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The Aryan Invasion Theory: more thanmeets the eye
There are some Indians today who are convinced that the subcontinent's population can beclassified into Indo-Aryan and Dravidian ethnic groups. Ignoring the fact that Indo-Aryan andDravidian are defined as being merely language families and so do not denote ethnicity at all,their conviction shows that it has now become a question of identity.The Indo-European language family represents a model of the world which incorporates a viewof history, of population dispersal and of language diffusion. Within its framework are to befound the now-familiar concepts of Aryan, Dravidian, Indo-European languages and their subfamilies, as well as the notion that at some point in its history, India accommodated entrantsfrom Eurasia who supposedly brought with them India's first Indo-European language and anequally alien culture.With these concepts having entered our everyday lives today (not just our vocabulary, but alsoour view of history), it is easy to forget how recent the Indo-European (IE) framework actuallyis. In a short span of time, just over two centuries, something has changed entirely. Indians havestarted to identify themselves with terms defined within the IE framework and have internalisedits views.
Language and thought
Today, the Indo-European world-view has very cleverly and dangerously reduced our choices to
either
Indo-Aryan
or
Dravidian, thereby excising the valid third option of 'Indian'. This mightappear very trivial, but it is a form of language control. Language control is a means to alter andlimit people's way of thinking. George Orwell's cautionary novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four
[1] describes a totalitarian dictatorship that systematically destroys language, thereby shaping thevery thoughts and reality of its undermined subjects.[2]Language is the means through which humans understand and formulate ideas, and by which wecommunicate and express ourselves. Denying language is to deny thought; and controllinglanguage is to control thought. Although this is what propaganda attempts to do in its own crudeand overt manner, the subtlety of the IE world-view in imposing language control on Indians hasmostly gone unnoticed by us. Many Indians have subconsciously absorbed its views and can nowonly look at the world according to how the IE framework has defined it. For a long time now, ithas been shaping the reality of present-day India. Consider that we have a political party (theDMK) whose name contains the term 'Dravidian', whilst history books have long been teachingchildren about Aryans who allegedly invaded India sometime around 1500 BCE. The IE world-view, through denying us access to the term 'Indian', has effectively started denying our thinkingof ourselves as Indians. It is shaping our perceptions of our own identity.A few other examples of language control that Indians are being subjected to today include how,through the media, the term 'Dalit' has slowly but consistently been replacing 'Harijan' [3]; the
vague and merely geographic 'South Asia' has come to replace the historic entity of the 'Indiansubcontinent'; and we are forced to use the Portuguese-derived word 'caste' which describesneither jati nor varna nor any other Indian word or Hindu concept.[4]Though one may notimmediately see it, these are impositions on our way of viewing and understanding history, our present world, and ourselves.Another example: the Holocaust memorial in the US commemorates the genocides of the'Soviets' and 'Yugoslavs' of World War II. Yet which nation today is called the Soviet Union?Where is Yugoslavia? There are no people and no nations today that go by these names. This istantamount to an act of rewriting history: through calculated use of language, historic atrocitiesagainst the Russians and Serbs have been pushed to the background. Why? In order to preventeither from gaining public sympathy when the west intends to take action against them: Serbiaduring the Balkan Wars of the last decade; and Russia, because its imminent rise might come to pose a threat to the west. [5]We return now to the Indo-European framework, which has attempted to explain (that is, tomodel) the observed linguistic similarities between European languages and India's Samskritamand northern languages. Like all models, it is based on some assumptions. Retracing the historyof how the IE linguistic family was formulated will uncover the assumptions underlying itsworld-view. By re-examining their validity in light of what is known today, we can re-evaluatethe IE framework and its applicability. And then perhaps, instead of passively accepting it, wemay be in a better position to decide whether or not its world-view should be considered so finalas to determine our own.
The west's understanding of its history and origins prior tothe IE world-view
The origin of language and language diversity
In
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom
, Andrew Dickson Whitewrites how until the second half of the 18th century, biblical doctrines expounded by the Churchdefined all western understanding about the origins of languages, which taught thatthe language spoken by the Almighty was Hebrew,--that it was taught by him to Adam,--and thatall other languages on the face of the earth originated from it at the dispersion attending thedestruction of the Tower of Babel.In the whole of this period, all attempts at explaining the origins of language were based onChristian theology:The most amazing efforts were made to trace back everything to the sacred language. Englishand Latin dictionaries appeared, in which every word was traced back to a Hebrew root. Nosupposition was too absurd in this attempt to square Science with Scripture.[6]White discusses howthe sacred theory of human language had been developed: how it had been strengthened in everyland until it seemed to bid defiance forever to advancing thought; how it rested firmly upon theletter of Scripture, upon the explicit declarations of leading fathers of the Church, of the great
doctors of the Middle Ages, of the most eminent theological scholars
down to the beginning of the eighteenth century
, and was guarded by the decrees of popes, kings, bishops, Catholic andProtestant, and the whole hierarchy of authorities in church and state. [7]
The origin of various peoples
Genesis 9:18 to 9:27 of the Old Testament tells the tale of Noah and his three sons, Shem,Japheth and Ham. For a transgression by Ham, Noah curses Ham's son Canaan (and all hisdescendants) to become slaves to Shem and Japheth (and their descendants).[8]According to the biblical view of history, all the people of the world belonged to one of three races, eachdescended from one of Noah's three sons:[9]
•
from Shem came the Semitic race, which today includes the Jewish and Arabian people;
•
from Japheth came all the Europeans, as per Genesis 10:5 which narrates that the sons of Japheth moved to the "isles of the Gentiles" or the Greek Isles;
•
from Ham came the Hamitic race: long believed to be all other people of the world(Africans, Asians, native Americans, etc.)Until but a few centuries ago, this was the understanding that Christian Europe had about itsorigins, and that of others. Unlike the Jews, whom the Bible accorded the special position of being the biblical God's Chosen People, the Europeans - who due to their religion neverthelessresigned themselves to the biblical view - had no particularly privileged status. Being in second place did not match with their then expanding powers as colonisers nor with their ambitions.After the rediscovery of the majesty of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisations, Europeanswanted to find out more about their origins: A glorious present deserved a glorious past. Theynever fully quit the racial biblical view, however, but built on it.[10]
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