Course Title: Anthropological Concepts in Archaeology

Course Code:306
Topic: Summery

Submitted to
Swadhin Sen
Professor
Department of Archaeology,
Jahangirnagar University
Submitted by
Group: Shitalakshya(2)
Roll:1102,1107,1108,2235 Batch:48(3rd year)
Department of Archaeology,
Jahangirnagar University

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Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3

Background......................................................................................................................................3

Earlier Concepts...............................................................................................................................3

Discussion on previous research......................................................................................................4

Newer Research...............................................................................................................................5

Linguistic.........................................................................................................................................6

Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Aryan invasion theory is one of the most popular theories in Indian cultural history for years but
now it has been questioned in many ways and several types of research are going on to find the
actual origin of us Indian people. This summary is based on one of those studies but interestingly
this study has focused on linguistics rather than archaeological evidence.

Background
This research is presented by a prominent linguistics expert, Dr. Peggy Moon who is from
Trinidad, West Indies, and earned a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Michigan, USA.
She has taught linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamie Amid Islamia, among other
centers. She's a regular contributor to various reputed publications and has authored three books,
the latest Being Wondrous Kings the Story of India through Its Languages. In The video, we are
summarizing She has talked about the migration theory by eliminating the so common invasion
theory based on linguistic evidence. In her speech, she also brought up some interesting aspects
like how gender division is an ethnic division and the variation in retroflex of language in the
same geographical Area.

Earlier Concepts
It all started when A shared heritage between Indians and Europeans was suggested when British
Orientalist William Jones found significant connections between Sanskrit and European
languages. This prompted many to quickly conclude that India was both the birthplace of
civilization and the source of Indo-European languages. However, the story shifted in the
nineteenth century, with the expansion of the European empire and the establishment of racial
superiority ideologies. Europeans started taking on the white man's burden, the responsibility of
enlightening the ‘barbaric peoples’ of Asia and Africa. For this reason, India can no longer claim
to be the origin of culture. It was in this setting that an alternate hypothesis for the origin of the
two languages was proposed. An ancient western civilization, calling itself Arians (as they do in
the Mahabharata), invaded India and brought with them a brilliant language and a complex
philosophy that evolved into Sanskrit and the Vedas. It made the British invasion of India appear
like any other Aryan bey coming to India and bringing their culture and education with them.

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There was a major problem with the narrator from the start because there was so little evidence
to back it up. The hypothesis of invasion was thoroughly debunked in the twentieth century, but
this did not resolve the mystery of our common language heritage. While there was no invasion,
the conventional wisdom now is that these Aryan people moved or migrated to India through
time. The fact remains, however, that this argument still indicates foreign roots for Sanskrit and
the Vedas, which is anathema to Indian nationalists who consider these texts vital to Indian
civilization and culture. The migration idea has been met with genuine critiques and other
explanations from many reputable researchers, but this valid academic discussion has been
obscured by the political controversies surrounding it. This summary will focus on ancient Indian
languages to make their history more accessible.

Discussion on previous research

Invasion debates have their roots in the colonial era and the British notion that any culture whose
people resembled their own (in language and, in some cases, theatrical frameworks like Sanskrit)
must have originated in Europe. Even though German was unrelated to ancient languages like
Sanskrit, a German proposed Indo-Germanic roots. Anatolia—now Turkey's Asian part—
followed. People repeated the Caucasus. Two of the fifty Caucasus languages are native. The
Caucasus has nothing to do with the entire white race, whom they call Caucasians. Some
academics investigated the origins of these languages, while others tried to ascertain if these
speakers were native to India or had immigrated.

First, at least two Indians led the probe. It was detected in maternal ancestry-determining
mitochondrial DNA. India has not witnessed considerable migration in 120 years. Everybody
halted. Invasion vanished. Since many historians believed there had been migrations into India,
they wondered how this was possible and the question remains How did this genetic
investigation discover no proof?

Thus, people backed down, and "gradual" was used. It supported the dubious but common
assumption that people had settled in India and the surrounding region.

Another 2017 research examined Y-DNA paternal lineage. Around 3500–3700, many people
arrived in India. They were all men. The model then added that hunter-gatherers travel as men
and women in bands, which intrigued the speaker since the notion of two parents to a language

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that reflects India's woman, or at least the female line, goes back much deeper, possibly even to
early Indians.

They are not moving. The journey to India might take up to 50 years. Nothing more happened
than that; they merely existed and then went about their business as usual. Explorers are the ones
that do the majority of the migrating, not men and women. Men are more likely to pursue careers
in exploration. Even in the animal realm, males predominate; think bears and the like. Women
are less likely to leave their homes and communities during a migration. And if we look at our
history, we see that the earliest Indian settlers in the Caribbean were almost all men. But then
They all perished without leaving any traces. The introduction of longer opening hours for
women was crucial in establishing a sense of community.

Newer Research
The researcher has found the two-stranded approach appealing. The geneticist claims that people
did travel to India, and they were men, but that there was a certain give-and-take between them.
This means that we are not talking about individuals entering and spreading their language as it
was. As with many male migrants across the world, we can only assume that the primary
motivation for their search was the desire to have a family by finding a suitable female partner.
They aren't invaders, since invaders usually just come in, grab what they want, and then depart.
These were settlers who eventually turned Indian, stopped thinking of themselves as outsiders,
married indigenous women, and raised a family.

Let's Imagine the onset of the first males. They are conversing in a language that closely
resembles Rigveda. It may have resembled Rigvedic Sanskrit, but it was not as literary in its
structure. Unfortunately, every man who immigrated to India found a way to discard their native
tongue and preserve what they valued most.

Instead of Uzbek, the Central Asian Uzbekists imported Persian. Hebrew was brought to Kerala
by the Jewish immigrants, but not ladino which indicates this thing is bigger than the concept
that Aryan people speak only Vedic or Sanskrit language.

These males enter and marry women of different ethnicity. There is a gender gap as well as an
ethnic gap. Children are born into homes where their moms speak a different language from their
dads. Typically, children spend their first five years of life with their mothers, and then, around

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the time they start school, some of them begin acquiring what is known as the father tongue.
Therefore, the first generation of their offspring was considered Arians because of their lack of
racism. They were not the type to say, "Well, these are merely half of what we are." Now that
they've arrived and acclimated, they can start working. Their moms are their first teachers of
language. Features of their mother tongue are also present in their everyday speech and in the
speech they use when interacting with others outside the house. When they do start learning
Sanskrit, they do so with the understanding that it is quite unlike the language that we speak.

After a certain age, these children of different parents were taught their father's language, which
is assumed to be an Indo-European language introduced from outside.

There is no correlation between the complexity of a language and its technological

sophistication. They may have brought the Rigveda or Composing instead of writing.

Linguistic
The words are extremely transferable especially but the grammatical structure doesn’t travel so it
can help to understand the previous state of a language. But in the case of Sanskrit, it's quite
different because it was taught as something pure and unchangeable. So the children were
reciting it very carefully with proper pronunciation but their daily life speaking has a lot of
retroflection from a local language.

In this research, several examples have been presented with geographical maps to demonstrate
the retroflex in languages. According to professor Madhab Deshpandey Sanskrit, it is the earliest
form when it first started being composed it did not have retroflection.

So, there is a generalized thought that these Vedic people did not have any retroflection but their
ethnically different wives had. So when the children were growing they were communicating in
a language which has retroflection and reciting Vedas which didn’t have any.

There were ţo, ţh to, tho, do, dho but in earlier Sanskrit, there were most probably only to in the
beginning but slowly retroflection was added. It could be a wild guess. Maybe they never made
to into ţo but they give a reason for it.

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In this research, several examples have been made to prove that Sanskrit was the only Indo-
European language from this era that does have retroflection but the question remains where did
they get it from?

In Gujrat and Rajasthan, there is lo, in Maharashtra, there is ţ, đ,n, l but in the deep south, there is
ŗ ţ, đ,n. This means this retroflection is an increasing thing over time and place and Sanskrit went
through this process.

Prakrit has more retroflection than Sanskrit and there is a revolution between how men and
women speak because they are ethnically different,

So maybe it happened like this, the Vedic people came to the place where Harappan people lived
and speak a language full of gh,jh,d,dh,bh but the local people resisted it in their language. This
is a problem to track down Sanskrit from the modern-day language.

The research concludes like this,

It was like a forensic journey that allows us to look at the past through different kinds of
linguistic genetics in the present they were People who avoid gh,jh,dh and were inclined to
divide the world into t and d.

According to the research, the Aryan influence spread more in Prakrit than Sanskrit except in
Kerala which adopted pure Sanskrit words.

There is no conclusion that these Aryan people come outside of India When the Indian language
went outside it also lost some retroflection so it is possible for Sanskrit as well.

Conclusion
During the webinar, Dr. Peggy Mohan proposed that we are unable to determine which language
is most similar to the Harappan language because we do not know how the Harappan language
and the other languages sounded when they were first spoken. This prevents us from being able
to determine which language is most similar to the Harappan language. Because of this, we can't
decide which language is the one that is most similar to the Harappan language. In Pakistan,
people speak a wide variety of languages, and each of these languages has its idiosyncratic
approach to the construction of sentences and other grammatical elements. This region is home
to a variety of regional variants of a language in addition to the national language of India, which
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is called Hindi. Some of these regional varieties include Gujarati, Marathi, and Rajasthani. The
Harappan language probably had some impact on these languages since they sound so much like
the Harappan language. She suggested that we examine these languages because of this
possibility. She continues her discussion of the Vedas in the chapters that follow the one we are
now reading. After that, a query about the retroflex L was brought up as the next subject of
conversation that took place after that. She said that the term "retroflex L" was not used in
Sanskrit, but that it may have been included in a Samhita written during the period when Sanskrit
was extensively utilized. She said that the "retroflex L" wasn't used until a long length of time
after the incident that was in issue, and she repeated the phrase. When we investigate these
concepts, we often end up giving them a meaning that is connected to eras that are now long
gone. She went on to elaborate on her views about the evolution of languages throughout history.
There was a trend toward the use of more sophisticated language for religious purposes, and even
in modern times, there is a discernible gap between the lingua francas that people of wealth use
and those that people of low socioeconomic status speak. This tendency toward the use of more
sophisticated language for religious purposes can be traced back to ancient times. People who
come from rich households have the propensity to utilize the English language as a method of
showing off how well off they are, just as wealthy people do. This is because English is a
universal language. As a direct consequence of this, the language came to be used to set up social
hierarchies and raise the general degree of intelligence among individuals. Again, humans have
the propensity to keep the most valuable aspects of what they acquire or own. For example, the
Central Asian invaders brought Persian with them even though they were not originally from
Iran. These concerns may have an impact on the development of the current language throughout
the course of the generations. Additionally, the terminology that was employed by men and
women differed significantly from one another. It is possible that many of the explorers
participated in sexual contact with indigenous women due to the fact that the majority of them
were males. This technique is still commonplace across a diverse variety of cultural settings in
the modern day. In terms of the children, they spent their formative years living close to the
moms who were native to the area, and later on, since their fathers spoke a different language,
they were instructed in a new tongue. As a result, the language that the youngsters use to
communicate with one another is a hybrid language since it incorporates aspects of various
languages. She concluded that the evolution of the language in India occurred as a result of the

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preservation of a structure. Then, the impact of other languages encouraged it to grow, and it
took components of the other language along with it. Additionally, they tend to separate the
language based on gender, particularly in India. She provided several instances using Prakrit as
well as higher Brahms. There is abundant evidence that various indigenous languages have
survived in the upper Brahms region. However, Prakrit just had a smattering of it. because
members of royalty, soldiers, and brahmans were intimately connected to it. Therefore, the
political and economic environment had a role in the development of languages. This paints a
picture for us of how languages developed over the whole of the Indian subcontinent.