The Vedic Evidence: Aryan Origins

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Koenraad Elst

The Vedic Evidence: The Vedic Corpus provides no evidence for the so

called "Aryan Invasion" of India

 

This article has been taken from http://members.xoom.com/KoenraadElst

 

The dominant paradigm concerning the presence of the Indo-Aryan

branch of the Indo-European language family is the so-called Aryan

invasion theory, which claims that Indo-Aryan was brought into India

by "Aryan" invaders from Central Asia at the end of the Harappan

period (early 2nd millennium BC). Though the question of Aryan

origins was much disputed in the 19th century, the Aryan invasion

theory has been so solidly dominant in the past century that attempts

to prove it have been extremely rare in recent decades, until the

debate flared up again in India after 1990. The main attempt to prove

the Aryan invasion (presented in Bernard Sergent: Genèse de l'Inde,

Paris 1997) uses the archaeological record, which, paradoxically, is

invoked with equal confidence by the non-invasionist school (e.g.

B.B. Lal: New Light on the Indus Civilization, Delhi 1997). Here we

will consider the sparse attempts to discover references to the Aryan

invasion in Vedic literature, and argue that these have not yielded

any such finding.

 

A first category consists of old but still commonly repeated

cases of circular reasoning, e.g. the assumption that the enemies

encountered by the tribe with which the Vedic poet identifies,

are "aboriginals" (e.g. in Ralph Griffith's translation The Hymns of

the Rgveda, 1889, still commonly used). In fact, there is not one

passage where the Vedic authors describe such encounters in terms

of "us invaders" vs. "them natives", even implicitly.

 

Among more recent attempts, motivated explicitly by the desire

to counter the increasing skepticism regarding the Aryan invasion

theory, the most precise endeavour to show up an explicit mention of

the invasion turns out to be based on mistranslation. Michael Witzel

("Rgvedic History", in G. Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient

South Asia, Berlin 1995, p.321) tries to read a line from

the "admittedly much later" Baudhâyana Shrauta Sûtra as attesting the

Aryan invasion: "Prân ayuh pravavrâja, tasyaite kuru-panchâlâh

kâshîvidehâ ity, etad âyavam, pratyan amâvasus tasyaite gândhârayas

parshavo'rattâ ity, etad âmâvasyam" (BSS 18.44:397.9). This is

rendered by Witzel as: "Ayu went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru-

Panchâla and the Kâshî-Videha. This is the Ayava (migration). (His

other people) stayed at home in the West. His people are the

Gândhârî, Parshu and Aratta. This is the Amâvasava (group)."

 

This passage consists of two halves in parallel, and it is

unlikely that in such a construction, the subject of the second half

would remain unexpressed, and that terms containing contrastive

information (like "migration" as opposed to the alleged non-migration

of the other group) would remain unexpressed, all left for future

scholars to fill in. It is more likely that a non-contrastive term

representing a subject indicated in both statements, is left

unexpressed in the second: that exactly is the case with the verb

pravavrâja "he went", meaning "Ayu went" and "Amavasu went". Amavasu

is the subject of the second statement, but Witzel spirits the

subject away, leaving the statement subjectless, and turns it into a

verb, "amâ vasu", "stayed at home". In fact, the meaning of the

sentence is really quite straightforward, and doesn't require

supposing a lot of unexpressed subjects: "Ayu went east, his is the

Yamuna-Ganga region", while "Amavasu went west, his is Afghanistan,

Parshu and West Panjab". Though the then location of "Parshu"

(Persia?) is hard to decide, it is definitely a western country,

along with the two others named, western from the viewpoint of a

people settled near the Saraswati river in what is now Haryana. Far

from attesting an eastward movement into India, this text actually

speaks of a westward movement towards Central Asia, coupled with a

symmetrical eastward movement from India's demographic centre around

the Saraswati basin towards the Ganga basin.

 

The fact that a world-class specialist has to content him self

with a late text like the BSS, and that he has to twist its meaning

this much in order to get an invasionist story out of it, suggests

that harvesting invasionist information in the oldest literature is

very difficult indeed. Witzel claims (op.cit., p.320) that: "Taking a

look at the data relating to the immigration of Indo-Aryans into

South Asia, one is struck by a number of vague reminiscences of

foreign localities and tribes in the Rgveda, in spite [of] repeated

assertions to the contrary in the secondary literature." But after

this promising start, he fails to quote even a single one of

those "vague reminiscences".

 

On the next page, however, Witzel does mention the ethnonyms of

the enemies of the Vedic Aryans, the Dasas (Iranian Daha, known to

Greco-Roman authors as Daai, Dahae), Dasyus (Iranian dahyu, "tribe",

esp. hostile nomadic tribe) and Panis (Greek Parnoi), as unmistakably

the names of Iranian tribes. The identification of these tribes as

Iranian has been elaborated by Asko Parpola ("The problem of the

Aryans and the Soma", in Erdosy: op.cit., p.367), and is now well-

established, a development which should at least put an end to the

talk of the Dasas being "the dark-skinned aboriginals enslaved by the

Aryan invaders".

 

Unfortunately, Witzel and Parpola project their invasionist

notions onto their discovery: they assume that the mentioning of

Iranian tribes constitutes a "reminiscence" of the Indo- Aryan

sojourn in Central Asia. This is in disregard of the explicit

evidence of the geographical data given in the same Vedic texts,

which locates the interaction with the Dasas and Dasyus in Panjab.

>From the identification of the Dasas and Dasyus as Iranians, it could

be deduced that these Iranian tribes have lived in India for a while.

Of course, this in ference might be explained away with the plea that

a narrative transfer of geographical setting may have taken place,

but that would be a purely external conjecture not supported by the

Vedic text itself.

 

Witzel (op.cit., p.321) makes much of the transfer of

geographical names: Sarasvatî, Gomatî, Sarayu, Rasâ are the names of

rivers in India as well as in Afghanistan. This is well- known, but

what does it prove? The Vedic references to these rivers definitely

concern the Indian rivers, not the Afghan ones, e.g. the Vedic

description of the Saraswati as "sea- going" does not apply to the

Afghan Harahvaitî, which, quite remarkably for a river, does not send

its waters to the sea but to a small lake on the Iranian plateau. It

is perfectly possible that the names were taken from the Indian

metropolis to the Afghan country of emigrant settlement, rather than

the other way around.

 

Another philological argument which keeps on being repeated is

the migration-related interpretation of the polysemy of ordinary

terms of direction, e.g. dakshina: "south" and "right- hand side",

pûrva: "east" and "frontside", pashchima: "west" and "backside".

Since the equivalence of "south" with "right- hand side" presupposes

an eastward orientation, it is assumed that this linguistic fact

(along with its ritual application of carrying the fire eastward

during the Vedic Agnichayana ceremony) "is connected with the

eastward expansion of the Vedic Indians through the plains north of

the Ganges" (Frits Staal: Ritual and Mantras, Delhi 1996, p.154, and

to the same effect, Frits Staal: Zin en Onzin, Amsterdam 1986, p.310).

 

This inference assumes that the Vedic Aryans had impressed on

such elementary items in their language an association with an

eastward movement which must have taken only a small part of their

daily routine (even migrants are sedentary much of the time,

producing or finding food and other necessities) and a relatively

short span in their history. Moreover, it is contradicted by a study

of similar polysemic terms in other languages. It is in fact very

common to identify the "positive", solar directions (east, south)

with the front side, the "negative" directions (west, north) with the

back side. Sometimes, the emphasis is on the north-south axis, e.g.

in Chinese, where the character bei, "north", is derived from the

character for "backside". Likewise, in Sanskrit, uttara, "north",

also means "last, final", while in Avestan, paurva, "frontside", also

means "south". Otherwise, the emphasis in on the east-west axis, as

in Sanskrit pûrva, "east" and "frontside". Thus, the old Hebrew word

yamin means both "right-hand side" and "south" (hence the country

name Yemen, the "south" of the Arabian peninsula), this eventhough

Abraham had made a westward journey from Ur of the Chaldees in

Mesopotamia to the Promised Land. The same polysemy exists in some of

the Celtic languages, which had also migrated westward from the

central part to the western coasts of Europe. The very word

orientation, from Latin, testifies to the natural tendency of taking

the orient as the direction of reference.

 

As for the orientation of the Vedic Agnichayana ritual, if this

proves an eastward movement of the Vedic ancestors, what shall we say

about the rule that Christian Churches are oriented towards the east,

eventhough Christianity is not particularly associated with any

eastward migration? The explanation of the ritual of carrying the

fire to the east may be much simpler and of universal application: it

symbolizes the underground night journey of the sun from the sunset

west to the sunrise east.

 

Sometimes, invasionist scholars miss the non-invasionist

information which is staring them in the face. It is easy to

establish on the basis of internal evidence (the genealogy of the

composers and of the kings they mention) that the 8th mandala of the

Rg-Veda is one of the younger parts of the book. It is there (RV 8:5,

8:46, 8:56) that we find clear reference to the material culture and

fauna of Afghanistan, including camels. Michael Witzel duly notes all

this (op.cit., p.322), but fails to realize that the invasionist

scenario requires that such references appear in the oldest part of

the Rg-Veda. What we now have is an indication that the movement went

from inside India to the northwest.

 

Witzel (op.cit., p.324 ff.) makes a beginning with a long-

overdue project: establishing the internal chronology of the Rg-Veda

on the basis of internal cross-references between kings and poets of

different generations. Unfortunately, his first results are rather

confused because he does not confine himself to the information

actually given in the Rg-Veda, frequently bringing in

the "information" (actually conjecture) provided by modern theorists

with their invasionist model. By contrast, Shrikant Talageri's survey

of the relative chronology of all Rg-Vedic kings and poets, recently

made public in several lectures, has been based exclusively on the

internal textual evidence (see Talageri: The Rg-Veda, a Historical

Analysis, Delhi, forthcoming), and yields a completely consistent

chronology. Its main finding is that the geographical gradient of

Vedic Aryan culture in its Rg-Vedic stage is from east to west, with

the eastern river Ganga appearing a few times in the older passages

(written by the oldest poets mentioning the oldest kings), and the

western river Indus appearing in later parts of the book (written by

descendents of the oldest poets mentioning descendents of the oldest

kings).

 

The status quaestionis is still, more than ever, that the Vedic

corpus provides no reference to an immigration of the so-called Vedic

Aryans from Central Asia. This need not be taken as sufficient proof

that such an invasion never took place, that Indo-Aryan was native to

India, and that India is the homeland of the Indo-European language

family. Perhaps such an invasion from a non-Indian homeland into

India took place at a much earlier date, so that it was forgotten by

the time of the composition of the Rg-Veda. But at least, such

an "Aryan invasion" cannot be proven from the information provided by

the Vedic narrative itself.