CLOSING THE
CHAPTER ON THE ‘ARYAN PROBLEM’
Recent findings combined
with the British admission of its complicity in propagating
the Aryan invasion as an imperial tool should put an end to
the debate.
Navaratna Rajaram
Background
No single aspect of ancient Indian history and
historiography has so dominated historical discourse as the
so-called ‘Aryan problem.’ There is the Aryan invasion that
is supposed to have brought the Vedic civilization and the
‘Aryan’ language (Sanskrit), the Aryan race, and even an
Aryan nation thousands of years later, of all places in
Germany! Even archaeology has not escaped the Aryan
assault, with scholars claiming that the Harappan
civilization was non-Aryan, destroyed by the invading
Aryans, who, of all things are supposed to have introduced
the horse into India, ignoring the fact that horse fossils
in India are over a million years old.
Recent findings in population genetics, literary
studies and official British admission regarding the
‘special conditions’ (as Huxley called it) that led to its
being foisted as the central dogma of ancient Indian
historiography allow us to close the sorry chapter on the
so-called Aryan problem. These ‘special conditions’ grew out
of nineteenth- and twentieth century political currents— of
German nationalism and British imperial needs.
We will
close the article by presenting in one place a summary of
the basic scientific facts that will put an end to all Aryan
theories. This will give this pernicious myth its long
overdue burial.
Aryan myth fostered in
‘special conditions’
The
notion that Indians are one branch of a common stock of
people who lived originally in Central Asia or in the
Eurasian steppes arose in the late eighteenth century. It
began as a linguistic theory to account for similarities
between Sanskrit and classical European languages like Greek
and Latin. From this modest beginning it soon acquired a
life of its own when scholars, especially in Germany,
concluded that Europeans and ancient Indians were two
branches of a people they called Aryans and later as
Indo-Europeans. A whole new academic discipline called
Indo-European studies came into existence whose very
survival is now at stake.
The Aryan theory, which began life as a
linguistic theory soon acquired a biological form. Scholars,
mostly linguists, began to talk about not just Aryan
languages, but also an Aryan race. Since Indology had its
greatest flowering in nineteenth century Germany, it is not
surprising that racial ideas that shaped German nationalism
should have found their way into scholarly discourse on
India. The Indo-European hypothesis and its offshoot of the
Aryan invasion (or migration) theory came to dominate this
discourse for over a century. The German born Oxford
linguist Friederich Max Müller was the most influential
proponent of this theory. 1
It is important to recognize that the people who
created this theory were linguists, and even theologians
like Bishop Caldwell— not biologists. Scientists, including
German scientists had little use for it. As far back as
1939, Sir Julian Huxley, one of the great natural scientists
of the twentieth century observed: 2
In 1848, the young German scholar Friederich Max Müller
(1823 – 1900) settled in Oxford…. About 1853 he introduced
into the English language the unlucky term Aryan as
applied to a large group of languages. …
Moreover, Max Müller threw another apple of discord. He
introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He
spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its
descendants, but also of a corresponding ‘Aryan race’. The
idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in England. (Ibid.)
Here is what Huxley had to say regarding the
scientific view at the time (1939):
In England and America the phrase ‘Aryan race’ has
quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific
knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and
propagandist literature…. In Germany, the idea of the ‘Aryan
race’ received no more scientific support than in England.
Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary
advocates who made it appear very flattering to local
vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special
conditions. (Ibid)
These ‘special conditions’ were the rise of
Nazism in Germany and British imperial interests in India.
While both Germany and Britain took to the idea of the Aryan
race, its fate in the two countries was somewhat different.
Its perversion in Germany leading eventually to Nazism and
its horrors is too well known to be repeated here. The
British, however, put it to more creative use for imperial
purposes, especially as a tool in making their rule
acceptable to Indians. A recent BBC report admitted (October
6, 2005):
It [the
Aryan invasion theory] gave a historical precedent to
justify the role and status of the British Raj, who could
argue that they were transforming India for the better in
the same way that the Aryans had done thousands of years
earlier. 3
That is to say, the British presented themselves
as a ‘new and improved brand of Aryans’ who were only
completing the work left undone by their ancestors in the
hoary past. This is how the British Prime Minister Stanley
Baldwin put it in the House of Commons in 1929:
Now, after ages, …the two branches of the great Aryan
ancestry have again been brought together by Providence… By
establishing British rule in India, God said to the British,
“I have brought you and the Indians together after a long
separation, …it is your duty to raise them to their own
level as quickly as possible …brothers as you are…”
This leaves little to the imagination. Today it
is sustained by other ‘special conditions’, like political
chauvinism in India, and vested interests in the survival of
Indo-European studies in Western academia. It is only a
matter of time before this vestige of colonial politics
disappears from the scene making way for a more rational
approach to the study of ancient India. This is already
happening. What follows is a brief summary of the different
aspects of this aberration of scholarship.
Language and literature:
tail wags the dog
In the
whole of the Rigveda, consisting of ten books
containing more than a thousand hymns, the word ‘Arya’
appears fewer than 40 times. It may occur as many times in a
single page of a modern European work, like for example, in
Hitler’s Mein Kampf. As a result, any modern book or
even discussion on the ‘Aryan problem’ is likely to be a
commentary on the voluminous 19th and 20th
century European literature on the Aryans that may have
little or no relevance to ancient India. This is simply a
matter of the sources: not only the Rigveda, but also
the whole body of ancient literature that followed it have
precious little to say about Aryans and Aryanism. It was
simply an honorific, which the ancient Sanskrit lexicon
known as the Amarakosha identifies as one of the
synonyms for honorable or decent conduct. There is no
reference to any ‘Aryan’ type.
A remarkable aspect of this vast “Aryanology” is that after
two hundred years and at least as many books on the subject
scholars are still not clear about the Aryan identity. At
first they were supposed to be a race distinguished by some
physical traits, but ancient texts know nothing of it.
Scientists too have no use for the ‘Aryan race.’ As we
already noted, as far back as 1939, Julian Huxley, one of
the great biologists of the 20th century, dismissed it as
part of “political and propagandist” literature.
Recently, there have been attempts to revive racial
arguments in the name of genome research, but eminent
geneticists like L. Cavalli-Sforza and Stephen Oppenheimer
have rejected it. The M17 genetic marker, which is supposed
to distinguish the ‘Caucasian’ type (politically correct for
Aryan), occurs with the highest frequency and diversity in
India, showing that among its carriers, the Indian
population is the oldest. (More of this later.)
It is a similar situation with the Aryans as a linguistic
group, which is what some scholars, sensitive to the
disrepute that race theories have fallen into are proposing.
The vast body of Indian literature on linguistics, the
richest in the world going back at least to Yaska and
Panini, knows nothing of any Aryan language.
The German-born Friedrich Max Müller made his celebrated
switch from Aryan race to Aryan language only to save his
career in England following German unification, when the
British began to see Germany as a major threat. The ‘Aryan
nation’ was the battle cry of German nationalists. It was
German nationalists, not ancient Indians who were obsessed
with their Aryan ancestry.
All this
means that the ‘Aryan problem’ is a non-problem— little more
than an aberration of historiography. It has been kept alive
by a school of historians with careers and reputations at
stake. According to its advocates, the Vedic language and
literature are of non-Indian origin, brought into India by
invading (or migrating) Aryans. In other words, Aryans are
needed because without them there can be no Aryan invasion
(or migration). Invasion is the tail that wags the Aryan
dog.
Linguistic theory fails
scientific tests
The human species is unique in its ability to
transmit what it has acquired in one generation to
succeeding generations non-biologically. Other animal
species depend on biological processes like natural
selection and mutation—the main creative forces in
evolution—to pass on their traits to their offspring and
beyond. For example, a dog or a horse that has been taught
to do tricks in a circus does not produce offspring that are
born with the same skill; nor does it have the means or the
tools to train them. Humans on the other hand have evolved
the tools to pass on what they have learnt to succeeding
generations. This important tool is language and its
offshoots like mathematics.
The importance of language, by which we mean
spoken language, to the evolution of culture and
civilization can hardly be exaggerated. This fact has been
recognized from the earliest time. All civilizations, the
Vedas perhaps more so than other sources, accord the highest
importance to speech.
At the
same time it is important to distinguish between language
and writing. Since written records go back only some 5,000
years, trying to reconstruct ancient, long disappeared
languages on the basis of inscriptions and other records is
bound to lead to errors. But this is what linguists have set
out to do in constructing what are called proto-languages
like proto-Indo European, proto-Dravidian and the like. They
have compounded the confusion by assigning dates to their
largely imaginary events like the branching of splitting of
a real language (like Sanskrit) from a hypothetical language
like Indo-Iranian of which there is no record.
This has had a two-fold and largely negative
effect in the study of ancient texts. First they have
shifted the field of study of ancient Indian records from
India to Europe and Eurasia, while largely ignoring
Southeast Asia. Next, by adopting a time scale based on
written records that go back only about 5,000 years, they
imposed a chronology on languages that go back at least ten
times that long. As a specific example, scholars assigned a
date of 1500 B.C. to the Rigveda, while
archaeological and astronomical evidence shows that much of
the Rigveda had been completed at least 2000
years earlier.
(It is not widely known that this was driven
partly by Biblical beliefs, in particular the superstition
that the world was created on 23 October 4004 B.C.E.!)
Chronology is not the only problem with linguistics as a
tool in history. They fail scientific tests also. When
mathematicians Kruksal, Dyen and Black applied statistical
tests to the languages that make up the Indo-European
family, they found extraordinary results that completely
contradicted the most basic assumption of linguists— that
they form a language family. The most important member is of
course Sanskrit, but their analysis threw up a major
contradiction: Indian and Iranian languages failed the
grouping test! This is a bombshell, for according to Indo
European linguistics, Indo-Iranian is the lynchpin of the
whole discipline, but the one quantitative test that was
applied to the hypothesis discredited it. 4
Struck by
this, Cavalli-Sforza highlighted that the Kruksal, Dyen and
Black study “…found no similarity at all between Italic and
Celtic languages, nor between Indian and Iranian ones… The
non-identification of an Indo-Iranian group by Dyen, et al.
is the major departure from the conclusions accepted by the
majority of traditional linguists.” 5
The result is so devastating to linguistics that
linguists rarely mention it. In addition to its scientific
unsoundness, linguistic theories and their conclusions
cannot be crosschecked with other sources and empirical
data. It is usually a question of accepting one theory or
other, neither of which may be scientifically valid. Since
Indian and Iranian languages are obviously related, this can
only mean that the methodology developed by comparative
linguists must be wrong.
When we
turn to science the picture we obtain is dramatically
different. The emergence of molecular biology and the growth
of population genetics in the second half of the twentieth
century have delivered the coup de grace to this
pseudo-discipline. The story which science has to tell us is
very different from what had been believed for well over a
century. What follows is a summing up of the current state
of knowledge of human populations and their movements,
beginning with an elementary discussion of population
genetics.
Inherited and acquired
traits
The Aryan
invasion (or migration) theory is only one of several
theories created during the European colonial period. Most
of them start with the belief that civilizations in
different parts of the world began with a massive migration
from a central homeland. This belief is usually presented in
terms of arguments based on the physical appearance of
different population groups. Skin, hair and eye color get
extraordinary attention and importance in this ‘science’.
The emergence of genetics, which is the study of
inheritance, has discredited the whole approach.
Two key
concepts play a fundamental role in the scientific study of
populations, including human populations: genotype and
phenotype. Genotype is what we inherit and phenotype is what
is observable. The most common error is to confuse the
phenotype, or an observable feature like skin color for an
inherited trait (genotype) without taking note of the
environment in which it evolved.
Here is
the key issue: any phenotype (observable feature) is the
result of the interaction between the genotype (inherited
factors) and the environment. The same genotype can produce
different phenotypes in different environments, or even if
the environment changes over time as almost all environments
do. This is why people in different parts of the world
look different even though all of us are descended from
Africans. By ‘environment’ we mean external factors that
include food habits and diseases that result in adaptation
as well as the elimination of those unfit to survive. (This
is called natural selection, but can also be called natural
elimination.)
Most
changes brought on by the interaction between inherited
features (genotype) and the environment take thousands to
tens of thousands of years, if not more. A phenotype (like
skin color) that we observe in an individual or a group
today is the result of this long evolutionary history. To
disentangle a specific original trait from features observed
today is next to impossible since the environment has also
changed with the phenotype. For example, Europeans today,
whose ancestors came from South Asia perhaps 40,000 years
ago, look quite different from what their ancestors did when
they first arrived in Europe.
To
compound the difficulty, differences between individuals
within a group are always greater than the differences
between different groups. That is to say, human beings now
inhabiting the world are extraordinarily close, genetically
speaking, though they exhibit great variability in
observable traits (phenotypes) like physical appearance.
They are a complex mix of inheritance and environment.
Although
all of us share a common origin, the contribution of the
environments in which we have evolved is what accounts for
the extraordinary diversity in the appearance of humans that
we see today.
This fact
makes it virtually impossible to trace the origin of any
population based purely on physical appearance since the
environment in which it evolved cannot be recreated. This
means we have to find some inherited traits that have been
preserved over very long periods and are independent across
environments. This is never easy. 6
Harvard
geneticist Lewontin puts it this way: “Reconstructing the
evolutionary past of the human species is almost as
difficult as predicting the future, although both are common
exercises that biologists engage in, especially when they
address a nonscientific public.” 7
In using
genetic data to study ancient populations and their
migrations, all we can do at this time is to look at some
traits that are not affected by the environment and
study their distribution among different human groups. It is
important to note that this cannot be a phenotype or
a superficially observable feature like skin color, which is
the result of interaction between what is inherited and the
environment. 8
A
particular trait that we choose as characterizing a
population group is called a genetic marker. One such marker
that has proven useful is the M17 genetic marker. It is
common in India and in adjacent regions but becomes
increasingly rare as we move westward into Europe. This,
combined with the fact that Indian carriers of M17 are
genetically more diverse than European carriers shows that
the Indian population is older than the European. 9
Space, time and genes
Population geneticists have identified two objects that
carry genetic information that is passed on from generation
to generation. They are the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and
the Y-chromosome. mtDNA is inherited through the female line
(or from mother to daughter) while the Y-chromosome is
transmitted through the male line. There are individual
quirks in these cells that are specific to regions like
Africa, India, Southeast Asia and so forth. These are the
genetic markers we look for. Mapping them allows us to study
the possible origins of different population groups now
inhabiting the globe. For example, we know that all humans
living in the world today are descended from a relatively
small African population because Africa contains almost all
the genetic markers found in other parts of the world, but
the reverse is not true. 10
Following
more than a century of research in genetics, especially in
molecular genetics, it is becoming possible to trace the
origins of different population groups in the world. It is
important however to approach it with care and avoid
pitfalls. In particular, since all humans living in the
world today have 99.98 percent of their genes in common,
almost any two groups can be found to be genetically
similar. Failing to recognize this has led to absurd
conclusions like the claim that upper caste Indians are of
European origin, who “imposed the oppressive caste system”
on the indigenous population. (There is no oppressor gene.)
The error
here was in assigning biological causes to a man-made
classification like caste. Nature, however, does not
recognize man-made boundaries. Similar claims can be made
for religion— like finding a genetic basis for Christianity.
Taking this a step further, one may identify Catholic genes,
Protestant genes, and presumably even Mormon genes in Salt
Lake City, Utah, the home of the Mormon Church, where the
claim about genes and caste was first made. 11
Similar
demonstrably false claims have been made about language,
social habits and the like that can have no biological
basis. The error lies in confusing the phenotype for a
genotype. In addition, some workers have tried to use
genetics to justify their own beliefs and pet theories like
the Aryan invasion. This has led to absurdities like one
group claiming that only males migrated (more of which
later) while another claimed only females did! Obviously
both cannot be true, but both can be false.
After some initial
hiccups, the definitive statement about the genetic
composition of the Indian population was summarized as
follows by researchers led by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza:
12
Taken together, these results show that Indian tribal and
caste populations derive largely from the same genetic
heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and
have received limited gene flow from external regions since
the Holocene. The phylogeography [neighboring branches]
of the primal mtDNA and Y-chromosome founders suggests that
these southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers from
Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent
differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western
Eurasian gene pools.” (Italics added.)
Noting that mtDNA is carried by the female line,
while Y-chromosome is passed on through the male line, what
this means is that the Indian population is largely
indigenous in origin and has received negligible external
input (gene flow) since the end of the last Ice Age
(Holocene). This means that various migration theories like
the Aryan invasion in 1500 B.C.E. simply cannot be true.
The Oxford geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer is
more specific and also more emphatic, focusing on the M17 or
the so-called ‘Caucasoid’ (politically correct for ‘Aryan’)
genetic marker: 13
…South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his
[Sic] ancestors; and sure enough we find highest
rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan,
India and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17
is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia,
but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated
tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory
of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India.
[Italics added.]
So there was no Aryan invasion— of males or of
females. This also means that the tribal or the so-called
‘indigenous’ populations of India are not any different from
the people making up the bulk of the Indian population,
which is what Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues also found.
As Oppenheimer observes, genetics is quite specific on this
point.
One age estimate for the origin of this line in India is as
much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have
found his [Sic] way initially from India or Pakistan,
through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before
finally coming to Europe. (Ibid)
It is worth noting that this is the exact
reverse of the scenario postulated by various
invasion/migration theories including the Aryan invasion
theory. This is not by any means the last word on
population genetics, but new findings are unlikely to
salvage these 19th centuries theories or their
modern incarnations founded on beliefs and political needs.
This is not the whole story. As Oppenheimer and
others have noted, while gene exchange between India and
Europe in the Holocene (post Ice Age) and earlier is
negligible to non-existent, the people of India—both North
and South—and Southeast Asia are genetically close.
All this
forces us to accept the following basic scientific fact:
outside of Africa, South Asia contains the world’s oldest
populations, and modern Europeans are themselves among the
peoples descended from migrants from India, going back more
than 40,000 years. This should be the starting point for
studying history in the Holocene or the post Ice Age period.
Notes and References
1. He later repudiated the racial aspect of the Aryan theory
insisting that it was entirely linguistic. This though was
due to political developments in Europe, notably German
unification following the Franco-Prussian War and the
emergence of Germany as Britain’s greatest rival. Max Müller,
originally a staunch German nationalist, had to renounce his
Aryan race theory to save his position at Oxford. For
details see Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization
by Rajaram and Frawley (2001), New Delhi: voice of
India.
2. Oxford Pamphlet No. 5, OUP: p 9. See also Rajaram and
Frawley Op. Cit. p 37.
3. Available on the Internet at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/hinduism/history/history5.shtml.
4. The Vocabulary and Method of Reconstructing Language
Trees: Innovations and Large Scale Applications by J.B.
Kruksal, I. Dyen and P. Black, in Mathematics in the
Archaeological and Historical Sciences (1971) edited by
F.R. Hodson, D.G. Kendall, and P. Tatu, Edinburgh University
Press, Edinburgh.
5. Great Human Diasporas, Addison-Wesley, 1995:
page 190.
6. There
are further complicating factors like mutation and genetic
drift that need not concern us here.
7. Human Diversity by Richard Lewontin (2000), New
York: Scientific American Library, p 163.
8. Skin
color tends to get darker as we move closer to the equator
and lighter as we move towards the poles. This is the result
of natural selection. Human pigmentation has evolved to be
dark enough to prevent sunlight from destroying the nutrient
called folate but light enough to foster the production of
vitamin D. The fact that we see wide variation in skin color
in India and Europe is evidence that they have lived there
long enough for natural selection to work and therefore not
recent migrants.
9. It is
a basic law of population genetics that older a population
group, more genetically diverse it is. Africa is genetically
the most diverse continent because it contains the oldest
humans. In contrast, Native Americans are the least diverse
because they are more recent comers to the region. (This
does not apply to countries like the United States and
Australia that are composed for the most part of recent
immigrants. They have not lived long enough for evolution to
work.)
10. This
means that the genotype responsible for fair skin and light
eyes that is common in Europe is present in Africa but does
not come into play because of the tropical environment.
11. Genetic Evidence on the Origin of Indian Caste
Populations by M. Bamshad, T. Kivisild, W.S. Watkins, M.E.
Dixon, C.E. Ricker, B.B. Rao, J.M. Naidu, B.V.R. Prasad, P.G.
Reddy, A. Rasanagam, et al. 2001, Genome Research 11,
pp 994 – 1004. (This article has a checkered history. When
Rajaram pointed out the fallacies in the article to the
editor of Genome Research, he responded that he was
not the one responsible for its publication!)
12. The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persist
Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations: by T. Kisilvid,
S. Rootsi, M. Metspahi, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E.
Metspalu, M. Adojan, H.-V. Tolk, V. Stepanov, M. Gölge, E.
Usanga, S.S. Papiha, C. Cinnigolu, R. King, L.
Cavalli-Sforza, P.A. Unterhill and R. Villems. 2003.
American Journal of Human Genetics, 72: pp 313 – 332.
13. Out of Eden: The peopling of the world by Stephen
Oppenheimer (2003): London: Constable, page 152.
