The Aryans were indigenous: neither invaders nor immigrants

-- BB Lal, Former Director General, Archaeological Survey of

India (2017)

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.

In 1920s the Harappan Civilization was discovered and dated to the

rd
3 millennium BCE on the basis of the occurrence of many Indus objects in the
already dated archaeological contexts in Mesopotamia. This led to the immediate
conclusion that since, according to Max Muller, the Vedas were not earlier than
1200 BCE, the Harappan Civilization could not have been the creation of the
Vedic people.

In 1946 Mortimer Wheeler (later knighted) excavated Harappa and

discovered a fort over there. On learning that in the Vedic texts Indra has been
described as puramdara i.e. ‘destroyer of forts’, he jumped to the conclusion that
the Vedic Aryans, represented by Indra, invaded India and destroyed the Harappan
Civilization. But, it must be stressed that there no evidence of any kind of
destruction at Harappa.

In support of his Invasion thesis, however, Wheeler referred to some

skeletons at Mohenjo-daro which he said represent the people massacred by the
Invading Aryans. But the fact is that these skeletons had been found in different

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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.

The ghost of ‘Invasion’ re-appeared in a new avatara, namely that

of ‘Immigration’.Said Romila Thapar in 1991: “If invasion is discarded then the
mechanism of migration and occasional contacts come into sharper focus. These
migrations appear to have been of pastoral cattle breeders who are prominent in
the Avesta and Rigveda.” Faithfully following her, R. S. Sharma elaborated: “The
pastoralists who moved to the Indian borderland came from Bactria-Margiana
Archaeological Complex or BMAC which saw the genesis of the culture of the
Rigveda.”

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.

Now, if there was no Aryan Invasion or an Aryan Immigration, were the

Vedic people indigenous? To answer this question we must first find out
the correct chronological horizon of theRigveda. It refers to the river Sarasvati
nearly seventy times. The river dried up before the composition of
the Panchavimsa Brahmana, as this text avers. Today this dry river is identifiable
with the Ghaggar in Haryana and Rajasthan. On its bank stands Kalibangan, a site
of the Harappan Civilization. An Indo-Italian team, under the leadership of Robert
Raikes, bore holes in the dry bed to find out its history. Raikes wrote an article
in Antiquity (UK), captioning it: ‘Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes.’ C-14
dates show that the flourishing settlement was suddenly abandoned because of the
drying up of the Sarasvati around 2000 BCE. What are the implications of this
discovery? Since the Sarasvati was a mighty flowing river during the Rigvedic
times, the Rigvedahas got to be earlier than that date. Thus, at least a
3rd millennium-BCE horizon is indicated for theRigveda.

We now pass on to another very important statement in the Rigveda. Verses

5 and 6 of Sukta 75 of Mandala 10 enumerate all the rivers serially from the Ganga
and Yamuna on the east to the Indus and its western tributaries on the west. In
other words, this was the area occupied by the Rigvedic people in the
3rd millennium BCE (the minimal date arrived at for the Rigveda, referred to in the
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previous paragraph). Now, if a simple question is asked, ‘Which archaeological
culture flourished in this very area in the 3rd millennium BCE’, the inescapable
answer shall have to be, ‘The Harappan Civilization’. In other
words, the Rigveda and Harappan Civilization are but two faces of the same
coin.

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.”

This north-westward movement of the Vedic people is duly supported by

both literature and archaeology. The Baudhayana Srautasutra, a later Vedic text,
mentions that Amavasu, a son of Pururavas and Urvashi, migrated westwards and
his progeny are the Gandharas, Persians and Arattas. Moving through these
regions, a section of the Vedic people reached Turkey where a 1380-BCE
inscription from Boghaz Koi refers to a treaty between the Hittite and
Mitanni kings mentioning as witnesses the Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra
and Nasatya. Further, there a treatise on horse-training by one Kikkuli, which uses
Sanskrit terms like ekavartana, dvivaratanaand trivartana, meaning thereby that
the horses under training should be made to make one, two or three rounds of the
prescribed course. What more evidence is needed to support a westward migration
of the Vedic Aryans themselves?

Let us, therefore, analyze the facts coolly and not remain glued to the
th
19 century paradigms!