Indigenous Aryanism

[2] It is a "religio-nationalistic" view of Indian history,[3][4] and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model,[5] which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.

"[9] Support for the IAT mostly exists among a subset of Indian scholars of Hindu religion and the history and archaeology of India,[10][11][12][13][5] and plays a significant role in Hindutva politics.

This primacy of Sanskrit inspired scholars such as Friedrich Schlegel, to assume that the locus of the proto-Indo-European homeland had been in India, with the other dialects spread to the west by historical migration.

This argument was developed by the mid-20th century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who interpreted the presence of many unburied corpses found in the top levels of Mohenjo-daro as the victims of conquests.

[45] The migration into northern India was not necessarily of a large population, but may have consisted of small groups,[46] who introduced their language and social system into the new territory when looking for pasture for their herds.

"[50] According to Bryant, Indigenists ... share a conviction that the theory of an external origin of the Indo-Aryan speaking people on the Indian subcontinent has been constructed on flimsy or false assumptions and conjectures.

[58][note 8] According to Witzel, the invasion model was criticised by Indigenous Aryanists for being a justification for colonial rule:[58] The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.While according to Koenraad Elst, a supporter of Indigenous Aryans:[69] The theory of which we are about to discuss the linguistic evidence, is widely known as the "Aryan invasion theory" (AIT).

[41] Given the lack of archaeological remains of the Indo-Aryans, Jim G. Shaffer, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, has argued for an indigenous cultural continuity between Harappan and post-Harappan times.

[web 6] In 1990, David Anthony published a defense of migratory models,[41] and in his The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007), has provided an extensive overview of the archaeological trail of the Indo-European people across the Eurasian steppes and central Asia.

[7] The development and "revolutionary"[33][34][86] improvement of genetic research since the early 2010s[34][86] has reinforced this shift in focus, as it has unearthed previously unaccessible data, showing large-scale migrations in prehistoric times.

A "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the North-Western region of the Indian subcontinent in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda;[note 28] 2.

Indeed, while I have enjoyed pointing out the flaws in the AIT statements of the politicized Indian academic establishment and its American amplifiers, I cannot rule out the possibility that the theory which they are defending may still have its merits.Edwin Bryant also notes that Elst's model is a "theoretical exercise:"[138] ...a purely theoretical linguistic exercise […] as an experiment to determine whether India can definitively be excluded as a possible homeland.

If it cannot, then this further problematizes the possibility of a homeland ever being established anywhere on linguistic grounds.And in Indo-Aryan Controversy Bryant notes:[139] Elst, perhaps more in a mood of devil's advocacy, toys with the evidence to show how it can be reconfigured, and to claim that no linguistic evidence has yet been produced to exclude India as a homeland that cannot be reconfigured to promote it as such.Koenraad Elst summarises "the emerging alternative to the Aryan Invasion Theory" as follows.

[140] Some time during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas.

[143] Pseudo-historian[144] Graham Hancock (2002) quotes Frawley's historical work extensively for the proposal of highly evolved ancient civilisations prior to the end of the last glacial period.

[148] When similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin were discovered by William Jones, a suggestion of "monogenesis" (single origin) was formulated for these languages as well as their speakers.

Jyotiba Phule argued that the dasas and sudras were indigenous people and the rightful inheritors of the land, whereas Brahmins were Aryan and alien.

Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades after the independence, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s.

[…] This impression of indifference changed, however, with Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–1973), who from 1940 until his death was leader of the extremist paramilitary organization the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Although no official connections exist, the books of 'Voice of India' — which are of outstanding typographical quality and are sold at a subsidized price — are widespread among the ranks of the leaders of the Sangh Parivar.

[147] He notes that "Indigenous Aryanism" has been adopted by Hindu nationalists as a part of their ideology, which makes it a political matter in addition to a scholarly problem.

[147] The proponents of Indigenous Aryanism necessarily engage in "moral disqualification" of Western Indology, which is a recurrent theme in much of the indigenist literature.

Accordingly, an essential part of 'Indian' identity in this point of view is being indigenous to the land.Repercussions of the disagreements about Aryan origins have reached Californian courts with the Californian Hindu textbook case, where according to The Times of India[web 19] historian and president of the Indian History Congress, Dwijendra Narayan Jha in a "crucial affidavit" to the Superior Court of California:[web 19] ...[g]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'.According to Thapar, Modi's government and the BJP have "peddled myths and stereotypes", such as the insistence on "a single uniform culture of the Aryans, ancestral to the Hindu, as having prevailed in the subcontinent, subsuming all others", despite the scholarly evidence for migrations into India, which is "anathema to the Hindutva construction of early history".

The revisionist and autochthonous project, then, should not be regarded as scholarly in the usual post-enlightenment sense of the word, but as an apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking aiming at proving the "truth" of traditional texts and beliefs.

Worse, it is, in many cases, not even scholastic scholarship at all but a political undertaking aiming at "rewriting" history out of national pride or for the purpose of "nation building".In her review of Bryant's The Indo-Aryan Controversy, which includes chapters by Elst and other "indigenists", Stephanie Jamison comments:[4] ... the parallels between the Intelligent Design issue and the Indo-Aryan "controversy" are distressingly close.

[161] This makes the "fair and adequate representation of the differences of opinion" problematic, since it neglects "the extent to which unscholarly opportunism has motivated the rebirth of this genre of 'scholarship'".

[161] Guha:[161] Bryant's call for accepting "the valid problems that are pointed out on both sides" (p. 500), holds intellectual value only if distinctions are strictly maintained between research that promotes scholarship, and that which does not.

Bryant and Patton gloss over the relevance of such distinctions for sustaining the academic nature of the Indo-Aryan debate, although the importance of distinguishing the scholarly from the unscholarly is rather well enunciated through the essays of Michael Witzel and Lars Martin Fosse.According to Bryant,[70] OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and inconclusive,[note 30] or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude and neglect significantly minimises the value of most OIT publications.

[163] Analysing the works of Sethna, Bhagwan Singh, Navaratna and Talageri, he notes that they mostly quote English literature, which is not fully explored, and omitting German and French Indology.

[165][note 32] Indo-Aryans Politics Indigenists Books Other Edwin Bryant, a cultural historian, has given an overview of the various "Indigenist" positions in his PhD-thesis and two subsequent publications: The Indigenous Aryan Debate and The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture are reports of his fieldwork, primarily interviews with Indian researchers, on the reception of the Indo-Aryan migration theory in India.