The Reverse Aryan Invasion
Aryans migrated from the Indus valley to Persia
The Vedic civilization was indigenous to India and existed on the banks of Saraswati in 6000 BC. The Aryans left the Indus valley and migrated to Persia after 2000 BC.
In the earlier article Hinduism and the Aryan Influence the theory that the Aryans had migrated into India from Iran around 1500 BC was described. This theory was formulated by the early European Indologists like Max Mueller in the middle of the nineteenth century and has been virtually unchallenged till a few decades ago. It is still taught in schools in India.
However Indian religious scholars never accepted this theory. According to them the Riga Veda dated back to at least around 6000 BC if not earlier. Also according to them the society that created the Riga Veda was indigenous to India and not a migrant tribe.
The European Indologists’ theory was devised to explain two undisputed facts. There existed a civilization in the Indus valley between 3000 BC and 2000 BC, of which there is considerable archeological evidence based on the excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. This civilization disappeared sometime after 2000 BC and it was assumed that some invaders wiped them out. There are similarities in Latin, Persian and Sanskrit. Hence it was assumed that the invaders were Aryans from Persia, the same people who also migrated to Europe.
David Frawley of the American Institute of Vedic Studies states that these assumptions were made to further the political and religious agenda of the British. This theory divided the Indian culture into Aryan and Dravidian, whereas no such division existed. This helped the British to divide and rule. It justified their act of invading India because they were only replicating what the ancestors of the Hindus had done thousands of years ago. This enabled them to date the Vedic civilization after the Biblical creation of the world in 4000 BC and after the Middle Eastern cultures, thereby making the Vedic civilization a derivative of another civilization.
If the Aryan invasion theory is biased and incorrect then what is the explanation of the two facts that this theory first set out to explain. Later archeological studies and analyses by social scientists more sensitive to the indigenous people have revealed the following chronology. At least about 6000 BC, if not earlier there existed a river Saraswati. This river flowed somewhat parallel to the Indus and to its east. The Vedic civilization began to evolve on the banks of the Saraswati at that time. The river Saraswati is frequently named in the Riga Veda. This civilization flourished till about 3000 BC when for some reason the river Saraswati began to dry up and the civilization began to shift to the banks of the Indus. For about the next 1500 years the civilization evolved in the Indus valley, the archeological remains of which have been mentioned earlier. Between 2000 and 1500 BC the Saraswati dried up completely. Land studies today have shown the bed of the Saraswati as it once existed. Also at this time there were spates of successive floods in the Indus, which forced the people to abandon the Indus valley. Studies of skeletons in the Indus valley do not show widespread evidence of violent killings as in war. This is the explanation for the end of the Indus valley civilization.
How does this theory account for the similarities in the languages mentioned earlier? Many inhabitants of the Indus valley moved east to the plains of the Ganga, where Hinduism continued to evolve. However others moved westward from India to Iran to Europe. Hence there exist similarities in Sanskrit, Persian and Latin. According to this theory the ‘Aryan’ movement took place from India to Iran and not vice versa. The Persian deities were based on the Vedic deities and not vice versa. In the Vedas the word ‘Arya’ means noble and does not refer to a race.
Weigh the evidence for yourself and draw your own conclusion.
The arguments presented here have been condensed from Frawley’s article
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