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| Indology III - The Myth Of The Aryan Invasion |
Svami B.V. Giri
01/29/2009
It is indeed ironic that the origin of this
theory does not lie in Indian records, but in 19th Century
politics and German nationalism. No where in the Vedas,
Puranas or Itihasas is there any mention of a Migration or
Invasion of any kind. In 1841 M.S. Elphinstone, the first governor of the
Bombay Presidency, wrote in his book History of
India: The Birth of a
Misconception It was established by linguists that
Sanskrit, Iranian and European languages all belonged to the same family,
categorizing them as ‘Indo-European’ languages. It was assumed that all
these people originated from one homeland where they spoke a common
language (which they called ‘Proto-Indo-European’ or PIE) which later
developed into Sanskrit, Latin, Greek etc. They then needed to ascertain
where this homeland was. By pure speculation, it was proposed that this
homeland was either southeast Europe or Central Asia. Harappa Archeologists excavating the sites at Harappa
and Mohenjo-daro found human skeletal remains; this seemed to them to be
undeniable evidence that a large-scale massacre had taken place in these
cities by the invading Aryan hordes. Prof. G. F. Dales (Former head of
department of South-Asian Archaeology and Anthropology, Berkeley
University, USA) in his ‘The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-daro’,
states the following about this evidence: Mohenjo-daro Evidence from the Vedas However, there are other references in the
Rg Veda 3 that point to India being a land of mixed races. The Rg Veda
also states that "We pray to Indra to give glory by which the Dasyus
will become Aryans." 4 Such a
statement confirms that to be an Aryan was not a matter of birth.
An inattentive skimming through the
Vedas has resulted in a gross misinterpretation of social and
racial struggles amongst the ancient Indians. North Aryans were pitted
against the Southern Dravidians, high-castes against low-castes, civilized
orthodox Indians against barbaric heterodox tribals. The hypothesis that
of racial hatred between the Aryans and the dark-skinned Dasyus has no
sastric foundation, yet some ‘scholars’ have misinterpreted texts
to try to prove that there was racial hatred amongst the Aryans and
Dravidians (such as the Rg Veda story of Indra slaying the
demon Vrta 5 ). Based on literary analysis, many scholars
including B.G. Tilak, Dayananda Saraswati and Aurobindo dismissed any idea
of an Aryan Invasion. For example, if the Aryans were foreign invaders,
why is it that they don’t name places outside of India as their religious
sites? Why do the Vedas only glorify holy places within
India? Max Mueller But the dye had already been cast! Political
and Nationalist groups in Germany and France exploited this racial
phenomenon to propagate the supremacy of an assumed Aryan race of white
people. Later, Adolf Hitler used this ideology to the extreme for his
political hegemony and his barbaric crusade to terrorize Jews, Slavs and
other racial minorities, culminating in the holocaust of millions of
innocent people. According to Mueller’s etymological
explanation of ‘Aryan’, the word is derived from ‘ar’ (to
plough, to cultivate). Therefore Arya means ‘a cultivator, or
farmer’. This is opposed to the idea that the Aryans were wandering
nomads. V.S. Apte's Sanskrit-English Dictionary relates the word
Arya to the root ‘r-’ to which the prefix ‘a’ has been
added in order to give a negating meaning. Therefore the meaning of
Arya is given as ‘excellent, best’, followed by ‘respectable’ and
as a noun, ‘master, lord, worthy, honorable, excellent,’ ‘upholder of
Arya values, and further: teacher, employer, master, father-in-law,
friend.’ There is no solid evidence that the Aryans
belonged to a nomadic tribe. In fact, to suggest that a nomadic horde of
barbarians wrote books of such profound wisdom as the Vedas and
Upanisads is nothing more than an absurdity and defies
imagination. Although in the Rg Veda Indra is
described as the ‘Destroyer of Cities,’ the same text mentions that the
Aryan people themselves were urban dwellers with hundreds of cities of
their own. They are mentioned as a complex metropolitan society with
numerous professions and as a seafaring race. This begs the question, if
the Aryans had indeed invaded the city of Harrapa, why did they not
inhabit it after? Archeological evidence shows that the city was left
deserted after the ‘Invasion’. Colin Renfrew, Prof. of Archeology at
Cambridge, writes in his book Archeology and Language: The Puzzle of
Indo-European Origins’ - ‘It is certainly true that the gods
invoked do aid the Aryas by over-throwing forts, but this does not in
itself establish that the Aryas had no forts themselves. Nor does the
fleetness in battle, provided by horses (who were clearly used primarily
for pulling chariots), in itself suggest that the writers of these hymns
were nomads. Indeed the chariot is not a vehicle especially associated
with nomads’ Horses and Chariots Another important point in this regard is
that nomadic tribes do not use chariots. They are used in areas of flat
land such as the Gangetic plains of Northern India. An Invasion of India
from Central Asia would require crossing mountains and deserts – a chariot
would be useless for such an exercise. Much later, further excavations in
the Indus Valley (and pre-Indus civilizations) revealed horses and
evidence of the wheel on the form of a seal showing a spoked wheel (as
used on chariots). An Iron Culture Yajna-vedhis The geometry of these yajna-vedhis is
explained in the Vedic texts such as the Satpatha-brahmana. The
University of California at Berkley has compared this geometry to the
early geometry of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia and established that the
geometry found in the Vedic scriptures should be dated before 1700BC. Such
evidence proves that the Harrapans were part of the Vedic fold. Objections in the Realm of Linguistics and
Literature North-South Divide Pasupati Siva The Discovery of the Sarasvati River
Introduction
The
aryan invasion theory has been one of the most controversial historical
topics for well over a century. However, it should be pointed out that it
remains just that – a theory. To date no hard evidence has proven the
aryan invasion theory to be fact. In this essay we will explain the roots
of this hypothesis and how, due to recent emergence of new evidence over
the last couple of decades, the validity of the aryan invasion theory has
been seriously challenged.
'It is opposed to their
(Hindus) foreign origin, that neither in the Code (of Manu) nor, I
believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the
code, is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more
than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further
than the Himalayan chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods...
.To say that it spread from a central point is an unwarranted assumption,
and even to analogy; for, emigration and civilization have not spread in a
circle, but from east to west. Where, also, could the central point be,
from which a language could spread over India, Greece, and Italy and yet
leave Chaldea, Syria and Arabia untouched? There is no reason whatever for
thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one,
and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest
trace of their records or tradition.’
Interest in the
field of Indology during the 19th Century was of mixed
motivations. Many scholars such as August Wilhelm von Schlegal, Hern
Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Arthur Schopenhauer lauded praise upon the Vedic
literatures and their profound wisdom, others were less than impressed. To
accept that there was an advanced civilization outside the boundaries of
Europe, at a time before the Patriarchs Abraham and Moses had made their
covenant with the Almighty was impossible to conceive of for most European
scholars, who harbored a strong Christian tendency. Most scholars of this
period were neither archeologists nor historians in the strict sense of
the word. Rather, they were missionaries paid by their governments to
establish western cultural and racial superiority over the subjugated
Indian citizens, through their study of the indigenous religious texts.
Consequently, for racial, political and religious reasons, early European
indologists created a myth that still survives to this day. Harappa and Mohenjo-daro
The discovery of ruins in the Indus Valley (Harappa
and Mohenjo-daro) was considered by indologists like Wheeler as proof of
their conjectures – that a nomadic tribe from foreign lands had plundered
India. It was pronounced that the ruins dated back to a time before the
Aryan Invasion, although this was actually never verified. By assigning a
period of 200 years to each of the several layers of the pre-Buddhist
Vedic literature, indologists arrived at a time frame of somewhere between
1500 and 1000BC for the Invasion of the Aryans. Using Biblical chronology
as their sheet anchor, nineteenth century indologists placed the creation
of the world at 4000BC 1 and Noah’s flood at
2500BC. They thus postulated that the Aryan Invasion could not have taken
place any time before 1500BC.‘What of these skeletal remains that
have taken on such undeserved importance? Nine years of extensive
excavations at Mohenjo-daro (1922-31) - a city of three miles in circuit -
yielded the total of some 37 skeletons, or parts thereof, that can be
attributed with some certainty to the period of the Indus civilizations.
Some of these were found in contorted positions and groupings that suggest
anything but orderly burials. Many are either disarticulated or
incomplete. They were all found in the area of the Lower Town - probably
the residential district. Not a single body was found within the area of
the fortified citadel where one could reasonably expect the final defense
of this thriving capital city to have been made…Where are the burned
fortresses, the arrow heads, weapons, pieces of armor, the smashed
chariots and bodies of the invaders and defenders? Despite the extensive
excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of
evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed
conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan
Invasion.’
It was
therefore concluded that light-skinned nomads from Central Asia who wiped
out the indigenous culture and enslaved or butchered the people, imposing
their alien culture upon them had invaded the Indian subcontinent. They
then wrote down their exploits in the form of the Rg Veda. This
hypothesis was apparently based upon references in the Vedas that
point to a conflict between the light-skinned Aryans and the dark-skinned
Dasyus. 2 This theory was strengthened by the archeological
discoveries in the Indus Valley of the charred skeletal remains that we
have mentioned above. Thus the Vedas became nothing more than a
series of poetic tales about the skirmishes between two barbaric
tribes.What is an ‘Aryan’?
The Sanskrit word ‘Aryan’ refers to one who is righteous and
noble. It is also used in the context of addressing a gentleman
(Arya-putra, Aryakanya etc). 6 Nowhere in the
Vedic literature is the word used to denote race or language. This was a
concoction by Max Mueller who, in 1853, introduced the word
‘Arya’ into the English language as referring a particular race and
language. He did this in order to give credibility to his Aryan race
theory (see Part 2). However in 1888, when challenged by
other eminent scholars and historians, Mueller could see that his
reputation was in jeopardy and made the following statement, thus refuting
his own theory -
(Max Mueller, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas, 1888,
pg 120)
No Nomads
Kenneth Kennedy of Cornell University has recently proven that
there was no significant influx of people into India during 4500 to 800BC.
Furthermore it is impossible for sites stretching over one thousand miles
to have all become simultaneously abandoned due to the Invasion of Nomadic
Tribes. The Invasion Theory was linked to references of horses in the
Vedas, assuming that the Aryans brought horses and chariots with
them, giving military superiority that made it possible for them to
conquer the indigenous inhabitants of India. Indologists tried to credit
this theory by claiming that the domestication of the horse took place
just before 1500BC. Their proof for this was that there were no traces of
horses and chariots found in the Indus Valley. The Vedic literature
nowhere mentions riding in battle and the word ‘asva’ for horse was
often used figuratively for speed. Recent excavations by Dr.S.R. Rao have
discovered both the remains of a horse from both the Late Harrapan Period
and the Early Harrapan Period (dated before the supposed Invasion by the
Aryans), and a clay model of a horse in Mohenjo-daro. Since Dr. Rao’s
discoveries other archeologists have uncovered numerous horse bones of
both domesticated and combat types. New discoveries in the Ukraine also
proves that horse riding was prevalent as early as 4000BC – thus debunking
the misconception that the Aryan nomads came riding into history after
2000BC.
Similarly, it was
claimed that another reason why the Invading Aryans gained the upper hand
was because their weapons were made of iron. This was based upon the word
‘ayas’ found in the Vedas, which was translated as iron.
Another reason was that iron was not found in the Indus Valley
region.However, in other Indo-European languages, ayas refers
to bronze, copper or ore. It is dubious to say that ayas only
referred to iron, especially when the Rg Veda does not mention
other metals apart from gold, which is mentioned more frequently than
ayas. Furthermore, the Yajur and Atharva Vedas
refer to different colors of ayas. This seems to show that he word
was a generic term for all types of metal. It is also mentioned in the
Vedas that the dasyus (enemies of the Aryans) also used
ayas to build their cities. Thus there is no hard evidence to prove
that the ‘Aryans invaders’ were an iron-based culture and their enemies
were not.
Throughout the
Vedas, there is mention of fire-sacrifices (yajnas) and the
elaborate construction of vedhis (fire altars). Fire-sacrifices
were probably the most important aspect of worshiping the Supreme for the
Aryan people. However, the remains of yajna-vedhis (fire altars)
were uncovered in Harrapa by B.B. Lal of the Archeological Survey of
India, in his excavations at the third millenium site of Kalibangan.
There are various objections to the conclusions
reached by the indologists concerning linguistics. Firstly they have never
given a plausible excuse to explain how a Nomadic Invasion could have
overwhelmed the original languages in one of the most densely populated
regions of the ancient world.
Secondly, there are more linguistic changes in Vedic
Sanskrit than there are in classical Sanskrit since the time of Panini
(aprox.500 BC). So although they have assigned an arbitrary figure of 200
year periods to each of the four Vedas, each of these periods could
have existed for any number of centuries and the 200 year figure is
totally subjective and probably too short a figure. Another important
point is that none of the Vedic literatures refer to any Invasion from
outside or an original homeland from which the Aryans came from. They only
focus upon the region of the Seven Rivers (sapta-sindhu). The
Puranas refer to migrations of people out of India, which
explains the discoveries of treaties between kings with Aryan names in the
Middle East, and references to Vedic gods in West Asian texts in the
second millenium BC. However, the indologists try to explain these as
traces of the migratory path of the Aryans into India.
Indologists have
concluded that the original inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilization
were of Dravidian descent. This poses another interesting question. If the
Aryans had invaded and forced the Dravidians down to the South, why is
there no Aryan/Dravidian divide in the respective religious literatures
and historical traditions? Prior to the British, the North and South lived
in peace and there was a continuous cultural exchange between the two.
Sanskrit was the common language between the two regions for centuries.
Great acaryas such as Sankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha, and
Nimbarka were all from South, yet they are all respected in North India.
Prior to them, there were great sages from the South such as Bodhayana and
Apastamba. Agastya Rsi is placed in high regard in South India as it is
said that he brought the Tamil language from Mount Kailasa to the South.
7 Yet he is from the North! Are we to understand that the South was
uninhabited before the Aryan Invasion? If not, who were the original
inhabitants of South India, who accepted these newcomers from the North
without any struggle or hostility?Saivism
The advocates of the Invasion theory
argue that the inhabitants of Indus valley were Saivites (Siva
worshippers) and since Saivism is more prevalent among the South Indians,
the inhabitants of the Indus valley region must have been Dravidians. Siva
worship, however, is not alien to Vedic culture, and is certainly not
confined to South India. The words Siva and Sambhu are not
Dravidian in origin as some indologists would have us believe (derived
from the Tamil words ‘civa’ - to redden, to become angry, and
‘cembu’ - copper, the red metal). Both words have Sanskrit roots –
‘si’ meaning auspicious, gracious, benevolent, helpful, kind, and
‘sam’ meaning being or existing for happiness or welfare, granting
or causing happiness, benevolent, helpful, kind. These words are used in
this sense only, right from their very first occurrence. 8
Moreover, some of the most important holy places for Saivites are located
in North India: the traditional holy residence of Lord Siva is Mount
Kailasa situated in the far north. Varanasi is the most revered and
auspicious seat of Saivism. There are verses in the Rg Veda
mentioning Siva and Rudra and consider him to be an important deity. Indra
himself is called Siva several times in Rg Veda (2:20:3, 6:45:17,
8:93:3). So Siva is not a Dravidian divinity only, and by no means is
he a non-Vedic divinity. Indologists have also presented terra-cotta lumps
found in the fire-alters in Harappa and taken them to be
Siva-lingas, implying that Saivism was prevalent among the Indus
valley people. But these terra-cotta lumps have been proved to be the
measures for weighing commodities by shopkeepers and merchants. Their
weights have been found in perfect integral ratios, in the manner like 1
gm, 2 gms, 5 gms, 10 gms etc. They were not used as the Siva-lingas
for worship, but as the weight measurements.
Whereas the famous River Ganga is mentioned only once in the Rg
Veda, the River Sarasvati is mentioned at least sixty times. Sarasvati
is now a dry river, but it once flowed all the way from the Himalayas to
the ocean across the desert of Rajasthan. Research by Dr. Wakankar has
verified that the River Sarasvati changed course at least four times
before going completely dry around 1900BC. 9 The latest
satellite data combined with field archaeological studies have shown that
the Rg Vedic Sarasvati had stopped being a perennial river long before
3000 BC. As Paul-Henri Francfort of CNRS, Paris recently
observed –"...We now know, thanks to the field work of the Indo-French
expedition that when the proto-historic people settled in this area, no
large river had flowed there for a long time." The proto-historic
people he refers to are the early Harappans of 3000 BC. But satellite
photos show that a great prehistoric river that was over 7 kilometers wide
did indeed flow through the area at one time. This was the Sarasvati
described in the Rg Veda. Numerous archaeological sites have also
been located along the course of this great prehistoric river thereby
confirming Vedic accounts. The great Sarasvati that flowed "from the
mountain to the sea" is now seen to belong to a date long anterior to 3000
BC. This means that the Rg Veda describes the geography of North
India long before 3000 BC. All this shows that the Rg Veda must
have been in existence no later than 3500 BC. 10 With so many
eulogies composed to the River Sarasvati, we can gather that it must have
been well known to the Aryans, who therefore could not have been foreign
invaders. This also indicates that the Vedas are much older than
Mahabharata, which mentions the Sarasvati as a dying
river.
Discoveries of New Sites
Since the initial
discoveries of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa on the Ravi and Sindhu rivers in
1922, over 2500 other settlements have been found stretching from
Baluchistan to the Ganga and beyond and down to the Tapti Valley. This
covers almost a million and a half square kilometers. More than 75% of
these sites are concentrated not along the Sindhu, as was believed 70
years ago, but on the banks of the dried up river Sarasvati. The drying up
of this great river was a catastrophe, which led to a massive exodus of
people in around 2000-1900BC. Some of these people moved southeast, some
northwest, and some to Middle-eastern countries such as Iran and
Mesopotamia. Dynasties and rulers with Indian names appear and disappear
all over west Asia confirming the migration of people from East to West.
With so much evidence against the Aryan Invasion theory, one wonders as to
why this ugly vestige of British imperialism is still taught in Indian
schools today! Such serious misconceptions can only be reconciled by
accepting that the Aryans were the original inhabitants of the Indus
Valley region, and not a horde of marauding foreign nomads. Such an
Invasion never occurred.
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Max Mueller