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The Aryans Were Indigenous Neither Invad
The Aryans Were Indigenous Neither Invad
The Aryans Were Indigenous Neither Invad
My attention has been drawn to an article published by Tony Joseph in The Hindu,
dated June 17, 2017, which, in essence, tries to say that The Vedic Aryans came to
India from outside. I would like to apprise the readers of the reality of the situation.
I have published many books on the subject, each one dealing with a specific
aspect of the issue. The latest book, The Rigvedic People: Invaders?, Immigrants?
Or Indigenous?, published in 2015 by Aryan Books International, New Delhi
clearly explains, using evidence of archaeology, hydrology, C-14 dating and
literature, why the Aryans were neither Invaders nor slow Immigrants, but were
indigenous. I present here my arguments, as briefly as possible.
At the root of the trouble lies the dating of the Vedas to 1200 BCE by the
German Scholar Max Muller. He did it on a very ad hoc basis and when his
contemporaries, such as Goldstucker, Whitney and Wilson, challenged his
methodology, he surrendered by saying, “Whether the Vedas were composed in
1000 or 2000 or 3000 BC no one on earth can ever determine.” The pity is that in
spite of such a candid confession by Max Muller himself many of his followers
even today stick to this date, or at the most give concession to 1500 BCE.
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stratigraphic contexts, some in the Middle levels, some in the Late and some in the
debris which accumulated after the desertion of the site. Thus, these cannot be
ascribed to a single event, much less to an Aryan Invasion.
These assertions of Thapar and Sharma are baseless. In the first place, the
BMAC is not a product of nomads. It has fortified settlements and elaborate
temple-complexes. It has yielded a very rich harvest of antiquities which include
silver axes, highly ornamented human and animal figurines and excellently carved
seals. But what is more important is that no element of the BMAC has ever been
found east of the Indus which was the area occupied by the Vedic people. So
there is no case whatsoever for the BMAC people having migrated into India.
The Harappan Civilization, which attained its maturity in the 3rd millennium BCE,
had its formative stages at Kunal and Bhirrana in the Sarasvati valley itself, taking
the beginning back to the 5th -6thmillennium BCE. In other words, the Harappans
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were the ‘sons of the soil’. And since, as already established, the Harappan
Civilization and the Rigveda are but two faces of the same coin, the Vedic Aryans
ipso facto were indigenous. They were neither invaders nor immigrants.
The application of DNA research to the Aryan debate is nothing new. The
renowned scientist Sanghamitra Sahoo and colleagues had declared: “The sharing
of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian
populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry
between the two regions, with the diffusion of some Indian-specific lineages
northward.”
Let us, therefore, analyze the facts coolly and not remain glued to the
th
19 century paradigms!