History is a very potent subject. Politics can be, and very often is, based on it. A nation which forgets, or falsifies, or wilfully ignores, or glosses over the lessons of its history is a nation heading towards doom. And, conversely, when a nation is intended to be sent to its doom, a process of falsification of its history can be profitably launched.
Indian "history", as it is formulated, taught, and propagated today, has been the handiwork of Leftist "intellectuals", ever since Leftist intellectualism came into vogue. And since destruction of national identity is one of the basic tenets of Leftist ideology, it is no wonder that Indian history, as an academic subject, has been falsified on a grand scale, with the sole aim and intention of uprooting and destroying India's national identity and ethos.
VOICE OF INDIA publications have contributed a great deal towards exposing most of the fallacies and falsehoods perpetrated by Leftist historians, and their secularist fellow-travellers, in respect of medieval and post-medieval history. There is, however, one remote period of history, or prehistory, which, in spite of its remoteness, has come to acquire a major propaganda- value for Leftists and their ilk - the period of the so-called "Aryan Invasion of India".
A race of people, called the "Aryans", is supposed to have invaded India somewhere around 2000-1500 BC from the north-west. These Aryans, after centuries of warfare and bloodshed, are supposed to have destroyed, or driven south-wards, or subjugated and absorbed (as lower castes) most of the natives in the north of the "subcontinent", and then themselves occupied the northern areas.
Originally formulated by European scholars, mainly for imperialistic reasons, this theory has been perfected by Indian Leftists into a powerful weapon to be used against Indian nationalism.
The theory has been accepted on such a scale that any textbook or scholarly book the world over, which deals with, or refers to, India's early history, mentions the Aryan Invasion of India in the second millennium BC, as if it were a natural and indisputable part of proven history.
To the Leftist propagandists, however, the theory means much more.
It means that just as the British and the Muslim invaders came from outside, so also the Aryan invaders came from outside. Hence, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are all equally foreign to India; or, conversely, all three are equally Indian.
Further, it means that just as Christianity and Islam were imposed on Indians by foreign invaders, so was Hinduism imposed on native Indians (Dravidians) by foreign invaders (Aryans).
For the Leftist, of course, the matter does not end there. He goes further and propounds that while the Aryans conquered India and reduced its natives to the level of lower castes within their social structure and hierarchy, in the name of Hinduism, the other invaders sought to liberate the natives from this bondage, in the name of Islam and Christianity. Hence these original natives, the "Dravidians", must reject Hinduism and align with Islam and Christianity!
Incidentally, the Aryan invasion theory is just one part of a larger scheme which seeks to brand India as a kind of Imperialists' paradise, into which people of different races and cultures poured in at various points of time; an area, therefore, with no native people of its own, to which no people can lay claim, and which belongs to anyone who has the power to acquire overlordship over it.
The first section of the book deals with the question of Hindu Nationalism in the context of the Aryan invasion theory, and makes it absolutely clear that Hindu Nationalism is identical with Indian Nationalism, irrespective of whether any Aryan invasion from outside took place or not. The second section examines the evidence presented and the arguments advanced by invasionist scholars. In the third section, the author demolishes the invasion theory, and propounds with plenty of evidence, that India was the Original Homeland of the "Aryan" or Indo-European languages.
Shrikant G. Talageri (b.1958) was educated in Mumbai where he lives and works. He has been interested in Wildlife, Comparative Music, Religion and Philosophy, History and Culture, and Linguistics. He has made a special study of the Konkani language, his mother-tongue. He has devoted several years, and much study, to the theory of an Aryan invasion of India, and interpreted the Vedas with the help of the Puranas - Itihdsapuranabhyam vedam samupa-brinhayeta.
It is now ten years, almost to the month, since the first edition of this book was published, in early 1993. And much water has flown under the bridge since then -in respect of both the political aspects dealt with in Section I of this book as well as in respect of the academic Aryan homeland debate dealt with in Sections II and III.
However, I would prefer to deal with these developments in short in this preface than to make internal changes in the original book published in 1993. The reader can draw his own conclusions by comparing the two.
Section I
Section I of this book stands apart from the other two sections in its political nature. It was in order to keep the political debate, without pretending that it did not exist, separate from the academic debate, that my book was published in two versions: the Voice of India edition with the political section, entitled Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, and the Aditya Prakashan edition without the political section, entitled The Aryan Invasion Theory - A Reappraisal.
Unfortunately, this created two kinds of misunderstandings. On the one hand, there was the embarrassment of seeming to be a pretender to the authorship of two books when I had actually written only one (that was before my second book, The Rigveda - A Historical Analysis in 2000) - I actually met people who told me seriously that they had read "both" my books.
On the other, there was the phenomenon of academic readers being put off by the first section, and more politically-interested readers finding only that section readable.
As I said, much water has flown under the bridge since 1993, and I must make my position clear.
The three chapters in this section make three very logical points clear in a systematic manner:
1) That India has always been one civilizational entity, and its Hindu identity has been the binding force.
2) That Hinduism is as emphatically Indian and Indianising as Islam and Christianity are foreign and de-Indianising.
3) That Hinduism is not "Aryan" but "Indian", even from the Aryan invasion point of view.
If, in the course of elucidating these points (which I challenge anyone to refute) I have occasionally used avoidable and even, by hindsight, inappropriate turns of phrases (about certain individuals and political parties, or communities), well: "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Nor all thy piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it".
But, then, I was examining only one side of the coin. I find it necessary, now, to examine the other:
1) I pointed out, in Chapter 2, how Islam and Christianity can lead to foreign affiliations.
Well, today (at this time of writing), India is in the control of a regime which is umbilically affiliated to a foreign country: the U.S.A. All its socio-economic policies are devised for the benefit of that country, and all its political policies are harmonized with those of that country, as surely as the colonialist policies of the British East India Company were devised for the benefit of Great Britain and to the detriment of India and Indians.
But this regime functions in the name of Hinduism, Hindutva, Indian Nationalism and Swadeshi with as ruthless an irony as the Pig-regime of George Orwell's Animal Farm functioned in the name of Animalism!
As in Animal Farm, the regime is propped up by an army of countless slogan-shouting sheep, blindly faithful and hardworking horses, confused but compliant cows, and snarling dogs - all controlled by a range of "Hindutva" organizations (the Squealers of this Animal Farm), which otherwise make threatening noises, when elections are far off, to keep restive cadres in line, but close ranks, every-time an election approaches, and declare this to be a HINDU regime (and its opponents anti-Hindu).
All the anti-poor, anti-middle class, pro-rich, pro-NRI and pro- American policies of this elitist regime (dominated by the representatives and agents of the elitist world: ex-royalty, big business, films, sports, fashion, etc. etc. and increasingly anti-poor and virulently anti-worker) cannot prevent the Hindu masses from being brought to heel (at the time of every elections) by a variety of familiar and no-less-effective- because-repeated tactics: by visions of bogies in neighbouring countries, by the timely actions (Kargil, Godhra, and many more to come) of helpful "enemies", by Issues (temples, riots, etc) which appear at the time of elections with as unfailing a regularity as they die out immediately afterwards ... all perfectly orchestrated by the Family with a Hundred Tongues - in the name of Hinduism and Hindutva.
Is this a Hindu government - under whose systematic supervision all aspects of Hindu culture and civilization are being slowly and systematically wiped out and rampant Americanisation is the norm, and under which only the most elitist or obscurantist aspects of the Hindu religion are promoted? Whose only Hindu philosophy is that of Charvaka (and America): rnam krtva ghrtam pibeta (repeated lowering of interest rates to actively discourage savings and promote the loan-and- credit culture)? Under whom casteist politics has reached new heights? Under whom the politics of vindictiveness (eg. persecution of news agencies exposing its corruption) is matched only by the politics of royal patronage (national awards for obscure singers who record the Leader's poems)? Under whom corruption and bureaucratic interference has reached unmatched proportions? Under whom people (including Hindus) are thrown out of jobs, and employment avenues completely blocked out on a war footing?
Clearly more foreign agency, anti-nationalism and injustice are possible in India in the name of Hinduism and Hindutva than in the name of Islam and Christianity or Secularism and Leftism. And more dangerous since it is cloaked in the garb of Nationalism.
2) I have depicted the Muslims as a more-or-less solid, monolithic bloc whose "foreign loyalties" and group identity lead them to "take to the streets and start vicious riots" at the drop of a pin in response to any event anywhere which affects Muslims.
The other side of the coin: today, not only can an oil-hungry America pick on one Muslim country after another to attack and destroy while fifty-odd Muslim countries stand by and watch, or even collaborate with the aggressor; but the Gujarat events can take place without causing Muslims anywhere else in India (or abroad) to raise a whimper: Muslim BJP ministers (voted to power by largely Muslim electorates) continue to support and even aggressively defend everything; Muslim Mullahs and clerics continue to join the BJP in large numbers and participate in their Iftar parties and other programmes; Muslim MPs, MLAs, etc. (even those, as in U.P., elected from parties which wooed the Muslim voters on "pseudo-secularist" and anti-BJP lines) continue to prop up BJP governments without batting an eyelid; and common Muslims go about their (as for all Indians under this regime) increasingly insecure lives as though nothing has happened.
Clearly, Money and power are greater factors than Religion. Humanity and Humanitarianism are the only casualties either way.
3) At the same time, those very forces of Islam which roused my ire in Chapter 2 have also given me occasion for reluctant respect:
In a world where bullies and masters (whether individuals, groups or nations) pick on weaker entities as targets of attack, and weaker entities crawl in submission before bullies and masters, and everything and everyone is up for sale to the highest bidder, we can also have an Osama Bin Laden who can attack an all-powerful America rather than pick on soft targets, and a Taliban which can allow itself to be wiped out rather than betray an ally.
Perhaps I have again allowed the moving finger to run away with me. In any case, politics and political entities are a depressing subject, and I will move on to sections II and III
Section II
Section II of the book deals with the background to the Aryan Invasion Theory, and requires no further clarification.
Dr. Rao's was the first major decipherment of the script (and the one which gave me the most personal satisfaction), and it was up to other scholars doing research on the subject to prove the correctness or incorrectness of his decipherment. However, no-one appears to have cared to take up the task as yet.
We have had a plethora of different decipherments since then, none of which, again, have been conclusively proved or disproved. I myself am not an authority on the subject.
Therefore, the last word on the subject of the Indus script is still to be said, and I can only leave it at that for the moment.
History of India is available in several versions - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, British, Marxist, Nehruvian. Each of these versions has created its own characrteristic politics and is, in turn, sustained by that politics.
Of these, the Hindu version alone is based on indigenous sources, literary and archaeological. The others have been floated by various imperialist ideologies that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions.
The Nehruvian version which has been sold as secularist in post-independence India, and which is being proclaimed as sacrosanct, is no more than a mix of the imperialist versions. It has served as a smoke- screen for the remnants of Islamic, Christian, British, and Communist imperialisms to play their politics with impunity, indeed with self-righteous aggressiveness.
The imperialist versions of India's history differ among themselves as to what India has been, what it has to be, and what it is to be saved from. But they are all agreed that something is seriously wrong with the "native" society - kufr (infidelism) and shirk (idolatry), sin and fornication with false gods, brahminism and black magic, primitive superstition and puerile priestcraft, caste discrimination and class oppression, sati and infanticide, child marriage and excessive breeding, disease and destitution, Asiatic mode of production and feudalism, capitalism and servitude to American imperialism, etc.; the list is endless. They also agree that the "native" society is incapable of coming out of this morass on its own, and some ideology or agency from outside is badly needed to rescue it from its plight.
The Hindu version of India's history, on the other hand, says that Hindu civilization was the dominant civilization of the world for several millenia before the birth of Christ, the same way as Western civilization has been dominant since the nineteenth century; that Hindu presence can still be seen in the language and literature, religion and philosophy, science and technology of almost all peoples, east and west, north and south; that Hindus became complacent at some stage due to a long spell of unrivalled power and prosperity, neglected the art of warfare and border defences, and invited invaders from far and near to swarm towards their homeland; that while the earlier invaders were beaten back from India's frontiers, the later ones, who came in and caused some turmoil, were absorbed rather speedily in the socio-cultural fabric of the country; that the Islamic invaders were the first to succeed in inflicting great havoc in most parts of the country, imposing an alien rule over large areas and for long periods, and spreading on same scale a closed and inhuman ideology which was at war with what-ever the Hindus had valued and preserved for ages past; that the Christian-Western imperialism intervened with equally alien regimes and ideologies at the very time when Hindus had just succeeded in breaking the stranglehold of Islamic imperialism after a long-drawn-out war of resistance followed by a swift war of liberation; and that the ills from which Hindu society had come to suffer in due course were the consequences rather than the causes of foreign invasions.
This version of India's history was vindicated by modem scholarship. Swami Dayananda, Bankim Chandra and Vivekananda confirmed it in a forceful manner. Finally, it found its full voice during the short-lived Swadeshi Movement (1905-10) led by Sri Aurobindo, Bipin Chandra Pal, and Lokamanya Tilak. Mahatma Gandhi, too, was inspired by it to a very large extent.
Unfortunately, this version suffered a setback when the Indian National Congress started wooing the Muslims in India in a vain bid to win them over to the fight for freedom against British imperialism. Hindus were told not to take too much pride in their ancient heritage, to honour Islam as a religion as good as Hinduism, and to accept the Muslim rule in medieval times as a native dispensation. The Muslims, however, remained far from satisfied by these "minor" concessions. Tampering with recorded history had failed in achieving Hindu-Muslim unity. But the misguided effort had set up an evil precedent, namely, that history could be tampered with for political purposes. That gave an opportunity to the Marxist brigade to launch their insideous operation.
This is not the place to detail the herculean labours which the brigade has invested in re-writing the history of India from its dawn to our own times. The large-scale exercise in suppressio vari suggestio falsi remains incomparable except for similar exercises in the late lamented Soviet Union and her satellites. The results are there for everyone to see. What was white till recently has been painted black, and the black has been made to look pretty bright. Heroes have become villains, and vice versa. The most amazing spectacle, however, is that these merchants of the most mendacious lies insist on their version of India's history to be recognized as the only version worth teaching.
The Hindu version of India's history is coming to the fore once again, after having suffered a more or less complete eclipse during the twilight of the British Raj (1947-92). We have a long way to go before the mischief done to India's history by the Nehruvian establishment gets undone. Shrikant's present work is a significant contribution in that direction. It puts the record straight regarding the starting point of India's history, and the source of our renowned heritage.
The theory of an Aryan invasion of India was floated by Western scholars at a time when Hindus lay helpless under the heel of British imperialism, and the memories of the Muslim rule in India were still alive. It was difficult for them to conceive that Hindus could be the authors of a magnificent civilization such as the ancient texts testified. Even so, this theory was no more than a tentative hypothesis, and so it has remained till today in spite of all efforts to prove it. The situation was no different when Pandit Nehru started (1931) writing to his daughter the letters which were subsequently published as Glimpses of World History. In fact, supporters of the theory had started shifting their ground in view of what had been recently discovered at Harappa and Mohenjodaro.
But the scholarly debate carried no weight with Pandit Nehru. He wrote to his daughter with great aplomb, "Can you not see them [the Aryans] trekking down the mountain passes into the unknown land below?'" In the next letter, he went On, "It is possible that the caste system was partly based on the desire of the Aryans to keep themselves aloof from the conquered people ... The very word for caste in Sanskrit is varna, colour. This also shows that the Aryans who came were fairer in complexion than the original inhabitants of India."
Nehru retailed the same fables as history in his second book, The Discovery of India (1946). He had remained blissfully unaware of the acrobatics which invasionist scholars had been staging in order to accommodate inconvenient facts of the Indus Civilization in their pet theory. And it was perhaps beneath his contempt to take note of what Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had already made known on the subject.
Dr. Ambedkar had made a thorough and first-hand study of the Rigveda and the Avesta. He had examined the context and counted the frequency of the few words such as Arya, Dasa, Dasyu, Mrdhravak, Anasa Krsnayoni, Varna, etc. which the invasionists had picked up from a bulky text in order to prop up their propositions. And he had said, "So far as the Rig Veda is concerned, there is not a particle of evidence suggesting the invasion of India by the Aryans from outside India ... So far as the testimony of the Vedic literature is concerned, it is against the theory that the original home of the Aryans was outside India.” He had also refuted the scholars' belief that the word varna in the Veda meant skin-colour in any of the 22 places where the word had been used. His conclusions at the end of the book were as follows: "1. The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race; 2. There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of India by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus supposed to be the natives of India; 3. There is no evidence to show that the distinction between Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction; 4. The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryas were different in colour from the Dasas and Dasyus."
These are also the conclusions drawn by Shrikant. Of course, he has covered a much larger territory, and drawn the inescapable conclusion that it was India from where the Aryans had spread to every country where Indo-European languages are spoken at present. The evidence he has marshalled from the Puranas in support of his conclusions is path-breaking. To the best of my knowledge-and I am no stranger to the subject-no one before him has noticed the presence and role of Puranic dynasties in the Vedic literature the way he has done. That is the most clinching part of his magnum opus.
Magnum opus because, before presenting his own arguments, he has placed before the reader all the arguments advanced by the invasionists. Next, he has examined those arguments in great detail and pointed out the flaws both as to facts and logic. Finally, he has built his own case, taking all known facts into account, and leading where straight logic is bound to lead anyone with no extra axe to grind. In short, he has not only stormed into the heart of the cakravyuh erected by the invasionists and regarded by them as impregnable, but has also come out of it with flying colours, although he is not much older than Abhimanyu of the Mahabharata fame.
VOICE OF INDIA publications have contributed a great deal towards exposing most of the fallacies and falsehoods perpetrated by Leftist historians, and their secularist fellow-travellers, in respect of medieval and post-medieval history. There is, however, one remote period of history, or prehistory, which, in spite of its remoteness, has come to acquire a major propaganda-value for Leftists and their ilk- the period of the so-called "Aryan Invasion of India".
A race of people, called the "Aryans", is supposed to have invaded India somewhere around 2000-1500 BC from the north-west. These Aryans, after centuries of warfare and bloodshed, are supposed to have destroyed, or driven southwards, or Subjugated and absorbed (as lower castes) most of the natives in the north of the "subcontinent", and then themselves occupied the northern areas.
Two aspects of this theory must be noted. The first is that this theory is widely accepted by almost everyone, and those who do not accept it can indeed be accused of being those who do not want to accept it. The second is that this theory has the potential to undermine the rationale of Indian nationalism, at least in the minds of those who are ever-willing to rest their thinking processes, and accept whatever half-witted formulations are placed before them in a cut-and-dried manner.
General Acceptance Of The Theory
This theory is taught, as fact, to all Indian children in their school textbooks. Most educated Indians, long after they have left school and forgotten most of what they had studied there, continue to retain the memory that "Aryans" were some people who invaded India in ancient times, even if they do not realize the exact implications of this theory.
At one time the prestige of European scholarship was so over-powering that even some Hindu Nationalists were unable to escape its effects. Lokmanya Tilak, a staunch Hindu Nationalist, actually wrote a book; The Arctic Home in the Vedas, to propound his theory that the original home of the Vedic Aryans was in the Arctic region. His motives may have been (misguidedly) Hindu Nationalistic in that he sought to prove, in this way, that the Vedas were much older than postulated by European scholars. Swatantryaveer Savarkar, rightly considered by many to be the prophet of Hindu Nationalism, in his book, Hindutva, seems to accept the theory, hook, line and sinker. He only attempts to suggest that the Aryans did not invade India, but only immigrated into it.
The TV serial Ramayana is accused of being partly responsible for, the recent revival of "Hindu fundamentalism" in the country. The dialogues in this serial, however, show full agreement with the view, held by protagonists of the invasion theory, that the Ramayana is an account of the expansion of the Aryans from their earlier settlements in the north into the Dravidian south. That the trend of the serial is to glorify the alleged expansion does not detract from the travesty, but only accentuates it.
The theory has been accepted on such a scale that any textbook or scholarly book the world over, which deals with, or refers to, India's early history, mentions the Aryan invasion of India in the second millenium BC, as if it were a natural and indisputable part of proven history.
And, so far as the common man is concerned, that is what it appears to be - a natural and indisputable part of proven history.
Corollaries Of The Theory
In India today, the languages spoken by Indians belong to six language families:
1. Indo-European (Aryan): This includes Sanskrit, Hindi, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, etc.
2. Dravidian: This includes Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, etc.
3. Austric: This includes the Kol-Munda languages (Santali, Savara, Gadba, etc.), the Khasi language of Meghalaya, and the Nicobarese languages.
4. Sino-Tibetan: This includes most of the languages in the Himalayas and the north-east: Ladakhi, Lepcha, Bhotia, the languages of Arunachal Pradesh, the Naga languages, Bodo, Ahom, Lushai, Meithei (Manipuri), Garo, etc.
5. Andamanese: This includes the languages of the Andaman Islands.
6. Burushaski: This consists of the Burushaski language spoken in Pak-occupied Kashmir (in Hunza, Gilgit and Nagar).
All the official languages of India belong to the first two language-families; and the four southern states have Dravidian languages as their state languages. From this, it is obvious that any attempt to strike at the unity of Indian nationalism must aim at creating an "Aryan-Dravidian" divide.
Hence the "natives" who are supposed to have borne the brunt of the "Aryan" invasion have been branded as "Dravidians".
Hence, also, the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) sites, which were discovered in this century, were immediately branded as Dravidian sites.
And an extremely venomous political movement, ostensibly a Dravidian movement, was launched, in the extreme south to throw off the shackles of Aryan Imperialism!
V.P. Singh, the mercifully short-termed Prime Minister of India, while launching his Mandal-astra to destroy Hindu Society from within by creating caste-wars, declared in Parliament that the Aryans had kept the Dravidians in subjugation for thousands of years!
Behind The Curtain
Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the eminent linguist, summarizes this view in the following words:
"We have the advent of the following peoples in India from the outside (no kind of man originated on the soil of India, all her human inhabitants having arrived originally from other lands ... ).”
He then proceeds to list these immigrants, into an originally empty India, in chronological order:
1. Negritos, "from Africa".
2. Proto-Australoids, "from the east Mediterranean area (Pales- tine)".
3. Early Mediterraneans (Austrics).
4. Advanced Mediterraneans (Dravidians).
5. Armenoids (Dravidians).
6. Alpines (Aryans).
7. Nordics (Vedic Aryans).
8. Mongoloids.
The sheer insolence of this detailed and specific timetable of foreign immigrations into India, can be appreciated when we consider that at the very beginning of the chapter, he admits:
" ... Lack of material has not allowed us to postulate with certainty about racial movements in ancient times, and any appraisement or reconstruction of movements of peoples in India, some four or three, or even two thousand years ago is bound to remain largely hypothetical and based on or inferred from the present situation only.”
From all these picturesque accounts, of various races making a beeline towards India from different parts of the world at different points of time, the only logical conclusion that can be drawn is, of course, that there is no such thing as "Indian" and "Foreign" in the Indian context: either everything, and everyone is Indian (or can become Indian by merely stepping within India's borders), or else nothing and no one can really be described by this term!
Needless to say, while the theory of an Aryan invasion (or immigration) is itself the result only of a long and determined effort by Western and West-oriented scholars, the other invasions (or immigrations) have not even a shred of evidence or scholarship to support them. Yet all these theories are firmly maintained as a sort of license to justify past, present and future imperialistic forays into India.
But, again, while these theories are being firmly maintained, they are being maintained only behind the curtain. It is only the theory of an Aryan invasion of a Dravidian India which has been, and remains, most profitable for Hindu-baiters. Hence, it is required that the Aryan invasion be played up, and a discreet veil be dropped on the earlier invasions!
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