The Myth of the Aryan Invasion was first written in 1994 in order to summarise important new information on the ancient history of India that refutes commonly held views on the subject inherited from the nineteenth century. It was a condensation of longer material from books of mine like Gods, Sages and Kings, Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization (with N.S. Rajaram) and In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (with Georg Feuerstein and Subhash Kak). The 2001 update reflected my recent book Rigveda and the History of India that pushed the Vedic horizon further into the South India.
The current 2005 edition reflects information from a new book that N.S. Rajaram and I are completing for the Swaminarayan movement and their new Delhi temple Akshardham, the largest to come up in the city in perhaps centuries, and its cultural displays. That book (Ancient India: From Oceanic Origins to the End of the Sarasvati) will take the origins of the Vedic age further back in time and in the direction of the Southeast Asia.
The amount of information available relative to ancient India is now much more extensive than that considered in old textbooks still used in India's schools and in most schools in the West. Numerous new archaeological finds, including several larger than Harappa, the geology of the Sarasvati River, the natural history of the region, Southeast Asia as the homeland for most human populations prior to the end of the last Ice Age, new views of genetics, new theories of linguistics, archaeo-astronomy, and a greater sensitivity to Vedic texts and their vast spiritual and cultural implications, are only part of the new fabric to be woven in order to really understand ancient India.
Whether one may agree with the details, it is clear that the ancient history of India needs to be totally recast. The history and cultural heritage of India is largely an indigenous development of the same basic peoples that have inhabited the region for over ten thousand years, as they have adapted to their environment and also discovered its spiritual essence in its great mountains, rivers and oceans. It is time to look at the history and culture of India as a whole, organically, and in an integral manner according to its own internal impetus as the primary factor.
Older views of India based on outside migrations, external cultural influences and foreign borrowings as the primary forces are the products of a failure to understand the real soul and spirit of India. In the twenty first century in which the antiquity of cultures all over the world is being extended back centuries, if not thousands of years, there is no need to keep the history of India frozen around speculative events of 1500 BCE that have so far failed to prove themselves. It is time to open the door to India's great ancient heritage that takes us back to the very dawn of time. This primary message of the book remains the same.
Many important new discoveries on the ancient world have occurred in recent decades, pushing back the dates of ancient peoples, cities, monuments and cultures centuries or even thousands of years in different countries and continents. The old denigration of ancient cultures is being discredited, though a new group of leftists is still trying to keep it going. The new view emerging is of rediscovered profound and advanced ancient cultures in many parts of the world whether in the Americas, Middle East or India, now respecting their monuments and the depth of their traditions and teachings.
Recent archaeological studies in India relative to the site of Bhirrana located in the Kurukshetra/Sarasvati region in what is now Haryana go back 8000 years or more and show no genetic trace of so-called Aryan or Indo-European invaders or migrants, but a continuity of the same indigenous peoples and cultures of India to the present. Similar findings from Rakhigarhi, the largest and one of the oldest Sarasvati River region (Harrapan) sites around 4000-5000 years ago, shows no such steppe populations present or any traces of their invasion.
Rather they indicate the persistence of the same genetic types from ancient to modern times in India along with a continuity of the same indigenous culture, practices, symbolism and rituals, as preserved in the Vedas.
On the other side of the world, remains of Native American Peoples have recently been found in New Mexico and Brazil dating from 20,000-25,000 years ago, which was during the last glacial maximum, disproving the Bering Straits migration theory of their migration from Siberia around 15,000 years ago. It shows that these native peoples lived in the Americas for more thousands of years, perhaps migrating earlier by sea from Asia or being part of indigenous Ice Age peoples dating back even longer in time.
The Aryan Invasion, Indo-European Languages and Peoples.
The term Aryan is first of all a misnomer, a modern European distortion, if not demonization, of a sacred Sanskrit term. Aryan is an ancient Sanskrit term meaning noble and refined and spiritual, used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains alike. It was expropriated by colonial scholars and used to indicate the invasion or migration of certain proposed ethnic groups from Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a usage that has no history in India. The term Aryan in the Aryan Invasion theory projects distortions, prejudices and wrong identifications starting from this erroneous term. Removing it is essential for understanding the disinformation it creates on many levels.
Vedas (1182)
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Dharmasastras (165)
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Bhakti (242)
Saints (1503)
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Shiva (370)
Journal (187)
Fiction (60)
Vedanta (362)
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