E. The First Aryan ‘Migrants’: Victorious Marchers or Lost Tribes?


Witzel considers Bactria[10] as the ‘staging area’ [Witzel 1997:xvii, note. 54, also 1995:113, fn.73] and in a similar vein, Dandekar [1997a] considers Balkh (adjacent to Bactria) as the place from where the Aryan migrants marched gloriously to the Saptasindhu region. Dandekar [1997a:23] describes[11] this event rather romantically:



The second important period in the age of the Rgveda was marked by the migration and victorious onward march of the Vedic Aryans from the region round about Balkh, where they had lived for a pretty long time, towards Saptasindhu or the land of the seven rivers (roughly the northwestern portion of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent) and their subsequent colonization in Saptasindhu and beyond.



The north-west region of the Indian subcontinent plays a pivotal role in all the theories concerning Indo-Aryans, because it lies directly between Bactria- the staging area, and north India, where the Aryans migrants eventually imposed their language, and to a great extent, their culture over the native, non-Aryan inhabitants. Witzel [1997:xvi] explains:



North-West India was a large “colonial” area, where the Indo-Iranian or early Vedic immigrant clans and tribes (including their poets) were struggling with each other and with more numerous local populations of non-Aryan descent which belonged to the post-Indus civilizations (c. 1900 B.C. and later).



North-West India comprises, to a large extent, the Saptasindhu region. The Long AMT model explains the spread of the Aryan ‘migrants’ from this region across north India in the following manner [Jha 1998:44-45] :-



The early Aryan settlers were engaged in taking possession of the Land of the Seven Rivers (saptasindhu) represented by the Indus and its principal tributaries. This often lead to conflict between the various Aryan tribes. ….. The chief opponents of the Aryans were however the indigenous inhabitants of non-Aryan origin. Many passages show a general feeling of hostility toward the people known as Panis. Described as wealthy, they refused to patronize the Vedic priests or perform Vedic rituals, and stole cattle from the Aryans. More hated than the Panis were the Dasas and the Dasyus. The Dasas have been equated with the tribal people called the Dahaes, mentioned in the ancient Iranian literature, and are sometimes considered a branch of the early Aryans. Divodasa, a chief of the Bharata clan, is said to have defeated the non-Aryan Sambara. The suffix dasa in the name of the chief of the Bharata clan indicates his Aryan antecedents. In the Rigveda, instances of the slaughter of the Dasyus (dasyu-hatya) outnumber references to conflicts with the Dasas, thus giving the impression that the Rigvedic Aryans were not as hostile to them. Dasyu corresponds to dahyu in the ancient Iranian language. It has therefore been suggested that conflicts between the Rigvedic tribes and the Dasyus were those between two main branches of the Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan peoples who came to India in successive waves. The Dasas and Dasyus were most likely people who originally belonged to the Aryan speaking stock and in course of their migration into the subcontinent they acquired cultural traits very different from those of the Rigvedic people. Not surprisingly, the Rigveda describes them as ‘black-skinned’, ‘malignant’, and ‘nonsacrificing’ (sic) and speaking a language totally different from that of the Aryans.



More recently however, Witzel seems to have abandoned such models of dramatic and glorious Aryan migrations in favor of scenarios involving vagrant pastoral tribes. He says, in a message dated 13 April 2001 on the Indology list[12] :



Ehret's "elite kit" and a post-Indus, opportunistic shift to more pastoralism will work best here. No big wave of "invaders" is necessary then, just some Afghani tribesmen who chose to stay in their winter quarters in the Indus, instead of going back to the Afghani highlands (as they did in Avestan times and as they still do.)



The lost tribe is then said to have unfurled a long, unstoppable, irreversible and mighty cascade of events that eventually lead to the Aryanization of almost the entire area of modern Pakistan, Bangladesh, much of India north of the provinces Karnataka/Andhra Pradesh and parts of Nepal. Witzel states (ibid):



Such a group could set off a wave of change, with adaptation (and further change!) of the dominant elite kit, all across the Panjab and beyond...(See forthcoming EJVS 7-3).



At present, almost 85% of the 1.35 billion inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent speak Indo-Aryan languages. Such a monumental change effected by a single tribe (or a few tribes) over an area of more than 3 million sq. km. might be unparalleled in human history elsewhere, especially when all this was caused without any large scale use of force, and has not left any archaeological, literary or anthropological evidence. In short, this historical process was nothing short of the famous example in which a single flutter of a butterfly wing unleashes a chain of events eventually leading to a tidal wave.



Scholarly opinion is also divided on the question of the exact time of the arrival of the Aryans, although the consensus is that they came sometime in the 2nd millennium BCE. In recent years, the time period of these migrations (assuming that there was more than one) has been expanded to cover several centuries. Kulke and Rothermund [1997:32] exemplify this recent tendency:



The arrival of a new population in South Asia which were the speakers of Indo-European languages therefore can be dated quite safely in the first half of the second millennium around 2000 to 1400 BC. The terminal points in time of these movements were, on one hand, the ‘intrusive traits’ in Late Harappan strata which indicate a close relationship with the Central Asian and Iranian Bronze Age culture of the Namazga V period and, on the other hand, the Rigveda as the oldest Vedic text in India which clearly reveals a semi-nomadic ‘post-urban’ civilization. Linguistically and culturally the Rigveda is linked with the fourteenth century evidence from West Asia. ….


The ‘intrusive traits’ mentioned above are signs of a violent intrusion in the Baluchistan area (mentioned above by me), new burial rites, horse bones and the discovery of some artifacts (buried treasures) that bear a clear affinity to similar artifacts in Central Asia and Iran. These traits are found in the late strata of ‘Cemetery H’ of Harappa and at chronologically similar strata of other sites like Mehrgarh and Nausharo in Baluchistan.