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The controversial Aryan invasion theory is a historical theory first put forth by the German Indologist Friedrich Max Müller and others in the mid nineteenth century in India. It is the predecessor of contemporary views of an Indo-Aryan migration in the context of the expansion of the Indo-Iranians.
Müller and his contemporaries based their views on the reconstructed language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and the accounts in the Rigveda, while they did not have available much of the archaeological evidence on which more detailed contemporary views are based.
As expressed, for example, by Charles Morris in his 1888 book "The Aryan Race," this theory holds that a Caucasian race of nomadic warriors known as the Aryans, originating in the Caucasus mountains in Southeastern Europe, invaded Northern India and Iran, somewhere between 1800 and 1500 BC. The invaders entered the Indian subcontinent from the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush, possibly on horseback, bringing with them the domesticated horse. The theory further proposes that this race displaced or assimilated the indigenous pre-Aryan peoples and that the bulk of these indigenous people moved to the southern reaches of the subcontinent or became the lower castes of post-Vedic society. The Aryans would have brought with them their own Vedic religion, which was codified in the Vedas around 1500 to 1200 BC. Upon arrival in India, the Aryans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and mingled with the native peoples remaining in the north of India. The victory of the Aryans over the native civilization was quick and complete, resulting in the dominance of Aryan culture and language over the northern part of the subcontinent and considerable influence on parts of the south. The initial theory was built primarily on linguistic grounds, since there is no mention of an actual invasion or migration into India in the Vedic texts, and the Vedic texts do not refer to a homeland of the Hindus outside of India, in contrast to the Avesta, which mentions an exterior homeland Airyanem Vaejah of the ancient Zoroastrians.
There are others, however, who take a completely different view, and do not accept that there was any specific Aryan migration from the west to India. These people tend to see a reverse migration from Western India to Central Asia, and from there into Europe. They claim either that the Proto-Indo-European language originated in India, or that Sanskrit was the actual proto Indo-European language and that it was the source of all later Indo-European languages.
The theory itself has a complex history — initial acceptance, subsequent modifications, and currently new challenges in terms of counter theories. No single conclusive theory now prevails. Rather, combinations of theories are generally accepted.
The theory was first proposed on linguistic grounds, following the discovery that Sanskrit was related to the principal languages of Europe (the Indo-European language group). It was assumed that Northern India, in which languages derived from Sanskrit were spoken, must have been occupied by migrants speaking Indo-European languages. The dominant languages in Southern India, known as "Dravidian", were assumed to have been spoken by autochthonous pre-Aryan peoples, who had been displaced southward. Hence the Aryans were said to have supplanted the Dravidians in the north of the subcontinent.
Initially Max Müller assumed that the migrants would have been farmers, but later writers envisioned an invasion by nomadic warriors. The vedic literature however does not mention the Aryans to be nomads. It was proposed, on the basis of passages in the Rig-Veda and assumptions about surviving racial hierarchies (see Dasa), that these invaders were light-skinned people who had subdued darker aboriginal people and then mixed with them. The theory fit some existing ideas that justified contemporary European colonization. Initially, the aboriginal 'Dravidian' occupants of India were assumed to have been primitive, and the achievements of ancient India were credited to the descendants of the Aryan invaders. In the 1920s, however, the Indus Valley Civilization was discovered. It was obviously advanced for its time, with planned cities, a standardized system of weights and bricks, etc, and it was understood that if the Aryans had invaded, then, regardless of their later achievements, they had in fact overthrown or at least supplanted a civilization more advanced than their own.
Accepted generally when it was first propounded, this theory has since been questioned on two fundamental grounds: firstly, whether the Aryans came through bloody invasions or through peaceful migration, and secondly, whether the Aryans came from outside the Indian subcontinent at all.