I keep seeing sites that claim that Aryan invasions of India were myth. So, I thought I’d check here to find out from you guys if there really was an invasion or if it was something made up to propagate the concept of “white man’s burden”.
good question, but if many distinguished scholars cannot agree (e.g see http://www.geocities.com/dipalsarvesh/indexAryan.html ) I don’t think this board will be able to. Still, any Indian historians out there?
As far as I know, there is something of a controversy as to whether there ever wasa mass invasion of India by fair-skinned invaders.
However, these ‘Aryans’ who may or may not have taken over were not blonde haired, blue eyed Tuetonic invaders. They were fair-skinned by comparison to the other peoples of India, but were more likely to have been Persian. There is a distinct possibility of an etymological connection between the words ‘Aryan’ and ‘Iranian’.
‘Aryan’ only became attached to white Northern Europeans relatively recently, i.e. the 18th or 19th century.
Alex B
My world history book says: “The Bhagavadgita is part of a larger work that deals with the early history of the Aryan peoples who entered India from beyond the mountains north of the Khyber Pass between 1500 and 1000 B.C.E. When the Aryans arrived, India had already had a thriving civilization for almost two thousand years.”
“These invaders, who called themselves Aryans, were part of an extensive group of Indo-European-speaking peoples who at that time inhabited vast areas in what is now Siberia and the steppes of Central Asia.”
Also, "…Aryans, descended from the pastoral peoples who flooded southward from Central Asia in the second millennium B.C.E. "
There is more about their not being as sophisticated as the Harrappans in a cultural sense and that like most nomadic people they excelled at the art of war. They practised some agriculture and were originally organized on a tribal basis. They didn’t have a written language and left few physical remains in the form of settled cities or villages. The Rigveda contains most of what is known based on oral traditions.
If you do a Google search, there are more sites than you can shake a stick at.
I’m hoping that the Straight Dope folks can validate or invalidate the claims by determining the soundness of the facts and logic behind them.
If there WASN’T an Aryan invasion of ancient India, it’s a little difficult to explain how it is that the people of Bangladesh, for example, speak an Indo-European language.
You might look, for example, at noted authority Romila Thapar’s History of India, in which Chapter 2 is entitled “The Impact of Aryan Culture.”
The evidence clearly indicates an invasion of northern India by nomadic tribes speaking an Indo-European language around 1500BC or so. The earliest Hindu texts, for example, tell of a war between the invading horse nomads and a sedentary dark-skinned people, the dasas.
This historical truth isn’t exactly material for neo-Nazis to celebrate, though. For one thing, the Indo-Europeans were clearly at a far lower cultural level than the people whose territory they invaded. For another, as has been mentioned before, we’re not talking blond-haired and blue-eyed. The Aryans were conscious of being lightER-skinned than the natives of India, but that doesn’t mean LIGHT-skinned.
if they plan to invade anytime soon, lemme know… i’ll keep my bags packed… 