Where Did the Aryans Come From?

Max Mueller has identified Central Asia as the original home of the Aryans. He has based his view on the study of the world's languages. The significant evidence is that there are fundamental similarities among some ancient languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and the resemblances continue in the languages derived from them.

For instance, 'Pitri, Sanskrit for Father, and 'Pater', Latin for Father sound similar, and so does 'Matri' and 'Mater' for Mother.

Max Mueller therefore concluded that the ancestors of the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the English and some other peoples must have originally resided at a common place.

The Austro-Hungarian theory, propounded by Di Giles and Prof. Macdonell, considers the banks of the Danube River (south-east Europe) to have been the original home of the Aryans.

Putting forward the Sapta-Sindhu theory, many Indian historians, including Dr Sampurnanand and Avinash Chandra Dass, point out that the modern Punjab and Sindh region (or Sapta-Sindhu) was where the Aryans originated. The view is based on a study of geographical features mentioned in the hymns of the Rigveda.

From the description of certain natural phenomena, such as long evenings, days and nights of six months' duration, etc., in the Rigveda, Lokmanya Tilak came to the conclusion that the original home of the Aryans was in the regions near the North Pole.

He reached this view after a close study of several ancient books such as the Zend Avesta apart from the Rigveda.

Swami Dayananda wrote in the Satyartha Prakash that the original home of the Aryans was Tibet. As their population grew they could not continue to stay in Tibet and thus migrated towards India. His view is support by F.E. Pargiter.

Large-scale migration or an invasion. Again, there is nothing Aryan' about any particular type of pottery, nor is there any ethnic or racial significance.

As regards the earlier belief (supported by Rigveda hymns calling upon Indra to destroy the dwellers of forts) that the Aryans destroyed the Harappans by razing to ground their cities and towns, there is no archaeological evidence to prove it.

There is no evidence to show that the Harappan civilisation was destroyed by an alien invasion. Likewise, if the PGW had been a product of Aryan craftsmanship, it should have been found in the areas of Bahawalpur and Punjab, the supposed route of the so-called Aryan invaders.

However, these pottery types are found in a region far from there in Haryana, the upper Ganga basin and in eastern Rajasthan.

Also, there is no basis to believe that there exists a time gap leading to cultural discontinuity between the late-Harappan and the post-Harappan Chalcolithic periods.

Recent excavations at Bhagwanpura and Dadheri in Haryana and Manda (Jammu) have shown that the late Harappan and the PGW were found together without any break. So, on the basis of archaeological evidence, invasion is not an acceptable theory.

After 1750 BC the urban features of the Harappan civilisation, its towns and cities along with its scales, weights and measures, the things related to trade and urbanisation-all these vanished.

There was no change in the rural structure of the earlier period, it continued into the second and the first millennium BC.

The differences observed in the archaeological find, in the pottery, metal objects and other items are possibly due to, and may be a representation of, the variations in Indian Chalcolithic cultures.

Thus, the archaeological evidences relating to the period between the second and first millennium BC have helped in modifying the earlier views on the Vedic "Aryans": (i) there is no archaeological evidence supporting the view that there was large scale migration from West Asia into the Indian subcontinent around 1500 BC; (ii) there is no archaeo­logical proof that the Aryans destroyed the Harappan civilisation and laid the foundation of a new Indian civilisation.

In fact, even though the Rigveda refers repeatedly to wars between different groups, these fights are not evidenced in archaeological finds.

What is most likely to have happened is as follows. With the decline of the cities of the Indus Civilisation and the administrative system, the emphasis must have moved over to rural settlements.

It was probably in this period-mid-second millen­nium BC-which the Indo-Aryan speakers entered the north-west of India from the Indo-Iranian border­lands through the passes in the mountains.

But they came in small groups, not in a large scale migration. Such small-scale migrations would not have been noticeably disruptive, and might have followed earlier pastoral routes.

The Avesta does refer to repeated migrations from lands in Iran to the Indus region in search of pastureland.