Author: Padma Manian, San Jose City College
Publication: World History Connected
Date:
URL: http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/3.2/manian.html
Probably without realizing it, World History
textbooks often take sides in an ideologically charged controversy over the
role of race in India's early history. Their account of the so-called Aryan
invasions may reflect nineteenth-century Eurocentric scholarship that privileged
lighter skinned peoples over darker skinned ones. Alternatively, it may show
a na¥ve endorsement of recent books by Indians and Westerners that owe
as much to ideology as to evidence. Certainly the facts don't speak as clearly
as most textbooks confidently represent them.
I have taught World History at colleges in
the United States for many years. When it came to the early history of India,
I once taught that "Aryans" invaded India in 1500 B.C.E., conquered
the "Dravidians" and then became predominant. This is what I had
learned in elementary school, high school and college courses in India. This
is still what is taught in most textbooks. About ten years ago, I became aware
of challenges to the idea of the Aryan invasion and decided to look more critically
at what World History textbooks were saying about this topic. My study was
published in the History Teacher.2 More than half of the textbooks I examined
stated that the ancient Harappan civilization was "burned, destroyed
and left in rubble by invading Aryan-speaking tribes." These Aryans were
"virile people, fond of war, drinking, chariot racing and gambling"
and were also "tall, blue-eyed and fair-skinned." The defeated natives
were "short, black, nose-less." The victorious Aryans had a "strong
sense of racial superiority" and "strove to prevent mixture with
their despised subjects". Accordingly they evolved the caste system with
the lighter skinned Aryans at the top.
In fact, archaeologists have been aware for
several decades that Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the demise of
the Harappan civilization.3 In contrast, most of the textbooks relied on out-dated
sources and presented erroneous material.
Although there is consensus among well-informed
students of Indian history that Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the
demise of the Harappan civilization, there is a contentious debate underway
both in India as well as in the rest of the world regarding whether there
was an invasion of Aryans into India around 1500 B.C.E (that is, after the
end of the Harappan civilization). The Indians who favor the invasion theory
are largely of a progressive or leftist political persuasion. They believe
that the iniquities of the caste system are a result of the Aryan invasion.
For such Indians, questioning the invasion theory would undermine the work
of redressing the injustices of the caste system. It would be akin to Holocaust
denial. On the other hand, many Indians who doubt the invasion theory view
it as a matter of national pride that their civilization is rooted in the
ancient past on Indian soil and is not a result of barbarian invaders a mere
3500 years ago. Each side believes that ideological commitment blinds the
other side from seeing the true facts. Western supporters of the invasion
theory are accused of intellectual inertia. They are also diagnosed as suffering
from "the Liberal White Man's Burden" - the guilt that some Western
scholars and journalists feel for the sins of their fathers in perpetrating
racism and imperialism in modern times. This predisposes them to believe in
the idea that their Aryan ancestors committed similar crimes 3500 years ago.
It is argued that the desire of Western liberals to atone for these sins inclines
them to support uncritically Indian leftist views on the Aryan invasion. As
for Western scholars who question the Aryan invasion theory, they are accused
of being sympathetic to the Indian right wing and, if they have no affiliation
with academic institutions, of lacking the credentials to justify commenting
on history. This debate can be followed on the Internet and is interesting
in its own right.
Recent advances in molecular genetics have
opened a promising approach to settle these questions, although the evidence
at this stage remains inconclusive. Bamshad et al. studied the DNA of people
from the Andhra region of Southern India and compared them to Africans, Europeans
and East Asians.4 The mitochondrial DNA (transmitted matrilineally) of all
castes was more similar to that of East Asians than of Africans or Europeans.
The DNA of the Y-chromosome (transmitted patrilineally) of all castes was
however more similar to that of Europeans than of East Asians or Africans.
Moreover the higher castes were more similar to Europeans than were the lower
castes. The authors conclude that "Indians are of proto-Asian origin
with West Eurasian admixture" due to the Aryan invasion. The majority
of the Aryan invaders were men who transmitted their European Y-chromosome
to their sons born from the native women and placed themselves at the top
of the caste hierarchy. But the maternal lineage remains largely "proto-Asian."
The analogy, not explicitly stated in the paper, corresponds to Latin American
countries where the conquistadors mated with native women to produce a largely
mestizo population, with those at the high end of the social scale having
the highest proportion of European ancestry. However, there are inconsistencies
in the data. In Table 3,5 the lower castes are closer to Asians than to Europeans
and the higher castes are closer to the Europeans than to Asians but not very
much so. But in Table 46 all castes are much closer to Europeans than to Asians.
Then in Table 5,7 the lower castes are again closer to Asians. In Table 4,
the upper castes have a "genetic distance" of 0.265 from West Europeans
and 0.073 from East Europeans. This would imply that East Europeans are closer
to upper caste Indians than they are to West Europeans! The one set of data
that does not use a calculation of "genetic distance" and which
is therefore more reliable is Table 2.8 This table shows that the upper castes
have 61% Asian maternal lineages, 23.7% West Eurasian lineages and 15.3% other.
However, the 23.7% West Eurasian number includes 16.9% from the U2i lineage
that the paper itself says is India-specific, and moreover is 50,000 years
old.9 Therefore in calculating the fraction of West Eurasian lineages that
Aryan women brought into India with the 1500 B.C.E. invasion, the U2i component
should be subtracted. Only 6.8% of maternal lineages of the upper castes could
have come with the invasion. The invasion looks very conquistador-like indeed!
Another recent paper has looked at the genetics
of the Indian population: Kivisild et al.10 The authors state 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."11 They looked at some
markers on the Y-chromosome that are widespread among Greeks and other Europeans
and found that of the 325 Indian chromosomes of diverse caste and geographical
background, none had these markers. From statistical considerations, this
implied that the European contribution to male lineages in India is less than
3%. Kivisild et al. also suggest "early 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." Other researchers,
such as Macaulay et al., take this suggestion further.12 They claim to have
found evidence that there was only a single dispersal of modern humans from
Africa and that this dispersal was through India. According to this account,
several generations of the ancestors of all non-African people would have
lived in India. The ancestors of Western Eurasians (including Europeans) would
have spent several thousand years in India until the climate improved to allow
them to migrate North and West out of India about 45000 years ago.
Let us go back now to how the commonly accepted
date of 1500 B.C.E. for the Aryan Invasion of India was proposed. It is not
based on any archaeological evidence, but instead was based on Friedrich Max
Mueller's linguistic work in the nineteenth century explaining the similarity
of the Indo-European languages. In his view, the speakers of the Indo-European
languages are descended from Japheth, one of the sons of Noah, the speakers
of Hebrew from Shem and Africans and Indian Dravidians from Ham, the least
favored of Noah's sons (Ham and his line were accursed because of Ham's disrespect
of Noah). Since the Flood can be dated from the genealogies of the Bible to
be around 2500 B.C.E. and the Vedas were ancient scripture at the time of
the Buddha (around 500 B.C.E.), the Aryans (said Max Mueller) likely invaded
India and defeated the Dravidian descendants of Ham around 1500 B.C.E. Around
the same time, the Israeli descendants of Shem were defeating another of Ham's
descendants, the Canaanites. Max Mueller dated the composition of the earliest
of the Vedas to around 1200 B.C.E., allowing the Aryans a few centuries to
get settled in India.
Those who challenge the Aryan invasion theory,
however, believe the Vedas to be much older than 1200 B.C.E. A key piece of
evidence is that the Sarasvati is the most important river in the Rig Veda
but is at present a small stream that gets lost in the desert. Proponents
for an ancient date for the composition of the Vedas argue that since the
river dried up in about 1900 B.C.E., the Vedas must have been composed before
then.
I expect that the question of whether there
was an Aryan invasion and whether it occurred around 1500 B.C. E. will be
resolved soon by a combination of genetic studies and by geologists dating
the ancient courses of dried-up rivers in the Indian desert. In the meantime,
teachers of history and textbooks would do well to present both sides of the
debate instead of ignoring the existence of the debate.
Biographical Note: Padma Manian received her
B.A. from Madras University, India and her Ph.D. in History from Miami University,
Oxford, Ohio. She taught World History for five years at the University of
Wisconsin, La Crosse. She now teaches U.S. History and Women's History at
San Jose City College, California.
Notes
1 The author would like to thank Professor
David Fahey of Miami University, Ohio for his valuable suggestions in improving
this manuscript.
2 Padma Manian, "Harappans and Aryans:
Old and New Perspectives of Ancient Indian History," The History Teacher
32:1 (November 1998), 17-32.
3 See, for example, Mark Kenoyer's essay at:
www.harappa.com/indus/indus3.html (1996).
4 Bamshad et al., "Genetic Evidence on
the Origins of Indian Caste Populations," Genome Research 11 (2001),
994-1004. Also available at: www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.173301.
5 Bamshad, 998.
6 Bamshad, 999.
7 Bamshad, 1000.
8 Bamshad, 996.
9 Bamshad, 1000.
10 Kivisild et al., "The Genetic Heritage
of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations,"
Amerian Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2003), 313-332. Also available at http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/AJHG_2003_v72_p313-332.pdf.
11 The Holocene refers to a period beginning
approximately 11,000 years ago.
12 Macaulay et al., "Single Rapid Costal
Settlement of Asia Revealed by Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial Genomes,"
Science 308 (2005), 1034-1036. Also available at: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5724/1034?ijkey=QWTbNGl4UEtZk&keytype=ref&siteid=sci.
