Aryan Invasion Theory - Publication - Vivekananda Kendra

VIVEKANANDA KENDRA PATRIKA
In th the late 18 century, it was
discovered that most languages of
Europe, India, Iran and Caucasus
had striking similarities. Hence, several
scholars belonging to academic and nonacademic
disciplines actively sought a
genetic link between them. In the
following century, philologists
constructed ‘language trees’ to show the
supposed genetic relationships-kinship
between various members of this newly
discovered ‘Indo-European’ (or
variously called ‘Aryan’ and ‘Indo-
German’) family of languages. India and
Western Europe formed the eastern and
western extremities of the continuum/
spectrum of this proposed language
family, which explains the name ‘Indo-
European’ (henceforth ‘IE’).
The equation ‘language = races/people’
was a standard underlying assumption
in those days. Therefore, it was
concluded that the speakers of these
languages, spread over a vast
geographical area, might have
descended in whole or in part from an
original set or race of people who spoke
the ‘Proto-Indo-European’ (henceforth
PIE) language, before dispersal from
their ‘homeland’. This dispersal
supposedly led to the fragmentation and
diversification of the original tongue PIE
into various IE languages. There was
(and is) no unanimity on the geographical
location of the original homeland of these
90
ARYAN INVASION THEORY
What is the Aryan Migration Theory?
Part I : Genesis of AMT
‘proto’ Indo-Europeans. But, most of the
suggestions by Europeans placed this
homeland in various parts of Europe, and
a few in western Central Asia, which was
close to Europe. This was partly due to
certain philological and logical reasons,
and partly because of allegiance to
ideologies and notions like White-
Caucasian superiority, European
imperialism and colonialism, the notion
of ‘White Man’s Burden’, Judeo-
Christian biases, European
ethnocentrism, and German Nationalism
on the part of these scholars
[Chakrabarti 1999:10-11; Kennedy
2000:80-84; Halbfass 1988:138-139;
Poliakov 1974; Rajaram:1995] – a
phenomenon whose details are beyond
the scope of the present essay.
A branch of the IE peoples, speaking the
‘Indo-Aryan (IA) Languages’ (from
which medieval and modern Indian
languages are derived) are said to have
transferred their languages to the
aboriginal, non-IA speakers of India. So
far, the following scenarios have been
used till date to explain the supposed
arrival of IA speakers and/or languages
into India around the middle of the 2nd
millennium BC[1] -
1. The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT)
2. The Aryan Migration Theory (AMT)