The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter One

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, Turkestān 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 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:

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(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-Irānian dialect, which was not yet fully characterized either as Indo-Aryan or as Irānian and which would seem to be derived from the language of communities originally living outside India and later separating to become Irānians and Indo-Aryans in approximately the middle of the second millennium B.C.?

(3)Linguistically, does the Rigveda, along with the Zara-thustrian Gāthās of Irān, 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 Harappā 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 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

1. D.P. Agrawal has suggested, from an analysis of radio-carbon (C 14) 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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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.

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