Indo-Aryan peoples

The Indo-Aryan peoples, or Indic peoples, are a diverse collection of ethnolinguistic groups speaking Indo-Aryan languages, a subgroup of the Indo-European language family. Indo-Aryan peoples are native to the northern Indian subcontinent, and presently found all across South Asia, where they form the majority.

Quotes

 * 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 invasions. 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 an independent India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history. Common sense might suggest that here was a striking example of a refutable hypothesis that had in fact been refuted. Indo-European scholars should have scrapped all their historical reconstructions and started again from scratch. But that is not what happened. Vested interests and academic posts were involved. Almost without exception the scholars in question managed to persuade themselves that despite appearances the theories of the philologists and the hard evidence of archeology could be made to fit together. The trick was to think of the horse-riding Aryans as conquerors of the cities of the Indus civilization in the same way that the Spanish conquistadores were conquerors of the cities of Mexico and Peru or the Israelites of the Exodus were conquerors of Jericho. The lowly Dasa of the Rig Veda, who had previously been thought of as primitive savages, were now reconstructed as members of a high civilization. “If we accept all this, then the Aryan invaders appear as a race of chariot-riding heroes who conquer a population of servile peasant barbarians, the Dasa (Dasyu). This is a familiar story. Crossland, writing as a skeptic about traditions concerning the origin of Greco-Roman civilization, remarks: ‘The role of the Indo-European peoples in the ancient world has been portrayed too often as the incarnation of northern virility sweeping down in massed chariots to bring new vigour to the decadant south’ (1971:826). Where India is concerned, the construction of this mytho-history was complete by 1920 and it was being written about as if it were fully authenticated history….
 * LEACH, Edmund. 1990. Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia. in E. Ohnuki-Tierney (ed.), ‘Culture Through Time, Anthropological Approaches’. Stanford University Press. Stanford (California)


 * The Vedas do not preserve any veneration, not even any mention, of an Urheimat. Compare this with the Thora (the first five books of the Bible): edited in about the 6th century BC, it gives a central place to Moses’ exodus from Egypt in about 1200 BC, and of Abraham from “Ur of the Chaldees” in about 1600 BC.  Similarly, in the 16th century, the Aztecs in Mexico still preserved the memory of Aztlan (probably Utah), the country from which they migrated in the 12th century.  Postulating that the Vedic people kept silent about a homeland which they still vividly remembered, as the invasionists imply, is not coherent with all we know about ancient peoples, who preserved such memories for many centuries.
 * Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.


 * Syed Shahabuddin's Muslim India (27.3.89) declares: "They (Aryans) don't belong to India and hence, don't love India. They are foreigners, the enemy within. As Aryans, they are also India's first foreigners. If Muslims and Christians are foreigners, and must get out of India, as India's first foreigners, the Aryans are duty bound to get out first."
 * Syed Shahabuddin's Muslim India (27.3.89) quoted in Talageri, "The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism"


 * You Aryans came from outside.
 * Mallikarjuna Kharge, the then leader of the Congress parliamentary party and now its party chairman, who said on the floor of the Lok Sabhā (India’s House of Commons) in 2015: attributed in


 * Lyonnet (1994), for example, notes that "it may be in vain to try and identify the Indo-Aryans," since "language, ethnic identity and culture are individual components that can be combined in many different ways, and nothing allows us to state that, knowing language x and culture x, we are dealing with ethnic group x" (425).
 * Lyonnet (1994) in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10


 * However, while Lyonnet (1994), for example, acknowledges that "both archaeologists and linguists have made attempts to find [the Indo-Aryans and Iranians] in Central Asia on the basis of bodi the precisions of the Rgveda and the Avesta, and archaeological data," she echoes the opinion of most archaeologists that none of these attempts "are entirely satisfactory either chronologically, linguistically or archaeologically" (425).
 * Lyonnet (1994) in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 10