A review of the Aryan invasion arguments in J. Bronkhorst and M.M. Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia

Dr. Koenraad Elst

On October 25-27, 1996, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor hosted a conference on "Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia". Its proceedings are now available as vol.3 of the Opera Minora in the Harvard Oriental Series, with some updates and a related more recent paper by Prof. Hans Heinrich Hock added, and edited by Prof. Johannes Bronkhorst and Prof. Madhav M. Deshpande: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia. Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology. Some of the papers have but little bearing on the question of the Aryan Invasion Theory, e.g. Pashaura Singh's paper on the 19th-century Hindu reform movement Arya Samaj, or Asko Parpola's paper on a Kerala folk deity. Here we will focus only on the arguments relevant to the Aryan Invasion debate.

1. Invasion vs. immigration

1.1. Invasion, not just immigration

To start with a clear understanding about the terminology used, please allow me me explain why I have chosen to retain the term "Aryan invasion" where most contributors to this volume use "Aryan immigration". Some of them have, in other forums, insisted that I drop the term "invasion" as this represents a long-abandoned theory of Aryan warrior bands attacking and destroying the peaceful Indus civilization. Well, I disagree.

Immigration means a movement from one country to another, without the connotation of conquest; invasion, by contrast, implies conquest or at least the intention of conquest. Yet invasion should not be confused with military conquest; it may be that, but it may also be demographic Unterwanderung. What makes it into an invasion is not the means used but the end achieved: after an invasion, the former outsiders are not merely in, as in an immigration, they are also in charge, just like after a military conquest.

In today's immigration debate, we can vividly see the contrast between the two terms. Those who expect Mexicans in the US to blend in, use the neutral term "immigrant", even when prefixed with "illegal". Some people, however, speak of a "Mexican invasion", by which they mean that the Mexicans, whether "wetback" or legal, have no intention of becoming Americans, of respecting the existing system, but want to impose their identity on Texas or California, making them Spanish-speaking rather than English-speaking states. Likewise, some French opinion leaders, including former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and former actress Brigitte Bardot, have spoken of a "Muslim invasion" in France, though most Muslims concerned are perfectly legal "immigrants" who entered France without any violence. What raises alarmist cries of "invasion" is the perception that these North-Africans want to impose a Muslim identity on French society.

It is the end result which decides whether an "immigration" can be called an "invasion". If the newcomers end up imposing their (cultural, religious, linguistic) identity rather than adopting the native identity, the result is the same as it would have been in the case of a military conquest, viz. that outsiders have made the country their own, and that natives who remain true to their identity (like Native Americans in the US) become strangers or second-class citizens in their own country.

In the case of the Aryan invasion, the end result clearly is that North India got aryanized.

The language of the Aryans marginalized or replaced all others. In a popular variant of the theory, they even reduced the natives to permanent subjugation through the caste system. So, whether or not there was a destructive Aryan conquest, the result was at any rate the humiliation of native culture and the elimination of the native language in the better part of India. It is therefore entirely reasonable to call such development an "invasion" and to speak of the prevalent paradigm as the "Aryan invasion theory" (AIT).

1.2. Was there a military conquest?

There is a hard variety of the AIT, mostly upheld by Dalit activists and Dravidian separatists (and their American Afrocentrist allies) which insists on such a conflictual scenario, with Aryans devastating the cities and civilization of the natives. But most scholars deny or avoid such a scenario, if only because the Harappan cities don't show trace of such military conquest. However, if there was no conquest, the question should be answered: how in the world could the Aryan "immigrants" have aryanized the Harappan area if not by military conquest? Those who are so particular about "immigration" as opposed to "invasion", like Prof. Michael Witzel, ought to explain how Central-Asian immigrants could impose their language on a far larger and culturally advanced Harappan population?

As far as I can see, the supposedly invading Aryans could only initiate a process of language replacement by a process of elite dominance (that much is accepted by most invasionists), which means that they first had to become the ruling class. Could they have peacefully immigrated and then worked their way up in society, somewhat like the Jews in pre-War Vienna or in New York? Moreover, the example given illustrates a necessary ingredient of peaceful immigration, viz. linguistic adaptation: in spite of earning many positions of honour and influence in society, the Jews never imposed their language like the Aryans supposedly did. So how could these Aryan immigrants first peacefully integrate into Harappan society yet preserve their language and later even impose it on their hospitable host society? Neither their numbers, relative to the very numerous natives, nor their cultural level, as illiterate invaders relative to a literate civilization, gave them much of an edge over the Harappans.

Therefore, the only way for them to wrest power from the natives must have been by their military superiority, tried and tested in the process of an actual conquest. Possibly there were some twists to the conquest scenario, making it more complicated than a simple attack,

e.g. some Harappan faction in a civil war may have invited an Aryan mercenary army which,after doing its job, overstayed its welcome and dethroned its employers. But at least some kind of military showdown seems necessarily to have taken place at some point. If invasionists now shy away from Sir Mortimer Wheeler's robust conquest scenario for the Aryan invasion, it is up to them to first of all think up and eventually prove the unlikely nonmilitary alternative. As things now stand, the Aryan "immigration" theory necessarily implies the hypothesis of military conquest.

2. The racial interpretation of the AIT

2.1. Awareness of colour difference

Two participants have dealt with the old assumption that Arya and Anarya are racial categories. Thomas R. Trautmann ("Constructing the racial theory of Indian civilization") acknowledges that ancient Hindus already had an awareness of skin colour, as when Râjashekhara in his Kâvyamîmânsâ describes the people of northern India as gaura, "fair", those of eastern India as shyâma, "dusky", those of southern India as krshna, "black", and those of western India as pandu, "pale". No colour discrimination is implied there, merely a description of facts, yet a preference for fair complexion in brides is reportedly attested as early as Vâsishtha Dharma Sûtra 18:18. Most famously, Patanjali the grammarian described Brahmins as gaura, "fair". Trautmann asks: "How can one argue against the racial theory in the face of such facts?" (p.289)

First of all, none of these quotations pertain to an opposition between natives and newcomers from the northwest, only one between different sections of the population of India, which even today varies in skin colour from almost white in the northwest to purely black in the south, just as in Europe, hair colour varies between white and black. Long before the 19thcentury wave of race theories, Europeans have described one another as red-haired or dark-haired or flaxen-haired, without implying inferiority or foreign origin.

That Brahmins were once recognizable as gaura is only logical when you consider that the heartland of the Vedic tradition was to the west of the Yamuna river, and that people in that northwestern region were (and could still be) characterized as gaura, this being the skin colour of Panjabis rather than of Europeans. Of course, at that time already Brahmins were swarming out over India, being invited by kings to settle in Tamil Nadu or Bengal, intermarrying with local women, and ending up as dusky Bengal Brahmins or black Tamil Brahmins. Which is why Patanjali's early commentators already rejected his confinement of Brahmins to gaura-skinned people as absurd.

The preference for white skin is very widespread among populations which certainly have no Aryan invasion history, e.g. the harems of the Caliphs and Sultans were full of captured white women. More generally, we find white and black having positive c.q. negative connotations among non-white populations, e.g. white is the sacred colour for many Indian tribals (which is why they select white goats or chicken for sacrifice). Conversely, they do not necessarily have these connotations among white people, e.g. the gaura North-Indian Hindus have white as their colour of mourning, as do the whitish Japanese, for whom black is an auspicious colour. At any rate, even the preference of Indians for any one colour need not prove that this was their own colour, much less that they originated in a non-Indian region where everyone wore that colour on his skin.

2.2. How the racial interpretation was popularized

Trautmann goes over the historical record of early Indology to show how the race theories of the 19th century forced racial interpretations on text fragments which had never been read in that sense before, e.g. how the single reference to the enemies as an-âs, "mouthless" (i.e. "of defective speech", meaning "not groomed in Vedic culture", Sayana's reading consistent with the traditional cultural interpretation) was read as a-nâs, "noseless",

i.e. "flat-nosed" by Max Müller, then cited by anthropometrist H.H. Risley as a racialdescription which the Vedic Aryans often made, and finally adopted in that version by most textbooks. (p.287-288)

Trautmann likewise points out that there is no contextual evidence supporting the nontraditional interpretation of varna, "colour, caste" as "skin colour": "On the evidence of use it appears that varna here simply means 'category, social group'." (p.288) Until recently such criticism of the racial interpretation of the ethnic data in the Rg-Veda was only made by the non-invasionist school.

Hans Hock ("Through a glass darkly: modern 'racial' interpretations vs. textual and general prehistoric evidence on ârya and dâsa/dasyu in Vedic society") also points to the genesis of the racial interpretation in the context of the "scramble of the European powers to divide up the non-European world", in which "the British take-over of India seemed to provide a perfect parallel to the assumed take-over of prehistoric India by the invading 'Aryans'" (p.168). He argues that "such notions as 'race', defined in terms of skin color, are an invention of (early) modern European colonialism and imperialism and thus inappropriate for the prehistoric contact between ârya and dâsa/dasyu", citing as example the absence of racial considerations in the Roman empire. (p.159)

2.3. The evidence

Prof. Hock provides a detailed survey of the Vedic verses which have been cited as proof of a racial antagonism between the Vedic people and their enemies (verses containing terms like asikni and krshna, "black"), and concludes that the racial interpretation "must be considered dubious". (p.154) He points out that "early Sanskrit literature offers no conclusive evidence for preoccupation with skin color. More than that, some of the greatest Epic heroes and heroines such as Krshna, Draupadi, Arjuna, Nakula and (...) Damayanti are characterized as dark-skinned. Similarly, the famous cave-paintings of Ajanta depict a vast range of skin colors. But in none of these contexts do we find that darker skin color disqualifies a person from being considered good, beautiful, or heroic." (p.154-155)

About Patanjali's description of Brahmins as gaura, he notes that "there is nothing in the passage that forces us to view this difference as one of inherited skin color" (p.155 n.29): it may be the difference between one who lives indoors or sits teaching his pupils in the shadow of a tree, as opposed to labourers or soldiers whose occupation exposes them to the elements. In Europe too, the distinction between the sun-tanned peasant woman and the lily-white lady of the castle was familiar until the recent vogue of sun-bathing.

But as already noted, since the North-Indians have been described by Rajashekhara as gaura, the gaura-skinned Brahmins do not really stand out by skin colour. Since gaura does not strictly mean European-white, we would need something more specific to indicate northern origins. Reference to fair hair would certainly qualify, but according to Michael Witzel, there is in Sanskrit literature exactly "one 'goldhaired' (hiranyakeshin) person that is not a god, the author of HShS", i.e. the Hiranyakeshin-Shrauta-Sûtra named after him. (p.390, emphasis in the original) Quite possibly, even the author called Hiranyakeshin or Goldhaired was not goldhaired at all, but had one of the epithets of the solar deity Vishnu as his given name, just as people called Nîlakanth, "blue-throated" like Shiva after he swallowed poison, are not blue-throated at all.

But suppose that we have at last found one Nordic-looking Vedic Aryan here. Considering that fair hair and blue eyes are recessive traits (meaning that in mixed genetic settings, they tend to diminish and disappear) and that fair hair is still common among certain communities in Afghanistan and even in Pakistan among the Kalash Kafir and ex-Kafir populations around Chitral (also known as Arya-e-Koh, "Aryans of the mountains"), it stands to reason that before the Christian era, fair hair was not all that uncommon along the Indus and farther northwest. But the Vedic texts make no mention of fair hair as a mark of friend or foe, of ethnic us or them.

Loss of pigmentation seems to be a selected trait of northern latitudes, because it favours the intake of ultraviolet rays needed for the production of vitamin D (in tropical latitudes, by contrast, pigmentation protects against excessive intake of ultraviolet). The neat picture of whiteness and fairness originating in the north is upset somewhat by their common occurrence among the Australian aborigines, but let us still assume it for now. Then, the white and fair people have most likely descended from the north to the subtropical latitudes during the Ice Age, when the northern regions were even more inhospitable. There is no trace of their descending on India after 8000 BC, since when the skeletal record shows the same population living in the Indus basis as lives there today.

Perhaps there was a kind of white penetration of northwestern India sometime in the Glacial age, but that immigrant group need not at all have been IE-speaking. Given the known fact that IE has crossed racial frontiers during its expansion, it remains perfectly possible that a darkish group of PIE-speaking Indians moved out to Central Asia and beyond in ca. 5000 BC, mixed with ever-whiter successive groups of natives, imparted their language through elite dominance, but lost their genetic distinctiveness after a sufficient number of generations of expansion and thinning out.

3. The political dimension

3.1. Racism vs. Hindu nationalism

It may be noted in passing that before arguing for the non-racialist interpretation, Prof. Hock apologizes "if some of my findings are superficially convergent with those of the nationalistically inspired groups". (p.147) At least he has grasped that in this debate, it is the hated Hindu nationalists who take the non-racialist position. Indian polemicists like Yoginder Sikand ("Exploding the Aryan myth", Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993) had tried to amalgamate Hindu nationalism, through the term "Arya(n)", with "racism", and many gullible Westerners have fallen prey to this deliberate confusion. Which brings us once more to the inevitable political dimension of the debate.

Most ivory-tower philologists have little understanding of the political aspects of the AIT debate. I will not try to support that statement with examples giving names and references, for enough bad blood has flowed already, so instead I will just indicate a general tendency. Most of them think that in the West, the chapter of Aryan politics has been closed for good in 1945, thus exonerating themselves from a charge still frequently made by Indians, viz. that their acceptance of the AIT is motivated by racism.

In their own case, I will gladly assume that none of them is motivated by racist doctrines, though they do work within a framework which is still indebted, through inertia, to ideas developed in an age when racist or colonial or missionary motives did play a significant role. They also have a personal stake in maintaining the status quo, for their own previous papers would suddenly look obsolete if the AIT were discarded,-- and not only AIT-related papers, for all indological papers contain innocuous chronological references, of the type "Upanishads (ca. 800 BC)", which would be far off the mark if the AIT-based low chronology were replaced with something closer to the indigenous high chronology.

Most Western scholars also know little of the contemporary Indian politics concerning the AIT. They generally link the questioning of the AIT to Hindu nationalism, of which they turn out to have a very exaggerated and demonizing image, without noticing that the Hindu-nationalist aversion to the AIT is in fact a reaction to an already old, widespread and well-entrenched political use of the AIT by its believers and propagators: Christian missionaries, Dalit separatists, Dravidian separatists, and to a large extent the Marxists. The latter case requires some explanation.

3.2. Two faces of Indian Marxism

Prof. Hock has once, just once, encountered an expression of Dravidian chauvinism in the AIT context (a Tamil professor walking out from a lecture in which it was shown that there is no pre-Vedic Dravidian substratum in Indo-Aryan, as Dravidian influence trickled into Sanskrit only from the later-Vedic stage onwards, p.146), illustrating once more how near-innocent Western scholars are of the intense and widespread political use made of the AIT by various separatist movements in India. But he is quite aware of the polarization on Marxist/anti-Marxist lines in the AIT debate. He was consequently surprised to find "a highly positive review" of anti-invasionist books by David Frawley, N.S. Rajaram, Subhash Kak and Georg Feuerstein "on the neo-Marxian Postcolonial List, in spite of the fact that authors such as Frawley heavily inveigh against the Marxists". (p.147)

This admittedly unusual phenomenon really only restores the natural order of things: in most Third World countries, Marxists are nationalists to the extent that they want to revalue the contributions of non-European peoples and deconstruct colonialist views, i.c. the AIT. Earlier Marxists like S.K. Chatterjee only accepted the AIT because it was the dominant paradigm and seemed satisfactory enough, and they were by no means as militant about it as their present-day successors prove to be. Today's Indian Marxists have joined the broad anti-Hindu front, allying themselves with ideological forces of which they used to be as critical as of Hinduism in the days when they were more self-confident.

In the 1950s and 60s, when the Soviet and Chinese models were in the ascendant, Marxists didn't mind offending everyone else. In parallel with Chinese propaganda against Tibetan "feudal society", Dev Raj Chanana could freely expose the numerous social injustices in which Buddhists participated, including the use of slave labour by monasteries and wholesale collaboration with feudal aristocracies and militaristic dictatorships, making a mockery of the pious claims by neo-Buddhists that Buddhism stood for social reform and equality. Today, the demoralized Indian Marxists flatter Buddhism ("revolt against Brahminical oppression") as well as Islam ("egalitarian mass movement against Meccan trade monopolists", later "welcomed by the oppressed masses in India") and all other possible enemies of Hinduism.

Now, these anti-Hindu forces are exploiting the AIT to the hilt, infusing crank racism in vast doses into India's body politic. Read e.g. Kancha Ilaiah's book Why I Am Not a Hindu (Calcutta 1996), sponsored by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, with its anti-Brahmin cartoons: move the hairlocks of the Brahmin villains from the back of the head to just in front of their ears, and you get exact replicas of the anti-Semitic cartoons from the Nazi paper Der Stürmer.

This crank Dalit tendency is strongly patronized by the Christian missions, witness the distribution of one of the Bahujan Swayamsevak Sangathan's anti-Hindu pamphlets at the Indian Catholic bishops' Delhi press conference just before the Pope's visit in November 1999.

Many of V.T. Rajshekar's brochures (Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore) are transcripts of speeches given at Christian conferences. Like pure Indian Marxism before, this lumpen anti-Brahminism is also well-liked and even patronized by Western academe. Thus, Ilaiah was invited to contribute to the American University Press book Democracy in India, a Hollow Shell edited by Prof. Arthur Bonner.

Another movement which puts Marxism in the shadow is Islamic militantism. Its rise goes against Marxism's predictions and sympathies, and has taken the lives of thousands of Marxists in Iran and Afghanistan. But it is so undeniably successful, even gaining a lot of sympathy and patronage in Western academe (witness e.g. Asghar Ali Engineer's contribution to Bonner's book, or Syed Shahabuddin's contribution to John Esposito's book Islam in Asia) that Marxists have decided: if you can't beat them, join them. It is no surprise, then, to find Marxist professors Irfan Habib and R.S. Sharma pleading the anti-temple case in the employ of the fundamentalist Babri Masjid Action Committee during the Ayodhya controversy.

Against this background, it is not so strange anymore that Indian Marxists have become zealous defenders of a colonial-originated thesis about ethnic movements of four thousand years ago, simply because that thesis is functioning as the war-horse of the united anti-Hindu forces. The greying Indian Marxists are trying to widen their shrinking base by uniting with forces they would once have denounced as obscurantist and populist-retrograde.

But then, not all Indian Marxists have followed their vanguard in taking this new ideological turn. One of the important contributors to the anti-invasionist case is a Marxist, Bhagwan Singh, author of The Vedic Harappans (Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1995), who has predictably focused on the economic and industrial aspects of the Vedic and Harappan evidence. During the past half-century, in most Third World countries, Marxism and nationalism have often gone hand in hand. That is why some Marxists and some RSS activists have recently joined hands in protesting against new footholds of the multinationals in India and other aspects of economic globalization. It should, then, also clear up Prof. Hock's puzzlement at occasional displays of Marxist sympathy for the non-invasionist argument.

3.3. Non-invasionism and Hindu nationalism

A wholly different political element in Prof. Hock's contributions concerns his characterization of the non-invasionist school. He repeatedly identifies it as the "Hindu nationalist" school. But this mistakenly attributes a political identity and motive to a scholarly hypothesis about ancient Indian history. I don't call the AIT party "the European racist school" or the "Dravidian chauvinist school" eventhough those terms do explain the motives behind at least a part of the pro-AIT polemic, past or present.

A number of anti-invasionist authors are not Hindu nationalists. I don't know if Klaus Klostermaier, Georg Feuerstein, François Gautier or Michel Danino considers himself a Hindu, but if so, he would (like David Frawley, a convert to Hinduism) definitely not be a Hindu nationalist: a non-Indian Hindu is a living denial of the Hindu nationalist identification of Hinduism with India. To whom it may concern: the present writer, at any rate, is neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. Even among those non-invasionists who are Hindu Indians, there may be some who are not "Hindu nationalists", as Prof. Hock acknowledges of BHU linguistics professor Satya Swarup Misra (p.1).

From the identification of a historical theory with a much-maligned political movement, worse things follow: "But given the nature of the politics of authenticity and of its practitioners, I doubt that a meaningful dialogue with any of the nationalistically motivated groups is feasible, just as I doubt that any meaningful dialogue is possible between evolutionists and creationists." (p.147) It is to Prof. Hock's credit that he acknowledges the existence of Tamil-chauvinist and tribal-separatist "nationalistically motivated groups" alongside the alleged "Hindu nationalists" as interested parties in the Aryan invasion debate. After Western academics have been effectively supporting the first two while demonizing the third one, it is perhaps a welcome progress that he puts them indiscriminately in the same bag: "In fact, given the unfortunate consequences in my native country, Germany, of a nationalism that sought authenticity in non-scholarly interpretations of history and prehistory, I am extremely uncomfortable with any of the modern Indian nationalisms briefly referred to earlier." (p.148)

But what evidence does Prof. Hock have for the "non-scholarly interpretation of history" by the non-invasionist school? It is not given, but it ought to be strong stuff, for he goes as far as to exclude all the "nationalistically motivated groups" from the history debate by equating them with Biblical-fundamentalist creationists. The one similarity he cites is that scholarly disagreements between different invasionists (e.g. identifying the Harappan language as Dravidian vs. Munda vs. Burushaski etc.) are exploited by non-invasionists to discredit the whole invasionist paradigm: "Creationists and various types of nationalists look upon such disagreements as indictments of scholarly methodology; but such disagreements are the very foundation of scholarly enquiry." (p.147)

Well, I haven't seen that polemical tactic in most non-invasionist publications. Probably the reference is to Prof. N.S. Rajaram, who has very substantial scientific contributions to the debate to his credit, but who once pointed out the controversies between linguists as an extra argument for not taking the soft evidence of linguistics too seriously. I repeat that I (along with Hindu authors like S.S. Misra and Shrikant Talageri) have always disagreed with the Indian skepticism vis-à-vis the linguistic evidence, yet here, Rajaram has a point.

If invasionist linguists still disagree on the IE Homeland by a margin of 5,000 km, from northern Germany (L. Kilian, J. Haudry) through Anatolia (T. Gamkrelidze & V. Ivanov, along with archaeologist C. Renfrew) and South Russia (Gordon Childe, Marija Gimbutas and most Journal of IE Studies contributors) to Xinjiang (A.K. Narain), it is not unreasonable to question the capacity of the linguistic data to yield decisive information on the location of the IE Homeland. Indeed, Prof. Hock himself accepts that pinpointing the exact location in this vast stretch of land is a question which "may, in fact, never be settled". (p.17) But if it is too early to exclude any part of this territory from possible Homeland status, is it so crazy to suggest that the exclusion of India may have been premature as well? In this case, the plurality of opinions does prove that there is as yet no solid evidence basis for deciding the Homeland question, which does not preclude that decisive evidence will be found in the near future. And which does not amount to asserting that faith and faith alone should decide the Homeland question.

3.4. Why there is so little genuine debate

In various discussion forums, I have repeatedly seen the same pattern of Aryan invasion debate. Invasionists, supposedly sobre scholars with no axe to grind, attack non-invasionists as religious obscurantists, flat-earthers, "lunatic fringe", Atlantis freaks, Nazis (apparently unaware that Hitler was an AIT believer), creationists, and what not: terms they would never use among each other. Even more than most people, invasionist academics prove to be mimophants: like the touch-me-not mimosa, they are extremely sensitive,-- at least when they themselves are criticized; and like the elephant, they are extremely insensitive,-- at least when it comes to throwing insults at others.

Then, when someone draws attention to their unusual ad hominem language, so unbecoming of scholarly company, they blame the non-invasionists: with such "Hindu nationalist" freaks, what else do you expect? Though quite untrue, that analysis is not really mendacious, merely prejudiced: Western indologists are so conditioned by a wild enemy-image of Hindu nationalism that they genuinely associate anyone rightly or wrongly counted as a Hindu nationalist with trouble and fury. So, when they see a debate degenerate into a slanging-match under their own impact, they wrongly yet sincerely attribute this to the input of the non-invasionists. At best, they pick up the quarrel in the middle, muse about how "the AIT debate doesn't bring out the best in people", and decide that it is best to suspend the debate.

Let me put on record here that in my 9 years of close involvement in this debate, I have seen time and again that it is the invasionist school which, when it did not refuse the debate, has spoiled the debate by replacing argument with mud-slinging. There are exceptions, of course, and the publication of the volume under discussion is a great step in the right direction.