Indigenous Aryans

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The notion of Indigenous (viz., to the Indian subcontinent) Aryans is the proposal that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, are "indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent. The claim is thus that the Vedic and pre-Vedic language evolved out of an earlier stage in situ, somewhere in Northern India. This contrasts with the mainstream model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India.

The concept is notable in Indian politics as part of Hindu nationalist propaganda. In its extreme forms, postulating "Aryans" in the Neolithic period (7th to 5th millennia BC), it qualifies as pseudohistory^[1] or national mysticism, while more moderate proposals (postulating the 3rd millennium BC Harappan civilization as the locus of Proto-Indo-Iranian^[2]) can qualify as bona fide scholarship, albeit far removed from mainstream opinion.^[3]

The proposition of "indigenous Aryans" thus does not correspond to a single identifiable opinion, but to a sentiment that may result in various, partly mutually exclusive, specific claims united by a common ideology.^[4] Witzel (2006:217) identifies three major types of revisionist scenario:

a "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the Punjab in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda, the position of e.g. the 1995 In Search of the Cradle of Civilization^[5]^[6]. Bryant (2001:4) proposes the label "Indigenous Aryanism" for this thesis, and clarifies that, in strict linguistic terms, "Indigenous Indo-Aryanism" would be correct, to differentiate from other connotations of "Aryan".
the "out of India" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland;
the position that all the world's languages and civilizations derive from India, represented e.g. by David Frawley or Graham Hancock^[7]

1 Historiographical Context
2 Political significance
3 Pseudoscience and Postmodernism
4 Notes
5 Literature
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Historiographical Context

"Indigenous Aryans" is usually taken to imply that the bearers of the Harappan civilization were linguistically Indo-Aryans^[8]. In any "Indigenous Aryan" scenario, speakers of Iranian languages must have left India at some point prior to the 10th century BC, when first mention of Iranian peoples is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the Yaz culture which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.^[9]

Proponents of "indigenous Aryan" scenarios typically base their claim on interpretations of the Rigveda, the oldest surviving Indo-Aryan text, which they date to the 3rd millennium BC (in some cases much earlier), in particular based on arguments in involving the Sarasvati River, and sometimes archaeoastronomy. The date of the Rigveda is clearly a terminus ante quem for Indo-Aryan presence in the Punjab, and its earliest portions are usually dated to the mid 2nd millennium BC, consistent with a Proto-Indo-Iranian breakup of ca. 2000 BC.

The "Indigenous Aryans" position would be a necessary corollary of an Indian origin of the Indo-European languages.^[10], and in recent years, the notion has been increasingly conflated with an "Out of India" ^[11] origin of Indo-European, which had been suggested sporadically since the 19th century (notably by Friedrich Schlegel), but has virtually no support in mainstream scholarship.

[edit] Political significance

Further information: Nationalism and ancient history

The concept is of great notability in Indian politics as the stated ideology of Hindu nationalist ("Hindutva") movements. It is based on Hindu reformist currents such as Arya Samaj or Gayatri Pariwar that emerged in the 19th century.

It is designed as the ideological counterpart of the Anti-Brahmanism of Dravidistan or "self respect" movements on one hand, effectively reflecting the conflict of Indo-Aryan vs. Dravidian ethnic nationalism (the main ethnic division of the population of the Republic of India), and the conflict between Hinduism and Islam in India on the other hand (the main religious division of the Republic of India). The implicit argument is that "Indigenous Aryans" take away any claim of priority from the Dravidian population, making both groups equally "autochthonous" while at the same time facilitating the portrayal of Islam as a recent and "foreign" violent intrusion into a monolithic and immutable native Indo-Aryan (Hindu) culture of incalculable antiquity.

Repercussions of these divisions have reached Californian courts with the Californian Hindu textbook case, where according to the Times of India^[12] historian and president of the Indian History Congress, D. N. Jha in a "crucial affidavit" to the superior court of the state of California, "[g]iving a hint of the Aryan origin debate in India, [...] asked the court not to fall for the 'indigenous Aryan' claim since it has led to 'demonisation of Muslims and Christians as foreigners and to the near denial of the contributions of non-Hindus to Indian culture'", exposing the "indigenous Aryan" claim as an appeal to consequences motivated by contemporary politics.

[edit] Pseudoscience and Postmodernism

Main article: Hindutva pseudoscience

Further information: Hindutva and Integral humanism

Nanda (2003) argues that the pseudoscience at the core of Hindu nationalism was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science" (Sokal 2006:32). Nanda (2003:72) explains how this relativization of "science" was employed by Hindutva ideologues during the 1998 to 2004 reign of the BJP:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honoric of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.

Criticism of the irrationality of such "Vedic science" is brushed aside by the notion that

The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since ‘Modern Science’ arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion. (Mukhyananda 1997:94)

Witzel (2006:204) traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always be "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism outlined above, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakasha.

[edit] Notes

^ some "proponents" do attempt to give it a "scholarly" face by rejecting mainstream academia as outdated, thus Rajaram 1995, page 230, (cited in Bryant 2001 page 74) "Ancient Indian history is ripe for a thorough revision [...] one can begin by clearing away the cobwebs cast by questionable linguistic theories, [...] using every available modern tool from archaeology to computer science"
^ there are several (mutually exclusive) decipherment claims of the Indus script as encoding a "Sanskritic" language; see also Indus Valley Civilization
^ A 2600 BC (Mature Harappan) date for Proto-Indo-Iranian is consistent with the "Anatolian" timeframe of Russell Gray and Atkinson, Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin, Nature 426 (2003) 435-439
^ Thus, Koenraad Elst postulates a Proto-Indo-Iranian Harappan culture, while Nicholas Kazanas argues that the Indo-Aryan Rigveda must predate the Harappan culture. The unifying ideology is apparent in that there is no academic controversy among proponents of "out of India" scenario aimed at resolving such contradictions.
^ "the Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia, deriving their Sanskritic language from earlier Indo-European dialects." (p. 155)
^ B.B. Lal in The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture: Some Thoughts claims that the Rigveda "must antedate ca. 2000 BCE" based on what he calls "literary-cum-archaeological-cum-hydrological-cum-radiocarbon evidence", but Lal postulates "Sanskrit-speakers were there in this area [Harappan culture] as early as [the 5th millennium BC]". Both are dates are compatible with a "mild" position if an early date for PIE (such as the 6500 BC of the Anatolian hypothesis) is assumed.
^ related to pseudoarchaeological fantasies involving "Ruins in the Gulf of Cambay"; c.f. Witzel (2006:230, note 57)
^ Bryant 2001 page 6
^ See, e.g., Roman Ghirshman, L'Iran et la migration des Indo-aryens et des Iraniens (Leiden 1977). Cited by Carl .C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Archeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians, in Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (Routledge 2005), p.162.
^ if proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India, some predecessor of any daughter langauge found outside India must have emigrated from there; Bryant 2001 page 6
^ (Witzel 2006:217)
^ US text row resolved by Indian, 9 Sep, 2006

[edit] Literature

Bryant, Edwin (2001), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, Oxford University Press
Bryant, Edwin, The indigenous Aryan debate, diss. Columbia University (1997). (abstract)
Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India Quest Books (IL) (October, 1995) ISBN 0-8356-0720-8
Kazanas, Nicholas (2001b). "Indigenous Indoaryans and the Rgveda". Journal of Indo-European Studies 29: 257-93.
D. N. Jha, Against Communalising History, Social Scientist (1998).
Lal, B. B., The Sarasvati flows on: The continuity of Indian culture, Aryan Books International (2002), ISBN 8173052026.
Mallory, JP. 1998. A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia. In: The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Ed. Mair. Washingion DC: Institue for the Study of Man.
Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press (2003), ISBN 0813533589.
Meera Nanda, Response to my critics, Social Epistemology Vol. 19, No. 1, January–March, 2005, pp. 147–191. [1]
Parpola, Asko (1998), "Aryan Languages, Archaeological Cultures, and Sinkiang: Where Did Proto-Iranian Come into Being and How Did It Spread?", in Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia, Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man
N. S. Rajaram, The politics of history : Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) ISBN 81-85990-28-X.
Talageri, S. G., The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0 [2]
Alan Sokal, 'Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?' in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415305934. [3]
Michael Witzel, 'Rama's Realm: Indocentric rewriting of early South Asian archaeology and history' in: Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public Routledge (2006), ISBN 0415305934.