Part II: The Aryan Migrants

D. Varieties of AMT


The various versions of the AMT all seek to explain the central dogma of introduction of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages from Central Asia into hitherto ‘non-Aryan’ India around the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE. Talageri [2000:335-397] has explained the various versions of AIT[8]. Since the AMT paradigms are rather new, we do not encounter such a bewildering variety as has been noted by him in case of AIT. Below, I attempt a simple classification of the various AMT models encountered by me:



· Grand Migration Model: Some academicians (E.g. Victor Mair – see below) appear to hold that the IA speakers migrated to India in very large numbers so as to alter the genetic make up or phenotype of the Indian population to a significant extent. Incidentally, the older versions of AIT also advocated that ‘waves after waves of Aryans invaded India’. Marxist historian R. S. Sharma [1999:50-52] also opines:



In several ancient societies the victorious were culturally conquered by vanquished, but the Indo-Aryan immigrants seem to have been numerous and strong enough to continue and disseminate much of their culture.



Most scholars currently hold that the migrants were very few in number. Hence, let us consider only the diversity in the latter view.



· Second Colonization Model: There is also a view that by the time the Aryans arrived in the IVC area, the original inhabitants had already fled the region (to Peninsular India?) as a result of which it had become depopulated. Apparently then, the old IVC area then came to be dominated demographically by these migrants without much violence. This model might is the close to being a pure migration model. For instance, Dandekar [1997b:322-323] speculates[9]



It may be incidentally mentioned that some modern historians have attributed the decline of the Indus culture to economic causes, such as non-clearing of wilderness and lack of food surplus and metals. However, the view which is now generally accepted is that the people of the Indus Civilization had fled away, before the advent of the Aryans, mainly on account of some natural calamity. The deserted settlements in the region, which had presumably come to be regarded as evil and inauspicious, were subsequently burnt down by the Aryans themselves. But the Rigvedic hymns suggest that Vedic Aryans, under the leader of purandara Indra, human hero who later became god, must have been responsible for the destruction of the fortified settlements of the Harappan people while that civilization had already begun to decay. In any case, one thing is certain, namely that the invasion or the migration of the Aryans was by no means on a massive scale.



One does wonder why IA speakers could colonize the area easily when it was inhabitable by the IVC people. A standard explanation given is that IVC was agriculture bases, and the desiccation of Sarasvati River and its environs made the area unfit for large-scale agriculture. In contrast, the pastoral Aryans could have subsisted without any intensive agriculture, because they relied much more on their livestock for food.



· Long March Model: Others advocate that the initial migrants came in several small waves and while they were themselves small in number altogether, they continued their migrations beyond the Saptasindhu region into the Gangetic plains. During these migrations, the Aryans fought amongst themselves as well as with the original inhabitants of India. This model comes closest to AIT and is subscribed to mainly by the Marxist historians of India like D. N. Jha (see below). German Indologists Hermann Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund [1997:37-38] and Kochhar [2000] also seem to uphold such a scenario. Curiously, iron technology plays a crucial role in at least some descriptions of this model - not for invasions and weapons but for clearing forest growth for settlement by Aryans. In the words of Rajesh Kochhar [2000]:



The compilation of the Rgveda had taken up after c. 1700 BC in Afghanistan by a section of the Indo-Iranians, designated the Rgvedic people or the Indo-Aryans. After 1400 BC, when the late Harappan cultures were in decline, the Rgvedic people entered the Punjab plain and eventually spread further eastwards up to the Yaga doab. In about 900 BC, the compilation of Rgveda was finally closed and the Bharata battle fought. Armed with the newly acquired iron technology, the Aryans moved east of the Ganga. The migration was not in a single procession but in phases. The first entrants were the Mahabharata people, the Puru-Bharatas, who settled close to the Yamuna. [pg. 92]

The clearing of the Ganga Plain forests had to await the development of the iron technology. The technique would have been to first burn down the jungles and then remove the rumps with axes. The Mahabharata itself provides an example of such a clearing, when the Khandava forest was burnt down to found Indraprastha. Another example is provided by Satapatha Brahmana (1.4.1.10-16), according to which Mathava, the king of Videgha (Videha), starting from Sarasvati “followed Agni [fire] as it went burning along this earth towards the east”. [pg. 90]



I shall consider this model in somewhat greater detail below.



· Migration cum Acculturation Models: Most ‘migrationist’ Indologists and archaeologists (e.g. Allchin, Erdosy, Witzel etc. – see below) seem to hold that the migrants lost their racial identity amongst the larger native population of India as soon as they reached the Saptasindhu region, but somehow their language, culture and religion went on propagating till it became dominant in most of the Indian subcontinent. These migrants could have come at various times, and some of them could in fact have been ‘pre-Vedic’. Such migration models are therefore combined with various acculturation or elite dominance models to explain the later spread of ‘Aryanism’ over large parts of India.



Let us consider the last model, as explained by Frank Raymond Allchin [1995]. First, Allchin rejects [ibid:41-42] the pure-acculturation model of archaeologist Jim Shaffer:



We cannot agree with the school of thought which maintains that ‘introduction of the Indo-Aryan language family to South Asia was not dependent upon population movement (Shaffer 1986,230); we hold the view that the initial introduction of any ancient language to a new area can only have been a result of the movement of speakers of that language into that area. This in no way disregards the probability that thereafter, increasingly as time went by, the further spread of the languages took place, along with processes of bilingualism and language replacement, meaning that the proportion of original speakers would decline while that of acquired speakers would continue to rise.



Allchin proposes a flexible hypothetical model allowing for multiple, multi-stage and several kinds of movements of people which, eventually leading to the prevalence of the Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia [ibid: 47-52]:

First Stage (2200-2000 BCE?): According to him, sometime around 2500 BCE, the Indo-Iranian nomads split up into Iranian and the Indian speaking tribal groups, with the latter moving southwards into the Iranian plateau, and spread west towards the Caucasus and East towards Afghanistan and thence into the Indus plains via the Bolan Pass. Allchin tries to link this first stage, i.e., the appearance of Indo-Aryans in the Indian subcontinent, with newly excavated sites like cemeteries south of Mehrgarh and nearby Sibri, the Quetta grave cache and other assemblages in Baluchistan. The material culture deducible from these graves appears to have been imported from Bactria. Trade and the prospect of rich plunder of the richer Indus cities is postulated as the possible reasons for the SE migration of these nomads and the signs of destruction of some sites in Baluchistan are attributed to these first Indo-Aryans. However, the nomads are not held accountable for the demise of the IVC, which is attributed to other factors. The decaying IVC is held to have a power vacuum, which was then filled with these incoming Indo-Aryans.

Second Stage (2000-1700 BCE): The arrivals of the first stage are called ‘pre-Vedic Aryans’ by Allchin, following Asko Parpola, since the characteristics of the Vedic lifestyle/material culture like fire altars are not visible in Baluchistan. In contrast, such structures have been unearthed at Kalibangan. Secondly, some foreign intrusion is seen in the Cemetery H culture and signs of a violent end are found, to some extent, at Mohenjodaro in this period. Simultaneously, a ‘Jhukar phase’ follows Harappan occupation at Chanhu-daro and Amri in the lower Indus. All this is taken to mean the following by Allchin [ibid:49]



Taken together, these sites may be interpreted as representing a major stage in the spread of the early Indo-Aryan speaking tribes, leading to their achieving hegemony over some sections of the existing Indus population and to the beginning of the process of acculturation……..During this time, many of the distinctive traits of material culture which pointed to the foreign origin of the makers of the Mehrgarh cemeteries disappear. It may be expected that the process of bilingualism which preceded language replacement began to operate in a limited way. By the end of stage 2 the Indo-Aryan speakers would have been substantially different from their ancestors who some centuries earlier had arrived on the frontiers of the Indus valley.



Thus, after these first two stages of rather violent migrations into the Indus valley and northern Rajasthan, further ‘Aryanization’ of North India now proceeds via acculturation in stage three (1700-1200 BCE). Finally, in stage four extending from 1200 BCE to 800 BCE, there is an emergence of an ‘Aryan’ consciousness accompanied by an expansion of the ‘Aryan’ culture and the assimilation of diverse ethnic groups into an poly-ethnic ‘Aryan’ society. This last stage is said to be contemporaneous with the Purusha Sukta (Rigveda X.90) wherein all the four castes are mentioned, and paves the way for the rise of second urbanization and empire formation in the Ganga basin. Recently, Raymond and Bridget Allchin have reiterated their belief in the above model, but also state [1997:222] that these migrations are ‘scarcely attested in the archaeological record’.



As stated above, we shall treat the acculturation models/stages in greater detail in other web pages.