Aryan invasion is a fake

[anadi]

The evidence of science now points to two basic conclusions: first, there was no Aryan invasion, and second, the Rigvedic people were already established in India no later than 4000 BC. How are we then to account for the continued presence of the Aryan invasion version of history in history books and encyclopedias even today? Some of the results - like Jha's decipherment of the Indus script - are relatively recent, and it is probably unrealistic to expect history books to reflect all the latest findings. But unfortunately, influential Indian historians and educators continue to resist all revisions and hold on to this racist creation - the Aryan invasion theory. Though there is now a tendency to treat the Aryan-Dravidian division as a linguistic phenomenon, its roots are decidedly racial and political, as we shall soon discover.

 

Speaking of the Aryan invasion theory, it would probably be an oversimplification to say: "Germans invented it, British used it," but not by much. The concept of the Aryans as a race and the associated idea of the 'Aryan nation' were very much a part of the ideology of German nationalism. For reasons known only to them, Indian educational authorities have continued to propagate this obsolete fiction that degrades and divides her people. They have allowed their political biases and career interests to take precedence over the education of children. They continue to propagate a version that has no scientific basis.

 

Before getting to the role played by German nationalism, it is useful first to take a brief look at what the word Arya does mean. After Hitler and the Nazi atrocities, most people, especially Europeans, are understandably reluctant to be reminded of the word. But that was a European crime; Indians had no part in it. The real Aryans have lived in India for thousands of years without committing anything remotely resembling the Nazi horrors. So there is no need to be diffident in examining the origins of the European misuse of the word. In any event, history demands it.

 

The first point to note is that the idea of the Aryans as foreigners who invaded India and destroyed the existing Harappan Civilization is a modern European invention; it receives no support whatsoever from Indian records - literary or archaeological.

The same is true of the notion of the Aryans as a race; it finds no support in Indian literature or tradition.

[anadi]

The word 'Arya' in Sanskrit means noble and never a race. In fact, the authoritative Sanskrit lexicon (c. 450 AD), the famous Amarakosa gives the following definition:

 

mahakula kulinarya sabhya sajjana sadhavah

 

An Arya is one who hails from a noble family, of gentle behavior and demeanor, good-natured and of righteous conduct

And the great epic Ramayana has a singularly eloquent expression describing Rama as: arya sarva samascaiva sadaiva priyadarsanah

 

Arya, who worked for the equality of all and was dear to everyone

 

 

The Rigveda also uses the word Arya something like thirty six times, but never to mean a race</font color>. The nearest to a definition that one can find in the Rigveda is probably:

 

praja arya jyotiragrah ... (Children of Arya are led by light)

 

RV, VII. 33.17

 

The word 'light' should be taken in the spiritual sense to mean enlightenment. The word Arya, according to those who originated the term, is to be used to describe those people who observed a code of conduct; people were Aryans or non-Aryans depending on whether or not they followed this code. This is made entirely clear in the Manudharma Shastra or the Manusmriti (X.43-45):

 

But in consequence of the omission of sacred rites, and of their not heeding the sages, the following people of the noble class [Arya Kshatriyas] have gradually sunk to the state of servants - the Paundrakas, Chodas, Dravidas, Kambojas, Yavanas, Shakhas, Paradhas, Pahlavas, Chinas, Kiratas and Daradas.

 

Two points about this list are worth noting: first, their fall from the Aryan fold had nothing to do with race, birth or nationality; it was due entirely to their failure to follow certain sacred rites. Second, the list includes people from all parts of India as well as a few neighboring countries like China and Persia (Pahlavas). Kambojas are from West Punjab, Yavanas from Afghanistan and beyond (not necessarily the Greeks) while Dravidas refers probably to people from the southwest of India and the South. Thus, the modern notion of an Aryan-Dravidian racial divide is contradicted by ancient records. We have it on the authority of Manu that the Dravidians were also part of the Aryan fold. Interestingly, so were the Chinese. Race never had anything to do with it until the Europeans adopted the ancient word to give expression to their nationalistic and other aspirations.

[Kulapavana]

the original civilization of Treta yuga was all Aryan and it covered the entire Earth. with time it shrunk to just the Indian subcontinent. However, Puranas (see Parashurama chasing out kshatriya tribes on several occasions) do speak of outward migrations of large Aryan populations moving out north, east and west. many clues point out to the Aryan influences in Europe, especially among the Slavic tribes.

 

in other words, there certainly were Aryan invasions, but the direction was OUT of India.

[Guest guest]

why did aryas from india invade other countries? Wasn't that un-arya, so to speak? Also, your theory has never been confirmed, India is a country that's been invaded repeatedly, it has never invaded, if I am not mistaken. So could it be possible that the original Aryas, the ones who composed vedas and all that, were Europeans, and not really the Indians of today? Because I really don't think the lofty vedic thoughts would've come from third-world people. It must've come from a higher source, and Europe definitely fits the bill. It seems more likely.

 

BTW, it is not Aryan but ARYA.

[Avinash]

So could it be possible that the original Aryas, the ones who composed vedas and all that, were Europeans, and not really the Indians of today?

 

If Vedas and other scriptures were composed by Europeans, then why is that these books do not glorify places in Europe? You will find glorification of rivers, mountains, places that are found in India. Does it not seem highly improbable that Europeans wrote these books, but they did not glorify what are found in their motherland?

[Kulapavana]

the Aryan migrations coming out of India in Dvapara yuga were mostly forced out due to conflicts. they were forced out by Lord Parashurama by non-Aryan behaviour in the first place. eventually they mixed with the local people and their culture drifted further and further away from the Vedic original.

 

"could it be possible that the original Aryas, the ones who composed vedas and all that, were Europeans, and not really the Indians of today?"

 

if you simply trust the Vedas it is all very simple. the original Aryan civilization collapsed after the battle of Kurukshetra. Indians today are very far removed from their Vedic roots, but still - nobody else is any closer to being Aryan than them. It is a matter of culture, not ethnicity.

[Guest guest]

Then how come North Indians are genetically closer to Europeans, whereas South Indians are dark, closer to the Africans and aborigines? Surely, that can't be a coincidence. It fits perfectly into the theory that Northies are fair-skinned aryas from Europe, whereas Southies are dark-skinned dravid natives. It also explains the caste system and related matters.

[Kulapavana]

if you read the Mahabharata (description of armies at Kurukshetra for example) you will see that several different races or tribes are described as Aryan, and some of them are definitely described as dark skinned. That goes to show that "arya" refers to culture and not race.

 

as to white North Indians: I'm not saying that there are no outside influences on the genetic diversity of current Indians, but Aryan India was racially diverse as well, and it did not make any difference. the Vedas say that different races were created by Prajapatis side by side. In Vedic times there were also "stone age" tribes living in the jungles and in the mountains - right next to materially advanced Aryan tribes. After Kurukshetra, these barbarian tribes took over (see the story of Yadava women captured by the barbarians from the hands of Arjuna), as pretty much all the kshatriyas were wiped out. what followed was a long period of darkness, lasting at least 1500 years, untill there was somewhat of a revival of Vedic culture.

[anadi]

 

Then how come North Indians are genetically closer to Europeans, whereas South Indians are dark, closer to the Africans and aborigines? Surely, that can't be a coincidence. It fits perfectly into the theory that Northies are fair-skinned aryas from Europe, whereas Southies are dark-skinned dravid natives.

 

 

"Julian Huxley, one of the leading biologists of the century, wrote as far back as 1939:

 

In 1848 the young German scholar Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) settled in Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his life. ... About 1853 he introduced into the English language the unlucky term Aryan as applied to a large group of languages. ...

 

Moreover, Max Müller threw another apple of discord. He introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its descendents, but also of a corresponding 'Aryan race'. The idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in England. It affected to some extent a certain number of the nationalistic and romantic writers, none of whom had any ethnological training. ...

 

In England and America the phrase 'Aryan race' has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature. In Germany the idea of the 'Aryan' race found no more scientific support than in England. Nonetheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who made it very flattering to local vanity. It therefore spread, fostered by special conditions.

 

This should help settle the issue as far as its modern misuse is concerned. As far as ancient India is concerned, one may safely say that the word Arya denoted certain spiritual and humanistic values that defined her civilization. The entire Aryan civilization - the civilization of Vedic India - was driven and sustained by these values. The whole of ancient Indian literature: from the Vedas, the Brahmanas to the Puranas to the epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana can be seen as a record of the struggles of an ancient people to live up to the ideals defined by these values. Anyone regardless of birth, race or national origin could become Aryan by following this code of conduct. It was not something to be imposed upon others by the sword or by proseleytization. Viewed in this light, the whole notion of any 'Aryan invasion' is an absurdity. It is like talking about an 'invasion of scientific thinking'.

 

Then there is also the fact that the concept of the Aryan race and the Aryan-Dravidian divide is a modern European invention that receives no support from any ancient source. To apply it to people who lived thousands of years ago is an exercise in anachronism if there ever was one.

 

The sum total of all this is that Indians have no reason to be defensive about the word Arya. It applies to everyone who has tried to live by the high ideals of an ancient culture regardless of race, language or nationality. It is a cultural designation of a people who created a great civilization. Anti-Semitism was an aberration of Christian Euorpean history, with its roots in the New Testament, of sayings like "He that is not with me is against me." If the Europeans (and their Indian disciples) fight shy of the word, it is their problem stemming from their history. Modern India has many things for which she has reason to be grateful to European knowledge, but this is definitely not one of them.

 

European currents: 'Aryan nation'

 

As Huxley makes clear in the passage cited earlier, the misuse of the word 'Aryan' was rooted in political propaganda aimed at appealing to local vanity. In order to understand the European misuse of the word Arya as a race, and the creation of the Aryan invasion idea, we need to go back to eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, especially to Germany. The idea has its roots in European anti-Semitism. Recent research by scholars like Poliakov, Shaffer and others has shown that the idea of the invading Aryan race can be traced to the aspirations of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans to give themselves an identity that was free from the taint of Judaism. The Bible, as is well known, consists of two books: the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament gives the traditional history of mankind. It is of course a Jewish creation. The New Testament is also of Jewish origin; recently discovered manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls show that Christianity, in fact, began as an extremist Jewish sect. But it was turned against the Judaism of its founding fathers by religious propagandists with political ambitions. In fact, anti-Semitism first makes its appearance in the New Testament, including in the Gospels. Nonetheless, without Judaism there would be no Christianity.

 

To free themselves from this Jewish heritage, the intellectuals of Christian Europe looked east, to Asia. And there they saw two ancient civilizations - India and China. To them the Indian Aryans were preferable as ancestors to the Chinese. As Shaffer has observed:

 

Many scholars such as Kant and Herder began to draw analogies between the myths and philosophies of ancient India and the West. In their attempt to separate Western European culture from its Judaic heritage, many scholars were convinced that the origin of Western culture was to be found in India rather than in the ancient Near East.

 

So they became Aryans. But it was not the whole human race that was given this Aryan ancestry, but only a white race that came down from the mountains of Asia, subsequently became Christian and colonized Europe. No less an intellectual than Voltaire claimed to be "convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc." (But Voltaire was emphatically not intolerant; he was in fact a strong critic of the Church of his day.)"

[anadi]

 

why did aryas from india invade other countries? Wasn't that un-arya, so to speak?

 

 

A modern student today can scarcely have an idea of the extraordinary influence of race theories in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Many educated people really believed that human qualities could be predicted on the basis of measurements of physical characteristics like eye color, length of the nose and such. It went beyond prejudice, it was an article of faith amounting to an ideology. Here is an example of what passed for informed opinion on 'race science' by the well-known French savant Paul Topinard. Much of the debate centered on the relative merits of racial types called dolichocephalics and brachycephalics, though no one seemed to have a clear idea of what was which. Anyway, here is what Topinard wrote in 1893, which should give modern readers an idea of the level of scientific thinking prevailing in those days:

 

The Gauls, according to history, were a people formed of two elements: the leaders or conquerors, blond, tall dolichocephalic, leptroscopes, etc. But the mass of the people, were small, relatively brachycephalic chaemeophrosopes. The brachycephalics were always oppressed. They were the victims of dolicocephalics who carried them off from their fields. ... The blond people changed from warriors into merchants and industrial workers. The brachycephalics breathed again. Being naturally prolific, their numbers [of brachycephalics] increased while the dolichocephalics naturally diminished. ... Does the future not belong to them? [sic: Belong to whom? - dolichocephalic leptroscopes, or brachycephalic chaemeophrosopes?]

 

This tongue-twisting passage may sound bizarre to a modern reader, but was considered an erudite piece of reasoning when it was written. In its influence and scientific unsoundness and dogmatism, 'race science' can only be compared in this century to Marxism, especially Marxist economics. Like Marxist theories, these race theories have also been fully discredited. The emergence of molecular genetics has shown these race theories to be completely false.

 

By creating this pseudo-science based on race, Europeans of the Age of Enlightenment sought to free themselves from their Jewish heritage. It is interesting to note that this very same theory - of the Aryan invasion and colonization of Europe - was later applied to India and became the Aryan invasion theory of India. In reality it was nothing more than a projection into the remote past of the contemporary European experience in colonizing parts of Asia and Africa. Substituting European for Aryan, and Asian or African for Dravidian will give us a description of any of the innumerable colonial campaigns in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. According to this theory, the Aryans were carbon copies of colonizing Europeans having nothing to do with the original meaning of the word aryan, which can be found in holy sanskrit texts. Seen in this light the theory is not even especially original.

 

[anadi]

 

So could it be possible that the original Aryas, the ones who composed vedas and all that, were Europeans...

 

 

The greatest effect of these ideas was on the psyche of the German people. German nationalism was the most powerful political movement of nineteenth century Europe. The idea of the Aryan race was a significant aspect of the German nationalistic movement. We are now used to regarding Germany as a rich and powerful country, but the German people at the beginning of the nineteenth century were weak and divided. There was no German nation at the time; the map of Europe then was dotted with numerous petty German principalities and dukedoms that had always been at the mercy of the neighboring great powers - Austria and France. For more than two centuries, from the time of the Thirty Years War to the Napoleonic conquests, the great powers had marched their armies through these petty German states treating these people and their rulers with utter disdain. It was very much in the interests of the French to keep the German people divided, a tactic later applied to India by the British. Every German at the time believed that he and his rulers were no more than pawns in great power rivalries. This had built up deep resentments in the hearts and minds of the German people. This was to have serious consequences for history.

 

In this climate of alienation and impotence, it is not surprising that German intellectuals should have sought solace in the culture of an ancient exotic land like India. Some of us can recall a very similar sentiment among Americans during the era of Vietnam and the Cold War, with many of them taking an interest in eastern religions and philosophy. These German intellectuals also felt a kinship towards India as a subjugated people, like themselves. Some of the greatest German intellectuals of the era like Humbolt, Frederick and Wilhem Schlegel, Schopenhauer and many others were students of Indian literature and philosophy. Hegel, the greatest philosopher of the age and a major influence on German nationalism was fond of saying that in philosophy and literature, Germans were the pupils of Indian sages. Humbolt went so far as to declare in 1827: " The Bhagavad-gita is perhaps the loftiest and the deepest thing that the world has to show." This was the climate in Germany when it was experiencing the rising tide of nationalism.

 

Whereas the German involvement in things Indian was emotional and romantic, the British interest was entirely practical, even though there were scholars like Jones and Colebrooke who were admirers of India and its literature. Well before the 1857 uprising it was recognized that British rule in India could not be sustained without a large number of Indian collaborators. Recognizing this reality, influential men like Thomas Babbington Macaulay, who was Chairman of the Education Board, sought to set up an educational system modeled along British lines that would also serve to undermine the Hindu tradition. While not a missionary himself, Macaulay came from a deeply religious family steeped in the Protestant Christian faith. His father was a Presbyterian minister and his mother a Quaker. He believed that the conversion of Hindus to Christianity held the answer to the problems of administering India. His idea was to create an English educated elite that would repudiate its tradition and become British collaborators. In 1836, while serving as chairman of the Education Board in India, he enthusiastically wrote his father:

Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. The effect of this education on the Hindus is prodigious. ...... It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytise, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the project.

[anadi]

 

I really don't think the lofty vedic thoughts would've come from third-world people. It must've come from a higher source, and Europe definitely fits the bill

 

 

 

So religious conversion and colonialism were to go hand in hand. As Arun Shourie has pointed out in his recent book Missionaries in India, European Christian missions were an appendage of the colonial government, with missionaries working hand in glove with the government. In a real sense, they cannot be called religious organizations at all but an unofficial arm of the Imperial Administration. (The same is true of many Catholic missions in Central American countries who were, and probably are, in the pay of the American CIA. This was admitted by a CIA director, testifying before the Congress.)

 

The key point here is Macaulay's belief that 'knowledge and reflection' on the part of the Hindus, especially the Brahmins, would cause them to give up their age-old belief in favor of Christianity. In effect, his idea was to turn the strength of Hindu intellectuals against them, by utilizing their commitment to scholarship in uprooting their own tradition. His plan was to educate the Hindus to become Christians and turn them into collaborators. He was being very naive no doubt, to think that his scheme could really succeed converting India to Christianity. At the same time it is a measure of his seriousness that Macaulay persisted with the idea for fifteen years until he found the money and the right man for turning his utopian idea into reality.

 

In pursuit of this goal he needed someone who would translate and interpret Indian scriptures, especially the Vedas, in such a way that the newly educated Indian elite would see the differences between them and the Bible and choose the latter. Upon his return to England, after a good deal of effort he found a talented but impoverished young German Vedic scholar by name Friedrich Max Müller who was willing to undertake this ardous task. Macaulay used his influence with the East India Company to find funds for Max Müller's translation of the Rigveda. Though an ardent German nationalist, Max Müller agreed for the sake of Christianity to work for the East India Company, which in reality meant the British Government of India. He also badly needed a major sponsor for his ambitious plans, which he felt he had at last found.

 

This was the genesis of his great enterprise, translating the Rigveda with Sayana's commentary and the editing of the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East. There can be no doubt at all regarding Max Müller's commitment to the conversion of Indians to Christianity. Writing to his wife in 1866 he observed:

 

It [the Rigveda] is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years</font color>.

Two years later he also wrote the Duke of Argyle, then acting Secretary of State for India: "The ancient religion of India is doomed. And if Christianity does not take its place, whose fault will it be?" The facts therefore are clear: like Lawrence of Arabia in this century, Max Müller, though a scholar was an agent of the British government paid to advance its colonial interests.

 

But he remained an ardent German nationalist even while working in England. This helps explain why he used his position as a recognized Vedic and Sanskrit scholar to promote the idea of the 'Aryan race' and the 'Aryan nation', both favorite slogans among German nationalists. Though he was later to repudiate it, it was Max Müller as much as anyone who popularized the notion of Arya as a race. This of course was to reach its culmination in the rise of Hitler and the horrors of Nazism in our own century.

 

 

[anadi]

Although it would be unfair to blame Max Müller for the rise of Nazism, he, as an eminent scholar of the Vedas and Sanskrit, bears a heavy responsibility for the deliberate misuse of a term in response to the emotion of the moment. He was guilty of giving scriptural sanction to the worst prejudice of his or any age. Not everyone however was guilty of such abuse. Wilhem Schlegel, no less a German nationalist, or romantic, always used the word 'Arya' to mean honorable and never in a racial sense. Max Müller's misuse of the term may be pardonable in an ignoramus, but not in a scholar of his stature.

 

At the same time it should be pointed out that there is nothing to indicate that Max Müller was himself a racist. He was a decent and honorable man who had many Indian friends. He simply allowed himself to be carried away by the emotion of the moment, and the heady feeling of being regarded an Aryan sage by fellow German nationalists. To be always in the public eye was a lifelong weakness with the man. With the benefit of hindsight we can say that Max Müller saw the opportunity and made a 'bargain with the devil' to gain fame and fortune. It would be a serious error however to judge the man based on this one unseemly episode in a many-sided life. His contribution as editor and publisher of ancient works is great beyond dispute. He was a great man and we must be prepared to recognize it.

 

Much now is made of the fact that Max Müller later repudiated the racial aspects of the Aryan theory, claiming it to be a linguistic concept.

[Guest guest]

There are serious problems with the Sarasvati idea. Ashoke Mukherjee summarizes them here

 

http://www.ee.iitkgp.ernet.in/~soumitro/bt...s/saraswati.pdf

 

"Whenever a material entity is examined in scientifc discourses, it involves gathering empirical data and their interpretation. When all examiners agree on the data and the interpretation, it may be accepted as a scientifc fact. On the question of Sarasvati river, just the reverse is the case. All the observers who accept it as a real river, take the cue from the Rigveda. But when they examine and interpret the available data, they differ among themselves about the who-is who of the ancient rivers, as seen in Figs. 2 and 3. Five different papers in the same book “Vedic Sarasvati” present Five different pictures of the Sarasvati river in relation to the other visible rivers [9]. No attempt is made to account for the discrepency not even by the editors, two geologists by profession. For the disappearance of Sarasvati also, different authors assign widely varying times.

 

The first thing to note is that all the other rivers mentioned in Rigveda have been extant at least for the last 3.5 thousand years (and if we consider the new dating of the Rigveda according to Radhakrishna, Rajaram & Co., for 8 thousand years). It is only the biggest and the strongest of them, the Sarasvati, which got lost in the Thar desert of the Kutchch. Is it possible or conceivable? It is one thing to say that rivers often change their courses, and so may have been done by the Sarasvati; it is completely different thing to say that the river has been lost in the deserts. For so big a river as the Rigvedic Sarasvati to exist and then perish, it requires a major geological event. However, such an event would have affected not only the Sarasvati but the entire river-system of the whole region. As far as our knowledge goes, there is no such report for the last, say, 10000 years, let alone the late-Vedic period...

 

Had the pastoralist Vedic tribes really developed the Harappan civilization, how is it that they could not build a single similar urban settlement during the 1500 years from the end of the Harappan civilization (19th century B.C.) to the beginning of the Magadh empire (4th century B.C.)? "

[Raghavan]

>>>>Because I really don't think the lofty vedic thoughts would've come from third-world people. It must've come from a higher source, and Europe definitely fits the bill. It seems more likely.""""""

 

The word third world countries were given primarily based on economic development and not based on culture. For all that matter, India was a very very rich country even financially-economically and thats why Mohamedans invaded India. Somnath temple was looted 17 times for its wealth in the form of Gold ornaments. The following link gives a detailed picture of pre-modern India destruction by the mughals, persian. IN those times, Afghanistan, pakistan were all India and the Mughals destroyed the temples there and converted them to muslims forcefully.

 

http://www.flonnet.com/fl1725/17250620.htm

 

India may be branded as a third world now, on economical aspects, (which is ofcourse developing very faster now) but one should not forget that the present day India after independence is less than 60 years old. Columbus wanted to go to India primarily for his business due to her immense wealth, but he landed in US.

 

This economical classification by itself is a cycle. India once a richest country is now third world, but the wheel of economy always rotates in time and the richer countries of today's world may become poor when the wheel goes down on the opposite side.

 

India may be third world in economy, but not in her rich cultural heritage, religious values and moral values when compared to any other countries of the western world which even any westerners would agree.

Do you know why Hinduism is not destroyed in spite of many many invasions by Mughal muslims, persians, Christians from British, German, France, Portugese, Spain etc etc, because hinduism originally called as Sanathana Dharma is not at all a religion and it is actually the way of life. This way of life is more disciplied, simple, straight forward when really understood, and it never condems any other paths. Thats why, the wheel is going up once again and its spreading to the west in the form of Krishna Consciousness.

[Raghavan]

The article in the link above explains also why there are lesser historical temples in northern India, while even today in South India especially tamilnadu one can see lots of ancient temples that date back to several centuries, made of stones and boulders. The reason was mughals could not totally extend their armies and power until the end where Emperors of Chola, Chera Dynasty were ruling. These dynasty rulers some of them during their time even constructed Indian type of temples in places like Cambodia, sumatra, Java.