2.0 The Literary ‘Evidence’

When the AIT was accepted as gospel truth, the invasionists (= proponents of AIT) mis-interpreted passage after passage, verse after verse of the Vedic texts to ‘prove’ their notions of the Aryan Invasion of India. This becomes amply clear when one reads the translations of or annotations on the Rigveda by Griffith, Keith, Oldenberg, Macdonell and so many other old and new Western scholars as well as their followers in India. Critiques of these invasionist translations started appearing simultaneously in India in the writings of Dayanand Sarasvati, Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekanda, Suryakanta, Bhagavad Datta, Ramagopal Shastri and many others but were ignored by the adherents of the ‘scholarly consensus’. However, the AIT has become unfashionable now, and even certain Western Indologists like Hans Heinrich Hock (an eminent linguist) have come to acknowledge that the earlier invasionist interpretations of the Rigveda were in error [Ref. 9] and that the Rigveda does not allude to any invasions from Central Asia to India.



With invasions out, and migrations in, literary evidence from the Vedic texts must necessarily be found and retrofitted into the theoretical migration models. Witzel has written several pioneering, noteworthy and widely read articles in this regard. Two of them [Ref. 10, 11] appear in Erdosy’s volume (first published in 1995) on the proceedings of a conference at Toronto on October 4-6, 1991, and the third in the proceedings (edited by Bronkhorst, Johannes and Deshpande, Madhav) of the 1995 conference at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor on October 25-27, 1996 [Ref. 12] that was published in 1999. In his recent book [Ref. 13], Talageri has critiqued the articles by Witzel in Erdosy’s volume very extensively and has shown how the data presented by Witzel actually proves an East to West migration within South Asia, and not otherwise as claimed by Witzel. Talageri has also demonstrated how the internal chronology of Rigvedic hymns itself militates against the scenario of Aryan migration from out of India in the stated time frame. This critique is now available on-line and Witzel’s abusive response to a portion of the book is also on the web.



In his rather long article on the ‘textual evidence’ from the Vedic texts, Witzel has produced a mere solitary passage as proof of the AMT thesis [Ref. 11, pg. 320-321]. I quote the relevant passage:



Taking a look at the data relating to the immigration of the Indo-Aryans into South Asia, one is stuck by the number of vague reminiscences of foreign localities and tribes in the Rgveda, in spite repeated assertions to the contrary in the secondary literature. Then, there is the following direct statement contained in (the admittedly much later) BSS (=Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra) 18.44:397.9 sqq which has once again been overlooked, not having been translated yet: “Ayu went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru Panchala and the Kasi-Videha. This is the Ayava (migration). (His other people) stayed at home. His people are the Gandhari, Parsu and Aratta. This is the Amavasava (group)” (Witzel 1989a: 235).





The reference (Witzel 1989a: 235) at the end is to an earlier article by Witzel, which is in publication that is rather difficult to obtain [Ref. 14]. We will come back to this publication later. In a footnote, Witzel also reproduces the original Sanskrit passage from the text in question.



That the above passage from a Vedic text is the sole ‘direct’ evidence for the AMT is clarified by Witzel later [Ref. 11, pg, 321]:



“Indirect references to the immigration of Indo-Aryan speakers include reminiscences of Iran….”