B.C., there has been a ferment of antagonism, time and again, between the North and the South.
The Northerners, figuring in their own eyes as Aryan conquerors, have occasionally felt a general superiority to the Southerners who have come to be designated Dravidians. The people of the South have often resented those of the North as being, historically, intruders upon their indigenous rights. An unhealthy movement has arisen in Tamil lands, sometimes erupting in violent strength and otherwise flowing as a subtle pervasive undercurrent which tends to make for a touchy and suspicious relationship between the two parts of our subcontinent, in spite of a broad unifying sense of nationhood.
It is of considerable importance in India to ascertain whether the so-called Aryans of the Rigveda are outsiders whose home a little earlier was, as historians variously hold, either the Baltic region, Austria-Hungary, the Ukraine, Turkestan or some other location beyond our frontiers.
But, of course, the fact that the idea of -extra-Indian origins of Aryanism has been a pernicious force amongst us and that its demolition would lead to greater harmony and co-operative creativity in India must not prejudice us as
* From: The Problem of Aryan Origins: From an Indian Point of View by K.D. Sethna, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1980; second extensively enlarged edition with five supplements 1992, pp. 1-17.
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historians. We have to be calm and clear in our approach to the problem even while realizing that we cannot afford to be lax about a matter that keenly affects our collective future.
In the field of history we have to face four crucial questions here:
(1) Is there any genuine evidence of what almost every history book at present takes for granted, namely, an Aryan invasion of India around 1500 B.C.?
(2) Do the Mitanni documents of an Aryan character from Boghaz-keui, dated c. 1360 B.C. but with a background of Aryan rulership on the Upper Euphrates from c. 1500 B.C. - documents comprising a treaty by a Maryanni king of the Mitanni peoples with a Hittite king and Kikkuli's fragmentary handbook on horse-breeding - suggest an archaic Indo-Iranian dialect, which was not yet fully characterized either as Indo-Aryan or as Iranian and which would seem to be derived from the language of communities originally living outside India and later separating to become Iranians and Indo-Aryans in approximately the middle of the second millennium B.C.?
(3) Linguistically, does the Rigveda, along with the Zarathustrian Gathas of Iran, which were composed undeniably in a sister form of speech, date no earlier than c. 1000 B.C. although the cultural contents of it must have needed some preceding time in India for development - a period which at its earliest could not go beyond c. 1500 B.C.?
(4) Was the Harappa Culture of the Indus Valley, which ran for at least a thousand years and whose end has been dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C.,1 basically
1. D.P. Agrawal has suggested, from an analysis of radio-carbon (C14) readings, the bracket 2300-1750 b.c., (Science, Washington, 28 February 1964, pp. 950-52). Sir Mortimer Wheeler has cogently argued against the lowered upper limit (Foreword to S.S. Rao's Lothal and the Indus Civilization, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1973, pp. vi-vii), and H.D. Sankalia after a detailed review of all aspects has urged that Wheeler's "old bracket of 2500-1500 b.c. for the overall duration of the Indus Valley Civilization be restored and provisions for dating it still further backwards be made" (Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan, Deccan College, Poona, 1974, p. 283, col. 2).
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non-Aryan, anterior to the oldest Aryan document in India, the Rigveda, and given its finishing stroke by hostile Rigvedic tribes, who hailed from beyond India's north-west and who came to reflect in their scripture the story of their fight with and conquest of this civilization?
We shall deal with these questions not always in the above order. Significant side-issues, which are not mentioned, will also arise. A natural sequence, with some deferred considerations as well as a harking back whenever necessary, will be followed so as to make the treatment as living and comprehensive as possible within a moderate compass.
THE SUPPOSED ARYAN INVASION
The first question has to be considered under two heads: archaeological and literary.
In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G.R. Dales, director of archaeological field work in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans... have not yet been identified arch-aeologically."2 Even a diehard defender like Sir Mortimer Wheeler of the Aryan-invasion hypothesis and of the theory that the Rigvedic Aryans destroyed the Harappa Culture had to state: "It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material culture has yet been identified in India."3 This statement was made in 1959. In 1970, following up some cool-headed remarks on the copper-hoards unearthed in the Gangetic basin and hastily ascribed to Aryan invaders, Wheeler refers to some other ascriptions:"... certain Iron Age cairn-burials in northern Baluchistan have been regarded in some sense as 'Aryan'. A series of Moghul Ghundai produced a distinctive tripod jar, a bracelet, bells, rings, and arrowheads, all of bronze, of types characteristic of 'Sialk B' in Persia and attributable to
2. Scientific American, New York, May 1966, p. 95.
3. Early India and Pakistan (Bombay, 1959), p. 126.
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the period before and after 1000 B.C. The association of these groups with early bearers of the Aryan tongue is without warrant. If a word of warning is appropriate, it is on the desirability of avoiding an excessively Aryan 'preoccupation'."4 The sense of negative results is still strong.
Perhaps the most favoured candidate in the public's eye for the preoccupation against which we are cautioned has been the Painted Grey Ware - PGW for short - found at a large number of sites in the Gangetic Valley. Presently it is considered datable even close to c. 1500 B.C. at Bhagwanpura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana rather than to c. 800 B.C. as elsewhere before. The Bhagwanpura PGW material is mixed with Late Harappan remains, but the issue relating to this mixture we shall touch upon at another place. At the moment we are concerned with the fact that, although.the pronouncements of Dales and Wheeler are not belied by any characteristic find here, a certain blurring suggestion which has long lingered may seem strengthened. When PGW was first reported in 1954-55 at several spots linked traditionally with the Mahabharata War as well as in the locale where the Rigvedic Aryans had lived, it was put substantially in line with the ceramic of the Shahi Tump cemetery in South Baluchistan which archaeologists had assigned to about the middle of the second millennium B.C., just the time postulated for the Aryan dispersal eastward. Shahi Tump could therefore be pictured as a side-track milestone on the way of invading Aryans, with their PGW culture, to India. But a few years later H.D. Sankalia came out with the authoritative information not only that the PGW of Shahi Tump was quite different in purpose, shape, design and consistency from the type in India but also that the two types were chronologically wide apart.5
4. In the revised part dealing with prehistoric India in the Third Edition (1970) of The Oxford History of India by the Late Vincent A. Smith, edited by Percival Spear, p. 34.
5. Op. cit. (see fn. 1), p. 403, col. 2 and p. 323, col. 2. The comparative study was done at first hand from the Safdarjung collection at New Delhi. The chronology derives from Richard H. Meadow et. al., "Problems in the Culture History of Baluchistan and South-eastern Iran" (cyclostyled copy).
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Subsequent stratified excavations at Bampur in Sistan and at Tepe Yahya in South Iran have helped to set right what in the absence of proper excavation could not hitherto be ascertained at Shahi Tump: namely, the exact relation between PGW there and the Harappa Culture whose relics were seen on the surface as well as below. This PGW, which used to be regarded as later, is now declared to be earlier. Sankalia tells us that the Harappa Culture is placed in the second half of the third millennium B.C. and the Shahi Tump Culture in the first half of the same millennium. Hence a gap of well over a thousand years separates and disconnects Shahi Tump's PGW from the most ancient specimens of such a ceramic in India. No sign exists that the bearers of the latter arrived from abroad.
Wheeler's warning is anticipated by implication when Bridget and Raymond Allchin, referring to "archaeological evidence... both in Iran and India and Pakistan", confess: "indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."6 Still they venture to press a case for them in more than one form. It looks its strongest in relation to certain signs which they consider typical of Aryan presence: copper pins with spiral loops, animal-headed pins, shaft-hole axes and adzes. They point to the upper levels of Mohenjo-daro where was found "the copper shaft-hole axe-adze, whose Iranian parallels date from c. 1800 to 1600 B.C." They also note that the Iranian examples "compare with those from Maikop and Tsarakaya in South Russia" of about the same date. Again, we learn: "A bronze animal-headed pin found at Harappa near the surface in area J suggests connexions with western Iran and the Caucasus between 1500 and 2000 B.C." These discoveries are taken as testimony to "the proximity of foreign barbarians": Aryan invaders. But the authors soon land themselves in self-contradiction. They inform us about
6. The Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan before 500 b.c. (A Pelican Original, Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 145. In the citations that follow, the pages involved are 145-47,106 and 140.
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Mohenjodaro: "The bronze pin with spiral loop, found by Mackay at a depth of 18.4 feet in the DK area, must indicate an earlier importation, and so too may the animal-headed pin discovered in the same part of the site." We may supplement the information with Stuart Piggott's news: "...at Mohenjodaro a... clay model was found at a low level, which... seems to represent a form of shaft-hole axe..."7 Hence the late finds are shown up as absolutely inconclusive for the Allchin thesis. They could be importations as well. Even a greater number of them could be such, since these objects were more abundantly manufactured between 2000 and 1500 B.C.
Our refutation is strengthened by what the Allchins record of South Afghanistan's ancient site Mundigak. Copper pins with spiral loops appear in its late period IV, but "related types are reported already in II, while shaft-hole axes and adzes are already present in III. 6". The earlier periods are assuredly pre-Harappan, for, according to the Allchins, period IV itself is only "in its later phase... contemporary with the Harappan period" which starts in c. 2500 B.C. or, if we credit the Allchins' chronology, 2250 B.C. Thus in India's neighbourhood no less than in her own Indus Valley the time of Maikop and Tsarakaya as well as of late Iranian sites is left far behind for the signs presumed to be of newly arrived Aryan invaders. The signs precede them by a substantial number of centuries.
Walter Fairservis, Jr. meets with no better success in the claim for Aryanism he staked on behalf of a people about whom he wrote at some length in 1971.8 Their remains at Swat (West Pakistan) were first reported by C.S. Antonini in 1963 and afterwards in the Gandhara plain by A.H. Dani in 1967. As all the sites were cemeteries, Dani coined the label "Gandhara Grave Culture". The Swat material starts in "the
7. Prehistoric India (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth 1960), p. 198.
8. The Roots of Ancient India: The Archaeology of Early Indian Civilization (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1971), pp. 354-58.
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first quarter of the second millennium B.C.", while the Gandharan dates from "the late second millennium", and both continue down to the sixth or fifth century B.C. Fairservis comments:
"The Gandhara Grave Culture is a good candidate for a representative of the 'Aryans.' Horses, horse furniture, contacts with Inner Asia [Tepe Hissar TIB], suggestion of high capability in metallurgy, etc., plus the chronology, and indeed the direction given in the ancient literary accounts, make such candidacy viable. However, it is a candidacy only, since the archaeological work in this important region is only just coming into its own in Dani's capable hands.
"The literary evidence, as B.B. Lai among others has shown, is there. The Rig-veda, the earliest account, tells of the coming of new people to the north-west; the Mahabharata stories record the movement to the middle Ganges Valley; the Ramayana is the final episode, which sees Bengal, Orissa, and Ceylon within the geographical bounds of the Vedic tradition however defined. Broadly reviewed, the literary trail is a good one."
Fairservis, it is clear, leans heavily on "the literary evidence". Archseologically, he does not feel any too confident. A link with Inner Asia does not mean much. According to Fairservis himself, phases 4 and 5 of the first period of Mundigak in South Afghanistan, considerably pre-dating the second millennium B.C., and also the Quetta wares of Central Baluchistan, belonging again to an early epoch, have pottery equivalents in the early Hissar culture.9 These equivalents are not seen to raise any Aryan issue. In fact, it is only the presence of the horse, over and above that of the cow, which can create the presumption of Aryanism for the Gandhara Grave Culture. But the horse should hardly come as the sign of an Aryan invasion from outside India unless one could prove the utter absence of this animal in the Indian subcontinent before the period into which the Gandhara
9. Ibid., p. 127.
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Grave Culture fits. As the invasion is posited at c. 1500 B.C., the question reduces itself most directly to whether the Harappa Culture which ended at this date knew the domesticated horse.
From the very beginning a sheer negative answer was impossible. A.D. Pusalker spoke of the model of an animal, found in an early stratum of Mohenjo-daro, which E.J.H. Mackay had taken as the representation of a horse.10 Sankalia marked in the very first phase at the Harappan site Lothal in Saurashtra a terracotta figurine of an equine with a thick short unmistakably horselike tail and with the whole head very much like that of equus caballus.11 SS. Rao referred to the terracotta model of a horse discovered at Rangpur as well and mentioned, too, "a painted potsherd from Rojdi depicting a human figure leading a horse".12 So there was always ground to cast doubt on the invaders' role allotted to the Gandhara Grave Culture. But now the controversy is set entirely at rest by the excavations carried out in 1965, 1967 and 1968 under J.P. Joshi at Harappan Surkotada in Kutch.13 For, among the animals "which were either domesticated or were in the process of domestication", the excavators discovered not only the "ass (Equus onager indicus)" but also the "horse (Equus caballus Linn.)". Joshi writes: "The Harappans of Surkotada knew Equus right from the time of their arrival at Surkotada." He also tells us: "A lot of equine bones right from earlier to top levels have been recovered. A majority of them are phalanges and teeth." Thus the possession of horses by the Gandhara Grave Culture cannot distinguish the people of it uniquely as Aryan invaders. They might easily be Indian borderlanders on the move.
10. "The Indus Valley Civilization", The Vedic Age, edited by R.C. Majumdar and A.D. Pusalker (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1952), p. 194.
11. Indian Archaeology Today (Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1962), p. 61.
12. Op. cit. (see fn. 1), pp. 89,124.
13. "Exploration in Kutch and Excavation at Surkotada and New Light on Harappan Migration", Journal of the Oriental Institute (M.S. University of Baroda), Vol. XII, Sept-Dec. 1972, Nos. 1-2, pp. 135-38,136.
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The historical implication of horse-knowledge by Indians in the Harappan age is a point we shall take up elsewhere. Our immediate task is to expose the inadequacy of Fairservis's brief. And what renders his invasion-idea particularly inapplicable here is the overall impression the archaeological evidence gives as compared to the literary one as he understands it. The latter, to his mind, depicts the Aryan invasion as a martial push into India; the former provides a different picture:
"It was probably not an invasion of hordes of Central Asian nomads who in great and overwhelming waves swept from the steppes to the Doab. It is more likely that Indo-European-speaking pastoral tribes of a variety of traditions and probably of a diversity of ethnic background gradually infiltrated the fertile plain from Peshawar to the Punjab. This pattern of movement is more characteristic of pastoral peoples than the great migration historians are prone to dramatize. As pastoralists they may have established traditional seasonal routes but at least initially were unlikely to settle in large permanent sedentary settlements. Thus their traces archaeologically are less likely to be in terms of habitation and more likely to be necropoli or even isolated monuments."
Surely, if this is all that we can surmise on archaeological grounds, the Gandhara Grave Culture may, again, be of borderland Indians peacefully passing. One has to look entirely to the literary account to prove it a genuine invader. But does this account really help Fairservis's claim? Here the Mahabharata and the Ramayana have no true bearing: they have nothing to do with a movement into India from outside. We have to attend solely to the Rigveda, "the earliest account", in which Fairservis and his sources see "the coming of new people to the north-west" as foreign conquerors.
What precisely is the literary situation? How do careful and meticulous scholars read it? The very proponents of the invasion-hypothesis cannot deny that the Rigveda supplies no clue to any migration. Thus RJ. Rapson, speaking of the Aryans in the period of this scripture, admits: "Their oldest
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literature supplies no certain indication that they still retained the recollection of their former home; and we may reasonably conclude therefore that the invasion which brought them into India took place at a date considerably earlier... ."14 Thus, on Rapson's authority, we cannot base on the hymns the story of Rigvedic Aryans hailing from another country and invading the Indus Valley.
The Cambridge History of India, from which we have quoted Rapson, has further to say through A.B. Keith: "It is certain... that the Rigveda offers no assistance in determining the mode in which the Vedic Aryans entered India.... If, as may be the case, the Aryan invaders of India entered by the western passes of the Hindu Kush and proceeded thence through the Punjab to the east, still that advance is not reflected in the Rigveda, the bulk at least of which seems to have been composed rather in the country round the Sarasvati river, south of the modern Ambala".15 Thus, according to Keith, there is in the Rigveda not only a total omission of pointers to a movement into India from abroad but also a marked sign that whatever story its composers tell is from a position as of inlanders and not invaders.
S.K. Chatterji, another supporter of the invasion-theory, has to concede: "There is no indication from the Rigveda that the Aryans were conscious of entering a new country when they came to India."16 Chatterji proffers the explanation that the Aryans were unconscious because the non-Aryan peoples they found in India were not different from those they had known in Eastern Iran, whence they are supposed to have migrated after a halt there in their journey from farther afield. The excuse is patently inadequate. Even if the non-Aryan peoples inside India were like those outside whom the invaders may have known, the country en-
14. "Peoples and Languages", The Cambridge History of India, edited by E.J. Rapson, 1922, p. 43.
15. "The Age of the Rigveda", ibid., p. 79.
16. "Race-movements and Prehistoric Culture", The Vedic Age, p. 157.
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tered is not thereby rendered such that the invading tribes would never refer to it as a new land reached from another country.
B.K. Ghosh remarks: "It really cannot be proved that the Vedic Aryans retained any memory of their extra-Indian associations, except perhaps a camouflaged reminiscence of their sojourn in Iran."17 The concluding phrase refers to the names Rasa, Sarasvati and Bahllka, which Ghosh takes to be Iranian ones Indianised and applied to two Indian rivers and one Indian province.18 But surely ancient Iranian and Indian Sanskrit were allied languages and several common terms are to be expected. Besides, Iran and India were close neighbours and some linguistic borrowing either way would not be surprising. What is indeed surprising is that in spite of linguistic affinities and neighbourly nearness the express signs of connection with Iran should be as good as nil in India's oldest literature - except perhaps for the tribes Prithu-Pars"u (Parthians-Persians rather than "those with large ribs" or "those with broad axes"?). On the hypothesis of a sojourn in Iran the absence of such signs would need a lot of explaining. In fact the absence is so striking that Ghosh, in order to bolster up his hypothesis, has to suppose in addition that the Vedic Aryans deliberately maintained silence about an original Indo-Iranian home outside both India and Iran because a religious and cultural incompatibility had developed between them and the Iranians.19 But surely no incompatibility could have been present in that home, for else there would have been no sojourn later in Iran with those who afterwards were known as Iranians? Why then an absolute reticence about this home which was extra-Iranian no less than extra-Indian? And why that reticence and not even any word deserving to be alleged as "perhaps a camouflaged reminiscence" of this home when such reminiscence is
17. "The Aryan Problem", ibid., p. 204.
18. "Indo-Iranian Relations", ibid., p. 219.
19. Ibid.
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hypothetised of a sojourn considered to be worth forgetting? Again, is not the reticence in strange contrast to the Iranians' tradition of an ancient Aryan home, Airiyanam vaejo (Eranvej of the later texts)? The supposed incompatibility between them and the Indians during the latter's "sojourn" in Iran did not prevent the former from recollecting their cradle-land. How then could it breed absolute reticence in the other party? On all counts Ghosh's excuse is illogical. Unlike the Iranians with their origin outside Iran, the Vedic Aryans for all practical purposes could have had no extra-Indian home.
To the two voices from India we may add a pair of Pakistani proponents of the invasion-hypothesis. A.H. Dani observes: "On the question of the Aryans, there is as yet no conclusive evidence as to either the time of their advent or the road by which they did it."20 F. Khan has the same thing to say in other words.21 Ambiguity and uncertainty prevail.
A.L. Basham, who too believes in an invasion, is honest enough to confess: "Direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking, and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India." Yet he makes an effort to make good the gap by means of what he designates "historical geography".22 He tells us: "The study of the geographical data in the hymns... throws a certain amount of light on the course of the Indo-Aryan migration.... In fact, the accepted belief in the Indo-Aryan immigration from Central Asia depends largely on the interpretation of the geographical allusions in the Rigveda and Yajurveda.. ..The amount of geographical knowledge implied in the literature is considerable. Such knowledge in those ancient days could have been acquired only by actual travelling."23
20. Archeology of Pakistan, V, 1970-71, p. 109.
21. Pakistan Archaeology, No. 2,1965, pp. 39-40.
22. In the revised part dealing with ancient India in The Oxford History of India (1970), from which we have already quoted Wheeler, p. 53.
23. Ibid.
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The argument seems queer. Just because actual travel alone could provide such geographical information as the hymns contain, why must we postulate that the Aryans came from Central Asia? Individual travellers could surely bring names of places abroad. These travellers might themselves be Indian Aryans moving out from India and returning with the information. Also, the places abroad could well belong to other Aryan settlements in contact with the Rigvedic. An interchange of knowledge could occur. In any case a collective immigration from Central Asia is not needed for whatever geographical sense of foreign locales is there. And actually how many Central-Asian names do we have?
Basham does not mention a single one. The example he gives of "a display" of "geographical information" is "the hymn Tn Praise of the Rivers (Nadi-stutt)' in the tenth book (x. 75)", and from this hymn he quotes the fifth stanza which lists "ten streams, small and great", all within India itself and, strangely enough, "in order from east to west", as Basham himself notes,24 instead of the opposite which we should expect of people who are claimed to have travelled from west to east. When we consider all the rivers listed, we have only a pointer to Afghanistan with the Kubha (Kabul), Krumu (Kurram), Gomatl (Gomal) and Suvastu (Swat), suggesting, as R.K. Mookerjee says, "the Indian occupation of Afghanistan in those days".25 The sole index to Central Asia is the naming of the river Rasa in stanza 6. Rasa has been phonetically equated to the Iranian Ranha, the river Jaxartes. It is difficult to understand how this reference or any other allusion of a similar sort could illuminate the course of the Indo-Aryan advent from a foreign region. Small contacts with a few foreign parts would be the utmost we might infer.
When the Rigveda and the Yajurveda are compared for their geographical data, we may notice a greater acquaintance with Central and Eastern India in the latter, showing perhaps
24. Ibid.
25. Hindu Civilization (Bhavan's Book University, Bombay, 1957), Part I, p. 84.
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the shift of the seat of Vedic Civilization more inland. But such a shift would be a matter of internal history and could have no bearing on the question of the Rigvedics hailing in 1500 B.C. from beyond the Afghanistan-Punjab complex.
The complete want of any hint in the Rigveda of an Aryan immigration or invasion cannot be evaded by an appeal to "historical geography". Neither can we plead that this want is isolated and accidental. Basham himself looks outside the Rigveda when he indicates that "no tradition" of a transfrontier home survives in India. Not only the religious books after the Rigveda but also those portions of the Puranas which purport to transmit either legendary or historical information are absolutely silent. "According to traditional history as recorded in the Puranas," says Pusalker, "India itself is the home of the Aryans, and it was from here that they expanded in different directions to various countries of the world, spreading the Aryan culture."26
Mookerji reports the Puranic pointers a little more elaborately and links them to some Rigvedic signposts, one of which we have already seen from Basham's own account:
Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aryan invasion of India from north-west and outside of India, nor of any advance of the Aryans from the west to east. On the other hand, it speaks of an Aila outflow, the expansion of the Druhyus through the north-west into the countries beyond. Accordingly, Rigveda X, 75, mentions rivers in their order from the east to the north-west, beginning with the Ganges, in accordance with the course of Aila expansion and its outflow beyond the north-west. Similarly, in the Rigvedic account of the Battle of the Ten Kings against Sudas who was an Aila king of north Panchala... he is described as pushing his conquest westwards into the Punjab. This is also in keeping with the view that the bulk of the Rigveda was composed in the Upper Ganges-Jumna doab and plain.
26. "Cultural Interrelation between India and the Outside World before Asoka", The Cultural Heritage of India (The Ramakrishna Mission, Calcutta, 1958), I, p. 144.
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The Rigveda holds the Sarasvati especially sacred, and als< knows the Sarayu, the river of Oudh.27
In justification of the last statement, which echoes tht view of Keith, Mookerji elsewhere explains: "A part of the Rigveda, the hymns to Ushas, recalls the splendours of dawn in the Punjab, but a larger part refers to the strife of the elements, thunder and lightning, rain bursting from the clouds and mountains, which are not seen in the Punjab, but in the region called Brahmavarta watered by the Sarasvati, the Drshadvatl and the Apaya, where the bulk of the Rigveda must have been composed."28
Literary evidence, on which the invasion-theory relies for the notion of a Rigvedic-Aryan entry into India, is one-voiced in its "No". Of course, we need not subscribe to the sweepingness of the Puranic assertion that Aryanism went everywhere from India. Some "outflow" could and must have occurred, but India may not have been the sole habitat of the Aryans. They may have existed spread out in a long belt of which India was one sector. Yet the very fact that traditional history visualized India as the ur-heimat, cradle-land, of the Aryans is highly meaningful in connection with the Rigvedics.
The conclusion provoked in their context by all these testimonies of archaeologists, historians and literary reporters appears to be unequivocal. To all intents and purposes the Rigvedics were autochthones in India, part of a diverse population going back to a hoary antiquity. This antiquity not only prevented them from making any direct allusion to a source beyond their frontier: it even stood in the way of any explicit expression that though they could not pinpoint their source they had the impression of its having been somewhere abroad.
S. Srikanta Sastri has rightly observed: "Migrating races look back to the land of their origin for centuries. The Parsis
27. Op. cit., I, pp. 182-83.
28. Ibid., pp. 84-85.
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of India remember their origin after eight hundred years. The ancient Egyptians and the Phoenicians remembered their respective lands of origin even though they had forgotten their location."29 About the Parsis we may add that their memory extends backwards actually for more than thirteen hundred years, for, as P.P. Balsam says, "from the facts available till today we can conclude that the Parsis of Iran began coming to India for permanent residence from the year 639 at different places and at different periods, and that their first permanent settlement in India was at Sanjan on the west coast in 716...."30 We may also hark back to the Airiyanam vaejo recollected by the ancestors of the Parsis, the ancient Iranians - quite in contrast to their fellow-Aryans across the border. We cannot help agreeing with Sastri's inference: "The Vedic Aryans, if at all they came from outside,... must have lived in the Sapta-Sindhu [the region of the seven rivers in the ancient Punjab] so many centuries before the Vedic period that they had lost all memory of an original home."31
29. "Appendix" to "The Aryan Problem", The Vedic Age, p. 216.
30. Highlights of Parsi History (Bombay, 1969), p. 29.
31. Loc. cit.
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