The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Three

THE INVASION-THEORY AND THE ALLEGED

ARYAN-DRAVIDIAN DIFFERENCE

The conclusion at which we have arrived is exactly that of Sri Aurobindo who was a multi-linguist and a cultural exponent, besides being a political guide, a philosophical thinker, a literary critic, a poet on a grand scale and a master of integral spirituality.

As far back as 1914, after mentioning how the old conceptions of the recent emergence of civilized man from the mere savage had been shaken by our increasing knowledge of remarkable civilizations many thousands of years ago, he wrote:

"If the Vedic Indians do not get the benefit of this revised knowledge, it is due to the survival of the theory with which European erudition started, that they belonged to the so-called Aryan race and were on the same level of culture with the early Aryan Greeks, Celts, Germans as they are represented to us in the Homeric poems, the old Norse Sagas and the Roman accounts of the ancient Gaul and Teuton. Hence has arisen the theory that these Aryan races were northern barbarians who broke in from the colder climes on the rich civilizations of Mediterranean Europe and Dravidian India.

"But the indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion. The distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan, on which so much has been built, seems on the mass of the evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference. The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worship or spiritual culture as the distinguishing sign of the Aryans, - a worship of Light and of the powers of Light and a self-discipline based on the culture of the Truth' and the aspiration to Immortality, - Ritam and Amritam. There is no reliable indication of any racial difference.

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It is always possible that the bulk of the peoples now inhabiting India may have been the descendants of a new race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as argued by Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions; but there is nothing in the Veda, as there is nothing in the present ethnological features of the country, to prove that this descent took place near to the time of the Vedic hymns or was the slow penetration of a small body of fair-skinned barbarians into a civilised Dravidian peninsula."¹

Here is a challenging proclamation waving a red rag in front of scholars who swear by categories like "Indo-European" and "Dravidian" as radical distinctions rendering it impossible for the Aryans to be essentially one people with the majority of the other inhabitants of India, and who also deem it impossible for the Aryans to have existed in any appreciable form in this country prior to about 1500 B.C. But these scholars go too far in both respects. At least their second "impossible" seems now to be fast fading. They overlook the most recent study of skeletonic materials from Harappān sites - sites which, according to them, are anterior in date to the "Aryan" civilization.

Wheeler, assessing the exhaustive report published in 1960 on the Harappā skeletons² observes apropos of the two main classes in which they are grouped: "Without emphasis, Class A is compared with the 'Proto-Australoid', 'Caucasic' or 'Eurafrican' of earlier writers, whilst Class A₁, which is of a slighter build, recalls the conventional 'Mediterranean', 'Indo-European' or 'Caspian'."³ Reporting on the human bones from Harappā's Area G, Wheeler writes of "a tightly packed mass of human skulls (some round-headed, but mostly long-headed of A₁ type)."⁴ The term "Indo-Euro-

1.The Secret of the Veda (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1971), PP- 23-4.

2.Bulletin of the Anthropological Survey of India, Vol. 9, No. 2, July 1960, Memorandum No. 9, "Human Skeletal Remains from Harappā".

3. The Indus Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 68.

4. Ibid.

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pean" as applicable to a part of the Harappān population is an eye-opener.

Equally startling is Sankalia's summing up of the findings of two "sets of scholars" at a Harappān site in Saurāshtra, Lothal: "...both sets seem to think that three main types of races lived at Lothal. ...the first would stand for proto-Nordic and Alpine-Armenoid types. Sarkar farther compared the groups one and two with those of Sialk and Hissar in Iran, and thought that Group I of Lothal viz. dolichocephalic with a mean [index] of 75.11 was Aryan."⁵

Pertinent here is a piece of information passed on by S.K. Chatterji while discussing the Aryan movements in the second millennium B.C. and the supposed migration into India: "The Aryan speakers... are believed to have represented a cultural union of two distinct racial stocks, the tall, blonde, long-headed, straight-nosed Nordics, and the comparatively short and dark and short-headed Alpines..."⁶ Both these "racial types" are clearly attested at Lothal before the supposed migration.

Again, pertinent and equally illuminating is Wheeler's general observation: "Indeed, the anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappā remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable from Harappān times to the present day."⁷ What the anthropologists are said to remark is extremely notable. It suggests that the supposed Aryan invasion of c. 1500 B.C. has brought about no distinct changes in physical characters in the regions involved: the Punjāb and Saurāshtra. The Aryans are no more and no less prominent there now than in Harappān times. It is as though there were no invasion by the Aryans at all to make any difference.

And then, looking at the uniform Aryan culture of both

5.Op. cit., p. 378, col. 2.

6.'The Basic Unity underlying the Diversity of Culture", Interrelations of Culture (UNESCO, Paris, 1951), p. 170.

7.Op. cit. p. 72

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the Punjāb and Saurāshtra today in spite of non-uniform physical traits marked in the population by anthropologists, we begin to find the very division into Aryan and non-Aryan in India, from the racial viewpoint, arbitrary and meaningless. Wheeler's seeing, in one anthropological group, the "Indo-European" type and the "Mediterranean", under which the "Dravidian" is usually put, is itself a help to this finding.

Perhaps the best scientific statement that can be framed on the subject would be like S.S. Sarkar's in 1958,⁸ indicating at the same time the large-scale variety of detail and the overall homogeneity of type. He begins: "It may be useful to remind ourselves of what one of the foremost authorities has said in regard to India. S.L. Washburn, in his essay, 'Thinking about Race', has said that the area where the greatest mixing has occurred and which is hardest to classify should be the most central one, that is India." After clarifying "that brachycephaly [short-headedness] in India does not show a sweeping distribution", he concludes: "It appears... that India is a predominantly dolichocephalic [long-leaded] country, and as [L.H. Dudley] Buxton has pointed out, three peoples are associated with this form of head: (1) the aboriginal peoples of India, (2) the Dravidians, as represented by the Tamils, Telugus, etc. of South India, and (3) the Caucasians or the Indo-Aryans. The first, however, contain a high percentage of hyperdolichocephalic heads and deserve to be treated separately."

Sarkar explains his final anthropological stand of 1958: (1) the aboriginal peoples are the Veddids derived from the Veddas of Ceylon, (2) the Dravidian type has evolved, as Sir Arthur Keith held, from the Veddids as a result of environmental stimuli, (3) both the Veddids and the Indo-Aryans have been much modified by mutual contact, and (4) the present-day Dravidian-speakers of South India have an

8. "Race and Race Movements in India", The Cultural Heritage of India (1958), I. In what follows, the matter from pp. 17,19,22 and 26 has been telescoped.

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Aryan ancestry no less than a Veddid and therefore show a bimodal (two-peaked) curve of cephalic index - one at 67-70 and the other at 72-75. Sarkar accepts the current Aryan invasion theory and hence refers to the South-Indian speakers of Dravidian today - that is, those who would be "post-invasion" peninsular Tamils, Telugus, etc. But, if we proceed without that theory, the picture along his line would be of an ancient Indian population with two fundamental strains, a major Indo-Aryan strain and a minor Veddid, with the Dravidians a joint evolute of Veddid and Indo-Aryan mixture leaning towards the Indo-Aryan long-headedness rather than the Veddid sort which is infused with a good deal of hyperdolichocephaly.

We learn from a review by Sankalia of a later writing of Sarkar that he altered his own old position about the Dravi-dians of antiquity and agreed with archaeologists like All-chin and Sankalia himself. Sarkar thought that waves after waves of immigrants from Western Asia had sought refuge in peninsular India and enriched by their contact the earlier inhabitants like the "Australoids" (=Veddids): thus alone would he account for the peculiar objects which could not be had by trade but were cultural borrowings, and for the mixture of developed with primitive physical features in the few well-preserved prehistoric skeletons.⁹

Although not denying several immigrant waves, we may yet refrain from explaining the "Mediterranean" aspects of those skeletons entirely in terms of these waves. According to Sankalia, culturally the earliest skeletons so far found are from Langhnaj, in north Gujarat.¹⁰ But what are his own words about them? He writes: "These show on the one hand many Veddid or Australoid traits, on the other hand Medi-terranid or those found among the Natufians, a culturally similar people from Palestine. Both these peoples, besides

9.Review of Sarkar's Ancient Races of the Deccan (Munshiram Manoharlal,New Delhi, 1973) in the Times of India Weekly (Bombay, December16, 1974).

10.Ibid.

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using microliths, wore ornaments of dentalium shell beads. While noting these affinities, one must remember the difference in dates as well as the great distance in space between the two. The Langhnaj skeletons are at least a few thousand years younger than those of the Natufian caves." The Langhnaj skeletons date to "around 2000 B.C."¹¹ The Natufians flourished in the seventh millennium B.C.⁵² It is impossible to believe that the Natufian people and culture immigrated into Gujarat and created the Langhnaj "Mediterranids"-cum-"Veddids" ethnologically and culturally. Another anomaly is at Tekkolakota (Mysore) at about the same date. A people with a developed culture from Western Asia is said to have colonized the region but adopted the existing primitive house-model current there, a model which unlike the rest of the cultural material - pottery, stone tools, lithic blades - has no analogue in Western Asia.¹³ It is unlikely that a fairly sophisticated culture from abroad should reproduce no sign at all of its own dwelling-style anywhere. It is much more probable that an indigenous people, habituated to live in a certain type of house, should continue in its own tradition al dwelling-style in spite of acquiring new cultural traits by a stimulus from abroad.

As between Sarkar's old and new stands, the sole alteration required is the acceptance of some extra-Indian influxes and infusions. The Dravidians could still be essentially an internal evolution, to which ethnological shades of an evolution comparable to it in general outside our subcontinent were added. Since "there is no finality or definiteness about their origin even today" and "the problem still remains as unsolved as it was decades ago",¹⁴ we should refrain from

11.Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan (1974 ed.), p. 257 ,col. 2.

12.W.F. Albright, The Archœology of Palestine (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 61.

13.Sankalia, op.cit., 539,543-44.

14."Home of the Dravidians" (The Hindu, Madras, October 17,1977, p. 5), a review by P. Natarajan of the latest thesis on the theme, The

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scepticism about this outlook. At most, to balance it, we may propose a parity in some respects between the Indo-Aryans and the Dravidians and see the former as being in physical features nearly as affected by the latter as the other way around, so that the anthropological upshot, by and large, would be the pure and simple Pan-Indian.

Combining the perspective drawn from Sarkar with the vista opened up by the reports from Harappā and Lothal, and bringing in psychological factors alongside physical ones, we may submit that a single multi-charactered race, with an abundant linguistic and cultural diversity based on a flexible yet persistent unity of civilization, seems to have continued from prehistory to our own period.

Once more we may note that such was always the opinion of Sri Aurobindo, who saw even a common origin to Sanskrit and Tamil. In 1914 we witness him writing:

"It was my stay in Southern India which first seriously turned my thoughts to the Veda. Two observations that were forced on my mind gave a serious shock to my secondhand belief in the racial division between Northern Aryans and Southern Dravidians. The distinction had always rested for me on a difference between the physical types of Aryan and Dravidian and a more definite incompatibility between the northern Sanskritic and the southern non-Sanskirtic tongues. I knew indeed of the later theories which suppose that a single homogeneous race, Dravidian or Indo-Afghan, inhabits the Indian peninsula; but hitherto I had not attached much importance to these speculations. I could not, however, be long in Southern India without being impressed by the general recurrence of northern or 'Aryan' types in the Tamil race. Wherever I turned, I seemed to recognise with a startling distinctness, not only among the Brahmins but in all castes and classes, the old though this similarity was less widely spread, of my own

Problem of Dravidian Origins by T. Balakrishna Nayar (University of Madras, 1977).

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province Bengal. The impression I received was as if an army of all the tribes of the North had descended on the South and submerged any previous population that may have occupied it. A general impression of a Southern type survived, but it was impossible to fix it rigidly while studying the physiognomy of individuals. And in the end I could not but perceive that whatever admixtures might have taken place, whatever regional differences might have been evolved, there remains, behind all varieties, a unity of physical as well as of cultural type throughout India. For the rest, this is a conclusion to which ethnological speculation itself has an increasing tendency.

"But what then of the sharp distinction between Aryan and Dravidian races created by the philologists? It disappears. If at all an Aryan invasion is admitted, we have either to suppose that it flooded India and determined the physical type of the people, with whatever modifications, or that it was the incursion of small bands of a less civilized race who melted away into the original population. We have then to suppose that entering a vast peninsula occupied by a civilized people, builders of great cities, extensive traders, not without mental and spiritual culture, they were yet able to impose on them their own language, religion, ideas and manners. Such a miracle would be just possible if the in-vaders possessed a very highly organised language, a greater force of creative mind and a more dynamic religious form and spirit.

"And then there was always the difference of language to support the theory of a meeting of races. But here also my preconceived ideas were disturbed and confounded. For on examining the vocables of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskritic form and character, I yet found myself continually guided by words or by families of words supposed to be pure Tamil in establishing new relations between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally between the Greek and the Sanskrit. Sometimes the Tamil vocables not only suggested the connection

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but proved the missing link in a family of connected words. And it was through the Dravidian language that I came first to perceive what seems to me the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology of the Aryan tongues.¹⁵ I was unable to pursue my examination far enough to establish any definite conclusion, but it certainly seems to me that the original connection between the Dravidian and the Aryan tongues was far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed and the possibility suggests itself that they may even have been two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue. If so, the sole remaining evidence of an Aryan invasion of Dravidian India would be the indications to be found in the Vedic hymns...

"It did not take me long to see that the Vedic indications of racial division between Aryans and Dasyus were of a far flimsier character than I had supposed..."¹⁶

Sri Aurobindo is not alone in his non-racial reading. A.A. Macdonell and A.B. Keith admit: "The great difference between the Dasyus and the Aryans was their religion... It is significant that constant reference is made to difference in religion between Aryans and Dāsa and Dasyu."¹⁷ Pusalker positively brings the point home to us that the Rigveda supplies no anthropological or ethnic particulars and that in it the word "Arya" has a cultural, not a racial significance.¹⁸ It would be absurd to conjure up, on the basis of this word and of expressions such as "Dāsa, Dasyu", Aryan foreigners in conflict with indigenous Dravidians.

15.Sri Aurobindo projected a work dealing with a re-examination of a large part of the field of Comparative Philology and a reconstruction on a new basis which he hoped would bring us nearer to a true science of language. He called it The Origins of Aryan Speech. The draft of only one chapter was found among his manuscripts, along with a substantial number of separate linguistic notes. The draft has been appended to his book. The Secret of the Veda, pp. 551-81.

16.Op. cit., pp. 35-36.

17.The Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (John Murray & Co.,London, 1912), I, pp. 347,356-7.

18.Bhāratiya Vidyā Bhavan, Bombay, January-June 1950, p. 114.

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Speaking of Dravidians, we may dwell a little on Sri Aurobindo's impression of a common source of the so-called Aryan and Dravidian tongues.¹⁹ He notes, with several illustrations, how those ancient languages, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, which we regard as related, tended to lose "even in the commonest terms... their original vocabulary and diverge from each other so that if the process had not been arrested by an early literature all obvious proof of relationship might well have disappeared". Elaborating on this contingency, Sri Aurobindo writes:

"It is only the accident of an early and continuous Sanskrit literature that enables us to establish the original unity of the Aryan tongues. If it were not for the old Sanskrit writings, if only the ordinary Sanskrit colloquial vocables had survived who could be certain of these connections? or who could confidently affiliate colloquial Bengali with its ordinary domestic terms to Latin any more certainly than Telugu or Tamil? How then are we to be sure that the dissonance of Tamil itself with the Aryan tongues is not due to an early separation and an extensive change of its vocabulary during its preliterary age? I shall be able, at a later stage of this inquiry, to afford some ground for supposing the Tamil numerals to be early Aryan vocables abandoned by Sanskrit but still traceable in the Veda or scattered and imbedded in the various Aryan tongues and the Tamil pronouns similarly the primitive Aryan denominatives of which traces still remain in the ancient tongues. I shall be able to show also that large families of words supposed to be pure Tamil are identical in the mass, though not in their units, with the Aryan family. But then we are logically driven towards this conclusion that absence of a common vocabulary for common ideas and objects is not necessarily a proof of diverse origin. Diversity of grammatical forms? But are we certain that the Tamil forms are not equally old Aryan forms, corrupted and preserved by the early deliquescence of the Tamilic dialect?

19. Op. cit., pp. 559-60. What follows is from the extant first chapter of The Origins of Aryan Speech.

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Some of them are common to the modern Aryan vernaculars, but unknown to Sanskrit, and it has even been thence concluded by some that the Aryan vernaculars were originally non-Aryan tongues linguistically overpowered by the foreign invader. But if so then into what quagmires of uncertainty do we not descend?"

Sri Aurobindo goes on pointing out various defects in "our fixed classification of language families"; but it is not his aim to prove that there is nothing fit to be really named "Dravidian". His drift is that this label and, along with it, the tab "Aryan" are misnomers when regarded as anything more than conveniences. He is prepared to consider the whole main population of India as well as its diverse speeches to be Dravidian provided we think of a homogeneous race and culture with whatever internal variations of cranio-skeletonic structure and provided we realize the illuminating linguistic role the most ancient Sanskrit, whether designated Aryan or Dravidian, is able to play.

Perhaps a remark may be apposite here on a much-noted feature of Rigvedic Sanskrit as distinguished from related "Aryan" languages, even the one closest to it, the Avestan form of Iranian. The feature is a second series of dental letters, those termed "cerebrals", which are taken as characteristic of "Dravidian" speech: t, d, n, l, s. The general opinion is that Rigvedic Sanskrit assimilated this series from an entirely different linguistic fount. But, once we get rid of the obsession of an Aryan invasion in c. 1500 B.C. and a pre-existing Dravidian India, all that is legitimate to believe is that in India the "Aryan" and "Dravidian" languages have some similar features directing us to a parallel development, during a prolonged antiquity, from a shared linguistic ancestor.

The idea of a parallel development would be put out of court if it was impossible for the cerebrals to have emerged by the internal evolution of an "Aryan" speech like Sanskrit in primitive times. A number of scholars do entertain the idea. But what appears to be the wisest word here is Sten

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Konow's, though it was set forth within the framework of the invasion-hypothesis:

"It seems to be a general rule that a people which invaded a foreign country, to some degree adopted the pronunciation of its new home, partly as a result of the influence of climate, and partly also on account of the intermixture with the old inhabitants. This has also generally been supposed to have been the case in India. Thus there has been a long discussion as to whether the Aryans have adopted the cerebral letters from the Drāvidas or have developed them independently. Good reasons have been adduced for both suppositions, and the question has not as yet been decided. The Indo-European languages do not seem to have possessed those letters. They had a series of dentals which were not, however, pronounced as pure dentals by putting the tongue between the teeth, but probably as alveolars, the tongue being pressed against the root of the upper teeth [as, for instance, in pronouncing the English -t- and -d-]. It is a well known fact that these sounds have in India partly become dentals and partly cerebrals. The cerebrals are in most cases derived from compound letters where the old dentals were preceded by an -l-. Similar changes also occur in other Indo-European languages, and it is therefore quite possible that the Indo-Aryan cerebrals have been developed quite independently. The cerebral letters, however, form an essential feature of the Dravidian phonology, and it therefore seems probable that Dravidian influence has been at work and at least given strength to a tendency which can, it is true, have taken its origin among the Aryans themselves."²⁰

We may conclude this section by referring to a remarkable group of papers recently published though written nearly fifty years ago when Sri Aurobindo was himself revising the current dichotomy of Aryan-Dravidian. It presses for a revision of several notions largely accepted so far of Rigvedic or other borrowings by Sanskrit from Dravidian. It counters

20. The Linguistic Survey of India, Vol .IV , p.279.

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most competently the pro-Dravidian bias set up in the minds of our philologists ever since Bishop Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages (1856, 2nd Edition 1875) gave a shock to the previous pro-Aryan bias. According to R. Swaminatha Aiyar,²¹ many of the words understood as non-Aryan turn out to be Aryan behind their Dravidian exteriors and this exterior itself can be seen as crypto-Aryan. He deals extensively with the conjugation of verbs, particularly tense and mood signs, and reserves for separate analysis basic vocabulary and nominal declension. Over a hundred Dravidian verbal forms occurring in ordinary speech are demonstrated to be derived from Indo-Aryan roots. The majority of grammatical structures in Dravidian are shown as arising from suffixed elements borrowed from Indo-Aryan. But he is careful to send us to Vedic idioms and spoken Prakrits rather than to classical Sanskrit which is a late literary development.

Aiyar seems to be on a genuine Aurobindonian tack, except that he does not envisage a common linguistic ancestry instead of being tempted by his important discoveries to argue that Dravidian "is made up of elements to be found in old Indo-Aryan and is merely a phase of Indo-Aryan".²²

21.Dravidian Theories (The Madras Law Journal Office, Madras, 1975). For a good brief review see "Linguistic Research" by S.N. Sri-ramadesikan in The Hindu (Madras), August 17, 1975, p. 15, col. 3. I have drawn on its summary for part of what follows.

22.Ibid., p. 164.

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