Home
FOSA/CAC
Position
Letters of Support
Textbook Edits
Action
Alerts
Press Coverage
IN DEPTH:
Nobel Laureate Dr.
Amartya Sen's Views
The NCERT Case
Caste and Gender in
Ancient India
The Coming of Aryans
About the Hindu Education
Foundation (HEF) and Vedic Foundation(VF)
Fact Sheet
and Chronology
|
The
claim that Aryans were indigenous to India has no scientific and
scholarly backing. In this section we provide some responses
to
(i) frequent misconceptions spread by Hindutva groups, (ii) a summary of what
recent archeogenetics research has to say in regards to the Aryan
Migration Theory, with abstracts from leading scientific
journals, and (iii) a list of scholarly resources for further study.
Frequently asked questions
1. Isn’t
it true that the Aryan Invasion Theory has been disproved?
There
is no evidence of invasions taking place, and the whole theory is based
on flaky linguistic theories.
2. What about the
genetic evidence that conclusively proves that the Aryans are
indigenous to India?
3. Isn’t
it true that the Aryan Invasion/ Migration Theory is a
racist idea and undermines the importance of India by suggesting that
Hinduism originated elsewhere?
1.
Isn’t it true that the Aryans Invasion Theory has been
disproved? There is no evidence of invasions taking place,
and
the whole theory is based on flaky linguistic theories.
The
Aryan Invasion Theory has many variants. The Aryan Invasion Theory
advocating a purely racial “invasion” proposed by
Max
Mueller has been questioned by many, including the noted historian,
Romila Thapar, in the 1960s. The contemporary theory of Aryan origin
corroborates data and evidences from over two dozen different fields of
study and demonstrate a pattern of cultural, social and linguistic
migration/domination/invasion of people speaking the
Indo-European
languages from Central Asia into India. This theory about the Aryan
origin, which is currently the most authoritative theory among
historians, does not state that the Aryans were an indigenous people.
For details see: "The Aryan Question Revisited", by Romila Thapar at
http://members.tripod.com/ascjnu/aryan.html .
The
Hindutva groups are misleading the masses by criticizing Max
Mueller’s Aryan Invasion Theory (which is already
discredited)
and cleverly, falsely and deviously claiming that Michael Witzel and
others (including Romila Thapar) are supporting Max Mueller’s
theory. In fact, under the cover of criticizing Max Mueller, the self
-styled Hindutva historians [most of whom are engineers and businessmen]
are promoting a theory that Aryans did not migrate from Central Asia
but were the original inhabitants of India. This theory has been
propped up as a propaganda item on numerous websites and is discussed as
a community specific truth within the Hindutva circles. It holds no
currency within established historical scholarship.
The main
agenda of promoting this theory is ideological and political. For those
concerned with a Hindutva ideology, the invasion has to be denied. The
definition of a Hindu as given by Savarkar (a fascist ideologue of the RSS) was that India had to be his
pitribhumi (ancestral land) and his punyabhumi (the land of his
religion). A Hindu therefore could not be descended from alien
invaders. Since Hindus sought a lineal descent from the Aryans, and a
cultural heritage, the Aryans had to be indigenous. This definition of
the Hindu excluded Muslims and Christians from being indigenous since
their religion did not originate in India. Hence the basis of Hindutva
ideology.
2. What about the genetic evidence that conclusively proves that the
Aryans are indigenous to India?
For
every one paper using population genetics that claims that Aryans are
indigenous to India, there are multiple others that show just the
opposite . We, however, would like to point out that this method simply
does not have the temporal resolution to address questions about
population movements in the time period that we are looking
at.
The error bars on these papers are in kiloyears (1000 years) and hence
cannot authoritatively suggest anything about the question of the
origin of Aryans in the time frame of 3000 or so years ago, and are
useful only for determining the movements of people in pre-historic
periods.
For a more in-depth discussion, visit our page summarizing recent findings in Archaeogenetics.
3.
Isn’t it true that the Aryan Invasion/ Migration Theory is a
racist idea and undermines the importance of India by suggesting that
Hinduism originated elsewhere?
The original Aryan
Invasion Theory does have a colonial geneology and was largely a
product of eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalist scholarship,
which was true of most historical research done at that period.
However,
to call the contemporary theory of influx/ migration
‘racist’ is outrageous. Such serious charges should
only be
levied when followed with strong arguments, and the only argument that
the Hindutva groups have offered so far is the race of *a few* scholars
proposing it. First of all, many well-respected scholars in
India
have also done extensive work to further develop the current theories--
Romila Thapar, DN Jha and Shireen Ratnagar to name a few. And
also, there are quite a few White “historians” who
have
also championed the theory that Aryans are indigenous (Koenraad Elst,
Michel Danino, David Frawley—though, the last two really
cannot
be called historians!)
But more importantly, the race of
the scholars proposing a theory by itself has little to do with the
suggestion that the theory in itself is racist. It is racist
only
if it furthers a certain agenda of promoting the interests of one race
over another in order to maintain superiority. But, how does
the
place of origin of Aryans provide *any* superiority to *any*
race? It does so, *only* if the lens through which you are
looking at history has already been distorted by Hindutva—if
you
believe that peoples who can trace their geneology all the way to India
have somehow more claims to its citizenship, than others whose
geneologies can be traced to areas outside the current-political
boundaries. While this is a dangerous idea to promote
anywhere,
we note that as South Asian Americans practicising religions of faraway
lands in the US, we MUST reject this notion entirely and with vehemence.
|
