Were there ever any Aryans?

INDIA has had close links with Afghanistan for a long long time. Buddhist influences no doubt go back only about 2,000 years; but many people, both laymen and historians, believe that it was in Afghanistan that the first books of the Rg Veda were conceived. In other words, if one goes along with the "Aryan invasion" theory, India could be said to have had intimate ties with Afghanistan as long as 4,000 years ago. It could even, in a way, be regarded as our "homeland" - before it got Talibanised, of course.

I will need a new and larger slate to scribble on for a definitive expose of the theory; to show that there never was any "Aryan invasion". But, meanwhile, I can at least let people know that there never were any "Aryans" either. (I promise not to argue later that "there could not possibly have ever been an Aryan invasion because there never were any Aryans.")

There are a number of references in the Rg Veda to the aryas; specially in the context of their ongoing feud against the dasyus. Most people think these refer to the colonisation of India by Aryan outsiders; simply because they are unaware that the term "Aryans" came into being as a result of the Rg Vedic people referring to themselves as aryas (a Sanskrit word meaning "honourable", "worth respect"); not the other way around. The Rg Vedic people never once referred to themselves as 'Aryans'; or, for that matter, as outsiders. So far as they were concerned the northern part of the subcontinent was the only land they had ever known. Anything that had happened earlier happened so long ago that it was, even 4,000 years ago, not even vaguely remembered; not even in mythological form.

How then did the word "Aryans" come into use? The story goes something like this. Towards the close of the 18th Century, and in the first decades of the 19th, it was discovered that Sanskrit had a lot in common with Latin, and perhaps Greek. The resemblance was much too striking to dismiss this as a mere coincidence. Therefore, since it was unlikely that India was the homeland of the Europeans (who were by then in a very advanced stage of development compared to India), it was assumed that Europe was the homeland of the Indians.

By the middle of the 19th Century, thanks to the enthusiasm and efforts of Max Mueller, everyone was pretty much convinced that an "Aryan invasion" must indeed once have taken place; how else could the aryas have got from Europe into India!

Furthermore, since the European branch of the original "Aryan" or "Indo-European" family had been somewhat lax in the preservation of their earliest records, the study of the record left to us by the "Aryans" in India was of critical importance, to get at the Aryan legacy in particular and at world history in general. "As modern history would be incomplete without medieval history", wrote Max Mueller, "or medieval history without Roman history, or Roman history without Greek history, so the whole history of the world would henceforth be incomplete without that first chapter in the life of Aryan humanity which has been preserved to us in Vedic literature". Max Mueller was not quite comfortable with the direction that Hinduism later took; Ganesh, Shiva, Krishna he had no time for. But he had the greatest veneration for the earliest "Aryans" in India, from the Rg Veda right down to the time of the Upanishads: they were the closest available link to his own primeval ancestors.

A lot of confusion and bad blood has been caused in India by stories about Aryan invaders having once, long long ago, come along and uprooted the native (tribal or Dravidian) population. It is therefore hardly surprising that the "theory" caused a great deal of damage in Europe as well. "During the 19th Century," the Encyclopedia Britannica tells us, "there arose a notion of an "Aryan race," who were considered to be responsible for all the progress that mankind had made, and who were also morally superior to 'semites', 'yellows' and 'blacks'. The Nordic or Germanic peoples came to be regarded as the purest Aryans." Thus was the ground prepared for Hitler.

SUDHANSHU RANADE

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