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The Indigenous Aryans position may entail an Indian origin of ],<ref name = "Bryant 2001">{{cite journal|title=The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate |author= ]|year= 2001|publisher=]|id=ISBN 0195137779|pages=6|quote=It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages.}}</ref> and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "]" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the mainstream model of ] which posits that ] tribes migrated to ] from Central Asia. The Indigenous Aryans position may entail an Indian origin of ],<ref name = "Bryant 2001">{{cite journal|title=The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate |author= ]|year= 2001|publisher=]|id=ISBN 0195137779|pages=6|quote=It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages.}}</ref> and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "]" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the mainstream model of ] which posits that ] tribes migrated to ] from Central Asia.


==Historiographical Context== ==Historiographical context==
Indigenous Aryans is usually taken to imply that the people of the ] were linguistically Indo-Aryans.<ref name = "Bryant 2001">{{cite journal|title=The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate |author= ]|year= 2001|publisher=]|id=ISBN 0195137779|pages=6|quote=It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages.}}</ref> In any "Indigenous Aryan" scenario, speakers of ] must have left India at some point prior to the ], when first mention of ] is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the ] which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.<ref>See, e.g., ], ''L'Iran et la migration des Indo-aryens et des Iraniens'' (Leiden 1977). Cited by Carl .C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ''Archeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians'', in Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, ''Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History'' (Routledge 2005), p.162.</ref> Indigenous Aryans is usually taken to imply that the people of the ] were linguistically Indo-Aryans.<ref name = "Bryant 2001">{{cite journal|title=The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate |author= ]|year= 2001|publisher=]|id=ISBN 0195137779|pages=6|quote=It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages.}}</ref> In any "Indigenous Aryan" scenario, speakers of ] must have left India at some point prior to the ], when first mention of ] is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the ] which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.<ref>See, e.g., ], ''L'Iran et la migration des Indo-aryens et des Iraniens'' (Leiden 1977). Cited by Carl .C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ''Archeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians'', in Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, ''Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History'' (Routledge 2005), p.162.</ref>


Revision as of 16:10, 14 July 2008

The notion of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. The notion is widespread in Hindu nationalism, and can take various forms, all of them emphasizing that Vedic Sanskrit and Vedism are native to Northern India.

The Indigenous Aryans position may entail an Indian origin of Indo-European languages, and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "Out of India" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the mainstream model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India from Central Asia.

Historiographical context

Indigenous Aryans is usually taken to imply that the people of the Harappan civilization were linguistically Indo-Aryans. In any "Indigenous Aryan" scenario, speakers of Iranian languages must have left India at some point prior to the 10th century BC, when first mention of Iranian peoples is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the Yaz culture which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.

Proponents of "indigenous Aryan" scenarios typically base their view on perceived flaws in the predominant Aryan invasion theory and interpretations of the Rigveda, the oldest surviving Indo-Aryan text, which they date to the 3rd millennium BC (in some cases much earlier), in particular based on arguments involving identifying the Sarasvati River referred to in the Rigveda with the Ghaggar-Hakra river and Harappan civilization, the complete lack of archaeological and genetic evidence for "Indo-Aryan invaders" postulated in the Aryan invasion theory, and sometimes archaeoastronomy.

Political significance

Further information: Nationalism and ancient history

Repercussions of these divisions have reached Californian courts with the Californian Hindu textbook case, where according to the Times of India historian and president of the Indian History Congress, D. N. Jha in a "crucial affidavit" to the superior court of the state of California, "iving a hint of the Aryan origin debate in India, asked the court not to fall for the 'indigenous Aryan' claim since it has led to 'demonisation of Muslims and Christians as foreigners and to the near denial of the contributions of non-Hindus to Indian culture'".

Pseudoscience and Postmodernism

Further information: Hindutva and Integral humanism

Nanda (2003) argues that the pseudoscience at the core of Hindu nationalism was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the postmodernism embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories" like Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva who rejected the universality of "Western" science and called for the "indigenous science" (Sokal 2006, p. 32). Nanda (2003, p. 72) explains how this relativization of "science" was employed by Hindutva ideologues during the 1998 to 2004 reign of the BJP:

any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honoric of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.

Criticism of the irrationality of such "Vedic science" is brushed aside by the notion that

The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since ‘Modern Science’ arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion.(Mukhyananda 1997, pp. 94)

Witzel (2006, p. 204) traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of Golwalkar and Savarkar. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always been "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi blood and soil mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakasha.

Witzel (2006, p. 217) identifies three major types of revisionist scenario:

  1. a "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the Punjab in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda;
  2. the "out of India" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland;
  3. the position that all the world's languages and civilizations derive from India, represented e.g. by David Frawley.

Bergunder (2004) likewise identifies Golwalkar as the originator of the "Indigenous Aryans" meme, and Goel's Voice of India as the instrument of its rise to notability.

Notes

  1. ^ Bryant, Edwin (2001). "The quest for the origins of Vedic culture: the Indo-Aryan migration debate". Oxford University Press: 6. ISBN 0195137779. It must be stated immediately that there is an unavoidable corollary of an Indigenist position. If the Indo-Aryan languages did not come from outside South Asia, this necessarily entails that India was the original homeland of all the other Indo-European languages. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. See, e.g., Roman Ghirshman, L'Iran et la migration des Indo-aryens et des Iraniens (Leiden 1977). Cited by Carl .C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, Archeology and language: the case of the Bronze Age Indo-Iranians, in Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History (Routledge 2005), p.162.
  3. B.B. Lal (07 January 2002). "The Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture: Some Thoughts". Delhi: Indian Council for Historical Research. The shift of the "original homeland" from Sogdiana to a few hundred miles to the south - i.e. to the region now comprising eastern Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India should not upset anyone, since the archaeological-cum-literary evidence from this area is more positive than that from Sogdiana. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Mukul, Akshaya (09 September, 2006). "US text row resolved by Indian". Times of India. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

Literature

literature discussing the "Indigenous Aryans" ideology
  • Bergunder, Michael Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist reconstructions of Indian prehistory, Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 31, Number 1, 2004, 59-104.
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  • Bryant, Edwin, The indigenous Aryan debate, diss. Columbia University (1997). (abstract)
  • D. N. Jha, Against Communalising History, Social Scientist (1998).
  • S. Guha, Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology, and the Indus Civilization, Modern Asian Studies 39.2, Cambridge University Press (2005), 399-426.
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  • Nanda, Meera (2003), Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press, ISBN 0813533589
  • Nanda, Meera (January - March, 2005). "Response to my critics" (PDF). Social Epistemology. 19 (1): 147–191. doi:10.1080/02691720500084358. {{cite journal}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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  • Sokal, Alan (2006), "Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?", in Fagan, Garrett (ed.), Archaeolological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, Routledge, ISBN 0415305926
  • Stephanie Jamison, Review of Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. (2005), Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 34 (2006) copy courtesy of editor of JIES
  • Trautmann, Thomas (ed.), The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8.
  • Witzel, Michael (2006), "Rama's realm: Indocentric rewritings of early South Asian History", in Fagan, Garrett (ed.), Archaeolological Fantasies: How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public, Routledge, ISBN 0415305926
literature by "Indigenous Aryans" proponents
  • Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India Quest Books (IL) (October, 1995) ISBN 0-8356-0720-8
  • Kazanas, Nicholas (2002). "Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 30: 275–334. {{cite journal}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)
  • Lal, B. B., The Sarasvati flows on: The continuity of Indian culture, Aryan Books International (2002), ISBN 8173052026.
  • Mukhyananda (1997), Vedanta: In the context of modern science : a comparative study, ASIN: B0000CPAAF {{citation}}: Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help)
  • N. S. Rajaram, The politics of history : Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) ISBN 81-85990-28-X.
  • Talageri, S. G., The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0

See also

External links

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