Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations

Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.

Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans.... I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.

The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures...

The historical context, this relates to a whole series of questions, how society is defined in the past — agro pastoral, agrarian, urban… What is the meaning of these terms? What is the interaction between ecological, social, economic, cultural, religious forms? These are all aspects of a historical problem and when you are studying a total problem like the so-called the Aryan question you have to go into the interaction of all these different aspects. Is there a difference between a cattle rearing society and a society which carries out overseas trade? And these are fundamental questions in historical analyses. You cannot avoid them. You cannot just say there is reference to cattle in the Rigveda and cattle are depicted on the Indus seals therefore there is a similarity. It is the function. The function, both the actual function, the ritual function, the role that cattle play in a particular society in terms of its economy, its rituals and so on.

And the fourth discipline which I think is important ... is social anthropology...

Comments

[Ron Krumpos]

I have studied the history of India, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Lucknow University, but am still not certain where the Aryans originated. Central Asia is not specific enough. Also, did the Aryans import concepts for the Vedas or simply adapt them?

[Namit]

Ron,
I agree with your point, but not sure if you also consider it likely that the Indo-European homeland could be in the Indian Subcontinent. I left this note on 3 Quarks Daily, which I think is worth emphasizing often, given the misinformed polemics around this issue:

It's good to keep an open mind about the homeland of the proto-Indo-European (IE) language and its speakers. You may know that there are competing theories among scholars (Kurgan hypothesis, Anatolian hypothesis, etc.)—all have major gaps, none can explain all of the data from various disciplines. But this does not mean that evidence exists for the IE homeland being in the Indian Subcontinent. If the latter is not a legitimate candidate based on data, then the IE language was brought in from elsewhere.

If you haven't read it, you may find profitable a book by Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate. Bryant not only has a sophisticated sense of history, his synthesis and exposition of a vast range of topics—such as 19th-century historiography in Europe and India, Vedic philology, Avestan studies, historical Indo-European linguistics, South Asian and Central Asian linguistics and archaeology, anthropology, astronomy, postcolonial studies, Hindu nationalism, etc.—is a real achievement. He even evaluates the claim of Hindu chauvinists—that India is the IE homeland—without condescension and based on evidence. And one of his key conclusions is that though gaps exist in the current migration theories, "there has been almost no convincing evidence brought forward in support of a homeland this far east".