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NATIONAL LAW INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY

HISTORY- I

A Project On

OUT OF INDIA THEORY

SUBMITTED TO: SUBMITTED BY:

DR. UDAY PRATAP SINGH AKSHEY JOSE

PROFESSOR 2013 B.A.LLB 39

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Contents

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 3

HISTORY ................................................................................................................................. 3

Early proposals .................................................................................................................................... 3

CHRONOLOGY ...................................................................................................................... 4

LINGUISTICS ........................................................................................................................... 6

Comparative linguistics ....................................................................................................................... 6

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit ............................................................................................. 7

Position of Sanskrit ............................................................................................................................. 9

PHILOLOGY .......................................................................................................................... 10

Sarasvati River ................................................................................................................................... 11

Items not in the Rigveda ................................................................................................................... 12

Memories of an Urheimat................................................................................................................. 14

Indo-Iranian and Avesta .................................................................................................................... 15

MATERIAL ARCHAEOLOGY ............................................................................................. 16

CRITICISMS ........................................................................................................................... 17

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................... 18

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INTRODUCTION

The Out of India theory (OIT), also known as the Indian Urheimat Theory, is the proposition

that the Indo-European language family originated in the Ganges Valley in Northern India

and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations.

Originally proposed in the late 18th century in an attempt to explain connections between

Sanskrit and European languages (and notably in 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel), it was rapidly

marginalised within academic linguistics, particularly by those who tend to favour the

Kurgan model.

Majority of scholars insist that the Indo-Aryans were intrusive into northwest India. This was

revived as a political topic in Hindu nationalism in the late 1990s. Such proponents insist on

an indigenist position, with the ancient people known as "Indigenous Aryans". There were

attempts to revive academic debate on this view in the 2000s. The theory's recent revival in

Hindu nationalist writing has made it the subject of contentious debate in Indian politics.

These recent "OIT" scenarios posit that the Indus Valley Civilization was Indo-Aryan,

contradicting the mainstream view that the Indus Valley Civilization spoke an as yet

uncategorized language.

HISTORY

Early proposals

When the finding of connections between languages from India to Europe led to the creation

of Indo-European studies in the late 18th century, some Indians and Europeans believed that

the Proto-Indo-European language must be Sanskrit, or something very close to it. A few

early Indo-Europeanists, such as Enlightenment pioneers Voltaire, Immanuel Kant and Karl

Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel had a firm belief in this and essentially created the idea that India

was the Urheimat (origin) of all Indo-European languages. In a 1775 letter, Voltaire

expressed his belief that the "dynasty of the Brahmins" taught the rest of the world: "I am

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convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges. The idea

intrigued Kant who "suggested that mankind together with all science must have originated

on the roof of the world [the Himalayas]."

The development of historical linguistics, specifically the law of palatals and the discovery of

the laryngeals in Hittite, affected Sanskrit's preeminent status as the most venerable elder in

this reconstructed family. This eroded support of India as the homeland of Indo-European

languages. The ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham was the first to state that,

according to the principles of natural science, a language family's most likely point of origin

is in the area of its greatest diversity which, in the case of Indo-European, is roughly in

Central eastern Europe, where the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic,

Thracian, and Greek branches of the Indo-European language family are attested, as opposed

to South Asia, where only the Indo-Aryan branch is. Lachhmi Dhar Kalla responded by

arguing that the greater linguistic diversity of Indo-European in Europe is the result of

absorbing foreign linguistic elements, and that a language family's point of origin should be

sought in the area of least linguistic change, since it has been least affected by substrate

interference.

CHRONOLOGY

The Indian Urheimat proposal put forward by Koenraad Elst, which he dubs the "emerging

non-invasionist model", suggests the following scenario:

During the 6th millennium BC Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Punjab region of northern

India. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria as the Kambojas. The

Paradas moved further and inhabited the Caspian coast and much of central Asia while the

Cinas moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin in north-western China, forming the

Tocharian group of IE speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that

region by 2000 BC. These people took the oldest form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE)

language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region,

transformed it into a separate dialect. While inhabiting central Asia they discovered the uses

of the horse, which they later sent back to the Urheimat. Later on during their history, they

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went on to occupy western Europe and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that

region.

During the 4th millennium BC, civilisation in India started evolving into what became the

urban Indus Valley Civilization. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-Indo-

Iranian. Sometime during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of

internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia

and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas.

They also expanded into parts of central Asia. By the end of this migration, India was left

with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river

began drying up and the remainder of the Indo-Aryans split into separate groups. Some

travelled westwards and established themselves as rulers of the Hurrian Mitanni kingdom by

around 1500 BC. Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others

travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

Map showing the spread of the Proto-Indo-European language from the Indus Valley.

Dates are those of the "emerging non-invasionist model" according to Elst.

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LINGUISTICS

According to Edwin Francis Bryant, OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who

either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and

inconclusive, or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude

and neglect significantly minimises the value of most OIT publications.

Shrikant G. Talageri and Nicholas Kazanas have adapted the language dispersal model

proposed by Johanna Nichols to support OIT by moving Nichols' proposed Indo-European

point of origin from Bactria Sogdiana to India. These ideas have not been accepted in

mainstream linguistics.

Elst argues that it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The

alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had

originally had the centum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-

Celtic,Germanic, Tocharic) retained the centum form and took it to the geographical

borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia,China), while the dialects which emigrated

later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects

(Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the stay behind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem

form. This would satisfy the claim of the so called Lateral Theory that the most conservative

forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Comparative linguistics

There are twelve accepted branches of the Indo-European family. The two Indo-Iranian

branches, Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian, dominate the eastern cluster, historically spanning

Scythia, Iran and northern India. While the exact sequence in which the different branches

separated, or migrated, away from a homeland is disputed, linguists generally agree that

Anatolian was the first branch to be separated from the remaining body of Indo-European.

Additionally, Graeco-Aryan isoglosses seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian may

have shared a common homeland for a while, after the splitting of the other IE branches.

Such a homeland could be North-western India (which is preferred by proponents of the OIT)

or the Pontic steppes (as preferred by the mainstream supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis).

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According to Hock, if evidence like linguistic isogloss patterns is ignored, then the

hypothesis of an Out of India migration becomes "relatively easy to maintain".

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit

According to Bryant, evidence of a pre Indo-European linguistic substratum in South Asia is

a solid reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland.

Burrow compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the Ṛigveda that he considered

to be loans predominantly from Dravidian. Kuiper identified 383 Ṛigvedic words as non-

Indo-Aryan – roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary – borrowed from Old Dravidian, Old

Munda, and several other languages. Paul Thieme has questioned Dravidian etymologies

proposed for Vedic words, for most of which he gives Indo-aryan or Sanskrit etymologies,

and condemned what he characterises as a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in

Sanskrit”. Das contends that there is “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been

found confirming the foreign origin of a Rigvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word".

Burrow in turn has criticised the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook

or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words".

Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative material—and the

scarcity of Dravidian or Munda—the inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a

Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it is not. Witzel argues that the earliest level of the

Rigveda shows signs of para-Munda influence and only later levels of Dravidian,

suggesting—against the older widespread two century old belief—that the original

inhabitants of Punjab were speakers of para-Munda rather than speakers of Dravidian, whom

the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rigvedic times.

Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical

and morphological features that are alien to other Indo-European languages. Phonologically,

there is the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals in Indo-Aryan;

morphologically there are the gerunds; and syntactically there is the use of a quotative marker

("iti"). Several linguists, all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on

other grounds, are quite open to considering that various syntactical developments in Indo-

Aryan could have been internal developments rather than the result of substrate influences, or

have been the result of adstratum. About retroflexion Tikkanen states that "in view of the

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strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early

loanwords, it is hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that did not have

a substratum with retroflexes."

Another concern raised is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials,

which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback. The latter is, however, not a cogent

argument if one compares, for example, modern Lithuanian (laukas patis) with early Vedic

Sanskrit (lokapati), which, too, are divided by a time span of 3200 years.

Elst proposes that any Dravidian in Sanskrit can still be explained via the OIT. He suggests

through David McAlpin's Proto-Elamo-Dravidian theory that the ancient homeland for Proto-

Elamo-Dravidian was in the Mesopotamia region, from where the languages spread across

the coast towards Sindh and eventually to South India where they still remain. According to

Elst, this theory would support the idea that Early Harappan culture was possibly bi- or

multilingual. Elst claims that the presence of the Brahui language, and similarities between

Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian

indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans

southwards and the resultant intermixing of races and languages.

Elfenbein argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late

immigration that took place within the last thousand years.

Elst believes that there is evidence suggesting that Dravidian influences in Maharashtra and

Gujarat were largely lost over the years. He traces this to linguistic evidence. Some

occurrences in Sangam Tamil, or ancient forms of Tamil, indicate small similarities with

Sanskrit or Prakrit. As the oldest recognisable forms of Tamil have influences of Indo-Aryan,

it is possible that they had Sanskrit influence as a result of a migration through the coastal

regions of western India.

Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, Thomason & Kaufman state that

there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native

Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits

in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the

only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of

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explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for several of the

innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Erdosy states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural

features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a

Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

Place Names and Hydronymy

Indo-Aryan languages are the oldest source of place and river names in northern India which

Shrikant G. Talageri sees as an argument in favour of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest

documented population of that area.

According to M.Witzel, river names are conservative, and "in northern India, rivers in general

have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter

languages of Sanskrit later on." Talageri cites this in support of the Out of India theory,

though Witzel himself would dispute jumping to that conclusion. Rather, he points out that

non-Sanskritic names are common in the "Sarasvati" (Ghaggar) area.

Kazanas argues that this indicates that the Harappan civilisation must have been dominated

by Indo-Aryan speakers, supposing that the arrival of Indo-Aryan migrants in Late Harappan

times to the remnants of an Indus Valley Civilization formerly stretching over a vast area

could not have resulted in the suppression of the entire native hydronymy.

However, Witzel argues exactly that: "The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the

Indus Valley (with a few exceptions, noted above) indicates the extent of the social and

political collapse experienced by the local population."

Position of Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit conserves many archaic aspects. In the words of T. Burrow: "Vedic is a

language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original Indo-

European than any other member of the family".

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Kazanas argues that linguistic stability corresponds to geographic stability, claiming that if

"the Indo-Aryans were on the move over many thousands of miles (from the Russian steppe,

Europe and/or Anatolia) over a very long period of centuries encountering many different

other cultures", their "language should have suffered faster and greater changes".

Bryant points out that this reasoning can be countered by arguing that Vedic retained the

Indo-European accent because, as a sacerdotal language, it artificially preserved forms that

would otherwise have evolved in a normal spoken language. Vedic Sanskrit is, like other

sacred languages, an extinct language, having evolved into Classical Sanskrit by the 6th

century BC, reaching stability long after northern India had been settled by Indo-Aryans.

By contrast, Lithuanian is a living, vernacular language that has preserved Indo-European

archaisms to the present day, thousands of years longer than Vedic did. But then it can be

argued that Lithuanian remained in comparative isolation, being attested only around 1500

AD, which is comparable to the Kalash language, which has maintained an arguably more

archaic form of an Indo-European language as a living vernacular.

PHILOLOGY

The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its

consequences for the Indo-Aryan question. The oldest text, the Rigveda, is full of precise

references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Punjab and Haryana, and thus

was unmistakably recorded in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm

terminus ante quem for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in India. In the academic

mainstream view it was composed in the mid to late 2nd millennium BC (Late Harappan)

while OIT proponents propose a pre-Harappan date.

OIT proponents claim that the bulk of the Rigveda was composed prior to the Indus Valley

Civilization by linking archaeological evidence with data from Vedic texts and archaeo-

astronomical evidence.

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Sarasvati River

Many hymns in all ten Books of the Rigveda (except the 4th) extol or mention a divine and

very large river named the Sarasvati, which flows mightily "from the mountains to the Indian

Ocean". Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to

the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda that it is

worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses".

The Nadistuti hymn (RV 10.75) gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely

mentioned while Sindhu receives all the praise. This may well indicate that RV 10 could be

dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati when the river lost its pre-eminence.It

is agreed that the tenth book of the Rigveda is later than the others.

The present Ghaggar/Hakra is a remnant of the Rigvedic Sarasvati, which was the lifeline of

the Indus Civilisation. The dating of the full-flowing Ghaggar/Hakra, corresponding to its

description in the RigVeda, is seen as a powerful archaeological evidence for the dating of

the RigVeda.

According to palaeo-environmental scientists, the desiccation of the Sarasvati came about as

a result of the diversion of at least two rivers that fed it, the Satluj and the Yamuna;

The chain of tectonic events diverted the Satluj westward into the Indus and the Palaeo

Yamuna eastward into the Ganges. This explains the 'death' of such a mighty river (the

Sarasvati) because its main feeders, the Satluj and Palaeo Yamuna were weaned away from it

by the Indus and the Ganga respectively".

This ended at BC 1750, but it started much earlier, perhaps with the upheavals and the large

flood of 1900, or more probably 2100.

In contrast, Mughal notes that the Yamuna was cut off in the middle of the third millennium

BCE, but the Sutlej kept providing water until the end of the second millennium BCE, or the

beginning of the first millennium BCE.

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The 414 archaeological sites along the bed of Saraswati dwarf the number of sites so far

recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River, which number only about three dozen.

About 80 percent of the sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium BCE, suggesting

that the river was in its prime during this period.

P. H. Francfort, utilising images from the French satellite SPOT, finds that the large river

Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up in the middle of the 4th

millennium BC; during Harappan times only a complex irrigation canal network was being

used in the southern region of the Indus Valley. With this the date should be pushed back to

3800 BC. According to Francfort, those sites were not at all located at a riverside, but were

outside of them, irrigated by small river channels.

Bryant notes:

Ironically, the findings of the French team have served to reinforce the "mythico-religious

tradition of Vedic origins." Rajaram's reaction to the team's much earlier date assigned to the

perennial river is that "this can only mean that the great Sarasvati that flowed 'from the

mountain to the sea' must belong to a much earlier epoch, to a date well before 3000 BCE."

Items not in the Rigveda

Some items typical of later Sanskrit literature are absent from the Rigveda. This is usually

taken as strong evidence that the Rigvedic hymns have a geographical background restricted

to the extreme northwest of the Indian subcontinent, corresponding to the route of

immigration. OIT proponents have taken the same evidence as indicating an extremely early

date for the Rigveda, predating the Harappan civilisation.

The Rigveda does not mention silver, though it does mention ayas (metal or

copper/bronze) and candra or hiranya (gold). Silver is denoted by rajatám híranyam

literally 'white gold' and appears in post-Rigvedic texts. There is a generally accepted

demarcation line for the use of silver at around 4000 BC and this metal is

archaeologically attested in the Harappan civilization.

The Rigveda makes no reference to the Harappan culture. The characteristic features

of the Harappan culture are urban life, large buildings, permanently erected fire altars

and bricks. There is no word for brick in the Rigveda and iswttakaa (brick) appears

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only in post-Rigvedic texts. The Rigvedic altar is a shallow bed dug in the ground and

covered with grass (e.g. RV 5.11.2, 7.43.2–3). Fixed brick altars are very common in

post-Rigvedic texts.

The Rigveda mentions no rice or cotton. A compound term is used which later

referred to rice cakes used for sacrificial purposes, but the word vrīhí, meaning 'rice',

does not occur. Rice was found in at least three Harappan sites: Rangpur (2000 BCE –

1500 BCE), Lothal (2000 BCE) and Mohenjodaro (2500 BCE) as Piggott, Grist and

others testify. Yet, despite the importance of rice in ritual in later times, the Rigveda

makes no mention of it. The cultivation of cotton is well attested in the Harappan

civilisation and is found at many sites thereafter.

Nakshatra were developed in 2400 BCE. They are important in a religious context,

yet the Rigveda does not mention this, which suggests the Rigveda is before 2400

BCE. The youngest book only mentions constellations, a concept known to all

cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions.

On the other hand, it has been claimed that the Rigveda has no term for "sword",

while Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and in Pirak. Ralph

Griffith uses "sword" twelve times in his translation, including in the old books 5 and

7, but in most cases a literal translation would be more generic "sharp implement"

(e.g. vāśī), the transition from "dagger" to "sword" in the Bronze Age being a gradual

process.

The aforementioned features are found in post Rigvedic texts – the Samhitas, the Brahmanas

and fully in the Sutra literature. For instance, brick altars are mentioned in Satapatha

Brahmanaṇa. Rice ( vrihi ) is found in AV 6.140.2; 7.1.20; etc. Cotton karpasa appears first

in Gautama’s (1.18) and in Bandhāyana's (14.13.10) Dharmasūtra. The fact of the

convergence of the post-Rigvedic texts and the Harappan culture was noted long ago by

archaeologists. Bridget and F. Raymond Allchin stated unequivocally that these features are

of the kind "described in detail in the later Vedic literature".

Based on this set of statements, OIT proponents argue that the whole of the Rigveda, except

for some few passages which may be of later date, must have been composed prior to the

Indus Valley Civilization.

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Memories of an Urheimat

The fact that the Vedas do not mention the Aryans' presence in India as being the result of a

migration or mention any possible Urheimat, has been taken as an argument in favour of the

OIT. The reasoning is that it is not uncommon for migrational accounts to be found in early

mythological and religious texts, a classical example being the Book of Exodus in the Torah,

describing the legendary migration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.

Proponents of the OIT, such as Koenraad Elst, argue that it would have been expected that

migrations, and possibly an Urheimat, would be mentioned in the Rigveda if the Aryans had

only arrived in India some centuries before the composition of the earliest Rigvedic hymns.

They argue that other migration stories of other Indo-European people have been documented

historically or archaeologically, and that the same would be expected if the Indo-Aryans had

migrated into India.

From the mainstream academic viewpoint, the concern is the degree of historical accuracy

that can be expected from the Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns, not an account of

tribal history, and those hymns that are assumed to reach back to within a few centuries of the

period of Indo-Aryan arrival in Gandhara make for just a small portion of the text.

Regarding migration of Indo-Aryans and imposing language on Harappans, Kazanas notes,

"The intruders would have been able to rename the rivers only if they were conquerors with

the power to impose this. And, of course, the same is true of their Vedic language: since no

people would bother of their own free will to learn a difficult, inflected foreign language,

unless they had much to gain by this, and since the Aryan immigrants had adopted the

“material culture and lifestyle” of the Harappans and consequently had little or nothing to

offer to the natives, the latter would have adopted the new language only under pressure.

Thus here again we discover that the substratum thinking is invasion and conquest."

"But invasion is the substratum of all such theories even if words like ‘migration’ are used.

There could not have been an Aryan immigration because (apart from the fact that there is no

archaeological evidence for this) the results would have been quite different. Immigrants do

not impose their own demands or desires on the natives of the new country: they are grateful

for being accepted, for having the use of lands and rivers for farming or pasturing and for any

help they receive from the natives; in time it is they who adopt the language (and perhaps the

religion) of the natives. You cannot have a migration with the results of an invasion."

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Indo-Iranian and Avesta

The Iranian Avesta is the oldest literary text of Zoroastrianism, which was prominent in the

Iranian regions in ancient times. The Avesta and Rig Veda have much in common, which

suggests that they both originated from the one culture (Proto-Indo-Iranian). The point at

contention is the direction of the split. Supporters of the Indo-Aryan migration hypothesis

believe it was a split from Central Asia in two waves. The Out of India theory, on the other

hand, suggests that it was a split in the Indian subcontinent after internal conflict between the

Proto-Indo-Iranians.

Talageri argues that the documented evidence shows Indo-Iranian were present earlier in

Eastern region. Talageri quotes P. Oktor Skjærvø "the earliest evidence for the Iranians is

835 BC in the case of Iran, and 521 BC in the case of Central Asia. The earliest geographical

names inherited from Indo-Iranian times indicate an area in southern Afghanistan.” He also

quotes Gnoli as stating that "very clearly the oldest regions known to the Iranians were

Afghanistan and areas to its east". Talageri states that The Rigveda and the Avesta are united

in testifying to the fact that the Sapta Sindhu or Hapta-Handu was one of the land of the

Iranians on their way to Afghanistan.

Talageri states "The development of the common Indo-Iranian culture, reconstructed from

linguistic, religious, and cultural elements in the Rigveda and the Avesta, took place in the

'later Vedic period'." He quotes J.C. Tavadia and Helmut Humbach to show the period of RV

8 is the period of composition of the major part of the Avesta. This indicates the possibility of

a rivalry between the Proto-Indo-Iranian which eventually led to split of the culture to the

Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures. The Avesta also shows that Iranians of the time called

themselves Dahas, a term also used by other ancient authors to refer to peoples in the area

occupied by Indo-Iranian tribes.

The Iranian Avesta is considered to be a literary indication of Proto-Iranian culture after they

were split from Vedic culture sometime during the 3rd millennium BC. The word for God in

the Vedas (deva) is the word for demon in the Avesta (daeva) while the word for demon in

the Vedas (asura) is this the word for god in the Avesta (ahura). This indicates the possibility

of a rivalry between the Proto-Indo-Iranian which eventually led to split of the culture to the

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Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures. The Avesta also shows that Iranians of the time called

themselves Dahas, a term also used by other ancient authors to refer to peoples in the area

occupied by Indo-Iranian tribes. The Rig Veda depicts conflict with Dasas and Dasyus.

MATERIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The opinion of the majority of professional archaeologists interviewed seems to be that there

is no archaeological evidence to support external Indo-Aryan origins. Thus, while the

linguistic community stands firm with the Kurgan hypothesis, the archaeological community

tends to be more agnostic.

According to one archaeologist, J. M. Kenoyer :

Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology,

subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the

indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people.

For many years, the 'invasions' or 'migrations' of these Indo-Aryan speaking Vedic/Aryan

tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the

Ganga-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an

uncritical reading of Vedic texts.

The examination of 300 skeletons from the Indus Valley Civilization and comparison of

those skeletons with modern day Indians by Kenneth Kennedy has also been a supporting

argument for the OIT. Kennedy claims that the Harappan inhabitants of the Indus Valley

Civilization are no different from the inhabitants of India in the following millennia.

However, this does not rule out one version of the Aryan Migration Hypothesis which

suggests that the only "migration" was one of languages as opposed to a complete

displacement of the indigenous population.

Bryant grants that "there is at least a series of archaeological cultures that can be traced

approaching the Indian subcontinent, even if discontinuous, which does not seem to be the

case for any hypothetical east to west emigration."

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CRITICISMS

The linguistic centre of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely

point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of Indo-

European, Indo-Aryan, is found in India, and whereas the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian,

Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of Indo-European are all

found in Central Eastern Europe. Because it requires a greater number of long

migrations, an Indian Urheimat is far less likely than one closer to the centre of Indo-

European linguistic diversity. However, the existence of the Tocharian language

family in Western China would shift the centre of gravity eastward. Some scholars

argue that the various language families in Central and Eastern Europe evolved fairly

recently, which implies that there was less diversity in the western side of the Indo-

European language family during the 2nd millennium BCE at a time contemporaneous

with Vedic Sanskrit.

The Indic languages show the influence of the Dravidian and Munda language

families. No other branch of Indo-European does. If the Indo-European homeland had

been located in India, then the Indo-European languages should have shown some

influence from Dravidian and Munda.

To postulate the migration of PIE speakers out of India necessitates an earlier dating

of the Rigveda than is normally accepted by Vedic scholars to make a deep enough

period of migration to allow for the longest migrations to be completed.

18 | P a g e

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