I’ve been reading a book on Hinduism lately (ok, it’s The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hinduism). I am not a Hindu, just interested in learning more about Hinduism. The book says that the theory of the Aryan invasion of India is now discredited and racist (it was supposedly used to support British rule of India)- that modern (post-1995) scholars believe that Hinduism originated in India. The most recent book I’ve read that mentions the Aryan invasion of India is the Cartoon History of the Universe 2, which was published in 1994.
My question is, what is the current scholarly consensus on the Aryan invasion of India? Is it a discredited theory, and considered vaguely racist, or do most scholars still think it happened?
This is in Great Debates because it’s a semi-religious question, and I suspec it might not have a factual answer. Mods, feel free to move it anywhere else you think it fits better.
QUOTE=Anne Neville]The book says that the theory of the Aryan invasion of India is now discredited and racist (it was supposedly used to support British rule of India)-
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Yes and no. Yes, some of the old theories of Aryan invasion and Aryans as a conquering white race ( which was much overblown in the early to mid-20th century ) are at least partially discredited and yes the British did factor it into their peculiar racist conception of India ( ovelapping with the concept of ‘martial races’ and the like ). However that a migration ( quite probably multiple waves - maybe invasion(s), maybe peaceful, likely a blend of both ) of Indo-Aryan/Indo-Iranian pastoralists into the subcontinent occurred seems to me pretty indisputable. The linguistic evidence at least is fairly clear on that - Sanskrit and Old Persian are apparently pretty close to each other.
Modern Indian nationalist scholars believe this. In a sense they are correct, but the exact nature of their near-fanatical beliefs on the exclusivity of Hinduism and the Aryans as internal to India are suspect in my view. What is more probable, in fact almost certain, is neither the old notion of an imported Aryan Hinduism, nor that Hinduism was a product of a purely native pre-Aryan culture ( or “indigenous” Aryan as some nationalists claim, disavowing any ancient penetration of India at all ), is true. Instead it was almost surely a synergy ( one that has continued to actively evolve ), which certainly does stamp it as uniquely Indian. But the language of the Vedas is Indo-Iranian Sanskrit and the similarities of the gods of the Arya to that of other early Indo–European religions, like that of the Ariana ( Persians and their relatives - Iran, Aryan, Arya, and Ariana are all basically derived from the same word ) is also pretty clear.
Hinduism is a syncretic faith, able to absorb and assign to equivalences the deities of groups it comes in contact with. There is a Dravidian Hinduism (check out Tamil mythology) which presumably predates any Indo-Aryan influence. But there is also an Indo-Aryan Hinduism that is intimately connected with them.
There are pretty solid linguistic grounds for thinking that the Indo-Aryan peoples entered India, and most likely from the general direction of Iran. As with other prehistoric “invasions,” however, to what extent it was a conquering and to what extent it was a gradual replacement, the ethnic identity of the invading peoples, etc., is nowhere as assured as it was thought to be 50 or 75 years ago.
Much of which Tamerlane already said, and better, but distinguishing between belief, language, and people struck me as worth adding to what he said.
We might start by getting rid of the term “Aryan,” which makes it sound like an mention of the “Aryan invasion” of India is a Nazi claim about the dominance of a master race. There’s no reason to use the term in a modern discussion of languages, religion, and genetic heritage in India. These three things tend to only very fuzzily overlap and often have completely different histories. Let’s start with language. There is a family of languages called Indo-European. It extends (well, let’s say that as of 1400 A.D. it extended) from Iceland to northern India. There’s really no doubt about this. The languages of northern India are descendents of the Indo-European language Sanskrit, which we have records of from as far back as about 1000 B.C. The languages of southern India are part of a completely different language family called Dravidian. Where exactly the Indo-European family originated 6000 to 8000 years ago is still debated. In any case, it’s now spoken (and even in, say, 1400 A.D. was spoken) by peoples of greatly different genetic backgrounds, so its spread was mostly a matter of people adapting a new language rather than a group spreading out and killing off all the older peoples.
Genetically, the people of northern India tend to be somewhere between the southern Indians and the people from lands to the west of India. Religiously, Hinduism appears to have some motifs from both mythologies of other Indo-European peoples and native Indian mythologies. It’s most likely then that there was some Indo-European invaders who came into India and imposed their languages on the northern half of the country. They intermarried with these peoples and are certainly in the minority in genetic heritage even in northern India. Hinduism seems to contain some elements of Indo-European mythologies and some native elements, so it was at least greatly influenced by these invaders.