1.0 Background

The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), rooted (to a great extent) on the white supremacist and colonialist paradigms of the 19th century, states that sometime in the second millennium BCE, hordes of Indo-Europeans descended from somewhere in Central Asia and subjugated the black skinned, stub nosed, Dravidian speaking natives of India through a military conquest and thereby, occupied entire North India, Pakistan, Bangladesh in course of time. The Indus Valley Culture (IVC), straddling over an area of 800,000 square kilometers, is supposed to be the Dravidian civilization that was overwhelmed by these ‘fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed’ invaders. In the process, the Dravidian inhabitants were supposedly pushed to the southern parts of peninsular India. As decades of research has failed to yield a shred of archaeological [Ref. 1,2], anthropological [Ref. 3,], genetic and literary [Ref. 4,5] evidence, and the linguistic evidence in support of AIT is also tenuous at the most [Ref.5,6,7], Indologists (who are largely linguists and philologists outside India) have proposed a new model called the ‘Aryan Migration Theory’ (AMT).



This model, as of yet, is rather confused and seems to be just a euphemistic nomenclature for AIT [See Note 1]. I say so because AMT still incorporates notions like the military use of ‘thundering chariots’ as ‘Vedic tanks’ by the ‘migrating’ Aryans, the scare caused by neighing horses of Aryans to the IVC inhabitants [see Notes 2-4], and the reduction of the native Indian population to serfdom [See Note 5] for rice cultivation through elite domination. In AMT, the ‘migrating’ groups are still postulated to resemble the (relatively fairer) present day Iranians and Afghans, and the Aryan migrations are explained with the examples of later ‘migrations’ (in reality, clear cut invasions) of Huns, Shakas etc. to India. [see Note 6]



While the only large scale migration attested archaeologically in the relevant time frame is that from the Indus basin to the more easterly Gangetic basin and to greater Gujarat, and there is no clear cut evidence for any other one way migration into India from outside in the time period in question, literary evidence is now being searched from ‘inside the Vedic texts’ to buttress the case of AMT.



The present article reviews one such attempt by Professor Michael Witzel, the Wales Professor of Sanskrit at the Harvard University. Witzel was born in and studied at Germany, and has thereafter worked in Nepal, Netherlands and in other countries.