Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
My attention has been drawn to an article published by Tony Joseph in The Hindu, dated June 17, 2017, which, in essence, tries to say that The Vedic Aryans came to India from outside. I would like to apprise the readers of the reality of the situation. I have published many books on the subject, each one dealing with a specific aspect of the issue. The latest book, The Rigvedic People: Invaders?, Immigrants? Or Indigenous?, published in 2015 by Aryan Books International, New Delhi clearly explains, using evidence of archaeology, hydrology, C-14 dating and literature, why the Aryans were neither Invaders nor slow Immigrants, but were indigenous. I present here my arguments, as briefly as possible. At the root of the trouble lies the dating of the Vedas to 1200 BCE by the German Scholar Max Muller. He did it on a very ad hoc basis and when his contemporaries, such as Goldstucker, Whitney and Wilson, challenged his methodology, he surrendered by saying, “Whether the Vedas were composed in 1000 or 2000 or 3000 BC no one on earth can ever determine.” The pity is that in spite of such a candid confession by Max Muller himself many of his followers even today stick to this date, or at the most give concession to 1500 BCE. In 1920s the Harappan Civilization was discovered and dated to the 3rd millennium BCE on the basis of the occurrence of many Indus objects in the already dated archaeological contexts in Mesopotamia. This led to the immediate conclusion that since, according to Max Muller, the Vedas were not earlier than 1200 BCE, the Harappan Civilization could not have been the creation of the Vedic people. In 1946 Mortimer Wheeler (later knighted) excavated Harappa and discovered a fort over there. On learning that in the Vedic texts Indra has been described as puramdara i.e. ‘destroyer of forts’, he jumped to the conclusion that the Vedic Aryans, represented by Indra, invaded India and destroyed the Harappan Civilization. But, it must be stressed that there no evidence of any kind of destruction at Harappa. In support of his Invasion thesis, however, Wheeler referred to some skeletons at Mohenjo-daro which he said represent the people massacred by the Invading Aryans. But the fact is that these skeletons had been found in different stratigraphic contexts, some in the Middle levels, some in the Late and some in the debris which accumulated after the desertion of the site. Thus, these cannot be ascribed to a single event, much less to an Aryan Invasion. The ghost of ‘Invasion’ re-appeared in a new avatara, namely that of ‘Immigration’.Said Romila Thapar in 1991: “If invasion is discarded then the mechanism of migration and occasional contacts come into sharper focus. These migrations appear to have been of pastoral cattle breeders who are prominent in the Avesta and Rigveda.” Faithfully following her, R. S. Sharma elaborated: “The pastoralists who moved to the Indian borderland came from Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex or BMAC which saw the genesis of the culture of the Rigveda.” These assertions of Thapar and Sharma are baseless. In the first place, the BMAC is not a product of nomads. It has fortified settlements and elaborate temple-complexes. It has yielded a very rich harvest of antiquities which include silver axes, highly ornamented human and animal figurines and excellently carved seals. But what is more important is that no element of the BMAC has ever been found east of the Indus which was the area occupied by the Vedic people. So there is no case whatsoever for the BMAC people having migrated into India. Now, if there was no Aryan Invasion or an Aryan Immigration, were the Vedic people indigenous? To answer this question we must first find out the correct chronological horizon of theRigveda. It refers to the river Sarasvati nearly seventy times. The river dried up before the composition of the Panchavimsa Brahmana, as this text avers. Today this dry river is identifiable with the Ghaggar in Haryana and Rajasthan. On its bank stands Kalibangan, a site of the Harappan Civilization. An Indo-Italian team, under the leadership of Robert Raikes, bore holes in the dry bed to find out its history. Raikes wrote an article in Antiquity (UK), captioning it: ‘Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes.’ C-14 dates show that the flourishing settlement was suddenly abandoned because of the drying up of the Sarasvati around 2000 BCE. What are the implications of this discovery? Since the Sarasvati was a mighty flowing river during the Rigvedic times, the Rigvedahas got to be earlier than that date. Thus, at least a 3rd millennium-BCE horizon is indicated for theRigveda.
What are the prehistoric sources of Brahminic Hinduism and Ancient Indian Civilization? The attempts to answer this question have given rise to the fractious debates of what's called 'The Aryan Controversy,' in which' Western scholars argue that Brahminic Hinduism is a result of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan (RVIA) conquest of the Indus Valley civilization (IVC), while Indigenist Indian intellectuals argue that Brahminic Hinduism, like the Sanskrit language and the Rig Veda, is a indigenous creation of the Harappan culture. Following Asko Parpola's 'The Roots of Hinduism,' this review essay argues that both the Rig Vedic-Indo Aryans and the Harappans played a significant role in the establishment of Brahminic Hinduism, and explores the diverse theories that have been devised to account for the world-historical dialectical relationship between the RVIA culture and the Harappan population. Although the IVC certainly predates the RVIA migrations from Central Asia by several millennia, the IVC was already in drastic decline by the second millennia BCE, when the RVIA tribes arrived in the Punjab; and the RVIA invasion of the Indus Valley resulted in a drastic transformation of the Harappan culture, whereby Brahminic Vedic sacrificial ritualism and the Sanskrit language were imposed upon the Harappan population. But the RVIA tribes were a small elite minority among the Harappan population, and within another thousand years, the Harappan population had swamped the RVIA invaders, resulting in the reemergence of the Pre-Rig Vedic Mesopotamian and Harappan elements which make up the greater part of 'village Hinduism.' After many thousand years of conquests of the Indian subcontinent by the RVIAs, the Greeks, the Mongols, the Mughals, and the British Empire, contemporary Hinduism thus testifies to the survival of Harappan (IVC) culture in the 21st Century Republic of India (est. 1947-1950).
The concept of Indo-Aryan group of peoples and their invasion has played a prominent role in explaining the cultural history of the Indian sub-continent. It was propounded that the Aryans, living somewhere outside India, invaded the Indian sub-continent around 1500 B.C. and after supplanting the indigenous powers and cultures settled in India. The Aryans were held responsible for the destruction of the earlier populations (esp. Indus valley civilization) and building of new cultures in the areas they invaded. The subject of this paper is to examine the physical anthropological dimensions of the " Aryan problem " , which are two fold: a. " foreign phenotypic element " in the later phases of Harappan culture, and b. the " massacre evidence " at Mohenjo-Daro. Findings of the restudies of Harappan skeletal series and implications thereof for evaluating the 'Aryan Invasion Theory' have been discussed. The findings strongly indicates that the hypothesis of identification of " foreign phenotypic element " or unceremonious slaughter of native Harappans is not supplemented by bone evidence.
archaeological studies
Aryan Invasion in the Indian Subcontinent Facts and Fallacies the Physical Anthropological Perspectives2011 •
The best answer to the Steppe Sons hoax reported in The Economist, is provided by BB Lal. His lecture in 2007 is reproduced below for ready reference. For details of the hoax see: Steppe sons, A new study squelches a treasured theory about Indians’ origins -- The Economist http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2018/04/steppe-sons-new-study-squelches.html TO REVERT TO THE THEORY OF ‘ARYAN INVASION’ -- BB Lal (2007) Inaugural Address delivered at the 19th International Conference of European Association of South Asian Archaeologists on South Asian Archaeology at University of Bologna, Ravenna, Italy on 2–6 July 2007 Distinguished fellow delegates and other members of the audience, I am most grateful to the organizers of this conference, in particular to the President, Professor Maurizio Tosi, not only for inviting me to participate in this Conference but also for giving me the additional honour of delivering the Inaugural Address. Indeed, I have no words to thank them adequately for their kindness. Perhaps this is the first occasion when a South Asian is being given this privileged treatment by the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists. The conference hall is full of scholars from all parts of the world – from the United States of America on the west to the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan, on the east. All these scholars have contributed in a number of ways to our understanding of the past of South Asia, and I salute them with all the humility that I can muster. However, I hope I will not be misunderstood when I say that some amongst us have not yet been able to shake off the 19th-century biases that have blurred our vision of South Asia’s past. As is well known, it was the renowned German scholar Max Muller who, in the 19th century, attempted for the first time to date the Vedas. Accepting that the Sutra literature was datable to the 6th century BCE, he gave a block-period of 200 years to the preceding three parts of the Vedic literature, namely the Aranyakas, Brahmanas and Vedas. Thus, he arrived at 1200 BCE as the date of the Vedas. However, when his contemporaries, like Goldstucker, Whitney and Wilson, objected to his ad-hocism, he toned down, and finally surrendered by saying (Max Muller 1890, reprint 1979): “Whether the Vedic hymns were composed [in] 1000 or 1500 or 2000 or 3000 BC, no power on earth will ever determine.” But the great pity is that, in spite of such a candid confession by the savant himself, many of his followers continue to swear by his initial dating, viz. 1200 BCE. The ultimate effect of this blind tenacity was that when in the 1920s the great civilization, now known variously as the Harappan, Indus or Indus-Sarasvati Civilization, was discovered in South Asia, and was dated to the 3rd millennium BCE, it was argued that since the Vedas were no earlier than 1200 BCE, the Harappan Civilization could not have been Vedic. Further, since the only other major linguistic group in the region was the Dravidian, it was held that the Harappans were a Dravidian-speaking people. Then came the master stroke. In 1946, my revered guru Mortimer Wheeler (later knighted) discovered a fortification wall at Harappa and on learning that the Aryan god Indra had been referred to as puramdara (destroyer of forts) he readily pronounced his judgment (Wheeler 1947: 82): “On circumstantial evidence Indra [representing the Aryans] stands accused [of destroying the Harappan Civilization].” In further support of his thesis, he cited certain human skeletons at Mohenjo-daro, saying that these were the people massacred by the Aryan invaders. Thus was reached the peak of the ‘Aryan Invasion’ theory. And lo and behold! The very first one to fall in the trap of the ‘Aryan Invasion’ theory was none else but the guru’s disciple himself. With all the enthusiasm inherited from the guru, I started looking for the remains of some culture that may be post-Harappan but anterior to the early historical times. In my exploration of the sites associated with the Mahabharata story I came across the Painted Grey Ware Culture which fitted the bill. It antedated the Northern Black Polished Ware whose beginning went back to the 6th-7th century BCE, and overlay, with a break in between, the Ochre Colour Ware of the early 2nd millennium BCE. In my report on the excavations at Hastinapura and in a few subsequent papers I expressed the view that the Painted Grey Ware Culture represented the early Aryans in India. But the honeymoon was soon to be over. Excavations in the middle Ganga valley threw up in the pre-NBP strata a ceramic industry with the same shapes (viz. bowls and dishes) and painted designs as in the case of the PGW, the only difference being that in the former case the ware had a black or black-and-red surface-colour, which, however, was just the result of a particular method of firing. And even the associated cultural equipment was alike in the two cases. All this similarity opened my eyes and I could no longer sustain the theory of the PGW having been a representative of the early Aryans in India. (The association of this Ware with the Mahabharata story was nevertheless sustainable since that event comes at a later stage in the sequence.) I had no qualms in abandoning my then-favourite theory. But linguists are far ahead of archaeologists in pushing the poor Aryans through the Khyber / Bolan passes into India. In doing so, they would not mind even distorting the original Sanskrit texts. A case in point is that of the well known Professor of Sanskrit at the Harvard University, Professor Witzel. He did not hesitate to mistranslate a part of the Baudhayana Srautasutra (Witzel 1995: 320-21). In 2003 I published a paper in the East and West (Vol. 53, Nos. 1-4), exposing his manipulation. Witzel’s translation of the relevant Sanskrit text was as follows: "Aya went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru-Pancalas and Kasi Videha. This is the Ayava(migration).(His other people)stayed at home in the west. His people are the Gandhari, Parasu and Aratta. This is the Amavasava (group). Whereas the correct translation is: Ayu migrated eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru-Pancalas and the Kasi-Videhas. This is the Ayava (migration). Amavasu migrated westwards. His (people) are the Ghandhari, Parsu and Aratta. This is the Amavasu (migration). According to the correct translation, there was no movement of the Aryan people from anywhere in the north-west. On the other hand, the evidence indicates that it was from an intermediary point that some of the Aryan tribes went eastwards and other westwards. This would be clear from the map that follows(Fig. 1).
The highly debated issue of the Aryan or proto-Indo-European language speaker’s homeland is still nowhere near to any resolve. The European and Indian scholars have been proposing drastically opposite theories to prove either Eurasia or India as the homeland. Sometimes they dramatically stretch the timelines leaving one wondering as to how the scholars can play around with the archaeological proofs and indications provided by ancient scriptures just to derive suitable meanings to meet their needs. In his book, Mr. Sonawani attempts to have a look at the ‘homeland’ scenario. While doing so, he takes cognizance of all the theories forwarded by the scholars so far from fresh angle and postulates that; 1. The Indo-European language group theory is based upon migrations of the proto Indo-European language speakers from some homeland. The author challenges the hypotheses’ of such migration and using the available archaeological, anthropological and scriptural evidences goes on to prove that there were no massive migrations from any place since 10,000 BC which may have caused substantial impact on other cultures. Using the archaeological evidences, he proves that the people all over the globe started settling down by 15,000 BC with the invention of early agriculture. The process was gradually completed by before 10,000 BC. Therefore, it is out of the question that the so-called PIE speakers started migrating from the hypothetical homelands at about 2000 BC or 5000 BC and impacted the linguistic and cultural features of other civilisations, as postulated by the scholars. 2. The author further proves that the early humans were foragers during the period ranging from 60,000 BC till 15,000 BC when they already had learnt to move around in the known territories and developed geographical consciousness. By then they had already shared, developed rudimentary languages having common features. These rudimentary languages took separate paths after he settled down in the respective regions. However, the early vocabulary and grammatical traits survived, which is why there are some similarities even today in the territories in question. These similarities are owed to the early human life and not to the movement of so-called Proto-Indo-European people. 3. Author proves that from all the results pouring in from the geological explorations at Ghaggar basin, and from the careful analysis of Rig Vedic/mythological descriptions of the Saraswati River, the Ghaggar river cannot be at all equated with the Rig Vedic Saraswati. 4. Mr. Sonawani, in this book, proves that many personalities, including Zarathustra and his patrons, were contemporary to the early phase of Rig Vedic compositions and have been mentioned in both the Rig Veda and the Avesta. This sheds light on the possible date of the Rig Veda and Gathas of the Avesta. Further, the author proves, with in depth analysis of numerous scriptural and archaeological evidences, that the Rig Vedic geography is that of nowhere else but Helmand valley, Southern Afghanistan. Using references from the Rig Veda and the Avesta, he has proved that most of the identifiable tribes mentioned were and still are located in Iran, Afghanistan and north-east India( now Pakistan), and are speaking the descendent languages even today. 5. The author also proves that the indigenous Vedic Aryan theory is unfounded since there is no slightest affinity between the Vedic and Indus culture. He explains diligently that, how, even if Rig Vedic period is stretched back substantially, i.e. from presently accepted period of about 1500 BC, to as back as 3000 BC or even far before, any association of the Vedic people with Indus-Ghaggar Civilisation is improbable. 6. Since Indus-Ghaggar Valley have not experienced any intruding immigrants from minimum of 7000+ BC, there is no any genetic or archeological proof to prove any foreign influx since then. Therefore, there is total absence of any proofs to prove the migration of so-called Vedic Aryans from India to West. The vital questions raised by Mr. Sonawani are: How the Vedic religion was introduced to India? How it found space here to become a major sect in the later course of time? The revelations, supported by substantial proofs may help us change the traditional perspective of our ancient socio-cultural and religious history. 7. Importantly, the author points out at the sever social harm caused by the supremacist views taken by the European and Vedicist scholars over the last two hundred years to solve non-existent mystery of origin, either of the Aryan race or of the PIE language. 8. This book explains the roots of the original Rig Vedic language and how it was gradually modified in ancient times to suite the changed linguistic environments, while providing the internal proofs from the Rig Veda and from the observations of Indian as well as European Sanskrit scholars. As a result, the myth of the Vedic dialect being mother of Sanskrit and other Prakrit languages crumbles. Rather the author of this book has referred to almost all the living and dead renowned scholars whose works have been related with a wide range of topics such as the myth of the Aryans or the PIE speakers hypotheses, archaeology, geology, linguistics, anthropology to religion. Mr. Sonawani stresses through this book that distorting the human history to prove that some humans are superior over others, racially or linguistically, is not the way to solve the puzzles of our ancient past. “Origin of the Vedic Religion and Indus-Ghaggar Civilization” is an attempt to help us look back at our past with clean and unprejudiced vision.
The origion of Aryans and their advance into India
The origin of Aryans and their advance into India2019 •
The paper is dedicated to the so-called Aryan problem in contemporary science, i.e. the issue of the ancestral homeland of the ancient Aryans. Main hypotheses are introduced here.
2018 •
2010 •
Ekonomiczne Problemy Usług
Development of Information Civilization Systemic Aspects2018 •
European Journal of Public Health
P3 Diaphragmatic Breathing Technique an Example of Motor Literacy for Health in Elderly with Isolated Systolic Hypertension2019 •
Open Journal of Preventive Medicine
Does Health Literacy Predict Preventive Lifestyle on Metabolic Syndrome? A Population-Based Study in Sarawak Malaysia2018 •
Solar Energy
Solar drying of Stevia (Rebaudiana Bertoni) leaves using direct and indirect technologies2018 •
1977 •
Inflammatory Bowel Diseases
Pengaruh Pakan Suplementasi Spirulina platensis dan Chlorella vulgaris terhadap Pertumbuhan dan Komposisi Tubuh Ikan Gurami (Osphronemus gouramy)2019 •
Journal of Experimental Botany
Fluctuation of Arabidopsis seed dormancy with relative humidity and temperature during dry storage2015 •
2020 •
Novos Estudos - CEBRAP
Rubem Valentim, Hélio Oiticica e o tropicalismo: dois caminhos para a antropofagia na arte brasileira2021 •
2006 •
Applied Mechanics and Materials
Subsea Processing Equipment: A Strategy for Effective Assessment and Selection2015 •
1985 •
Gastroenterology
Urinary glycosaminoglycan patterns in human hepatic angiosarcoma, hepatoma, and in workers at risk for angiosarcoma1978 •
American Journal of Hematology
Cost-effectiveness of hydroxyurea in sickle cell anemia2000 •
Journal of Applied Physics
Radiation-induced micro-structures as ground states of a Swift-Hohenberg energy functional2019 •
2023 •
Ambiente e Agua - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Science
Sanitary quality of reused water for irrigation in agriculture in Brazil