Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism

Title: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism

Author: Shrikant G. Talageri

Publisher: Voice of India, 1993 (First)

ISBN: 8185990026

Pages: 408

 

According to Semitic tradition, it was in Babylon that God cursed humanity to split into mutually incomprehensible language groups so that no cooperation would be possible among them. Bengali, the language spoken on the east coast of India would sound like gibberish to a Lithuanian speaker in northwest Europe. However, as the Europeans began their explorations around the world in the Renaissance period, they began to notice similarities in words or their roots cutting across continents and mountain ranges. After the colonization of India, British scholars learned Indian languages and an unmistakable relationship between Sanskrit and European languages were established. Though confused at first, they postulated that an ancient language, called proto-Indo European, flourished somewhere in south Russia from where it spread across the entire landmass of Eurasia through migration. In the case of India, it was assumed that an invading group, calling themselves Aryans, annexed India and defeated the local inhabitants called Dravidians. This Aryan invasion theory was given recognition and support of the Indian historical establishment that was keen to put down Hindu nationalism, the consensus being that all major racial groups of modern India came to the land as invaders. However, modern historical research and its methodology firmly reject the concept of ‘Aryan’ as denoting a human race. Now it is well established that the terms Aryan and Dravidian refer to language groups. Moreover, genetic data point to the fact that the people of India essentially belongs to a single race, of course with miscegenation over a large period of time. This book analyses the features of the Aryan invasion theory and pinpoints its illogical conclusions and false claims. It no doubt tries to vindicate Indian nationalism, but the encyclopedic nature of facts and powerful insight make it a unique one. Shrikant G. Talageri is a Mumbai-based scholar who has made a special study on Aryans and Vedas. He lives and works in Mumbai and has studied his mother-tongue Konkani in much detail.

 

Talageri begins with a critical evaluation of Indian historiography after independence. During this period, Indian history was formulated, taught and propagated by leftist intellectuals who were more interested in proving Marx right than weaving a narrative that bound the newly-built nation together. Since destruction of national identities is one of the basic tenets of Marxist ideology, it has been falsified on a grand scale, with the sole aim and intention of uprooting and destroying India’s national awareness and ethos. Nehru reached a symbiosis with them and placed them at the highest levels of academia. In return, they sang his praise as long as his actions did not inconvenience them. Nehruvian vision of Indian history was nothing more than a mix of various imperialist versions that play their politics with impunity and self-righteous aggressiveness. These historians accepted the consensus among European historians of the nineteenth century that India witnessed an Aryan invasion around 1500 BCE which devastated the indigenous culture and languages and replaced it with the Indo-European language of Sanskrit. At one time, the prestige of the European scholarship was so overpowering that even eminent nationalists like Tilak and Savarkar had subscribed to this theory. Their intention was to prove that just as the British and Muslim invaders had come from the outside, so also were the Hindus. By corollary, it was also claimed that Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are all equally foreign or equally native to India.

 

Leftists always negated India’s nationhood. Mirroring Churchill’s claim that India was only a geographic term like the equator, rather than a nation, they granted each language group a claim for nationhood like what we see in Europe. Eminent leftist thinkers in the British era professed that India was a collection of up to sixteen nationalities and hence they wholeheartedly supported the Pakistan demand. The author strongly refutes this argument and comes up with self-evident examples from India’s ancient past to prove that it always had a consciousness of being one nation. Even a dry compendium on grammar like Panini’s Ashtadhyayi provides a nearly complete count of all the janapadas in ancient India. Panini was a native of the region around Peshawar in today’s Pakistan. The Vanaparva in Mahabharata gives details of the pilgrimages undertaken by the Pandavas to numerous places all over India.

 

Talageri has studied in detail all the hypotheses and conclusions of his opponents before demolishing them ideologically. The invasion theorists were forced to make compromising concessions to account for the widespread inconsistencies in what they predicted to what is actually practiced in society. Indra and Brahma were prominent Vedic gods, but nobody worship them now. Besides, there are no references or collective memory of any places outside India in the Vedas. Even according to invasion theorists, most of the aspects of Hinduism like the use of religious marks on the body, the idea of transmigration of souls, enumeration of the days by phases of moon (tithi), zoomorphic aspects of worshipping deities, most gods and goddesses except Brahma and the concept of holy places and rivers are all pre-Aryan. The Aryan invaders are credited only with the authorship of the Vedas and development of Sanskrit. But this looks more like assimilation rather than conquest. Close relationship of the language spoken in North India and Europe can be explained by other means as well. The author then presents the role of Hindu nationalists in safeguarding the national well-being. Hindu nationalism is not concerned with the ancestry of communities. It believes only in identifying the de-Indianizing elements and doing whatever has to be done in this matter.

 

This book firmly points out that the term ‘Aryan’ denote a language group and definitely not a human race. Even Max Muller had discounted the idea of there being an actual race of ‘Aryans’. After the racist orgy indulged in by the Nazis, the concept has become even more taboo. The Brahui language spoken in Baluchistan belongs to the Dravidian group, but in racial features, the speakers are identical to their neighbours and anthropologically Iranians. Similarly, Sinhalese language belongs to the Aryan group, but its speakers do not show any racial affinity to features traditionally assigned to Aryans. Philologists have reconstructed a proto-Indo European language based on cognate words found in all of them. On this basis, they found that modern Lithuanian preserves this archaic general language structure. Hence, the original homeland of Aryans cannot be far from Lithuania, so the logic went. South Russia was eventually postulated as a likely place. The entire Aryan invasion theory pivots on this claim. Talageri analyses a lot of linguistic principles and concludes that Sanskrit is the closest to the proto language in respect of both vocabulary and general linguistic form. This book claims that Sanskrit was born in India and it is the original homeland of the Indo-European language group. The author’s arguments are so brilliantly technical that readers are not competent enough to judge their acceptance among other learned peers of Talageri.

 

There are no references to any places outside India in the Rig Veda and it is certain that it was composed in the region of Saptasindhu or Punjab. However, there are mentions of the eastern and western seas in it. The sun is said to rise from and set in the sea. This is not valid in Punjab and shows a familiarity to the southern peninsula. There are indications that they were familiar with places as far east as Bihar and as far south as Maharashtra. Surprisingly, this is the geographical extent of the Indo-Aryan languages even to this day. Contrary to what is made to believe today, the enemies of Aryans, called Dasa/Dasyu are not non-Aryans of India, but instead, a section of Aryans in ancient Iran. According to Iranian texts, Asuras are their gods and Devas demons. The supreme god is Ahura Mazda. Minding the interchange of the sound ‘h’ with ‘s’ in the Persian language, this is similar to Asura Mazda. Their supreme demon is Angra Mainyu, whch is derived from Angiras, the major rishi family in Rig Veda. Mainyu in Rig Veda is a particularly destructive form of Indra which is represented as anger or passion personified. This and a set of detailed arguments prove that the conflicts mentioned in Rig Veda were between the Vedic people and Iranians.

 

This is a very well-researched book with startling conclusions. It posits the origin of the entire Indo-European languages in India by proposing three centres of influence in pre-historic India. What became the European group was prominent in the northwest of India. The Vedic language and Iranian group formed the centre in Punjab and all present Indo-Aryan languages spoken in India formed the inner group. This also explains why they are more familiar with non-Aryan languages whose speakers somewhat constituted the areas where they are spoken now. The book begins with a goal-setting foreword by Sita Ram Goel, the stalwart of Hindu nationalism. The book makes some deep phonetic and philological analyses which most readers would find cumbersome. The text is often firmly fixed on the target and readability suffers in some chapters. Absence of an index is a serious concern. Another drawback is that the author accepts the genealogical tables of kings given in the Puranas at face value. He questions their regnal years and arrives at a reasonable value, but the number of kings is simply acknowledged as true.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 4 Star