NATIONAL LAW INSTITUTE UNIVERSITY

HISTORY- I

A Project On

OUT OF INDIA THEORY

SUBMITTED TO:

SUBMITTED BY:

DR. UDAY PRATAP SINGH

AKSHEY JOSE

PROFESSOR

2013 B.A.LLB 39

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Contents
INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 3
HISTORY ................................................................................................................................. 3
Early proposals .................................................................................................................................... 3

CHRONOLOGY ...................................................................................................................... 4
LINGUISTICS ........................................................................................................................... 6
Comparative linguistics ....................................................................................................................... 6
Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit............................................................................................. 7
Position of Sanskrit ............................................................................................................................. 9

PHILOLOGY .......................................................................................................................... 10
Sarasvati River ................................................................................................................................... 11
Items not in the Rigveda ................................................................................................................... 12
Memories of an Urheimat................................................................................................................. 14
Indo-Iranian and Avesta .................................................................................................................... 15

MATERIAL ARCHAEOLOGY ............................................................................................. 16

CRITICISMS ........................................................................................................................... 17
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................... 18

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INTRODUCTION

The Out of India theory (OIT), also known as the Indian Urheimat Theory, is the proposition
that the Indo-European language family originated in the Ganges Valley in Northern India
and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations.

Originally proposed in the late 18th century in an attempt to explain connections between
Sanskrit and European languages (and notably in 1808 by Friedrich Schlegel), it was rapidly
marginalised within academic linguistics, particularly by those who tend to favour the
Kurgan model.

Majority of scholars insist that the Indo-Aryans were intrusive into northwest India. This was
revived as a political topic in Hindu nationalism in the late 1990s. Such proponents insist on
an indigenist position, with the ancient people known as "Indigenous Aryans". There were
attempts to revive academic debate on this view in the 2000s. The theory's recent revival in
Hindu nationalist writing has made it the subject of contentious debate in Indian politics.
These recent "OIT" scenarios posit that the Indus Valley Civilization was Indo-Aryan,
contradicting the mainstream view that the Indus Valley Civilization spoke an as yet
uncategorized language.

HISTORY

Early proposals
When the finding of connections between languages from India to Europe led to the creation
of Indo-European studies in the late 18th century, some Indians and Europeans believed that
the Proto-Indo-European language must be Sanskrit, or something very close to it. A few
early Indo-Europeanists, such as Enlightenment pioneers Voltaire, Immanuel Kant and Karl
Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel had a firm belief in this and essentially created the idea that India
was the Urheimat (origin) of all Indo-European languages. In a 1775 letter, Voltaire
expressed his belief that the "dynasty of the Brahmins" taught the rest of the world: "I am
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convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges. The idea
intrigued Kant who "suggested that mankind together with all science must have originated
on the roof of the world [the Himalayas]."
The development of historical linguistics, specifically the law of palatals and the discovery of
the laryngeals in Hittite, affected Sanskrit's preeminent status as the most venerable elder in
this reconstructed family. This eroded support of India as the homeland of Indo-European
languages. The ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham was the first to state that,
according to the principles of natural science, a language family's most likely point of origin
is in the area of its greatest diversity which, in the case of Indo-European, is roughly in
Central eastern Europe, where the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic,
Thracian, and Greek branches of the Indo-European language family are attested, as opposed
to South Asia, where only the Indo-Aryan branch is. Lachhmi Dhar Kalla responded by
arguing that the greater linguistic diversity of Indo-European in Europe is the result of
absorbing foreign linguistic elements, and that a language family's point of origin should be
sought in the area of least linguistic change, since it has been least affected by substrate
interference.

CHRONOLOGY
The Indian Urheimat proposal put forward by Koenraad Elst, which he dubs the "emerging
non-invasionist model", suggests the following scenario:
During the 6th millennium BC Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Punjab region of northern
India. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria as the Kambojas. The
Paradas moved further and inhabited the Caspian coast and much of central Asia while the
Cinas moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin in north-western China, forming the
Tocharian group of IE speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that
region by 2000 BC. These people took the oldest form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE)
language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region,
transformed it into a separate dialect. While inhabiting central Asia they discovered the uses
of the horse, which they later sent back to the Urheimat. Later on during their history, they

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went on to occupy western Europe and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that
region.
During the 4th millennium BC, civilisation in India started evolving into what became the
urban Indus Valley Civilization. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-IndoIranian. Sometime during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of
internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia
and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas.
They also expanded into parts of central Asia. By the end of this migration, India was left
with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river
began drying up and the remainder of the Indo-Aryans split into separate groups. Some
travelled westwards and established themselves as rulers of the Hurrian Mitanni kingdom by
around 1500 BC. Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others
travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

Map showing the spread of the Proto-Indo-European language from the Indus Valley.
Dates are those of the "emerging non-invasionist model" according to Elst.

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LINGUISTICS

According to Edwin Francis Bryant, OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who
either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and
inconclusive, or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications this attitude
and neglect significantly minimises the value of most OIT publications.
Shrikant G. Talageri and Nicholas Kazanas have adapted the language dispersal model
proposed by Johanna Nichols to support OIT by moving Nichols' proposed Indo-European
point of origin from Bactria Sogdiana to India. These ideas have not been accepted in
mainstream linguistics.

Elst argues that it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The
alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had
originally had the centum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, ItaloCeltic,Germanic, Tocharic) retained the centum form and took it to the geographical
borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia,China), while the dialects which emigrated
later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects
(Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the stay behind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem
form. This would satisfy the claim of the so called Lateral Theory that the most conservative
forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Comparative linguistics
There are twelve accepted branches of the Indo-European family. The two Indo-Iranian
branches, Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian, dominate the eastern cluster, historically spanning
Scythia, Iran and northern India. While the exact sequence in which the different branches
separated, or migrated, away from a homeland is disputed, linguists generally agree that
Anatolian was the first branch to be separated from the remaining body of Indo-European.
Additionally, Graeco-Aryan isoglosses seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian may
have shared a common homeland for a while, after the splitting of the other IE branches.
Such a homeland could be North-western India (which is preferred by proponents of the OIT)
or the Pontic steppes (as preferred by the mainstream supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis).

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According to Hock, if evidence like linguistic isogloss patterns is ignored, then the
hypothesis of an Out of India migration becomes "relatively easy to maintain".

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit

According to Bryant, evidence of a pre Indo-European linguistic substratum in South Asia is
a solid reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland.
Burrow compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the igveda that he considered
to be loans predominantly from Dravidian. Kuiper identified 383 igvedic words as nonIndo-Aryan roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary borrowed from Old Dravidian, Old
Munda, and several other languages. Paul Thieme has questioned Dravidian etymologies
proposed for Vedic words, for most of which he gives Indo-aryan or Sanskrit etymologies,
and condemned what he characterises as a misplaced zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in
Sanskrit. Das contends that there is not a single case in which a communis opinio has been
found confirming the foreign origin of a Rigvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word".
Burrow in turn has criticised the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook
or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words".
Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative materialand the
scarcity of Dravidian or Mundathe inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a
Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it is not. Witzel argues that the earliest level of the
Rigveda shows signs of para-Munda influence and only later levels of Dravidian,
suggestingagainst the older widespread two century old beliefthat the original
inhabitants of Punjab were speakers of para-Munda rather than speakers of Dravidian, whom
the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rigvedic times.

Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical
and morphological features that are alien to other Indo-European languages. Phonologically,
there is the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals in Indo-Aryan
morphologically there are the gerunds and syntactically there is the use of a quotative marker
("iti"). Several linguists, all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on
other grounds, are quite open to considering that various syntactical developments in IndoAryan could have been internal developments rather than the result of substrate influences, or
have been the result of adstratum. About retroflexion Tikkanen states that "in view of the

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strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early
loanwords, it is hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that did not have
a substratum with retroflexes."

Another concern raised is that there is large time gap between the comparative materials,
which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback. The latter is, however, not a cogent
argument if one compares, for example, modern Lithuanian (laukas patis) with early Vedic
Sanskrit (lokapati), which, too, are divided by a time span of 3200 years.

Elst proposes that any Dravidian in Sanskrit can still be explained via the OIT. He suggests
through David McAlpin's Proto-Elamo-Dravidian theory that the ancient homeland for ProtoElamo-Dravidian was in the Mesopotamia region, from where the languages spread across
the coast towards Sindh and eventually to South India where they still remain. According to
Elst, this theory would support the idea that Early Harappan culture was possibly bi- or
multilingual. Elst claims that the presence of the Brahui language, and similarities between
Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian
indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans
southwards and the resultant intermixing of races and languages.

Elfenbein argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late

immigration that took place within the last thousand years.

Elst believes that there is evidence suggesting that Dravidian influences in Maharashtra and
Gujarat were largely lost over the years. He traces this to linguistic evidence. Some
occurrences in Sangam Tamil, or ancient forms of Tamil, indicate small similarities with
Sanskrit or Prakrit. As the oldest recognisable forms of Tamil have influences of Indo-Aryan,
it is possible that they had Sanskrit influence as a result of a migration through the coastal
regions of western India.
Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, Thomason & Kaufman state that
there is strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native
Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits
in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the
only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once it becomes a question of

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explanatory parsimony moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for several of the
innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Erdosy states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural
features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a
Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

Place Names and Hydronymy

Indo-Aryan languages are the oldest source of place and river names in northern India which
Shrikant G. Talageri sees as an argument in favour of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest
documented population of that area.
According to M.Witzel, river names are conservative, and "in northern India, rivers in general
have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter
languages of Sanskrit later on." Talageri cites this in support of the Out of India theory,
though Witzel himself would dispute jumping to that conclusion. Rather, he points out that
non-Sanskritic names are common in the "Sarasvati" (Ghaggar) area.

Kazanas argues that this indicates that the Harappan civilisation must have been dominated
by Indo-Aryan speakers, supposing that the arrival of Indo-Aryan migrants in Late Harappan
times to the remnants of an Indus Valley Civilization formerly stretching over a vast area
could not have resulted in the suppression of the entire native hydronymy.
However, Witzel argues exactly that: "The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the
Indus Valley (with a few exceptions, noted above) indicates the extent of the social and
political collapse experienced by the local population."

Position of Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit conserves many archaic aspects. In the words of T. Burrow: "Vedic is a
language which in most respects is more archaic and less altered from original IndoEuropean than any other member of the family".

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Kazanas argues that linguistic stability corresponds to geographic stability, claiming that if
"the Indo-Aryans were on the move over many thousands of miles (from the Russian steppe,
Europe and/or Anatolia) over a very long period of centuries encountering many different
other cultures", their "language should have suffered faster and greater changes".
Bryant points out that this reasoning can be countered by arguing that Vedic retained the
Indo-European accent because, as a sacerdotal language, it artificially preserved forms that
would otherwise have evolved in a normal spoken language. Vedic Sanskrit is, like other
sacred languages, an extinct language, having evolved into Classical Sanskrit by the 6th
century BC, reaching stability long after northern India had been settled by Indo-Aryans.

By contrast, Lithuanian is a living, vernacular language that has preserved Indo-European

archaisms to the present day, thousands of years longer than Vedic did. But then it can be
argued that Lithuanian remained in comparative isolation, being attested only around 1500
AD, which is comparable to the Kalash language, which has maintained an arguably more
archaic form of an Indo-European language as a living vernacular.

PHILOLOGY

The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its
consequences for the Indo-Aryan question. The oldest text, the Rigveda, is full of precise
references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Punjab and Haryana, and thus
was unmistakably recorded in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm
terminus ante quem for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in India. In the academic
mainstream view it was composed in the mid to late 2nd millennium BC (Late Harappan)
while OIT proponents propose a pre-Harappan date.

OIT proponents claim that the bulk of the Rigveda was composed prior to the Indus Valley
Civilization by linking archaeological evidence with data from Vedic texts and archaeoastronomical evidence.
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Sarasvati River
Many hymns in all ten Books of the Rigveda (except the 4th) extol or mention a divine and
very large river named the Sarasvati, which flows mightily "from the mountains to the Indian
Ocean". Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to
the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda that it is
worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses".
The Nadistuti hymn (RV 10.75) gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely
mentioned while Sindhu receives all the praise. This may well indicate that RV 10 could be
dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati when the river lost its pre-eminence.It
is agreed that the tenth book of the Rigveda is later than the others.
The present Ghaggar/Hakra is a remnant of the Rigvedic Sarasvati, which was the lifeline of
the Indus Civilisation. The dating of the full-flowing Ghaggar/Hakra, corresponding to its
description in the RigVeda, is seen as a powerful archaeological evidence for the dating of
the RigVeda.
According to palaeo-environmental scientists, the desiccation of the Sarasvati came about as
a result of the diversion of at least two rivers that fed it, the Satluj and the Yamuna
The chain of tectonic events diverted the Satluj westward into the Indus and the Palaeo
Yamuna eastward into the Ganges. This explains the 'death' of such a mighty river (the
Sarasvati) because its main feeders, the Satluj and Palaeo Yamuna were weaned away from it
by the Indus and the Ganga respectively".
This ended at BC 1750, but it started much earlier, perhaps with the upheavals and the large
flood of 1900, or more probably 2100.
In contrast, Mughal notes that the Yamuna was cut off in the middle of the third millennium
BCE, but the Sutlej kept providing water until the end of the second millennium BCE, or the
beginning of the first millennium BCE.

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The 414 archaeological sites along the bed of Saraswati dwarf the number of sites so far
recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River, which number only about three dozen.
About 80 percent of the sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium BCE, suggesting
that the river was in its prime during this period.
P. H. Francfort, utilising images from the French satellite SPOT, finds that the large river
Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up in the middle of the 4th
millennium BC during Harappan times only a complex irrigation canal network was being
used in the southern region of the Indus Valley. With this the date should be pushed back to
3800 BC. According to Francfort, those sites were not at all located at a riverside, but were
outside of them, irrigated by small river channels.
Bryant notes:
Ironically, the findings of the French team have served to reinforce the "mythico-religious
tradition of Vedic origins." Rajaram's reaction to the team's much earlier date assigned to the
perennial river is that "this can only mean that the great Sarasvati that flowed 'from the
mountain to the sea' must belong to a much earlier epoch, to a date well before 3000 BCE."

Items not in the Rigveda

Some items typical of later Sanskrit literature are absent from the Rigveda. This is usually
taken as strong evidence that the Rigvedic hymns have a geographical background restricted
to the extreme northwest of the Indian subcontinent, corresponding to the route of
immigration. OIT proponents have taken the same evidence as indicating an extremely early
date for the Rigveda, predating the Harappan civilisation.

The Rigveda does not mention silver, though it does mention ayas (metal or
copper/bronze) and candra or hiranya (gold). Silver is denoted by rajatm hranyam
literally 'white gold' and appears in post-Rigvedic texts. There is a generally accepted
demarcation line for the use of silver at around 4000 BC and this metal is
archaeologically attested in the Harappan civilization.

The Rigveda makes no reference to the Harappan culture. The characteristic features
of the Harappan culture are urban life, large buildings, permanently erected fire altars
and bricks. There is no word for brick in the Rigveda and iswttakaa (brick) appears
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only in post-Rigvedic texts. The Rigvedic altar is a shallow bed dug in the ground and
covered with grass (e.g. RV 5.11.2, 7.43.23). Fixed brick altars are very common in
post-Rigvedic texts.

The Rigveda mentions no rice or cotton. A compound term is used which later
referred to rice cakes used for sacrificial purposes, but the word vrh, meaning 'rice',
does not occur. Rice was found in at least three Harappan sites: Rangpur (2000 BCE
1500 BCE), Lothal (2000 BCE) and Mohenjodaro (2500 BCE) as Piggott, Grist and
others testify. Yet, despite the importance of rice in ritual in later times, the Rigveda
makes no mention of it. The cultivation of cotton is well attested in the Harappan
civilisation and is found at many sites thereafter.

Nakshatra were developed in 2400 BCE. They are important in a religious context,
yet the Rigveda does not mention this, which suggests the Rigveda is before 2400
BCE. The youngest book only mentions constellations, a concept known to all
cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions.

On the other hand, it has been claimed that the Rigveda has no term for "sword",
while Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and in Pirak. Ralph
Griffith uses "sword" twelve times in his translation, including in the old books 5 and
7, but in most cases a literal translation would be more generic "sharp implement"
(e.g. v), the transition from "dagger" to "sword" in the Bronze Age being a gradual
process.

The aforementioned features are found in post Rigvedic texts the Samhitas, the Brahmanas
and fully in the Sutra literature. For instance, brick altars are mentioned in Satapatha
Brahmanaa. Rice ( vrihi ) is found in AV 6.140.2 7.1.20 etc. Cotton karpasa appears first
in Gautamas (1.18) and in Bandhyana's (14.13.10) Dharmastra. The fact of the
convergence of the post-Rigvedic texts and the Harappan culture was noted long ago by
archaeologists. Bridget and F. Raymond Allchin stated unequivocally that these features are
of the kind "described in detail in the later Vedic literature".

Based on this set of statements, OIT proponents argue that the whole of the Rigveda, except
for some few passages which may be of later date, must have been composed prior to the
Indus Valley Civilization.

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Memories of an Urheimat
The fact that the Vedas do not mention the Aryans' presence in India as being the result of a
migration or mention any possible Urheimat, has been taken as an argument in favour of the
OIT. The reasoning is that it is not uncommon for migrational accounts to be found in early
mythological and religious texts, a classical example being the Book of Exodus in the Torah,
describing the legendary migration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.

Proponents of the OIT, such as Koenraad Elst, argue that it would have been expected that
migrations, and possibly an Urheimat, would be mentioned in the Rigveda if the Aryans had
only arrived in India some centuries before the composition of the earliest Rigvedic hymns.
They argue that other migration stories of other Indo-European people have been documented
historically or archaeologically, and that the same would be expected if the Indo-Aryans had
migrated into India.
From the mainstream academic viewpoint, the concern is the degree of historical accuracy
that can be expected from the Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns, not an account of
tribal history, and those hymns that are assumed to reach back to within a few centuries of the
period of Indo-Aryan arrival in Gandhara make for just a small portion of the text.
Regarding migration of Indo-Aryans and imposing language on Harappans, Kazanas notes,
"The intruders would have been able to rename the rivers only if they were conquerors with
the power to impose this. And, of course, the same is true of their Vedic language: since no
people would bother of their own free will to learn a difficult, inflected foreign language,
unless they had much to gain by this, and since the Aryan immigrants had adopted the
material culture and lifestyle of the Harappans and consequently had little or nothing to
offer to the natives, the latter would have adopted the new language only under pressure.
Thus here again we discover that the substratum thinking is invasion and conquest."
"But invasion is the substratum of all such theories even if words like migration are used.
There could not have been an Aryan immigration because (apart from the fact that there is no
archaeological evidence for this) the results would have been quite different. Immigrants do
not impose their own demands or desires on the natives of the new country: they are grateful
for being accepted, for having the use of lands and rivers for farming or pasturing and for any
help they receive from the natives in time it is they who adopt the language (and perhaps the
religion) of the natives. You cannot have a migration with the results of an invasion."
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Indo-Iranian and Avesta

The Iranian Avesta is the oldest literary text of Zoroastrianism, which was prominent in the
Iranian regions in ancient times. The Avesta and Rig Veda have much in common, which
suggests that they both originated from the one culture (Proto-Indo-Iranian). The point at
contention is the direction of the split. Supporters of the Indo-Aryan migration hypothesis
believe it was a split from Central Asia in two waves. The Out of India theory, on the other
hand, suggests that it was a split in the Indian subcontinent after internal conflict between the
Proto-Indo-Iranians.

Talageri argues that the documented evidence shows Indo-Iranian were present earlier in
Eastern region. Talageri quotes P. Oktor Skjrv "the earliest evidence for the Iranians is
835 BC in the case of Iran, and 521 BC in the case of Central Asia. The earliest geographical
names inherited from Indo-Iranian times indicate an area in southern Afghanistan. He also
quotes Gnoli as stating that "very clearly the oldest regions known to the Iranians were
Afghanistan and areas to its east". Talageri states that The Rigveda and the Avesta are united
in testifying to the fact that the Sapta Sindhu or Hapta-Handu was one of the land of the
Iranians on their way to Afghanistan.

Talageri states "The development of the common Indo-Iranian culture, reconstructed from
linguistic, religious, and cultural elements in the Rigveda and the Avesta, took place in the
'later Vedic period'." He quotes J.C. Tavadia and Helmut Humbach to show the period of RV
8 is the period of composition of the major part of the Avesta. This indicates the possibility of
a rivalry between the Proto-Indo-Iranian which eventually led to split of the culture to the
Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures. The Avesta also shows that Iranians of the time called
themselves Dahas, a term also used by other ancient authors to refer to peoples in the area
occupied by Indo-Iranian tribes.

The Iranian Avesta is considered to be a literary indication of Proto-Iranian culture after they
were split from Vedic culture sometime during the 3rd millennium BC. The word for God in
the Vedas (deva) is the word for demon in the Avesta (daeva) while the word for demon in
the Vedas (asura) is this the word for god in the Avesta (ahura). This indicates the possibility
of a rivalry between the Proto-Indo-Iranian which eventually led to split of the culture to the

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Iranian and Indo-Aryan cultures. The Avesta also shows that Iranians of the time called
themselves Dahas, a term also used by other ancient authors to refer to peoples in the area
occupied by Indo-Iranian tribes. The Rig Veda depicts conflict with Dasas and Dasyus.

MATERIAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The opinion of the majority of professional archaeologists interviewed seems to be that there
is no archaeological evidence to support external Indo-Aryan origins. Thus, while the
linguistic community stands firm with the Kurgan hypothesis, the archaeological community
tends to be more agnostic.
According to one archaeologist, J. M. Kenoyer :
Although the overall socioeconomic organization changed, continuities in technology,
subsistence practices, settlement organization, and some regional symbols show that the
indigenous population was not displaced by invading hordes of Indo-Aryan speaking people.
For many years, the 'invasions' or 'migrations' of these Indo-Aryan speaking Vedic/Aryan
tribes explained the decline of the Indus civilization and the sudden rise of urbanization in the
Ganga-Yamuna valley. This was based on simplistic models of culture change and an
uncritical reading of Vedic texts.
The examination of 300 skeletons from the Indus Valley Civilization and comparison of
those skeletons with modern day Indians by Kenneth Kennedy has also been a supporting
argument for the OIT. Kennedy claims that the Harappan inhabitants of the Indus Valley
Civilization are no different from the inhabitants of India in the following millennia.
However, this does not rule out one version of the Aryan Migration Hypothesis which
suggests that the only "migration" was one of languages as opposed to a complete
displacement of the indigenous population.

Bryant grants that "there is at least a series of archaeological cultures that can be traced
approaching the Indian subcontinent, even if discontinuous, which does not seem to be the
case for any hypothetical east to west emigration."

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CRITICISMS

The linguistic centre of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely
point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of IndoEuropean, Indo-Aryan, is found in India, and whereas the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian,
Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of Indo-European are all
found in Central Eastern Europe. Because it requires a greater number of long
migrations, an Indian Urheimat is far less likely than one closer to the centre of IndoEuropean linguistic diversity. However, the existence of the Tocharian language
family in Western China would shift the centre of gravity eastward. Some scholars
argue that the various language families in Central and Eastern Europe evolved fairly
recently, which implies that there was less diversity in the western side of the IndoEuropean language family during the 2nd millennium BCE at a time contemporaneous
with Vedic Sanskrit.

The Indic languages show the influence of the Dravidian and Munda language
families. No other branch of Indo-European does. If the Indo-European homeland had
been located in India, then the Indo-European languages should have shown some
influence from Dravidian and Munda.

To postulate the migration of PIE speakers out of India necessitates an earlier dating
of the Rigveda than is normally accepted by Vedic scholars to make a deep enough
period of migration to allow for the longest migrations to be completed.

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Talagari, Shrikant. Out of India Theory: The Linguistic Case.

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Erdosy, George. The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South-Asia: Language, Material Culture

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books.google.co.in. Walter de Guyter. 1995. Book. 7.Dec.2014

Bryant, Edwin and Patton, Laurie. The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and
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archive.org. 2005. Book. 8 Dec.2014

Thieme, Paul. Pini and the Veda : Studies in the early history of Linguistic science
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worldcat.org. Allahabad : Globe Press. 1935. Book. 7 Dec.2014

Ballester, Xaverio. Commentary on Kazanas's : Semantics of the Indo-Aryan

Controversy.
academia.edu. Universitat de Valencia. Web. 9.Dec.2014

Danino, Michel. Genetics and the Aryan debate.

omilosmeleton.gr. Puratattva. 2005-06. Bulletin of the Indian Archaeological Society.
9.Dec.2014

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