Aryan invasion ரொமிலா தாப்பர்
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If science proceeds funeral by funeral, history takes the route of wildfires. And the largest wildfire of them all, one that has consumed us for the better part of a century, is the debate surrounding our roots. Who are we, where did we come from; is this land ours or are we mercenaries? While both science and history struggle to discover answers to these questions, the difference lies in the timescale. RNA World in one case, Aryan World the other.
For the victors a quill to write history with, for the vanquished the burden to peddle it. Nations weaken not because of their past but rather by how they are taught it. For more than a century Müller-putras have sold to us a theory that tries to explain who we are. It goes like this: Around 3,500 years ago, a horde of light-skinned warriors called Aryans invaded the upper reaches of Hindoostan only to percolate slowly to the badlands where they accosted the dark-skinned Dravidians. This so-called Aryan Invasion Theory, or AIT, has echoed forever and a day beyond in our history classrooms and we, the children of a coerced conscience, have lapped it up. There is an opinion – not unfounded – that AIT is nothing but magic realism, a coloniser’s fantasy that hymns n’ high culture came galloping down from the civilised world to the barbaric. The natives had to be shown their place. Run along now!
To her credit, the eminent historian Romila Thapar was among a chosen few to have denounced AIT. “Not only did the invasion not happen, the use of the word Aryan itself is erroneous.” The Aryans were a linguistically similar collection of people and not a race, wrote Prof Thapar. “They didn’t invade India, they migrated to it.”
Prof Thapar may not believe in the Aryan Invasion Theory – preferring the Aryan Migration option instead – but she has done little to oppose it, a fact that emerged from the 2005 California state schools controversy when there were found as many as 49 textbook mentions of the word “Aryan”. These included claims such as: “Around 1500 BCE, invaders called Aryans conquered northern India”…“Some historians credit the Aryans with bringing Hinduism to India.”…“The Aryans created a caste system”…“Aryan technology improved farming in India”. When some Hindu groups protested, Prof Thapar – having earlier never objected to the inclusion of such references – bitterly opposed changes to the curriculum. “We should stick to teaching the facts,” she said.
True, Prof Thapar does not believe in the Aryan Invasion – she has said so publicly. But did she ever believe in it only to adopt later the diluted version? There exists no evidence of this – in her books or in transcripts of her lectures. To be sure, the invasion-migration question is a moot one. Millennia-old human history makes us realise, time and again, that migrations are seldom non-threatening, especially when they happen across populated continents. As Prof Thapar admits in her book Early India: “Some settlements in the north-west and Punjab might have been subjected to raids and skirmishes [by the Aryans], such as are described in the Rig Veda, or for which there appears to be occasional evidence at some site, for example Kot Diji.”
Sure, invasions can be diluted. What is malignant one day can turn benign the next. Here is Prof Thapar on India’s recent past: “I do not see the medieval period as one where the Muslims are the conquerors. It was a period of creation of communities. Muslims came in various ways. They were traders, they were pastoralists, they were conquerors, they were missionaries, and they created different kinds of communities all over the subcontinent…The trauma of Mahmud of Ghazni’s raid on Somnath was never experienced at the time or even for centuries thereafter. This trauma has been appropriated from the reading of the British version of this event.”
There are historians who disagree with Prof Thapar’s diluted view of Islamic invasions, and they cite the same sources as she does – Chachnama or Rihla – sources that either describe the invasions or their immediate aftermath. Many also point out – through their writings on the annihilation of Vijayanagara, academic or narrative – that the assimilation of Islam in south India was hardly the “smooth process” Prof Thapar claims it to be.
History is not Homeopathy – it does not leave an imprint when diluted, it simply disappears. Ironically, Prof Thapar by her own admission is practicing an art that can be doubted at every step. “Even archaeological artefacts are as much subject to interpretation as textual facts,” she says. She is not alone. The acclaimed historian Ilan Pappé told BBC recently: “Sure, the History I write is influenced by my agenda and ideology, but so what!”
What, then, is to be done? Are we to reduce History to dining-table fights, at the returning mercy of wildfires – douse one, get ready for the next? Perhaps.
Perhaps not, with a little help from science. Indian historians may think otherwise but Population Genetics, a discipline still in its infancy has made immense contribution towards corroborating historical details and is as indispensable today as an archaeologist’s coco-bristled hand brush. At its base it is the study of haplogroups, a term meant to indicate a common ancestor traceable because of identical mutations in lineage DNA. These mutations, called Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms or SNPs, accumulate through the passage of time and act as “markers” to identify a specific haplotype. To make sense out of SNPs, one ideally needs a region of genome that doesn’t undergo recombination. Mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA, is one such region as is also the Y chromosome, passed down from father to son. Mitochondrial DNA does not recombine, only gathers mutations along the evolutionary timeline. Remarkably, the human egg is genetically programmed to tag any incoming sperm mitochondria with a “death-tag” protein called ubiquitin, thereby assuring its destruction. All mitochondria, therefore, are inherited exclusively from the mother’s side; the further away in time they are the more SNP mutational differences there will be. Indeed, using a calibrated molecular clock, i.e. a verifiable tool to calculate the mutational rate, one can estimate the age of divergence or coalescence (merging). To understand how population genetics has helped solve the Aryan question it is worth recounting some of its monumental discoveries beginning with, well, the beginning.
Africa is where Man began – and Woman, too, of course. No surprise, then, that both Adam and Eve, our “most recent common ancestors”, are African. Information gained from sequencing whole genomes of 69 males from nine populations has led scientists to estimate Adam’s age to be between 120,000 and 156,000 years. For Eve it is 99,000 to 148,000 years. And even though the Adams were a happy lot, it wasn’t long before curiosity got the better of them. Migrations started in earnest, first briefly to Israel (90,000 years ago) and then in a major way 5000 years later to other parts of the world including India (66,000 years ago) and, following the southern route, Australia some 3000 years later. Population genetics has helped us understand the nature and timescale of these migrations, from North America to Singapore to Gujarat, besides solving some long-standing mysteries. For example, we now know that Roma gypsies migrated to central Europe exclusively from Punjab.
To return now to the question of the troublesome Aryans, Prof Thapar believes Aryan Migration happened around the time of the Rig Veda that, she concurs, resembles the Iranian sacred text Avesta – dated 1400 BC. The Iranians split into two groups one of which – the Indo-Aryans – migrated eastwards and reached India. Upon reaching India they penned the Rig Veda, a facsimile of Avesta except for a bizarre reversal of subject matter – the Avesta Gods became Rig Veda demons and vice-versa. The migration of peoples was also accompanied by migration of names and places. “The Harahvati becomes Sarasvati, quite a distance away from Afghanistan to Punjab. The Harayu becomes Sarayu from Afghanistan to UP.”
In her book, Early India, Prof Thapar accepts the theory that “Indo-Aryan speakers gradually migrated from Indo-Iranian borderlands and Afghanistan to northern India where they introduced the language. The migrations were generally not disruptive of settlements and cultures [no citation provided]”…“[The immigrants] were dissident groups that had broken away from the speakers of Old Iranian, whose language and ideas came to be encapsulated in the Avesta.”
Clearly, Prof Thapar is of the view that the migration happened after Avesta, i.e. around 1400 BC or 3,500 years ago. Unfortunately for her, science knows otherwise.
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