You are on page 1of 22

Eric D.

Meyer
6707 S. Holmes Ave.
Idaho Falls Idaho 83404
ericd.meyer@yahoo.com
1-208-206-1338

The Aryan Controversy Decided?


Ancient India Between the Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization

A Review Essay on Asko Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus
Civilization. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. 2015. ISBN 978-0-19-022690-9 (hbk.)
978-0-19-022692-3 (pbk.) 384 p. $105.00/$36.95.

What Is the Aryan Controversy? And Why Is It So Controversial?

Contemporary Western scholars of Brahminic Hinduism and Indigenist Indian intellectuals


associated with Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) might each read with
interest Asko Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. But
if they were to share their reactions to Parpola’s discussion of the bipartite origins of Ancient
Indian culture, which he sees as equally divided between the contributions of the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryans and the Harappan Indus Valley civilization, Parpola would immediately find
himself embroiled in the fierce scholarly debates and bitter political disputes of what’s called
‘the Aryan controversy.’ But what is the Aryan controversy? And why is it so controversial?
Briefly: The Aryan controversy is the continuing debate between Western scholars and Indian
intellectuals over the prehistoric origins of Ancient Indian civilization.1 According to Western
scholars like Sir Mortimer Wheeler, the British archaeologist who excavated the shattered ruins
of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa back in the 1940s, Ancient Indian civilization began with the Rig
Vedic Indo-Aryans, who migrated into the Punjab and Northwest India sometime in the second
millennia BCE, bringing with them the Sanskrit language and the Rig Vedic sacrificial rituals
from which Brahminic Hinduism originated, and conquered, displaced, or assimilated the
surviving remnants of the indigenous population of the Harappan Indus Valley civilization, who
then became the subaltern castes of the Brahminic Hindu caste-system.2 This Western theory,
1
For a brief introduction to the Aryan controversy, see Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins
of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
and The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History, ed. Edwin F. Bryant
and Laurie L. Patton (London/New York: Routledge, 2005). Bryant’s contributions, however,
focus on archeology and linguistics, and neglect the genetic evidence on the Aryan controversy.
For a brief introduction to the genetic evidence, see David Reich, “The Collision That Formed
India,” in Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human
Past (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018): 123-134.
2
Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, Harappa 1946: the defenses/cemetery R37 (New Delhi.
Archeological Society of India, 1947); and The Indus Civilization: Supplementary Volume to the
Cambridge History of India, Third Edition (Cambridge/London/New York/Melbourne:
Cambridge University Press, 1968). The Aryan conquest theory has been widely criticized by
both Western scholars and Indian intellectuals. See also, inter alia, Colin Renfrew, Archeology
and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London/New York: Penguin Books:
called ‘the Aryan conquest theory,’ has been stoutly challenged by Indigenist Indian
intellectuals, especially those associated with the 20th Century Hindu nationalist (‘Hindutva’)
movement of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who argue that there
never was a Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent, and that Ancient Indian
civilization, like Brahminic Hinduism and the Sanskrit language, was an indigenous creation of
the autochthonous inhabitants of the Harappan Indus Valley culture.3 But the Indigenist Aryan
theory that Brahminic Hinduism and the Sanskrit language, like the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans
themselves, were indigenous creations of Ancient Indian civilization, is not simply a fabrication
of Indian intellectuals, but was also proposed by the British archeologist who excavated the
Harappan ruins before Wheeler’s investigations, Sir John Marshall, who “claimed that the Indus
Valley civilization represented an indigenous culture that set the foundation for later Vedic,
Buddhist, and Hindu civilization,” a position supported by Western archeologists like Raymond
and Bridget Allchin, and Jim G. Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein.4

1987): 187-188; Jim G. Schaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein, “South Asian Archeology and the
Myth of Indo-Aryan Invasions,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, ed. Bryant and Patton, 75-104:
79-81; and B.B. Lal, “The Aryan Invasion of India: Perpetuation of a Myth,” ibid., 50-74: 52-53.
Despite attempts by Western scholars to rephrase the Aryan conquest theory as an Aryan
migration theory, Aryan migration theories still presuppose that the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans
dominated the Harappan population and imposed their Sanskrit language and Brahminic Vedic
sacrificial culture upon them. Hence, as Koenraad Elst points out “[t[he Aryan ‘immigration’
theory necessarily implies the hypothesis of military conquest.” “Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan
Non-Invasion Theory,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 234-281: 234-235. But the Aryan
conquest theory can be reframed as an elite domination theory, whereby the Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryans simply replace the Harappan elites as the sovereign caste of the Indus Valley civilization
without excessive violence on the indigenous population. See n. 11 & 14 below.
3
See Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Hindutva (Bombay: S. S. Savarkar, 1923); and Madhav
Sadashiv Golwalkar, We, or, Our Nationhood Defined (Nagpur: Bharat Publications, 1939). For
a brief discussion of the connctions between the Aryan controversy and Hindutva, see Bryant,
“The Aryans in Hindutva Ideology,” in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, 270-275.
Michael Witzel distinguishes three version of the Indigenous Aryan theory: “(1) a mild version,
insisting on the origin of the Rigvedic Indo-Aryans in the Panjab, the ‘autochthonous’ or
indigenous school; [ … ] (2) a more stringent but increasingly popular ''Out of India'' school [ …
] which views the [Indo-]Iranians and even all Indo-Europeans emigrating from the Panjab; to
the (3) most intense version, which has all languages of the world derived from Sanskrit.”
“Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts,” in Electronic
Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 7 No. 3 (2001): 1-115; 28. In his critique of the Hindutva elements
of Dilip K. Chakrabarthi’s Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past (New
Delhi: Munshiuram Manoharlal Publishers, 1997), Lars Martin Fosse argues that the Indigenous
Aryan theory is “a reaction to and a mirror image of the anti-Indian rhetoric of the [British]
colonial period.” “Aryan Past and Post-Colonial Present,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 434-
467; 437. On the origins of the Indigenous Aryan theory among 19th Century British-educated
Brahmins, see Mahdav Deshpande, “Aryan Origins,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 407-433.
4
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, “Culture Change during the Later Harappan Period at Harappan: New
Insights on Vedic Aryan Issues,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 21-49: 21. But see Sir John
Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Civilization: Being an Official Account of the
Archeological Excavations Carried Out by the Government of India between 1922 and 1927
The stark differences between these two theories are certainly enough to stimulate a friendly
debate. But how can the scholarly discussion of a world-historical event that occurred between
three or four thousand years ago still continue to provoke the kind of frenzied scholarly diatribes
and feverish arguments that are evident, for example, in Michael Witzel’s exchanges with N.S.
Rajaram and R. Nagaswamy in The Hindu (Jan. 2002-Jan. 2004),5 and that resulted in Wendy
Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, being charged with “deliberate and
malicious acts intended to outrage the feelings of a religious community,” withdrawn from the
book-markets, and finally pulped by Penguin Books India?6 And if that weren’t enough to stoke
the continuing debate, the Aryan controversy has been revived by the publication, in Western
scientific journals like Nature, of genetic studies strongly supporting the Aryan conquest theory,
which were quickly disputed by Indigenist Indian intellectuals as simply another example of the
false science and fake news of the Western Eurocentric intellectual establishment, with its
staunch commitment to Western imperialism and British colonialism.7 Bipartisanship aside,

(London: Arthur Probsthain, 1931). Marshall argues that “nothing has yet been found either at
Mohenjo-Daro or Harappa that conflicts with the orthodox theory that the Indo-Aryans entered
the Punjab about the middle of the second millennium BC” (112). Cf. Raymond and Bridget
Allchin, The Birth of Indian Civilization: India and Pakistan Before 500 (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968), 323-324; and Jim G. Shaffer and Diana A. Lichtenstein, “South Asian
Archeology and the Myth of the Indo-Aryan Invasions,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 75-104.
5
For a complete index to the Witzel/Rajaram/Nagaswamy controversy, see the supplement to
Witzel’s website, archived at: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/Har-veda.htm
6
See Gargi Gupta, “Penguin India Withdraws Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus,” DNA, February
12, 2014, archived at: http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-penguin-india-withdraws-wendy-
doniger-s-the-hindus-1961315 Charles V. Reed, “Professor Doniger’s Statement Regarding
Withdrawing of her Book by Penguin India,” H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online,
February 13, 2014, archived at: https://networks.h-net.org/node/9857/pdf and Krishnadev
Calamur, “Author of Book Yanked in India Says Move Has Backfired,” The Two-Way:
Breaking News from NPR, February 14, 2014, archived at: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2014/02/14/277043653/author-of-book-yanked-in-india-says-move-has-backfired
7
See Marina Silva et al., “A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily
sex-based dispersals,” in BMC Evolutionary Biology. March 23, 2017, archived at
https://bmcevolbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12862-017-0936-9#Sec2 For
commentary on these studies, see Tony Joseph, “How genetics is settling the Aryan migration
debate,” in The Hindu. June 16/19, 2017, archived at http://www.thehindu.com/sci-
tech/science/how-genetics-is-settling-the-aryan-migration-debate/article19090301.ece Shoaib
Daniyal, “Blood nationalism: Why does Hindutva perceive a mortal danger from the Aryan
migration theory?” in Scroll.in. June 27, 2017, archived at https://scroll.in/article/841740/blood-
nationalism-why-does-hindutva-perceive-a-mortal-danger-from-the-aryan-migration-theory
Tony Joseph, “How We, the Indians, Came to Be,” in The Quint, Feb. 2, 2018, archived at:
https://www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/genomic-study-vedic-aryan-migration-dravidian-
languages-sanskrit and Rohan Ventkataramakrishnan, “Aryan Migration: Everything You Need
to Know About the New Study on Indian Genetics,” in Scroll.in, April 3, 2018. Archived at
https://scroll.in/article/874102/aryan-migration-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-
study-on-indian-genetics By contrast, DNA studies of Indus Valley specimens from the
Harappan necropolis of Rakhigarhi have been interpreted to support the Indigenous Aryan
what’s a disinterested observer, like the current reviewer, to make of the fervent political
passions and hot-blooded arguments inspired in both Western scholars and Indian intellectuals
by the casual mention of the Aryan controversy?

The political stakes of the fractious debates between Western scholars and Indian intellectuals
over the distant origins of Ancient Indian civilization may appear obscure to Western readers.
But those political stakes are stunningly obvious to Indigenist Indian intellectuals, whose
patriotic feelings about the recently-independent Republic of India (est. 1947-1950) are caught
up with the prehistoric origins of Ancient Indian civilization (c. 3500 BCE?), as described in the
Rig Veda, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana, the sacred texts of Hinduism, which are also
crucial to the definition of what’s called ‘Hindutva’ (‘Hindu-ness’), aptly defined by my on-line
dictionary as “[a] great enthusiasm for the Hindu way of life, especially when combined with the
desire for a Hindu state.” For Indigenist Indian intellectuals, Ancient Indian civilization should
be traced back to the glorious heyday of the Harappan Indus Valley culture (c. 3500-1700 BCE),
from which the Sanskrit language and the Hindu religion originated, as has been recently
suggested by Dilip K. Chakrabarti and Makkhan Lal in their History of Ancient India.8 And so
when Western scholars argue that the distant origins of Ancient Indian civilization should instead
be identified with the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion (1500-1200 BCE), which follows the
decline and fall of the Harappan Indus Valley civilization (c. 1900-1500 BCE), they risk
offending Indian scholars’ pride in their indigenous national origins, and reawakening the bitter
feelings of cultural and racial inferiority that sparked the 20th Century Indian independence
movement of Subhas Chandra Bose, Mohandas Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, in the first place.

For Indigenist Indian intellectuals, the mere mention of a Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the
Harappan civilization evokes unpleasant memories of British colonization of the Indian
subcontinent, beginning with Queen Elizabeth’s chartering of the East India Company on
December 31st, 1600, and culminating with the inglorious period of joint British-Indian rule
known as ‘the Raj’ (c. 1757-1885), which witnessed the crushing defeat of the Maratha Empire
by British East India Company troops in The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817-1818. And
these disturbing memories are made especially unpleasant by the recollection that an early

theory, since they show no evidence of an Indo-Aryan admixture. See Anubhuti Vishnoi,
“Harappan site of Rakhigarhi: DNA study finds no Central Asian trace, junks Aryan invasion
theory,” in Economic Times, June 13, 2018. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-
and-nation/harappan-site-of-rakhigarhi-dna-study-finds-no-central-asian-trace-junks-aryan-
invasion-theory/articleshow/64565413.cms But see Hartosh Singh Bal, “Indus Valley People Did
Not Have Genetic Contribution From the Steppes: Head of Ancient DNA Lab Testing
Rakhigarhi Samples,” in The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, April 27, 2018,
archived at: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/vantage/indus-valley-genetic-contribution-steppes-
rakhigarhi The latter article concludes that “the preprint [of the Rakhigarhi findings] observes
that the migration from the steppes to South Asia was the source of the Indo-European languages
in the subcontinent. Commenting on this, Rai [the DNA researcher in the Rakhigarhi study] said,
‘any model of migration of Indo-Europeans from South Asia simply cannot fit the data that is
now available.’” At the current moment, the Rakhigarhi findings have not been published.
8
Dilip K. Chakrabarti and Makkhan Lal, The History of Ancient India (New Delhi: Aryan Books
International, 2014). See also the articles archived under the heading, “Aryan Invasion Theories:
Myth, Fact or Theory,” at: http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-invasions.html
version of the Aryan conquest theory was promulgated the British colonial administrator,
Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his Minute on Indian Education (1835), to buttress the British
ruling-elite in their self-righteous sense of racial superiority over the indigenous population. The
Western scholarly theory of the Proto-Indo-European origins of the Sanskrit language, first
proposed by Sir William (‘Oriental’) Jones in his address to the Asiatick Society of Bengal in
1786, and the Aryan racial theory of the German anthropologist Max Mueller, propounded in his
Lectures on the Science of Language (1861), then quickly became caught up with the Social
Darwinist anthropology and Nietzschean biological race-theories of 19th and 20th Century
Western scholars, which finally reached a catastrophic climax with the genocidal racial program
of Adolf Hitler and the German National Socialist Party that spawned the Nazi Holocaust or
Jewish Shoah (c. 1941-1944).9 And all these discredited theories have cast a darksome shadow
over what might otherwise be a strictly scholarly, scientific study of the distant origins of
Ancient Indian civilization, like Asko Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism.

The Origins of Ancient Indian Civilization:


The Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans and the Harappan Indus Valley Culture

But Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism does not directly address either the Aryan controversy or
the Aryan racial theories that have underwritten Western scholarship on the obscure origins of
Ancient Indian civilization.10 Instead, Parpola attempts to strike a scholarly middle-ground in
9
See Bryant, “The Aryans and Colonial and Missionary Discourse,” and “German Aryanism,” in
The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, 21-35. For a more extended treatment, see Stefan
Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, tr. Sonia Wichmann
(Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). On the connections of these Western
theories and Hindutva, see Romila Thapar, “The Theory of the Aryan Race and India: History
and Politics,” in Social Scientist, Vol. 24, No. 1/3 (January/March. 1996): 3-29. For an example
of the problems created by applying 18th and 19th Century Western European racial typologies to
Sanskrit literature, see Arthur Berriedale Keith, “The Mingling of Races and Cultures,” in The
Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and the Upanishads, Harvard Oriental Series Vol. 31
(Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1925): 51-55. On the persistence of Aryan racial
thinking in the Aryan controversy, see Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans Been Identified in
the Prehistoric Skeletal Record of South Asia? Biological Anthropology and the Concept of
Ancient Races,” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture, and
Ethnicity, ed. George Erdosy. Series: Indian Philology and South Asian Studies, ed. Albrecht
Weller and Michael Witzel, Vol. 1 (Berlin/New York: Walter DeGruyter, 1995): 32-66.
10
Aryan racial theories are based upon the un-scientific concept of a pristine, pure racial type,
which was combined with a strict correlation between race and language to support 18th and 19th
Century Western European nationalist imperialism. This Western scientific concept has largely
been replaced, in contemporary socio-biology, by the concept of populations of more-or-less
mixed tribal, ethnic, or genetic backgrounds, which cannot be strictly correlated with a distinct
archeological complex or a specific language. A series of genomic studies have shown that the
Ancient Indian population was composed of two, four, five, or seven ancestral sources: 1) an
Ancestral Northern Indian (ANI) population, composed of Indus Valley (Harappan) sources and
a Steppe Middle-Late Bronze Age (Steppe_MLBA) (Indo-European) population; and 2) an
Ancestral South Indian (ASI) (Dravidian?) population, composed of Ancient South Indian
hunter-gatherer tribes combined with Iranian agriculturalists from the Zagros Mountains; along
these bitter debates by describing the diverse origins of Ancient Indian civilization from both Rig
Vedic Indo-Aryan and Harappan sources, each of which, Parpola contends, played an important
role in the subsequent emergence of Brahminic Hinduism, which took place sometime between
the Early Rig-Vedic period (c. 1000-500 BCE) and the Post-Vedic period of the Upanishads and
Vedanta (c. 500-300 BCE), from which the Bhakti devotional schools of Shaivism and
Vaishnavism emerged in the first millennium of the common era (c. 300 BCE to 500 CE).11 And

with admixtures of 3) East Asian-related Tibeto-Burman (Sino-Tibetan-speaking) groups and 4)


Ancient Austroasiatic (Munda-speaking) groups. The Indo Aryans were a Steppe_MLBA (Indo-
European) group, composed of Western Siberian hunter-gatherers combined with a Western
Eurasian Neolithic agriculturalist population. See David Reich et al, “Reconstructing Indian
Population History,” in Nature, Vol. 461 (24 September 2009): 489-495, archived at:
http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reichlab/Reich_Lab/Datasets_files/2009_Nature_Reich_India.pd
f Analabha Basu et al. “Genomic reconstruction of the history of extant populations reveals five
ancestral components and a complex structure,” in PNAS, Vol. 113, No. 6 (February 9, 2016):
1594-1500, archived at: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/6/1594 and Vagheesh M. Narasimhan
et al, “Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia,” bioRxiv, March 31st, 2018, archived at
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/03/31/292581 In the case of the Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryans, Witzel observes: “we may regard the ‘importation’ of Indo-Aryan into the Subcontinent
as the outcome of the influx of a group of clans, tribes or people who spoke early Vedic and had
an Indo-Iranian, or rather Indo-Aryan, civilization [ … ]. By the time they reached the
Subcontinent they were already racially mixed [ … ] and may not have looked very different
from the modern inhabitants of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands.” “Early Indian History: Linguistic
and Textual Parameters,” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, 85-125: 113.
11
As employed here, ‘Brahminic Hinduism’ refers to the esoteric religion of the Sanskrit-
speaking upper castes, based largely upon the Vedas and Upanishads, as opposed to what’s
called the ‘village Hinduism’ of the Prakrit-speaking (Sanskrit dialect-speaking) or Dravidian-
speaking lower castes, which incorporates elements of folk or popular religions, sometimes,
according to Parpola, surviving from the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes and Harappan Indus-
Valley culture. ‘Brahminic Vedic Hinduism’ is specifically associated with the sacrificial
ritualism of the four Vedas (the Rig Veda, Atharva Veda, Sama Veda, and White and Black Yajur
Veda), which is predominantly derived from the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan culture, although the
Atharva Veda and the Black Yajur Veda also incorporate elements of the Pre-Rig Vedic left-hand
magical thinking of the Proto-Indo-Iranian tribes. Brahminic Vedic Hinduism then begins with
the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the Punjab and the Indus Valley (c. 1500-1200 BCE?) and
culminates with the Upanishads and Vedanta (c. 800-200 BCE), and is followed by the rise of
Buddhism and Jainism (c. 500-400 BCE) and the Mauryan Empire (322-287 BCE). Following
the Buddhist Mauryan Empire, there was a resurgence of Brahminic and non-Brahminic
Hinduism in the Vikram (58 BCE-200 BCE) period, emerging from the Dravidian-speaking
lower castes of Southern India, associated with the Bhakhti devotional movements of
Vaishnavism and Shaivism, worshipping the largely non-Vedic gods Vishnu and Shiva, and
culminating with the Gupta Empire (c. 240-554 CE). Although Vishnu appears some few times
in the Rig Veda (cf. RV 1.154.5, 7.99, 10.15.3), he gains in importance in the Vaishnava
Upanishads (the Narayana Upanishad, Mahanarayana Upanishad, etc.) and the Puranas (the
Bhagavata Purana, the Vishnu Purana, etc.), and is often worshipped through his eighth avatar,
Krishna, as in the Bhagavad Gita, while Shaivism is often traced to Harappan sources through
the Pashupati (‘Lord of the Beasts’) seal from Mohenjo-Daro, which depicts a bull-horned god-
as opposed to the more inflammatory, highly-charged political question that fuels the Aryan
controversy---viz., ‘Is Ancient Indian civilization Harappan or Indo-Aryan?’---Parpola’s
question, in his first chapter, “Defining ‘Hindu’ and ‘Hinduism’,” is the more superficially
innocuous “where did the many, indeed dominant, elements of Hinduism that are not Vedic
come from?” (RH, 4): a somewhat awkwardly-phrased question that might simply add to the
confusion created by the strident debates that rage around what’s called ‘the Aryan controversy.’

The controversial questions that concern Western and Indian scholars caught up in the Aryan
controversy are more like the following: What are the prehistoric sources of Brahminic
Hinduism and the Ancient Indian civilization? Did world history really begin in Ancient India, as
Western (‘Eurocentric’) scholars argue, with the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the
Harappan Indus Valley civilization (c.1500-1200 BCE), which brought the Sanskrit language
and Brahminic Vedic culture into the Punjab and Northwest India? Or did there already exist, as
Indigenist Indian scholars have stubbornly countered, an Indigenous Aryan civilization in
Ancient India (c. 5000 BCE? 7000 BCE?), which carried out an ‘Indo-centric’ version of the
Aryan conquest, only in reverse---beginning, not from the Central Asian steppes which were the
Proto-Indo-European homeland, but from Ancient India itself, from which the Aryan race and
the PIE languages spread to Greece, Rome, and Western Europe? Did the Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryans really migrate from the Caspian-Pontic steppes to the Bactria-Margiana Archeological
Complex (the BMAC) (c. 2300-1500 BCE), over the Khyber and Bolan Passes into the Punjab,
and then conquer the Harappan Indus Valley culture (c. 1500-1200 BCE), as Western advocates
of the Aryan conquest theory argue? Or did the Harappan culture (c. 3500-1400 BCE) not only
survive the Aryan conquest, but even eventually, a thousand years later, finally absorb the Aryan
invaders, with their Sanskrit language and their Brahminic religion of blood sacrifice (yajna)
characteristic of the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas, into the ‘Hindu synthesis’ of Brahminic Vedic
sacrificial culture (yajna) with the fetishistic image-worship (puja) of the Puranas (c. 100 BCE-
500 CE) and the devotional (bhakti) religion of the Vaishnavite and Shaivite sects (c. 100 BCE
to present), which are the sacramental ritual basis of Brahminic Hinduism?

These are the scholarly questions that Parpola’s book not only raises, but often succeeds in
answering, if not always to the satisfaction of the two embattled parties to the Aryan controversy.
But there is really no doubt that the Aryan controversy will continue to provoke both Western
scholars and Indian intellectuals to pose counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments to
Parpola’s theories on the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) languages, on the splitting of
the Proto-Indo-Iranian (PIIr) and Proto-Indo-Aryan (PIA) tribes, on the intertribal warfare
between the Proto-Indo-Aryans and the Proto-Indo-Iranians during their tribal migrations into
Transoxania, the BMAC, and the Punjab, on the successive waves of Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan
invasion of the Indus civilization, and, finally, on the assimilation of both the PIA and PIIr tribes
and the Harappan culture into the polymorphous, polytheistic, multilingual, and multiethnic
culture of Brahminic Hinduism. Parpola makes a strong case for the significant contributions of
both the Early Aryans and the Harappan Indus Valley culture to the diverse origins of Ancient

figure seated in the yogic posture of Shiva. If the Aryan conquest theory is correct, Brahminic
Hinduism results from the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the Harappan culture (c. 1500-
1200 BCE). But if Parpola’s theory that ‘village Hinduism’ incorporates elements of the Pre-Rig
Vedic tribal religions and Mesopotamian fertility-cults is correct, then Brahminic Hinduism can
be dated back to the glorious heyday of the Harappan Indus Valley culture (c. 3500-2500 BCE).
Indian civilization. And even if he does not quite succeed in actually synthesizing these two
superficially diametrically opposed influences into a single monolithic entity called ‘Hinduism,’
his book is a strong contribution to the scholarly field that can be read with satisfaction by
specialists and non-specialists alike who are willing to make the effort to follow his often
difficult arguments, which are the result of fifty years of intensive study of the Early Aryans and
the Indus civilization, spread over some fifty-odd scholarly articles and half-a-dozen books, now
condensed for the first time into the slim volume of The Roots of Hinduism.12

The Proto-Indo European Homeland and the Proto-Indo-Iranian Tribal Migrations:


Philology, Archeology, and Ancient Indian Prehistory

That said, Parpola’s book is still not an easy read, especially for the non-specialist (like myself)
who lacks a strong scholarly background in Ancient Indian archeology, in the Brahminic Vedic
texts, and in the Proto-Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, and Dravidian languages
(besides, of course, Classical Sanskrit) which are Parpola’s specialty. Contemporary scholarship
on the breakup of the Late-PIE languages is dauntingly complicated, and Parpola does not
always succeed in making this scholarship easily accessible to the non-specialist, despite his
obvious desire to do so. Still, there appears to be an emergent consensus between Western
scholars like J.P. Mallory and David Anthony, Michael Witzel, Elena E. Kuz’mina, and Parpola,
on the origins and genesis of the PIA and PIIr tribes who were the distant ancestors of the Rig
Vedic Indo-Aryans, even if there are still subtle differences that must be worked out before a
complete itinerary of the Proto-Indo-Aryan tribal migrations can be arrived at.13 According to
12
Hereafter cited as RH.
13
See, inter alia, J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology, and
Myth (New York; Thames & Hudson, 1989/2003); David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel,
and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Michael Witzel, “Autochthonous Aryans?;” op.
cit., n. 3; and Elena Kuz’mina, Origins of the Indo-Iranians: The Leiden Etymological
Dictionary Series, Vol. 3, ed. J.P. Mallory (Leiden: Brill, 2007). These scholars support what is
called ‘The Steppe Hypothesis,” which argues that the PIE languages were carried by the Proto-
Indo-European tribes from the PIE homeland in the Caspian-Pontic steppes (c. 5000 BCE) into
Western and Central Europe, Persia and India (c. 4200-1200 BCE), in contrast to those Western
scholars who espouse ‘The Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis,” who locate the PIE
homeland in Anatolia (c. 7000-5000 BCE) and argue that the dispersal of the Western Indo-
European languages followed the spread of Neolithic farming techniques by ‘demic diffusion’
through Western and Central Europe (5000-3000 BCE) and into Persia and India (2000-1200
BCE). See Colin Renfrew, Archeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Colin Renfrew and Peter Bellwood, Examining
the Farming/ Language Dispersal Hypothesis (London: Macdonald Institute for Archeological
Research, 2002); and Jared Diamond and Peter Bellwood, “Farmers and Their Languages: The
First Expansions,” in Science 300 (2003): 597-603. Renfrew designates the two hypotheses
‘Hypothesis A: The Wave of Advance Hypothesis’ (the Neolithic farming/language dispersal
hypothesis) and ‘Hypothesis B: The Elite Domination Hypothesis’ (the Aryan
conquest/migration theory). See Archeology and Language, 124-133. 189-210. For a
comparative study of the status of the two hypotheses in contemporary scholarship, see J.P.
Mallory, “Twenty-First Century Clouds over the Indo-European Homeland,” in Journal of
this scholarly consensus, the Early-PIE languages emerged among the Skelya pastoralists of the
Sredny Stog II culture, on the Caspian-Pontic steppes during the Late Neolithic/Eneolithic period
(c. 5000-3500 BCE), and then spread to the Tripolye-Cucuteni culture (c. 4200-3400 BCE)
between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, where a flourishing population of Neolithic
agriculturalists still existed, as a surviving bastion of what Marija Gimbutas called ‘Old Europe,’
which had arisen with the spread of Neolithic farmers from Mesopotamia and Anatolia across
Greece, Rome, and Western and Central Europe between roughly 6500 and 3500 BCE.14

The Skelya pastoralists were staunchly war-like, semi-nomadic pastoralist tribes, who carried
scepter-like horse-head maces as symbols of their sovereignty and drove large herds of semi-
domesticated horses which they slaughtered (and heartily ate!) in sacrificial rituals like the Rig
Vedic ashvamedha (‘horse sacrifice’). David Anthony’s argument that the Skelya pastoralists
actually rode their steppe-horses is disputed by Parpola, who believes that the Proto-Indo-
Europeans simply harnessed their half-wild horses to the clumsy, solid-wheeled wagons which
were the Early-PIE trademark, as evidenced by the prevalence of words for ‘horse,’ ‘wheel,’ and
‘wagon’ in the PIE lexicon (*ekwos, *kweklos, and *kwekle, respectively).15 But the Skelya
pastoralists evidently succeeded in conquering the Tripolye-Cucuteni peoples without destroying
their indigenous culture, while still imposing their PIE culture, language, and religion on them,16
in what perhaps became a predatory, tributary relationship between the Skelya pastoralists and

Language Relationship No. 9 (2013): 145-154. https://www.proto-indo-european.ru/ie-


cradle/_pdf/clouds-over-ie-homelands-nallory.pdf
14
Marija Alkseikaite Gimbutas The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500 to 3500 BC:
Myths and Cult Images (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974/2007). The
Gimbutas/Mallory/Anthony theory of the PIE migrations from the Caspian-Pontic steppes is
opposed to the Renfrew/Bellwood theory that the PIE languages spread with the Neolithic
farmers from Anatolia across Central and Western Europe.
15
See Anthony, “‘Wheel’: An Example of Semantic Reconstruction,” in The Horse, the Wheel,
and Language, 33-36; and “The Domestication of the Horse and the Origins of Riding,” 193-
224. Cf. Parpola. “The Coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the Cultural and Ethnic
Identity of the Dasas,” in Studia Orientalia Vol. 64 (1988): 195-302; 198-200;
https://journal.fi/store/article/view/49745 and “Formation of the Indo-European and Uralic
(Finno-Ugric) Language Families in the Light of Archeology: Revised and Integrated ‘Total’
Correlations,” in A Linguistic Map of Prehistoric Northern Europe (Helsinki: Mémoires de la
Société Finno-Ougrienne 266, 2012): 119–184; 123.
https://www.sgr.fi/sust/sust266/sust266_parpola.pdf
16
See Wolfgang Haak et al, “Massive Migration form the Steppes Was the Source of the Indo-
European Languages,” in Nature 522 (11 June 2016): 207-211. The culture-and-language
dispersal process whereby a sovereign ruling-elite succeeds in imposing its language upon a
subaltern culture through a slightly less violent version of elite dominance, while still adopting
the material culture of the indigenous population, has been dubbed by J.P. Mallory ‘the
kulturkugel hypothesis.’ See “A European perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia,” in The
Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. H. Mair, 1 (Washington
and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum):
175–201. See also Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 343, 498 n. 7; Kuz’mina,
Origin of the Indo-Iranians, 325; and Witzel, “The Home of the Aryans,” 8, archived at:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/AryanHome.pdf
the Neolithic Old Europeans, which emerged during the Middle-PIE culture-period (c. 4000-
3800 BCE).17 What happens next, however, is a subject of controversy, since Mallory and
Anthony argue that the Middle-PIE languages continued to spread eastward across the Caspian-
Pontic steppes, through the Majkop culture region (c. 3800-3300 BCE), past what Anthony calls
‘the Yamnaya horizon’ (c. 3300 BCE), before the Late-PIE languages finally began to splinter
into separate branches: spreading southward into Anatolia, to become Palaic, Luwian, and
Lucian in Asia Minor (c. 3500-3000 BCE); northeastward across the Central Asian steppes to
become Tocharian in the Afanesyevo culture of the Western Altai (c. 3300-2500 BCE);
southwestward to become Italo-Celtic in Western Europe and the Italic Peninsula (c. 3300 BCE);
westward to become Proto-Germanic in Central Europe (c. 3300 BCE); northwestward toward
the Baltics to become Balto-Slavic (c. 2500 BCE); and finally southeastward to become Pre-PIIr
and Pre-PIA in Central Asia, India and Persia (c. 2500-2200 BCE).18 Parpola argues, contrarily,
that the breakup of Late-PIE had already taken place with the split between the western and
eastern branches of the Skelya-Tripolye culture, prior to 3400 BCE.19 This early split between
the Pre-PIIr and Pre-PIA tribes was then passed through the east/west division in the Yamnaya
culture between the Pre-Proto-Indo-Iranian-Armenian-Greek branch of the PIE tribes, who
continued their migrations through the Babeco (2100-1850 BCE) and Srubnya (1850-1450 BCE)
regions, before reaching Greece, Persia, and Asia Minor; and the Pre-Proto-Indo-Aryan branch
of the PIE tribes, who continued their migrations into the Abashevo (2300-1850 BCE), Sintashta
(2100-1800 BCE), and Petrovka (1800-1450 BCE) culture-areas, where the characteristic
technology of swift spoke-wheeled war-chariots, bridled-and-bitted war-horses, and brazen
weaponry was finally invented by the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans.

During the Late Skelya-Tripolye period, on the brink of the Yamnaya horizon (c. 3300 BCE),
Parpola argues, “late PIE disintegrate[d] explosively in all directions” (RH, 46),20 perhaps as a
result (although Parpola doesn’t say so) of some wholesale tribal/civil war between the diverse
branches of the PIE super-tribe,21 which sent the Anatolians fleeing southward 2000 kilometers
across the Caucasus Mountains into Asia Minor, the Tocharians fleeing northeastward 1500
17
On the establishment of a predatory/tributary relationship between a semi-nomadic warrior
tribe (in this case, the Xiongnu) and a sedentary population (the Chinese empire) see Nicola
DiCosmo, “State Formation and Periodization in Inner Asian History,” Journal of World History
10:1 (Spring 1999): 1-40, and Ancient China and its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in
East Asian History (Cambridge/ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18
See Anthony, “The Western Indo-European Languages,” in The Horse, The Wheel, and
Language, 340-370.
19
See also Parpola, “Formation of the Indo-European and Uralic (Finno-Ugric) Language
Families,” 125-127.
20
See also Parpola, ibid., 127-128.
21
Alternatively, considering the factors behind the Steppe PIE invasion of Western and Central
Europe which displaced Gimbutas’ ‘Old Europeans,’ Anthony suggests: “’It would imply a
continuing strongly negative push-factor from the steppes.’ [ … ] Or, [Anthony] says it could be
the beginning of cultures that sent out bands of men to establish new politically aligned colonies
in distant lands, as in later groups of Romans or Vikings.” Ann Gibbons, “Thousands of Bronze
Age Horsemen May Have Swept into Europe, Transforming the Local Population,” in Science,
February 21, 2017, archived at: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/thousands-horsemen-
may-have-swept-bronze-age-europe-transforming-local-population
kilometers across the Central Asian steppes to the Western Altai and Mongolia, and the Proto-
Indo-Iranians and Pre-Proto-Indo-Aryans fleeing southeastwards toward Central Asia,
Transoxania, and the BMAC, where they conquered, displaced, or assimilated the indigenous
inhabitants, before continuing onward into the Punjab and Indus Valley, where they finally
encountered the Harappan culture, at the climactic end-point of their Pre-PIA tribal migrations. It
is now fashionable among Western scholars to reduce the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion of the
Indus civilization to a “gradual trickling-in” (Michael Witzel’s words) of the PIA tribes, in
successive waves, into the Punjab and the Sapta Sindhu (‘the Seven Rivers’: the Indus Valley),22
rather than portraying it as a sweeping, whirlwind conquest of the Harappan culture, as did Sir
Mortimer Wheeler, when he attributed the destruction of the Indus civilization to the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryans. But these currently fashionable theories cannot satisfactorily explain how the Rig
Vedic Indo-Aryans somehow managed to impose their Brahminic sacrificial culture and their
Sanskrit language on the surviving remnants of the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans and the Harappan
population, without the catastrophic violence and brutal slaughter characteristic, for example, of
the Spanish and British conquests of the New World, or the Greek, Persian, Muslim, and Mongol
conquests of the Indian subcontinent (c. 326 BCE to 1327 CE), during which turbulent period
India was invaded (by conservative estimate) seventeen or eighteen times by foreign armies,
each of which left its scars in Ancient and Classic Indian cultural history. How, then, could the
Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion, if it occurred as described, have failed to leave its marks in the
archeological record of Ancient Indian civilization? But Western scholars are still baffled by the
absence of evidence of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion among the excavated ruins of the
Indus Valley culture, which currently show no signs of the characteristic PIA trademarks
(chariots, wheels, and horses).23 Unless, of course, the “strangely contorted” skeletons
22
Witzel, “Early Indian History,” 114. In a similar vein, Elst sardonically suggests that “the
Aryans secretively stole their way into India, careful not to leave any traces.” “Linguistic
Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 234-281: 236.
23
Mark Kenoyer observes: “There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or
mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan phase, about 1900 B.C.
and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 B.C.” Ancient Cities of the Indus
Valley Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press.1998): 174. And Mallory also admits,
“there [is] no credible archaeological evidence to demonstrate, through elite dominance or any
other mechanism, the type of language shift required to explain, for example, the arrival and
dominance of the Indo-Aryans in India.” “Twenty-First Century Clouds over Indo-European
Homelands,” 150. See notes 10 & 12 supra. While also admitting the current dearth of
archeological evidence of a Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion, Witzel explains this absence of
supporting evidence by emphasizing the comparatively smaller number of the Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryans and their subsequent assimilation into Harappan culture. “Indocentrism: Autochthonous
Visions of Ancient India,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 341-404: 347. The discovery of what
appear to be chariots and brazen weapons at the Harappan ruins of Sinauli has perhaps called
into question these observations, although it has not been determined whether the Sinauli
chariots are Harappan or Indo-Aryan. See Sandeep Rai, “ASI Unearths ‘First-Ever’ Physical
Evidence of Chariots in Copper-Bronze Age,” in The Times of India, June 6, 2018, archived at:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/meerut/asi-unearths-first-ever-physical-evidence-of-
chariots-in-copper-bronze-age/articleshow/64469616.cms and Deeksha Bhardwaj, “ASI Finds
Corpses, ‘Chariots,’ at Contemporary Harappan Site, Royalty Angle Being Explored,” in The
Print, July 1, 2018, archived at: https://theprint.in/governance/asi-finds-corpses-chariots-at-
discovered among the rubble and debris of Mohenjo Daro by Sir Mortimer Wheeler can be taken
as evidence of the brutal massacres accompanying the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion?24

What is seldom emphasized enough, however, is that, from the earliest phases of the PIE tribal
migrations, the PIIr and PIA tribes were in a virtually constant state of sacrificial warfare against
each other (and against themselves!), which internecine family/clan feuds continued throughout
the several thousand years of their tribal migrations, making it difficult to discern, precisely,
which of these PIIr/PIA tribes is Proto-Indo-Iranian, and which Proto-Indo-Aryan. Or vice versa.
And this problem becomes especially bothersome during the three waves of PIIr/PIA migration
into Central Asia and the BMAC, when the PIIr/PIA tribes clashed and battled with each other
over subtle differences of sacrificial protocol and religious terminology (e.g., Sanskrit
yajna=Avestan yazna), with each accusing the other of non-Aryan sacrificial heresies and non-
Aryan dialectal speech, as is evident in ‘the family books’ (Mandalas II-VII) of the Rig Veda.
(See especially RV IV:16, VII:6, VII:18, VII:19, VII:33 etc.; Parpola, RH, 94-96.) According to
Parpola, the stereotypical enemies of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans (the Arya), known as the Dasa,
Dasyus, or Pani, were really not the Harappan Indus Valley peoples, but instead were the Proto-
Indo-Iranians or Pre-Proto-Indo-Aryans, who had arrived sometime earlier in the BMAC and the
Indus Valley directly from the Sintashta-Petrovka culture, during the first wave of PIIr/PIA tribal
migrations, and had then ‘gone native’ by assimilating the indigenous non-Aryan culture of the
Dravidians, Elamites, and Harappans, while still preserving certain archaic elements of the
PIIr/PIA religion.25 The Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, by contrast, had migrated somewhat later to the
Andronovo/Federovo region of Central Asia, where they developed the distinctive culture of Rig
Vedic soma-rituals and Agni/Indra-worship that distinguished them from the Proto-Indo-Iranians
or Pre-Proto-Indo-Aryans, before entering the Sapta Sindhu and the Punjab, in a second wave of
PIA invasions of the Harappan Indus Valley. But even after the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans had
finally defeated the Dasyus and Pani (the Pre-Rig Vedic PIIr tribes) and sent the Proto-Indo-
Iranians packing off across the Central Asian steppes, and the Bharata tribal chieftain Divodasa
and the Puru chieftain Purukutsa had triumphantly led the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans across the
Bolan Pass into the Punjab and the Indus Valley, these self-perpetuating tribal wars and
internecine family/clan feuds still continued, with the sacrificial warfare between the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryan sub-tribes recorded in the Rig Veda. The climactic clash came with ‘The Battle of
the Ten Kings’ (RV VII:18, 33, 82), when the upstart Bharata clan, led by their charismatic war-
chief, Sudas, decisively defeated the competing chieftain, Trasadasyu, and the Puru sub-tribe,
before both tribes together migrated to the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan homeland, the Kurukshetra, in
the Ganges-Yamuna Doab, where they established the Kuru-Panchala State, with its Sanskritized
sacrificial canon and its Brahminic caste-system, as described in the Rig Vedic ‘Hymn of Man,’

contemporary-harappan-site-royalty-angle-being-explored/66363/ Witzel observes that “the


word ‘chariot’” in Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan culture “implies [that] it was a lightweight (30 kg),
horse-drawn vehicle with two spoked wheels, mounted by one or two riders [ … ]. This is clearly
not the case in the recent find of ‘chariots’ at Sinauli that have full [i.e., solid, spoke-less] wheels
and will have been drawn by bullocks, like the Harappan toy carts and the massive Daimabad
bronze race cart.” “Beyond the Flight of the Falcon: Early Aryans ‘Within’ and Outside India,”
unpublished ms. for the Romila Thapar Conference 2018, 3.
24
Wheeler, The Indus Civilization, 130.
25
See Parpola. “The Coming of the Aryans,” 208-229.
the Purushasuktah (RV 10:90), which is the foundational charter of the Kuru-Panchala State.26

And so, the critical reader might ask, after the establishment of the Bharata-Puru tribal
confederation (c. 900 BCE) and the Kuru-Panchala State (c. 800 BCE), did the perpetual inter-
tribal wars and bitter family/clan feuds between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans and their Pre-Rig
Vedic tribal enemies therefore finally cease? Evidently not! Because, according to Parpola’s
argument (RH, 145-149), there was yet another third wave of PIIr/PIA tribal migrations, which
brought the Early Iranian horsemen from the Central Asian steppes charging into the Punjab and
Northwest India, to clash with the previous two waves of (Pre-)Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, in yet
another episode of the schismatic tribal wars and fractious family/clan feuds which are
characteristic of the PIIr/PIA tribal migrations. And the fierce horse-mounted steppe-warriors
who carried out this third wave of ‘aryanization’ or ‘sanskritization’ of Ancient India then
continued charging onward, ever onward, across the subcontinent, where the PIIr/PIA tribes
finally encountered, and, of course, clashed with the Dravidian and Munda inhabitants of
Southern India and Sri Lanka. This third wave of Post-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of
Ancient India is then described, according to Parpola, in the battle between the Pandavas and the
Kauravas in the Mahabharata, and in the Pandava takeover of Sri Lanka depicted in the
Ramayana, although Parpola’s thesis has been staunchly challenged by Wendy Doniger, who
argues against taking the Ancient Indian epics as evidence of an Aryan conquest.27 Following
from this description of the PIIr/PIA tribal migrations, then, Parpola argues that the difference
between those Rig Vedic hymns associated with the Bharata-Puru tribes, and those associated
with the Kanvas and Angirasas---like the difference, say, between the Rig Veda and the Atharva
Veda---is attributable to the difference between the two distinct waves of PIIr/PIA tribal
migration. The first wave of Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribal migration, associated with the
Kanva and Angirasas tribes, stems from the Sintashta-Petrovka culture (c. 2100-1800 BCE), with
its distinctive emphasis on spectacular horse-sacrifices and royal chariot-burials in sacrificial
kurgan-graves. This first wave of PIIr-PIA tribal migrations is then represented by those Rig
Vedic hymns dedicated to the Nasatyas or Asvins, the divine charioteer-twins, and the Adityas,
Mitra and Varuna. The distinctive doubling of sovereign deities, like the Asvins or Mitra-
Varuna, in the Pre-Rig Vedic hymns, reflects the Sintashta cult of dual kingship, with the
sacrificial warrior-king (the kshatriya-raja) and his charioteer-priest (the brahmin-purohita)
standing in for the two highest castes of Brahminic Vedic society: the brahmins (priests) and the
kshatriyas (warriors), who are the charismatic embodiments of Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan caste-
sovereignty, later appearing as the sovereign castes in the Brahminic Hindu caste-system.

The Pre-Rig Vedic sacrificial hymns of the Kanva and Angirasas tribes are then distinguishable,
Parpola argues, from the Rig Vedic hymns to the Aryan war-god, Indra, and his favorite
intoxicating beverage, Soma, stemming from the second wave of PIIr/PIA migrations. This
second wave of PIIr/PIA migrations into the BMAC and the Punjab is then also represented by
those Rig Vedic hymns dedicated to the Bharata-Puru chieftains and the Five Tribes, whose
ancestral origins stem from the Andronovo/Federovo culture of the Central Asian steppes and the
Western Altai Mountains, and are associated with the Soma cult of the Rig Vedic war-god, Indra.
26
Witzel, “Early Sanskritization: Origins and Development of the Kuru State,” in Recht, Staat
und Verwaltung im klassischen Indien, ed. B. Koelver (Munich: R. Oldenburgh, 1997): 27-52
27
Wendy Doniger, “Another Great Story,” in Inference, Vol. 3 Issue 2 (2017). Archived at:
http://inference-review.com/article/another-great-story
This distinctly non-PIE cult was adopted by the second wave of Proto-Indo-Iranians in Central
Asia, giving the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans the charismatic charge of sacrificial warrior-frenzy that
enabled them to defeat the Dasas, Dasyus, or Pani, who were the stubborn survivors of the first
wave of PIIr/PIA tribal migrations. The subsequent incorporation of the Pre-Rig Vedic sacrificial
hymns of the Kanvas and Angirasas into Mandalas I, VIII, and IX of the Rig Veda represents an
attempt by the Kuru-Panchala State to assimilate the surviving remnants of the first wave of
PIIr/PIA tribal migrations into the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribal confederation, and to subordinate
their Pre-Rig Vedic sacrificial rituals into a Brahminic sacrificial orthopraxy dedicated to Agni,
Indra, and Soma. The Atharva Veda then appears as a compilation of the sacrificial hymns of the
Kanvas and Angirasas (whose brahmins were called the vratyas), with the Angirasas especially
associated with the black magic sorcery practices of the Black Yajur Veda and subsequent ‘left-
hand Tantrism.’28 Finally, Parpola assigns the Great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, to the third wave of PIIr/PIA migration, which is evident in the excavations of the
Megalith Culture that existed in the central and southern subcontinent in the first millennium
BCE, with the Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata standing in for the Eastern Iranian horsemen
who came charging into the Punjab and Northwest India after 800 BCE. This Post-Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryan invasion of Southern India and Sri Lanka must have taken place, Parpola argues,
sometime between 750 and 350 BCE, after which point something like the Vaishnava-Bhagavata
religion of the Upanishads and Vedanta began to emerge, combining elements of the Rig Vedic
sacrificial cult with surviving elements of the Mesopotamian/Harappan fertility-goddess religion
and the Puranic bhakti cults of Shiva, Vishnu, and Ma Devi (c. 100-600 CE), in what finally
emerged as Brahminic Hinduism. In the Post-Rig Vedic period of the Upanishads and Vedanta
(‘The End of the Vedas’: c. 600-300 BCE), the Rig Vedic sacrificial religion (yajna), which
celebrated elaborate rituals like the Brahminic ashvamedha and the Ancient Indian rajasuya, was
gradually replaced by the Mesopotamian fertility-goddess-rituals and Harappan devotional
practices dedicated to the non-Rig Vedic deities, Shiva, Vishnu, and Ma Devi, along with the
fetishistic idol-worship (puja) of statuesque cult-images, like the Shiva-linga (phallus) and the
Devi-yoni (vagina), which are still characteristic of contemporary ‘village Hinduism.’29

Can Brahminic Hinduism be Considered a Synthesis


of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan and the Mesopotamian/Harappans Religion?

28
On the vratyas, see also Parpola, “The Coming of the Aryans,” 251-256.
29
On the evidence of linga and yoni in the Harappan Indus Valley culture, see Parpola, “Bronze
Age Bactria and Indian Religion,” in Studia Orientalia Electronica, Vol. 70 (1993): 81-88; 81.
Doniger notes that “[t]he linga […] is well known throughout India, a signifier that is understood
across barriers of caste and language, a linga franca, if you will.” The Hindus: An Alternative
History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009): 22. Although some may have taken offense at
this off-color joke, it has been repeated by, inter alia, K.R.A Narasiah, “Lots to Delight and
Enough to Provoke,” The Hindu, September 2, 2013, updated June 2, 2016, archived at:
http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/lots-to-delight-and-enough-to-
provoke/article5086266.ece and Shoba Narayan, “The Real Reason Wendy Doniger’s Book on
Hindus Was Banned in India: It Wasn’t Boring Enough,” Quartz, March 12, 2014, archived at:
https://qz.com/187020/the-real-reason-wendy-donigers-book-on-hindus-was-banned-in-india-its-
not-boring-enough/ Professor Doniger’s discussion of these fertility symbols, however, appears
to have neglected the yoni, as also evidently did the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans. See below.
The Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan religion, however, was strongly male-centered, dedicated as it was to
the worship of predominantly masculine deities (Agni and Indra, Mitra and Varuna, the Asvins,
the Maruts, Rudra, et al.), devoted to the bloody observances of sacrifice and warfare, and
practicing spectacular rituals (the ashvamedha and rajasuya) which celebrated the charismatic
sovereignty of the sacrificial priests (the brahmins) and the sacred warrior-chiefs (the kshatriyas)
over the subaltern caste of herdsmen (the vaisya) in the Brahminic Vedic caste system. The Pre-
Rig Vedic Mesopotamian and Harappan religions, by contrast, were staunchly female-centered,
if not actually matriarchal, being dedicated to the worship of distinctly feminine deities, whether
the Mesopotamian mother-goddesses (Sumerian Inana, Babylonian Ishtar, Phoenician Astarte,
Semitic Asherah), the Early Harappan goddesses (Nanaya or Nana), or the Hindu goddesses
(Durga, Kali, Ma Devi), who are associated with fertility, birth, sex, and death.30 These
Mesopotamian/Harappan fertility-cults also practiced sacrificial rituals like the bloody water-
buffalo sacrifices to the fierce warrior-goddess, Durga (the mahishashura-mardini, ‘the killer of
the water buffalo-demon’), which celebrated the biennial renewal of the earth through the sacred
marriage of the Great Goddess (Ishtar, Astarte) and her Hindu counterparts (Devi, Durga, Kali),
with her young male consorts (Thamuz, Adonis), and climaxed with the sacrificial killing of the
water-buffalo-demon (the mahisha-ashura), whose shed blood was spilled upon the earth to
fertilize the Great Goddess’s womb.31 Considering the stark difference between the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryan sacrificial religion (yajna) and the Mesopotamian/Harappan devotional religion
(puja), it is difficult to believe that the first encounters between these divergent cultures could
have taken place without the shockingly violent conflicts imagined by Sir Mortimer Wheeler,
while excavating the shattered ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, when he discovered skeletal corpses
scattered in the rubble-strewn streets, and propounded an early version of the Aryan conquest
theory. But the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans must have somehow subjugated the surviving remnants
of the Harappan culture without extirpating the surviving remnants of the Pre-Rig Vedic and
Mesopotamian/Harappan religions, which have survived, comparatively intact, in the
Vaishnavite and Shaivite cults and the Durga-puja festivals of Brahminic Hinduism.32

What appears to have happened, then, during the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the
Harappan Indus Valley civilization, is that the sovereign conquering tribes of the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryans initially succeeded in imposing their Brahminic religion and their Sanskrit language
upon the Harappan population, by some version of ‘elite transference,’ as described by Colin
Renfrew’s elite dominance theory and J.P. Mallory’s kulturkugel hypothesis.33 But the Harappan
Indus Valley peoples nonetheless preserved their subaltern subculture of Pre-Rig Vedic
sacrificial rituals and Mesopotamian fertility-cults throughout the shattering experience of
conquest and subjugation; and that indigenous subculture finally reemerged, a thousand years
later, as the dominant culture of Brahminic Hinduism.34 If the Harappan Indus Valley culture
was already in advanced decline when the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans arrived in the Punjab and
30
See also Parpola, “The Metamorphoses of Mahisha Asura and Prajapati,” in Ritual, State and
History in South Asia: Studies in Honor of J.C. Heesterman, ed. J.W. Van Den Hoek, D.H.A.
Kolff, M.S, Oort (Leiden/NewYork/Koeln: E.J. Brill, 1992): 275-308:275-283.
31
It is also possible that the bull-horned god-figure of the Pashupati seal found at Mohenjo-Daro
is the buffalo-demon, mahisha-ashura. See n. 10 supra.
32
See n. 16 supra.
33
See n. 2, 11, & 14.
34
See n. 10 & 12 supra.
Northwest India (c. 1900-1500 BCE), the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan warriors (the kshatriyas) might
have easily claimed the sovereign dominant position in the stratified caste-system previously
vacated by the Harappan priest-kings, without the wholesale massacres which might have
otherwise occurred in this ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans and the
Harappan Indus Valley culture.35 The Rig Vedic priests (the brahmins) might have also
successfully assimilated the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan religions and the Mesopotamian fertility-
goddess-cults within the sacrificial ritual system of Brahminic Vedic Hinduism, without
necessarily eliminating the surviving vestiges of the Harappan Indus Valley culture. This
successful assimilation of the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan religions and the Mesopotamian
fertility-cults of the Harappan Indus Valley population by the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan brahmins
was then also accomplished by incorporating the non-Rig Vedic hymns of the Kanvas and
Angirasas into the Brahminic canon, as the Sama, Artharva, and White and Black Yajur Vedas,
while also adopting ‘sanskritized’ or ‘aryanized’ versions of the bloody fertility-rituals of the
Mesopotamian mother-goddesses (Astarte, Ishtar, Inana) and Harappan deities (Nanaya. Nana)
into the Brahminic Vedic worship of the Goddess of Victory (Sanskrit Vac: also “Speech”) (RV
1.164, 8.100, 10.71).36 But the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans would still have been a comparatively
small ruling-elite of semi-nomadic tribal warriors and sacrificial priests, attempting to impose
their Sanskrit culture and their Brahminic sacrificial rituals upon a much larger population of
indigenous peoples; and the Harappan Indus Valley people would have eventually swamped the
Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, while their Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan religion would have been eventually
assimilated into the Bhakti devotional cults and the Vaishnavite and Shaivite cults of Brahminic
Hinduism. And despite their antipathy to the Pre-Rig Vedic religions, the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans
would have been compelled to accept the Mesopotamian fertility-cults and the Bhakti devotional
cults of the Harappan peoples, while still preserving their Brahminic sacrificial rituals and their
Sanskrit language, which were then transformed into the sovereign dominant culture and esoteric
ritualism of the two elite-castes (the brahmins and kshatriyas) of Brahminic Hinduism.

This compromise solution to the clash and collision between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, the Pre-
Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes, and the Harappan Indus Valley civilization, then permitted the Pre-
35
Recent genomic studies have shown that the Indian caste-system has preserved strict genetic
differences between stratified caste-groups essentially unbroken since the re-establishment of
Brahminic Hinduism by the Gupta empire (c. 240 CE). These studies also show that the Steppe
Middle-Late Bronze Age (Indo-European) contributions to the Indian genome have been passed
on almost exclusively through the male chromosomes of the Brahminic upper castes, providing
support for the Aryan conquest theory by suggesting that the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan priests and
warriors established themselves as the sovereign dominant castes of the Harappan Indus Valley
culture by exercising patriarchal, masculine domination and propagating children through the
female portion of the indigenous population, as did, for example, the British slaveholders in the
American South and Spanish creoles in Latin America. See Partha P. Majumdar, “Indian Caste
Origins: Genomic Insights and Future Outlook,” in Genome Research, Vol. 11 (2001): 931-932,
archived at: https://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/6/931.full Michael Bamshad et al., “Genetic
Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste Populations,” in ibid, 994-1004, archived at:
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/6/994.full David Reich et al. “Reconstructing Indian
Population History,” op. cit,, 489-494, and Reich, “The Collision That Formed India,” 136-146.
36
See also Parpola, “Vac as a Goddess of Victory in the Veda and Her Relation to Durga,” in
Zinbun Vol. 34 #2 (2000): 101-143. https://doi.org/10.14989/48782
Rig Vedic tribes to continue to perform their obscene sacrificial rituals, like the mahavrata and
the visuvat, put on by the vratya-brahmins of the Kanva and Angirasa tribes and recorded in the
Atharva Veda, and also allowed the Harappan population to practice their Mesopotamian
fertility-goddess rituals, while still suppressing the wilder elements of the Pre-Rig Vedic
vratyastomas and the Early Harappan religion, which were considered incompatible with the
sublime sacrificial rituals and priestly austerities of the Brahminic upper castes. From this
improbable synthesis of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan sacrificial religion, the Pre-Rig Vedic
vratyastomas, and the Mesopotamian/Harappan fertility-goddess cults, Brahminic Hinduism
emerged, sometime between the period of the Upanishads and Vedanta (c. 800-300 BCE) and
the appearance of the Vaishnavite and Shaivite cults in the Gupta Empire (c. 240-550 CE). And
some version of Brahminic Hinduism, with its Pre-Rig Vedic and Mesopotamian/Harappan
variants, has apparently survived, virtually unscathed by the Greek, Persian, Muslim, and
Mongol conquests, by British colonization, by the bloody struggles between the British
authorities and Indian independence fighters, and by the Hindu nationalist (‘Hindutva’)
movements of the 20th Century, into the ‘village Hinduism’ of the 21st Century Republic of India.

Deciphering the Indus Script, Recovering the Harappan Language:


The Philology of Ancient Indian Origins

In “The Language of the Indus Civilization,” Parpola also suggests that this implausible
synthesis of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan sacrificial religion, the Pre-Rig Vedic vratyastomas, and
the Mesopotamian/Harappan fertility-goddess religion, can be traced through analysis of the non-
cognate, substrate words which appear as loan-words in the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas, and
which provide clues to the aboriginal language of the Harappan Indus Valley civilization.37
Briefly, Parpola argues that the Harappan language was Proto-Dravidian; and that the Indus
script, a hieroglyphic language preserved on stamp-seals found in the Harappan excavations, is
therefore decipherable as Dravidian. Dravidian is frequently proposed as the indigenous
language of the Harappan Indus Valley civilization, since it is still the dominant language of
Southern Indian subcontinent; and as Mallory observes, “[t]here are still remnant northern
Dravidian languages[,] including Brahui,” extant in Baluchistan in Pakistan. “The most obvious
explanation of this situation,” Mallory continues, “is that the Dravidian languages once occupied
37
According to Witzel, there are some 250-350 non-IE substrate words in the Rig Veda, a
surprising number, since the Rig Veda was composed in conservative, hieratic Sanskrit. “The
Languages of Harappa,” in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2000): 6-7.
Archived at: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/IndusLang.pdf But there are no
Dravidian loan-words in the earliest stratum of the Rig Veda (Mandalas 4, 5, and 6; c. 1700-1500
BCE), prior to the invasion of the Punjab. “Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages,”
in Mother Tongue, Special Issue (October 1999): 1-76; 8. Witzel argues that “[s]ince no traces of
the supposedly Dravidian language of the Indus civilization [ … ] are visible in the early RV [ …
], the people who spoke this language must either have disappeared without a trace, or, more
likely, the language of the Panjab was Para-Munda already during the Indus period (2600- 1900
BCE). “The Languages of Harappa,” 16. Witzel then suggests that the substrate languages of the
Harappan culture were diverse, differing among tribes, with a Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan Sanskrit
overlay superimposed over Dravidian, Munda, and other substrates, including an unknown
‘Language X.’ “Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Rig Vedic, Middle and Late Vedic),” in
Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1999): 1-67; 13, 40-43, 56-57.
nearly all of the Indian subcontinent[;] and it [was] the intrusion of [the Rig Vedic] Indo-Aryans
that engulfed them in northern India[,] leaving but a few isolated enclaves. This argument is
further supported by the fact that Dravidian loan words begin to appear in Sanskrit literature
from its very beginning," amounting to some thirty or forty loan-words in the Rig Veda, and that
these Dravidian substrate words increase in frequency in the Brahmanas.38 Deciphering the
Indus script would certainly mark a giant step toward solving the Aryan controversy, since if the
Indus script should prove translatable as Sanskrit, as Indigenist Aryanists like S.S. Misra and S.
G. Talgeri propose, the Indigenous Aryan thesis would be proved39; but if the Indus script should
prove to be a written version of Dravidian or Munda, this finding would strongly support the
Aryan conquest theory.40 Hence a final settlement of the Aryan controversy might be said to
hinge upon the decipherment of the enigmatic stamp-seals of the Harappan culture.

Contemporary studies of the Indus script are perhaps not as productive of fractious scholarly
debates as the Aryan controversy itself. Still, the diverse attempts by Western scholars and
Indian intellectuals to decipher the Indus script have managed to generate a considerable amount
of acrimonious debate,41 and Parpola’s current efforts at deciphering the Indus script will no
doubt be controversial. Although the Indus script has not been connected to a known language by
a Sanskrit/Harappan version of the Rosetta Stone, the Indus script---a pictographic system of
symbols or glyphs, mostly animals or plants, embossed on stone stamp-seals and used to stamp
impressions on wet clay tablets---certainly suggests a hieroglyphic language, since the repetition
of discernible sequences of glyphs on the Harappan stamp-seals suggests that these pictographic
sequences carry both a syntactic and a semantic function. But Steve Farmer, Michael Witzel, and
Richard Sproat have instead argued that the sequence and repetition of the pictographic
inscriptions of the Indus script proves that the petroglyphs do not represent a spoken or written
language, but rather serve a purely iconic function, perhaps associated with the worship of
Harappan deities, or maybe denoting ownership of trade-goods within the Mesopotamian trade-
networks, in which the Indus Valley culture, then known as Meluhha, was a significant trading
partner.42 Parpola, however, argues that the Indus script is a logo-syllabic system which conveys
semantic meaning through a rebus-like syntax, in which specific signs, in combination with
diacritical markings and supplementary syllables, may signify two or more words that sound
38
Mallory, In Search of the Indo Europeans, 44; Mallory and Douglas O. Adams, Encyclopedia
of Indo-European Culture (London/Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997): 308.
39
See Satya Swarup Misra, “The Date of the Rig Veda,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 181-
233; and Shrikant G. Taligeri, “The Rig Veda as a Source of Indo-European History,” in The
Indo-Aryan Controversy, 332-340. But see Witzel’s comments, n. 37 supra.
40
Against Parpola and Witzel, see Elst, “Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory,”
in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 252-260. See also Bryant, “Concluding Remarks” to The Indo-
Aryan Controversy, 475-483. Bryant concludes that “it will only be the decipherment of the
[Indus] script that will prove decisive to the satisfaction of most scholars” (498).
41
In addition to Dravidian and Munda, scholars have also proposed Sumerian, Semitic, and
Uralic as possible sources of the Harappan language. See Elst, “Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan
Non-Invasion Theory,” in The Indo-Aryan Controversy, 267-276.
42
Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, “The Collapse of the Indus Script Thesis:
The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization,” in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, Vol. 11,
No 2 (2004). In “Another Great Story,” Doniger is also skeptical of Parpola’s claims. See n. 27
supra. For Parpola’s response to Farmer, Sproat, and Witzel, see RH 26-29.
alike, but convey different meanings (that is: homonyms). Parpola gives the example of the
Harappan fish-symbol, which he correlates with the Dravidian word miin=‘fish.’ The Dravidian
word miin=‘fish’ may also correspond with Dravidian miin=‘star,’ and may then be used in
complex combinations with simple numerical marks to designate constellations in the Early
Harappan astronomical system: as, for example, the pictographs, “7” + ‘fish’ may designate the
Big Dipper (Ursa Major), which, in Dravidian, is called elu-miin=‘seven stars.’ An interesting
consequence of Parpola’s translations is that the Early Harappan religion is also correlated with a
Mesopotamian astrological system, in which Harappan deities are associated with specific
constellations and distinctive stars, and further correlated with the Mesopotamian/Harappan,
calendrical system, which also obliquely appears in certain Rig Vedic hymns.

A conspicuous problem with Parpola’s attempt to transcribe the Indus script into its Proto-
Dravidian equivalents, however, is that it only yields these simple one-to-one correspondences
between symbols and words and does not result in the transcription of whole sequences of
pictographs into complete sentences, thereby leaving the question raised by Farmer, Witzel, and
Sproat still very much in doubt. Despite these skeptical voices, Parpola stoutly argues that the
Indus script was transcribed from a Proto-Dravidian language, and that therefore the Indus script
might still be deciphered. Parpola’s proposed decryption of the Indus script might then
demonstrate how the implausible synthesis between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, the Pre-Rig
Vedic Indo-Aryans, and the Harappan Indus Valley civilization, proposed in The Roots of
Hinduism, might have taken place through the ‘aryanization’ or ‘sanskritization’ of Ancient
India---that is, through the dissemination of Brahminic Vedic culture and the Sanskrit language
to the Harappan population---even if the Indian subcontinent still remains a hodgepodge of
polymorphous cultures and heteroglot languages (at least sixteen officially recognized, still
largely divided between Sanskrit and Dravidian cognates) that have steadfastly refused to be
integrated into a strictly monolingual national culture in the 21st Century Republic of India.

A Brief Counter-Argument to Parpola’s Theory: The Aryan Conquest Theory Revisited?

What Parpola doesn’t explain, though, is how the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, the Pre-Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryan tribes, and the Harappan Indus Valley population might have not only not destroyed
each other, during the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan invasion of the Punjab and the Indus Valley, or
during the subsequent ‘sanskritization’ or ‘aryanization’ of the Pre-Rig Vedic/Harappan
subculture by the Brahminic castes of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, but might have somehow
combined to create the eclectic, polytheistic culture of Brahminic Hinduism. And it is surprising,
too, that the Pre-Rig Vedic tribes and the Harappan population should have submitted to
subjugation by the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, who purportedly adopted them as the fourth (slave)
caste (the shudra) of their Brahminic caste system, without the Pre-Rig Vedic tribes and the
Harappan Indus Valley peoples finally surrendering their Mesopotamian fertility-goddess
religions and their fetishistic image-worship, which also appear to have survived in the bloody
sacrificial rites and orgiastic sex-practices of ‘village Hinduism.’ The clash and collision
between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes and the Harappan Indus Valley population then might
provide a classic case-study in the cross-cultural dynamics of the conquest, subjugation, and
assimilation of a comparatively larger indigenous population by a small elite-group of warriors
and priests from a sovereign dominant culture, as described by Renfrew’s theory of elite
dominance and Mallory’s kulturkugel model of the spread of the Proto-Indo-European tribes.43

Following from current theories of ‘the clash of civilizations,’ it might have been expected that
the clash and collision between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes,
and the Harappan Indus Valley civilization should have resulted in a catastrophic period of
wholesale cross-cultural warfare and brutal intertribal massacres---a Rig Vedic/Harappan
equivalent of the Greek Dark Ages44---as was suggested by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, when,
contemplating the skeletal corpses in the shattered streets of Mohenjo-Daro, he proclaimed that,
“by circumstantial evidence,” the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan war-god, Indra “stands accused” of the
destruction of the Indus civilization.45 The world-historical evidence provided by the clash of
civilizations between, for example, the British and Spanish empires and the indigenous
inhabitants of North and South America, also strongly suggests that the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan
invasion of the Punjab and Northwest India must have resulted in a considerable attrition of the
Harappan population, whether that decimation was caused by the wholesale massacre of the
indigenous population, by epidemic disease, or simply by the culture shock involved in the brutal
subjugation of the indigenous people (the Harappan Indus Valley people) by a staunchly war-
like, sovereign dominant culture: the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes.46 Subsequent excavations,
however, have failed to support Sir Mortimer’s theories of the catastrophic wrack and ruin
reeked upon Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa by the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest. But
43
See n. 11 & 14 supra. Evidence for the Renfrew/Mallory theory is also provided by the Proto-
Indo-European migrations of the Anatolian branch of the PIE tribes into Asia Minor and
Mesopotamia, where, for example, the Proto-Indo-Iranians, the Hittites and Mitanni, established
themselves as a sovereign conquering ruling-elite over the indigenous populations, the Hattians
and Hurrians. See Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 43-48.
44
The Greek Dark Ages (c. 1200-800 BCE) were the result of the conquest of the Peloponnese
by the Bronze Age steppe-warriors of the PIIr tribes, the Mycenaeans or Achaeans, which drove
the previous PIIr tribes, the Aeolians and Ionians, to seek refuge in the Greek islands off the
Persian coastline, until a reconciliation between the Spartans (Dorians) and the Athenians
(Ionians) was established during the Classic Age (c. 500-350 BCE) to defend the Greek cities
against the invasions of the PIIr (non-Greek) tribes, the Persians or Iranians (also ‘Aryans’). Just
as distant memories of the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the Punjab and the Indus Valley
are recorded in the Rig Veda, so also distant memories of the Greek Dark Ages and the Dorian
conquests are preserved in the Homeric epics, the Iliad and Odyssey. For a brief comparison of
Ancient Greece and India, see R.S. Sharma, “Identity of Aryan Culture,” in India’s Ancient Past
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005): 94-105; and Ricardo Duchense, “The Aristocratic
War-Like Ethos of the Indo-Europeans and the Primordial Origins of Western Civilization,” in
Comparative Civilizations Review, Vol. 61, No. 51 (Fall, 2009): 13-51, esp. 13-28.
45
Wheeler, Harappa 1946, 82.
46
Recent genetic studies have also shown that the disease agents of the bubonic plague (Yersinia
pestis) appeared among the Steppe EMBA populations c. 5000 ybp and may have been
responsible for the massive population replacements that accompanied the Western Indo-
European migrations into Central and Western Europe (c. 4200-3000 BCE), especially if the
Steppe populations had acquired an immunity which the ‘Old Europeans’ had not. See Simon
Rasmussen et al. “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5000 Years Ago,” in Cell
Vol. 163 No. 3 (October 22, 2015): 571-582; Aida Andrades Vatluena et. al., “The Stone Age
Plague and Its Persistence in Eurasia,” in Cell, Vol. 27, No. 23 (December 4, 2017): 3683-3691.
considering that only ten percent of the Indus Valley archeological sites have been excavated, it
will be interesting to see if Parpola’s theory of the harmonic convergence between the Rig Vedic
Indo-Aryans, the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes, and the Harappan population is borne out, or
if it still might be proven that some version of the Aryan conquest actually did take place.

In brief response to Parpola’s theory, then, I might modestly suggest that the clash and collision
between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan tribes, and the
Mesopotamian/Harappan population, can perhaps best be described, in terms adopted from the
Subaltern Studies Group of Indian intellectuals (Ranajit Guha, Partha Chaterjee, Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Gyan Prakash, et al.),47 as a world-historical dialectical conflict
between competing cultures, in which the sovereign dominant culture (the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan
culture) briefly succeeds in subjugating its subaltern subculture (the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan
tribes) and its indigenous counter-culture (the Mesopotamian/Harappan civilization) and
assimilating them into its sovereign dominant cultural system (the Brahminic Vedic sacrificial
system). But as this world-historical dialectical conflict between competing cultures continues,
the sovereign dominant culture (the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan culture) is finally subverted by its
subaltern subculture (the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan subculture) and its indigenous counter-
culture (the Mesopotamian/Harappan civilization), which then combine, in a world-historical
dialectical synthesis, to assimilate the previously sovereign dominant culture into a syncretistic,
polytheistic, multilingual culture: the Brahminic Hinduism of the 21st Century Republic of India.

The pertinent comparison, then, between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the Harappan
Indus Valley population and the Western European conquests of the Spanish and British empires,
is not with the British conquests of North America, Africa, China, and India, but with the
Spanish conquests of Central and South America, in which a small elite group from the
sovereign conquering culture (the Spanish creoles) first attempted to rule over an enormously
larger population of indigenous peoples (the Native American tribes), but was eventually
swamped by the indigenous population, while still largely succeeding in imposing their
sovereign culture and language (Spanish Catholicism) upon them, resulting in the creation of the
polymorphous, multiethnic population of the Spanish-America mestizo subculture. The obvious
difference between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the Harappan Indus Valley culture,
and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America, however, is that the Spanish conquest
of the Native Americans was accomplished by a technologically more sophisticated, more highly
‘civilized,’ essentially ‘modern’ Western European culture, over an indigenous population of
Native American tribal people, still existing in an anthropological state somewhere between the
Paleolithic and Early Neolithic culture-periods, while the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan conquest of the
Harappan Indus Valley culture was accomplished by Central Asian steppe-warriors from a semi-
nomadic tribal culture who evidently succeeded in conquering a Mesopotamian-style Neolithic
civilization, albeit one in advanced decline. And it can be conjectured that it was the Harappan
Indus Valley population who finally succeeded, not only in assimilating, but also in ‘civilizing’
the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans, who were gradually settled in the Indus Valley (the Sapta Sindhu),
and, subsequently, in the Ganges-Yamuna Doab (the Kurukshetra), where they finally adopted
47
For a brief introduction to the Subaltern Studies Group, see Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies
as Postcolonial Criticism,” American Historical Review Vol. 99, Issue 5 (December 1994) 1475-
1490; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” in
Nepantla: Views from the South, Vol. 1, No. 1 (2000): 9-32.
the Neolithic metropolitan lifestyle of the Harappan Indus Valley culture and established the
Kuru-Panchala State, with its Brahminic caste system and Sanskritized high-culture.

But, in both cases, it is a striking testament to the strength and endurance of the indigenous
subculture that the Harappan Indus Valley peoples, like the Native American tribes, somehow
survived the shocking experience of conquest and subjugation by a sovereign war-like culture,
and finally succeeded in assimilating the sovereign dominant culture of the Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryan conquerors into the polytheistic, multiethnic, multitribal, and multilingual culture of
Brahminic Hinduism. This successful assimilation of sovereign war-like, conquering cultures
would appear to be a special propensity of the Brahminic Hindu culture of the Indian
subcontinent, which has survived repeated conquests by Western Indo-European (Greek), Afro-
Asiatic or Semitic (Muslim), or Turkic-Mongolian (Mongol) invaders, while still preserving,
comparatively intact, the indigenous culture of the Harappan Indus Valley peoples. And whether
or not the clash and collision between the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan culture, the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-
Aryan subculture, and the Mesopotamian/Harappan counter-culture, can be fruitfully compared
to the British and Spanish conquests of the indigenous tribal populations of the New World,
Asko Parpola’s The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization offers
substantial evidence that the indigenous subcultures of the Pre-Rig Vedic Indo-Aryans and the
Harappan Indus Valley population were not simply destroyed by the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan
conquest, and did not simply die out, but stubbornly survived, as subversive counter-cultures
within Brahminic Hinduism, and are still alive and well in the 21st Century Republic of India.

You might also like