Highest Sageness -41

Background on Aryan Invasion Theory
According to author Bansi Pandit author of The Hindu Mind:
"The Aryan Invasion Theory was put forth by Western scholars, many of whom were Christian missionaries or whose scientific reasoning was influenced by religious overtones. The Western scholars (who were mostly Christians) believed in Biblical chronology, according to which the world was created in about 4,000 BCE. Thus they rejected outright any literary evidence in the ancient Hindu scriptures that pointed to dates and events earlier that 4,000 BCE.
Max Mulller, as a Christian himself, believed that the world was created around 4,000 BCE, as endorsed by Biblical chronology. He thus arbitrarily assumed the time interval for development of each Veda to be at 200 years. Any time period assumed to be greater than 200 years would have pushed the date of the composition of the Vedas earlier than 4,000 BCE. thus conflicting with Max Muller's religious belief about the creation of the world. Knowing that Buddha lived around 500 BCE and that the Vedas were composed prior to Buddha, Max Muller calculated the date of the arrival of Aryans in India as 500 BCE + 200 years (per time interval) x 5 (time intervals) = 1500 BCE.
The Vedas often speak of the war between "the forces of light" and "the forces of darkness." Although these expressions are only poetic metaphors (to illustrate a war between virtue and evil) in the Vedas, they were nevertheless interpreted as by Western scholars to indicate a war between light-skinned Aryans and dark-skinned Dravidians. Thus it was concluded that India was invaded by Aryans who destroyed the supposed pre-Aryan Indus Valley culture. Current archaeological data have revealed that the Indus Valley culture was not destroyed by any outside invasion, but by natural causes, such as seismic events and floods.
Also, the correct translation of the Sanskrit term samudra is ocean, it was initially translated as "a body of water." Hence the references to ships in the Rig Veda and to the river Saraswati (and other ancient rivers) were considered false and mythical by Westerners. If samudra had been translated correctly as ocean, the references to ships and the vast trade over water would have been considered real and not mythical, and would have also indicated that the Aryans were civilized people and not nomads. The idea of nomadic Aryans had been assumed by Western scholars to fit their idea of the Aryan invasion. 
The Implication of the Aryan Invasion theory is that it declares the Vedic culture to be primitive. The Puranas, Mahabharata, and Ramayana are labled as mythical and approximately 7,000 years of Vedic culture are left without any historical basis. It creates a rift between the North and South. Also that Vedic culture was subsequent to the Middle-Eastern culture, which are historically linked to the Bible and Christianity. 
(source: The Hindu Mind: Fundamentals of Hindu Religion and Philosophy for All Ages - By Bansi Pandit  B & V Enterprises 1996. page 312-315).
Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge
Koenraad Elst, (1959 -) Dutch historian, Belgian scholar, has said that: 
"Until the mid-19th century, no Indian had ever heard of the notion that his ancestors could be Aryan invaders from Central Asia who had destroyed the native civilization and enslaved the native population. Neither had South-Indians ever dreamt that they were the rightful owners of the whole subcontinent, dispossessed by the Aryan invaders who had chased them from North India, turning it into Aryavarata, the land of the Aryans. Nor had the low-caste people heard that they were the original inhabitants of India, subdued by the Aryans and forced into the prison house of caste which the conquerors imposed upon them as an early form of Apartheid.

All these ideas had to be imported by European scholars and missionaries, who thought through the implications of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), the theory that the Indo-European (IE) language family had spread out from a given homeland, probably in Eastern Europe, and found a place in Western and Southern Europe and in India as a cultural luggage of horse-borne invaders who subjugated the natives."
(source: Update on the Aryan Invasion - Dr. Koenraad Elst)

Overrunning Asia in the wake of its nascent imperialism in the 18th century, Western scholars ran berserk propounding half-baked theories and forcing mistaken thesis on the subjugated peoples of the world. One such mistaken notion forced on a psychologically supine world was the phantom of a so-called 'Aryan race.' This shadow-chasing was bound to result in nothing but utter confusion and total failure because blundering Western scholarship has raised the phantom of the so-called 'Aryan Race' out of its own imagination caused by a basic misunderstanding of the Sanskrit term 'Arya.'
Sanskrit-speaking Indians have coined the word 'Arya' to signify and ideal. To the Indians an 'Arya' signified a thorough bred ...a perfect gentleman, an ideal person, a superman. Being great Idealists and sticklers for purity of behavior they constantly referred to the 'Arya' concept as a state of evolution to which every individual must aspire. 
What better proof of this truth can be found than the well known maxim which enjoins on all Indians the ideal "KRUNVANTO VISHAM ARYAM"  ie "MAKE THE ENTIRE WORLD ARYAN".

Had the 'Aryan' signified a race, the above dictum would not have come into being because race-conscious people far from wanting to assimilate the 'world' in their fold believe in maintaining an exclusive identity. 

(Source: Some Blunders of Indian Historical Research - By P.N. Oak Bharati Sahitya Sadan. New Delhi. p. 212-213). 
"Upon the discovery of the Indus cities, Aryan invasion theorists promptly scouted around for signs of battles between the invading Aryans and the settlers of the Indus River. In a late layer at Mohenjo-daro, archaelogists discovered the skeletal remains of thirty-eight individuals in contexts suggesting violence. Hypnotized by the Aryan Invasion theory, archaeologists summarily attributed the death of these urbanites to a "final massacre" at the hands of marauding bands of Aryan nomads." 
(source: In Search Of The Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India - By Georg Feurerstein, Subhash Kak & David Frawley p. 77-78).
One main reason that the theory has been called into question is that there is no primary evidence. No monuments to any heroes of such invasions have been excavated, no related cemeteries unearthed, no battle fields identified in relation to the theory, no forts, in short- nothing in the way of physical evidence. There is a host of other in congruencies, but this is the general idea. What Western scholars have relied upon to substantiate the theory is etymology. They trace linguistic patterns, encompassing the East and West, and then by implication pinpoint a central geographic area which then serves as a common point of origin of the Indo-European language and race. This point, being basically the Caucasians and mountainous regions of Persia, is of course, outside of India, such that the existence of the Aryan race in Northern India is attributed to an invasion, and such is the flimsy explanation they offer for the Caucasian presence in India.

It has often been pointed out that few other principal theories have ever been accepted based on such indirect, flimsy evidence. When something ends up being so rigidly imposed with such little basis, a reasonable mind will look for other motives. 
Again we may rely on the broad understanding of David Frawley:

"It is important to examine the social and political implications of the Aryan invasion idea:
First, it served to divide India into a northern Aryan and southern Dravidian culture which were made hostile to each other. This kept the Hindus divided and is still a source of social tension.
Second, it gave the British an excuse in their conquest of India. They could claim to be doing only what the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus had previously done millennia ago.
Third, it served to make Vedic culture later than and possibly derived from Middle Eastern cultures. With the proximity and relationship of the latter with the Bible and Christianity, this kept the Hindu religion as a sidelight to the development of religion and civilization to the West.
Fourth, it allowed the sciences of India to be given a Greek basis, as any Vedic basis was largely disqualified by the primitive nature of the Vedic culture.

This discredited not only the 'Vedas' but the genealogies of the 'Puranas' and their long list of the kings before the Buddha or Krishna were left without any historical basis. The 'Mahabharata', instead of a civil war in which all the main kings of India participated as it is described, became a local skirmish among petty princes that was later exaggerated by poets. In short, it discredited the most of the Hindu tradition and almost all its ancient literature. It turned its scriptures and sages into fantasies and exaggerations.

This served a social, political and economical purpose of domination, proving the superiority of Western culture and religion. It made the Hindus feel that their culture was not the great thing that their sages and ancestors had said it was. It made Hindus feel ashamed of their culture - that its basis was neither historical nor scientific. It made them feel that the main line of civilization was developed first in the Middle East and then in Europe and that the culture of India was peripheral and secondary to the real development of world culture.

Such a view is not good scholarship or archeology but merely cultural imperialism. The Western Vedic scholars did in the intellectual sphere what the British army did in the political realm - discredit, divide and conquer the Hindus. In short, the compelling reasons for the Aryan invasion theory were neither literary nor archeological but political and religious - that is to say, not scholarship but prejudice."

(source: Hollow Earth Theory And The Aryan Invasion - By Dean De Lucia/Dharmapada Dasa)

Shri Aurobindo wrote about European scholarship:  
"European scholarship regards human civilization as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander, and ending today with Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily half savage culture." It is a superstition of modern thought that the march of knowledge has always been linear." "Our vision of "prehistory" is terribly inadequate. We have not yet rid our minds from the hold of a one-and-only God or one-and-only Book, and now a one-and-only Science."  
(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 86-87). 
(Note: In the Mosaic system, the whole world just as we know, was formed in the course of six days. Archbishop Ussher, in the 17th century fixed the date as 4004 B.C. Later theologians however, not being content with the specifications of the year alone, added further refinements to their date-scheme and specified 9 am. of the 23rd October, 4004 BC as being the exact hour, correct to the second, fixed in accordance to the present G.M.T. This cosmogonic dogma of Christian theology held a dominate place in Mediaeval thought even as late as the last century, due to the influence that Christian theology has had on contemporary thought).
According to Sri Aurobindo: 
“We are ready to accept all European theories, the theory of an 'Aryan' colonization of a Dravidian India, the theory of Nature worship…as if these hazardous speculations were on par in authority and certainty with the law of gravitation and the theory of evolution.” “So great is the force of attractive generalizations and widely popularized errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder talking of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions."
(source: The Secret of the Veda - By Sri Aurobindo 1972   p. 4).
***

Samuel Butler said "God cannot alter the past, historians can." This is the most effective way of emphasizing the need for research into the origins of the Aryans. One of the major reasons why a consideration of the idea of an Aryan invasion into India is prevalent among some Western researchers is because of their misinterpretation of the Vedas, deliberate or otherwise, that suggests the Aryans were a nomadic people. One such misinterpretation is from the Rig-Veda, which describes the battle between Sudas and the ten kings.
Dr. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, in his book,  Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization categorically states that the decline of this ancient civilization was due to natural causes and not because of destruction by invading nomads. He makes a clear rejection of the Aryan invasion theory, which the distinguished British anthropologist, Edmund Leach,(1910-1981) has termed a theory born out of European racism.

More information in this regard is found in article by J. F. Jarrige and R. H. Meadow in the August, 1980 issue of Scientific American called "The Antecedents of Civilization in the Indus Valley." In the article they mention that recent excavations at Mehrgarh show that the antecedents of the Indus Valley culture go back earlier than 6,000 B. C. in India. An outside influence did not affect its development. Astronomical references established in the Vedas do indeed concur with the date of Mehrgarh. Therefore, sites such as Mehrgarh reflect the earlier Vedic age of India. Thus, we have a theory of an Aryan invasion which is not remembered by the people of the area that was supposed to have been conquered by the Aryans. 

The Vedic literature is massive and no other culture has produced anything like it in regard to ancient history. Not the Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, or Chinese. So if it was produced outside of India, how could there not be some reference to its land of origination.? For the matter, how could these so called nomads who came invading the Indus region invent such a sophisticated language and produce such a distinguished record of their customs in spite of migrations and numerous battles? This is hardly likely. 
(source: Proof of Vedic Culture's Global Existence - By Stephen Knapp p. 42).
Ramachandra B.J. Rao could dub this theory as "nothing but a varnished tale utterly undeserving of the name of traditional history", an opinion which was echoed in different ways by some other persons as well. It is gratifying to note that people like Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh and Dadabhai Naoroji did not have appetite for racial theories, because, as Naoroji put it, they were unrealistic and often used to prove the inferiority of Asians. 
In a perceptive essay Devendra Swarup (1926-1993) Historian and Journalist, argues that after 1857 the British Imperial policy tried to reconcile the Indian upper classes to the British rule and "implement a policy of "Divide and Rule" by giving Indian diversity and institutions a racial interpretation and to uproot all the bonds of unity that had evolved through a very very long historical journey." 
One does not grudge the British rulers of India their policy, but one may justifiably ask why such a racist theory was accepted, some oppositions notwithstanding, by all and sundry not merely among the Indian masses but also among most of the professional historians and archaeologists till today. The roots of Hindu bigotry do not lie in the glorification of ancient India but in the historical acceptance of a demeaning racist theory which equated the history of ancient India to that of Aryan colonization.


Scientific Racism

Western Romantic Fantasy?

Charles Kingsley (1819 – 75) displayed a marked Anglo-Saxon racism was blended into his “defense of Christianity, home, family, womanhood, monarch, and empire.” 

In his lecture in Cambridge in 1864 Kingsley argued that the Teutonic race was fitted by God to be the ruling race of the world, thus pre-empting the Nazi philosophy by several decades. The welfare of the Teutonic race was supposed to be the welfare of the world. It was the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic Christians to establish world peace, order and morality in the world, exterminating, if necessary, the inferior races.  He also wrote: ‘the welfare of the white race is the welfare of the world and “degenerate races” [non-whites] were better off dead’.

At the end of her concise discourse on The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800 – 1960, Nancy Stepan argues that the long-lasting tradition of scientific racism from the early 19^th century until the end of the Second World War if not later “testifies to the deep psychological need Western Europeans, scientists among them, seem to have felt to divide and rank human groups, and to measure them negatively against an idealized, romanticized picture of themselves.” 

(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti  p. 78 - 85 and The roots of racism. Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel and Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
This was one of the main ideological weapon in support of the White colonial domination of the world, the main way of colonizing the mind of the ruled.
The British philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) was convinced that  
"there never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white."

Robert Knox (1791-1862) anatomist, whose writings can still shock by the ferocity and directness of their racist assertions, was in his day a pivotal figure of British science. He stated his conviction that "in human history race is everything." As far as the black men are concerned, they suffer from " a physical and consequently, a psychological inferiority." They should also know their place: "since the earliest times.. the dark races have been the slaves of their fairer brethren. In some case, as in Tasmania, it is their destiny to be cleared out by the Anglo-Saxon. Australia, is too large, but by shooting the natives as freely as we do crows in other countries, the population must become thin and scarce in time.." The Saxon race, by which he means the Europeans and the White Americans, "hopes ultimately to be the masters of the world."

Charles Kingsley (1819-75) Clergyman, teacher, writer and naturalist, the Christian socialist. There was " a marked Anglo-Saxon racism" was blended into his "defense of Christianity, home, family, womanhood, monarchy, and empire." In his lecture in Cambridge in 1864 Kingsley argued that the Teutonic race was fitted by God to be the ruling race of the world, thus pre-empting the Nazi philosophy by several decades. It was the responsibility of the Anglo-Saxon Teutonic Christians to establish world peace, order and morality in the world, exterminating, if necessary, the inferior races. 
(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti p. 66-85).
For Christian Europe, long uncomfortable with what it thought to be a Hebrew ancestry, was eager to find for itself an identity distinct from the Jewish; the sudden appearance of the Aryan race out of the misty plateaus of Central Asia was seen as god-send, especially in the strongly anti-Semitic atmosphere of the 19th century. Ernest Renan (1823-1892) the French historian of religion, wrote in 1860: " The Semites are incapable of doing that which is essential. Let us remain Germans and Celts; let us keep our 'eternal gospel,' Christianity....(After) the Semitic race declined, the Aryan race alone was left to lead the march of human destiny." 
(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 29-30).

Amaury de Riencourt (1918 - ) was born in Orleans, France. He received his B.A. from the Sorbonne and his M.A. from the University of Algiers. He is author of several books including The American empire and The Soul of India.

He writes that philosophers Hegel and Schelling and historians such as Schlegel and Herder acclaimed the discovery of India as the Home of Universal Religion…of all literature and philosophy invited opposition from the missionaries. 

Indians were allowed to possess the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Aryans, but the Aryans themselves were made to migrate, this time from Europe to India, as conquerors.  

The 19^th century European scholars tried to find a home for the Aryan race outside India. After considerable speculation they preferred Central Asia for the Aryan Hittites as well as the Vedic Aryans of India. After the discovery of Harappa, Mohenjodaro and other sites of the Indus Valley Civilization in the twenties of this century the Aryans were made the conquerors of Indus cities. 

This theory of Aryan invasion and expulsion of the Indus people to the south had its impact in the political field giving rise to North-South conflict in India. The recent excavations by Dales (1965, 1982, 1984) at Harappa, Mohenja-daro, the two major cities of the Indus Civilization, have revealed that there was no invasion by foreigners and the so-called massacre of the people of Mohenja-daro by the invading foreigners was purely imaginary. 

(source: The Lost City of Dvaraka - S. R. Rao p. 2). 
Max Muller was responsible for giving the word "Aryan" a racial meaning. Yet nothing resembling a racial definition is in the original Sanskrit. Like Richard Burton (and Lawrence of Arabia in the next century). Muller was an agent of the British government. He was paid to advance its colonial interests. Muller was told that the East India Company would be prepared to fund him to the tune of one lakh rupees - about 10,000 pounds, then an enormous sum - to translate the Rg Veda in a way that would destroy the belief of newly English educated Hindus in their ancient scriptures. For an impoverished foreign scholar who had already been working on the Rg Veda for several years, this was a godsend. This is no way to diminish his contribution. 
Muller saw his scholarly work as part of a mission to convert India to Christianity. When writing to his wife in 1866 about his translation of the Rg Veda, he observed:
"This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years."

(source: The Life and Letters of the Rt. Hon. Fredrich Max Muller, edited by his wife. Longmans, London, 1902, Volume I, p. 328) Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization - By N. S. Rajaram & David Frawley p. 10). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel.
Refer to QuickTime trailer and Part One of the film The God Awful Truth.
Schlegel became an anthropologist and boldly portrayed columns of masterful men marching down from the roof of the world, founding empires and civilizing the west. The term Aryan reputedly gained widespread authority with support of Schlegel in 1819. Further more, The idea of an Egyptian and/or Phoenician influence on ancient Greece was "incompatible with the paradigms of race and progress of the early 19th century. 
(source: Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past - By Dilip K. Chakrabarti p. 70)
Dilip K. Chakrabarti states: 
"The impact of the Aryan image was manifold and has been partly traced by Joan Leopold (1974). In Max Muller's parlance "a native writer" exclaimed in Indian Mirror, Calcutta, of 20 September, 1874: 
"we were niggers at one time. We now become brethen."  
On the British side, it was like going back after many centuries to claim their share in the long-lost inheritance, as it were, with the added task of re-educating the now-degenerate brothers or cousins or, in a different and certainly more widely acceptable perspective, the British appeared at the end of a long line of invaders of the land, beginning with the Aryans."
Anwar Shaikh has commented: 
"The Europeans did agree to the intellectual, rational and cultural splendor of the Rgveda, a product of the Aryan mind but refused to accept that the Aryans were Indians. It was a device to deny the beneficence which India had bestowed on the European civilization and many other cultures. The inferiority-complex which the Indians had come to inherit generation after generation, exerted its evil influence once again; to overcome their psychological compulsions, they felt elated when they heard the news that they were racially as good as the Europeans because the Aryans were Europeans who invaded India. India is the home of the Aryans who civilized the West: the migration is from India to Europe, and many eastern countries, and not the other way round. Once we know this truth, we realize that wherever the Indians (Aryans) want, they took with them the Rgveda, which influenced the new lands of the Aryan settlements. "
(source: The Wonders of Rgveda: Who were the Aryans? - By Anwar Shaikh).
Cinderella of the Ancient World
History begins at Sumer was the title of S. N. Kramer's major work (1965) which reflects the prevalent view fostered by the West, that civilization – life in cities – first began in Mesopotamia. Over three decades later in BBC's superb TV series LEGACY [1997] Michael Wood put forward the same idea: the first city in the world was Eridu in Sumer. As though the Harappa Culture had not happened! No wonder Geoffrey Bibby in his Looking for Dilmun described the Indus Valley civilization as "the Cinderella of the ancient world".

(source: Cinderella of the Ancient World - By Pradip Bhattacharya International HRD Fellow (Manchester) Author of the entry on the Indus Civilization in the Dravidian Encyclopaedia August 12, 200. groups.yahoo.com).

The Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon
And few other spurious "truths" have been so insidious -- or so destructive. Responsible for subjugation of millions of Indians under British rule, Aryan Race Theory continued its wretched legacy well into the twentieth century, mutating into the horrific pseudo-science that rationalized Hitler's Final Solution, and lingering in the bloody ethnic convulsions of modern Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and other troubled areas of the post-colonial world.
Far from being merely an academic exercise, though, Aryan Race Theory is in fact the brainchild of Christian evangelist-scholars, fashioned and tempered in the nineteenth century as a weapon for European expansionism in India. Promulgated to generations of Indian children in British-created schools, it created, like so many other Western creeds and dogmas, social divisions where none had hitherto existed, resulting in jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion among communities where peaceful coexistence had been the norm. This theory, which posits the invasion of ancient India by a white-skinned race (the "Aryans") who conquer an indigenous, dark-skinned population, therefore worked ingeniously with the British divide-and-conquer strategy for rule in India. The theory and its variants continue to be used today by the Vatican and other Christian enterprises in their campaign to "harvest" tribals and other vulnerable communities of Hindus. For these spiritual imperialists, spurious racial theories still hold their divide-and-conquer appeal.

Racial theories and pseudo-science continue to be vigorously employed today by the Vatican and other Western evangelist enterprises in their ongoing campaign to harvest souls for Christianity. But it is not only in the remote corners of the Third World where the unexamined "truths" of Max Muller and his missionary-scholar contemporaries are still used as weapons of propaganda.

(source: The Missionary's Swastika: Racism as an Evangelical Weapon - By Aravindan Neelakandan. S).

Role in Imperialism and Nazism 

The theory that the original Aryans were northern Europeans who had migrated into India was used by some British imperialists as an ideological justification for British control of India, on the grounds that the founders of Indian culture were of the same race as the Anglo-Saxon invaders who established the British Raj.

The most notorious appropriation of the Nordic theory was that of the Nazis who adopted the swastika design from Indian culture as an "Aryan" badge. The Nazi race-theorist Alfred Rosenberg argued in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930) that the Vedas were written by a superior Nordic master race who had invaded and occupied India in ancient times. These people had later become corrupted because they had lost contact with their "racial soul" due to their involvement with subordinated non-Aryans. For the Nazis, the Aryan invasion of India served as an allegory of the dangers of racial mixing. This argument was later repeated by other white supremacists such as the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke 

After Indian independence, Socialist and Marxist accounts of history proliferated in Indian universities. Opponents of the invasion theory contend that Marxists promoted the theory because its model of invasion and subordination corresponded to Marxist concepts of class struggle and ideology. Some modern opponents of the Aryan-Vedic continuity in India, like Romila Thapar, are Marxist

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_invasion_theory).
***
Dr. David Gray, Woodrow Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities in the Center for the Study of Cultures, has taught courses on Asian religions at Rice, Columbia, and Princeton universities has written:
"The Aryan Invasion theory was first propounded when linguistic similarities between Sanskrit and the major European languages were discovered by European scholars during the colonial era. In an atmosphere of raging Eurocentricism, it was inevitable that any explanation of this seemingly inexplicable discovery would taken on racial and ideological overtones, 
Colonial expositions of the Aryan Invasion Theory
British intellectuals were particularly nonplussed by this apparent link between the languages of the conquerors and the conquered. In the earliest phases of British rule in India, the East India Company proceeded largely unconsciously - without moral dilemmas and without overt recourse to ideological or racial superiority. But as the rule of the East India Company expanded, and battles became more hard fought and the resistance to British occupation in India grew, the ideology of European racial superiority became almost essential in justifying British presence in India - not only to assuage British conscience, but also to convince the Indian people that the British were not mere colonial conquerors but a superior race on a noble civilizational mission.

After 1857, the British education system in India had been deliberately designed to assist in the development of a narrow but influential class of deeply indoctrinated and predominantly loyal agents of British colonial rule in India. British elaborations of the Aryan invasion theory became powerful and convenient ideological tools in generating legitimacy for British rule. And by claiming a cultural continuity between this noble race of ancient times and themselves, the British could become inheritors of the grand Aryan tradition and assert their "legitimate" civilizational right to rule over the people of the subcontinent - not to exploit them, but so as to "reinvigorate" Indian civilization by reintroducing Aryan rule that had been disfigured and corrupted by the violent and barbaric incursions of the Muslims. Preposterous and distorted as it was, this absurdly racist proposition was made palatable to a self-doubting and repressed class of upper-caste Hindus who were told that they were descendants of the Aryans, and could identify with the manifold and globally encompassing achievements of the Aryan people by accepting British authority so as to participate in this great Aryan renaissance in India.

Uniquely Indian Aspects of Vedic Literature
The grammar of Sanskrit and it's highly systematized alphabet also had little to do with any "Aryan" invasion.  Sanskrit is a highly structured and methodical language, optimized for engaging in rational debates and expressing mathematical formulas. And it's skillfully organized alphabet bears little resemblance to the rather random and arbitrary alphabet of it's European cousins.  Much of it's vocabulary and syntax developed long after any supposed  invasion, and although the structure of the South Indian languages may differ from those of the North, the majority of India's languages (both Northern and Southern) share a large base of a common Sanskrit-derived vocabulary. It is therefore ironic how much is made of the "Indo-European" classification.
(source: The Aryan Invasion: theories, counter-theories and historical significance - By David Grey).

Western opponents cry,  “Foul play – Hindu Nationalism/Saffronization.”
Into India, Out from India, or Both? 

“Aryan Comings and Goings” is now the biggest football game in Indology town. Scholars line up on both sides of the divide: Aryans into India or Aryans out. Western Indologists predominantly defend the “into-India” goal. Some Indian Indologists vehemently defend the “out-from-India” goal. Most Indian scholars, however, just want to shut down the West’s dominance of the tourney – or at least establish a level playing field.  

Now the Indian scholars are hungry for an upset – they want to take possession of the game. After all, most popular books on India written for educated people imply that blue-eyed warriors from near Europe conquered the South Asian region and then mixed with the backward natives to create the Vedic tradition and modern India.

The Western titans shoot back that it is highly probable, if not almost certain, that the Aryans were coming in – even if we do not know when, how or why. Any other view, they feel, has to reek of contemporary South Asian nationalism, and politics. Most of the Indian scholars simply feel that there is no evidence that the Indo-Aryans pushed their way into the subcontinent from outside.  

Understandably, they wonder why they should uncritically inherit a version of their remote antiquity assembled for them by their former colonial lords. They want to erect ac post-colonial era of Indian scholarship, unencumbered by excess baggage from the British Raj. Hence, Indian brains feel the need to reclaim their intellectual sovereignty, so to speak.  

Attempts by Indian scholars to establish the so-called indigenous-Aryan paradigm set off a mighty uproar in Western arenas. Immediately the Western opponents cry, “Foul play – nationalism.” Unfortunately, sometimes even moderate attempts just to question the incumbent Aryan immigration model – not replace it – risk swift chastisement.  

Western Indologists bristle at the thought that their Indian counterparts may see them as neo-colonists. Nevertheless, decreasing numbers of Western scholars are willing to deny that what we now call India’s ancient history was largely the product of the 19^th century climate of European politics and religion. 

The British regime had a huge stake in the Aryan notion. By asserting that the Ancient Aryans intruded into India from Europe or nearby, the British arrival could be seen as the modern reenactment of an ancient drama. Instead of colonialism, Indians were witnessing the natural return of long-lost Aryan brothers. Indologists have tacitly clung to the Aryan-entrace idea in the same way biologist seem to hold tight to Darwinism.  

(source: Searching for Vedic India – By Devamrita Swami  p. 60 – 64). Refer to Quotes from The American Taliban and Christian Fundamentalists to Push Bible as Classroom "Knowledge" and Bush, the Neocons and Evangelical Christian Fiction: America "Left Behind" - By Hugh Urban and The Christian Right, Dominionism, and Theocracy - publiceye.org).

Refer to Michael Witzel and pals to target BBC next after CA textbook debacle and Aryan Invasion Theory and Christian Supremacism in Academia - By Arvind Kumar and Witzel's vanishing ocean and Scholarship of Equine Posteriors– Har(vard)appa Style – By Narayanan Komerath.

Mohenjo Daro – An Ancient Feat of Civil Engineering

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about 4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary, baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks. The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built with well-engineered drainage channels.

Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40 feet The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment. We need to address the following question to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro?

2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when 99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labeling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and are being overly indulgent with our "soft sciences" regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers? Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilization that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries. 

(source: Mohenjo Daro – Civil Engineering).

***

No sense of History or Colonial theology?
The idea that Indians have no sense of history is a European conceit not any Indian view'. 
It was Karl Marx, not any ancient Indian sage who insisted that India had no history, and what is called history is simply a record of successive intruders. This has now become the central dogma of the Marxist school as indeed it has for the inheritors of the Eurocentric colonial thinking like Michael Witzel. This is what brings together the Indian Marxists and some Western Indologists on the issue of the Aryan invasion (or migration).
Setting aside such absurdities, what is really at issue is the teaching of history and creating suitable methodology for the study of ancient India. The Vedas are part of Indian history and this history cannot be based on wild speculation in the name of cosmology or twisted in response to cries of ‘saffronization' The last few decades have thrown up new data from diverse sources that pose a major challenge to historians and old theories. In order to preserve historical methods that some scholars are comfortable with, there are continuing attempts to negate data that contradict existing theories; Michael Witzel, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib are among prime exponents of such negationism.
(source: Indology: Skeletons in the closet - By N S Rajaram - hvk.org). Also refer to Zydenbos vs. Rajaram: a Case Study in Aryan Invasion Polemic - By Koenraad Elst). Refer to Jesus Christ: Artifice for Aggression - By Sita Ram Goel
Michel Danino (1956 - ) Born in 1956 at Honfleur (France) into a Jewish family recently emigrated from Morocco, from the age of fifteen Michel Danino was drawn to India. he is the convener of the International Forum for India's Heritage says:
"Missionaries and others who have recourse to such perverse arguments really belong to the colonial dark ages -- for massive evidence from archaeology, anthropology and other sciences, piling up in recent decades, has thoroughly disproved the theory of an Aryan invasion of India. It simply never took place, nor was there ever any Aryan race or any Dravidian race."
" It is time these crude and unscientific distortions of India's past are laid to rest forever; they have done enough harm to the Indian people as it is. Do we really have to blindly perpetuate colonial myths in this 'scientific era'? "
(source: Divide and Convert; Divide and Rule - By Michel Danino rediff.com).

Indology and Racism – Fabrication of the narrative of Aryan invasion of the 2^nd millennium BC.
The Hegemonic Circle - Defenders of the invasion theory hits out at critics 

All evidence we have goes against it: There is biological continuity in the skeletal record for 4500-800 BC; the archaeological record has been seen to belong to the same cultural tradition from 7000 BC to historical times; the literary texts know of no other geography but that of India; and so on.

So what should we do if some textbooks continue to repeat this fabrication?

It is bad enough if a fabrication – a story – is palmed off as the truth, but what if the fabrication is driven not just by poor logic but by racism?

Ten years ago, the distinguished British anthropologist, Edmund Leach (1910–1989) wrote a famous essay on this problem titled “Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia”. Published in a book called Culture Through Time (edited by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), this essay exposed the racist basis of the 19^th century construction of Indian prehistory and, perhaps more important to us, it showed how racism persists in the academic approach to the study of India. The implication of Leach’s charge is that many of the assumptions at the basis of the academic study of Indian social organization, language development, and evolution of religion are simply wrong! Here are some excerpts from this essay:

“ Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?….Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?…

Where the Indo-European philologists are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates the previously existing population!

The details of the theory fit in with this racist framework…Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground, the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this we derived the myth of the Aryan Invasion…QED.

The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but morally corrupt) kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasion of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.”

The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization need a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial expansion.

The Hegemonic Circle

One example of this phenomenon is the interesting strategy devised by the defenders of the invasion theory to beat back criticism. They say: The critics are mainly Hindu nationalists motivated by political consideration.

This is nonsense. The invasion/migration theory has been criticized by scholars from all parts of the world, working in different fields of Indic Studies. Edmund Leach was not a Hindu nationalist. Neither are Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, perhaps the most modern scholars of Indian prehistory, who write in a recent essay:

“The South Asian archaeological record reviewed here does not support…any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis….

Another archaeologist, Mark Kenoyer, has this to say in his recent book Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization:

“There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historical period around 600 BC.”

Those within the hegemonic circles are rendered blind to facts that are inconvenient.

(source: Edmund Leach on Racism & Indology - By S Kak and The Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak  p. 23 - 27).
***

Now, Imagining Europeans in China

The recent enthusiastic quest for Celtic and other Western Indo-European people and cultural influences in northwest China strongly echoes earlier European fascination with the dissemination of supposedly "Aryan" culture and ethics in India and Europe. But more generally the explosion of interest in the attempt to make big history--evidence for cultural and genetic connections between "West" and "East" how scholarly work gets distorted by racial myths and assumptions about essentialized identities. 
"The desolate wastes of the Takla Makan Desert, at the heart  of central Asia, are haunted by an ancient mystery. It was here, long ago, that East and West--two of the greatest  civilizations on earth--made imperceptible contact.  And here the faint traces of ancient life have long pressed a deep and vexing enigma. Did the civilization of ancient China arise in isolation? Or was there an unremembered link with the cultures of the West?"

Thus begins the NOVA/WGBH documentary The Mysterious Mummies of China. This film purports to prove that that the people who developed the oasis civilizations of northwest China were an "ethnically European people" who were related to Celts and Germans, and who "breached China's fabled isolation 1000 years earlier than previously thought." But it does this by sleight of hand, through insinuation and conflation and denial of the richness of the cultural and historical facts.
(source: Hidden Discourses of Race: Imagining Europeans in China - By Nathan Light).
Also refer to Aryans: Culture Bearers to China - New Evidence Of Ancient European Migration to the Orient - by Mark Deavin.
***
Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI

Former director-general of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI)  B.B. Lal on Saturday dubbed the hypothesis of “Aryan invasion of India” a myth. He alleged that it was still accepted for reasons other than historical.
“The theory that there was an Aryan invasion of India is completely wrong,” Lal stressed in a seminar in New Delhi and alleged that political reasons were behind its being in the textbooks.
The dating of the Vedas to 1200 BC by Max Muller was ad hoc and even he confessed it to his colleagues, Lal claimed and argued that the Rig Veda could not be later than 2000 BC. He also discounted the discovery of skeletons at Mohenjodaro site, the basis for hypothesising an invasion and said, “the hard fact is that these came from various levels, some from the middle and some from the late, and some were found in deposits after the site was abandoned”. There were no remains of weapons and material culture of the invaders at the site, the former director-general said.
He also came down on those historians who assert that the 'Dravidians' are descendants of Harappans who dispersed after the 'Aryan invasion'. None of the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala has any Harappan sites, but sites of Neolithic culture, Lal said. “Do the proponents of this theory expect us to believe that urban Harappans, on being sent away to south India, shed overnight their urban characteristics and took to a stone age way of living?" asks Lal.
(source: Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI - indianexpress.com).
B B (Braj Basi) Lal (1921- ) On joining the Archaeological Survey in January 1946, he held charge of the Excavations Branch and participated with Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavations at Harappa, now in Pakistan. In 1951 he was deputed for advanced studies at the Institute of Archaeology, London. In 1961, under a UNESCO project, he conducted excavations in Nubia, Egypt, and brought to light valuable evidence relating to prehistoric and proto historic periods of that country.

He was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1968 to 1972. He writes:

Speaking about the River Saraswati, he writes:

"Western linguists and historians and their, more vociferous, Indian counterparts claim that the Rigvedic Sarasvati was the Helmand of Afghanistan. The Rigvedic Saraswati, according to what is stated in the Rig Veda (RV. 10. 75. 5) itself lay between the Yamuna on the one hand and the Sutlej on the other. These two rivers do not exist in Afghanistan.

(source:  The Saraswati Flows on: The Continuity of Indian Culture - By B. B. Lal. p. Chapter V p. 136).

Lal is critical of ‘‘Western scholars and their Indian followers’’ for not accepting the unity between the Indus Valley and Vedic Civilizations.

‘‘Most likely, the authors of the Indus valley civilization were the Sanskrit-speaking Vedic Aryans,’’ Lal asserted. Lal invoked the Rig Veda to prove his thesis. “To say the Vedic people were nomads is either ignorance or due to a willful twisting of facts,” he alleged.

(source: Times of India 12/26/02). 

He has dubbed the hypothesis of “Aryan invasion of India” a myth. He alleged that it was still accepted for reasons other than historical.

“The theory that there was an Aryan invasion of India is completely wrong,” Lal stressed in a seminar in New Delhi and alleged that political reasons were behind its being in the textbooks. “Do the proponents of this theory expect us to believe that urban Harappans, on being sent away to south India, shed overnight their urban characteristics and took to a stone age way of living?" asks Lal.

(source: Aryan invasion a myth, argues former DG of ASI - indianexpress.com).

Even as political parties debate whether India is "shining," a momentous-though unreported- international academic consensus has established that there was no Aryan invasion of India. This intellectual breakthrough has staggering implications for us as a nation. Not only has a colonial falsehood been overturned, but the origins of a corrosive divide in our political, cultural and emotional life stand exposed.  

Hopefully, our Leftist (read anti-Hindu) historians will accept the truth and help in re-writing true history for new generations, so they may enjoy legitimate pride in their heritage. The Aryan invasion theory (modified to Aryan migration theory) did grave damage to the Hindu psyche and to national unity.   

As Hindus are both the native and the majority community of India, this colonial canard wrought terrible havoc upon the nation. Its foremost manifestation was the North-South divide, engineered by Sir William Jones when he invented the fair-skinned Aryan "race" that drove native dark-skinned Dravidians southwards after seizing their lands. The archaeological evidence for this claim was sketchy even at the time, and was challenged by qualified Indians, but colonial intellectual monopoly triumphed. This mischief, many will remember, triggered Tamil separatism, even though Tamil Nadu has long been an outstanding centre of classical Hindu erudition and cultural accomplishment. Sadly, the post-Independence intellectual tradition fostered by Jawaharlal Nehru was obdurately anti-Hindu. The Aligarh School took advantage of this environment to forge an alliance with Leftist historians and promote a supercilious history wherein India was ever subjected to foreign rule and conquest; that this was its true historical tradition; that contemporary Indians (read Hindus) had no right to regard Arab-Turk-Afghan rule as foreign; or currently, to object to the possible reign of Ms Sonia Gandhi! The British were outsiders because they disrupted the glory of India's Islamic rulers.

(source: India shining: Aryans are Hindu - By Sandhya Jain - dailypioneer.com - March 5 2004).

Om Tat Sat

                                                        

(Continued...) 

( My humble Pranam, Honour  and also gratefulness  to   Ms. Sushma Londhe ji for her  noble, magnanimous and eminent works on the   peerless  Wisdom of our Sacred Scriptures)

  

_{(My humble salutations to   , H H Swamyjis, Hindu Wisdom, great Universal Philosophers, Historians, Professors and Devotees   for the discovering  collection)}

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