The
Aryan Migration Theory: Fabricating Literary Evidence
By Vishal Agarwal
http://www.voi.org/vishal_agarwal/AMT.html
The
classical Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), rooted (to a great extent) on the white
supremacist and colonialist paradigms of the 19th century, states
that sometime in the second millennium BCE, hordes of Indo-Europeans descended
from somewhere in Central Asia and subjugated the black skinned, stub nosed,
Dravidian speaking natives of India through a military conquest and thereby,
occupied entire North India, Pakistan, Bangladesh in course of time. The Indus
Valley Culture (IVC), straddling over an area of
800,000 square kilometers, is supposed to be the Dravidian civilization
that was overwhelmed by these ‘fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, sharp-nosed’
invaders. In the process, the Dravidian inhabitants were pushed to the southern
parts of peninsular India. As decades of research has failed to yield a shred of
archaeological [Ref. 1,2], anthropological [Ref. 3,], genetic and literary [Ref.
4,5] evidence, and the linguistic evidence in support of AIT is also tenuous at
the most [Ref.5,6,7], Indologists (who are largely linguists and philologists
outside India) have proposed a new model called the ‘Aryan Migration Theory’
(AMT).
This
model, as of yet, is rather confused and seems to be just a euphemistic
nomenclature for AIT. I say so because AMT still incorporates notions like the
military use of ‘thundering chariots’ as ‘Vedic tanks’ by the
‘migrating’ Aryans, the scare caused by neighing horses of Aryans to the IVC
inhabitants [see Notes 1-3], and the reduction of the native Indian population
to serfdom [Ref. 8, pg.xxviii] through elite domination. In AMT, the
‘migrating’ groups are still postulated to resemble the (relatively fairer,
and more European looking) present day Iranians and Afghans, and the Aryan
migrations are explained with the help of later ‘migrations’ (in reality,
clear cut invasions) of Huns, Shakas etc. to India. [see Note
4]
While the
only large scale migration attested archaeologically in the relevant time frame
is that from the Indus basin to the more easterly Gangetic basin and to greater
Gujarat, and there is no clear cut evidence for any other migration into India
from outside in the time period in question, literary evidence is now being
searched from ‘inside the Vedic texts’ to buttress the case of AMT.
The
present article reviews one such attempt by Professor Michael Witzel, the Wales
Professor of Sanskrit at the Harvard University. Witzel was born in and studied
at Germany, and has thereafter worked in Nepal, Netherlands and in other
countries.
(for the rest of the long article please refer to
The
Aryan Migration Theory: Fabricating Literary Evidence
http://www.voi.org/vishal_agarwal/AMT.html
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