Aryan Invasion Theory - Publication - Vivekananda Kendra

VIVEKANANDA KENDRA PATRIKA ARYAN INVASION THEORY VOL-II 

VIVEKANANDA KENDRA PATRIKA 

A DISTINCTIVE CULTURAL 

MAGAZINE OF INDIA 

(A Half-Yearly Publication) 

AUGUST 2010 - JANUARY 2011 

Vol.40 No.2, 80 th Issue 

Founder-Editor : MANANEEYA EKNATHJI RANADE 

Editor : P.PARAMESWARAN 

ARYAN INVASION THEORY 

-FABRICATIONS AND FALLOUTS - VOLUME TWO 

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Contents 

Editorial 5 

Part I 

Swami Vivekananda : On Aryan Invasion 8 

‘A Philological Myth’ Sri Aurobindo on Aryan Invasion Theory 10 

‘A Perversion of Scientific Investigation’ 11 

Part II 

Satish S Mishra & 

Pre-Rig Vedic Mitanni? Ravilochanan Iyengar 

19 

On Perceiving Aryan Migrations in 

Vedic Ritual Texts Vishal Agarwal 27 

Indo-aryan And Slavic Linguistic And Genetic 

Affinities Predate The Origin Of Cereal Farming Joseph Skulj and others 44 

Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born 

Some Modern Genetic Studies on the Aryan 

Nicholas Wade 86 

Invasion Issues (2009-2011) Swarkar Sharma and others 89 

European Journal of Human Genetics 

(2010) 18, 479–484 

The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 89, 

Peter A Underhill and others 91 

Issue 6, 731-744, 9 December 2011 Mait Metspalu 93 

Part III 


VOLUME TWO 

The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate Koenraad Elst 96 

Racism and Indology Prof. Subash Kak 114 

Who Owns India’s Past? Prof: Dilip K. Chakrabarti 121 

Harappans and Aryans:Old and New Perspectives 

of Ancient Indian History Padma Manian De Anza College 124 

The Missionary’s Swastika: Racism as an 

Evangelical Weapon S. Aravindan Neelakandan 141 

2


Editorial 

Vivekananda Kendra Patrika Vol.40 No.2, 80 th Issue 


-FABRICATIONS AND FALLOUTS- VOLUME TWO 

Moving Beyond Invasion and Race… 

In this second volume on ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ we explore the theme under three 

major headings. In the first we see how three great seers of India rejected the Aryan 

race/invasion theory. They are Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Baba Saheb 

Ambedkar. Even as the whole academicia was accepting the race theories propounded 

by the Western scholars, these three original thinkers rejected the race theory of 

studying the Indian population. They did that not out of blind faith but through original 

research and studies of Indic literature from Indic point of view. The first section thus 

presents the view of the founding figures of Indian nation in the modern age. 

Naturally a question may arise. How far can the observations of these great men be 

considered as empirically correct and scientifically valid? 

Our next section answers this question. Of course ancient past is a deep mystery. Many 

times we make conjectures. But today science is offering us wonderful tool to test any 

conjectures we may make. With the help of archaeology and linguistics, scholars probe 

into the past. And in the post-colonial milieu scholars with their minds unfettered, 

discover that the colonial myths get shattered with every archaeological dig and every 

linguistic reconstruction. Perhaps the myth of Sanskrit and Tamil emerging from the 

two sides of Siva’s drum may hold a more fundamental truth than all the colonial scholarly 

3


constructions put together. Aryan invasion model itself has mutated into something 

called ‘Aryan migration model’. Its nevertheless only old wine in old bottle with a new 

label. A scholarly look into the claims of this model also makes the model crumble into 

dust. Then there is molecular genetics which provides a very interesting tool to look 

into the deep ancestry of humanity. And painstaking reconstruction of the past by 

archaeologists, geneticists and linguists again show us that nothing called Aryan invasion 

or migration ever happened in India’s past. In fact there was no such thing as ‘Aryan 

race’ at all. 

If so wrong, and if so completely proved wrong, then why does the Aryan Invasion 

Theory still persist in the common psyche? This is the most important question we 

need to ask. Is there a vested interest, which has political and religious dimensions, in 

promoting this unscientific colonial race theory? Are there sinister forces at work 

which want to create racial faultlines in India’s common psyche so that they can be later 

used to create full blown civil wars? What shall be the logical extension of Aryan race 

theory if applied to present Indian society? Who will benefit if India’s caste conflicts 

are projected as racial wars rooted in ancient history? Such a horrific scenario that 

unfolds, reminds us why this Aryan race theory needs to be combatted at all levels. 

We need to show every Indian that India is one. Whatever language, creed or social 

group to which he or she may belong, India is spiritually one. The unity of a nation is 

not racial or linguistic or political. It is deeply spiritual and cultural. India in that 

sense is one nation. In India all spiritual traditions in the world have found a nurturing 

space. Even the long destroyed pagan cultures of Europe and the spiritual traditions 

of South America and Africa, can find in the cultural and spiritual elements of India, a 

validation. To deconstruct such a nation with the help of a colonial pseudo-scientific 

myth like ‘Aryan race theory’ is not just an exercise in futility but an injustice to 

human civilization itself. So through this Kendra Patrika we again dedicate ourself to 

the grand vision of Indian seers who, as Kabir said, embrace the whole universe as 

their Benaras and declare that from pole to pole humanity is of one blood and that all 

human made divisions are artificial. 

S.Aravindan Neelakandan 

VKP Editorial Team 

4


While the fabricators of Aryan Invasion Theory, the Western Indologists, claimed 

that the idea of Aryan race as well as the theory of their invasion of India from 

outside India, were supported by literary evidence from Indian scriptures. Many 

Indian scholars, who venerated the Western scholarship, also meekly accepted 

the Aryan invasion theory as historical fact. 

But not all Indian agreed. 

Swami Vivekananda, the patriotic monk of the spiritual as well as social 

renaissance of India, categorically denied the invasion theory and the idea that 

Aryans came from outside India. Here we present a collection of Swamiji’s views 

on Aryan invasion and race theories culled out from many of his lectures. 

We also present the views of Sri Aurobindo, a great modern Rishi, whose 

interpretations of the Vedic literature are so refreshingly in tune with the ancient 

vision of the Vedic Seers. 

Next are the research findings of an unique historian and a great social reformer, 

Dr.Ambedkar. The architect of the modern Indian constitution, the modern 

Smrithi giver has thoroughly analysed the Aryan theories and had demolished 

them in a systematic manner. 

His conclusions resonate with what Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo have 

said about the Aryan-Dravidian divide and race theories about India’s ancient 

past. Together these three articles form a preamble for this Kendra Patrika. 

Aryan Invasion - Monstrous Lies! 

Part-I 

5


Swami Vivekananda : On Aryan Invasion 

What your European Pundits say 

about the Aryan’s swooping 

down from some foreign land, 

snatching away the lands of the 

aborigines and settling in India by 

exterminating them, is all pure nonsense 

foolish talk! Strange, that our 

Indian scholars too, say amen to them, 

all these monstrous lies are being taught 

to our boys! This is very bad indeed. 1 

European worldview Imposed on Vedic 

People! 

…Wherever the Europeans find an 

opportunity they exterminate the 

aborigines and settle down in ease 

and comfort on their lands and 

therefore think that the Aryans have 

done the same. But where is proof? 

Guesswork! 

In what Veda, what Sukta, do you find 

that the Aryans came to India from a 

foreign country? Where do you get the 

idea that they slaughtered wild 

aborigines? What do you gain by 

talking such nonsense? 

6 

Well, what is the Ramayana? The 

conquest of the savage aborigines of 

Southern Inda by Aryans? Indeed 

Ramachandra is a civilized Aryan 

being and with whom is he fighting? 

With the king Ravana of Lanka. Just 

read the Ramayana, and you will find 

that Ravana was rather more and not 

less civilized than Ramachandra. The 

civilization of Lanka was rather 

higher and surely not lower than that 

of Ayodhya . And then, when were 

these vanaras (monkeys) and other 

Southern Indians conquered? They 

were all on the other hand 

Ramachandra’s friends and allies. Say 

what kingdoms of Vali and Guhaka 

were annexed by Ramachandra? 

And may I ask you, Europeans, what 

country you have ever raised t better 

conditions? Where ever you have 

found weaker races, you have 

examined them by the roots, as it were. 

You have settled on their lands, and 

they are gone for ever. What is the 

history of your America, your 

Australia and New Zealand, your


Pacific Islands and South Africa? 

Where are those aboriginal race 

today? They are all exterminated, you 

have killed them outright, as if they 

were wild beasts. It is only where you 

have not the power to do so, and there 

only that other nations are still alive. 

But India has never done that. The 

Aryans were kind and generous, and 

in their hearts which were large and 

unbounded as the ocean and in their 

brains gifted with superhuman genius, 

all these ephemeral and apparently 

pleasant but virtually beastly 

processes, never found a place. 

The object of the peoples of Europe is 

the extermination of all in order to 

live themselves. Te aim of the Aryans 

is to raise all up to their own level, 

nay, even to a higher level than 

themselves. The means of the 

European civilization is the sword,of 

the Aryans ‘ the division into different 

varnas. This system of division into 

different varnas is the stepping stone 

to civilization, making one rise higher 

and higher in proportion to one’s 

learning and culture. In Europe it is 

everywhere victory to the strong, and 

death to the weak. In the land of 

7 

Bharata every social rule is for the 

protection of the weak. 2 

From where did the Aryans come? 

According to some, they came from 

central Tibet, others will have it, they 

came from central Asia. There are 

patriotic English men who think that 

the Aryans were all red haired. If the 

writer happens to be a black haired 

man the Aryans were all black haired. 

Of late, there was an attempt to prove 

that the Aryans lived on the Swiss 

lakes. Some say now that they live at 

the north pole. Lord bless the Aryans 

and their habitations. As for the truth 

of these theories, there is not one word 

in scriptures, not one, to prove that the 

Aryans ever came from anywhere 

outside of India and in ancient India 

was included Afganistan. There It 

ends. And the theory that the Shudra 

caste were all non-Aryans and they 

were a multitude, is equally illogical 

and equally irrational. 3 

1.The Complete Works of Swami 

Vivekananda, Jan 1989, Vol.V, p.534. 

2. CWSV, Vol V, The East and West. 

pp534,537 

.3. CWSV. Vol III, The Future of India. 

pp292-3.


‘A Philological Myth’ 

Sri Aurobindo on Aryan Invasion Theory 

Europe has formed certain views 

about the Veda and the Vedanta, and 

succeeded in imposing them on the 

Indian intellect… When a hundred worldfamous 

scholars cry out, “This is so”, it is 

hard indeed for the average mind, and even 

minds above the average but inexpert in 

these special subjects not to acquiesce… 

Nevertheless a time must come when the 

Indian mind will shake off the darkness that 

has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold 

opinions at second and third hand and 

reassert its right to judge and enquire in a 

perfect freedom into the meaning of its 

own Scriptures. 

When that day comes we shall, I think, 

discover that the imposing fabric of Vedic 

theory is based upon nothing more sound 

or true than a foundation of loosely massed 

conjectures. We shall question many 

established philological myths, - the 

legend, for the instance, of an Aryan 

invasion of India from the north, the 

artificial and inimical distinction of Aryan 

and Dravidian which an erroneous 

8 

philology* has driven like a wedge into the 

unity of the homogenous Indo-Afghan race; 

the strange dogma of a “henotheistic”** 

Vedic naturalism; the ingenious and 

brilliant extravagances of the modern sun 

and star myth weavers… 

Religious movements and revolutions have 

come and gone or left their mark but after 

all and through all the Veda remains to us 

our Rock of the Ages, our eternal 

foundation…. The Upanishads, mighty as 

they are, only aspire to bring out, arrange 

philosophically in the language of later 

thinking and crown with supreme name of 

Brahman the eternal knowledge enshrined 

in the Vedas. Yet for some two thousand 

years at least no Indian has really 

understood the Vedas. 

I find in the Aryan and Dravidian tongues, 

the Aryan and Dravidian races not separate 

and unconnected families but two branches 

of a single stock. The legend of the Aryan 

invasion and settlement in the Punjab in 

Vedic times is, to me, a philological myth.


‘A Perversion of Scientific Investigation’ 

- Baba Saheb Ambedkar (PhD History) on Aryan 

Race Theory 

That the theory of the Aryan race 

set up by Western writers falls to 

the ground at every point goes 

without saying. This is somewhat 

surprising since Western scholarship is 

usually associated with thorough research 

and careful analysis. Why has the theory 

failed? … Anyone who cares to scrutinise 

the theory will find that it suffers from a 

double infection. In the first place, the 

theory is based on nothing but pleasing 

assumptions and inferences based on such 

assumptions. In the second place, the 

theory is a perversion of scientific 

investigation. It is not allowed to evolve 

out of facts. On the contrary the theory is 

preconceived and facts are selected to 

prove it. 

The theory of the Aryan race is just an 

assumption and no more. It is based on a 

philological proposition put forth by Dr. 

Bopp in his epoch-making book called 

Comparative Grammar, which appeared in 

1835. In this book, Dr. Bopp demonstrated 

that a greater number of languages of 

Europe and some languages of Asia must 

9 

be referred to a common ancestral speech. 

The European languages and Asiatic 

languages to which Bopp’s proposition 

applied are called Indo-Germanic. 

Collectively, they have come to be called 

the Aryan languages largely because Vedic 

language refers to the Aryas and is also of 

the same family as the Indo-Germanic. This 

assumption is the major premise on which 

the theory of the Aryan race is based. 

From this assumption are drawn two 

inferences: (1) unity of race, and (2) that 

race being the Aryan race. The argument is 

that if the languages have descended from 

a common ancestral speech then there must 

have existed a race whose mother tongue 

it was and since the mother tongue was 

known as the Aryan tongue the race who 

spoke it was the Aryan race. The existence 

of a separate and a distinct Aryan race is 

thus an inference only. From this inference, 

is drawn another inference which is that of 

a common original habitat. It is argued that 

there could be no community of language 

unless people had a common habitat 

permitting close communion. Common


original habitat is thus an inference from 

an inference. 

The theory of invasion is an invention. This 

invention is necessary because of a 

gratuitous assumption, which underlies the 

Western theory. The assumption is that the 

Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the 

modern representatives of the original 

Aryan race. Its first home is assumed to 

have been somewhere in Europe. These 

assumptions raise a question: How could 

the Aryan speech have come to India? This 

question can be answered only by the 

supposition that the Aryans must have 

come into India from outside. Hence the 

necessity for inventing the theory of 

invasion. 

The third assumption is that the Aryans were 

a superior race. This theory has its origin 

in the belief that the Aryans are a European 

race and as a European race it is presumed 

to be superior to the Asiatic races. Having 

assumed its superiority, the next logical 

step one is driven to is to establish the fact 

of superiority. Knowing that nothing can 

prove the superiority of the Aryan race 

better than the invasion and conquest of 

native races, the Western writers have 

proceeded to invent the story of the 

invasion of India by the Aryans and the 

10 

conquest of native races, and the conquest 

by them of the Dasas and Dasyus. 

The fourth assumption is that the European 

races were white and had a colour prejudice 

against the dark races. The Aryans being a 

European race, it is assumed that it must 

have had colour prejudice. The theory 

proceeds to find evidence for colour 

prejudice in the Aryans who came into 

India. This it finds in the Chaturvarnya - an 

institution by the established Indo-Aryans 

after they came to India and which 

according to these scholars is based upon 

Varna which is taken by them to mean 

colour. 

Not one of these assumptions is borne out 

by facts. Take the premise about the Aryan 

race. The theory does not take account of 

the possibility that the Aryan race in the 

physiological sense is one thing and an 

Aryan race in philological sense quite 

different, and that it is perfectly possible 

that, the Aryan race, if there is one, in the 

physiological sense may have its habitat in 

one place and that the Aryan race, in the 

philological sense, in quite a different 

place. The theory of the Aryan race is based 

on the premise of a common language and 

it is supposed to be common because it 

has a structural affinity. The assertion that


the Aryans came from outside and invaded 

India is not proved and the premise that the 

Dasas and Dasyus are aboriginal tribes of 

India is demonstrably false. 

Again, to say that the institution of 

Chaturvarnya is a reflection of the innate 

colour prejudice of the Aryans is really to 

assert too much. If colour is the origin of 

class distinction, there must be four 

different colours to account for the 

different classes, which comprise Chaturvarnya. 

Nobody has said what those four 

colours are and who were the four coloured 

races who were welded together in 

Chaturvarnya. As it is, the theory starts with 

only two opposing people, Aryas and Dasas 

- one assumed to be white and the other 

assumed to be dark… 

Prof. Micheal Foster has somewhere said 

that ‘hypothesis is the salt of science.’ 

Without hypothesis there is no possibility 

of fruitful investigation. But it is equally 

true that where the desire to prove a 

particular hypothesis is dominant, 

hypothesis becomes the poison of science. 

The Aryan race theory of Western scholars 

is as good an illustration of how hypothesis 

can be the poison of science as one can 

think of. 

11 

The Aryan race theory is so absurd that it 

ought to have been dead long ago. But far 

from being dead, the theory has a 

considerable hold upon the people. There 

are two explanations which account for this 

phenomenon. The first explanation is to be 

found in the support which the theory 

receives from Brahmin scholars. This is a 

very strange phenomenon. As Hindus, they 

should ordinarily show a dislike for the 

Aryan theory with its express avowal of the 

superiority of the European races over the 

Asiatic races. But the Brahmin scholar has 

not only no such aversion but he most 

willingly hails it. The reasons are obvious. 

The Brahmin believes in the two-nation 

theory. He claims to be the representative 

of the Aryan race and he regards the rest 

of the Hindus as descendants of the non- 

Aryans. The theory helps him to establish 

his kinship with the European races and 

share their arrogance and their superiority. 

He likes particularly that part of the theory 

which makes the Aryan an invader and a 

conqueror of the non-Aryan native races. 

For it helps him to maintain and justify his 

overlordship over the non-Brahmins. 

The second explanation why the Aryan race 

theory is not dead is because of the general 

insistence by European scholars that the 

word Varna means colour and the


acceptance of that view by a majority of 

the Brahmin scholars. Indeed, this is the 

mainstay of the Aryan theory. There is no 

doubt that as long as this interpretation of 

the Varna continues to be accepted the 

Aryan theory will continue to live. This part 

of the Aryan theory is therefore very 

important and calls for fuller examination. 

It needs to be examined from three 

different points of view: (1) Were the 

European races fair or dark? (2) Were the 

Indo-Aryans fair? (3) What is the original 

meaning of the word Varna? 

On the question of the colour of the 

earliest Europeans, Prof. Ripley is quite 

definite that they were of dark complexion. 

Prof. Ripley goes on to say: “We are 

strengthened in this assumption that the 

earliest Europeans were not only longheaded 

but also dark complexioned, by 

various points in our inquiry thus far. We 

have proved the prehistoric antiquity of the 

living Cro-Magnon type in Southern 

France; and we saw that among these 

peasants, the prevalence of black hair and 

eyes is very striking. And comparing types 

in the British Isles we saw that everything 

tended to show that the brunet populations 

of Wales, Ireland and Scotland constituted 

the most primitive stratum of population 

in Britain… it would seem as if this earliest 

12 

race in Europe must have been very dark.... 

It was Mediterranean in its pigmental 

affinities, and not Scandinavian.’ 

Turning to the Vedas for any indication 

whether the Aryans had any colour 

prejudice, reference may be made to the 

following passages in the Rig Veda: 

In Rig Veda, i. 117.8, there is a reference 

to Ashvins having brought about the 

marriage between Shyavya and Rushati. 

Shyavya is black and Rushati is fair. 

In Rig Veda, i. 117.5, there is a prayer 

addressed to Ashvins for having saved 

Vandana who is spoken as of golden colour. 

In Rig Veda, ii. 3.9, there is a prayer by an 

Aryan invoking the Devas to bless him with 

a son with certain virtues but of (pishanga) 

tawny (reddish brown) complexion. 

These instances show that the Vedic Aryans 

had no colour prejudice. How could they 

have? The Vedic Aryans were not of one 

colour. Their complexion varied; some 

were of copper complexion, some white, 

and some black. Rama the son of 

Dasharatha has been described as Shyama, 

i.e., dark in complexion, so is Krishna the 

descendant of the Yadus, another Aryan


clan. The Rishi Dirghatamas, who is the 

author of many mantras of the Rig Veda, 

must have been of dark colour if his name 

was given to him after his complexion. 

Kanva is an Aryan rishi of great repute. But 

according to the description given in the 

Rig Veda - x. 31.11 - he was of dark colour. 

To take up the third and the last point, 

namely, the meaning of the word Varna. Let 

us first see in what sense it is used in the 

Rig Veda. The word Varna is used in the 

Rig Veda in 22 places. Of these, in about 

17 places the word is used in reference to 

deities such as Ushas, Agni, Soma, etc., and 

means lustre, features or colour. Being 

used in connection with deities, it would 

be unsafe to use them for ascertaining what 

meaning the word Varna had in the Rig Veda 

when applied to human beings. There are 

four and at the most five places in the Rig 

Veda where the word is used in reference 

to human beings. They are: i. 104.2; i. 

179.6; ii. 12.4; iii. 34.5; ix. 71.2. 

Do these references prove that the word 

Varna is used in the Rig Veda in the sense 

of colour and complexion? ... The question 

is: What does the word Varna mean when 

applied to Dasa? Does it refer to the colour 

and complexion of the Dasa, or does it 

13 

indicate that Dasas formed a separate class? 

... 

The evidence of the Rig Veda is quite 

inconclusive. In this connection, it will be 

of great help to know if the word occurs in 

the literature of the Indo-Iranians and if so, 

in what sense. 

Fortunately, the word Varna does occur in 

the Zend Avesta. It takes the form of Varana 

or Varena. It is used specifically in the 

sense of “Faith, Religious doctrine, Choice 

of creed or belief.” It is derived from the 

root Var which means to put faith in, to 

believe in. One comes across the word 

Varana or Varena in the Gathas about six 

times used in the sense of faith, doctrine, 

creed or belief… This evidence from the 

Zend Avesta as to the meaning of the word 

Varna leaves no doubt that it originally 

meant a class holding to a particular faith 

and it had nothing to do with colour or 

complexion. 

The conclusions that follow from the 

examination of the Western theory may 

now be summarised. They are: 

(1) The Vedas do not know any such race 

as the Aryan race.


(2) There is no evidence in the Vedas of 

any invasion of India by the Aryan race and 

its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus, 

supposed to be natives of India. 

(3) There is no evidence to show that the 

distinction between Aryans, Dasas and 

Dasyus was a racial distinction. 

(4) The Vedas do not support the contention 

that the Aryans were different in colour 

from the Dasas and Dasyus. 

14


Part-II 

This part contains some technical papers on Aryan Race/Invasion/Migration 

theories. 

Ravilochanan and Satish Mishra two linguists study the famous Mittani text and 

make an indepth comparison of the language of the text with Rig Vedic language. 

This analysis challenges some of the long cherished beliefs in certain academic 

circles that the Mitanni text predates the Rig Vedic and hence is a proof of Indo- 

Aryan migration from the west to east. 

The article ‘On Perceiving Aryan Migrations in Vedic Ritual Texts’ is written by 

Vishal Agarwal. Vishal Agarwal is an engineer who devoted himself to studying 

the Aryan invasion/migration debate. His excellent research articles have brought 

out the weaknesses and inaccuracies embedded in the attempts of certain class of 

academics in sustaining the age old colonial myths for their own vested interests. 

In this research paper Agarwal shows how a text was mistranslated and texttortured 

by a famous Harvard Professor so that the professor could support his 

Aryan migration theory. This article by Vishal Agarwal appeared in Puratattva 

(Bulletin of the Indian Archaeolgical Society), New Delhi, No. 36, 2005-06. 

Joseph Skulj, Jagdish C. Sharda etal present a massive evidence –both linguistic 

and genetic- that actually reverses the direction of human migration in deep 

time. Perhaps language and farming along with humns migrated from east to the 

west – rather than in the reverse direction. 

Lastly we have presented three abstracts of genetic studies from 2009-2011 which 

all consistently question or reject the Aryan invasion or migration into India. 

15


In all the technical papers presented here show how the common idea of Aryan 

Race/Invasion/Migration theories are unscientific and based on shaky grounds. 

While one can perfectly understand why colonial scholarship of a bygone era 

fabricated and reinforced this pseudo-scientific theory what baffles one is the 

way a section of vested interests in the academia and also politics, is trying to 

still sustain this race theory. 

Lastly we have presented three abstracts of genetic studies from 2009-2011 which 

all consistently question or reject the Aryan invasion or migration into India. 

In all the technical papers presented here show how the common idea of Aryan 

Race/Invasion/Migration theories are unscientific and based on shaky grounds. 

While one can perfectly understand why colonial scholarship of a bygone era 

fabricated and reinforced this pseudo-scientific theory what baffles one is the 

way a section of vested interests in the academia and also politics, is trying to 

still sustain this race theory. 

16


Abstract 

The paper deals with the position 

of Mitanni Indo-Aryan vis-à-vis 

Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan. The claim 

about Mitanni Indo-Aryan (henceforth, IA) 

being pre-RigVeda is considered and 

proved to be wrong. It is shown that 

Mitanni IA does not affect the position of 

those scholars who advocate a much-higher 

antiquity for RigVeda (henceforth, RV) than 

the popular date of 1200 BCE. 

Abbreviations Used 

IA = Indo-Aryan; RV = RigVeda; Skt. = 

Sanskrit; Pa. = Pali; Pk. = Prakrit. 

Introduction 

Witzel (2005:361) has argued that 

“…remnants of IA in Mitanni, belong to an 

early pre-Rgvedic stage of IA”. He claims 

– “…..Rgvedic is younger than the Mitanni 

words preserved at c. 1450-1350 BCE” 

(Witzel 2005:364). 

Pre-Rig Vedic Mitanni? - 

An analysis of the archaisms in Mitanni IA and their repercussions on 

the date of RV 

Satish S Mishra & Ravilochanan Iyengar 

17 

Mitanni seems to retain certain archaic 

features lost in Vedic: 

a) Presence of ‘ai’ in the place of ‘e’ 

(precedes ‘ai>e’ & ‘au>o’) 

b) Presence of voiced sibilant ‘z’ 

c) Presence of jh (precedes ‘jh>h’ 

found in Vedic) 

Witzel is not the only scholar to arrive at 

this conclusion either. 

Fortson (2004:183) says about the fate of 

diphthongs in Indic – “In Sanskrit *ai and 

*au were monophthongised to e and o.....but 

they were still diphthongs in the earliest 

preserved Indic, the fourteenth-century- 

BC cuneiform documents...”. Burrow 

(1973:125) states that diphthongs were 

lost between the period of Proto-Indo- 

Aryans and Vedic. In the same page, Burrow 

calls the Mitannis as Proto-Indo-Aryans of 

Near East but also notes that their language 

had evolved beyond the Proto-Indo-Aryan 

stage (cf. šatta


These scholars are not the only ones to take 

into consideration these ‘pre-Vedic’ forms. 

Thieme had done it five decades ago. He 

says – “The pronunciation e and o can be a 

secondarily introduced change under the 

influence of the spoken language on the 

scholastic recitation” (Thieme 1960:302). 

It is well known that RV has undergone 

several changes during the course of oral 

transmission before the final redaction of 

the text. The metrical scars found in RV 

stand as testimony to this fact. Hence, 

Thieme is justified in stating that one 

cannot hold Mitanni IA to be older than 

Vedic based on such flimsy grounds. 

Thieme has made it clear that one cannot 

‘prove’ Mitanni IA to be older than RV 

based on these phonetic archaisms. In this 

paper, we will show that some of these 

‘archaisms’ were definitely present in RV 

during the composition of the hymns. But 

they were lost subsequently. 

Archaisms 

Diphthongs in RV 

In Sanskrit grammar, a+i gives e (one of 

the long vowels in Sanskrit). This by itself 

seems to confirm that ‘ai>e’ change 

occurred in Sanskrit. The question is: when 

did this occur? As RV text uses ‘e’, Witzel 

18 

seems to think that this change occurred 

prior to Rgvedic period. But Thieme has 

pointed out that such changes could be 

from post-RV period (when either these 

changes were incorporated into RV by the 

redactors or a change which crept into 

scholiastic recitation from spoken 

language of the day). 

Both ai and e are long vowels according to 

Sanskrit grammar. Therefore, any such 

change will not leave behind a metrical scar 

(as one long vowel is replaced by another). 

But we have some evidences which 

establish that RV preceded the ‘ai>e’ 

change. 

As early as 1905, Arnold (1905:5) has 

noted that “in a few words long vowels or 

diphthongs are optionally to be read as 

equivalent to two syllables: thus 

œrécmha% as œráyicmha%..”. The terms 

œrécmha% and œráyicmha% seem to be 

the result of dialectal variation. Macdonell 

(1916:16) notes that hiatus is common in 

Samhitas where the “... the original vowels 

of contractions having often to be restored 

both within a word and in Sandhi; e.g. 

jyécmha mightiest as jyá-icmha..”. 

We found more than 40 cases in RV where 

e must be read as ayi (see Appendix I) 1 . A


dialectal variation between ai and ayi is 

most natural. RV Prâtiúâkhya (14.43-44) 

also states that there is confusion between 

‘ai’ and ‘ayI’ (wrongly pronouncing one for 

other). That there are places in RV where e 

must be read as ayi is most important. It 

shows that RV preceded the ‘ai>e’ change. 

This alone can explain the cases where e 

must be scanned as disyllabic in RV. 

Thus, we have enough evidence to believe 

that the ‘ai>e’ and ‘au>o’ changes occurred 

in post RV period. Appendix I gives the 

instances where ‘e’ must be scanned as ‘ayi’ 

in RV. 

[Note: Mitanni IA has tueisaratta as a form, 

which is an ai>e(i) change! The ei points 

probably to a long vowel ei, but certainly a 

loss of the ancient ai.] 

Voiced sibilant ‘z’ 

In RV, we don’t find voiced sibilant ‘z’ in 

the currently available text. But we can see 

the remnants of a voiced sibilant in it. In 

RV, we find the word ‘dudukcan’ 

(desiderative form of the root ‘dhugh-‘) in 

three places (RV 7.18.4, 10.61.10 and 

10.74.4). In later period, we find that the 

word is given as ‘dudhukcan’. By 

Grassmann’s law, if one aspirated syllable 

is followed by another then the former 

19 

loses its aspiration. Also, in Sanskrit, any 

consonant cluster with s becomes 

devoiced and deaspirated. The desiderative 

of ‘dhugh-‘ is formed in the following way: 

1) Reduplicated first syllable is 

prefixed to ‘dhug-‘: dhu-dhugh- 

2) ‘sa’ is suffixed to the word: 

‘dhu-dhugh-sa’ 

3) ‘ghsa>kca’: s devoices and 

deaspirates gh and the ruki rule 

changes s to c. 

4) ‘dhudhu-‘ becomes ‘dudhu-’ by 

the application of Grassmann’s 

Law. 

5) The result will be ‘dudhukca-‘. 

This is the form used in 

Sanskrit. 

But RV has the form ‘dudukcan’ as noted 

above. This shows that when Grassmann’s 

Law was applied to the word, it must have 

contained voiced sibilant. The form must 

have been ‘dudugzhan’ (‘gh-sa’ becomes 

‘gzha’ under Bartholomae’s Law). It is clear 

that ‘z>s’ postdates RV. This explains why 

RV has the peculiar form ‘dudukcan’. 

Once again, we see a secondarily 

introduced change under the influence of 

spoken language on scholastic recitation.


‘jh’ in Mitanni IA 

The presence of ‘jh’ in Mitanni IA is 

questionable. It is based on a single word 

‘vasana-‘, 

derived from the root *vajh>vah = to carry, 

to transport, to convey [Mayrhofer 

1996:536 s.v. vah *wâzhanasi%a “of the 

training area”]. This seems to be odd, if one 

follows the description in the Kikkuli Text. 

The word is mentioned twice in the Kikkuli 

Text [tablet III. IV 22; IV. Recto 26) as wa- 

Sa-an-na-Sa-ia na (gen.) and wa-Sa-an-ni 

(dat. Loc.). It is measured in height and 

width (Kammenhuber 1961, 121; 139; 

Raulwing 2006, 65 ff.): “na-as na-wa-arta-an-ni 

wa-Sa-an-na-Sa-ya 1 DANNA 80 

IKU.HI.A par-ha-I a-na wa-Sa-an-ni-ma 

par-ga-tar-se-it 6 IKU pal-ha-tar-se-itma 

4 IKU.HI.A. He drives then on the ninerounder 

of the race-course; of the racecourse 

the height (=long side) (is) [90 

meters], it width (is) [60 meters].” 

Raulwing has the following comment on 

this: “The scribe of Kikkuli Text tablet III. 

IV 24 explicitly mentions objects made of 

wood [GIS*I.A] which surround the 

wasanna training area on its outside.” 

(From P. Raulwing: The Kikkuli Text, p. 14) 

This description of the enclosed training 

area doesn’t point to a root *vajh > Ved. 

20 

Vah = carry, which doesn’t make sense, but 

rather to a root ‘vaj’ giving IA vAja = 1. 

Strength, vigour, speed (of a horse), 2. A 

race, contest. The area is an enclosed place 

(normally vAsana) where races are held and 

the strength and speed of the horses is 

trained. (vAja-nna). 

There is another issue to consider: the 

change jh>h will not leave any metrical 

scars. Hence, one cannot argue that jh>h 

change pre-dates the date of composition 

of RV. We can never say for sure. It is very 

much possible that the change is post-RV 

and affected RV hymns due to the effect 

of spoken language. In light of the 

evidences shown above regarding the 

changes which affected RV hymns postcomposition, 

it is prudent to consider the 

jh>h change to be post-RV. 

Developed Mitanni IA 

Mitanni IA seems to have developed/ 

innovated new forms in several cases. They 

are certainly not pre-RV as Witzel may like 

to claim. We will be seeing a few examples 

of such innovations/developments. 

1. ~ SauSSattar Text (ST) 

– a>zero: *bara becomes bar in barsasattar. 

But there is an older IA bara-ttarna. 

2. ~ El-Amarna Letters (EA)


– ai>ei>> i/zero: lost archaic 

*twaiSaratta> older tueiSaratta >> 

developed tuiSaratta; 

Another example: 

aitagama>etagama>itakkama [O’Callaghan 

(1948:59)] 

i>zero: tuiSaratta is fully 

developed to the form tuSratta. 

– tr > tt/dd or zd >tt/dd: su-mi-t/d-t/da = 

sumitta/sumidda. Either this is 

*sumitra>sumitta, or *sumizda>sumidda 

(Dumont: equal to sumÑ 

ha). Either case, it is a developed form and 

shows an innovation. 

3. ~ Kikkuli Texts (KT): Development 

before ca. 1345 BCE gave rise to the 

following case (due to Hittitisms?): 

– w>zero: haplology, or *nawa > na-a (Kbo 

iii 2 Vs 36), variation na (Kbo iii 2 Rs 22); 

(And also *waruna>aruna in TT?) – wa>u: 

aSSwa to aSSu in aSSuSSa-nni; 

– p(a)t> tt: *sap(a)ta becomes satta 

4. ~ S-S Treaty Texts (TT): Development 

around the middle of the 14 th century 

BCE: 

– lost initial w of *waruna 

– metathesis eastern Hurrian: *waruna > 

(u+)ruwana 

Forms in –an(i) or –ana get elision by the 

Hurrian suffix nna/i: *aSSuasani > 

aSSUsa-nni, Vasukhani > vasuka-nni, etc. 

5. v>b 

21 

-virya>biria; vIrajana>birazzana; 

vIrasena>biraSSena (similar development 

in modern Bengali) [O’Callaghan 

(1948:58)]. 

[Note: There is a possibility that ‘biria’ 

could stand for ‘priya’. But ‘birazzana’and 

‘biraSSena’appear to be clear cases of ‘v>b’ 

change.] 

6. kc, ck > SS, kk 

Kicku>kikku (cf. Skt. akca>Pa. akkha; Skt. 

puckara> Pk. pukkhara); 

Saukcatra>SauSSattar. 

[Note: We identify Kikkuli as related to 

Skt. ‘Kicku’. The Mitanni IA name Kikkuli 

has an older occurrence in a UR III text, as 

Kikkulu, but there it occurs as the name of 

a MeluHHan resident (which may be taken 

another clue for the IA nature of Harappan 

Culture.] 

Conclusion 

From the above, it can be seen that any 

attempt to consider Vedic as post-Mitanni 

IA is on shaky grounds. There is not enough 

evidence to decide one way or other about 

the age of Mitanni IA vis-à-vis Vedic IA. 

While Mitanni IA does show some


developments, they could have taken place 

after the split occurred between Vedic 

Indo-Aryans and Mitanni Indo-Aryans. 

Thus, one cannot hold them as post-RV 

simply on the basis of these developments 

alone. 

Thankfully, we have another methodology: 

Talageri (2008) has compared the Mitanni 

IA and RV names. He has shown that 

Mitanni IA must have been 

contemporaneous with late RV (or even 

post-RV) period. The most common name 

elements (shared by Mitanni with RV) are 

found in late RV. This is a clear verdict 

against any case for pre-RV Mitanni IA. 

After all, if Mitanni IA was pre-RV, then 

the common name elements would be 

found in early books of RV (and then 

gradually diappear, leaving the ground for 

new developments). But what we find is an 

opposite situation. Most of the common 

22 

name elements appear to be later 

innovations or developments which find 

place only in the later books of RV. 

The only argument against a pre-Mitanni 

RV (or at least pre-Mitanni early RV) was 

the presence of a few archaic forms in 

Mitanni IA (which were lost in the oral 

Pathas of RV). That argument has been put 

to rest in this paper. It has been shown that 

such changes could be a result of later 

developments seeping into the oral 

tradition. Also, we have shown traces of 

the presence of these archaic forms in RV 

text. 

Thus, we can safely conclude that Mitanni 

IA is certainly not pre-RV. One cannot hide 

behind the few archaisms found in Mitanni 

IA and defend the low dates given by the 

AIT/AMT scholars for RV Samhita and 

other Vedic texts based on that argument. 

Bibliography 

Arnold, E.V. 1905 Vedic Metre: In its Historical Development, Cambridge, 

University Press 

Burrow, T. 1973 ‘The Proto-Indoaryans’ in Journal of Royal Asiatic Society 

(1973, No.2, pg:123-140), Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain 

and Ireland 

Burrow, T. 2001 The Sanskrit Language, Delhi (Indian reprint), Motilal 

Banarsidass 

Fortson, B.W. 2004 Indo-European Language and Culture – An Introduction, 

Oxford, Blackwell Publishing


Knudtzon, J.A. 1907-15 Die-El-Amarna-Tafeln, Leipzig, J.C. Hinrichs 

Macdonell, A.A. 1916 A Vedic Grammar For Students, Oxford, Clarendon Press 

Mayrhofer, M. 1996 Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen II, 

Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag C. Winter 

O’Callaghan, R.T. 1948 Aram Naharaim, Rome, Pontifical Biblical Institute 

Raulwing, P. 2006 The Kikkuli Text’ in Les Équidés dans le monde méditerranéen 

antique edited by Armelle Gardesein (pg. 61-75), Lattes, 

Association pour le développement de l’archéologie en 

Languedoc-Roussillon 

Talageri, S. 2008 The Rigveda and The Avesta, New Delhi, Aditya Prakashan 

Thieme, P. 1960 ‘The Aryan Gods of the Mitanni Treaties’ in Journal of American 

Oriental Studies (Vol. 80; No.4; pg. 301-17), American Oriental 

Society 

Turner, RL 1962-85 A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages,London, 

Oxford University Press 

Witzel, M. 2005 ‘Indocentrism: autochthonous visions of ancient India’ in The Indo- 

Aryan Controversy – Evidence and Inference inIndian 

History edited by Edwin F. Bryant and Laurie L.Patton (pg. 341- 

404), London & New York, Routledge 

(Footnotes) 

1 In Rig Veda: a Metrically Restor ed Text, Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. Holland have 

made the change ‘-e-‘ to ‘-ayi-‘ in all the required places as a part of their metrical restoration. For 

a knowledge of all such instances, the e-text of this excellent work can be found at 

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/RV/RV00.html 

23


Appendix I 

The following table gives instances in RV where ‘-e-’ must be scanned as ‘-ayi-/-ayI-. 

No jyáyicmha práyicmha yáyicmha dayisna 

(19 instances) (13 instances) (3 instances) (5 instances) 

1 1.100.4 1.167.10 5.41.3 6.63.8 

2 1.127.2 1.169.1 5.74.8 7.20.7 

3 2.18.8 1.181.1 7.56.6 7.37.3 

4 4.1.2 1.186.3 7.58.4 

5 4.22.9 5.43.7 7.93.4 

6 6.48.21 6.26.8 

7 7.65.1 6.63.1 

8 7.86.4 7.34.14 nayit- (7 instances) praGayit- (2 instances) 

9 7.97.3 7.36.5 1.92.7 8.19.37 

10 8.23.23 7.88.1 1.113.04 8.46.1 

11 8.46.19 7.97.4 5.50.1 

12 8.74.4 8.84.1 5.50.2 

13 8.102.11 8.103.10 5.50.5 

14 10.6.1 5.83.6 

15 10.50.4 10.103.8 

16 10.61.17 

17 10.78.2 

18 10.78.5 

19 10.120.1 

There are several other cases where ‘-e-‘ must be scanned as ‘-ayi-‘ in RV. Those, who 

want to know all such places, can refer the e-text of Barend A. van Nooten and Gary B. 

Holland’s Rigveda: A Metrically Restored Text at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/ 

lrc/RV/RV00.html 

24


On Perceiving Aryan Migrations in Vedic Ritual 

Texts 

Vishal Agarwal 

Puratattva (Bulletin of the Indian Archaeolgical Society), New Delhi, No. 36, 2005-06, pp. 155-165 

1. Background: 

Vedicists have generally agreed in 

the last 150 years that the vast 

corpus of extant Vedic literature, 

comprising of several hundred texts, is 

completely silent on Aryan immigrations 

from Central Asia into India. But, in a 

lecture delivered on 11 October 1999 at 

the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New 

Delhi), historian Romila Thapar (1999) 

made a revisionist claim: 

“... and later on, the Srauta Sutra of 

Baudhayana refers to the Parasus and the 

arattas who stayed behind and others 

who moved eastwards to the middle 

Ganges valley and the places equivalent 

such as the Kasi, the Videhas and the 

Kuru Pancalas, and so on. In fact, when 

one looks for them, there are evidence 

for migration.” 

Another historian of ancient India, Ram 

Sharan Sharma considers this passage as 

an important piece of evidence in favor 

of the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT). 

He writes (Sharma 1999: 87-89): 

25 

“More importantly, Witzel produces a 

passage from the Baudhayana 

Srautasutra which contains ‘the most 

explicit statement of immigration into 

the Subcontinent’. This passage 

contains a dialogue between Pururava 

and Urvasi which refers to horses, 

chariot parts, 100 houses and 100 jars 

of ghee. 

Towards the end, it speaks of the birth 

of their sons Ayu and Amavasu, who 

were asked by their parents, to go out. 

‘Ayu went eastward. His people are the 

Kuru-Pancalas and the Kasi-Videhas. 

This is the Ayava kin group. Amavasu 

stayed in the west. His people are the 

Gandharas, the Parsavas and the 

Arattas. This is the Amavasava kin 

group.’” 

Sharma is so confident of the ‘evidence’ 

of the AMT produced by Witzel that he 

even goes to the extent of co-relating these 

two groups with various pottery types 

attested in the archaeological record (ibid, 

p. 89). It is quite apparent that all these


claims of alleged Vedic literary evidence 

for an Indo-Aryan immigration into the 

Indian subcontinent are informed by the 

following passage writtenby a Harvard 

philologist (Witzel 1995: 320-321): 

“Taking a look at the data relating to 

the immigration of the Indo-Aryans 

into South Asia, one is stuck by the 

number of vague reminiscences of 

foreign localities and tribes in the 

Rgveda, in spite repeated assertions to 

the contrary in the secondary 

literature. Then, there is the following 

direct statement contained in (the 

admittedly much later) BSS 

(=Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra) 

18.44:397.9 sqq which has once again 

been overlooked, not having been 

translated yet: “Ayu went eastwards. 

His (people) are the Kuru Panchala and 

the Kasi-Videha. This is the Ayava 

(migration). (His other people) stayed 

at home. His people are the Gandhari, 

Parsu and Aratta. This is the Amavasava 

(group)” (Witzel 1989a: 235).” 

That the above passage of the Baudhayana 

Srautasutra (henceforth ‘BSS’) is the only 

‘direct’ evidence for an Indo-Aryan 

immigration into India is clarified by 

Witzel in the same article later (p. 321). 

The reference (Witzel 1989a: 235) at the 

26 

end of the above citation pertains to an 

earlier article by Witzel, where he has 

elaborated it further (Witzel 1989: 235): 

“In the case of ancient N. India, we 

do not know anything about the 

immigration of various tribes and 

clans, except for a few elusive 

remarks in the RV (= Rigveda), SB 

(= Shatapatha Brahmana) or BSS ( = 

Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra). This text 

retains at 18.44 : 397.9 sqq. the most 

pregnant memory, perhaps, of an 

immigration of the In do-Aryans into 

Northern India and of their split into 

two groups: pran Ayuh pravavraja. 

Tasyaite Kuru-Pancalah Kasi- 

Videha ity. Etad Ayavam pravrajam. 

Pratyan amavasus. Tasyaite 

Gandharvarayas Parsavo ‘ratta 

ity. Etad Amavasavam. “Ayu went 

eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru- 

Pancala and the Kasi Videha. This is 

the Ayava migration. (His other 

people) stayed at home in the West. 

His people are the Gandhari, Parsu 

and Aratta. This is the Amavasava 

(group)”. 

Finally, this mistranslation is found in an 

even older publication of Witzel (1987: 

202) as well. This article intends to show 

how this Sutra passage actually says the


reverse of what Witzel intends to prove, 

because Witzel’s translation is flawed. As 

an aside, a Czech scholar Václav Bla•ek 

(2002: 216) relies on the mistranslation 

of the passage in Witzel (1995: 320-321) 

to reinforce his conclusion that the Arattas 

were localized in the Helmand basin. 

Interestingly, in the ‘Acknowledgements’ 

section (p. 235) of the paper, Bla•ek 

mentions Witzel. Therefore, we can 

discount his interpretation as one that has 

no independent value due to it being 

dependent upon Witzel’s erroneous 

arguments. 

2. Grammatical Flaws in Witzel’s Mistranslation 

of Baudhayana Srautasutra 

18.44- 

In a review of Erdosy’s volume where 

Witzel’s article appeared, Koenraad Elst 

took issue with Witzel on the precise 

translation of the Sanskrit passage. He 

stated (Elst 1999: 164-165): 

“This passage consists of two 

halves in parallel, and it is unlikely 

that in such a construction, the 

subject of the second half would 

remain unexpressed, and that terms 

containing contrastive information 

(like “migration” as opposed to the 

alleged non-migration of the other 

27 

group) would remain unexpressed, 

all left for future scholars to fill 

in. It is more likely that a noncontrastive 

term representing a 

subject indicated in both 

statements, is left unexpressed in 

the second: that exactly is the case 

with the verb pravavrâja “he went”, 

meaning “Ayu went” and “Amavasu 

went”. Amavasu is the subject of 

the second statement, but Witzel 

spirits the subject away, leaving the 

statement subject-less, and turns it 

into a verb, “amâ vasu”, “stayed at 

home”. In fact, the meaning of the 

sentence is really quite 

straightforward, and doesn’t 

require supposing a lot of unexpre 

ssed subjects: “Ayu went east, his 

is the Yamuna-Ganga region”, while 

“Amavasu went west, his is 

Afghanistan, Parshu and West 

Panjab”. Though the then location 

of “Parshu” (Persia?) is hard to 

decide, it is definitely a western 

country, along with the two others 

named, western from the viewpoint 

of a people settled near the 

Saraswati river in what is now 

Haryana. Far from attesting an 

eastward movement into India, this 

text actually speaks of a westward


movement towards Central Asia, 

coupled with a symmetrical 

eastward movement from India’s 

demographic centre around the 

Saraswati basin towards the Ganga 

basin.” 

Elst further commented (ibid): 

“The fact that a world-class 

specialist has to content himself 

with a late text like the BSS, and that 

he has to twist its meaning this 

much in order to get an invasionist 

story out of it, suggests that 

harvesting invasionist information 

in the oldest literature is very 

difficult indeed. Witzel claims (op. 

cit., p.320) that: ‘Taking a look at 

the data relating to the immigration 

of Indo-Aryans into South Asia, one 

is struck by a number of vague 

reminiscences of foreign localities 

and tribes in the Rgveda, in spite [of] 

repeated assertions to the contrary 

in the secondary literature.’ But 

after this promising start, he fails 

to quote even a single one of those 

‘vague reminiscences’.” 

If Elst’s critique is correct, the solitary 

direct literary evidence cited by Witzel for 

the AMT gets annulled. Elst’s revelation 

generated a very bitter controversy 

28 

involving accusations of a personal nature. 

We need not detail these here as the 

controversy is documented in my earlier 

online article (Agarwal 2001). Dr. S. 

Kalyanaraman, referred the matter to Dr. 

George Cardona, an international authority 

in Sanskrit language and author of 

numerous definitive publications on 

Panini’s grammar. Cardona clearly rejected 

Witzel’s translation, and upheld the 

objections of Elst on the basis of rules of 

Sanskrit grammar. In a message posted on 

an internet discussion forum, he stated 

(Cardona 2000): 

“The passage (from Baudha_yana 

S’rautasu_tra), part of a version of the 

Puruuravas and Urva’sii legend 

concerns two children that Urva’sii 

bore and which were to attain their 

full life span, in contrast with the 

previous ones she had put away. On 

p. 397, line 8, the text says: saayu.m 

caamaavasu.m ca janayaa.m cakaara 

‘she bore Saayu and Amaavasu.’ 

Clearly, the following text concerns 

these two sons, and not one of them 

along with some vague people. 

Grammatical points also speak 

against Witzel’s interpretation. First, 

if amaavasus is taken as amaa ‘at 

home’ followed by a form of vas, this


causes problems: the imperfect third 

plural of vas (present vasati vasata.h 

vasanti etc.) would be avasan; the 

third plural aorist would be avaatsu.h. 

I have not had the chance to check 

Witzel’s article again directly, so I 

cannot say what he says about a 

purported verb form (a)vasu.h. It is 

possible, however, that Elst has 

misunderstood Witzel and that the 

latter did not mean vasu as a verb 

form per se. 

Instead, he may have taken amaavasu.h 

as the nominative singular of 

a compound amaa-vasu-meaning 

literally ‘stay-at-home’, with -vas-ubeing 

a derivate in -u- from -vas. In 

this case, there is still what Elst 

points out: an abrupt elliptic syntax 

that is a mismatch with the earlier 

mention of Amaavasu along with 

Aayu. Further, tasya can only be 

genitive singular and, in accordance 

with usual Vedic (and later) syntax, 

should have as antecedent the closest 

earlier nominal: if we take the text 

as referring to Amaavasu, all is in 

order: tasya (sc. Amaavaso.h). 

Finally, the taddhitaanta derivates 

aayava and aamaavasava then are 

correctly parallels to the terms aayu 

29 

and amaavasu. In sum, everything fits 

grammatically and thematically if we 

straightforwardly view the text as 

concerning the wanderings of two 

sons of Urva’sii and the people 

associated with them. There is 

certainly no good way of having this 

refer to a people that remained in the 

west.” 

The noted archaeologist B. B. Lal (Lal 

2005: 85-88) has also stated clearly that 

Witzel’s translation is untenable and is a 

willful distortion of Vedic texts to prove 

the non-proven Aryan migration theory 

(AMT). Lal’s criticism is along the same 

lines as that of Elst. 

3. Translations of BSS 18:44 by other 

Scholars in English, German and 

Dutch: 

Let us consider the few publications where 

the relevant Baudhayana Srautasutra (BSS) 

passage has actually been studied, or has 

been translated by other scholars. 

3.1 Willem Caland’s Dutch translation: 

It is Caland who first published the 

Baudhayana Srautrasutra from manuscripts 

(Caland 1903-1913). In an obscure study 

of the Urvashi legend written in Dutch, he 

focuses on the version found in 

Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.44-45 and


translates the relevant sentences of text 

(Caland 1903: 58). Translated into English, 

the relevant sentences in the Dutch original 

read: 

“To the East went Ayus; from him 

descend the Kurus, Pancalas, Kasis and 

Videhas. These are the peoples which 

originated as a consequence of Ayus’s 

going forth. To the West went Amavasu; 

from him descend the Gandharis, the 

Sparsus and the Arattas. These are the 

peoples which originated as a 

consequence of Amavasu’s going 

forth.” 

The text, as reconstituted by Caland (and 

also accepted by Kashikar - see below) 

reads ‘Sparsus’, which apparently stands for 

the peoples who are known as ‘Parshus’ 

elsewhere in the Vedic literature, and are 

often identified as the ancestors of 

Persians (or even of Pashtuns). Clearly, 

Caland interpreted this sutra passage to 

mean that from a central region, the 

Arattas, Gandharis and Parsus migrated 

west, while the Kasi-Videhas and Kuru- 

Pancalas migrated east. Combined with the 

testimony of the Satapatha Brahmana (see 

below), the implication of this version in 

the Baudhayana Srautasutra, narrated in the 

context of the agnyadheya rite, is that that 

30 

the two outward migrations took place 

from the central region watered by the 

Sarasvati. Interestingly, the volume of 

Caland’s Kleine Schriften have been edited 

as by none other than Michael Witzel 

(1990). Therefore it is all the more 

surprising that in this entire controversy, 

Witzel did not allude to Caland’s translation 

of the passage at all! 

3.2C. G. Kashikar’s English translation: 

Very recently, Kashikar (2003: 1235) has 

translated the relevant sentences of the 

text as follows: 

“Ayu moved towards the east. Kuru- 

Pancala and Kasi-Videha were his 

regions. This is the realm of Ayu. 

Amavasu proceeded towards the 

west. The Gandharis, Sparsus and 

Arattas were his regions. This is the 

realm of Amavasu.” 

3.3D. S. Triveda’s English translation: 

In an article (Triveda 1938-39) dealing 

specifically with the homeland of Aryans, 

he titles the oncluding section as “Aryans 

went abroad from India”. He commences 

this section with the following words (ibid, 

p. 68): 

“The Kalpasutra asserts that 

Pururavas had two sons by Urvasi - 

Ayus and Amavasu. Ayu went 

eastwards and founded Kuru -


Pancala and Kasi - Videha nations, 

while Amavasu went westwards and 

founded Gandhara, Sprsava and 

Aratta.” 

In a footnote, the author gives the source 

as ‘Baudhayana Srautasutra XVIII. 35-51’. 

The address is wrong, but it is clear that 

Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.44 is meant. 

Therefore, Triveda also takes the passage 

to mean that Amavasu migrated westwards, 

rather than staying where he was as Witzel 

would translate it. 

3.4 Toshifumi Goto’s German 

Translation: In his recent study (Goto 

2000) of some parallel Vedic passages 

dealing with the agnyadheya rite, 

Toshifumi Goto translates the relevant 

Sutra passage into German (p. 101 sqq.). 

Loosely translated into English, this reads: 

“From there, Ayu wandered 

Eastwards. To him belong (the groups 

called) ‘Kurus and Panchalas, Kashis 

and Videhas’ (note 87). They are the 

branches/leading away (note 88) 

originating from Ayu. From there, 

Amavasu turned westwards (wandered 

forth). To him belong (the groups 

called) ‘Gandharis, Parsus (note 89) 

Arattas’. They are the branches/ 

leading away originating from 

Amavasu. (note 90).” 

31 

{90}: It appears that the notion of 

‘Ayu’ as an normal adjectival sense 

‘living’, ‘agile’ underlies this name. 

Correspondingly, Krick 214 

interprets Amavasu as - “Westwards 

[travelled] A. (or: he stayed back in 

the west in his home, because his name 

says- ‘one who has his goods at 

home’)”. 

Notes 87-89 in the German original are 

irrelevant to this present discussion and are 

therefore left untranslated here. We will 

discuss the views of Hertha Krick referred 

to by Goto in greater detail later. What is 

important here is that four scholars have 

translated the disputed passage in the same 

manner as Elst, and differently from 

Witzel. 

4. Pururava-Uruvasi (or Urvasi) 

Narratives in Vedic Texts, a Conspectus: 

The Pururava-Urvasi legend is found in 

numerous Vedic and non-Vedic texts. In the 

former, the couple and their son Ayu are 

related to the agnyadheya rite. Some 

passages in Vedic texts that allude to this 

rite/tale are - Rigveda 10.95; Kathaka 

Samhita 26.7 etc.; Agnyadheya Brahmana 

(in the surviving portions of the Brahmana 

of Katha Sakha) etc.; Maitrayani Samhita


1.2.7; 3.9.5; Vajasneyi (Madhyandina) 

Samhita 5.2; Satapatha Brahmana 

(Madhyandina) 11.5.1.1; Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18.44-45; Vadhula Anvakhyana 

1.1-2 etc. Note that the Kathaka Brahmana 

exists only in short fragments, most of 

which have been collected together by 

Suryakanta (1981), Rosenfield (2004) and 

also by some other earlier scholars. The 

agnyadheya brahmanam portion of the 

Kathaka Brahmana survives (and is 

included in Suryakanta’s collection), but it 

does not shed any light on the question at 

hand. Many of the above textual references, 

as well as those in Srautasutras (not listed 

above), do not throw much light on the 

historical aspects of the legend. Several 

passages cursorily mention Urvasi as 

mother, Pururava as father, Ayu (equated to 

Agni) as their son and ghee as (Pururava’s) 

seed in a symbolic manner in connection 

with various rites (Taittiriya Samhita 

1.3.7.1; 6.3.5.3; Kathaka Samhita 3.4; 

Kapisthala Samhita 2.11; 41.5; Kanva 

Samhita 5.2; Maitrayani Samhita 2.8.10). 

Elsewhere, Urvasi is enumerated as an 

apsara and prayers are directed towards 

her for protection (Kathaka Samhita 17.9; 

Kapisthala Samhita 26.8, Taittiriya Samhita 

4.4.3.2; Maitrayani Samhita 2.8.10). At 

least in one ritual context, Urvasi is taken 

to represent all Devis (Taittiriya Samhita 

32 

1.2.5.2). Kathaka Samhita 8.10 narrates the 

tale in brief and may be paraphrased as: 

“Urvasi was the wife of Pururava. 

She left Pururava and returned to 

devas. Pururava prayed to devas for 

Urvasi. Then, devas gave him a son 

named Ayu. At their bidding, Pururava 

fabricated aranis (fire stick and base 

used for the fire sacrifice) from the 

branches of a tree and rubbed them 

together. This generated fire, and 

Pururava’s desire was fulfilled. He 

who establishes sacrificial fires this 

attains progeny, animals etc.”. 

Thus, this passage also equates Ayu with 

Agni. In addition, some passages of 

Srautasutras mention them in the context 

of caturmasya rites (E.g., Katyayana 

Srautasutra 5.1.24-25). 

The texts that are of most use for the 

present purpose are Rigveda 10.95, 

Satapatha Brahmana 11.5.1; Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18.44-45 and Vadhula 

Anvakhyana 1.1-2. Dozens of published 

secondary studies examine the legend 

from the data scattered in Vedic, Puranic 

and Kavya texts. We need not dwell upon 

the versions available in Brhaddevata, 

Sarvanukramani, Puranas etc., here because 

they are either too late or do not shed any


additional light on our problem. A survey 

of a few of these is given in Shridhar (2001: 

311-345). Most of these studies do take 

into account the information contained in 

Rigveda and Satapatha Brahmana. Very few 

however analyze the information in the 

Baudhayana Srautasutra. Even Volume I.1 

of the Srautakosa (Dandekar 1958), which 

studies the agnyadheya rite in detail with 

a special emphasis on the Baudhayana 

Srautasutra, ignores these sections. To my 

knowledge, only Willem Caland (1903), 

Hertha Krick (1982) and Yasuke Ikari 

(1998) have studied the relevant sections 

of the Baudhayana Srautasutra in detail. 

5. Kuruksetra in Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18:45: 

A very strong piece of evidence for 

deciding the correct translation of 

Baudhayana Srautrasutra 18.44 is the 

passage that occurs right after it, i.e., 

Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.45. I am 

reproducing the translation of Kashikar 

(2003: 1235) with minor modifications 

that do not affect the issue at hand: 

“[....JAfter having returned from the 

Avabhrta (the king) saw her (Urvasi). 

The sons approached her and said, “Do 

thou take us there where thou are 

33 

going. We are strong. Thou hast put our 

father, one of you two, to grief.” [2] 

She said, “O sons, I have given birth to 

you together. (Therefore) I stay here 

for three nights. Let not the word of 

the brahmana be untrue.” The king 

wearing the inner garment lived with 

her for three nights. He shed semen 

virile unto her. 

She said, “What is to be done?” “What to 

do?”, the king responded. She said, “Do 

thou fetch a new pitcher?” She disposed 

it into it. In Kurukshetra, there were 

ponds called Bisavati. The northern-most 

among then created gold. She put it (the 

semen) into it (the pond). From it (the 

banks of the pond) came out the 

Asvattha tree surrounded by Sami. It was 

Asvattha because of the virile semen, it 

was Sami by reason of the womb. Such is 

the creation of (Asvattha tree) born over 

Sami. This is its source. It is indeed said, 

“Gods attained heaven through the entire 

sacrifice.”[3] 

When the sacrifice came down to 

man from the gods, it came down 

upon the Asvattha (tree). They 

prepared the churning woods out 

of it; it is the sacrifice. Indeed, 

whichever may the Asvattha be, it 

should be deemed, as growing on 

the Sami (tree). [....]


^ Doubtful word and meaning. [ 

3] Taittiriya Samhita I.7.1.3" 

From this text, it is clear that Urvasi, 

Pururava and their two sons were present 

in Kurukshetra in their very lifetimes. 

There is no evidence that Ayu’s descendants 

traveled all the way from Afghanistan to 

Haryana (where Kurukshetra is located) 

subsequently, nor is there any evidence that 

she took her sons from Kurukshetra to 

Afghanistan after disposing off the pitcher. 

Therefore, the disputed passage BSS 18.45 

would imply that the descendants of 

Amavasu, i.e., Arattas, Parsus and Gandharis 

migrated westwards from the Kurushetra 

region. Note that in Taittiriya Aranyaka 

5.1.1, the Kurukshetra region is said to be 

bounded by Turghna (=Srughna or the 

modern village of Sugh in the Sirhind 

district of Punjab) in the north, by Khandava 

in the south (corresponding roughly to 

Delhi and Mewat regions), Maru (= desert) 

in the west, and ‘Parin’ (?) in the east. This 

roughly corresponds to the modern state 

of Haryana in India. 

6. Satapatha Brahmana IX. 5.1 

andPururava-Urvasi Narrative 

The Satapatha Brahmana XI.5.1 is very 

clear that the wanderings of Pururava, the 

34 

re-union with Uravashi (and from context, 

their initial cohabitation) were all in the 

Kurukshetra region (and not in W Punjab 

or anywhere further west). Another point 

to note is that Pururava is said to be the 

son of Ila, a deity again closely linked to 

the Kurukshetra region and Sarasvati. Let 

me reproduce the relevant passages from 

the Satapatha Brahmana XI.5.1, as 

translated by Julius Eggeling [1900(1963): 

68-74]: 

“Then, indeed, she vanished: ‘Here I 

am back,’ he said, and lo! She had 

vanished. Wailing with sorrow he 

wandered all over Kurukshetra. Now 

there is a lotus-lake there, called 

Anyatahplaksha: He walked along its 

bank; and there nymphs were 

swimming about in the shape of 

swans. XI.5.1.4 

They said, ‘Surely, there is not among 

men that holy form of fire by sacrificing 

wherewith one would become one of 

ourselves.’ They put fire into a pan, and 

gave it to him saying, ‘By sacrificing 

therewith thou shalt become one of 

ourselves.’ He took it (the fire) and his 

boy, and went on his way home. He then 

deposited the fire in the forest and went 

to the village with the boy alone. [He 

came back and thought] ‘Here I am back;’


and lo! It had disappeared: what had been 

the fire was an Asvattha tree (ficus 

religiosa), and what had been the pan was 

the Sami tree (mimosa suma). He then 

returned to the Gandharvas. 

XI.5.1.13[....]” 

The mention of a lotus pond at 

Kurukshetra in the Satapatha Brahmana 

needs to be noted by the reader because it 

is consistent with the information provided 

by Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.45, which 

also refers to the presence of Pururava and 

Urvasi by a lotus pond surrounded by 

Peepul (Asvattha) trees in Kuruksetra, and 

performance of rituals at the site. It is clear 

then, that Urvasi and Pururava themselves 

were present in Kuruksetra for the birth 

of Ayu according to the author of both the 

Satapatha Brahmana and Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18.44-45. In conclusion 

therefore, Ayu or his descendants did not 

migrate to India from Afghanistan 

according to these texts. 

7. Vadhula Anvakhyana Version of the 

Narrative 

The relevant portion of the text has been 

published only recently, first by Y Ikari 

(1998:19-23), and more recently by Braj 

Bihari Chaubey (2001). Based on Ikari’s 

text, Toshifumi Goto (2000) has studied 

35 

the legend in detail, comparing it with 

parallel passages in Vedic texts, in 

particular Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.44- 

45. The Vadhula Anvakhyana Brahmana 1.1- 

2 (Chaubey 2001: pp. 34-35, 1-3 of 

devanagari text) does not add any 

additional geographical information except 

stating that Pururava and Urvasi traveled to 

Urvasi’s father’s home for the birth of their 

son Ayu. This might again be interpreted 

by Aryan invasionists as proof that Ayu was 

born in Afghanistan. They would argue that 

Urvasi was an apsara, and therefore, she 

belonged to the gandharvas who are 

sometimes placed in Afghanistan by 

scholars still believing in the Aryan 

Invasion Theory (AIT). For instance, Malati 

Shengde (1977: 111) suggests that the 

gandharvas were the priests of people 

who resided in the Kabul valley. Such 

speculations however are very tentative and 

tenuous, and do not constitute evidence of 

any type. They certainly cannot over-ride 

rules of Sanskrit grammar in interpreting 

Sanskrit texts such as Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18.44. Moreover, the Vadhula 

text does not mention the separation of 

Pururava and Urvasi. It does not mention 

Amavasu or his birth at all, and states 

instead that Pururava left the home of his 

in laws with his son Ayu, and with the 

knowledge of yajna. The section 1.1.2 of


this text explicitly equates Ayu with Agni, 

that eats food for both humans and the 

Devas (“.... aayurasi iti jaatam 

abhimantrayate sa vaa esha aayuh 

pauruuvasa ubhayeshaan 

devamanushyanaam annaado 

agnibhagavaan ubhayeshaam... “). It 

also states explicitly that Urvasi was 

actually a human who had been given over 

to the gandharvas. So much for the 

Afghani provenance of Urvasi and 

Pururava! 

8. Hertha Krick’s study (Krick 1982) on 

the agnyadheya Rite: 

Hertha Krick presents her translation, or 

rather an interpretation of Baudhayana 

Srautrasutra 18.44 (p. 214) in her PhD 

thesis that was published posthumously 

(Krich 1982). She first suggests that the 

descendants of Amavasu migrated 

westwards, but them proposes an alternate 

interpretation that Amavasu stayed west in 

his home, and only Ayu migrated eastwards. 

Later on too, she refers (page 218-219) 

to her second interpretation that the 

descendants of Ayu migrated to 

Kurukshetra region and thence to other 

parts of Madhyadesha where Vedic 

orthodoxy/orthopraxy was established 

eventually by Brahmins, whereas the 

36 

Amavasus stayed back in western regions 

of Gandhara etc. She also links Ayu and his 

descendants with symbolism related to 

Moon and Soma, and reproduces passages 

from later Sanskrit texts on the progeny 

of Pururava and Urvashi. None of this 

really sheds light on our problem at hand. 

It should be noted that the entire work of 

Krick is written under the Aryan invasionist 

(AIT) paradigms. Her major argument for 

situating Urvasi in the Gandhara region is 

that Urvasi resided with sheep and goats 

and rearing of these animals was especially 

important for residents of Afghanistan and 

its adjoining areas! Parpola (1980: 8) 

translates the relevant sentences from 

German, 

“Urvasi calls them (pair of sheep) her 

children, and becomes desperate 

when they are robbed, while 

Pururavas boasts of having ‘ascended 

the sky’ through the recapture of the 

ram. This shows that the generative 

and fertility power of the royal family 

and thereby the whole kingdom was 

dependent upon these sheep. This 

component of the tale should be 

based upon the actual old customs and 

cultic conceptions of a country 

subsisting in sheep raising, such as 

Gandhara... .(p. 160)”.


But such an argument is not conclusive 

because sheep and goat herding have been 

important occupations not just in 

Afghanistan and North Western Frontier 

Province region of Pakistan, but also in 

much of Rajasthan, Punjab and parts of 

Haryana down to present times. Not 

surprisingly, scholars who still adhere to 

AIT and its euphemistic interpretations 

(such as Aryan migration theory) continue 

to torture Vedic texts and see ‘evidence’ 

for Indo-Aryan migrations into India. 

Therefore, Krick’s interpretations have 

also found support in her obituary written 

by Asko Parpola, another scholar who till 

this day believes not just in one, but in 

multiple Aryan invasions of India. Parpola 

(1980:10) remarks sympathetically: 

“Such feasts dedicated to gandharvas 

and apsarases have been celebrated 

at quite specific lotus ponds 

surrounded by holy fig trees in the 

Kuruksetra. The analysis cited above 

suggests, however, that the original 

location of the legend was a country 

like Gandhara, where sheep-raising 

was the predominant form of 

economy. This eastward shift, which 

is in agreement with the model of 

the Aryan penetration into India, 

starting from the mountains of the 

northwest, is corroborated. Hertha 

37 

Krick points out, also by the 

geneology of the peoples as given 

in the Baudhayana-Srautasutra 

(18,44-45): while Amavasu stayed 

in the west (Gandhara), Ayu went to 

the east (Kuruksetra).” 

Likewise, in a later publication, Witzel 

(2001a) too draws solace from the fact that 

Krick interprets ‘Amavasu’ as one who 

‘keeps his goods at home’, and ‘Ayu’, as 

‘active/agile/alive’. According to Witzel, 

Krick and Parpola, BSS 18.44 designates 

the homeland of Gandharis, Parsus and 

Arattas as ‘here’ (‘ama’ in ‘amavasu’). 

Prima facie, this suggestion is illogical, 

because the territory inhabited by these 

three groups of people is a vast swathe of 

land comprising a major portion of 

modern-day NWFP/Baluchistan provinces 

of Pakistan, and much of Afghanistan. To 

denote such a vast swathe of territory by 

the word ‘here’, while contrasting it with 

supposed migrations of Kurus and other 

Indian peoples from ‘here’ to ‘there’ (= 

northern India) is somewhat of a stretch. 

Muni Baudhayana (or whoever wrote BSS 

18.44) was definitely a resident of northern 

India, and for him, Afghanistan and 

northwestern Pakistan would be ‘there’, 

and not ‘here’ or ‘home’ (which would be 

his region of northern India).


Now, in an online paper, Witzel (Witzel 2001: 

16, fn. 45) tries to minimize the importance he 

had placed earlier on BSS 18.44 as the only 

important ‘direct evidence’ for an Indo-Aryan 

immigration. In this paper, Witzel refers to his 

earlier publication ‘Witzel (1980)’ as proof that 

Arattas were ‘Arachosians’ (= residents of 

Helmand valley in S W Afghanistan). But when 

the present author checked this publication 

(Witzel 1980: fn. 3), it was found to place the 

Arattas in the Badakhshan area in extreme N E 

Afghanistan! In other words, Witzel now 

misquotes his own earlier publication incorrectly 

while defending his mistranslation! 

9. Conclusion- Imposing Colonial 

Paradigms on Ancient Ritual Passages: 

Rather than insisting on seeing evidence for 

‘movement’ or ‘migration’ in the word ‘Ayu’, 

and correspondingly ‘remaining in their home’ 

in the word Amavasu, it is perhaps less tortuous 

to interpret this passage figuratively in a manner 

that is more consistent with the Indian tradition. 

How then do we interpret the Vedic narratives 

about the birth of Ayu and Amavasu? Tradition 

holds that the Kuru-Panchalas, and later the 

Kashi-Videhas conformed to Vedic orthoproxy 

(i.e., they performed fire sacrifices to the Devas) 

and were therefore ‘alive’. On the other hand, 

the progeny of Amavasu did not sacrifice to the 

Devas and hoarded their wealth in their homes. 

An over-arching theme in the versions of the 

Pururava-Urvasi legend in the Vedic texts is the 

semi-divine origin of the Vedic ritual. The yajna 

is said to have reached mankind through 

Pururava, who got it from semi-divine beings, 

the gandharvas, via the intervention of Urvasi, 

who herself was an apsaraa and belonged to 

the gandharvas. Coupled with the Baudhayana 

Srautasutra 18.44-45 passage, we may interpret 

the names of Ayu and Amavasu to mean that the 

former represents the mythical ancestor of 

peoples (Kuru-Panchalas and Kasi-Videhas) 

who are ‘alive and bright’, and ‘vibrant’ or 

‘moving’ because they sacrificed to the Devas. 

Vadhula Anvakhyana 1.1.1 explicitly declares 

that before the birth of Ayu, humans did not 

perform Yajna properly due to which they had 

developed only the trunk part of their body and 

not their limbs-”...naanyaani kaani 

chanaangaani... “. In contrast, the Gandharis, 

Parsus and Arattas did not perform Vedic 

sacrifices for Devas and hoarded their 

‘possessions in their homes’, due to which they 

were ‘stationary’ or ‘dead’ and ‘devoid of light’, 

like the ‘amavasya’ or moonless night. This 

interpretation would be completely consistent 

with later traditions concerning the conformity 

to Vedic orthopraxy by the Kurus, Panchalas, 

Kashis and Videhas; and the lack of the same in 

the case of Arattas, Gandharis and Parshus. In 

‘modern idiom’, the former group are progeny 

of ‘fire’ or ‘light’, and the latter are progeny of 

38


‘darkness’ and ‘death’ from the perspective of 

Vedic orthopraxy. 

Whatever be the ritual interpretation of this 

passage, there is no convincing way to uphold 

Witzel’s mistranslation or over-interpretation of 

Baudhayana Srautasutra 18.44. One must be 

extremely wary of using at least the Vedic 

versions of this legend to construct real history 

of human migrations, otherwise we would have 

to deduce an outward from India towards 

Central Asia. There is absolutely no need to read 

modern and colonial Aryan invasion and 

migration theories into ancient ritual texts. 

Therefore, we may conclude there still exists 

no Vedic evidence for an Aryan immigration 

into India. All such attempts by Witzel (and 

following him R Thapar, and R S Sharma) must 

be considered as over-zealous 

misinterpretations eventually derived from 

colonial theories such as the Aryan invasion 

theory. Eminent historians must not fall into the 

trap of seeing ‘evidence’ for Aryan migrations 

or invasions in texts that are chronologically 

removed by a 1000 years from the period of 

these supposed demographic movements. 

Doing so is bad historiography and not just a 

case of “when one looks for them, there are 

evidence for migration” (Thapar 1999). The 

Vedic texts, comprising of several thousand 

pages of printed texts, indeed do not have a 

39 

single statement may serve as literary evidence 

for AIT or AMT unless one wants to imagine 

evidence that does not exist. 

Acknowledgements: At my request, 

Koenraad Elst translated the Dutch passage in 

Caland (1903:58), while Nitin Agrawal (my 

younger brother) consulted Kashikar (2003: 

1235) promptly. Professor Shiva Bajpai 

provided several useful suggestions, although all 

errors are mine. The paper was presented at 

the World Association For Vedic Studies’ 

conference at Houston (USA) held on 8-10 July 

2006. 

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41 

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Atharvaveda’, inPersica, vol. IX: 86-128


INDO-ARYAN AND SLAVIC LINGUISTIC 

AND GENETIC AFFINITIES PREDATE 

THE ORIGIN OF CEREAL FARMING 

Joseph Skulj, Jagdish C. Sharda, Snejina Sonina, Ratnakar 

Narale 

The Hindu Institute of Learning, Toronto, Canada 

Paper read at: The Sixth International Topical Conference: Origin of Europeans in Ljubljana, 

Slovenia June 6th and 7th 2008. 

Abstract 

Linguistic comparisons between Indo-Aryan languages, Vedic Sanskrit in 

particular, and Slavic languages show evidence of remarkable similarities in 

words of elemental nature and those describing the process of domestication 

of animals specially the terminology regarding the sheep and the cattle. Similarly, 

Haplogroup (Hg) R1a1 (HG3 in Rosser’s nomenclature), the male lineage Y- 

Chromosome genetic marker found at high frequencies both in the Slavic and the Indo- 

Aryan male populations points to a common genetic origin of a large percentage of 

speakers of Slavic and Indic languages. Judging from the linguistic evidence, the 

separation of these Indo-European branches appears to predate the advent of cereal 

domestication. Applying Alinei’s ‘Lexical Self-Dating’ (LSD) methodology to date the 

linguistic and the genetic evidence, we estimate that the split between Indo-Aryans and 

the ancestors of Slavs occurred, after the domestication of the sheep and cattle, about 

10,000 years ago, but before cereal farming became a common industry amongst the 

ancestors of Slavs in Europe and Indo-Aryans on the Indian sub-continent. Moreover, 

the genetic evidence does not indicate that there were any major migrations of people 

from Europe, including the ancestors of the present day Slavs, to the Indian sub-continent 

during the last 8,000 years. The migration appears to have come from the Indian subcontinent 

to Europe. However, there is a record of many military incursions over the 

millennia into the sub-continent. 

42


Furthermore, based on the linguistic, genetic, zooarchaeological and population 

growth evidence, the coalescence of R1a1 in an ancestor common to many Indo-Aryans 

and Slavs, probably occurred during the hunting-gathering era and there is evidence that 

the close contact between the ancestors of Indo-Aryans and Slavs continued during the 

sheep and cattle domestication, up to and including the nomadic pastoral age. Based on 

this evidence, the major population expansion from the Indian sub-continent into Europe 

appears to have come, before the age of cereal farming. 

Also the patrilineal Y-Chromosome genetic marker Hg R1a1, that accompanied this 

expansion, appears to be more than 100,000 years old, based on its relative high 

frequency, diversity and wide distribution extending from the Balkans to the Bay of 

Bengal. This estimated age, based on the reproductive rates of historical individuals, is 

considerably older than the molecular ages calculated on the basis of mutation rates as 

reported in the literature. 

Introduction 

The earliest evidence of Paleolithic 

human presence in the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent 

consists of stone implements 

found in the Soan River Valley in northern 

Pakistan. These tools appear to indicate the 

presence of hominids in the sub-continent 

as early as 200,000-400,000 years ago 

(Qamar et al. 2002). However, according 

to C. Renfrew, when W. Jones first spoke 

of the early literature of India he had 

absolutely no idea of the antiquity of Indian 

civilization. For many years, the material 

record did not go back much before the 

time of King Ashoka in the 3rd century BC, 

and the brief accounts of north India left 

by the commentators upon Alexander the 

43 

Great travels and conquests in the previous 

century. It was in 1921 that the great 

discovery of the Indus Valley civilization 

was made, with the investigation of two of 

its great cities at Mohenjodaro and 

Harappa. This civilization was already 

flourishing shortly after 3000 BC. Other 

archaeological excavations in western 

Pakistan have found evidence of the 

cultivation of cereal crops such as barley, 

einkorn, emmer and bread wheat preceding 

6000 BC (Renfrew 1987: 183, 190). 

Based on archaeological evidence, it is 

generally accepted that the agriculture 

originated in the Fertile Crescent of the 

Near East about 12,000 years ago and that


new cereal crops, as well as domesticated 

sheep, goat and probably cattle spread via 

Anatolia all over Europe. It has also been 

suggested that the global expansion of 

farming included also the dispersal of 

genes and languages (Haak 2005, Renfrew 

1987: 266). However, genetic evidence 

suggests firmly that there were at least two 

independent domestications of cattle, 

sheep, pig and water buffalo. In addition to 

the Fertile Crescent, cattle and sheep were 

also domesticated on the Indian subcontinent 

(Loftus 1994, Bradley 2000). In 

this paper, we will attempt to demonstrate 

that there is genetic and linguistic evidence 

that the expansion of herding, from the 

Indian sub-continent, was also 

accompanied by the dispersal of genes and 

languages. 

From the Greek historian Herodotus, 

who was describing notable events 

occurring during his lifetime and the times 

before ~2,500 years ago, we learn that the 

Indians were more numerous than any 

other nation that he was acquainted with 

and paid tribute exceeding that of every 

other people, 360 talents of gold-dust, to 

the Persian king Darius. From his accounts 

we also learn, that in his day, the tribes of 

Indians were numerous and did not all 

speak the same language; some were 

44 

nomads others not (Herodotus 1942: 259- 

264). 

It is noteworthy how little have things 

changed in the last 2,500 years, since 

Herodotus. Even now, the population of the 

Indian sub-continent, including Pakistan, 

Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India 

proper, is the largest on the planet and 

totals nearly 1.5 billion humans, 

representing ~23% of the world’s 

population. This is higher than the 

population of China or any other nation. 

Many languages are still spoken in India; 

Hindi speakers being the largest population 

Similarly for the Slavs in Europe: 

Herodotus writes, »The Thracians are the 

most powerful people in the world, except, 

of course, the Indians; and if they had one 

head, or were agreed among themselves, it 

is my belief that their match could not be 

found anywhere, and that they would very 

far surpass all other nations. But such union 

is impossible for 

them, and there are no means for ever 

bringing it about. Herein, therefore, 

consists their weakness. The Thracians bear 

many names in the different regions of 

their country, but all of them have like 

usages in every respect, excepting only the 

Getae, the Trausi and those who dwell 

above the people of Creston« (Herodotus:


374). Alinei has advanced a hypothesis 

based on the historical and linguistic 

evidence that Thracians was the name 

Herodotus gave to the Slavs owing to the 

fact that the Thracians were one of the most 

powerful and representative elites of the 

Slavic speaking Eastern Europe (Alinei 

2003). Modern day relative population 

numbers appear to reflect those of the 

ancient world. The population on the Indian 

sub-continent is still the largest in the 

world and the Slavic speakers form the 

most numerous language group in Europe 

and they occupy more than one half of the 

landmass of Europe (Rand McNally 1980). 

Linguistic comparisons 

It is necessary to mention that over the 

millennia many changes occurred in Indian 

languages and that these changes resulted 

in the origin of a number of tongues, for 

many of which Sanskrit can be regarded as 

proto-language. The changes of this type 

(ancestor-descendent) are illustrated 

below by Sanskrit and Hindi 

correspondences. It is obvious that through 

the ages many changes were happening in 

the Slavic proto-language as well, which 

resulted in the formation of modern Slavic 

tongues. The differences of this type 

(sister-sister) are illustrated below and in 

45 

the Appendix by the comparison of Russian 

and Slovenian. The tables in the Appendix 

also allow the comparison of the two Slavic 

languages with their more remote cousin 

Hindi together with their ancestor Sanskrit. 

We cite here the most striking similarities 

from elemental and agro-pastoral 

vocabulary (for more complete lists see 

Skulj et al. 2006) and semantically 

structured comparisons of cereal farming 

terminology. The corpus for farming 

comparisons was initially extracted from 

Russian proverbs related to agriculture 

collected by V. I. Dal’ (1994: 563-567) and 

later completed with semantically and 

morphologically related words. 

C. Renfrew notes that, despite the 

confusion which surrounds the question of 

the origins of the Indo-European languages, 

there remains much value in the 

comparative method, and the approach is 

indeed one of the most useful ways to 

study the relationship between them. If the 

languages with the related words are 

geographically far apart, the linguistic 

palaeontologist can argue that borrowing 

from one by another is unlikely. Thus the 

basic principle of linguistic palaeontology 

is that if the Indo-European can be shown 

by linguistic analysis to have had the name 

of a specific thing within their protolexicon, 

then they can be assumed to have


been acquainted with the thing itself 

(Renfrew 1987: 183). 

M. Alinei has taken this concept, in an 

innovative way, a step further, naming it 

‘lexical self-dating’ and has shown that it 

can be applied to the dating of historical 

events (Alinei 2004). 

It is evident from the linguistic 

comparisons as shown in the Appendices 

that, Sanskrit and Slavic languages share 

many cognates of the pre-pastoral and 

pastoral terminology, which would indicate 

a common origin or a common homeland 

prior to and during the 

domestication of the livestock such as 

cattle and sheep. However, this close 

linguistic affinity does not continue with 

the domestication of the cereals. At the 

cereal farming stage of their development, 

this linguistic similarity ends abruptly. 

In the Appendix under Farming, it is 

very apparent that there is no obvious 

similarity in the cereal farming 

terminology between Slavic and Indo- 

Aryan languages. This lack of 

resemblances in the terminology 

describing the cereal farming instruments, 

methods and products is evident, despite 

an attempt to select the words that are 

closest in sound and meaning. Some 

similarities would be expected, particularly 

46 

in the names of the plants and cereals used 

for food, given that wild grasses (wild 

cereals) were utilized by Levantine 

foragers as early as 19,500 years ago and 

have been inferred to have been used by 

aboriginal Australians perhaps as far back 

as 30,000 years ago (Fuller 2002). 

Herodotus writing ~2500 years ago also 

reports: »There is another set of Indians 

whose customs are very different. They 

refuse to put any live animal to death; they 

sow no corn, and have no dwelling-houses. 

Vegetables are their only food. There is a 

plant which grows wild in their country, 

bearing seed about the size of millet-seed 

in a calyx: their wont is to gather this seed 

and having boiled it, calyx and all, to use it 

for food« (Herodotus 1942: 61). 

All of this gives credence to M. Snoj 

who in his etymological dictionary 

proposes that Slovenian ‘•ito’ meaning 

grain, cereals has its origin in ‘•ive•’, 

‘•ivilo’ meaning food, provisions, 

foodstuff and ultimately in ‘•iveti’ (pron. 

zhiveti) to live; this corresponds to ‘•iti’ 

(zhiti) meaning to live (Snoj 1997). This 

is analogous to Sanskrit ‘jîv (jîvati)’ 

meaning to live; ‘jîvâtu’ meaning life (RV) 

and also victuals, food and ‘jîvala’ meaning 

full of life, animating (AV). 

Renfrew cites W. Lehmann, who 

concluded that on the basis of modern


linguistics, the terms for ‘herd’, ‘cow’, 

‘sheep’, ‘wolf’,‘ grain’ etc. and the lack of 

specific terms for grains or vegetables 

indicates a heavy reliance on animals for 

food. This led to the notions that the Proto- 

Indo-Europeans were nomads. The 

Comparative Method has also been applied 

to the localization of their homeland by 

focusing on the features of the natural 

environment such as names of certain 

animals and trees. This method has also 

been used to make chronological 

inferences (Renfrew 1998: 78-82). 

Similarly, we are making analogous 

chronological inferences, based on 

linguistic and genetic comparisons 

between Indo-Aryans and Slavs, that the 

ancestors of Slavs and Indo-Aryans had a 

common pre-pastoral sojourn involving 

hunting and gathering, followed by 

domestication of sheep and cattle and then 

nomadic pastoral society. The split 

between them appears to have occurred 

during their nomadic pastoral stage, before 

the development of agriculture. Slavs were 

also known historically by other names 

such as Sclavenes, Antes and also Venedi, 

Venethi (Curta 2001: 7); Wenden, Winden, 

Winedas (Little 1957); Veneti>Windisch, 

Vandals (Priestly 1997); Sarmati 

(Ramusio 1604). In addition, the 

Macedonians and the Veneti both belonged 

47 

to the numerous family of nations that was 

usually designated by the collective term 

Thracian (Sotiroff 1971). Furthermore, 

the cultures of Scythians and Sarmatians 

are believed to have been Slavic (Šavli 

1996: 74), but most linguists consider the 

languages to have belonged to northeastern 

Iranian family. 

We know that three-quarters of the 

population on the Indian subcontinent 

speak 

the I-E languages, which are based on 

Sanskrit. Also in Europe, Slavic languages 

share many linguistic and grammatical 

similarities with Sanskrit, particularly 

Vedic Sanskrit. It is enigmatic that the 

Slovenian language, bordering on Italy and 

Austria, still shares more linguistic 

similarities with the Sanskrit, than with the 

neighboring languages. In addition, 

Slovenians also have greater genetic 

similarity, with respect to R1a1 frequency, 

to the extant Indo-Aryan speaking 

populations of India, than to their European 

neighbors to the west. Furthermore, 

Slovenian language, due to its archaic 

character, still preserves many lexical and 

grammatical forms present in the Sanskrit, 

but no longer used in the present day Indic 

languages and most I-E languages. The still 

active daily usage of the dual in the 

grammatical forms of the nouns and the


verbs is noteworthy. The conjugation of the 

verb ‘to be’ is illustrative of this similarity 

with Sanskrit (Skulj & Sharda 2001, Narale 

2004p.101). 

Table 1. The Present Tense Conjugation and the Imperative of the verb ‘to be’ 

Sanskrit Slovenian Russian OCS* Hindi English 

Sing. Asmi sem ja jest’ iesm’ maim hum I am 

Asi si tyjest’ iesi tuhai you are 

Asti je on jest’ iest’ vahai he is 

Dual Sva sva X jesve X X 

Stha sta X jesta X X 

Sta sta X jeste X X 

Plural Sma smo my jest’ jesm ham haim we are 

Stha ste vyjest’ jeste tum ho you are 

Santi so onijest’ sut’ ve haim they are 

* OCS is a common abbreviation for the Old Church Slavonic (or Slavic) 

Transliteration Legend: 

Russian transliteration generally follows the guidelines of The Random House 

College Dictionary. 

Slovenian pronunciation is similar to Russian: c is pronuciated as TS; è as CH; j as 

Y; š as SH; z as ZH. 

Sanskrit transliteration of Devanagari follows primarily A Sanskrit-English 

Dictionary com-piled by M. Monier-Williams and Sanskrit for English Speaking 

People by A. Ratnakar, where English is used as the base but: æ is pronounced as 

CH; œ as SH; dot under a letter denotes a cerebral letter. 

Hindi transliteration follows the Sanskrit. In the Appendix: m. means 

masculine; f. feminine; n. neuter; f.p. feminine plural; v. verb 

Table 2. Imperative of Sanskrit verb ‘bhû,bhavati’ meaning to be, become 

Sanskrit Slovenian Russian OCS Hindi English 

Sing. bodhi bodi bud’ ho be 

Dual bhavatâm bodita 

Plural bhavata bodite X X X 

48


Slovenian language shows more similarity 

with Sanskrit than Russian and Hindi: 

it kept all the forms and the dual closer 

to Sanskrit. A very similar picture can be 

observed in the comparison of noun declensions. 

The Sanskrit noun ‘mâti’, chosen 

as a typical example and shown below 

declined in singular number, has 

Table 3. Declination of the Sanskrit noun ‘mâti’ 

Sanskrit Slovenian Russian Hindi English 

nominative mâtâ mati mat’ mâtâ mother 

accusative mâtâram mater mat’ mâtâ ko mother 

instrumental mâtrâ materjo materju mâtâ ne, se by mother 

dative mâtre materi materi mâtâ ke liye to mother 

ablative mâtur matere - mâtâ se from mother 

genitive mâtur matere materi mâtâ ka of mother, mother’s 

locative mâtari materi materi mâtâ men on mother 

vocative mâtar mati - he mâtâ mother 

Furthermore, in addition to similarities in vocabulary (see Appendix), 

declensions and conjugations, there are also additional morphological similarities, 

as reflected in many derived forms. 

49 

eight forms. In all compared languages, 

same or similar endings and suffixes are 

used to construct declension forms but 

both modern Russian and Hindi lack several 

forms if compared to Sanskrit. Once 

again Slovenian language shows more 

similarity with Sanskrit than Russian and 

Hindi: it kept more forms and also the 

dual along with the plural.


Table 4. Verbs > nouns (Suffixes -sna, -nje, -n’; -ti, -tje) 

Sanskrit Sanskrit Slovenian Russian Hindi English 

Verb Noun Noun Noun Noun Noun 

bhî bhiyas bojazen bojazn’ bhay fear, apprehension 

bhû bhûtî bitje bytije hastî,astitva being, existence 

jîv jîvana •ivenje(arch.) •izn’ jîvan life 

jîv jîvitva •ivetje (arch.) •itje (arch.) astitva (living) life 

jîv jîvina •ivina (cattle) •ivotina jîv living being 

jna jñâna znanje znanie jñâna knowledge 

mi mâra mor, mora mor maran death, pestilence 

mi mitaka mrtvak mirtvjec mritak dead man, corpse 

prach praœna (v)prašanje vopros praœ question, query 

prach prasa prièa pritèa (fable) priææha statement in debate 

snâ snâna sna•enje X snâna bathing, cleansing 

sthâ sthâna stanje sostojanije sthiti state, condition 

sthâ sthâna stan stan(ica) sthân abode, dwelling 

utthâ utthâna vstanje vstavanije utthân rising, resurrection 

utthâ utthâya vstaja stoja (p.p.) utthanâ standing up 

udvâs udvâsa odveza otvjaz muta karnâ setting free 

(yvanije) 

(p.p.) - past participle 

The examples above show that many 

derived Slovenian nouns formed on verbal 

stems use derivative suffixes that are very 

similar to the corresponding suffixes in 

Sanskrit. Both Slovenian and Russian kept 

one of the most archaic suffixes ‘-tih’ (Cf. 

Meillet 1 964 p.273) in the noun ‘bitjebytije’ 

corresponding to Sanskrit ‘bhûtî’. 

However in other verbal nouns, Russian 

often appends on more suffix in addition 

to the initial form of the verbal noun: it 

50 

can be the suffix ‘-nije’ corresponding to 

the very characteristic Sanskrit suffix ‘-na’ 

(stojanije, otvjaz(anije)) or the typical 

Russian suffix’-, ec, ic(a) (mertvjec, 

stan(ica)). Some corresponding Russian 

words changed their meaning or have to be 

qualified as archaic. Hindi often has no 

corresponding noun at all or uses a verbal 

periphrase (hastî, astitva, muta karnâ). 

The situation is more or less the same 

in the formation of verbal adjectives.


Table 5. Verb > verbal adjective (Suffixes -ena, -ev; -ta) 


Verb Adjective Adjective Adjective Adjective 

bhî bhiyasâna bojazen bojazjen bhîru fearful, timid 

jîv Jîva •iv •iv jîvit living, alive 

jna Jña znan znakom jânnâ familiar with 

mi Mita mrtev mjortv mrit dead, rigid 

pâ Pîta pitan upitan (fed) piye-hue drunk, suckled 

prî priyatva prijeten prijaten priya pleasing, being 

dear 

prî Purna poln napolnen pûrn filled, full 

snâ Snâta sna•en èišèen snât washed, cleansed 

siv Syûta šivan, sešit sšit sewn 

The verbal adjective is derived directly from the verbal root and not from a tense 

stem (Beekes 1995: 250). Slovenian shows most similarities with Sanskrit, Russian 

often adds a prefix or another suffix, and Hindi often lacks corresponding adjective. 

Examples below illustrate similarities between Sanskrit and Slavic languages in 

formation of active and causative verbs and nouns. 

Table 6. Verbs: active > causative (Prefix o-, stem change to -o-) 


jîv Jîvati •iveti •it’ jînâ to live, be alive 

jîv Ajîjivat o•iveti o•ivit’ jîlânâ restore to life, make alive 

pâ pibati, pâti piti pit’ pînâ to drink, swallow 

pâ -yayati, pîyate pojiti poit’ pîlanâ to cause to drink 

pâ pû (drinking) pupati pit’ pînâ to drink 

Pi pay ate pitati pitat’ pâlanâ to fatten, cause to swell 

Table 7. Verbal nouns: active > causative (Stem change to -o-) 


Verb Noun Noun Noun Noun Noun 

mi mityu mrtje umiranie maranâ dying 

mi mâraa morjenje morjenje mâranâ killing, causing to die 

pâ > pî pîti pitje pitjo pînâ drinking 

pâ pâyana pojenje pojenije pîlânâ causing or giving to 

drink 

51


Just as Sanskrit, Slavic languages use prefixes (o•iveti, o•ivit’) or change the stem 

vowel to ‘-o-’ (pojiti, poit’; morjenje, morjenje; pojenje, pojenije) to form the causative 

but Hindi does not allow to discern a similar pattern. 

Many prefixed verbs and corresponding nouns show similarities between Indic and Slavic 

languages. 

Table 8. Prefixed verbs (pra-, ud-) 


pra-dru (-dravati) pridrveti prepustit pradrava to hasten towards, rush upon 

pra-pat (-patati) propasti propast’ prapâd to fall down, lose 

prati-vah (-vahati) privesti privest’ pravâãalânâ to lead or draw towards 

ud-â-vas (vasati) odvzeti udvas to remove 

ud-â-vah (-vahati) odvesti otvest’ vahan karnâ to lead away; marry 

ud-i (eti) oditi ujti / otojti ua to go, march off 

Table 9.Prefixed verbs and corresponding nouns (Suffixes -va, -na , -nje) 


verb pra-dhâ (-dhatte)pradhâna prodati predat’(give out) pradânkarnâ to give 

away, sell 

verb pra-dî (-dîryate) predreti(pierce) prodrat’ phanâ to split open 

noun Pradara Prodor, razdor (quarrel) Pradara rout of an army 

prodor 

verb pra-stu (-stauti) predstaviti predstavit’ prastut karnâ introduce as a 

topic 

noun prastâva predstava predstavljenije prastut introduction 

verb prati-budh (-budhyate) pradara prebuditi prabodh karnâ to awaken, 

noun pratibodhanâ prebud, prebujenje probu•djenije pratibodhân awaking 

Verb prati-jñâ (-jânâti) priznati priznat’ pratijñâ to admit, consent 

noun pratijñâna priznanje priznanije pratijñâ admission, assertion 

verb jalam-pâ (pâti) •lampati hljupat’ jalpinâj to drink water the 

noun jalap âna •lampanje hljupanjej alpînâ drinking water 

Behind phonetic changes occurred in 

Slavic languages, it is still possible to 

recognize prefixes corresponding to the 

Sanskrit prefixes ‘pra-’ and ‘ud-’. Russian, 

however, changed the meaning of derived 

verbs or used a different suffix to form a 

noun more often than Slovenian. 

52 

The morphological tendencies illustrated 

above are confirmed by the view from 

another angle. Above we were looking at 

the same type of derivatives from different 

stems. Below we show different type of 

derivatives from the same stem.


Table 10. Verbal family of derivatives from stem ‘vid > vedati, vidati, vindati’; to 

know, percieve, understand 


vid > veda (n.) veda vedjenije veda knowledge 

vid > vedi (n.) vedec v’ed’ma (witch) vidvân wise man 

vid > vedin (adj.) veden svedušè vidvân knowing 

vid > vitta (adj.) viden vedom gñat known 

vid > vindu (adj.) (Vind > Venet)? jânkâr familiar or 

acquainted with 

(n.) - noun (adj.) - adjective 

As in all other examples, the closest 

phonetic and semantic correspondences 

can be observed between Sanskrit and 

Slovenian words. Two out of four Hindi 

words diverse more from Sanskrit than 

Slovenian ones in form (phonetic 

epenthesis ‘vidvân’) and one word does not 

exist because the corresponding adjective 

uses a different stem (‘gñat’). Russian 

examples also confirm the derivation 

tendencies noticed earlier: it looks like the 

Russian language normalized its derivative 

suffixes (vedje-nije, (s)ved-ušè, ved-om) 

unlike the Slovenian that often keeps the 

original form of the word. Typical for the 

Russian examples change of meaning also 

occurs within this derivative paradigm. The 

Russian word ‘ved’ma’ meaning ‘a witch’ 

can be linked to the Sanskrit stem ‘vid’ for 

two reasons: first, because all other words 

of the family show the same phonetic 

change ‘vid > ved’; second, because the 

53 

suffix ‘-ma’, according to Meillet (1964: 

274), is known to form agent nouns in 

Sanskrit (Cf.: dhar-ma- ‘qui tient’ = ‘the 

one who holds’; brahma- ‘prëtre’=’priest’) 

and corresponds to the Indo-European 

suffix ‘-men’. The corresponding Greek 

noun ‘ßä-ìùí’ [id-mon] meaning ‘the one 

who knows’(‘qui sait’ in Meillet 1964: 

275) also helps to link ‘ved’ma’ to ‘vid’ with 

the meaning ‘a woman who possesses some 

esoteric knowledge’. 

The fact that Slovenian seems to be closer 

to Sanskrit than other Slavic languages is 

important in different regards. From the 

linguistic point of view, Sanskrit - 

Slovenian -Russian comparisons provide 

unexpected insights into etymology. For 

instance, while working on this paper we 

were able to see many missing links that 

cannot be discovered by comparing 

Sanskrit with Old Church Slavic, as it is


usually done in Indo-European linguistics 

(Cf.: Meier-Brügger 2003) for the simple 

reason that old scriptures use quite limited 

vocabulary. For instance, it is possible to 

see that the Russian verb ‘hljupat’ - ‘make 

ugly noises while drinking’ can be linked 

to the Sanskrit compound ‘jalam-pâ (pâti)’- 

‘drink water’ only after coming across the 

Slovenian compound verb ‘•lampati’ with 

the meaning close to Russian. From the 

genetic point of view, this study of 

different degrees of language resemblance 

can be inspiring for a research seeking to 

understand to what extent linguistic 

affinities can be backed by genetic 

similarities. 

Genetic comparisons 

Two localities are considered more alike 

if the same haplogroups occur at similar 

frequencies and if the various haplogroups 

differ by fewer mutations. Clines are 

usually associated with distinct population 

movements. Demic diffusion, which is a 

combination of demographic growth, range 

expansion and limited admixture, is an 

example of a form of directional 

population expansion causing allelefrequency 

clines. Clines maybe generated 

by loss of genetic variation or by admixture 

between two genetically distinct groups 

initially separated by a non-populated area 

54 

(Karafet et al. 2001). 

Bradley (2000) shows that the motif of 

dual domestication is a common one in 

livestock. On the basis of mtDNA results, 

he demonstrates that sheep and cattle were 

domesticated both in the Fertile Crescent 

and also on the Indian sub-continent. It can 

be inferred that the domestication of the 

sheep and cattle on the Indian sub-continent 

is the likely source of the linguistic 

similarity between Indo-Aryan and Slavic 

terminology relating to the sheep and cattle 

(Skulj et al. 2006). 

In addition to linguistic similarities, the 

comparisons of the human genetic markers 

on the Y-Chromosome also indicate close 

relationship. Geneticists, studying the 

human DNA note that a Y-Chromosome 

genetic marker which they named, 

according to Y Chromosome Consortium, 

haplogroup R1a1 (HG3 according to 

Rosser 2000 nomenclature) is the most 

common among the Slavic populations in 

Europe and Indo-Aryans in India, at 47% 

and 30% respectively; but is found to be 

as high as 51% in Punjab (Kivisild et al. 

2002) - (Figure 1). If we do the math, using 

the published statistics, we see that in 

Europe, ~61 million Slavic speaking males 

have this genetic marker, but on the Indian 

sub-continent, the number is almost four


times higher, at ~240 million males. 

Some may argue that this genetic (Figure 

1) and linguistic affinity (Tables 1-9 and 

Appendix) is due to the recent arrival of 

the Vedic Aryans from India into Central 

Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. 

However, such a recent migration from the 

Southeast Asia, would have also picked up 

and brought a Finno-Ugric genetic marker 

Haplogroup N3 (HG16 of Rosser’s 

nomenclature) to the Balkans, since it is 

widely distributed in Russia and Ukrainebetween 

Black Sea and the Baltic Sea 

(Rosser et al. 2000) - (Figure 3). The 

Uralic-speaking people are suggested to 

have been descendants of the huntergatherers 

who lived in the periglacial zone 

between the Carpathian Mountains and the 

Volga River during the last glacial 

maximum and have inhabited the Baltic 

area for ~10,000 years (Laitinen et al. 

2002). 

It is significant that this Hg N3 genetic 

marker has not been found either south of 

the Carpathian Mountains, central Europe 

nor in the Balkans. This would indicate that 

the populations carrying the Hg R1a1 came 

55 

to the Balkans before the Finno-Ugric 

population spread into Northeastern 

Europe, European Russia and Ukraine 

about 10,000 years ago. Therefore, the 

R1a1 expansion from the Indian subcontinent 

to the Balkans must have 

occurred prior to this Finno-Ugric 

expansion ~10,000 years ago; thus avoiding 

an mixing with the populations with the 

Finno-Ugric genetic marker. 

The reverse major population movement, 

from Europe to India, within the last 

10,000 years, is highly unlikely. Such a 

migration would have brought a Finno- 

Ugric genetic marker Hg N3 and also the 

palaeolithic, more than 20,000 years old 

Hg I to India. This Hg I genetic marker is 

common throughout Europe; the highest 

frequencies have been found in the Balkans 

and is a likely signature of a Balkan 

population re-expansion after the Last 

Glacial Maximum (Marjanovic et al. 2005, 

Pericic et al. 2005). It is important to note 

that these two genetic markers, Hg N3 and 

Hg I, have not been detected in India 

(Cordaux et al. 2004, Sengupta et al. 2006).


Table 11. Hg R1a1 & Hg I Y-chromosome frequencies in Eurasia 

Population HgR1a1 HgI 

Basques % 0 Rosser et al 2000 % 6 Rootsi et al 2004 

Irish 1 Rosser et al 2000 11 Rootsi et al 2004 

Western Europe 4 Kivisild et al 2002 3-39 Rootsi et al 2004 

Germans 30 Rosser et al 2000 20 Rosser et al 2000 

Poles 54 Rosser et al 2000 18 Rootsi et al 2004 

Sorbs 63 Behar et al 2003 18 Behar et al 2003 

Czechs 38 Rosser et al 2000 14 Rootsi et al 2004 

Slovaks 47 Rosser et al 2000 14 Rootsi et al 2004 

Slovenians 37 Rosser et al 2000 38 Rootsi et al 2004 

Croats 29 Semino et al 2000 38 Rootsi et al 2004 

Bosniacs 15 Marjanovic et al 2005 48 Marjanovic et al 2005 

Macedonians 35 Semino et al 2000 30 Rootsi et al 2004 

Belarussians 39 Rosser et al 2000 19 Rootsi et al 2004 

Ukrainians 44 Kharkov et al 2004 22 Rootsi et al 2004 

Russians/North 43 Nasidze et al 2005 5 Rootsi et al 2004 

Russians/Moscow 47 Rosser et al 2000 19 Rootsi et al 2004 

Russians/Tashkent 47 Nasidze et al 2005 

Anatolia & Caucasus 5 Kivisild et al 2002 0-6 Rootsi et al 2004 

Central Asia 2 Rootsi et al 2004 

Iran 11 Kivisild et al 2002 0 Rootsi et al 2004 

Pakistan 37 Firasat et al 2007 1 Sengupta et al 2006 

Burusho 28 Qamar et al 2002 

Pathan 45 Qamar et al 2002 

Sindhi 49 Qamar et al 2002 

India 30 Kivisild et al 2002 0 Sengupta et al 2006 

Cordaux et al 2004 

Punjab 51 Kivisild et al 2002 

Gujarat 24 Kivisild et al 2002 

West Bengal 39 Kivisild et al 2002 

Sri Lanka 24 Kivisild et al 2002 

Nepal/Kathmandu 35 Gayden et al 2007 

Bangladesh (W. Bengal) 39 Kivisild et al 2002 

56


Figure 1: Hg R1a1 Y-Chromosome frequencies in Europe, West Asia and Indian sub-contintent 

11 1 8. 1 9 1 9 

A 

14-,-, 3 

- 

39 47 22 

Figure 2: Hg I Y-Chromosome frequencies in Europe, West Asia and Indian sub-contintent 

57


Figure 3: Hg N3 Y-Chromosome frequencies in Europe, West Asia and Indian sub-contintent 

The human population growth over 

millennia 

Until Meave Leakey of Kenya found new 

evidence, it was believed that the first and 

oldest species of our family Homo habilis, 

evolved into Homo erectus, and finally into 

Homo sapiens. New evidence shows that 

the two earlier species lived side by side 

about 1.5 million years ago in Kenya and 

that they have a common still-undiscovered 

ancestor that probably lived two to three 

million years ago. After studying the 

fossils, Leakey’s team announced their 

findings and concluded that is was time to 

redraw the family tree and rethink other 

ideas about human evolutionary theory, 

especially about our most immediate 

ancestor, Homo erectus (Borenstein 

2007). 

58 

Now the homo sapiens population is 

estimated at 6.5 billion. Over the millennia 

the human population growth has been 

closely associated with the social 

organization and with the technologically 

assisted food production. Historically, 

human population has grown very slowly 

and the exponential growth did not begin 

until the last few centuries. 

From Hanson (2000) we learn that many 

authors have informally summarized world 

history as continually accelerating change, 

and that many others have described human 

history as sequences of specific growth 

modes. Human history has also been 

described as slow expansion of huntergatherers, 

followed by faster growth with 

the domestication of animals and plants and


then followed by even faster growth with 

science and industry. The age of human 

population has been estimated by Hawks 

et al. to be 2 million years. From 2 million 

years ago up to about 5,000 BC hunters 

were dominant, then, as the world 

population grew to approximately 5 

million to 20 million, farmers began to 

dominate (Hanson 2000, U.S. Census 

Bureau 2007). 

McEvedy and Jones (1978) estimated that 

12, 000 years ago the human population 

was at approximately 4,000,000; then it 

took 11,500 years of near linear growth to 

reach 425,000,000 in the 15 th century. 

After 1500 AD, the exponential population 

growth began and it took only 400 years 

for the population to reach 1.6 billion in 

the year 1900 AD and then only 100 years 

for the population to reach 6 billion. 

On the other hand, Kremer (1993), went 

back further into pre-history and estimated 

that 1 million years ago, there was already 

a human population of 125,000, which 

grew, albeit very slowly, and reached 4 

million people 12,000 years ago and 

increased to 425 million in 1500 AD. 

The question arises, how many male or Ychromosome 

lineages were in existence 

or came into existence due to mutations 

59 

over a span of 1 million years and how many 

of them are extinct now? A widely accepted 

hypothesis amongst the geneticists is one 

that places all modern humans in Africa, 

within the past 200,000 years, and assigns 

a genetic date of the ancestor of all human 

males at 40,000 to 140,000 years ago 

(Wells 2003: 54-55). At the present time, 

due to mutations, there are 153 different 

known haplogroups world-wide (The Y 

Chromosome Consortium 2002). Indian 

sub-continent shows great genetic 

diversity, since 36 of them are present in 

India and Pakistan (Sengupta et al. 2006) 

and Hg R1a1 being the one with the highest 

frequency of 30% in India (Kivisild et al. 

2002, Wells 2003: 167). 

Origin of’Satem’ Indo-European 

Languages 

In our paper, we do not address the origins 

of human language, which some believe has 

its beginnings 150,000 years ago (The 

Economist, September 22 nd 2007) nor of 

the Indo-European languages, which some 

believe that they have their beginnings in 

central and eastern Anatolia and others 

posit their origin north of the Black Sea. 

From Anatolia, according to some 

hypotheses, the distribution of the early 

form of the language and its successors 

spread into Europe in association with the


farming (Renfrew 1987: 205). However, 

Bandelt et al. (2002) point out that, to 

stretch the origin of language families to 

the Fertile Crescent or nearby regions may 

not explain the real processes, which could 

actually have run in the opposite direction 

or have involved other centers of origin. 

In our paper, we demonstrate that the Slavs 

and Indo-Aryans share both genetic and 

linguistic affinities and that the distribution 

of their ancestors stretching from the 

Balkans, central and northern Europe, also 

north of the Black Sea and along northeastern 

shores of the Caspian Sea and on 

the Indian sub-continent from Punjab to the 

Bay of Bengal and Sri Lanka (Table 11), is 

associated with the nomadic-pastoral age 

and that the subsequent split into Slavic and 

Indo-Aryan speakers predates the origin of 

farming. 

At present, there are a number of 

hypotheses that propose to account for the 

greater similarity of Indians with western 

Eurasians than with the Mongoloid people 

to the east of India. First, there is a widely 

known hypothesis of an invasion of 

nomadic Indo-Aryan tribes around 4,000 

years ago into India, either from the west 

or from the Central Asian steppes in the 

north. Second, there is a more recently 

proposed postulate, which is based on the 

60 

fact that 8,000-9,000 years ago several 

varieties of wheat and other cereals 

reached India, presumably from the Fertile 

Crescent. This hypothesis is supported by 

linguistically based suggestions of a recent 

common root for Elamite and Dravidic 

languages (Kivisild et al. 2000, Wells 

2003: 167). 

In addition to the invasion theories, the 

theory of the indigenous origin of the 

Aryans on the Indian subcontinent has been 

advocated by a number of scholars. The 

indigenous theory is credible since, there 

is no evidence to show that the Vedic 

Aryans were foreigners or that they 

migrated into India within traditional 

memory. Sufficient literary materials are 

available to indicate, that the Vedic Aryans 

themselves regarded Sapta-Sindhu as their 

original home (Ghosh 1951: 220). Ghosh 

also cites H. Güntert and F.R. Schröder who 

have shown that Western Europe is one of 

those areas that were Aryanized last (Ghosh 

1951: 214). This is in agreement with the 

frequency of R1a1; only 4 % in Western 

Europe, 1 % in Irish and 0% in the Basques 

who are the farthest from the Indian subcontinent. 

This is in contrast to high 

frequencies amongst the male Slavs in 

Europe at 47 % the males in India at 30 % 

(Kivisild et al. 2002, Rosser et al. 2000)


numbering 61 million and 169 million 

respectively and 237 million for the whole 

Indian sub-continent. 

Kivisild et al (2000) have found that the 

node of the phylogenic tree of the mtDNA, 

ancestral to more than 90% of the presentday 

typically European maternal lineages, 

is present in India at a relatively high 

frequency. They estimate that the age of 

this ancestral node is greater than 50,000 

years. They have also found that mtDNA 

haplogroup U is the most abundant mtDNA 

variety in India as it is in Europe. 

Furthermore, they believe that there are 

now enough reasons to question the recent 

Indo-Aryan invasion into India some 4,000 

years ago and alternatively to consider 

India as a part of the common gene pool 

ancestral to the diversity of human 

maternal lineages in Europe. 

Age of Hg R1a1 (time since 

coalescence) 

Bandelt et al. (2002) express some caveats 

regarding the coalescence times, which 

play an integral part in historical genetics, 

because there has been an over-emphasis 

on superficial population-genetics 

formalizations and insufficient attention to 

the resources of other disciplines. In 

addition, geneticists are calculating the 

coalescence times using the model of 

61 

random-mating populations of constant 

sizes. This can lead to potentially dramatic 

miscalculations of coalescence times. 

Kharkov et al. (2004) attempt to clarify the 

ethnogenesis of the Slavs in general and 

Eastern Slavs in particular, by studying the 

Y-chromosome diversity in the Ukrainians 

and other populations of Eurasia. They 

agree with some of the published 

estimates, that Hg R1a1 coalesced in a 

common ancestor 2,500 to 3,800 years 

ago. Although, in their paper, they alluded 

to the relatively high frequency of R1a1 in 

India and Pakistan, they did not inquire into 

the significance of such large numbers of 

R1a1 carriers, both on the Indian subcontinent 

and amongst the Slavs, in Europe. 

They also failed to demonstrate how R1a1 

could become one of the most widespread 

and also the most numerous genetic 

markers both in Europe and on the Indian 

sub-continent during a relatively short 

period of time, i.e. less than 4,000 years. 

They note that haplogroup (Hg) R1a1 is the 

most common Y-chromosome variant 

among the Ukrainians at ~ 44%. Upon 

further analysis of the published results in 

the literature, it appears that Hg R1a1 is 

one of the most frequent genetic markers 

in the world. It is most frequent in the 

populations speaking ‘satem’ I-E languages,


namely the Slavic speakers in Europe and 

the Indo-Aryan speakers on the Indian subcontinent. 

If we do the math, using the US 

Census I. P. Center population figures and 

the percentages published in the literature 

(Rosser et al. 2000, Semino et al. 2000, 

Pericic et al. 2005, Sengupta et al. 2006, 

Kivisild et al. 2002) we see that in Europe, 

~61 million Slavic speaking males have the 

Hg R1a1 genetic marker; but in India the 

number is more than two and a half times 

higher, at ~170 million males. When 

considering the Indian sub-continent as a 

whole, the number is ~240 million or 

almost four times higher than in the Slavic 

populations. In addition this genetic 

marker is also present in smaller numbers 

in Western Europe, Scandinavia, Baltic 

States, Caucasus, Turkey and Central Asian 

countries and totals ~25.5 million. In total 

this represents more than 10 % of the male 

population of the world. Sengupta et al. 

(2006) also report that the R1a1 frequency 

in I-E speakers of Upper Castes is at 45%, 

which is similar to frequencies in the Slavic 

populations of Europe. This would indicate 

that a similar increase of Hg R1a1, relative 

to populations with other genetic markers, 

took place among the Slavic populations 

of Europe as in the caste populations of 

India. 

62 

In order to do a ‘reality check’ on the age 

of Hg R1a1, we will use a macro-analytical 

approach with a global perspective and 

consider the recorded genealogies of 

known historical individuals, some in a 

position of privilege, others just common 

men. We will then compare the results 

with the estimated coalescence dates of Hg 

R1a1-M17 lineage found in the literature, 

where the micro-analytical approach, based 

on mutation rates, is used for determining 

the ages of Y-Chromosome mutations. 

Mutation Rate is defined as the rate at 

which a genetic marker mutates or changes 

over time (Kerchner 2007). There is as yet 

no general agreement on the mutation rate 

at an average Y-Chromosome short-tandem 

repeat locus; the range is quite wide; 

0.00069 per 25 years (Zhivotovsky et al. 

2004); 0.00069 per locus per mutation, 

with an intergeneration time of 25 years 

(Gayden et al. 2007); 0.00026 per 20 years 

(Forster et al. 2000); 0.002 per generation 

(Kerchner 2007) and 0.0018 per 

generation (Quintana-Murci et al. 2001). 

The subsequent calculated age estimates 

are then based on these mutation rates. 

Understandably, there is also no consensus 

on the length of time from coalescence, 

for the first male with Hg R1a1 mutation, 

which is the most recent common ancestor


for the largest percentage of Indo-Aryans 

and Slavs. These ages vary from 1,650- 

4260 years (Kayser et al. 2000); 2,500- 

3,800 years (Kharkov et al. 2004); 3,800 

years (Zerjal et al. 1999); 7,500 years 

(Karafet et al. 1999); 10,000-15,000 years 

(Wells 2003:176) and Semino et al. 

(2000) posit that it expanded from the 

present day Ukraine after Last Glacial 

Maximum 20,000 to 13,000 years ago. 

Passarino et al (2001) are very candid 

about dating: »Unfortunately, poor 

knowledge of the molecular basis of 49a,f 

system and the complete ignorance of the 

mutational rate do not allow any attempt 

to date this phylogeny. However, an 

attempt to date the Eu19 (R1a1 - M17) 

lineage was made by combining the microsatellite 

variations resulting from the 

analysis of 243 Y chromosomes. By the 

two approaches used, ages of 7,654 and 

13,031 years were obtained.« 

For this reason, it is worthwhile to compare 

the age estimates, which are based on 

mutation rates, with the reproductive 

capabilities of some known historical men, 

since the number of their descendants, over 

known time period, integrates all the 

factors that influenced their procreation 

and in some cases made their progeny 

grow, not only in numbers, but also in 

63 

relation to the population of the world. By 

comparing these dates with the ones 

obtained by the mutation rates, it is 

possible to test the validity of the results 

obtained by the mutation rate method and 

also to determine, what is a reasonable time 

interval, for more than 325 million men, 

representing ~ 10 % of the world’s male 

population, now living with this Hg R1a1 

mutation, to come into existence; starting 

from a single individual. For example: 

A. Confucius. Year 2009 will coincide 

with the 2,560 th anniversary of this great 

philosopher’s birth. He now has about 3 

million descendants, which includes 

female relatives, world wide. This number 

represents ~ 0.23 % of the population of 

China and 0.046 % of the world’s 

population. From the growth rate it can be 

seen that Confucius’ clan grew at a faster 

rate than the population of the world, which 

is estimated to have been 95 million in 551 

BC (US Census Bureau 2007) and at birth 

he represented only 0.000001 % of the 

world’s population. On the average, an 

individual born at the same time, as 

Confucius, would have only ~68 

descendants now. 

Assuming a linear growth in relation to the 

world’s population, it will require 217 time 

periods of 2560 years or 555,520 years


for the descendants of Confucius to reach 

10 % of the population world’s population. 

(10 : 0.046 x 2560 = 555,520) 

B. Macedonian cavalry with Hg I-170/ 

M223/M379 in Pakistan - Sengupta et al. 

(2006) and Firasat et al (2007) report that 

0.57 % and 0.3 % respectively, of the 

Pakistani males are identified with this 

genetic marker. According to Firasat et al. 

(2007), this genetic marker may have been 

brought by the Greek slaves 150 years 

before Alexander the Great, but more likely 

by the Alexander’s army of 25,000-30,000 

mercenary foot soldiers from Persia and 

West Asia and 5,000-7,000 Macedonian 

cavalry during the invasion 327-323 BC. 

Hg I-M170, which is a component of the 

European Y Chromosome gene pool and 

accounts for 18 % of the total paternal 

lineages, is widespread in Europe, but is 

absent in India. In Europe six 

subhaplogroups of HgI-M 170 have been 

reported (Rootsiet al. 2004). 

In Pakistan only the subhaplogroup I- 

M223/M379 is found. The subhaplogroup 

I-M223 is relatively rare in Europe, 

nevertheless, it is also found amongst the 

Slavic speakers in the Balkans at 0.4 % 

(Marjanovic et al. 2005). Assuming that the 

genetic marker was brought to Pakistan by 

the Macedonian cavalry of the Alexander 

64 

the Great and by using the data provided by 

Firasat et al. (2007), it is apparent that it 

took ~2,300 years for this genetic marker 

to reach ~ 0.43 % of the Pakistani male 

population of 82.4 million or 354,000. 

From a global perspective, 354,000 males 

represent 0.011 % of the world’s male 

population. However, an average individual 

born 2,300 years ago would now have only 

- 40 descendants. 

Therefore, the Macedonian cavalryman, 

perhaps there was more than one individual 

with this genetic marker, was reproducing 

faster than the population of the world over 

this period of 2,300 years. By giving credit 

to only one individual and thus increase the 

compounding rate, we can estimate the 

length of time that, it would take for the 

descendants to reach 10 % of the world’s 

population. Since it took 2,300 years to 

reach 0.011% of the world’s population 

and assuming a linear growth in relation to 

the world’s population, it will take them 

909 time periods of 2,300 years or 

2,090,700 years to reach 10% of the 

world’s population (10 : 0.011 x 2,300 = 

2,090,700 years). 

C. Giocangga. Geneticist Tyler-Smith 

(2005) has estimated that 1.5 million 

Chinese men are descendants of 

Giocangga, the grandfather of the founder


of the Qing dynasty, from about 500 years 

ago. His descendants were in a privileged 

position and the extraordinary number is 

thought to be a result of the many wives 

and concubines his offspring took. Because 

of the special privileges, his children 

would have had a good chance of survival, 

but an average individual has only ~20 

descendants, for that time period. This 

number of 1.5 million males represents 

0.23% of the total male population of 

China, estimated at 660,926,000 males. 

From a global perspective, 1.5 million 

males represent 0.046 % of the world’s 

male population of 3.25 billion. 

Assuming a linear growth, in relation to the 

male population of the world, for the 

descendants of Giocannga, it will require 

217 time periods of 500 years to reach 

10% of the world’s population or ~109,000 

years (10 : 0.046 x 500 = 108,696 years). 

Cohen (2002) in estimating the population 

growth modeled his estimates on the 

compounding interest calculations. With 

his model, he attempted to take into 

consideration natural disasters and the 

subsequent population bottlenecks. 

Consequently, when using the compounding 

interest calculations, he was concerned that 

the population growth could be greatly 

overstated. Recognizing this and using trial 

65 

and error method he estimated that prior 

to the adoption of the agriculture, about 

10,000 years ago, the growth rate had to 

be very near zero, perhaps only 0.003% 

(rate of 0.00003) per year. From then, to 

the time of Columbus, he estimated that 

the rate was also small, at 0.1 % (0.001); 

higher compounding rate would result in a 

historical population greater than it is. He 

gave an example that at the 0.1% 

compounding rate, it would take a group 

of 500 individuals more than a thousand 

years to grow to 1500. 

In our calculations, to estimate how long 

it would be necessary to reach 10 % of the 

global population, starting from a single 

individual, we used a somewhat different 

approach, by using the recorded 

reproduction statistics of the known 

historical individuals and going past the 

exponential population growth of the past 

century, when during this time period of 

1965-1970, the growth rate was ~2.1 % 

(0.021) per year. As a further refinement, 

the simultaneous global population growth 

was also part of the equation used to 

determine the incremental growth rate of 

these historical men against the population 

as a whole. Since it is this incremental 

growth rate that determines the time that 

it would take to grow from one individual 

to millions of human beings representing


more than 10% of the world’s population. 

From the above real time examples, where 

all the descendants grew faster than the 

global population, it is apparent that growth 

of the human populations, having specific 

human traits, be it a genetic marker or a 

surname, relative to the rest of the 

population, is a long term process. The 

process of growth, relative to the rest of 

the population, has to be accompanied with 

special attributes not present in the 

surrounding population. This ‘reproductive 

fitness advantage’ (RFA), can be in the form 

of fertility or reproductive fitness, special 

privileges or resistance to disease which 

ensures the survival of the progeny and 

allows the privileged population to grow 

faster than the surrounding population. This 

is analogous to the mechanics of a similar 

process such as language replacement, 

which C. Renfrew named ‘elite dominance’ 

(Renfrew 1998: 95,132). 

To account for the relatively high 

frequency of Hg R1a1, there is no reason 

to believe that the Slavic populations have 

an inherently higher reproduction rate than 

surrounding populations, due to 

reproductive fitness. For example, the 

population of Russia is now decreasing and 

will continue to decrease into the 

foreseeable future, relative to other 

66 

countries (The Economist, June 2007). 

This creates a dilemma. How could the 

male population with this genetic marker 

have grown to more than ~325 million? 

Obviously, higher rate of growth, relative 

to other populations, coupled with a long 

time period since coalescence was needed 

to achieve this. These are the only two ways 

that could have created the necessary 

conditions to have one man leave enough 

descendants to go from ~ 0 % to 10 % of 

the world’s male population. Factors such 

as economic, cultural, physical, military 

superiority or resistance to disease must 

have been present to a higher degree to 

have a higher population growth rate and 

thus allowed the males with this R1a1 

genetic marker to grow so dominantly and 

to preserve this status in relation to the 

other 152 Y-Chromosome haplogroups of 

the world’s male populations, so that now 

one out of every ten males has this genetic 

marker. 

It is noteworthy that the majority of the 

populations on the Indian subcontinent who 

speak the I-E languages, which are based 

on Sanskrit also have a high frequency of 

the R1a1 genetic marker. Also in Europe, 

Slavic languages share many linguistic and 

grammatical similarities with Sanskrit, 

particularly Vedic Sanskrit. Thus it is


possible to regard R1a1 as an Indo-Aryan 

and Slavic genetic marker. Wells (2003: 

167) calls it Indo-European as a contrast 

to Dravidian genetic markers. 

Based on these linguistic and genetic 

similarities, it is not out of order to 

combine the Slavic and Indian populations 

and the relative percentages of Hg R1a1 

of 47% and 30%, respectively, as reported 

by Kivisild et al. (2002). This means that 

the coalescence of the common ancestor 

of Hg R1a1 would have taken place 

considerably earlier than the Ice Age. Only 

the early coalescence can account for the 

high frequency and wide distribution of Hg 

R1a1 prior to modern day population 

migrations. This reproduction rate is in line 

with that of the historical personage, 

Giocangga, whose descendents would 

require ~109,000 years, to reach 10 % of 

the world’s male population, based on their 

past reproduction rates. Taking into 

consideration the reproduction rates of 

historical individuals, it can be concluded 

that the time since coalescence of Hg R1a1 

must be at least 100,000 years, but very 

likely much more, since this calculation 

is based on reproduction rate of an 

individual not affected by the population 

Botlenecks created by such events as the 

Toba Volcano explosion on the last iceage. 

67 

This age estimate of ~100,000 years 

since coalescence of Hg R1a1, should not 

be discounted as unrealistic, since that area 

of the world has supported human life for 

more than 1 million years (Kremer 1993, 

Zerjal et al. 2002) and humans have been 

speaking for at least 150,000 years (The 

Economist, September 2007 p. 57). New 

discovery of a human lower jawbone, dated 

to be 1.3 million years old, in a limestone 

cave in northern Spain (Hurst 2008), will 

undoubtedly lead to reappraisal of human 

existence in and outside Africa. 

Direction of gene flow 

Some would argue that genetic and 

linguistic affinity between Slavs and Indo- 

Aryans is due to the recent arrivals from 

the east. However, a recent migration from 

the east would have also brought Hg N3 to 

the Balkans, since it is widely distributed 

in Russia and Ukraine - between Black Sea 

and the Baltic Sea, but this genetic marker 

has not been found in the Balkans. This 

indicates that R1a1 migration to the 

Balkans took place before Hg N3 arrived 

in European Russia and Ukraine. Hg N3 has 

the highest frequency amongst the Finns 

at 61% and has been considered a Finno- 

Ugric marker. Laitinen et al. (2002) 

estimate that Finno-Ugric tribes arrived in


the Baltic region 5,000-6,000 years ago. 

Therefore, the Hg R1a1 migration from 

the east to the Balkans must have occurred 

prior to the Hg N3 expansion and thus 

avoided the contact with the populations 

when Hg N3 was already present (Skulj et 

al. 2006). 

Significantly, Hg I-M170 (Figure 2), which 

is posited to be older than Hg R1a1-M17 

and is believed to have expanded from a 

refuge in the northern Balkans after LGM 

(Semino et al. 2000), has not been detected 

in India (Sengupta et al. 2006). Hg I is 

widespread throughout Europe; from 

British Isles to Russia and from Baltic Sea 

to the Balkan peninsula. The frequency is 

particularly high in the Balkans, as high as 

~71% in the Croats of Bosnia- 

Herzegovina. It is frequent in Russia and 

Ukraine at ~20%, and also the rest of 

Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. In 

England the frequency is 18%, Germany 

20%, Denmark 39%, Norway 40%, south 

Sweden 40% and Estonia 19%. The 

estimated age of Hg I is 22, 000 years, 

which would give it an abundance of time 

for expansion, and it is also considerably 

more widely spread in Europe than Hg 

R1a1. It should be stressed that, despite 

the theories of Aryan home in Germany or 

68 

Germanic lands (Ghosh 1951: 213-214), 

Hg I has not been detected in India. This 

would rule out Europe as the home of the 

Aryans after the last Ice Age. Hg I-M170 

has been detected in Pakistan at 0.57 % 

(Sengupta et al. 2006) and at 0.3 % (Firasat 

et al. 2007), where it could have been 

brought by the army of the Alexander the 

Great (Qamar et al. 2002, Firasat et al. 

2007). At lower frequencies, Hg I is found 

in the Near East, Caucasus and Central Asia 

but not in Iran. In the populations of Central 

Asia, the frequency is only 1.5% 

(Marjanovic et al. 2005, Qamar et al. 2002, 

Rootsi et al. 2004). 

Furthermore, another haplogroup can 

provide some insights into the origins of 

the Indo-Aryans. It is Hg K*-M9, which is 

widespread in Asia and appears at high 

frequencies in Koreans at 69 %, 

Mongolians at 25 %, Uzbeks at 15 %, 

Kazakhs at 11 %, Tatars at 9 %, Russians/ 

Tashkent at 6 % (Nasidze et al. 2005), 

Russians/Yaroslavl at 14 % (Malyarchuket 

al. 2004). In India it was not detected in a 

sample of 728 males, but in Pakistan there 

was one individual in a sample size of 176 

or 0.57 % (Sengupta et al. 2006). While 

Kivisild et al. (2002) has found that Hg K* 

(HG26-M9) is absent in Punjab, Andhra 

Pradesh and Sri Lanka, but is present at


0.8% in India as a whole, but at 3.2 % in 

Western Bengal and 3.4 % in Gujarat and 

also in Iran at 3.6 %. From Chatterji 

(1988) we learn that there is a Mongoloid 

stratum in the Himalayas and in the tracts 

immediately to the south, in Assam, in 

North and East Bengal and that he observed 

Sino-Tibetan influence is still present 

there. 

It is significant, that Hg N3 and also Hg I 

did not reach Iran and India. This can be 

taken as another indication that the 

migration(s) carrying Hg R1a1 did not 

originate in Europe. A northern, central or 

east European origin of Hg R1a1, and the 

subsequent expansions and migrations 

would have picked up both Hg I and Hg N3 

chromosomes and the linguistic affinities 

with Sanskrit and taken them eastward in 

the direction of India. However, high 

frequency of Hg R1a1 chromosomes, and 

the high linguistic affinities with Sanskrit 

are primarily common only to Slavic and 

Indo-Aryan populations. This is not the case 

for other European or eastern European 

genetic markers such as Hg I and Hg N3, 

since Hg I and Hg N3 are absent from India. 

Also the virtual absence of Hg K* also rules 

out central Asia or Siberia as the homeland 

of the Indo-Aryans. 

As mentioned before, Hg N3, which is 

69 

widely distributed among Finno-Ugric 

populations where the high frequencies 

occur, is also frequent in the Slavic 

populations surrounding the Baltic and 

Black Sea, where the largest absolute 

numbers occur. This marker, which is 

considered to be as old as R1a1, has not 

reached the Balkans, nor has it migrated to 

India (Skulj 2007) (Figure 3). 

Based on the above mentioned genetic 

markers, one has to conclude that Hg R1a1 

chromosomes came from India and 

reached the Balkans, before Hg N3 

expanded between the Baltic and the Black 

Seas. Also the expansion of Hg I from the 

Balkans was impeded and did not reach 

India. All of this is in agreement and 

supports Out of India Theory (OIT) of the 

‘satem’ branch of the Indo-European 

language family. Furthermore, the 

domestication of cattle in the Indus valley 

and no indication of domestication of 

European aurochs (Edwards et al. 2007) 

further support the OIT. 

That is why it is very difficult to accept the 

relative young age of R1a1, which Karafet 

et al. (1999), Kayser et al. (2000), Kharkov 

et al. (2004), Zerjal et al. (1999) propose 

to have coalesced in a common ancestor 

less than 10,000 years ago. If this R1a1 

genetic marker is one of the youngest, why


is it, in this Darwinian world, one of the 

most prolific and prior to the discovery of 

the Americas was also one of the most 

widely distributed haplogroups? At high 

frequencies, it stretches like an arc north 

of the Black and Caspian Seas from 

southern Adriatic in Europe to the Bay of 

Bengal and Sri Lanka on the Indian subcontinent. 

However, the numerical success of the 

R1a1 in India and in Europe raises some 

obvious questions: 1) In the populations 

north of Black Sea and Caspian Sea where 

Hg I and Hg N3 are at high frequencies: 

- What has prevented the carriers of 

ostensibly much older genetic markers 

from blossoming and taking over the planet 

and leaving R1a1 chromosome in a minor 

role? 

- What prevented N3 from 

supplanting R1a1? 

- What prevented Hg I from doing the 

same, or Hg P which is considered to be 

even older than Hg I? 

2) In the populations south of Black and 

Caspian Seas: 

- Why have the Anatolian and Middle 

East agriculturists, with older aplogroups 

such as Hg J and Hg E, lagged behind 1a1 

70 

populations in numbers, since they would 

have had a head-start in time, agricultural 

food production and technology? 

3) Was the agro-pastoral way of life the 

sole means to provide this advantage, or 

was it a combination of some other form 

of the ‘elite dominance’ in culture, warfare, 

technology or resistance to particular 

diseases that enabled the populations with 

the high frequency of R1a1 chromosome 

to surpass in frequency all others in 

Eurasia? 

How can the high frequency of~10 % of 

Hg R1a1 in the world’s male population 

be accounted for, when the expected 

percentage is less than 1 %, since the 

lineage is just one out of 153 and at the 

same time considered to be one of the 

youngest. S. Wells (2003 p. 84) has 

attempted to explain why certain genetic 

lineages are more numerous than others. 

He offers a rather simplistic explanation, 

based on intelligence and the ruthlessness 

of the founder and his progeny. The 

progenitor was more intelligent than other 

members of his clan. He was also a better 

hunter, since he had better knowledge of 

the animal behavior and devised better tools 

to hunt them. He became their leader; 

members of his clan ate well, prospered 

and he was able to father many children.


Then his children, when grown, killed or 

chased away other males of the clan. Thus 

the lineage had a head-start and was able to 

prosper. There are probably also other 

reasons. 

There is anecdotal evidence that people of 

East Indian descent in Canada have a much 

higher incidence of cardio-vascular 

diseases than other nationalities. These 

diseases affect primarily individuals past 

their best reproductive years (Ogilvie 

2008). Therefore, in light of the high 

population numbers with the R1a1 genetic 

marker, it would be reasonable to expect 

that people with this genetic marker may 

have had better resistance to other forms 

of disease, during their reproductive years. 

Such an advantage could have provided 

them with better survival rates with respect 

to other 152 lineages. 

Also part of the answer will probably be 

found to be in the evidence that the age of 

Hg R1a1 is considerably older than the 

estimates of Kharkov et al (2004) of 

2,500-3800 years. Passarino et al (2001) 

presented two different dates for the age 

of R1a1 M17 lineage, namely, 7,654 years 

and 13,031 years. However, they do 

mention that when an attempt was made to 

estimate the age of mutations M1 73 and 

M1 7, the values obtained were compatible 

71 

with a Palaeolithic origin. 

We estimate that mutation is in all 

probability much older; we estimate the age 

at more than 100,000 years based on 

compounding calculations and the results 

agree with the straight line estimates (Skulj 

2007). In addition to the antiquity of this 

genetic marker, the carriers of R1a1 must 

also have had a tremendous Darwinian 

advantages mentioned above, to surpass the 

other Y-chromosome genetic competitors 

in their reproductive fitness. 

Furthermore, their data shows that the 

highest frequency of what could be the 

oldest c-haplotype, namely c-Ht 17 of the 

M17 lineage, occurs in India, where it was 

observed in 10.5% of the males or ~57.5 

million men. In Eastern Europe, it occurs 

at 9.5% or in ~12 million males, in the 

Balkans at 3.8%, in Western Europe at 

0.3% and Middle East at 2.5%. Another 

haplotype, c-Ht 19 has been found almost 

exclusively in the Balkans, Eastern Europe 

and India. Here again India represents 8%, 

Eastern Europe 4%, Balkans 0.5% and 

Western Europe 0.2% of the male 

population with this haplotype. The 

percentages and absolute numbers suggest 

the direction of the gene flow. These 

statistics are also an indication that the 

gene flow appears to be from India to


Europe. 

Using Alinei’s ‘lexical self-dating’, there 

is evidence that a common agro-pastoral 

origin of Sanskrit ‘gopati’, ‘gospati’ and 

Slavic ‘gospod’, ‘gospodin’ meaning lord/ 

master/gentleman occurred more than 

8,000 years ago (Skulj et al. 2006). 

Therefore, the people who invented this 

terminology must have had their origin 

prior to that period of human history when 

the domesticated cattle were already part 

of the wealth of certain individuals. 

There is a common belief, primarily based 

on the linguistic similarities between the 

Indo-Aryans and the Europeans, that their 

original common home was Europe (An•ur 

2006). However, as discussed earlier, 

despite the linguistic and genetic similarity 

between Indo-Aryans and Slavs, there is 

evidence to the contrary. The 

domestication of cattle and sheep on the 

Indian sub-continent, the absence of Hg I 

and Hg N3 in India and their high 

frequencies in Europe are indicators that 

the gene flow was not from Europe to India, 

but from India to Europe in the distant past 

- pre 10,000 years ago, along with the 

precursor of the ‘satem’ Indo-European 

languages. 

72 

Conclusions 

In many instances, the Slovenian language 

appears to be gramatically closer to 

Sanskrit than other Slavic languages and 

even Indic languages such as Hindi, Bengali 

and Gujarati. 

Genetic and linguistic affinities between 

the Indo-Aryan and Slavic speaking 

populations indicate that a large percentage 

of their ancestors had a common sojourn 

during the pre-pastoral and also during the 

pastoral age. 

Linguistic evidence suggests that the 

separation of the Indo-Aryans and the 

ancestors of present day Slavs occurred 

prior to the innovation of the cereal 

farming in agriculture. 

Hg R1a1-M17 lineage appears to have 

come to Europe, via the ancestors of the 

present day Slavs, from the Indian subcontinent, 

before the spread of farming 

~9000 years ago. 

Genetic evidence does not support a large 

scale invasion of India from Europe during 

the prehistoric times, since no evidence 

of Hg R1*-M173, Hg I-M170 or of Hg 

N3-TAT has been found in India, although 

these Haplogroups are very frequent in 

Europe (Rosser et al. 2000, Sengupta et 

al. 2006).


The coalescence of Hg R1a1, the most 

frequent genetic marker in Indo-Aryan and 

Slavic populations, very likely occurred 

more than 100,000 years ago. Only if the 

most recent common ancestor of such a 

large percentage of Indo-Aryans and the 

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Austria and Boswell B.C. Canada, Editiones Veneti, p. 74 (ISBN 0-9681236-0-0) 

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The Economist September 22 nd 2007 p. 57, 150,000 Years Ago, Humans Started Talking and Language Has 

Been Changing ever since 

Tyler-Smith C 2005.1.5 m Chinese ‘descendants of one man’, BBCNews Tuesday, 1 November, http:// 

news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/world/asia-pacific/4396246.stm 

U.S. Census Bureau 2007. Historical Estimates of World Population, http://www.census.gov/ ipc/www/ 

worldhis.html 

Wells S 2003. The journey of man: a genetic odyssey, 2 nd ed. New York, Random House Trade Paperback 

Edition, p. 84,167. ISBN 0-9129-7146-9 

Zerjal T, Pandya A, Santos FR, Adhikari R, et al. 1999. The use of Y-chromosomal DNA variation to investigate 

population history: recent male spread in Asia and Europe, in Genomic diversity: applications in human 

population genetics. Papiha SS, Deka R, Chakraborty R, eds. Plenum Press, New York, pp. 91-102 

Zerjal T, Wells RS, Yuldasheva N, Ruzibakiev R, Tyler-Smith C 2002. A Genetic Landscape Reshaped by 

Recent Events: Y-Chromosomal Insights into Central Asia, Am. J. Hum. Genet. 71: 466-482 

Zhivotovsky LA, Underhill PA, Cinnioglu C, Kayser M, et al 2004. The Effective Mutation Rate at Y 

Chromosome Short Tandem Repeats, with Application to Human Population-Divergence Time, Am. J. 

Hum. Genet. 74: 50-61 

The Y Chromosome Consortium 2002. A Nomenclature System for the Tree of Human Y-Chromosomal Binary 

Haplogroups, Genome Research 12: 339-348 

Dictionaries and Textbooks consulted 

Avasthi S, Avasthi I, Chambers English Hindi Dictionary, Allied Publishers, New Delhi 

1995. Bajec A, Kolariè R, Legiša L, Moder J, Rupel M, Sovre A, Šmalc M, Šolar J, Tomšiè F, Slovenski 

pravopis, Dr•avna Zalo•ba Slovenije, Ljubljana, 1962. 

Betteridge HT, Cassell’s German & English Dictionary, Cassell & Company, London, 1966. Chaturvedi M, 

Tiwari BN, A Practical Hindi-English Dictionary, National Publishing House, 

New Delhi 1994. ISBN 81-214-0450-9 

Grad A, Škerlj R, Vitoroviè N, Veliki angleško-slovenski slovar=English-Slovene Dictionary, 

DZS, Ljubljana, 1998. ISBN 86-341-0824-4 

Komac D, Angleško-Slovenski in Slovensko-Angleški Moderni Slovar : English-Slovene and Slovene- 

English Modern Dictionary, Cankarjeva Zalo•ba, Ljubljana, 2004. ISBN 961-231-041-6 Little 

W, Fowler HW, Coulson J, Onions CT, Oxford International Dictionary of the English 

Language, Leland Publishing Company, Toronto, 1957. Monier-Williams M, A Sanskrit-English 

Dictionary, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2005. ISBN 

81-208-0069-9 Narale R, Hindi Teacher for English Speaking People, Prabhat Prakashan, New Delhi, 

2005. 

ISBN 81-7315-536-4 Narale R, Sanskrit for English Speaking People, Prabhat Prakashan, New Delhi, 

2004. ISBN 

81-7315-481-3 O’Brian MA, New Russian-English and English Russian Dictionary, Dover 

Publications, New 

York, 1954. ISBN 0-486-20208-0 

Pleteršnik M, Slovensko nemški slovar, Knezoskofijstvo, Ljubljana, 1894. Snoj M, Slovenski etimološki 

slovar, Mladinska Knjiga, Ljubljana, 1997. ISBN 86-11-14772-3 Stein J, Hauck LC, Su PY, The Random House 

College Dictionary, Random House, Toronto, 

New York, 1980. ISBN 0-394-43500-1 Williams M, A Dictionary English & Sanskrit, Motilal 

Banarsidass, Delhi, 1982. ISBN 0- 

89581-169-3 

76


APPENDIX 

LINGUISTIC COMPARISONS 

Transliteration and Pronunciation 

Slovenian: Pronunciation: c is pronuciated as TS; è as CH; j as Y; š as SH; • as ZH. 

Russian: Transliteration of Cyrillic alphabet follows Slovenian orthography. Apostrophe 

at the end of a word marks a palatalized consonant. The letter represents central [i] 

sound, [+] in the IPA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_central_unrounded_vowel). 

Sanskrit: Transliteration of Devanagari follows primarily A Sanskrit-English 

Dictionary” compiled by Sir Monier Monier-Williams and Sanskrit for English 

Speaking People by Acharya Ratnakar, where English is used as the base but: æ is 

pronounced as CH; œ as SH sometimes as S; dot under a letter denotes a cerebral letter. 

Hindi: Transliteration follows the Sanskrit, m. means masculine; f. feminine; n. 

neuter; f.pl. feminine plural; v. verb 

A) ELEMENTAL 

Four elements 

English Russian Slovenian Sanskrit Hindi 

air in motion veter m. veter m. vata vât, vâyu f. 

fire ogon’ m. ogenj m. agni, vahni agni 

ground, earth zemlja f. prst f., zemlja f., tla f. pithvî f., tala prthvî, sthal 

water voda f. voda f. udan. pânî 

Astronomyand seasons 


bright (be) svet (brightness) svetiti, svitati se svit (svetate) suspash karnâ 

day den’ dan m. dina n. din 

darkness t’ma tem a f. tam a tam as 

dawn svetat’ (to dawn) svit m. svetanâ ushâ kâl 

light, brightness svet, luè (ray) luè f., svit rucf. rashmî (ray) 

month mesjac m. mesec m. mâsam. orn. mukh 

77


moon mesjac m. mesec m. mâs m. mâsa 

night noc noc f., tema f. nisâ f., tamâ f. tam 

sky nebo n. nebo n. nabha nabha 

spring vesna vesna vasanta vasânt 

sun solnce n. sonce n., solnce n. surya surya 

winter, cold zima f. zima f. him a sît kâl 

Weather and geography 


cloud oblako n. megla f, oblak m. megha megh 

dew, moisture rosa f. rosa f. rasa rasa 

dryness suš suša f. úushikâ f. sûkhapan 

heat (to) topit’ topiti tap (tapati) tapânâ 

heat teplo(ta) n. toplota f. tâpa tâpa 

lake ozero jezero,jezer sara n. sarovar 

mountain gora f. gora f. giri m. giri 

open space lug (meadow) loka (meadow) loka ãarâgah 

rain (to) (idjot) do•d’ padati pat (pâtayati) varsha padanâ 

river reka drava (name of river) dravantî dariya 

sprinkle (to) pryskat’ pršiti pish (parshate) chhirikanâ 

vapour dym m. dim m. dhûma vâshp 

warm teplo topel m. topla f. tapta tapt 

wet, moist vlaga f. voden voda, ârdra gîla 

Primary actions 


ask (to), beg prosit’ prašati, prositi prach (piææhati) puchhnâ 

abide(to) live, exist byt, byvat’ bivati, biti bhû (bhavati) honâ 

bake (to) peè’ peèi paæ (paæyate) pakânâ 

be (imperative) bud’ bodi < biti bodhi


die (to) umirat’ mreti mi (mriyate), maranâ 

(marati) 

drink (to) pit’ piti pî (pîyate), pâ pînâ 

(pibati) 

drink (causing to) pojit’ pojitiv.,pojenjen. pâyana n. pîlânâ 

dry(to) sušit’ sušiti œush (œushyati) sûkhanâ 

eat (to) jest’, pojedat’ jesti, jedati ad (atsyati, âdayati) khanâ 

excrete (to) srat’ (vulgar) srati si (sâryate) utsarjit karnâ 

fall (to) padat’ padati pad (padyate) patan honâ 

fear, be afraid bojat’sja f. bati se (bojim se) bhî (bhayate) bhaya honâ 


fearful, timid bojazlivji bojazen, bojazljiv bhijasâna bhîru 

free (to set), release rešit’ rešiti rî (reshyati) chhodanâ 

give (to) dat’ dati, dajati dâ (dadâti, dâti), dây den â 

(dâyati) 

go (to) idti iti i(eti) jânâ 

kill, hurt (to) kolot’ (kill klati krath, klath mârânâ 

animals) (klathati) 

know (to) znat’, vedat’ znati, vedeti jñâ (jânâti), vid jânnâ 

(vetti) 

knowledge znanije znanje n., veda f. jñâna, veda gyân 

lead away (to) otvest’ odvesti udvah (udvahati) lejânâ 

live (to) •it’ •iveti jîv (jîvati) jînâ 

murder (to) morit’ (archaic) moriti mi (mâryati) mârnâ 

nibble (to), gnaw kusat’ (bite) (po)kušati kush (kushati) kutarnâ 

open mouth (to) zevat’ (yawn) zijati, zehati (yawn) jeh (jehate) jâbha:nâ 

pleased, fond of rad (a) rad, rada adj. rata adj. rat 

pleasure, delight radost’ f. radost f. rati f. rati f. 

remove (to), ubrat’ odvzeti, odvezati udvas (udvasayati) vichchhin 

separate honâ 

setting free otvjaz (yvanije) odveza f. udvâsa m. 

report (to) obvinit’ (accuse) ovaditi âvid (âvidati) âvedan karnâ 

revolve (to), turn vertet’ vrteti vit (vartate) vartan karnâ 

run (to), hasten be•at’ drveti dru (dravati) druti karnâ 

scream (to) krièat’ rjuti, krièati ru (rauti) ronâ 

see (to) videt’ opaziti,paziti paœ (paœyati) dekanâ 

sit upon (to) sidet’ sedeti sad (sadati, sîdati) baithnâ 

shine (to), glitter bljestet’ blesteti, blešèati bhlâú (bhlâúati) âbhâs honâ 

sleep (to) spat’ spati svap (svapiti) sonâ 

speak (to) govorit’ govoriti, praviti bru (bravîti) prakad karnâ 

stand (to) stojat’ stati sthâ (tishhati) sthan lena 

stand firm (to) stojat’ trvjordo stalen (biti) sthal (sthalati) 

state, condition sostojanije stanje n. sthâna n. 

stop at a place (to) vstat’ vasovati vas (vasati) vasnâ 

swim (to) plavat’ plavati plu (plavate) tairnâ 

thirsty (to be) •a•dat’ •ejati jeh (jehati) pyâsâ honâ 

79


understand (to) uvidet’ (to see) uvideti vid (vedati), ave jananâ 

(avaiti) 

violate (to), rob grabit’ ropati rup (rupyati) lup chhînanâ 

(lumpati) 

wake (to) budit’ buditi budh (budhyate) jâgnâ 

waken (to) probudit’ prebuditi prabudh jagânâ 

(prabodhayati) 

ward off (to), hide vorovat’ varovati, varati vi (varati) âvaran karnâ 

yell (to) krièat’ krièati kruœ (kroœati) chînkhanâ 

Life and life sustaining substances 


alive •ivoj, -a, -o (m., f. n.) •iv, -a, -o (m., f., n.) jîva m., n. jivâ f. jivâ m. 

animal •ivotnoje n. •ival f. jîvî m. jîvî m. 

cover, membrane : ko•a (skin) ko•a f.(skin, hide) koœa m. kosha 

dwelling ves (little village) vas f.(village) vasa m. âvâs 

food pišèaf., jedaf. •ive•m.,jedf.,pièaf. jîvatu (m., n.), adana, jivan 

pitu m. 

honey mjod medm. madhu n. madhu 

home dom dom dam, dama dhâm 

living being •ivyje •ivina (f.pl.) (cattle) jîvin jîvî 

meat mjaso n. meso n. mâs n. = mans mâns 

raft plot splav m. plava lattha 

seat sidenje sede• m. sadas n. âsan 

skin, hide sdirat’ (to skin, to dreti (to skin, to flay) ditim.,krittif. 

flay) 

tree derevo n. drevo n. dru, taru m. taru 

wood drova n.pl. drva f.pl. dam driksh 

Wild Animals and Prey 


bear medved’ medved m. madhvad (honeyeater) bhâlû 

bird ptica, ptaha ptiè m. ptica f. patat m. pakshi 

deer, wild beast zver’ m. mrha?, mrhaè (bear) miga mrig 

flock staja (of birds) jata yûtha yûth 

hunter ohotnik ujeda (bird of prey) vyâdha vyâdh 

louse voš’ ušf. yûkâ yûkâ 

mouse myš’ miš, miška f. mûsh m. f., mûshika mûshak 

otter vydra f. vidra f. udra jalamarjara 

wolf volkm. volk m. vika bheiâ 

80


B) PASTORAL 


beef govjadina f. goveje meso gomânsa n. gomâns 

cattle skot m. govo, govedo n. gâva gâyen 

cow korova f. krava f. go, gaus, gava gâu, gâya. 

grass trava f. trava f. tria n. tri 

herd stado n. paša f. pâúava n. pashu 

herdsman pastuh pastir, pašnikar m. gopa, paúupâla pashupâlak 

lamb jagnjonokm. bac m., jagnje n. vatsa bachchaa 

master, owner gospodin, gospod, gospodar pati, gopati pati, gopati 

milk (thickened) syr (cheese) sir m. (cheese) kshîra n. kshir 

mutton baranina f. ovèje meso n. avimânsa n. goœta 

pasture pastbišèe n. pašnik m. paœavya n. pashuchar 

ram baran m. oven m. avi mesh 

sheep ovca f. ovca f. avikâ bhe 

shepherd ovèar m. ovnar, ovèar m. avipâla charavâhâ 

wool šerst’ f. / runo n. volna f., runo n. urâ ûn 

yoke 

C) FARMING 

Farmer 

jarmo n. / igo n. igo n., jug m., jarem m. yuga yoktra 


farmer krestjanin m. kmet m. krishaka, kshetrî krishaka 

plough man pakhar’m. oraè, oratar, oravec krishaka, sairika halvâhâ 

reaper •njec m. •anjec m, •anjica f. lavaka, æhedaka lavanâ 

sower sejatel’ m. sejaè, sejavec m. vaptâ m., vijavaptâ bîj bonevâlâ 

winnower vejatel’ m. vejaè, vejavec m. pâvaka pâvak m. 

thresher 

Field 

molotil ’šèik m. mlatiè m. mardana m. mardan m. 


field pole n. niva f. polje n., njiva f. kshetra n., bhûmi f. khad 

field (ploughed) pašnja f. zorana zemlja f. sîtyakshetra n. 

furrow borozda, pašnja f. brazda f. sîtâ f. harâî 

garden sadm. vrt m. udyana, upavana n. udyân 

manure, dung 

Instruments 

navoz m. gnoj m., sranje n. gomaya, sâra gobar 


plough(wooden) soha f. drevo n. hala n., sîra, gokîla hal 

plough (metal) plug m. plug m, oralo n. larigala n. lângala 

flail cep’ m. cep/cepec m. kandani f., musala mûsal 

harrow borona f. brana f. koiœa hengâ m. 

hoe motyga f. motika f. khanitra, khâtra n. khanitra 

mill mel’nica f. mlin m. peshaa, æatra n. chak-ki 

scythe kosa f. kosa f. khadgika, lavitra n. hansiyâ 

sickle serp m. srp m. lavitra n. dâtra n. dâtrî 

threshing-floor gumno n. gumno n. khala m. khaliyân m. 

81


Products for humans 


bread hleb m. kruh m.(hleb-loaf) pûpa, abhyusha rotî 

flour braðno n. muka f. moka f. (braðnofood) úaktu, godhûmacûrna âttâ 

sheaf snop m. snop m. stamba m. gattha pulindâ 

Food for animals 


forage korm m. krma f. gavâdana n. chârâ 

grass trava f. trava f. trina n. ghâs 

hay seno n. seno n. œushkatria n. chârâ 

Agricultural activity verbs and gerunds 


furrow (to) borozdit’, pahat’ brazditi sîtam kri, hal (halati) hal chalânâ 

harrow (to) boronit’ branati koikshetrena bhûmim kri chalânâ 

harrowing - branitva, branitev f. krashanam hengâ chalanâ 

hoe (to) moty•it’, ryhlit’ okopati, rahljati khanitrea khan khodanâ 

(khanati) 

mill (to) molot’ mleti cûr (cûrayati) pîsnâ 

milling pomol m. mletva, mletev f. cûratva n. pîsnâ 

plough (to) pahat’ orati halena krish (karshati) hal chalânâ 

ploughing pašnja f. oratva, oratev f. halanam hal chalânâ 

reap (to) •at’ •eti lû (lunâti) kâtnâ 

reaping, harvest •atva •etva, •etev f. lavanam lavanâ 

seed (to) seyat dati seme, posejati vîjam dâ bîjanâ 

sow (to) seyat, zasevat’ sejati vap (vapati), vapanam bonâ 

kri 

sowing posevm., sejanje n. setevf., sejanje n. vapanam bonâ 

thresh (to) molotit’ mlatiti dhânyâdi mrid pitna 

threshing molot’ba f. mlatitva, mlatitev f. mardanam pitna 

winnow (to) vejat’ vejati œudh (œodhayati) osâvâ 

winnowing vejanie n. vejanje n. vejatev f. prasphoanam osânâ 

Cultivated plants 


cereals, grain •ito n. •ito n. dhânya n., sîtya n. dhânyu 

barley jaèmen’ m. jeèmen m. yava, yavaka javf. 

beet svjokla f. pesa pâlanga hukandar 

cabbage kapusta f. zelje n., kapus m. úâkaprabheda, úâka bandgobhî 

carrot morkov’ f. koren m. garjara gâjar 

cucumber ogurec m. kumara f. karkaî khîrâ 

flax ljon m. lan m. atasî, umâ, mâlikâ san 

hemp konoplja f. konoplja f. œaa n., bhariga pauâ 

82


millet proso n. proso n. au, priyarigu bâjrî, juâr f. 

nut oreh m. oreh m. dridhaphalam dhibrî 

oats ovjos m. oves m. osangnaka jaîf. 

onion lukm. luk m., èebula f. palandu, nîãabhojya pyâj 

pea goroh m. grah m. kalâya, hareu maar 

rowen otava f. otava f. X 

rye ro•’ f., •ito n. r•f. X 

spelt polba f. pira f. X 

swede brjukva f. repa f. X 

turnip repa f. repa f. griññana shalgam 

wheat pšenica f. pšenica f. godhûma gehûn 

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83


Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born 

NICHOLAS WADE 

[This news feature shows how our knowledge of linguistic evolution is undergoing a 

paradigm shift and in the light of these new understanding AIT-AMT models need to 

be abandoned and a new model needs to be considered as an approximation to 

what happened in the deep time of human evolution.] 

A 

researcher analyzing the sounds 

in languages spoken around the 

world has detected an ancient 

signal that points to southern Africa as the 

place where modern human language 

originated. 

The finding fits well with the evidence from 

fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans 

originated in Africa. It also implies, though 

does not prove, that modern language 

originated only once, an issue of 

considerable controversy among linguists. 

The detection of such an ancient signal in 

language is surprising. Because words 

change so rapidly, many linguists think that 

languages cannot be traced very far back 

in time. The oldest language tree so far 

reconstructed, that of the Indo-European 

family, which includes English, goes back 

9,000 years at most. 

Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the 

University of Auckland in New Zealand, has 

shattered this time barrier, if his claim is 

correct, by looking not at words but at 

84 

phonemes — the consonants, vowels and 

tones that are the simplest elements of 

language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at 

applying mathematical methods to 

linguistics, has found a simple but striking 

pattern in some 500 languages spoken 

throughout the world: A language area uses 

fewer phonemes the farther that early 

humans had to travel from Africa to reach 

it. 

Some of the click-using languages of 

Africa have more than 100 phonemes, 

whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of 

the human migration route out of Africa, 

has only 13. English has about 45 

phonemes. 

This pattern of decreasing diversity with 

distance, similar to the well-established 

decrease in genetic diversity with distance 

from Africa, implies that the origin of 

modern human language is in the region of 

southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in 

an article published on Thursday in the 

journal Science.


Language is at least 50,000 years old, the 

date that modern humans dispersed from 

Africa, and some experts say it is at least 

100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his 

work is correct, is picking up a distant echo 

from this far back in time. 

“We’re uneasy about mathematical 

modeling that we don’t understand 

juxtaposed to philological modeling that 

we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a 

linguist at Ohio State University, said about 

the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that 

linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. 

Atkinson’s new article because it does not 

conflict with any established area of 

linguistic scholarship. 

“I think we ought to take this seriously, 

although there are some who will dismiss 

it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said. 

Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the 

University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too 

early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, 

but if so, it’s one of the most interesting 

articles in historical linguistics that I’ve 

seen in a decade.” 

Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other 

evidence about the origins of language. The 

Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to 

85 

one of the earliest branches of the genetic 

tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. 

Their languages belong to a family known 

as Khoisan and include many click sounds, 

which seem to be a very ancient feature of 

language. And they live in southern Africa, 

which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to 

as the origin of language. But whether 

Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form 

of language “is not something my method 

can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said. 

His study was prompted by a recent finding 

that the number of phonemes in a language 

increases with the number of people who 

speak it. This gave him the idea that 

phoneme diversity would increase as a 

population grew, but would fall again when 

a small group split off and migrated away 

from the parent group. 

Such a continual budding process, which 

is the way the first modern humans 

expanded around the world, is known to 

produce what biologists call a serial 

founder effect. Each time a smaller group 

moves away, there is a reduction in its 

genetic diversity. The reduction in 

phonemic diversity over increasing 

distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. 

Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic 

diversity already recorded by biologists.


For either kind of reduction in diversity to 

occur, the population budding process 

must be rapid, or diversity will build up 

again. This implies that the human 

expansion out of Africa was very rapid at 

each stage. The acquisition of modern 

language, or the technology it made 

possible, may have prompted the 

expansion, Dr. Atkinson said. 

“What’s so remarkable about this work is 

that it shows language doesn’t change all 

that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry 

over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark 

Pagel, a biologist at the University of 

Reading in England who advised Dr. 

Atkinson. 

86 

Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human 

expansion across the globe. 

“Language was our secret weapon, and as 

soon we got language we became a really 

dangerous species,” he said. 

In the wake of modern human expansion, 

archaic human species like the 

Neanderthals were wiped out and large 

species of game, fossil evidence shows, 

fell into extinction on every continent 

shortly after the arrival of modern humans. 

[Newyork Times: April 14 2011]


Abstract 

Some Modern Genetic Studies on the Aryan 

Invasion Issues (2009-2011) 

Journal of Human Genetics 54, 47-55 (January 2009) 

The Indian origin of paternal haplogroup R1a1* substantiates the autochthonous origin 

of Brahmins and the caste systemOrigin of paternal haplogroup R1a1* 

Authors: 

Swarkar Sharma, Ekta Rai, Prithviraj Sharma, Mamata Jena, Shweta Singh, Katayoon 

Darvishi, Audesh K Bhat, A J S Bhanwer, Pramod Kumar Tiwari and Rameshwar N K 

Bamezai 

Many major rival models of the 

origin of the Hindu caste 

system co-exist despite 

extensive studies, each with associated 

genetic evidences. One of the major 

factors that has still kept the origin of the 

Indian caste system obscure is the 

unresolved question of the origin of Yhaplogroup 

R1a1*, at times associated 

with a male-mediated major genetic influx 

from Central Asia or Eurasia, which has 

contributed to the higher castes in India. 

Y-haplogroup R1a1* has a widespread 

distribution and high frequency across 

Eurasia, Central Asia and the Indian 

subcontinent, with scanty reports of its 

ancestral (R*, R1* and R1a*) and derived 

lineages (R1a1a, R1a1b and R1a1c). To 

87 

resolve these issues, we screened 621 Ychromosomes 

(of Brahmins occupying the 

upper-most caste position and schedule 

castes/tribals occupying the lower-most 

positions) with 55 Y-chromosomal binary 

markers and seven Y-microsatellite 

markers and compiled an extensive dataset 

of 2809 Y-chromosomes (681 Brahmins, 

and 2128 tribals and schedule castes) for 

conclusions. A peculiar observation of the 

highest frequency (up to 72.22%) of Yhaplogroup 

R1a1* in Brahmins hinted at 

its presence as a founder lineage for this 

caste group. Further, observation of R1a1* 

in different tribal population groups, 

existence of Y-haplogroup R1a* in 

ancestors and extended phylogenetic 

analyses of the pooled dataset of 530 

Indians, 224 Pakistanis and 276 Central 

Asians and Eurasians bearing the R1a1*


haplogroup supported the autochthonous 

origin of R1a1 lineage in India and a tribal 

link to Indian Brahmins. However, it is 

important to discover novel Y- 

88 

chromosomal binary marker(s) for a higher 

resolution of R1a1* and confirm the 

present conclusions.


European Journal of Human Genetics (2010) 

18, 479–484 

Separating the post-Glacial coancestry of European and Asian Y chromosomes within 

haplogroup R1a 

Authors 

Peter A Underhill, Natalie M Myres, Siiri Rootsi, Mait Metspalu, Lev A Zhivotovsky, Roy J King, 

Alice A Lin, Cheryl-Emiliane T Chow, Ornella Semino, Vincenza Battaglia, Ildus Kutuev, Mari 

Järve, Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Qasim Ayub, Aisha Mohyuddin, S Qasim Mehdi, Sanghamitra 

Sengupta, Evgeny I Rogaev, Elza K Khusnutdinova, Andrey Pshenichnov, Oleg Balanovsky, 

Elena Balanovska, Nina Jeran, Dubravka Havas Augustin, Marian Baldovic, Rene J Herrera, 

Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Vijay Singh, Lalji Singh, Partha Majumder, Pavao Rudan, Dragan 

Primorac, Richard Villems and Toomas Kivisild 

Human Y-chromosome haplogroup 

structure is largely 

circumscribed by continental 

boundaries. One notable exception to this 

general pattern is the young haplogroup 

R1a that exhibits post-Glacial coalescent 

times and relates the paternal ancestry of 

more than 10% of men in a wide geographic 

area extending from South Asia to Central 

East Europe and South Siberia. Its origin 

and dispersal patterns are poorly 

understood as no marker has yet been 

described that would distinguish European 

R1a chromosomes from Asian. Here we 

present frequency and haplotype diversity 

estimates for more than 2000 R1a 

89 

chromosomes assessed for several newly 

discovered SNP markers that introduce the 

onset of informative R1a subdivisions by 

geography. Marker M434 has a low 

frequency and a late origin in West Asia 

bearing witness to recent gene flow over 

the Arabian Sea. Conversely, marker M458 

has a significant frequency in Europe, 

exceeding 30% in its core area in Eastern 

Europe and comprising up to 70% of all 

M17 chromosomes present there. The 

diversity and frequency profiles of M458 

suggest its origin during the early 

Holocene and a subsequent expansion 

likely related to a number of prehistoric 

cultural developments in the region. Its


primary frequency and diversity 

distribution correlates well with some of 

the major Central and East European river 

basins where settled farming was 

established before its spread further 

eastward. Importantly, the virtual 

absence of M458 chromosomes outside 

Europe speaks against substantial 

patrilineal gene flow from East Europe 

to Asia, including to India, at least since 

the mid-Holocene. 

90


The American Journal of Human Genetics, 

Volume 89, Issue 6, 731-744, 9 December 2011 

Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide 

Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia 

Authors 

Mait Metspalu, Irene Gallego Romero, Bayazit Yunusbayev, Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Chandana 

Basu Mallick, Georgi Hudjashov, Mari Nelis, Reedik Mägi, Ene Metspalu2, Maido Remm, 

Ramasamy Pitchappan, Lalji Singh, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Richard Villems and Toomas Kivisild 

Abstract: 

South Asia harbors one of the highest 

levels genetic diversity in Eurasia, 

which could be interpreted as a 

result of its long-term large effective 

population size and of admixture during its 

complex demographic history. In contrast 

to Pakistani populations, populations of 

Indian origin have been underrepresented 

in previous genomic scans of positive 

selection and population structure. Here 

we report data for more than 600,000 SNP 

markers genotyped in 142 samples from 

30 ethnic groups in India. Combining our 

results with other available genome-wide 

data, we show that Indian populations are 

characterized by two major ancestry 

components, one of which is spread at 

comparable frequency and haplotype 

diversity in populations of South and West 

Asia and the Caucasus. The second 

component is more restricted to South 

91 

Asia and accounts for more than 50% of 

the ancestry in Indian populations. 

Haplotype diversity associated with these 

South Asian ancestry components is 

significantly higher than that of the 

components dominating the West Eurasian 

ancestry palette. Modeling of the 

observed haplotype diversities suggests 

that both Indian ancestry components 

are older than the purported Indo-Aryan 

invasion 3,500 YBP. Consistent with the 

results of pairwise genetic distances 

among world regions, Indians share more 

ancestry signals with West than with East 

Eurasians. However, compared to Pakistani 

populations, a higher proportion of their 

genes show regionally specific signals of 

high haplotype homozygosity. Among such 

candidates of positive selection in India are 

MSTN and DOK5, both of which have 

potential implications in lipid metabolism 

and the etiology of type 2 diabetes.


PART III 

What is actually at stake in the Aryan Invasion Theory? Why do certain powerful 

forces, both academic and political, want to perpetuate the myth of Aryan invasion 

theory and Aryan race theory? There are larger issues at stake and we have three 

experts bringing out the hidden vested interests that operate behind the Aryan 

race theories. 

Dr. Koenraad Elst, an eminent Belgian Indologist, graduated in Philosophy, 

Chinese Studies and Indo-Iranian Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven. 

His research on the ideological development of Hindu revivalism earned him 

his Ph.D. in Leuven in 1998. He has also published about multiculturalism, 

language policy issues, ancient Chinese history and philosophy, comparative 

religion, and the Aryan invasion debate. He shows in the essay ‘The Politics of 

the Aryan Invasion Debate’ the ideological stands of various socio-political forces 

in India and abroad vis-à-vis the Aryan race theory. 

Subash Kak is Donald C. and Elaine T. Delaune Distinguished Professor of 

Electrical and Computer Engineering and from 2007 the head of the Computer 

Science department at Oklahoma State University. He is most notable for his 

significant Indological publications on history, the philosophy of science, ancient 

astronomy, and the history of mathematics. In this essay he argues quoting 

extensively the distinguished British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, that Aryan 

race theory is kept living because of the Euro-centric bias, that is still persistent 

in humanities. 

Prof. Dilip Kumar Chakrabarti is a noted Indian archaeologist and professor of 

South Asian archaeology at Cambridge University. He is known for his studies 

on the early use of Iron in India and the archaeology of Eastern India. In this 

92


lecture titled ‘Who Owns India’s Past’, which he delivered at the India 

International Centre, Delhi, on 21 July, 2009, Prof. Chakrabarti shows how Indian 

archeology is at the peril of losing its academic freedom. This lecture is included 

here because given the fact that Indian archeology has successfully demolished 

some of the corner stones of Aryan invasion theory, if it loses freedom, may be a 

throw-back to colonial days – a few centuries back. 

The next paper presents the view of an academic who teaches history. Her 

perspective on Aryan debate presents the problem from the point of view of a 

person who teaches history: what the history teaching establishment generally 

neglects with respect to the the Aryan invasion debate. The author Dr. Padma 

Manian did her Ph.D. in History from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. She taught 

‘World History’ for five years at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. She 

now teaches U.S. History and Women’s History at San Jose City College, 

California. The article published here is courtesy: ‘The History Teacher’, Vol. 

32, No. 1, Nov., 1998 

The last article in this section, shows how Aryan race theory was used as an 

evangelical weapon and how this game has been played in almost all colonized 

countries by colonial powers resulting in genocides and civil wars. 

93


The Politics of the Aryan Invasion Debate 

– Koenraad Elst 

Anumber of participants in the 

Aryan invasion debate as relayed 

in the fall/winter 2002 issue of 

the Journal for Indo-European Studies have 

alluded to the role of political 

predilections in influencing and distorting 

the argument. In particular, Aryan invasion 

skepticism, presented there by Prof. 

Nikolas Kazanas, is painted by some of its 

critics as essentially a political ploy by 

Hindu nationalist (or “Hindutva”) forces. 

In India, apolitical scholars known to have 

crossed over to this position, most notably 

archaeologist B.B. Lal, have been accused 

of political motives for doing so. 

Questioning the Aryan Invasion Theory 

(AIT) is now widely presented as a part of 

the alleged hinduization or “saffronization” 

of history by the BJP-led government in 

India. 

This much is true, that in its tentative and 

clumsy manner, the BJP (Indian People’s 

Party) and the nationalist movement behind 

it, the RSS (National Volunteer Corps), 

have been trying to effect glasnost in the 

94 

Marxist-dominated history establishment. 

Through the media, the West has vaguely 

heard an echo of the commotion about this 

development among Indian Marxist 

historians trying to hold on to their power 

positions. The focus has mostly been on 

deplorable gaffes like the planned 

introduction of astrology as an academic 

subject and the attempt to weed out 

reference to cow-slaughter in the Vedic 

age, not on the serious and perfectly valid 

reasons for the attempted reform, esp. the 

entrenched distortions of history imposed 

by the Marxists. It is a pity that the BJP 

doesn’t have the resources and the 

competent people to achieve a proper and 

satisfactory overhaul of the textbooks (the 

Marxists having blocked Hindu-minded 

young historians from access to academic 

careers for decades), so that its reforms 

have been less than adequate and in a few 

cases downright laughable. Fortunately, 

however, AIT skepticism is a trend far older 

and wider than the recent politics of 

“saffronization”, and should be dealt with 

on its own terms.


European political uses of the Aryan 

invasion theory: 

Anyone familiar with the uncertainties 

inherent in historical research will be 

amazed to notice the immense selfassuredness 

with which most spokesmen 

for either side in the Aryan invasion debate 

are making their case. In reality, a lot in 

this question of ancient history is 

undecided: the Harappan script remains 

undeciphered and the archaeological 

findings (e.g. Lal 2002) are open to 

interpretation. Analysis of the historical 

data in the Rg-Veda fails to find any trace 

of an Aryan invasion (pace Witzel 

1995:321, as shown by Elst 1999:164- 

166, Talageri 2000:425-476), though along 

with the Puranas it alludes to episodes of 

Aryan emigration (Renu 1994:26-33, 

Talageri 1993:359-370, 2000:140, 256- 

265), but these textual findings cannot be 

deemed conclusive. Even if they are 

accepted as solid historical data, scenarios 

of immigration at an earlier date than 

hitherto assumed remain compatible with 

them. So the claim by linguists that the 

genealogy of the Indo-European language 

family is best explained by an (as yet not 

firmly dated) invasion scenario should not 

be dismissed lightly. We are faced here 

with an open and undecided question, a fit 

95 

object for intense but open-minded 

research. 

One of the reasons for the absolutist 

rhetoric bedevilling the Aryan invasion 

debate is the enormous investment of 

various political messages in the 

competing theories. Their political use in 

India will be discussed below; but the 

Western scholar may be expected to know 

about their political uses in the West, which 

predate the Hindu nationalist involvement 

by at least a century. The Out-of-India 

Theory (OIT) was briefly popular in 

Europe in the Romantic age as part of the 

Orientomanic fashion, but the AIT had 

many more political uses. By relating an 

ancient instance of white colonization in a 

dark subcontinent, it confirmed the 

colonial worldview. 

The AIT specifically justified the presence 

of the British among their “Aryan cousins” 

in India, being merely the second wave of 

Aryan settlement there. It supported the 

British view of India as merely a 

geographical region without historical 

unity, a legitimate prey for any invader 

capable of imposing himself. It provided 

the master illustration to the rising racialist 

worldview:


(1) the dynamic whites entered the land of 

the indolent dark natives; 

(2) being superior, the whites established 

their dominance and imparted their 

language to the natives; 

(3) being race-conscious, they established 

the caste system to preserve their racial 

separateness; 

(4) but being insufficiently fanatical about 

their race purity, some miscegenation with 

the natives took place anyway, making the 

Indian Aryans darker than their European 

cousins and correspondingly less 

intelligent and less dynamic; 

(5) hence, for their own benefit they were 

susceptible to an uplifting intervention by 

a new wave of purer Aryan colonizers. 

The AIT was consequently a must in all Nazi 

textbooks on race (e.g. Günther 1932, 

1934). In this controversy, the AIT camp 

happens to be Hitler’s camp. I would like 

to caution those who expect to trump the 

indigenist argument by insinuating political 

motives: you have no chance of winning 

that game, for no ugly name, not even 

“Hindu chauvinism”, can trump “Hitler” in 

branding an opponent with guilt by 

96 

association and blowing him out of the 

arena. 

Contemporary Euro-nationalists uphold 

the pro-invasionist tradition, e.g. 

Meerbosch 1992, Van den Haute 1993. 

Certain rightist circles, vaguely known on 

the Continent as the Nouvelle Droite, 

devote particular attention to the Indo- 

European heritage, invariably claiming a 

European homeland, e.g. Schuon 1979; de 

Benoist 1997, 2000; Benoît 2001:13; or 

Venner 2002:63. This trend has enlisted the 

contributions of eminent scholars, and their 

political views need not detract from the 

validity of their argumentation, but the 

political dimension is undeniably and 

explicitly present, e.g. AIT supporters 

Varenne (1967:25) and Haudry (1985, 

1987, 1997, 2000) are, or were members 

of the Scientific Committee of the French 

nationalist party Front National. 

Conversely, the French Left has tried to 

delegitimize any research into the “tainted” 

topic of Indo-European (“Aryan”!) culture 

and origins, leading to the closure of the 

Institut d’Etudes Indo-Européennes in 

Lyons. Likewise in the US, the Journal for 

Indo-European Studies has been under 

attack for alleged rightist connections.


Indian political uses of the Aryan 

invasion theory 

Western AIT proponents, right-wing or 

otherwise, may not realize very well who 

their allies in India are, and vice versa. The 

Indian uses of the AIT predate any political 

use (or even the mere articulation) of the 

OIT. On this topic, the Western scholars 

who so unhesitatingly parrot denunciations 

of the Indian indigenists by Indian 

invasionists, are simply babes in the wood. 

For their information, a brief overview of 

the several AIT-exploiting movements is 

given here: 

(1) Dravidian Separatism. Sponsored by 

the British colonial government, a 

movement of the middle castes in the 

southern Tamil region started attacking 

Brahmin and North-Indian interests and 

symbols, taking the shape of a political 

party, the Justice Party (later Dravida 

Kazhagam) in 1916. Given the Brahmin 

leadership in the independence movement, 

Dravidian self-assertion had obvious uses 

for the colonial status-quo. To beef up 

Dravidian pride, a claim was made that the 

whole of Indian culture, or at least all the 

good things in it (including, from ca. 1925 

onwards, the Harappan cities), belonged to 

the aboriginal Dravidians, while the Aryans 

97 

had mostly brought destruction and 

reactionary social mores. After 

independence, the movement opted for a 

separate Dravidian state, a demand which 

never caught on outside Tamil Nadu and was 

abandoned even there after the Chinese 

invasion of 1962. In the next years the 

movement got integrated into the political 

system and after a split the two successor 

parties have been alternating with each 

other in power at the state level ever since, 

but with an ever-decreasing fervour for 

Dravidian separateness. The movement’s 

greatest success was when, in 1965, it 

joined hands with the English-speaking 

elite in Delhi to thwart the Constitutional 

provision that from that year onwards, 

Hindi rather than English be the sole link 

language of India, — surely a fitting 

thanksgiving for the British patronage 

which had groomed the movement into 

political viability. 

(2) Dalit neo-Ambedkarism. Dalit, 

“broken” or “oppressed”, is a term applied 

to the former Untouchable castes, 

sparingly by the late-19th-century reform 

movement Arya Samaj, and more officially 

by mid-20th-century Dalit leader Dr. 

Bhimrao Ambedkar and by his followers 

ever since. Today, the term has eclipsed the 

Gandhian euphemism Harijan. Ambedkar


himself (1917:21) rejected both the AIT 

and its caste-racialist implication that 

lower castes sprang from the native race 

while upper castes were the invaders’ 

progeny. Yet, his followers (e.g. Theertha 

1941, Rajshekar 1987, Biswas 1995), 

along with his 19th-century precursor, the 

Christian-educated Jyotirao Phule, took 

the more conformist road of adapting the 

AIT and staking their political claims in the 

name of being “aboriginals” deprived of 

their land, culture and social status by the 

“Aryan invaders”. Among these neo- 

Ambedkarites, who claim Ambedkar’s 

mantle but have turned against him on many 

points (e.g. favouring conversion to 

Christianity or Islam, which Ambedkar 

energetically rejected in favour of native 

religions, esp. Buddhism), strange 

international alliances abound, e.g. with 

Islamic militancy, Evangelical 

fundamentalism and cranky American 

Afrocentrism. Many of V.T. Rajshekar’s 

brochures are transcripts of lectures at 

Christian institutions, and one wonders if 

the latter are aware of the more eccentric 

parts of his work, e.g. he is the only Indian 

to merit a mention in an authoritative study 

(Poliakov 1994) of contemporary anti- 

Semitism. His anti-Brahminism is also 

moulded after the anti-Semitic model, e.g. 

just like both capitalist plutocracy and 

98 

Bolshevism have been blamed on the Jews, 

Rajshekar (1993) treats both religious 

Brahminism and Brahmin-led Indian 

Marxism as two hands of a single Brahmin 

conspiracy. Note that his anti-Brahmin plea 

opens with a profession of belief in the AIT: 

“The fair-skinned foreigners, the Aryan 

barbarians, who strayed into India, came 

into clash with India’s dark-skinned 

indigenous population - the Untouchables” 

(1993:1). This kind of company ought to 

worry those who rely on the principle of 

“guilt by association” in their argument 

against the AIT skeptics. 

(3) Tribal separatism. Whereas the first 

tribal revolts of the colonial age (Santal 

Hool, Birsa rebellion) had a distinctly anti- 

British and anti-missionary thrust, 

administrators and missionaries tried to 

redirect tribal frustration and aspiration in 

an anti-Hindu and anti-Indian sense. This 

caught on quite well among the more 

peripheral, least “aryanized” tribes, 

particularly in the Northeast. The claim of 

being primeval Indians displaced from the 

fertile plains by the Aryan invaders was a 

logical rallying-point for their new selfconsciousness. 

To a very large extent, this 

“pre-Aryan” identity was a total novelty 

tutored by the Christian missions, who 

made the tribals their privileged focus of


activity and rechristened them as 

“aboriginals” ( div sî), a pseudo-indigenous 

term falsely suggesting that non-tribals had 

all along been seen as foreign intruders. 

Given the frequency with which journalists 

and even scholars swallow the invasionist 

implication of the term div sî, this coinage 

deserves a gold medal as a brilliantly 

successful one-word disinformation 

campaign. Some of the Northeastern tribes 

have been converted to Christianity in toto 

and refuse to give “Indian” as their 

nationality during the census, preferring 

their tribal identities as “Naga” or “Mizo” 

instead, thus confirming Hindu nationalist 

suspicions against Christianity. Ironically, 

it is these Northeastern tribes who have the 

least right to be called “aboriginal”, as their 

immigration from the East in the medieval 

period, much later than any Aryan invasion, 

is well-documented. Even the older 

Munda-speaking tribes are widely assumed 

to originate in Southeast Asia, still the 

centre of gravity of their Austro-Asiatic 

language family; while the Dravidians have 

variously been traced to Central Asia, Elam 

and even Africa. If the Aryans must perforce 

pass as invaders, they are not the only ones. 

(4) Christian mission. The single biggest 

promoter of the AIT as the bedrock of new 

political group identities has undeniably 

99 

been the Christian mission, incidentally 

also the biggest operator of elite 

educational institutions in India and a major 

media owner, hence a powerful moulder 

of public opinion. Christian missionary 

authors in the 19th century such as Sir 

Monier Monier-Williams, Friedrich Max 

Müller, Bishop Robert Caldwell and Rev. 

G.U. Pope laid the intellectual groundwork 

for Dravidian, Tribal and Dalit political 

movements and for a new fragmented selfperception 

of Hinduism. Quite deliberately, 

Hindu self-esteem was undermined by 

breaking the Hindu pantheon into a set of 

native gods like Shiva and a set of Aryaninvader 

gods like Indra; by redefining 

reform movements like Buddhism and 

Bhakti as “revolts of the natives against 

Aryan-Brahminical impositions”; and by 

reinterpreting the Dharma-Sh stras as 

nothing but an elaborate apartheid 

legislation for preserving the race and 

dominance of the Aryan invader castes. 

(5) Indian Islam. In recent years, militant 

Muslims such as Muslim India monthly’s 

editor Syed Shahabuddin have tried to 

integrate the AIT in their anti-Hindu 

polemics. The thrust of their argument is 

that if Hindus see Muslims as foreigners, 

they should be told that they themselves, 

at least the Aryan elite among them, once


were foreign intruders. And that not 

Muslims but Aryan Hindus were the trailblazers 

of destructive invasions pillaging 

and destroying native centres of 

civilization. Further, building on the 

erroneous but by now widespread belief 

that most Indian Muslims were low-caste 

Hindus who sought equality by converting 

to Islam, it is argued that they are largely 

part of the native stock, hence more Indian 

than Hindu nationalists, who are (equally 

erroneously) identified as upper-caste and 

hence as Aryan invaders. 

(6) Indo-Anglian snobbery. English 

education and more recently the 

westernization of the workplace, of 

popular music and other everyday 

circumstances have generated a class of 

Indians quite alienated from and ignorant 

of native culture. More than the Englishemployed 

Babus of yore, they delight in 

mocking and belittling native culture. In 

their hands, the AIT is simply an instrument 

to tease Indian “chauvinists” and 

deconstruct the very notion of a distinct 

Indian or Hindu civilization. With the 

decline of ideology and the rise of the 

commercial outlook in the media, this 

supercilious and nihilistic attitude is now 

a rising force in the opinion landscape, but 

it has always been around in non-Marxist 

100 

sections of independent India’s anglicised 

elite. 

(7) Indian Marxism. Among the Englisheducated 

elite, a class of Marxist 

intellectuals has been very active and 

increasingly influential since the 1930s. 

Around the time of independence, they 

emphasized the Leninist theory of national 

self-determination, favouring the creation 

of a Muslim state Pakistan and the further 

partition of India into separate linguistic 

states. Though not actively militating for 

separatism later on, they kept on promoting 

notions like “Bengali nationhood” and 

refused to accept the Indian state, for “India 

was never the solution”, according to 

Marxwadi Communist Party politburo 

member Ashok Mitra (1993). In that 

discourse, the AIT didn’t figure very 

prominently at first because as Marxists 

they focused on present social realities 

rather than the distant “feudal” past. Well 

into the 1980s, as long as they thought in 

terms of socio-economic class, they 

refused to cultivate casteist and ethnic 

identities and consequently took only a 

limited interest in AIT-based identity 

politics. But with the decline of world 

Communism, the Indian comrades 

increasingly compromised with 

identitarian populism, in some states even


with Islamic fundamentalism, in fact with 

any force deemed hostile to the perceived 

ruling class, characterized as upper-caste 

Hindu. In the 1990s, when the AIT was 

getting challenged, they became its most 

ardent and most effective defenders, vide 

e.g. Thapar 1996; Sharma 1995, 1999. 

While the other above-mentioned anti- 

Hindu or anti-Indian groups merely assume 

and use the AIT, the Indian Marxists have 

seriously invested in intellectually 

upholding it. 

The common denominator in all these uses 

of the AIT is that it undermines or 

contradicts India’s sense of unity. In Hindu 

nationalist parlance, the AIT is “antinational”. 

The reason why the votaries of 

Hindutva have recently rallied around the 

position of AIT skepticism is simply to 

counter these anti-national uses of the AIT. 

Ideological power equation in India 

To grasp the political dimension of the 

Aryan invasion debate, it is necessary to 

clarify the political power equation in the 

dominant media and academic institutions 

in India. As former Times of India editor 

Girilal Jain (sacked in 1989 for developing 

Hindutva sympathies) used to say: “Nothing 

ever dies in India.” Movements long dead 

101 

in the West are still alive and vigorous in 

India. That is why the last Communist will 

not be called Popov or Zhang or Kim, but 

Chatterji or Bose. Numerically, the 

Communists’ power base in India was 

always small, but in a few key sectors, 

including the bottlenecks in the 

information flow to the West, their 

presence was overwhelming and remains 

disproportionate even now. 

Around 1970, entryist policies 

(Communists entering Congress, the 

ministerial offices and the cultural 

institutions) and a very gainful quid pro quo 

with a besieged Prime Minister Indira 

Gandhi made Marxism the dominant 

ideology in the Indian state and parastatal 

institutions such as the Indian History 

Congress and the National Centre for 

Educational Research and Training. While 

ruling parties came and went, the 

entrenched Marxists defended their 

position and reserved access for their own 

kind. The first BJP government at the 

centre (1998-99) made no dent in the 

Marxist academic hegemony, and the 

second one (1999-present) only very 

partially. Even then, the Marxists didn’t take 

kindly to this first fresh breeze of glasnost, 

hence their campaign against new anti-


colonial and allegedly “saffron” accents in 

the textbooks. 

The Marxists don’t like to be caught in the 

searchlight. One of the most respected 

Marxist scholars, Romila Thapar, chides 

her critics thus: “Those that question their 

theories are dismissed as Marxists!” 

(1996:17) Well, apart from her reliance 

on a Marxist conceptual framework in her 

publications, she is also confirmed to be a 

representative of the Indian Marxist school 

of historiography in an authoritative 

Marxist source, the Dictionary of Marxist 

Thought (Bottomore 1988), under its entry 

“Hinduism”, along with R.S. Sharma. For 

those still in doubt, Irfan Habib, one of the 

deans of the Marxist school, has put his 

cards on the table in a book subtitled 

“Towards a Marxist Perception” (1995). 

Among the print media, the one most active 

in the anti-indigenist crusade is the 

Chennai-based fortnightly Frontline, a 

consistent defender of the Cuban and 

North-Korean regimes and of the Chinese 

occupation of Tibet. After the mock 

referendum in Iraq in the autumn of 2002, 

Frontline displayed its nostalgia for Soviet 

mock elections by treating Saddam 

Hussein’s 100% approval rate as a genuine 

democratic endorsement. Judging from its 

record, we may take the Frontline initiative 

102 

to prominently feature pro-AIT 

contributions by Asko Parpola and Michael 

Witzel, participants in the present JIES 

debate, to be motivated by something else 

than a concern for good scholarship. 

To be sure, the Marxist motives of the 

Frontline editors and of the old history 

establishment have no logical implications 

for the correctness or otherwise of the 

pro-invasionist argument. Of course not. 

But then it is not invasion sceptic Prof. 

Kazanas who tried to twist this debate to 

his advantage by raising the issue of 

political motives; that was the doing of 

some of his critics. If they don’t feel 

troubled by their de facto alliance with 

crackpots like V.T. Rajshekar or with the 

Marxist school and its record of history 

distortion, they have no reason to mobilize 

(false!) rumours of Hindu nationalist 

connections against Prof. Kazanas. 

Hindu nationalist approaches to the 

Aryan invasion hypothesis 

For all their focusing on the all-purpose 

bogey of Hindu nationalism (or worse 

isms), it is remarkable that Indian Marxists 

and their Western disciples have 

completely failed to study this ideology. 

During my Ph.D. research on this very


topic (vide Elst 2001/1), I found that 

practically all secondary publications in the 

field, including some influential ones (e.g. 

Pandey 1993, McKean 1996, more 

recently Hansen 1999), dispensed almost 

completely with the reading of primary 

sources. Typically, a few embarrassing 

quotations, selected by Indian critics of 

Hindutva from some old pamphlets (mostly 

Golwalkar 1939), are repeated endlessly 

and in unabashedly polemical fashion. 

A shameful example of the total reliance 

of Western scholars on outright partisan 

secondary Indian sources while passing 

judgment on a Hindu nationalist position 

was the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute, 

as I discussed in detail in Elst 2002. Until 

the late 1980s, there was a complete 

consensus among all Hindu, Muslim and 

Western sources about the fact that the 

mosque had been built in forcible 

replacement of a temple, a very common 

occurrence throughout Muslim-conquered 

territories. This consensus, nowadays 

mischaracterized as the Hindu nationalist 

position, was since confirmed by new 

findings and remained strictly 

unchallenged by any counter-findings. 

Note indeed that all the official and 

unofficial argumentations against the 

temple limited themselves to downplaying 

103 

the impact of some of the evidence for the 

temple, and never offered even one piece 

of positive testimony for an alternative 

scenario. Yet, the dominant Marxist circles 

decreed that there had never been a temple 

at the site (e.g. Sharma et al. 1991) and 

lambasted Western scholars who had 

earlier confirmed the consensus as 

handmaidens of Hindu fundamentalism 

(Gopal 1991:30),— enough to send these 

scholars into prudent retirement from the 

Ayodhya debate, vide Van der Veer 

1994:161. Lately the Marxists have had to 

swallow that maximalist position and 

revert to the more reasonable political 

position that temple demolitions of the past 

do not justify mosque demolitions in the 

present; but for more than a decade, their 

leaden dogma has stifled the history debate, 

viz. that the temple demolition was merely 

a “Hindu chauvinist fabrication”. 

Those who stuck to the old consensus view, 

the one confirmed by the evidence, have 

had tons of mud thrown at them not just by 

Indian Marxists but by their Western dupes 

as well, e.g. Hansen 1999:262. Not one of 

the latter ever took issue with the actual 

evidence, behaving instead as obedient 

soldiers carrying out and amplifying the 

Indian Marxist ukase. At the time of this 

writing, Indian archaeologists are digging


up more Hindu religious artefacts from 

underneath the temple/mosque site (Mishra 

2003), yet the Financial Times (Dalrymple 

2003) carries a long article extolling 

Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib, ridiculing 

the consensus view on Ayodhya along with 

the non-invasionist “myth”, denouncing 

Ayodhya consensus representative K.S. 

Lal (conveniently dead and unable to 

defend himself), and bluffing about “all the 

evidence” disproving the Ayodhya temple’s 

existence but not actually mentioning any 

of it. 

The same pattern, though less extreme, is 

in evidence concerning the specific 

involvement of declared Hindu nationalists 

in the Aryan invasion debate. Their 

positions are systematically ignored or 

misrepresented, and false motives are 

attributed to them according to the 

accuser’s convenience. A brazen-faced 

example is Thapar 1996:8, about the Vedic 

revivalist movement Arya Samaj, a socialreformist 

society founded in 1875 whose 

spokesmen incidentally also rejected the 

AIT: “The Arya Samaj was described by its 

followers as ‘the society of the Aryan 

race’. The Aryas were the upper castes and 

the untouchables were excluded.” In reality, 

the Arya Samaj made its mark in Indian 

history by working, often at great personal 

104 

sacrifice, to undo the exclusion of the 

untouchables; and by redefining “Arya” as 

“Vedic”, away from both its old Indian 

casteist and its new Western racist 

interpretation. As for the expression 

“society of the Aryan race”, while I am 

unaware of its application to the Arya Samaj 

specifically, it is true that around the turn 

of the 20th century, the expression “Aryan 

race” was fairly commonly used by Indian 

nationalists in the sense of “Indian nation”, 

neither more nor less. 

Romila Thapar’s use of “Aryan” cited 

above, by contrast, is a transparent attempt 

to play on its post-Nazi connotations, as if 

its meaning hadn’t radically changed at 

some dramatic point between 1875 and 

1996 (this exploitation of the confusion 

and hysteria about the term “Aryan” is 

standard fare in Indian anti-indigenist 

polemic, e.g. Sikand 1993). And yet, 

Romila Thapar remains the most celebrated 

Indian historian among Western Indiawatchers, 

a status recently confirmed by 

her honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne. In 

the laudatio, the authorities of France’s 

most prestigious university repeated the 

well-known Indian Marxist rhetoric against 

“saffronization”, with the unusual extra of 

specifically denouncing the French pro- 

Indian journalist François Gautier, a well-


known critic of the AIT (1996). Nobody 

took the trouble to verify the criticisms 

raised against the scholarly performance 

of the honorary doctor. 

If we want to know about Hindu nationalist 

involvement in the Aryan invasion debate, 

the Indian Marxist school and its Western 

spokesmen cannot help us. The one extant 

critical review of the various Hindu 

nationalist positions regarding the Aryan 

problem was written by Shrikant Talageri, 

ironically but significantly a declared 

Hindu nationalist himself. The following 

much briefer review is indebted to his 

input. 

(1) Acceptance of the AIT 

A number of Hindu nationalists have 

accepted the AIT. Most prominent among 

them is Hindu nationalist seed ideologue 

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In his 

influential booklet Hindutva (“Hinduness”), 

he wrote of how migrations had “welded 

Aryans and non-Aryans into a common 

race” (1923:8) and how “not even the 

aborigines of the Andamans are without 

some sprinkling of the so-called Aryan 

blood in their veins and vice-versa” 

(1923:56). This way, he rejected the 

divisive implication of the AIT that India 

105 

was composed of several distinct nations, 

arguing instead that they had biologically 

mingled and culturally fused into a single 

Hindu nation. Like his leftist opponent 

Jawaharlal Nehru, he accepted that the 

nation was a product of historical 

processes, not an age-old God-given 

essence. There is no organic link between 

Savarkar’s positions on nationalism and 

ancient history: as a non-specialist, he 

merely accepted the dominant paradigm 

and tried to accommodate it into his 

political views. But note at any rate, all you 

who identify OIT with Hindutva, that the 

founder of the Hindutva ideology was an 

AIT believer. 

Sharply to be distinguished from Hindu 

nationalists, who are modernists and social 

reformers for the sake of national unity, 

there is also a dwindling school of Hindu 

traditionalists. Among them, you find 

pandits who are steeped in Sanskritic lore 

and have never even heard of an Aryan 

invasion, which is after all unattested in 

Vedic literature. The one traditionalist who 

must be mentioned here as accepting the 

AIT was a Western “honorary Hindu”, the 

French musicologist Alain Daniélou 

(1971, 1975), companion of the 

traditionalist leader Swami Karpatri. Here 

again, there is no organic link between his


Hindu-traditionalist view of society and his 

historical beliefs, which were borrowed 

wholesale from the dominant Western 

school of thought. 

The most well-known Hindu nationalist to 

actively support the AIT and explore its 

implications was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an 

Indian National Congress leader in the early 

20th century. His chronology, worked out 

in dialogue with Hermann Jacobi (and still 

upheld by archaeo-astronomers, e.g. Kak 

2003), was sharply incompatible with the 

currently dominant theory: he put the Rg- 

Veda ca. 4000 BC rather than 1500 BC 

(Tilak 1893, 1903). If the Vedas were that 

old, the invasion would have to be pushed 

back accordingly, as the Vedic geographical 

setting is obviously South-Asian; but Tilak 

solved this problem by having the Vedic 

seers compose their hymns far outside 

India, in an Indo-European homeland 

situated in the Arctic region. Except for a 

handful of European rightist non-scholars, 

nobody takes this eccentric scenario 

seriously anymore, not even the Tilak 

loyalists in Maharashtrian Brahmin circles 

which happen to be the cradle of both the 

Savarkarite and RSS-BJP strands within the 

Hindu nationalist movement. All the same, 

Tilak’s acceptance of a version of the AIT 

106 

again disproves the identification of the 

OIT with Hindu nationalism. 

(2) Rejection of the AIT 

Few among the Hindu nationalists have 

really studied the relevant evidence. Some 

even reject the whole notion of historical 

evidence as pertinent to this question. From 

Jaimini’s Mim ns -Sûtra (BCE) down to 

Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda’s 

Saty rtha Prakash (ca. AD 1875), a school 

of Vedic scholars has believed that the 

Vedas were not a human creation, but were 

created by the Gods aeons ago and then 

revealed in complete form to the Vedic 

seers. Oddly, for people who held the Vedas 

in such awe, their theory flies in the face 

of the Vedic testimony itself: unlike the 

Quran, the Vedas never take the form of a 

statement by God addressing man. Instead, 

they take the form of hymns in which man 

is addressing the Gods. The names of the 

seers composing the hymns are also given, 

and they are put in a historical context, 

often with their mutual relations, 

genealogical kinship and faction feuds 

detailed in the texts themselves. Moreover, 

a number of presumably historical events 

are described or alluded to, most famously 

the Battle of the Ten Kings. All this points 

to the historicity of the Vedas: they came


about as a creation of human poetry in a 

specific society at a specific phase in its 

development. But Vedic enthusiasts like 

Dayananda and to a lesser extent Sri 

Aurobindo Ghose chose to disregard this 

information and reinterpreted all these 

mundane data as spiritual metaphor. 

Though they also happened to reject the 

invasion hypothesis, they excluded the 

Vedic information as possible source of 

evidence for their own indigenist position. 

Aurobindo’s correct observation 

(1971:242-251) that the Vedas contain no 

mention of an Aryan invasion, thereby 

loses its force. 

After Aurobindo’s death, his otherwise 

loyal secretary K.D. Sethna (1982, 1992) 

abandoned this position and started using 

Vedic data on material culture to argue the 

chronological precedence of Rg-Vedic 

over high Harappan culture, e.g. that the 

Harappan cultivation of cotton goes 

unmentioned in the older Vedic layers so 

that its early-Harappan introduction must 

coincide with some mid-Vedic date. More 

perhaps than the archaeologists’ 

acknowledged inability to discover any 

remains of an Aryan invasion (Shaffer 

1984, Rao 1991, Lal 1987, 2002, etc.), 

Sethna’s theses truly were the opening shot 

in the Hindu nationalist mobilization 

107 

against the AIT. Within the Aurobindo 

circle, this work was continued by Danino 

& Nahar 2000. 

Since Sethna’s publications, many Hindu 

authors of divergent levels of qualification 

have felt emboldened to contribute to the 

anti-invasionist argument. Some of them 

lose themselves in projects they are not 

up to, such as the decipherment of the Indus 

script, but in matters of textual 

interpretation and of matching 

archaeological and genetic data with 

cultural history, they are often better 

equipped than their invasionist opponents. 

Those who care to read this literature, will 

notice how it belies its characterization by 

hostile commentators as “far-rightist” and 

the like. It actually taps into the discourse 

of anti-colonialism, anti-racism and antiorientalism 

(e.g. Rajaram 1995, 2000), 

which most Westerners would 

spontaneously describe as leftist. A lone 

Indian Marxist (Singh 1995) has also 

contributed to the anti-invasionist 

argument, predictably focusing on material 

and economic data suggesting Harappan- 

Aryan continuity, and thus upholding the 

more usual Third World Marxist tradition 

of anti-colonialism as opposed to the 

Indian card-carrying Marxists’


championing of the colonial view of 

history. 

Conclusion 

The political instrumentalization of 

theories about Indo-European origins has 

yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. 

On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan 

invasion of India, we find old colonial 

apologists and race theorists and their 

marginalized successors in the 

contemporary West along with a broad 

alliance of anti-Hindu forces in India, most 

articulate among them the Christian 

missionaries and the Marxists who have 

dominated India’s intellectual sector for 

the past several decades. This dominant 

school of thought has also carried along 

Bibliography 

108 

some prominent early votaries of Hindu 

nationalism. On the side of the noninvasionist 

or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, 

we find long-dead European Romantics 

and a few contemporary Western India 

lovers, along with an anti-colonialist school 

of thought in India, mainly consisting of 

contemporary Hindu nationalists. 

Obviously, among the subscribers to either 

view we also find scholars without any 

political axe to grind. And even in the 

writings of politically motivated authors, 

we do come across valid argumentations. 

Consequently, it is best to continue this 

research without getting sidetracked by the 

real or alleged or imagined political 

connotations of certain scholarly lines of 

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Maharashtra, Mumbai 1986. 

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1922?). 

Benoist, Alain de, 1997: “Indo-Européens: à la recherche du foyer d’origine”, Nouvelle Ecole 49, 

Paris, p.13-105. 

—, 2000: « Les Aryens en Inde: présentation », Nouvelle Ecole 51, Paris, p.127-133. 

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Hohe Warte, Pähl 1982). 

—, 1934: Frömmigkeit nordischer Artung (French translation: Religiosité Indo-Européenne, Pardès, 

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51, Paris, p.147-153. 

Kak, Subhash, 2003: “Babylonian and Indian astronomy: early connections”, www.arXiv:physics/ 

0301078v1. 

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109


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Scholarship, Voice of India, Delhi. 

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—, 1993: Dialogue of the Bhoodevatas: Sacred Brahmins versus Socialist Brahmins, Dalit 

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(April 2003) 

111


Our narratives about the past are 

scraps of evidence joined with the 

glue of imagination. So there can 

be many narratives and many retellings as 

the vocabulary changes with time. This is 

all ancient history can be and we should be 

satisfied with that. It is sensible to accept 

that our reconstructions of the past are 

subjective. 

But what does one do if a narrative is at 

variance with the evidence and yet, because 

of endless repetition, it has become 

entrenched in popular imagination as well 

as in scholarly discourse? And what if such 

a narrative is accepted as the only truth? 

Here I am talking of the fabrication of the 

narrative of Aryan invasions of the 2nd 

millennium BC. All evidence we have goes 

against it: There is biological continuity 

in the skeletal record for 4500-800 BC; 

the archaeological record has been seen 

to belong to the same cultural tradition 

from 7000 BC to historical times; the 

literary texts know of no other geography 

but that of India; and so on. Furthermore, 

the texts remember several astronomical 

Racism and Indology 

Prof. Subash Kak 

112 

events that took place during 5000 BC to 

1000 BC; they also state that the Sarasvati 

flowed to the sea, which is memory of a 

period prior to 2000 BC, because we now 

know that the river dried up around that 

time. Here it is not my intention to review 

the evidence for which broad consensus 

exists amongst archaeologists. 

So what should we do if some textbooks 

continue to repeat this fabrication? There 

are those who say that history doesn’t 

matter and so let’s not worry about what 

the books say and in due course better 

books will be published. 

Maybe true. But isn’t it foolish to let wrong 

things be taught in schools and colleges? 

How does it help education if we assault 

the intelligence of the youth and tell them 

something to be a fact for which there is 

no evidence? 

Indology and Racism 

It is bad enough if a fabrication— a story— 

is palmed off as the truth, but what if the


fabrication is driven not just by poor logic 

but by racism? 

Ten years ago, the distinguished British 

anthropologist, Edmund Leach, wrote a 

famous essay on this problem titled “Aryan 

Invasions Over Four Millennia”. 

Published in a book called “Culture 

Through Time” (edited by Emiko Ohnuki- 

Tierney, Stanford University Press, 1990), 

this essay exposed the racist basis of the 

19th century construction of Indian 

prehistory and, perhaps more important for 

us, it showed how racism persists in the 

academic approach to the study of India. 

The implication of Leach’s charge is that 

many of the assumptions at the basis of the 

academic study of Indian social 

organization, language development, and 

evolution of religion are simply wrong! 

Here are some excerpts from this essay: 

Why do serious scholars persist 

in believing in the Aryan 

invasions?... Why is this sort of 

thing attractive? Who finds it 

attractive? Why has the 

development of early Sanskrit 

come to be so dogmatically 

associated with an Aryan 

invasion?…Where the Indo- 

113 

European philologists are 

concerned, the invasion argument 

is tied in with their assumption 

that if a particular language is 

identified as having been used in 

a particular locality at a 

particular time, no attention need 

be paid to what was there before; 

the slate is wiped clean. 

Obviously, the easiest way to 

imagine this happening in real 

life is to have a military conquest 

that obliterates the previously 

existing population! The details of 

the theory fit in with this racist 

framework... Because of their 

commitment to a unilineal 

segmentary history of language 

development that needed to be 

mapped onto the ground, the 

philologists took it for granted 

that proto-Indo-Iranian was a 

language that had originated 

outside either India or Iran. Hence 

it followed that the text of the Rig 

Veda was in a language that was 

actually spoken by those who 

introduced this earliest form of 

Sanskrit into India. From this we 

derived the myth of the Aryan 

invasions. QED. The origin myth 

of British colonial imperialism


helped the elite administrators in 

the Indian Civil Service to see 

themselves as bringing ‘pure’ 

civilization to a country in which 

civilization of the most 

sophisticated (but ‘morally 

corrupt’) kind was already nearly 

6,000 years old. Here I will only 

remark that the hold of this myth 

on the British middle-class 

imagination is so strong that even 

today, 44 years after the death of 

Hitler and 43 years after the 

creation of an independent India 

and independent Pakistan, the 

Aryan invasions of the second 

millennium BC are still treated as 

if they were an established fact of 

history. 

In editorial comments, Emiko Ohnuki- 

Tierney summarizes Leach’s arguments 

regarding the fabrication: 

Seemingly objective academic 

endeavors are affected by the 

mentality of the culture to which 

they belong. Leach describes how 

cherished but erroneous 

assumptions in linguistics and 

anthropology were accepted 

without question. If the mentality 

114 

of the academic culture was in 

part responsible for the 

fabrication, geopolitics was even 

more responsible for upholding 

the Aryan invasion as history. The 

theory fit the Western or British 

vision of their place in the world 

at the time. The conquest of Asian 

civilization needed a mythical 

charter to serve as the moral 

justification for colonial 

expansion. Convenient, if not 

consciously acknowledged, was 

the Aryan invasion by a fairskinned 

people, speaking the socalled 

Proto-Indo-European 

language, militarily conquering 

the dark-skinned, peasant Dasa 

(Dasyu), who spoke a non- 

European language and with 

whom the conquerors lived, as 

Leach puts it, in a ‘system of 

sexual apartheid.’ ...A remarkable 

case of Orientalism indeed. 

The Hegemonic Circle 

According to the postmodern theorist 

Lalita Pandit conventions of history writing 

are more often than not marked by 

intellectual bad faith that serves and 

maintains hegemonic ideologies. She adds,


it is nearly impossible to alter the premises 

of hegemonic claims, because hegemonies 

are founded in such retellings, and passing 

off of myth for fact and history, non-truth 

for belief. In part at least, all hegemonies 

are founded in discourses. Discourse 

conventions are automatically set to deal 

with exigencies. When a contrary, antihegemonic 

view comes out strong, 

historiagraphic conventions, having 

become habit or mind-sets, are all set to 

transform the contrary view and absorb into 

a grand paradigm that ultimately only 

serves the hegemonic ideology. At the 

same time, hegemonic institutions are 

automatically set up to not validate, not 

give authority to contrary views. After all, 

what is considered truth is what comes 

from the horse’s mouth, and who decides 

who this privileged horse, the subject who 

knows the truth is?’ One example of this 

phenomenon is the interesting strategy 

devised by the defenders of the Invasion 

theory to beat back criticism. They say: The 

critics are Hindu nationalists motivated by 

political considerations and besides they 

are not from academic departments. This 

is nonsense. The issue is the message and 

it shouldn’t matter who the messenger is. 

Anyway, this charge that the Invasion/ 

migration theory has been criticised only 

115 

by independent scholars and nationalists is 

false. Edmund Leach was not a Hindu 

nationalist. Neither are Jim Shaffer and 

Diane Lichtenstein, perhaps the foremost 

modern scholars of Indian prehistory, who 

write in a recent essay: 

The South Asian archaeological 

record reviewed here does not 

support ... any version of the 

migration/invasion hypothesis. 

Rather, the physical distribution 

of sites and artifacts, 

stratigraphic data, radiometric 

dates, and geological data can 

account form the Vedic oral 

population movement. 

Shaffer and Lichtenstein go to the heart of 

the matter when they further say about the 

Invasion/migration theories: 

[These theories] are significantly 

diminished by European 

ethnocentrism, colonialism, 

racism, and antisemitism. Surely, 

as South Asian studies the twentyfirst 

century, it is time to describe 

emerging data objectively rather 

than perpetuate interpretations 

without regard to the data


archaeologists have worked so 

hard to reveal. 

A Question of Method 

Let’s for a moment forget the sorry history 

of the construction of India’s past; Edmund 

Leach has covered that ground very well in 

his essay. I am prepared to concede that 

what Leach called racism in Indic studies 

may not be obvious to the protagonists. 

Wearing the blinkers of the tradition in 

their subspeciality, they may believe that 

they are merely following in the footsteps 

of their predecessors. But if a method is 

wrong the incremental “advances” in the 

framework will only lead one more astray. 

There are many examples of this such as 

the research during the Lysenko regime in 

the Soviet Union or the work done by the 

believers in cold fusion. 

The basic error in the Orientalist enterprise 

of Indian prehistory is the “logic” of 

apportionment of credit for culture to one 

“race” or another. It is comparable to the 

search for Aryan and Jewish components 

in modern science, the absurdity of which 

is clear to everyone excepting extremist 

racist groups. Yet it has become common 

in Indic studies to write whole volumes on 

the discovery of the “Aryan” and 

116 

“Dravidian” components of Indian culture! 

Words and cultural ideas that have evolved 

over all of India are now being examined 

to find which elements of these are Aryan 

and Dravidian! These are questions to 

which no definitive answers can be found. 

If nothing else this is a colossal waste of 

academic resources. 

There are studies, for example, which trace 

the caste system to the Indo-European 

tripartite scheme, and there are still others 

that trace it to the Dravidian social 

organization! The Puranas are seen by 

some to be an organic outgrowth of the 

Vedic system, and by others to be an 

expression of the earlier Dravidian 

Hinduism. This and that of the cultural life 

are assigned to Aryans and Dravidians with 

no consistent logic. This list goes on and 

on. 

Edmund Leach ridiculed the method used 

by Indo-Europeanists. He commended a 

paper, “Did the Dravidians of India obtain 

their culture from Aryan immigrants?”, 

written by P.T. Srinivas Iyengar in 1914 

(Anthropos, vol. 9, pp. 1-15) that clearly 

shows the propositions of the Invasionsit/ 

migrationsts are “either fictitious or 

unproved.” Iyengar has some fun in the 

process: “It was reserved for the


philologists of the first half of the 19th 

century to discover that Arya and Dasyu 

were names of different races. They 

diligently searched the Veda for indication 

of this, and their discoveries remind us of 

the proverbial mouse begotten of the 

mountain.” The philological edifice has 

been punctured by Swaminathan Aiyar in 

his remarkable “Dravidian Theories” which 

appeared in 1975. 

Discourse as Theatre 

Geertz’s eloquent argument, in 1980, for 

a ‘theatre state’ interpretation of the 

Balinese kingdom provides us with a useful 

insight for the examination of the Indian 

prehistory paradigm. In a discipline as a 

theatre, the continuing ‘elaborations’ of the 

basic schema are part of a ritual that has 

nothing to do with the reality of the 

evidence. Geertz seems to be addressing 

us when he says, “The state [is a] 

metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to 

express a view of the ultimate nature of 

reality and, at the same time, to shape the 

existing conditions of life to be consistent 

with that reality: that is, theatre to present 

an ontology of the world and, by presenting 

it, to make it happen—make it actual.” The 

theatre of Indian prehistory has likewise 

moulded the current conditions to conform 

117 

to its reality. It is not physical force but 

words and ideas (or shall we call them 

mantras) that bind people. 

In the hour of defeat, the theatre state 

expired with the puputans, the royal parade, 

with parasols and all, into the fire of the 

attacking Dutch troops. Is such mass 

suicide the only end possible for a theatre 

state? Can there be a peaceful resolution? 

Coda 

Edmund Leach was a great anthropologist, 

a sober man, who was for many years a 

professor at Cambridge and later provost 

at King’s College. He used the charge of 

racism against Indo-Europeanists 

deliberately. He said, 

“[To] bring about a shift in this 

entrenched paradigm is like 

trying to cut down a 300-yearold 

oak tree with a penknife. But 

the job will have to be done one 

day.” 

Academic study on ancient India will 

remain “like a patient etherized upon a 

table” unless it finds a proper center and 

fresh energy. This center will be located 

only as a result of critiques like that of


Leach. But what about energy? Will it be 

provided by the financial support of Indians 

in the West, who have made enormous 

fortunes in the electronic and computer 

industry? I don’t think so, at least not in 

the near future. The racism at the basis of 

Indic studies, which Indians have 

experienced in their own education and of 

which they continue to hear from their 

children in college, has made them 

reluctant to support academic programs. 

The Aryan affair is, nevertheless, of great 

interest to the anthropologist. Paraphrasing 

Leach, one may raise questions like: Why 

do serious people spend their lives in the 

elaboration of a racist paradigm? It seems 

to be like the scholiasts of the Middle Ages 

spinning volumes on how many angels can 

rest on the point of a needle! 

References: 

· Aiyar, R. Swaminathan. Dravidian 

Theories. The Madras Law Journal 

Office, Madras, 1975. 

· Geertz, C. Negara: The theatre state in 

nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton 

University Press, Princeton, 1980, p. 

104. 

118 

· Iyengar, P.T. Srinivas. “Did the 

Dravidians of India obtain their culture 

from Aryan immigrant?’’ Anthropos, 

vol. 9, 1914, pp. 1-15. 

· Leach, Edmund. “Aryan invasions over 

four millennia.’’ In Culture through 

Time, Anthropological Approaches, 

edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford 

University Press, Stanford, 1990, pp. 

227-245. 

· Pandit, Lalita. “Caste, Race, and 

Nation:History and Dialectic in 

Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora”. In 

Literary India: Comparative Studies in 

Aesthetics, Colonialism, And 

Culture.” Eds. Patrick Colm Hogan 

and Lalita Pandit. Albany, New York: 

State University of New York Press, 

1995. 

· Shaffer, Jim and Lichtenstein, Diane. 

“Migration, philology and South Asian 

Archaeology.’’ In Aryan and Non- 

Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, 

Interpretation and Ideology, edited by 

J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande, 

CSSAS, Univ of Michigan, 1999.


The question ˜who owns the past?” 

is not a rhetorical question. On the 

one hand, it is tied to the issue of 

identities, which has played a major role 

in archaeological research since its very 

inception, and on the other, it is bound up 

with the various features of cultural 

resource management including the thorny 

relationship between the mainstream 

archaeology and the rights of indigenous 

people in the countries like USA, Australia 

and Canada. 

There is a vast amount of literature on both 

themes. The first one, i.e. the question of 

identity, is linked to the establishment of 

national identity as well as various other 

collective identities like gender, ethnicity 

and religion. The issue of identity may 

assume many forms and generate many 

debates. In the context of Israel and the 

Palestinian territory, it has been argued [1], 

for instance, that there are four types of 

desired pasts there : 

(1) Israeli desired past which is sought by 

the Israeli state and the Jewish 

organizations of the United States; 

Who Owns India’s Past? 

Prof: Dilip K. Chakrabarti 

119 

(2) Conservative Christian past which is 

championed by the Christian 

fundamentalist organizations, the American 

School of Oriental Research and the 

Biblical Archaeological Society; 

(3) Palestinian desired past favored by the 

Palestinian rights organizations and 

Palestinian archaeologists and 

intellectuals; and finally, 

(4) Diplomatic desired past, as represented 

by the appointed officials of the US State 

department. 

Issues such as these have always been parts 

of archaeological research tradition, but in 

the modern world where the public 

awareness of such issues is much sharper 

, archaeological literature has to be 

concerned with the process and nature of 

various identity-formations. 

The second theme is equally visible, 

although currently at its sharpest 

only in the United States and Australia. The 

Native American Graves Protection and 

Repatriation Act, a federal law requiring 

agencies and institutions in receipt of


federal funding to return native American 

human remains, funerary objects, sacred 

objects and objects of cultural patrimony 

to their respective peoples, was passed in 

1990. Similarly, the recognition of the 

traditional land-rights of the Australian 

indigenous people has also led to the 

recognition of their control over the 

cultural objects, sacred places and human 

remains found in their land [2]. 

As I wrote in 2004, all the people of the 

subcontinent are, in one way or another, 

the inheritors of the Indus civilization [1]. 

The Indian past represented by this 

civilization belongs to them. 

Let me conclude this by pointing out a 

danger which is increasingly facing Indian 

archaeology today. If one goes through the 

archaeological literature on Egypt and 

Mesopotamia, the areas where Western 

scholarship has been paramount since the 

beginning of archaeological research in 

those areas, one notes that the contribution 

made by the native Egyptian and Iraqi 

archaeologists is completely ignored in 

that literature. The Bronze Age past of 

Egypt, Mesopotamia and the intervening 

region is completely appropriated by the 

Western scholarship. Also, when Western 

archaeologists write on Pakistani 

120 

archaeology, they seldom mention the 

contribution made by the Pakistani 

archaeologists themselves. There are 

exceptions but they are very rare. After 

Independence, the Archaeological Survey 

of India pursued a policy of relative 

isolation, which enabled archaeology as a 

subject to develop in the country and 

helped Indian archaeologists to find their 

feet. 

The policy seems to be changing now, and 

supercilious articles like the one by 

Lawler are an indication of the effect of 

this change. There is a great deal of 

arrogance and sense of superiority in 

that segment of the First World 

archaeology which specializes in the Third 

World. Unless this segment of the 

First World archaeology changes its way 

and attitude, it should be treated with a great 

deal of caution in the Third World. 

As a British author, William Dalrymple, 

possibly well-known in Delhi, is supposed 

to have commented in an interview to the 

Channel 4 of the British television, “One 

should protect one‘s own history and fight 

for it by tooth and claw, as others will 

always try to change.”


References: 

[1] Sandra Scham, Diplomacy and desired 

pasts, Journal of Social Archaeology, 9(2), 

2009, pp. 163-199 

[2] N.Ferries, Between colonial and 

indigenous archaeologies: legal and extralegal 

ownership of the archaeological past 

in north America. Canadian Journal of 

Archaeology 27(2), 2003, pp. 154-190 ; 

D.Ritchie, Principles and practice of site 

protection laws in Australia. In, 

Charmichael, D., Hubert, J., Reeves, B and 

Schanche , .eds. Sacred Sites, Sacred 

Places London, 1994: Routledge, pp. 227- 

244 

121


Harappans and Aryans: 

Old and New Perspectives of Ancient Indian 

History* 

IN THIS ERA OF GLOBALIZATION it is 

important for the general public to have 

some knowledge of the histories and 

cultures of people around the world. The main 

source of information for most people would 

be a world history course. What they learn may 

not, however, be as accurate as one might wish. 

I have found that, to some extent, world history 

texts suffer from a Eurocentric bias when dealing 

with the histo-ries of non-European peoples. I 

will illustrate this point by looking at how nine 

world history texts treat the Harappan (also 

called Indus) civilization and the Aryans in ancient 

India. These are the texts: 1 

L.S. Stavrianos, A Global History: From 

Prehistory to the Present 

Peter Stearns and others, 

World Civilizations: The Global 

Experience 

William McNeill, A History of the 

Human Community 

Anthony Esler, The Human Venture 

Kevin Reilly, The West and the World 

Richard Greaves and others, 

Civilizations of the World 

Padma Manian De Anza College 

Walter Wallbank and others, 

Civilization: Past & Present 

Stanley Chodorow and others, The 

Mainstream of Civilization 

John McKay and others, A History of 

World Societies 

I will begin by looking at what these texts say 

about the Indus civiliza-tion and the Aryans under 

four categories: their description of the Indus 

civilization, the causes of its decline, the entrance 

of the Aryans, and the aftermath of their 

appearance in India. Then I will analyze the 

sources from which these texts drew their 

material. Finally I will discuss alterna-tive ideas 

as seen in some old and new scholarship. 

All the texts mention Harappa and 

Mohenjodaro, the two sites of the Indus 

civilization that were first discovered. They 

describe general fea-tures of the cities such as 

well-planned streets, extraordinary drainage 

systems, citadels, granaries, and the great bath 

at Mohenjodaro. They also mention the many 

artifacts excavated such as pottery, and statues. 

All of them note that the Indus script found on 

the numerous seals is undeciphered. Greaves and 

coauthors and McKay and coauthors give the 

122


size of the area over which the civilization had 

existed as half a million square miles and over 

1.25 million square kilometers respectively. Only 

Greaves and coauthors mention Kalibangan, 

another big excavated city. Most mention that 

two hundred “village sites” have been excavated 

while Chodorow and coauthors say that three 

hundred sites have been exca-vated. McKay 

and coauthors and Stearns and coauthors alone 

devote some attention to the neolithic settlements 

which were antecedents to the Indus civilization. 

The texts all date the beginning of the Indus 

civilization to the third millennium BCE. Except 

for Greaves and coauthors, who give 3000 BCE 

as its origin, the rest have opted for 2500 BCE. 

Again Greaves and coauthors alone give 2000 

BCE as the end of the civilization whereas all 

others state that it ended in 1500 BCE. The year 

1500 BCE is also significant in another way for 

these texts in that they all state that as the year 

when the Aryans entered India. 

We now turn to the next issue at hand, namely 

what causes led to the decline of the Indus 

civilization. I found that the texts could generally 

be put into two groups according to the causes 

they attributed for the decline. The first group 

unequivocally see the Aryans as the destroyers 

who massacred and enslaved the Indus people, 

while the second group say that environmental 

changes led to the civilization’s decline. Four of 

the texts; Reilly, McNeill, Stavrianos, and Esler 

123 

fall into the first cat-egory. Greaves and 

coauthors, McKay and coauthors, and 

Chodorow and coauthors, belong to the second 

category. The other texts, Stearns and coauthors, 

and Wallbank and coauthors straddle the two 

groups. 

In the words of Reilly, the civilization was 

“burned, destroyed, and left in rubble by invading 

Aryan-speaking tribes from the North.” He 

be-lieves that this was part of a worldwide series 

of Aryan invasions ca. 1500 BCE when “nomadic 

tribes in chariots invaded and destroyed 

civilizations such as Minoan and Indus.” 

Stavrianos writes that the Indus people were 

“overrun by tribes people who, with the military 

advantage of iron weapons and horse-drawn 

chariots, easily overwhelmed the copper 

weap-ons and ox-drawn carts of the natives. 

The invaders called themselves the Aryans.” 

While he clearly sees the Aryans as destroyers, 

in another chapter Stavrianos also states that the 

Indus civilization “may have been literally 

drowned in mud. Subterranean volcanic activity, 

according to this theory, caused a huge upwelling 

of mud, silt, and sand that dammed the Indus 

and formed a huge lake, swamping the capital, 

Mohenjo-daro.” The third text belonging to this 

group, by Esler, states “the fall of the Harappan 

world was almost certainly due to the intrusion 

of a new people into northwestern India: the 

Aryans.” McNeill also states the same opin-ion. 2


On the other hand, Greaves and coauthors 

emphatically state that the Aryans entered India 

after the Indus civilization collapsed. They say 

that the Aryan invaders could never have seen 

the Indus civilization in its prime and are thus 

unlikely causes for its decline. Instead “the Indus 

people encountered some specific problems 

resulting from their desert or semiarid 

environment, problems that may quickly have 

become over-whelming.” 3 However it must be 

pointed out that while they did not say that the 

Aryans destroyed the Indus civilization, they 

nonetheless saw them as conquerors who 

destroyed other indigenous people whom they 

encountered. Chodorow and coauthors see that 

“environmental factors such as devastating 

floods, a shift in the course of the Indus River, 

and exhaustion of soil fertility may have 

accounted for the demise of the civilization.” 4 

Wallbank and coauthors who straddle the 

above two interpretations first suggest that the 

decline set in 1700 BCE culminating in 1500 BCE 

“when a series of floods caused by earthquakes 

altered the course of the Indus and brought 

chaos.” However the authors also find an Aryan 

hand in its destruction when they said “the 

semibarbaric invaders brought an end to what 

little was left of Indus civilization.” 5 Similarly, 

Stearns and coauthors say that “a dramatic vision 

of a wave of “barbarian” invaders smashing town 

dwellers’ skulls made for good story-telling but 

124 

bad history.” Instead, they explain the demise in 

terms of natural factors. Nevertheless, later on 

in writing about the Aryan displacement of the 

Harappans, they suggest “that there was a good 

deal of violent conflict in this transition cannot 

be ruled out.” 6 

All the texts believe that the Aryans were 

pastoral nomads. Reilly says that the Aryans 

originally came from the grasslands of Eastern 

Europe and Western Asia. Stavrianos states that 

they came from the region of the Caspian Sea. 

According to Chodorow and McKay and their 

coauthors, the Aryans were from Anatolia. Esler 

identifies the steppes of European Russia, 

perhaps north of the Caspian Sea, as the Aryan 

homeland. Greaves and coauthors say that the 

Aryans came from south-central Asia, includ-ing 

what is now Iran. Stearns and coauthors believe 

that the Aryans originally came from the area 

between the Caspian and Black seas. Wallbank 

and coauthors merely say that they came from 

the north. And McNeill is silent on this topic. 7 In 

addition, the texts led by Reilly, Stearns, 

Wallbank, McNeill, Stavrianos, Greaves and 

Esler also believe that these nomads came not 

only with their cattle but also in horse-drawn 

chariots across the difficult northwestern 

mountain passes of the Himalayas. Except for 

Greaves and coauthors, the rest also state that 

the Aryans came with iron weapons which helped 

in their conquest of the Indus people who had


only bronze weapons. Chodorow and coauthors 

make no mention of Aryan metallurgy. Stearns 

and coauthors merely state that the Aryan metaltipped 

spears were more effective than the 

weapons of the indigenous peoples without 

specifying the nature of the metal. Greaves and 

coauthors differ from the rest in stating that the 

Aryans came to use iron only after they migrated 

into India. 

A few conclusions can be drawn from this 

review of the texts. First, all of them believe that 

the Aryans came from outside India in 1500 BCE. 

Second, whether it was destroyed by invading 

Aryans or by environmen-tal factors, the Indus 

civilization ceased to exist with the arrival of the 

Aryans. Third, they all assume that the civilization, 

its people, or culture was mutually exclusive of 

the Aryans and their culture. 

This brings us to the fourth issue, the aftermath 

of the Aryan invasion. It is indisputably taken 

for granted by the texts that the Aryan invasion 

in India culminated in their victory over the Indus 

or other people they encountered. So who were 

the vanquished people, be they the Indus people 

or others? How did the Aryans perceive them? 

How did they relate to and treat the conquered? 

All the texts arrive at their answers through their 

understanding of the caste system (varna) 

mentioned in the Vedas, the sacred texts of 

Hinduism composed by the Aryans. They 

125 

identify the four varnas; namely brahmana, 

kshatriya, vaisya, and shudra as the four castes. 

Stavrianos sees the Aryans as a race who 

were “very conscious of their physical features” 

and describes them as “tall, blue-eyed, fairskinned.” 

He further states that the image of 

them from the Vedas was that of a “virile people, 

fond of war, drinking, chariot racing, and 

gambling.” In contrast, the conquered people 

he found, were called the Dasas or “slaves” in 

the Vedas, and were “short, black, noseless.” 

Based on their fair and dark skin colors, 

Stavrianos concludes that they belonged to two 

different races. He projects such racial 

interpretations further into his discussion of varna 

or the caste system: “With their strong sense of 

racial superiority, the Aryans strove to prevent 

mixture with their despised subjects. 

Ac-cordingly they evolved a system of four 

hereditary castes. The first three comprised their 

own occupational classes, the priests 

(brahmans), the warrior nobles (kshatriyas), and 

the farmers (vaishyas). The fourth caste (shudras) 

was reserved for the Dasas who were excluded 

from the reli-gious ceremonies and social rights 

enjoyed by their conquerors.” How-ever, he 

thinks that “this arrangement ceased to 

correspond to racial reality with the passage of 

time” because he finds that in present-day India 

there are “black Southern Indian Brahmans”


who enjoy a high status and “light-skinned greyeyed 

untouchables” in Northern India. 8 

Stearns and coauthors understand that when 

the Aryans entered India, they were already 

divided into three main social groups of warriors, 

priests, and commoners. The Aryans enslaved 

the conquered indigenous people who then 

formed the fourth group of “slaves or serfs.” 

These authors also see “a physical dimension to 

the sharp division between the free and enslaved. 

The Aryans pictured themselves as light-skinned 

conquerors in a sea of dark-skinned Dasas.” 9 

Esler, Wallbank and coau-thors, and Chodorow 

and coauthors also present a similar racial 

interpre-tation. They go further in identifying the 

Aryans and Dravidians as the two races in India. 

Esler also reads varna in the Vedas to mean skin 

color when he says that it was “clearly referring 

to the old racial differences between the 

conquerors and conquered.” Chodorow and 

coauthors are of a similar opinion: “the darkskinned 

conquered people who formed the 

fourth order, were the shudras, who were 

reduced to serfdom and forced to perform 

menial tasks.” Wallbank and coauthors state that 

the shudras were the non-Aryan dark-skinned 

Dasas mentioned in the Vedas.’ 0 

Reilly has a different understanding of the caste 

system. He sees the “untouchables” as the 

“lower outcaste group of darker, non-Aryan 

indig-enous peoples who were required to do 

126 

the work that all other groups considered 

“polluting.” These “other groups” consisted of 

brahmanas, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and the 

shudras. He also does not put the shudras in the 

non-Aryan category as the other texts do. Yet 

he says that they were denied the same rights as 

the other three castes.” 

With the coming in of the Aryans, these texts 

see a clear divide in India between the fair and 

dark skin colors of Aryans and non-Aryans 

respec-tively, suggesting that the Aryans 

regarded themselves as the superior race. It 

ought to be pointed out that none of the authors 

of these texts appears to be a specialist in ancient 

Indian history and that they have all presented 

the views of other scholars of India. It is now 

pertinent to look at the work of some of the 

pioneering scholars of Indian studies to see the 

development of ideas about ancient Indian 

history. Sir William Jones was a distinguished 

linguist and a British judge in Bengal. He was a 

principal founder of western scholarship on 

ancient India. He was also highly influenced by 

his Christian beliefs. Upon studying Sanskrit he 

made the remarkable discovery in 1786 that it 

had striking similarities with Greek, Latin, Gothic, 

and Celtic. He was one of the first scholars to 

clearly put forward the idea that the languages 

of India and Europe constituted one family. He 

believed that this came about because the 

speakers of all these languages were descended


from Ham, one of Noah’s sons. Indians must 

therefore have come into India from the Biblical 

lands of West Asia where, presumably, Noah 

and his sons settled after the Great Flood and 

before the dispersal of the nations. 12 We can see 

the Aryan invasion theory prefigured in his work 

in that he proposed a migration into India from 

outside to explain the relationship between the 

languages of India and Europe. 

Among the many linguists who studied the 

Indo-European languages after Jones, Max 

Mtiller stands out as one of the most significant 

scholars of Indo-European language studies. 

Born in Germany, he lived and worked in 

England and made a translation of the Vedas 

from Sanskrit to English and was influential in 

his dating of the Vedas. As we shall see below, 

the dating of the Vedas is crucial to the dating of 

the Aryan invasion to 1500 BCE. Like Jones, 

Miiller assumed that the stories of the Bible were 

historical facts. But unlike Jones, he believed that 

Indo-Europeans descended from Japeth, 

an-other of Noah’s sons rather than Ham. 13 

Navaratna Rajaram describes in detail how 

MUiller arrived at his dates for the composition 

of the Vedas. 14 In short, since Miiller subscribed 

to a literal interpretation of the Bible, the 

descendants of Japeth would have left for India 

after the dispersal of the nations following the 

construction of the Tower of Babel after the 

Flood. This would be around 2500 BCE as 

127 

calculated from the genealogies of the Bible. The 

Buddha can be reliably dated to around 500 

BCE and since most of the Vedas already existed 

in the Buddha’s time, Miiller knew that the Vedas 

had to be composed between 2500 BCE and 

500 BCE. From the differences in language in 

different portions of the Vedas, Muiller saw 

several stages in their compo-sition. He assumed 

around two hundred years for each stage and 

also assumed that the latest stages of the Vedic 

literature were composed after the time of the 

Buddha. Miiller assigned 200 BCE for the 

composition of the last of the Vedic literature 

and 1200 BCE for its earliest composition. This 

is a span of a thousand years which allowed five 

stages of 200 years each. Therefore the 

descendants of Japeth must have invaded India 

a few centuries earlier or around 1500 BCE. 

When the belief in the literal veracity of the 

Bible decreased after the publication of Darwin’s 

work on evolution, interest in Indo-European 

languages took a different turn. Scholars were 

then primarily driven by the belief that the first 

speakers of an Indo-European language, termed 

by them proto-Indo-European, comprised an 

ethnic group (the Aryans) who inhabited an 

original homeland from which they then dispersed 

into various parts of the world. Incidentally, the 

word Aryan was appropriated from the word 

“arya” which occurs in the Vedas as an adjective 

meaning honorable. The usage of “arya” in the


Vedas has no racial connotation since potentially 

any person can be “arya” or honorable. The 

search for the Aryan homeland was then 

conducted by the enterprise of historical 

linguistics or linguistic paleontology. 15 The 

methodology of this disci-pline consisted of 

building up the vocabulary of the hypothetical 

proto-Indo-European language by studying what 

was common to specific cognate words in the 

different Indo-European languages. Next, based 

on this lexicon, inferences were made. One 

conclusion to which these schol-ars arrived was 

that the Aryans were pastoral nomads since the 

hypotheti-cal vocabulary that they created had 

many words for domesticated ani-mals and 

fewer words for cereal grains. They then tried 

to identify the homeland where the Aryans first 

practiced nomadic pastoralism. Various widely 

separated places for the Aryan homeland were 

suggested such as northern Europe, the Balkans, 

Anatolia, Southern Russia and the Caucasus; but 

India was not one of them. Therefore it was 

believed that the first speakers of Indo-European 

languages in India must have come from outside. 

Thus was born the theory that India had been 

invaded by the Aryans. Max Miiller and other 

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars 

propounded what Thomas Trautmann has called 

the “racial theory of Indian civilization.” This is 

the notion: “that India’s civilization was produced 

by the clash and subsequent mixture of light- 

128 

skinned civilizing invaders (the Aryans) and 

dark-skinned barbarous aborigines (often 

iden-tified as Dravidians).” 16I call this the first 

or Miiller version of the Aryan invasion theory. 

This theory was based on the interpretation of 

linguistic and literary evidence from the Vedas 

by MUiller and others and not on archaeology. 

In 1921, Sir John Marshall and R.D. Banerji 

identified the ruins at Harappa and Mohenjodaro 

as the remains of the Indus civilization. This 

civilization was found to have been flourishing in 

the third millennium BCE. Since the invasion of 

the Aryans was accepted to have occurred in 

1500 BCE the authors of the Indus civilization 

could not have been the Aryans. Instead Sir 

Mortimer Wheeler who made further 

archaeological investigations of the Indus 

civilization and whose name is now more closely 

associated with it, came up with his own theory.’ 7 

He interpreted groups of skeletons which were 

carelessly buried in Mohenjodaro as the victims 

of a massacre by invading Aryans. He then 

concluded that these Aryans caused the Indus 

civilization to collapse. In the words of 

Stavrianos, the Aryans did the work of “empire 

smashing.”’ 8 The racial theory of Indian 

civilization thus underwent a metamorphosis into 

what I call the second version of the Aryan 

invasion theory. 

Unlike Miiller’s theory which saw the whiteskinned 

Aryans as the superior race and the


civilizers, Wheeler’s theory saw them as the 

barbar-ians and the dark-skinned Dravidian 

natives as the civilized ones. How-ever racial 

and cultural stereotypes were not abandoned. 

The Aryans were supposed to have brought 

fresh vigorous blood, energy, and ideas to the 

old, conservative, hidebound civilization that 

prevailed in India. We repeatedly see images of 

the “conquerors” and “conquered” in the world 

history texts. To quote Gordon Childe, the noted 

archaeologist: 

At the same time the fact that the first 

Aryans were Nordics was not without 

importance. The physical qualities of that 

stock did enable them by the bare fact of 

superior strength to conquer even more 

advanced peoples and so to impose their 

language on areas from which their bodily 

type has almost completely vanished. This 

is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the 

Germanists: the Nordics’ superiority in 

physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a 

superior language. 19 

Since the discovery of Harappa and 

Mohenjodaro, archaeologists have uncovered 

several hundred Harappan village and city sites 

spread over a wide area. It is now clear that the 

Harappan civilization was the most extensive in 

terms of area of any of the ancient civilizations 

before the second millennium BCE. It also has 

129 

become clear that the urban phase of the 

Harappan civilization had ended by 2000 BCE. 20 

This has presented a problem for the second 

Aryan invasion theory’s notion that the end of 

the Indus civilization was caused by the Aryan 

invasion. Scholars were not willing to abandon 

the theory that the Aryans invaded with their 

cattle and chariots in 1500 BCE. SO they modified 

the invasion theory to say that the Indus 

civilization declined for other reasons and that 

the Aryans came into India when there was no 

urban civilization left. This is the third version of 

the Aryan invasion theory. 

In examining the texts we see that Esler, 

Stavrianos, Chodorow and coauthors, and 

McNeill presented the second version of the 

Aryan inva-sion theory while the others 

presented some combination of the second and 

third versions. We can be thankful that none of 

the texts presented the first version. 

Let us now turn to what some of the more 

recent scholars say about the Aryan invasion 

theory and with it the Indus civilization and the 

Vedas. Their findings, archaeological and 

literary, have refuted and challenged the old ideas 

of Mtiller, Wheeler, and their subscribers such 

as the world history texts reviewed here. Jim 

Shaffer, an archaeologist of South Asia, says: 

“that current archaeological data do not support 

the existence of an Indo-Aryan or European 

invasion into South Asia at any time in the pre-


or proto-historic period. Instead it is possible to 

document archaeologically a series of cultural 

changes reflecting indigenous cultural 

developments from prehistoric to historic 

periods.” 21 For example, Shaffer in another 

article, discussed the Painted Grey Ware Pottery 

which some archaeolo-gists identified as the 

work of Aryans and echoed by Stearns and 

coau-thors when they said “rapid changes in 

pottery suggest a series of sudden waves of 

migrants into the region.” 22 Shaffer pointed out 

this pottery’s absence along the supposed route 

the Aryans would have taken to reach the 

Ganga-Yamuna region where this pottery was 

found. In addition he noted that the Painted Grey 

Ware pottery was a continuation of earlier styles 

native to that area. 23 

Colin Renfrew, another archaeologist, 

criticized historical linguistics saying that while it 

could be useful in establishing relationships 

between languages, its precision in determining 

the homeland of the original speakers of the 

Indo-European language family is 

questionable. 24 Thus the identification of 

Southern Russia, Anatolia, or any other place 

as the original homeland of the Aryans based 

only on historical linguistics is largely speculative. 

He does not see any evidence in the Rig Veda 

that the Aryans were invaders in India or that 

they were nomads. He adds: “Indeed the chariot 

is not a vehicle especially associated with 

nomads.” He further says that “we should, in 

130 

other words, seriously consider the possibility 

that the new religious and cultural synthesis which 

is repre-sented by the Rig Veda was essentially 

a product of the soil of India and Pakistan, and 

that it was not imported, ready-made, on the 

backs of the steeds of the Indo-Aryans.” 25 

Kenneth R. Kennedy, a physical 

anthropologist and archaeologist studied all the 

skeletons recovered from several Harappan sites 

including those of the alleged massacre victims 

of Mohenjodaro. He found that only two skulls 

showed signs of injury and that even those two 

individu-als did not die immediately from these 

injuries but rather several months later possibly 

from other causes. 26 Mortimer Wheeler’s 

misinterpretation of these and other skeletal 

remains as those of massacre victims caused 

Esler to write that the invading Aryans “left the 

corpses of their foes to rot in the streets of 

Mohenjodaro” and Stearns and coauthors to 

write that “groups of skeletons with smashed 

skulls or in postures of flight have been found on 

the stairways at some sites.” 27 Kennedy further 

states that after examining the skeletons of the 

Harappans, he “recognizes a biologi-cal 

continuum of many of their morphometric 

variables in the modern populations of Punjab 

and Sindh.” 28 This finding is not favorable to the 

Aryan invasion theory because the “tall, blueeyed, 

fair-skinned” Aryans were supposed to 

be so unlike the “short, black, noseless” natives


that they defeated. The invasion of the Aryans 

should have resulted in a significant change 

between the Harappans and the present-day 

people. 

Robert H. Dyson, also an archaeologist, in 

talking about the Aryan invasion theory says that 

“the invasion thesis also becomes a paradigm of 

limited usefulness. By freeing themselves from 

this hypothesis drawn from earlier linguistic 

studies, archaeologists may now focus their 

atten-tion on the archaeological evidence in its 

own terms.” 29 

Trautmann, Shaffer and Lichtenstein, and 

Rajaram and Frawley have shown how 

nineteenth-century scholarship on India was 

influenced by Victorian racial thought. 30 Scholars 

including Max Mtiller went out of their way to 

find references in the Vedas to racial differences 

between the Aryans and their enemies the Dasas 

and Dasyus. Unfortunately, for all their labors 

they could come up with precious little—just 

three passages. Even these three passages hardly 

gave unambiguous support to the notion that the 

Vedic Aryans were conscious of a racial 

difference between themselves and their Dasyu 

and Dasa enemies. In one of those passages, 

Max Miiller found the enemies described as 

“anasa.” Muiller interpreted that to mean that 

they were noseless or snub-nosed which we 

found earlier was a description Stavrianos used 

in his text. However, Trautmann showed that the 

131 

medieval commentator Sayana’s interpretation 

that it was a figurative description referring to 

someone without speech as more reasonable. 

Thus it had nothing to do with the shape or size 

of the Dasyus’ noses.” 1 

The other two passages referred to enemies 

with dark skins. Neverthe-less, two references 

to dark skin do not imply that the Dasas or 

Dasyus were despised on account of their skin 

color. In many more passages it is clear that the 

Aryans considered the Dasyus despicable 

because of their irreligiosity and uncouth 

language. Rajaram and Frawley have suggested 

that the battles between the Aryans and their 

enemies should be symboli-cally interpreted as 

struggles between the forces of light and 

darkness and not between light-skinned and 

dark-skinned people. 32 I might also add that 

many highly respected sages and mythical figures 

in India were said to have dark skin. The most 

well-known and popular is Lord Krishna, the 

human incarnation of the Lord Vishnu. His very 

name means the dark-skinned one. 

Let us move on to varna or caste. Varna does 

mean color. Conditioned no doubt by the 

European experiences with nonwhite people in 

the last few centuries, Max Miiller as well as 

many of the texts did not hesitate to give a racial 

interpretation to caste. They claimed that the 

highest castes


Harappans and Aryans: Old and New were 

descended from light-skinned Aryans and the 

lowest castes were descended from the darkskinned 

people defeated by the Aryans. But the 

colors associated with the various castes are 

“heraldic” colors and not the color of the skin as 

shown by Trautmann and the Vedic scholar 

David Frawley. 33 The brahmana caste is assigned 

the color white because this is the caste which is 

devoted to spirituality and enlightenment. The 

kshatriya or warrior caste is supposed to have a 

fiery and courageous temperament and therefore 

the associated color is red. The vaishya caste’s 

function is commerce leading to the accumulation 

of wealth and its emblematic color is the yellow 

of gold. The shudra laboring caste is supposed 

to have neither the discipline and self-sacrifice 

required for spiritual pursuits, nor the courage 

of the warriors, nor the enterprise of the traders, 

but instead has to labor at the direction of one 

of the other castes and the emblematic color is 

the black of the darkness of ignorance. Whatever 

the significance of the caste system, there is no 

evidence that it was a division of society by skin 

color or race. To interpret caste as race would 

be a “fantastic back-projection of systems of 

racial segregation in the American South and in 

South Africa onto early Indian history.” 34 

The Aryan invasion theory, as Rajaram and 

Frawley have pointed out, has created a 

paradox in Indian history. 35 There are plenty of 

132 

archaeologi-cal remains of the largest civilization 

of ancient times but if the Aryan invasion theory 

is accepted, there are apparently no surviving 

literary records from this extensive civilization. 

On the other hand, the Aryans have left no 

archaeological trace of their supposed invasion 

but in the form of the voluminous Vedas have 

left the most massive literature from ancient times. 

However, this paradox can be resolved if we 

accept that the Harappans were themselves 

followers of the Vedic religion. In none of the 

ancient literature of India is there any mention of 

an invasion from outside India, in contrast to the 

Bible, which relates the story of how the 

Israelites took possession of their promised land 

from the Canaanites. Therefore when Europeans 

beginning to study Indo-European languages 

created the Aryan invasion theory it was as new 

to India as it was to the rest of the world. 

The Aryan invasion theory also has some other 

weaknesses. I have already noted that chariots 

are not especially associated with nomads. It 

seems implausible that relatively unorganized 

bands of semi-barbarous nomads could move 

with their chariots across the difficult desert 

terrain of Afghanistan and the high mountain 

passes of the Himalayas. Even if these Aryan 

nomads did manage to do so, they would have 

had to conquer the far more numerous inhabitants 

of India and then impose their language and 

culture upon them. Now, when we look at the


cases of the barbarian conquests of Rome or of 

the Mongol conquest of China, we see that the 

barbarians got romanized and the Mongols 

sinicized. In the analogous case of the Aryan 

invasion of India, why should the culture of the 

less-sophisti-cated group prevail? An 

explanation in terms of the “Nordics’ superior 

physique” will not be acceptable at the close of 

the twentieth century. 

Yet another weakness of this theory concerns 

the use of metals. Most of the texts mentioned 

that one of the advantages that the Aryans had 

over the Harappans was iron weapons. 

However, both the reputed historian A.L. 

Basham, and Frawley have pointed out that this 

was not necessarily so. This idea was based on 

the fact that the word “Ayas” which occurred in 

the Rig Veda was interpreted as iron. 36 But in 

the opinion of Basham and of Frawley, “Ayas” 

simply meant metal. I must also point out here 

that in one chapter Stavrianos said that the iron 

weapons of the Aryans defeated the Indus 

civilization, but in another chapter of the very 

same book he contradicted himself by saying 

that the Aryans’ expansion into the Gangetic plain 

from the Indus valley was “slow at first, since 

only stone, bronze, and copper axes were 

available. But iron was introduced about 800 

BCE, and the expansion pace quickened.”” 37 

Maybe the Aryans forgot their iron technology 

133 

after they defeated the Harappans in 1500 BCE 

and remembered it 700 years later! 

Historians have long referred to the ancient 

Indian civilization as the Indus civilization. 

However even that is now challenged in the light 

of new geological findings. Rajaram and Frawley 

have shown that the river Saraswati, and not the 

Indus river, was the most prominent and sacred 

river in the Rig Veda (playing the same role there 

as the River Ganges in later Hinduism). The 

Vedas described the Saraswati as a mighty river 

flowing from the mountains to the sea. 38 But 

today the Saraswati, known now as the Ghaggar, 

is a much smaller stream which gets lost in the 

Thar desert. A large number of Harappan sites 

have been found along the banks of the nowdry 

Saraswati or Ghaggar (see for example the 

map from McNeill). Recent geological 

investigations have shown that the Saraswati was 

indeed once a very substantial river flowing to 

the sea but that it dried up around 1900 BCE 

when the Yamuna ceased flowing into it, and 

instead flowed east to join the Ganges. The 

decline of the urban phase of the Harappan 

civilization seems to be correlated with that event. 

Rajaram and Frawley have argued that since the 

Vedas speak of the Saraswati as a big river, the 

Vedic people must have been present in India 

well before 1900 BCE. They have also suggested 

that the civilization should now be renamed as 

the Indus-Saraswati civilization. Saraswati has 

always had a sacred place in Hindu traditions.


Scholars such as Basham knew of the importance 

of the Saraswati in the Vedas and also that it is 

now a small stream but they were unaware of 

the recent geological information regarding when 

it dried up. 39 

Rajaram andFrawley have also shown how 

astronomical statements in the Vedas could be 

used to date them. 40 The Vedic people made 

observa-tions of the positions of the Sun with 

respect to the fixed stars at the time of the 

equinoxes and solstices and recorded them in 

the Vedas. Because of the phenomenon of the 

precession of the equinoxes, the equinoxes in 

ancient times occurred in different positions from 

where they occur now. This information can be 

used to date the Vedas. Another source of 

information about the date of the composition 

of the Vedas is that they mentioned observations 

of a pole star. Again because of the precession 

of the equinoxes, only at certain periods of 

history was there a pole star. Scholars have been 

aware of these astronomical references for a long 

time. However, they studied the Vedas without 

a knowledge of astronomy and dismissed dates 

derived from those observations since the dates 

were much more ancient than they were willing 

to accept. Rajaram and Frawley be-lieved that 

the astronomical observations in the Vedas 

indicated that the Vedas were composed before 

3000 BCE. Acceptance of such an early date 

would mean giving up belief in an Aryan invasion 

of India in 1500 BCE. 

134 

The present is clearly a time when long 

accepted views on ancient Indian history are 

being radically challenged. Clearly many of the 

writers of the world history texts have been 

influenced by older authorities. For example, see 

Shaffer and Lichtenstein’s criticism of Piggott 

and Wheeler who were very influential in the 

middle parts of this century. 41 Many of the details 

of the newer findings are still coming in and the 

story that is forming is certainly less violent than 

the one we find in many of these texts. Let us 

now sketch out some of what is emerging from 

recent scholarship and from a reinterpretation 

of long-available evidence. 

It appears that cultural developments in the 

Indian subcontinent go back a very long time 

and are largely independent of developments in 

West Asia. Previously it was thought that 

agricultural techniques as well as the food crops 

themselves came into India from West Asia. 42 

The large neolithic settlement at Mehrgarh 

discovered in 1974 by a French ar-chaeological 

team has been dated to the seventh millennium 

BCE and attests to the antiquity of agriculture in 

India. 43 There appears to be an underlying 

continuity in the culture of India which Shaffer 

and Lichtenstein have called the Indo-Gangetic 

tradition, and changes that have occurred in it 

seem to be largely due to internal factors rather 

than external influences and invasions. There 

appears to be a west-to-east movement of


people within India around the second millennium 

BCE due to the drying up of the Saraswati and 

other ecological changes in Western India but 

there is no archaeological or literary evidence of 

intrusions of people from outside India. 44 The 

Vedas would, then, not be the composition of 

invaders but of people long resident in India. If 

we accept the chronology of Rajaram and 

Frawley, the Vedas were composed before 3000 

BCE. 45 It is not possible to reconcile this with the 

1200 BCE date that is often quoted for the start 

of the composition of the Vedas. Max Miller was 

right in seeing several stages in language evolution 

in the Vedas. However the Vedas are sacred 

texts and as such change in them should be very 

slow. Max Miiller’ s attribution of 200 years for 

each stage may be too low and a larger number 

would result in a much more ancient date for the 

Vedas. 

The Aryan invasion theory of India, as we 

have seen, was proposed in order to account 

for the similarities in the Indo-European family 

of languages. This theory can be analyzed as 

consisting of three hypotheses. The first is the 

notion that there was an ancestral language to 

all the present-day Indo-European languages 

called proto-Indo-European which was 

originally spoken by a small group of people 

called Aryans. The second is that these Aryans 

originally occupied a homeland outside of India. 

The third hypothesis proposes that they invaded 

135 

India in 1500 BCE with the Vedas supposedly 

documenting the defeat of the “short, black, 

noseless” natives by the “tall, blue-eyed, fairskinned” 

Aryans. Thus we see that though long 

accepted as fact, the Aryan invasion theory of 

India is a series of unproved hypotheses. The 

evidence described in this article shows that the 

third hypothesis (invasion in 1500 BCE) is wrong. 

Shrikant Talageri accepts only the first hypothesis 

and further believes that India is the original 

homeland of the Aryans from where they took 

the language family to Europe. 46 Another 

possibility that occurs to me is that perhaps there 

was an Aryan homeland outside India but that 

the Aryans came into India at a very early date 

well before the seventh millennium BCE at which 

time we already have evidence of cattle 

husbandry and agriculture at Mehrgarh. I leave 

it for further work to decide between these and 

possi-bly other theories which seek to explain 

the origin of the Indo-European languages. At 

the present state of research the provenance of 

the Aryans is a matter for hypothesis not 

certitude. 

Much more work needs to be done to fill in 

the details. The question then is what can be 

done to improve the world history texts. I would 

suggest that they leave out old incorrect ideas 

such as a massacre at Mohenjodaro. They 

should leave out references to race and color 

with respect to ancient Indian history and as an


explanation of the caste system. And if authors 

wish to present the Aryan invasion theory they 

should explain the evidence for and against it 

instead of simply stating it as fact. The 

fragmentary evidence is susceptible to more than 

one inter-pretation. The Aryan invasion theory 

is just that; a theory. 

The central event in the twentieth century is 

certainly the second world war and the Holocaust 

perpetrated by the “Aryans” of Nazi Germany. 

The Nazis were influenced in their ideology by 

the work of scholars such as Max Muiller who 

produced the “racial theory of Indian 

civilization.” As we have seen, many of the 

distinguished historians who have authored the 

texts reviewed in this article have repeated the 

erroneous theories of the same scholars. When 

even the best-informed hold such opinions, 

surely the picture of Aryans in the popular mind 

is much in need of correction. 

Notes 

1. L. S. Stavrianos, A Global History: From 

Prehistory to the Present, 6th ed. 

(Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1995); 

Peter N Stearns, Michael Adas, and Stuart B. Schwartz, 

World Civilizations: The Global Experience, vol. 1, 

2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 

1996); William McNeill, A History of the Human 

136 

Community: Prehistory to 1500, vol. 1, 5th ed. (Upper 

Saddle River, New Jersey: 

Simon & Schuster, 1997); Anthony Esler, The Human 

Venture: The Great Enterprise: A World History to 

1500, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice 

Hall, 1992); 

Kevin Reilly, The West and the World: A History of 

Civilization, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 

1989); Richard Greaves et al, Civilizations of the 

World: The Human 

Adventure, vol. 1, To the Late 1600s, 3rd ed. (New 

York: Longman, 1997); Walter Wallbank 

et al, Civilization: Past & Present, vol. 1, To 1774, 8th 

ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 

1996); Stanley Chodorow et al, The Mainstream of 

Civilization to 1500, 6th ed. (Fort Worth, 

TX: Harcourt Press, 1994); and John McKay, Bennett 

Hill, and John Buckler, A History of World Societies, 

vol. 1, To 1715, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 

1996). 

2. Reilly, The West, pp. 61, 69; Stavrianos, A 

Global, pp. 66, 58; and Esler, The Human, pp. 72. 

3. Greaves et al, Civilizations of the World, p. 

51. 

4. Chodorow et al, The Mainstream, p. 146. 

5. Wallbank et al, Civilization, p. 108.


6. Stearns et al, World Civilizations, pp. 51, 

52. 

7. Wallbank et al, Civilization, p. 27; Reilly, 

The West, p. 8; Stavrianos, A Global, 

p. 61; Chodorow et al, The Mainstream, p. 8; 

McKay et al, A History, p. 30; Esler, The 

Human, p. 72; and Greaves et al, Civilizations of the 

World, p. 52. 

8. Stavrianos, A Global, p. 66. 

9. Stearns et al, World Civilizations, p. 54. 

10. Esler, The Human, p. 73; Wallbank et al, 

Civilization, p. 108, and Chodorow et 

al, The Mainstream, p. 146. 

11. Reilly, The West, p. 61. 

12. Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British 

India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 

University of California Press, 1997), pp. 37-52. 

13. Ibid., pp. 172-78. 

14. Navaratna S. Rajaram, The Politics of 

History: Aryan Invasion Theory and the 

Subversion of Scholarship (New Delhi: Voice of 

India, 1995), pp. 91-96. 

15. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and 

Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European 

Origins (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 14. 

16. Trautmann, Aryans (Berkeley and Los 

Angeles: University of California Press, 

1997), p. 4. 

137 

17. Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Civilizations of the 

Indus Valley and Beyond (London: 

Thames and Hudson, 1966), p. 83. 

1. 32 Padma Manian 

18. Stavrianos, A Global, p. 61. 

19. V. Gordon Childe, The Aryans: A Study of 

Indo-European Origins (1926; 

reprint, Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1970), 

p. 212. 

20. Jim G. Shaffer, “Indus Valley, Baluchistan 

and the Helmand Drainage (Af- 

ghanistan),” in Chronologies in Old World 

Archaeology, vol, 2, 3rd ed., ed. Robert W. 

Ehrich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 

pp. 441-64. 

21. Ibid., p. 441. 

22. Stearns et al, World Civilizations, p. 51. 

23. Shaffer, “The Indo-Aryan Invasions: 

Cultural Myth and Archaeological Real- 

ity,” in The People of South Asia: The Biological 

Anthropology of India, Pakistan, and 

Nepal, ed. John R. Luckacs (New York: Plenum 

Press, 1984), p. 84. 

24. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language, p. 

77. 

25. Ibid., pp. 182, 196. 

26. Kenneth R. Kennedy, “Skulls, Aryans, and 

Flowing Drains: The Interface of


Archaeology and Skeletal Biology in the Study of 

the Harappan Civilization,” in Harappan 

Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective, ed. 

Gregory L. Possehl (New Delhi: Oxford 

and IBH Publishing Co., 1982), p. 291. 

27. Esler, The Human, p. 72. 

28. Kennedy, “Skulls,” 291. 

29. Robert H. Dyson, Jr., “Paradigm Changes in 

the Study of the Indus Civiliza- 

tion” in Harappan, ed. Possehl, p. 422. 

30. Trautmann, Aryans; Shaffer and Diane A. 

Lichtenstein, “The Concepts of 

‘cultural tradition’ and ‘palaeoethnicity’ in South 

Asian archaeology” in The Indo-Aryans 

of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material 

Culture and Ethnicity, ed. G. Erdosy (Berlin: 

Walter de Gruyter), 127-8; Rajaram and Frawley, 

Vedic “Aryans. “ 

31. Trautmann, Aryans, pp. 211-216. 

32. Navaratna S. Rajaram and David Frawley, 

Vedic “Aryans” and the Origins of 

Civilization (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995), p. 27. 

33. Trautmann, Aryans, p. 210; and Frawley, 

Gods, Sages and Kings: Vedic Secrets 

of Ancient Civilization (Salt Lake City, UT: Passage 

Press, 1991), pp. 261-62. 

34. Trautmann, Aryans, p. 211. 

35. Rajaram and Frawley, Vedic “Aryans, “ p. 23. 

138 

36. A. L. Basham, The Wonder that was India: 

A Survey of the Culture of the Indian 

Sub-Continent before the Coming of the Muslims 

(New York: Glove Press, 1954), p. 37; and Frawley, 

Gods, p. 252. 

37. Stavrianos, A Global, pp. 66, 116. 

38. Rajaram and Frawley, Vedic “Aryans,” p. 49. 

39. Basham, The Wonder, p. 32. 

40. Rajaram and Frawley, Vedic “Aryans, “ pp. 

98-99 

41. Shaffer and Lichtenstein, “The Concepts,” 

126-30. 

42. Ibid. 

43. Jean-Francois Jarrige and Richard H. 

Meadow, “The Antecedents of Civiliza- 

tion in the Indus Valley,” Scientific American 243, 

no. 2 (August 1980): 122-133 and 

Jarrige, “Excavations at Mehrgarh: Their 

Significance for Understanding the Background 

of the Harappan Civilization,” in Harappan, ed. 

Possehl, pp. 79-84. 

44. Shaffer and Lichtenstein, “The Concepts.” 

45. Rajaram and Frawley, Vedic “Aryans,” p. 

143. 

46. Shrikant G. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion: A 

Reappraisal (New Delhi: Aditya 

Prakashan, 1993).


The Missionary’s Swastika: Racism as an 

Evangelical Weapon 

Of the various theories of history 

that have over the years been 

discredited for lack of evidence, 

ill-founded or baseless assumptions, or 

have been simply undermined by superior 

scholarship, few have been dismantled 

quite so thoroughly as Aryan Race Theory. 

Yet, as historian James Schaffer notes 

above, few other discredited theories have 

so stubbornly and inexplicably retained 

credence among the public, the media, and 

even some academic circles, in spite of 

direct evidence to the contrary. Aryan race 

theory is a fabrication, evolved into a myth, 

that survives today as an unexamined 

‘truth.’ 

S. Aravindan Neelakandan 

We reject the historical interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth 

century, that continue to be imposed on South Asian culture history. These still 

prevailing interpretations are significantly diminished by European 

ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and antisemitism. Surely, as South Asian 

studies approaches the twenty-first century, it is time to describe emerging data 

objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations without regard to the data 

archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal.’ [1] 

139 

And few other spurious ‘truths’ have been 

so insidious — or so destructive. 

Responsible for subjugation of millions of 

Indians under British rule, Aryan Race 

Theory continued its wretched legacy well 

into the twentieth century, mutating into 

the horrific pseudo-science that 

rationalized Hitler’s Final Solution, and 

lingering in the bloody ethnic convulsions 

of modern Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and other 

troubled areas of the post-colonial world. 

Far from being merely an academic 

exercise, though, Aryan Race Theory is in 

fact the brainchild of Christian evangelistscholars, 

fashioned and tempered in the 

nineteenth century as a weapon for


European expansionism in India. 

Promulgated to generations of Indian 

children in British-created schools, it 

created, like so many other Western creeds 

and dogmas, social divisions where none 

had hitherto existed, resulting in jealousy, 

mistrust, and suspicion among 

communities where peaceful coexistence 

had been the norm. This theory, which 

posits the invasion of ancient India by a 

white-skinned race (the ‘Aryans’) who 

conquer an indigenous, dark-skinned 

population, therefore worked ingeniously 

with the British divide-and-conquer 

strategy for rule in India. The theory and 

its variants continue to be used today by 

the Vatican and other Christian enterprises 

in their campaign to ‘harvest’ tribals and 

other vulnerable communities of Hindus. 

For these spiritual imperialists, spurious 

racial theories still hold their divide-andconquer 

appeal. 

The roots of the theory reach back much 

further than the pseudo-scholarship of 

European missionaries, however. As early 

as 1312 CE, the Ecumenical Council of 

Vienna declared that ‘the Holy Church 

should have an abundant number of 

Catholics well versed in the languages, 

especially in those of the infidels so as to 

be able to instruct them in the sacred 

140 

doctrine.’ This not only defined the early 

Church’s strategy for evangelizing the 

‘infidels,’ but also established the very 

study of language, and the linguistic and 

philological scholarship that would 

emerge in later centuries, as tools of 

evangelism. Thus, when the university (as 

with society’s other institutions) was 

recruited into the national effort of 

empire-building, its agents — many of 

them pious Christians and nationalists, 

trained in a predominantly parochial 

(Catholic, Anglican, etc.) academic system 

— enthusiastically pursued knowledge not 

for the sake of truth, but for the sake of 

Christianity. 

Throughout its history, Christianity has 

never been above the endorsement of 

fabricated ‘truths’ in order to spread its 

creed throughout the globe. So, it is not 

surprising that when the Boden Chair for 

Oriental Studies was established in Oxford 

University in 1832, Colonel Boden, who 

bequeathed 25,000 pounds (a generous 

sum for that time) to establish that chair, 

stated explicitly that the aim of study of 

Sanskrit literature was not for the sake of 

knowledge, but natives of India to the 

Christian religion.’ It was the Boden chair 

which later emerged as the academic 

epicenter of Aryan Race Theory.


In fact, it was an Oxford Professor of 

Sanskrit who vigorously propagated the 

notion of the Aryan race. Fredrich Max 

Muller, a staunch German nationalist and 

Christian missionary, was Professor of 

Sanskrit at Oxford labored for years 

translating the Vedas into English. Muller 

would comment unequivocally regarding 

the motives of his life’s work, 

‘. . . [t]his edition of mine and translation 

of Vedas will hereafter tell to a very great 

extent on the fate of India and on the growth 

of millions of souls in that country. It is 

the root of their religion and to show them 

as to what their root is, I feel sure, is the 

only way of uprooting all that sprang from 

it during the last 3000 years.’ [2 

Muller’s objective, it is seen, was not to 

make the achievements of Hindu 

civilization accessible to his European 

fellows, but to expose them to the scrutiny 

of his fellow evangelists, so that they may 

become better in deconstructing them. 

In 1851 Muller wrote his first article in 

English wherein he used the word ‘Aryan’ 

for the first time in the sense of a race. 

Max Muller’s good friend and fellow 

Indologist Paul then popularized the word 

141 

‘Aryan’ in France. Soon many Christian 

scholars were seized upon by the theory 

of Aryan race. In 1859 Swiss linguist 

Adolph Pictet wrote that the Aryan race was 

the 

‘. . . one destined by Providence to reign 

one day supreme over the entire earth . . . 

They were the race of Aryans. . . . The 

religion of Christ became the torch of 

humanity. The genius of Greece adapted it. 

The power of Rome propagated it. 

Germanic energy gave it new strength. The 

whole race of the European Aryans came 

to be the main instrument of God’s plan 

for the destiny of mankind’. [3] 

Wrote Ernest Renan, the French historian 

of religion in 1860, ‘[t]he Semites are 

incapable of doing that which is essential. 

Let us remain Germans and Celts; let us 

keep our eternal gospel Christianity . .. . 

After the Semitic race declined, the Aryan 

race alone was left to lead the march of 

human destiny.’ [4] The notion of ‘Aryan’ 

had become, in a few short years, the 

emblem of European manifest destiny over 

the world, a signet coined in the language 

of scholarship which gave Europeans a 

racial and religious mantle of superiority.


Not all scholars of the time accepted 

Muller’s ideas, however. In 1861, after 

Muller gave three lectures titled ‘Science 

of Languages’ in which he justified his 

theory with quotes from Vedas, American 

historian Louis B. Synder noted that 

‘Max Muller repeatedly 

hammered away at the idea that 

the terms Indo-European and 

Indo-Germanic must be replaced 

by Aryan because the people 

who lived in India and who 

spoke the Sanskrit language 

called themselves Arya. This 

primitive Aryan language 

indicated that there was an 

Aryan race, the common 

ancestors of Germans, Celts, 

Romans, Slavs, Greeks, 

Persians, and Hindus.’ [5] 

Synder then went on to remark that ‘all 

attempts to correlate the Aryan language 

to Aryan race were not only unsuccessful 

but also absurd’. [5] Even at that time many 

academics opposed the Aryan invasion 

theory. Noted scholars such as Jacoby, 

Hillebrant and Winternitz strongly opposed 

the racial theory, noting that Indians 

themselves had had no idea about any 

142 

distinct Aryan racial identity in their own 

literature. 

Why, then, was a theory that had no 

grounding in fact so readily accepted and 

promoted in the Western academic circles 

and imposed on Indians? Because the 

theory of the Aryan race and its invasion 

of India were formulated, and then 

vigorously promulgated, by Christian 

missionaries. As W. W. Hunter, another 

well-known Indologist of missionary 

persuasion, candidly admitted, their 

‘scholarship is warmed with the holy flame 

of Christian zeal.’ [6] As an example, some 

elements of the theory are clearly 

attributable to Biblical scripture. For 

instance, ideas like the existence of an 

Aryan proto-language were associated with 

and inspired by the Biblical myth of the 

tower of Babel. Even the date of creation 

of the Vedas was fixed by Max Muller to 

tailor-fit a Biblical creation time scale. [7] 

Clearly, those members of the academic 

establishment who promoted the theory 

had vested political and religious interests 

in mind, and the propaganda of religious 

and racial superiority sanctified by Aryan 

Race Theory served those interests well. 

This marriage of racial superiority and the 

‘holy flame of Christian zeal’ would ensure 

the future development of the ugly racist


theories that would culminate in Europe’s 

concentration camps and final solutions. 

The primary political motive of nineteenthcentury 

Britain was, of course, expansion 

of its empire, and the theory of Aryan race 

provided a veneer of benevolence that 

justified colonial rule in India. Protestant 

missionary John Wilson, President of the 

Asiatic Society of Bombay from 1836 to 

1846, wanted the Indian population to be 

divided into Aryan and non-Aryan groups 

so that special target groups like tribals 

could be easily identified by the 

missionaries for conversion. In 1856 

Wilson delivered a lecture titled ‘India 

3000 years ago,’ in which he preached the 

Aryan invasion of India and the theory of 

Aryan race as historical facts. Wilson 

declared 

‘[w]hat has taken place since 

the commencement of the 

British rule in India is only a 

reunion, to a certain extent, of 

the members of the same family.’ 

Naturally, this happy reunion 

had now brought India into 

contact ‘with the most 

enlightened and philanthropic 

nation in the world.’ [8] 

143 

The racist ‘scholarship’ conducted by the 

missionaries also helped to diminish any 

of the pride Indians had developed for their 

own heritage. Max Muller in his address 

to the International Congress of 

Orientalists openly remarked that, thanks 

to the work of the missionary-scholars, ‘a 

more intelligent appreciation had taken the 

place of the extravagant admiration of the 

work of their old poets.’ [9] In other words, 

Indians’ appreciation of their own epic 

literature was to be cut down to size by an 

application of ‘proper’ critical scrutiny, 

righteously applied by Muller and his 

Christo-centric cohorts. 

British cultural ‘re-education’ of the Indian 

populace was accomplished through 

imposition of a colonial educational 

system. To do this the indigenous system 

of education had to first be eradicated. By 

the first half of the nineteenth century, the 

colonial rulers along with their 

missionaries had already destroyed the vast 

network of indigenous schools which for 

generations had proven more efficient and 

effective than the contemporary British 

educational system. Parliamentarian Keir 

Hardie observed, based on the strength of 

official documents and the reports of 

missionaries in the field, that prior to


British occupation of India, in Bengal alone 

there had been 80,000 native schools, 

meaning one school for every 400 of the 

population. This would change radically 

once colonization was underway. Ludlow, 

in his History of British India, says, ‘[i]n 

every Hindoo village which has retained its 

original form all children were able to read, 

write and cipher, but where we have swept 

away the village system as in Bengal there 

the village school has also disappeared.’ 

The 1823 report of the British Collector 

of Bellary, A. D. Campbell, is telling. He 

first lauds the indigenous education 

system, saying: 

‘The economy with which 

children are taught to write in 

the native schools and the 

system by which the more 

advanced scholars are taught to 

educate the less advanced and 

at the same time to confirm their 

own knowledge is certainly 

admirable and well deserved the 

imitation it has received in 

England,’ 

but he then goes on to remark, ‘[o]f nearly 

a million souls not 7000 are now at school.’ 

The decimation of the Indian education 

144 

system thus created a vacuum that then had 

to be filled. Into that vacuum, eager and 

waiting, went the missionaries, who swiftly 

set up their own church-sponsored schools 

and taught Indian children their own 

literature and history according to the 

gospel of Max Muller. 

It is by now a well-established fact that 

education was a means to Christianize and 

‘domesticate’ the native population and 

render it loyal to the British empire. 

Thomas Macaulay, member of the Supreme 

Council of India and instrumental in 

destroying the indigenous educational 

system and in introducing English language 

education in India, remarked in his now 

famous Minute of 1835, 

‘. . . the dialects commonly spoken 

among the natives of this part of 

India contain neither literary nor 

scientific information,’ and thus 

were not worthy of preservation. 

However, Macaulay’s interest was 

not educational, but decidedly 

religious. In a letter to his father 

he proclaimed, ‘It is my firm belief 

that, if our plans of education are 

followed up, there will not be a 

single idolater among the


respectable classes in Bengal 

thirty years hence.’ 

Macaulay’s boastful predictions, 

fortunately, would not come to pass. But 

as the eighteenth century came to a close, 

Aryan RaceTheory had been taught to 

millions of Indian children in schools 

operated by the Macaulay-Missionary axis. 

The damage was done. The effect of 

indoctrinating generations of young Indians 

with a fabricated, racist interpretation of 

their history was the division of Indian 

society into ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ 

communities, polarizing North and South 

India. In South India, Anglican Bishop R. 

Caldwell began promoting the idea that 

South Indians were descendents of a non- 

Aryan ‘race,’ called Dravidians, who were 

racially different and culturally superior to 

the Aryans from the North. Soon many 

South Indians had accepted these theories, 

and their new alienation from the Hindispeaking 

(‘Aryan’) North lead to deep 

political division. Dravidian political 

parties were formed which, in opposition 

to the ‘Aryan’ mainstream, were decidedly 

pro-British. These parties passed 

resolutions demanding, among other 

things, that the British should not leave 

India, even as Indian nationalists were 

fighting for their country’s freedom.* 

145 

After independence, racial theory 

continued to be used by the Church as a 

ploy to further balkanize the Indian 

populace. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, 

high Church officials continued to publicly 

assert that Dravidian Race Theory was a 

‘time bomb’ planted by the Church to 

destroy Hinduism. Though Macaulay’s 

predictions failed, zealous proselytizers 

still nurse their bigoted ambitions to 

eradicate ‘idolatry.’ 

Today, insurgency and terrorism in 

Northeast India continue to be enflamed 

by the divisive propaganda of Christian 

missionaries. In neighboring Sri Lanka, the 

violent ethic conflict can also be directly 

traced to the promulgation of racial 

theories by Christian missionaries among 

the Sinhalese and Tamils, who had 

previously lived together in relative peace. 

Ana Pararaja Singham, secretary of the 

Australasian Federation of Tamil 

Associations, remarked while discussing 

the ethnic conflict in the island, 

‘. . . While legends and myths of 

the [founding of Sri Lanka] 

formed the basis of Sinhala 

nationalism, the present 

nationalism is also due to the


considerable influence wielded 

by Europeans throughout the 

19th and 20th centuries. This 

dealt with racial concepts such 

as ‘Aryan’. The notion that the 

Sinhalese were an Aryan people 

was not a Mahavamsa inspired 

myth, but an opinion 

attributable to European 

linguists who classified the 

languages spoken by the Sinhala 

and Tamil people into two 

distinct categories.’ 

The racial polarization of Sri Lanka began 

as early as 1856, when Robert Caldwell, 

in his A Comparative Grammar of the 

Dravidian South Indian Family of 

Languages , argued that there was ‘no direct 

affinity between the Sinhalese and Tamil 

languages.’ Max Muller, meanwhile, 

weighed in with his Lectures on the 

Science of Language (1861), in which he 

declared that after ‘careful and minute 

comparison’ he was led to ‘class the idioms 

spoken in Iceland and Ceylon as cognate 

dialects of the Aryan family of languages’. 

Though contrary views were expressed by 

other scholars, Muller’s Aryan Race 

Theory was lent support by a number of 

prominent European scholars, and the 

theory therefore held sway. 

146 

Kamalika Pieris , a Sinhalese intellectual, 

agrees. In his article, ‘Ethnic conflict and 

Tamil Separatism,’ he examines the origin 

of the conflict and traces it to the race 

theories proposed by the missionaryscholars:There 

developed the notion of an 

‘Aryan race’ consisting of anybody who 

spoke an Aryan language, the Dravidian race 

consisting of anybody who spoke a 

Dravidian language, and the Jews who 

spoke neither. Max Muller, the German 

linguist spoke of the ‘Aryan Race’ in 1888. 

Earlier Robert Caldwell had spoken of 

Dravidian languages in 1856. The 

Portuguese and the Dutch brought into Sri 

Lanka the prejudices available in their 

countries. Notably the Christian 

antagonism to Islam and other ‘heathen’ 

religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. But 

the concept of ‘race’ was introduced to the 

country during the British period, in the 

19th century. The British labelled the 

Sinhala community as ‘Sinhalese race’ and 

‘Tamil race’ in 1833 or 1871. 1833 saw 

the first communal representation in the 

Legislative Council and 1871 was the year 

of the first British Census of Ceylon. [10] 

A century later, the fruits of Aryan Race 

Theory would be clearly seen in Sri Lanka, 

with devastating results. One of the first


Sri Lankans to realize the enormous 

political gain to be reaped through 

exploiting the Mahavamsa mindset was S. 

W. R. D. Bandaranaike, who, ironically, was 

a member of the elitist Christian 

Bandaranaike-Obeyasekera clan. At the 

general election of 1956, Bandaranaike ‘ 

bulldozed his way into political power by 

successfully marshalling popular Sinhala 

support on a chauvinistic platform.’ [11] 

The polarization of the Tamil and Sinhalese 

communities would eventually lead to the 

civil war which ravages the island to this 

day. 

It is not only the Indian Subcontinent where 

Christian evangelists have used dubious 

pseudo-science to foment racial division. 

Missionaries have concocted numerous 

versions of the Aryan RacialTheory, 

tailored to the history and circumstances 

found in various ex-colonial ‘target’ 

populations. For example, commenting on 

the recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, the French 

anthropologist Jean-Pierre Langellier 

reveals: 

‘The idea that the Hutus 

and the Tutsis were 

physically different was 

first aired in the 1860s by 

the British explorer John 

147 

Speke. The history of 

Rwanda (like that of much 

of Africa) has been 

distorted by missionaries, 

academics and colonial 

administrators. They made 

the Tutsis out to be a 

superior race, which had 

conquered the region and 

enslaved the Hutus. 

Missionaries taught the 

Hutus that historical 

fallacy, which was the 

result of racist European 

concepts being applied to 

an African reality. At the 

end of the fifties, the Hutus 

used that discourse to react 

against the Tutsis.’[12] 

The horrific ethnic cleansing that occurred 

in Rwanda in the early 90s, then, can be 

directly attributed to a mindset of racial 

superiority engendered by Christian 

missionary-scholars. 

Conclusion 

Racial theories and pseudo-science 

continue to be vigorously employed today 

by the Vatican and other Western evangelist 

enterprises in their ongoing campaign to


harvest souls for Christianity. But it is not 

only in the remote corners of the Third 

World where the unexamined ‘truths’ of 

Max Muller and his missionary-scholar 

contemporaries are still used as weapons 

of propaganda. Aryan Race Theory is alive 

and well in the United States. Take, for 

instance, white supremacist David Duke, 

who in one of his recent books speaks of 

the hordes of Aryans pouring into ancient 

India: 

‘Aryans, or Indo-Europeans 

(Caucasians) created the great 

Indian, or Hindu civilization. 

Aryans swept over the Himalayas 

to the Indian subcontinent and 

conquered the aboriginal people. 

(. . .) The word Aryan has an 

etymological origin in the word 

Arya from Sanskrit, meaning 

References 

148 

noble. The word also has been 

associated with gold, the noble 

metal, and denoted the goldenskinned 

invaders (as compared to 

the brown-skinned aboriginals) 

from the West. (. . .) The 

conquering race initiated a caste 

system to preserve their status and 

their racial identity. The Hindu 

word for caste is Varna, which 

directly translated into English 

means color.’ [13] 

Never mind that Duke is only regurgitating 

a spurious and discredited interpretation 

of history. The lies of Aryan Race Theory 

are as useful for white supremacists today 

as they were for the Christian missionaries 

a century ago in their campaign not only to 

convert the infidels but also to justify the 

colonization of ‘heathen Hindoostan.’ 

1. James Schaffer (Case Western University) concluding his article, ‘Migration, Philology and 

South Asian Archaeology,’ in Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and 

History, edited by J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande (University of Michigan Press, 1998). [back] 

2. The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, vol I, edited by his wife (London: 

Longmans, 1902), 328. [back 

3. Adolphe Pictet in Essai de paleontologie linguistique (1859), quoted by Michael Danino in his 

The Invasion That Never Was (1996). [back] 

4. Ernest Renan, L’Avenir religieux des societes modernes (1860), quoted by Michael Danino op. 

cit. [back]


5. Louis B. Synder, The Idea of Nationalism: Its Meaning and History (New York: Von Nostrand, 

1962) [back] 

6. See ‘Genesis of the Aryan race Theory and its Application to Indian History’ by Devendranath 

Swarup, published in Manthan - Journal of Deendayal Research Institute (New Delhi, April- 

September 1994). [back] 

7. N. S. Rajaram, Aryan Invasion of India, The Myth and the Truth (Voice of India, 1993). [back] 

8. Sri Aurobindo, ‘The Origins of Aryan Speech,’ The Secret of the Veda, p. 554. [back] 

9. Quoted in Arun Shourie’s Missionaries in India - Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: 

ASA, 1994), 149.[back] 

10. The article can be found at http://www.lacnet.org/srilanka/politics/devolution/item1342.html 

11. Ana Pararasasingam, ‘Peace with Justice.’ Paper presented at proceedings of the 

International Conference on the Conflict in Sri Lanka, Canberra, Australia, 1996. [back] 

12. Quoted by N. S. Rajaram in his book, The Politics of History (New Delhi: Voice of India, 

1995). [back] 

13. David Duke, My Awakening (Mandeville, LA: Free Speech Press, 1999), 517-518 . [back] 

Note 

*As more and more secular scholars studied these racist theories they started questioning the integrity 

of Max Muller. During the 1880s Muller began refuting his own racist interpretation of the Vedas. 

The damage, however, had already been done. [back] 

Further Reading: 

Missionaries in India - Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas by Arun Shourie (New Delhi: ASA, 1994). 

Breaking India: Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Amaryllis, 2011 

149


About Vivekananda Kendra 

Swami Vivekananda, with intense love in his heart for the motherland undertook 

wanderings all over India. He came to Kanyakumari and sat on 25th, 26th and 27th 

December 1892 on the mid-sea rock meditating on India’s past, present and future. 

It was on this Rock that he discovered the mission for glorious India and later shook 

the world by India’s spirituality. On this sanctified place Mananeeya Sri Eknathji Ranade, 

with the participation of millions of people of India constructed the Vivekananda Rock 

Memorial, which symbolizes the glorious mission of India as seen by Swami 

Vivekananda in his meditation. Millions of people visit this monument at Kanyakumari 

and the three permanent Exhibitions - “Arise Awake”, “The Wandering Monk” and 

“Gangotri” based on the Life and Message of Swami Vivekananda and Mananeeya Sri 

Eknathji get inspired to work for the nation. 

Along with this Memorial, Sri Eknathji Ranade founded Vivekananda Kendra a “spiritually 

oriented service mission” to translate Swami Vivekananda’s vision of glorious India 

into action. Vivekananda Kendra calls upon those youth to be the life-workers and 

dedicate their life in the service of the nation. 

For actualizing this vision, the Kendra has over 663 branch centres spread over 23 

states of India to work for all sections of the society to rebuild the nation. To achieve 

this, Life-workers and the local workers of the Kendra, carry out various service 

activities through Yoga, Organizing Youth and Women, Rural Development, Education, 

Development of Natural Resources, and Publications based on the life and message of 

Swami Vivekananda. The Kendra urges all to join in this task of national regeneration. 

150

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