A plausible account of the early Indian’s evolution
The generally accepted view of India’s past is dominated by the Aryan invasion theory originally floated by colonial Europeans who wanted to justify their rule over Indians. The Aryan theory, as most of us know, claims India was once exclusively populated by darkskinned people which changed when fair- skinned foreigners from Eurasia tore into the subcontinent on horses, defeating and subjugating its darkskinned aboriginals.
In recent years, this theory of an Aryan invasion fundamentally altering the country’s past has been challenged by new theories conjuring alternative scenarios of India’s complex ancient past. Some scholars have even suggested that India’s Vedic culture and the IndoEuropean language associated with the Aryans is actually of indigenous origin.
In a significant new book on “Early Indians”, journalistauthor Tony Joseph sums up some of these new findings to debunk these alternative views and reaffirm the Aryan invasion theory. “Until recently,” he writes, “there was some room for debate on the question whether the spread of IndoEuropean languages around the world could be explained by people moving out of India with an early version of Sanskrit rather than people moving into India with an early version of Sanskrit. But genetic studies, especially those based on ancient DNA, are rapidly closing the door on that debate.”
The author believes that genetics has proved beyond doubt that the Sanskrit language and the Aryans came from outside India and not the other way around. His assertions are based on the greater prevalence of the R1a- Z93 chromosome subclade among Brahmins in India. This he argues suggests Brahmins, who, he says, are the traditional custodians of the Sanskrit language, came from somewhere in the Eurasian Steppes.
This theory is apparently bolstered by a 2018 study titled “The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia”. This study, the author writes, “says there was indeed a southern migration of pastoralists from the Kazakh Steppe — first towards southern Central Asian regions, that is, present- day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, after 2100 BCE; and then towards South Asia throughout the second millennium BCE ( 2000 BCE to 1000 BCE)”.
As these Eurasian migrants moved into the subcontinent, “they mixed with people of the Harappan Civilisation, thus creating one of the two main sources of population in India today: Ancestral North Indians, or ANI, the other being Ancestral South Indians, or ASI, who were formed by the mixing of the people of the Harappan Civilisation with the First Indians in southern India around the same time”.
He notes that “a great majority of the people speaking IndoEuropean languages in Europe and Asia today carry ancestry that is related to Steppe pastoralists known as the Yamnaya…” He believes that it
What the colonialists told us about our past is absolutely true. The Vedic culture, Sanskrit language and everything associated with all that was brought to India by primitive pastoralists from the Steppe, identified as the Yamnaya.
was the people with high levels of Steppe ancestry who were responsible for the spread of Vedic culture and IndoEuropean language.
In other words, what the colonialists told us about our past is absolutely true. The Vedic culture, Sanskrit language and everything associated with all that was brought to India by primitive pastoralists from the Steppe. The specific people who brought about this transformation have been identified as the Yamnaya, who “burst upon Europe around 3000 BCE, a thousand years before their descendants and relatives reached south Asia.”
These migrants appear to have reached India when the Harappan civilisation was falling apart due to various reasons, the primary of which might have been a long persistent drought. While the Harappans “migrated to the east and the south in search of a new life; a new set of migrants came in from the north- west, bringing new languages and a different culture that put an emphasis on sacrificial rituals and prioritised pastoralism and cattle breeding over urban settlements…”
The narrative appears neat but often gives rise to more questions than there are answers. To raise just one: Why did the pastoralists settle in an area ravaged by persistent drought abandoned by a previous civilisation? How come an older and far more evolved civilisation as epitomised by the Harappans was completely submerged by a bunch of nomads?
While this book can best be properly assessed by a genome expert and historian, what can be said is that its author clearly is a genetic evangelist who believes that India’s ancient past has been accurately revealed by a few recent findings in the field. He has used these findings and associated evidence to build up a plausible account of the early Indians.
However, it would have been far more preferable if the author, instead of asserting that his understanding of the way ancient Indians evolved is the incontrovertible truth, suggested that he is depicting one probable view of what might actually have happened.
We perhaps will never know what is the “incontrovertible truth”. Besides, all theories of the ancient past are based on probabilities and huge assumptions. Genetics too, like other sciences, does not stand still but changes with time, new theories debunking or supplanting the old ones. Our belief in our own positions should, therefore, be tempered with some humility.