Aryan Invasion - Eastwards or Westwards?

Dear Brethren,

One of the most interesting puzzles in archaeology, and one that hasn't been completely solved yet, concerns the story of the supposed Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent. The story goes like this: The Aryans were a tribe of Indo-European-speaking, horse-riding nomads living in the arid steppes of Eurasia. Sometime around 1700 BC, the Aryans invaded the ancient urban civilizations of the Indus Valley, and destroyed that culture. The Indus Valley civilizations were far more civilized than any horse-back nomad, having had a written language, farming capabilities, and led a truly urban existence. Some 1,200 years after the supposed invasion, the descendants of the Aryans, so they say, wrote the classic Indian literature called the Vedic manuscripts.

Aryans, race of Indo-Europeans, who were supposed to be Nordic in appearance. These Nordic invaders were defined as directly opposite to native south Asian peoples, called Dravidians, who were supposed to have been darker-skinned.

During the 18^th - 19th century, many European missionaries and imperialists traveled the world seeking conquests and converts. One country which saw a great deal of this kind of exploration was India (including what is now Pakistan). Some of the missionaries were also antiquarians by avocation, and one such fellow was the French missionary Abbé Dubois (1770-1848). His manuscript on Indian culture makes some unusual reading today; the good Abbé tried to fit in what he understood of Noah and the Great Flood with what he was reading in the great literature of India. It was not a good fit, but he did describe Indian civilization at the time, and provided some pretty bad translations of the literature.

It was the Abbé's work, translated into English by the British East India Company in 1897 and with a laudatory preface by German archaeologist Max Muller, that formed the basis of the Aryan invasion story--not the Vedic manuscripts themselves. Scholars had long noted the similarities between Sanskrit, the ancient language in which the classical Vedic texts are written, and other Latin-based languages such as German, French and Italian. And when the first excavations at the large Indus Valley site of Mohenjo Daro were completed early in the 20th century, and it was recognized as a truly advanced civilization, a civilization not mentioned in the Vedic manuscripts, among some circles this was considered ample evidence that an invasion of people related to the peoples of Europe had occurred, destroying the earlier civilization and creating the second great civilization of India.

There are no references to an invasion in the Vedic manuscripts. The Sanskrit word "Aryas" means "noble". Secondly, recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Indus civilization was shut down by droughts combined with a devastating flood, and not a violent confrontation. Recent archaeological evidence also shows that many of the so-called "Indus River" valley peoples lived in the Sarasvati River, which is mentioned in the Vedic manuscripts as a homeland. There is no biological or archaeological evidence of a massive invasion of people of a different race.

The most recent studies concerning the Aryan include language studies, which have attempted to decipher and thereby discover the origins of the Indus script, and the Vedic manuscripts, to determine the origins of the Sanskrit in which it was written. Excavations at the site of Gola Dhoro in Gujarat suggest the site was abandoned quite suddenly, although why that may occurred is yet to be determined. In my opinion it was draught which led to invasion / migration of ‘Aryans’ to Europe.

I reproduce below an article which I recently came across ;

"Title : Indus Valley Civilisation Author : Bhalchandrarao C Patwardhan Publication : Indian Express (Letters to The Editor) Date of Publication : January 11, 1998 Dear Sir It was interesting to read a few weeks ago that a breakthrough had been achieved by Natwar Jha and N.S.Rajaram in deciphering of the Indus script. This brought to mind the scholastically accepted but scientifically untenable 'Aryan Invasion Theory'. It appears surprising, to say the least, that our children, like us before them, are still being taught that a fair skinned, light-eyed race of nomads called the 'Aryans' invaded India c.1500 BCE and succeeded in destroying within a ridiculously short time the highly advanced Indus Valley civilization of the dark-skinned 'Dravidians'. Fortunately, however, more and more lay persons are now being exposed to recent developments in archaeology (records of stellar observations in the Vedas), hydrology (the drying up of the Sarasvati) and metallurgy (Rigvedic ignorance of Silver) through the columns of prestigious journals such as yours. It is now becoming more widely known that the so-called Aryan Invasion theory holds no more water today than does the desiccated Sarasvati river! Indeed, there is ample mutually corroborative evidence from recent advances in these and relevant disciplines to conclusively surmise that there was in fact c. 2000 BCE a westward and, therefore, an exactly opposite migration from the Sarasvati region to Europe (discovery of the mention of Vedic deities in a c. 1750 BCE contract in Mesopotamia); that Harappan settlements along the Indus were only the final stages of the once flourishing Sarasvati-Drishadvati civilization that stretched from India to Ireland (explaining at the same time why there is such a marked similarity between Sanskrit and the European languages); and that the gradual drying up of that once great river system (and not any invasion by those wicked Aryans) was the cause of the collapse of the Harappan civilisation, which then shifted eastward to the Gangetic plain. The Aryan Invasion theory was the creation more of motivated 19th century European politics than of honest scholarship. It was occasioned by the rise of German nationalism but was manipulated by European colonial powers like Britain to justify their own colonization of foreign lands, especially India, by attempting to fraudulently convince Indians that their remote ancestors had done just that. The man most responsible for the origin of this theory, perhaps, among others, was the great Indologist and Sanskritist, Friedrich Max Müeller, who was hired by Thomas Babbington Macaulay on behalf of the East India Company to study and translate the sacred texts of the East, the sole intention of the exercise being the 'exposure' of the presumed deficiency of Vedic philosophy in comparison to the Bible! The quest for knowledge or the Truth was obviously the least of their concerns. By this, Macaulay hoped to wean Indians away from their traditional culture and transform them with 'education' imparted in his schools into a politically more convenient polity. Now that several fairly accurate sciences are available, and indeed have been used to give results that glaringly contradict the highly suspect linguistic proof, is it not imperative we did some introspection, and examined the wisdom and propriety of clinging to false scenarios of our ancient past"

 Bhalchandrarao C Patwardhan Pune.

Kaps.