DMB

There is some evidence that the caste system has a genetic basis that tends to support an invasion by Aryan men. See
http://archive.newscientist.com/archive.jsp?id=22912000

HindooHeathen

1."Aryan" Invasion theory has more political and evangelical reasons for its promotion in India rather than any scientific evidence.

2. As a person speaking so-called Dravidian language I know that Tamil the oldest Dravidian lanuage shares a common grammatical structure with Sanskrit. Even the most ancient Tamil literature does not have a single reference to any Aryan invasion.

3.Strange it is that we Indians have to accept a racist interpretation of our own classic with frequently exposed intentional misreadings by people whose knowledge of either Sanskrit or any of the so-called Dravidian languages is secondary.

4. A lot of genetic research done on Indian populations have proved that Indians are a genetically diverse group. In fact even the fiercest Indian nationalists have opposed calling Indians a race. We know that a lot of migrations have happened in and out of India. But to suggest that Vedas talk of an Aryan invasion or that caste system is a result of a racial subjugation, is nothing but fabrications.

jess

Thanks for the link--- great food for thought...

DMB

Hinduheathen: did you actually look at the New Scientist link I posted?

Don't forget that correlation between genes and languages is far from perfect. There are also different kinds of invasions and all the following outcomes are possible:

1. Invaders are a small elite and largely pick up local language.

2. Invaders are a quite big group and largely impose their language.

3. For whatever reason there is a fusion of the two languages.

lpetrich

HindooHeathen:
1."Aryan" Invasion theory has more political and evangelical reasons for its promotion in India rather than any scientific evidence.

LP:
I disagree. There is good non-political reason to posit such an invasion; there have been several such invasions of other parts of the world in better-documented times. For example, the Turkic tribes spread from their Central Asian homeland starting in 800 CE and reaching Anatolia a few centuries later. Also, over the centuries, the Germanic tribes spread from their homeland near the present-day Germany-Denmark border (the Jastorf culture of about 500 BCE) to what is now Sweden, Holland, and northern Germany, and from there to England, the rest of Scandinavia, and southern Europe. The Germanic tribes "won" in some places and "lost" in others, notably southern Europe, where the western Romance languages preserve Germanic words for "north", "east", "south", "west", and some others.

HindooHeathen:
2. As a person speaking so-called Dravidian language I know that Tamil the oldest Dravidian lanuage shares a common grammatical structure with Sanskrit. Even the most ancient Tamil literature does not have a single reference to any Aryan invasion.

LP:
Oldest in what sense? With the oldest written records? The most conservative?

But even such old written documents may be too recent to describe an Aryan invasion; the absence of mention of the invasion of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes in many documents written in England does not mean that that invasion never happened.

And as to sharing a common grammatical structure, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I'm sure that those similarities do not indicate common ancestry very well. Actual word forms do a much better job; consider pronouns and other basic vocabulary that seldom get borrowed.

The linguist Joseph Greenberg had pioneered the study of linguistic universals, of finding out which features were typical of humanity's languages. Word order is a good example; when it is fixed, there is a preference for either one set of orders or its opposite. Object-verb (OV) "typology", as it's called, features

Object, Verb
Adjective, Noun
Genitive, Noun
Relative clause, Noun
Noun, Adposition (Postposition)

Verb-object (VO) typology features

Verb, Object
Noun, Adjective
Noun, Genitive
Noun, Relative clause
Adposition (Preposition), Noun

English is largely VO, though adjective-noun is OV; the Romance languages are more strongly VO here.

The Indo-Aryan and the Dravidian languages are both strongly OV; interestingly, this is shared with Turkic languages, Mongolian ones, Manchu-Tungus ones, Korean and Japanese.

So word-order similarities do not tell us very much about language ancestry.

HindooHeathen:
3.Strange it is that we Indians have to accept a racist interpretation of our own classic with frequently exposed intentional misreadings by people whose knowledge of either Sanskrit or any of the so-called Dravidian languages is secondary.

LP:
I don't think that Aryan invasions are any more racist than Turkic or Germanic ones.

And I'm sure that online tutorials will contain what's necessary for a broad classification; I once amused myself by digging up Hebrew, Arabic, and Akkadian pronouns and finding that they resembled each other very closely -- and had a much poorer resemblance to Indo-European ones, which also tended to have a close resemblance to each other. So it might be interesting to do that with the Dravidian languages to see how they compare with IE.

HindooHeathen:
4. A lot of genetic research done on Indian populations have proved that Indians are a genetically diverse group. In fact even the fiercest Indian nationalists have opposed calling Indians a race. We know that a lot of migrations have happened in and out of India. But to suggest that Vedas talk of an Aryan invasion or that caste system is a result of a racial subjugation, is nothing but fabrications.

LP:
The first part comes remarkably close to conceding the Aryan-invasion hypothesis, it must be said.

[ July 25, 2001: Message edited by: lpetrich ]

[ July 25, 2001: Message edited by: lpetrich ]

lpetrich

hinduwoman:
Recent research proves that there is not much voilence involved in destruction of Mohenjodaro. Environmental degradfation and draughts are mostly responsible.

LP:
Actually, drought has been implicated in the collapse of several ancient societies, such as in the Middle East and Central America, so that is certainly possible. During wet times, farmers could produce enough food to easily support a city population, which could no longer happen in dry times. This would also make settled societies vulnerable to nomadic invaders who have greater proficiency in living in relatively dry climates.

There was a drought in Mesopotamia in about 2200 BCE that caused the Sumerians to collapse; during that drought, the Guti barbarians invaded.

In 1200 BCE, there was a big drought in the eastern Mediterranean area, which caused a variety of happenings:

* The Sea Peoples invaded Egypt; these were whole populations on the move.

* The Mycenaean-Greek citadels of Knossos and Pylos were destroyed, and the Greek world lost literacy.

* The Hittite Empire was destroyed, and was eventually overrun.

* Babylon survived, though its chroniclers mentioned a big drought.

phaedrus

Sigh, cant people just read the links instead of shooting their mouths?

And for that old language "crutch", (linguistic evidence) that they use for an invasion theory, see

Linguistic Aspects of the Indo-European Urheimat Question

HindooHeathen

1. Max Muller studied Vedas and introduced the term Aryan as a racial term. There is no evidence in the Vedas as to the term Aryan having been used in India in a racial context. Then why did Max Muller do that? The question here is not whether or not migrations of populations happened in and out of ancient India but whether Vedas have a record of an Aryan invasion and whether the caste system has any racial aspect to it?
2. Throughout her history India has welcomed peoples of different cultures and religions as migrants, refugees and even as invaders and they all got assimilated into India's cultural matrix. "Many paths to perceive the ultimate reality" has been the Vedic dictum rather than "I your jealous God, am the only God to worship". So the attempt to read Vedas like a racist document (which the Bible is) alwaqys brings in ridiculous results.

3.As far as the genetic makeup of Indian population here I give the relevant points :
A press release of a recent anthropological survey led by Kumar Suresh Singh explains "English anthropologists contended that the upper castes of India belonged to the Caucasian race and the rest drew their origin from Australoid types. The survey has revealed this to be a myth. 'Biologically and linguistically, we are very mixed', says Suresh Singh (...) The report says that the people of India have more genes in common,
and also share a large number of morphological traits. 'There is much greater homogenization in terms of morphological and genetic traits at the regional level', says the report. For example, the Brahmins of
Tamil Nadu (esp. Iyengars) share more traits with non-Brahmins in the state than with fellow Brahmins in western or northern India. (...) The sons-of-the-soil theory also stands demolished. The Anthropological
Survey of India has found no community in India that can't remember having migrated from some other part of the country."[N.V. Subramaniam: "The way we are. An ASI project shatters some entrenched myths", Sunday, 10-4-1994]. In fact, the so-called Aryans of North India, who preserved their racial purity through varna conspiracy have also been proved to be genetically closer to the Dravidian South Indians than the "Aryan" Iranians. (Luigi Luca Cavalli- forza: "Genes, Peoples and Languages", scientific American, November 1991).

4.Oldest Tamil songs (like Thol Kappiyam or Pura Nannurru) are estimated at 2000 BCE. They talk of a king whose age they tell belong to an age "unknowingly old". And he the songs say, "has performed Vedic rituals".

5.Many astronomical data of the Vedas help to date them as belonging to at least 3000 BCE (lowest estimate). In the AIT model Aryans invade India around 1500 BCE, (the date conjured by Max Muller to fit the 4004 BC rtime scale of Biblical creation.)then how could they write the Vedas in which even position of constellations with respect to south of Vindhya mountains are mentioned?

Seems for some people the sun still revolves around the earth...


[ July 26, 2001: Message edited by: HindooHeathen ]

DMB

HH: I don't know why you are being so defensive. Is anyone here peddling biblical creationist lines? Have you read the link I posted to the New Scientist article?

Surely the whole question of the caste system and racism are separate. The caste system was established so long ago, at a time when the whole concept of "racism" had no meaning, that it is anachronistic to apply such a word to its originators.

It is, of course of scientific and historical interest to try to discover how it started.

However, whatever its origins, the caste system works as a kind of apartheid, discriminating against people on the basis of their family origins, and surely should have no place in the 21st century

SRWelch

All,

Expertise on this subject goes to HindooHeathen, HinduWoman, and Phaedrus, but I'd like to make a couple of comments, for what they're worth.

From some of their comments, Ipetrich, DMB and Boshko (and others) appear to be confusing some issues here regarding the Aryan Race Theory debate. First, it should be made clear that opponents to ART do not argue against the idea that tribal migrations and invasions occured in India's past, per se. This would be against common sense. However, what ART posits is that Hindu culture is the product of a white-skinned race of outsiders ("Aryans"), and therefore is by implication not indigenous to India. It is this linkage between race and Hindu culture, based upon psuedo-science from the 19th century called Aryan Race Theory, that is so hotly contested.

So, ART is most certainly race-based, because the very objective of the theory was precisely to paint racial distinctions upon Indian civilization. At the time the ART was invented, the European concept of "race" was quite popular and had become quite sophisticated -- it also served well in keeping white Europeans on top of a the heirarchy they imposed through colonization.

"Psuedo-science" accurately describes ART. One of ART's creators, Max Muller, tried everything he could to shoehorn Indian history into a 4000--year old timeline that conformed with the Biblical creation myth (so HH's reference to the Bible are not pulled out of thin air). ART fits this bill nicely, but it certainly can't be called science by today's standards, any more than other racial "sciences" of the era.

Also, it's true that race and caste are separate, but understand that ART is an attempt to conflate the two, e.g. "upper caste = white invaders = Hinduism" vs. "lower caste = dark skin = non-Hindu". When one considers the obvious benefits to the European colonizers and missionaries of inventing such distinctions, one again has to question the validity of the theory.

And just a quick comment regarding the whole topic of the "genetic foundation" for race. I don't believe that there is any genetic foundation for "race". Modern forensic experts can't confidently determine a person's race based on DNA samples alone, and the greater part of genetic differentiation among our species (90%+?) is found between individuals of the same race -- less than 10% accounts for differences across the so-called "race" boundaries. Among the "races," in fact, Caucasians (of which Indians are generally grouped) supposedly express the greatest variety in terms of skin color, hair color, etc. etc. So when someone presents an argument claiming that a genetic basis has been found that substantiates a Dravidian (or any other) "race group," I'm extremely skeptical.

Lastly, the whole topic of race and community is a serious and volatile issue in India, so comparing the rise and fall of the Hitites or the invasions of ancient Germanic tribes to the debate over ART in India displays a lack of appreciation for today's reality in that country. India was under British subjugation until only 50 years ago, and it until this day is being invaded every year by thousands of American and Australian missionaries bent on Christianizing it. The Hitites are long gone, and the Germans and Gauls and everyone else in Europe fell long ago to Christian domination. Hindus prefer not to let that happen to them as well, and are today struggling to prevent it. As a propoganda tool of former colonizers and today's evangelists, ART therefore is taken seriously.

Personally, what I find most troubling is that the ART continues to be promulgated in high-school and college classrooms, and that it still appears in contemporary textbooks on Asian history without serious question. Skeptics and rationalists should be distrubed by this. If ART does not hold up under scrutiny, if it isn't supported by the evidence, it should tossed into the dustbin.