Aryan Invasion vs Aryan Migration

Members of an archaeological team work in Rakhigarhi on March 4, 2015. Credit: Manoj Dhaka/AFP.and Scroll.in


In my novel, Yugantar, I had made several interpretations of Indian history, first of which was:

“There was no Aryan invasion from outside India. The earlier Indus civilisation disintegrated over several centuries due to various factors. By 330 BCE'—the period of this novel—there had been sufficient mixing of cultures, languages, religions, scripts and schools of thought which defined the concept of India”.

A reader while congratulating my efforts said “I do not agree with 1st interpretation. In the last decade there have been multiple genetic studies that there was an influx of large number of persons from central Asia 4500 years ago. Their genes are found in Indian population. Kokanastha Brahmins of Pune have 73%. The least are found in certain castes in Andhra and north Tamilnadu. The Gond tribals do not have these genes. Brahmins have higher % than others. Some of my school mates were genetically tested all of them have the central Asian genes”. 

The point is that there is a difference between an influx or migration spread over several hundreds of years and an invasion, which is usually short-term and destructive. The Aryan ‘invasion’ was a British concoction to create a dividing line among Indians.

Recent studies published in Science and Cell throw more light on this. The picture that emerges from these studies is one of diverse origin for the modern South Asian population. The main building blocks at the time of the Bronze Age (around four millennia ago) are the Ancient Ancestral South Indians, the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation and a significant migration from the Pontic Steppe. None of these people exist today but it is their mixing that caused most of the modern Indian population to be formed.

Of these, the Ancient Ancestral South Indians are probably the least studied and were present across parts of the subcontinent that did not fall under the Indus Valley Civilisation. Their closest modern-day relatives are the tribes of the Andaman Islands.

For all practical purposes, the people of the Indus Valley had no Steppe DNA. They mainly had a mixture of Iranian-farmer-related DNA as well as some DNA from Ancient Ancestral South Indians.

The Steppe population came in from grasslands in Eastern Europe corresponding to modern-day Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. The genetic research identifies that this Steppe ancestry migrated between 2,000 BC and 1,500 BC, in about a span of 500 years.

So, the present day Indian population has three ancestors. I don’t know whether a DNA count has any meaning today when these original ancestors have mixed together for about 4500 years now. In the final count we are all Homo Sapiens who started migrating from Africa around 300,000 years back.

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