The Aryans and the Vedic Age: Brief History

Namit Arora, 1/2024; Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Shauna Schwartz (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Man, this kind of Indian history is way better than American history about Indians.

Oh, how we worship our male gods, Hitler, Goebbels, Mengele, von Braun, and Little Eve.

Indians | Ep. 2: The Aryans and the Vedic Age | A Brief History of a Civilization

(The Wire) The story of [proto-India or Great Bharat] is one of profound and continuous change. It has been shaped by the dynamic of migration, conflict, mixing, coexistence, and cooperation.

Am I Aryan? The Right thinks so (Swift)

In this 10-part web series, Namit Arora tells the story of Indians and their civilization by exploring some of our greatest historical sites, most of which were lost to memory and were dug out by archaeologists.

He focuses on ancient and medieval foreign travelers whose idiosyncratic accounts conceal surprising insights about us Indians.

All along, Arora surveys India’s long and exciting churn of cultural ideas, beliefs, and values — some that still shape us today, and others that have been lost forever.

The series mostly mirrors — and often extends — the contents of his book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization.

Episode 2: The Aryans and the Vedic Age

Indians: A Brief History

After the decline of the Harappan Civilization, waves of Aryan [from the Steppes around the Stans and Ukraine] migrants arrived from Central Asia between 2000–1500 BCE.

A nomadic-pastoralist people of lighter skin, the Aryans were culturally different from the Subcontinent’s settled farmers and forest tribes of darker skin.

They brought along an early Sanskrit, proto-Vedas, Vedic [mostly male] gods, a [Brahmin] priestly class fond of fire rituals and oral chants, new social and [sexist] gender hierarchies, the horse and chariot.

Who will be US president: Kamala, Nikki, Vivek?

Mixing with the locals forged a lighter-skinned elite that spoke Indo-European languages, or Prakrits.

In the centuries ahead, larger political units led by tribal chiefs emerged in north India. War among Aryanized tribes like the Bharatas and Purus became common.

From this substrate and its social conflicts came the early stories of the Mahabharata, circa 1,000 BCE.

Indo-Aryan culture and languages became dominant in Aryavarta, whose cultural and material qualities Arora explores in this episode.

More than 1,000 years after the Harappans, the next cities arose in the Gangetic Plain in mid-first millennium BCE.

• The use of the word "Aryan" is not a coincidence. It was stolen by German Nazis along with other elements of Buddhist philosophy and legend (namely that of a world monarch chakravartin world ruler) by genius Nazi propagandist Goebbels. As for the problem of suffering (dukkha), "the final solution" would be the ultimate liberation (moksha), nirvana, cynically used by Nazi killers and eugenicists (inspired by earlier U.S. eugenic projects and programs) to refer to the extermination of invalids, the infirm, and "human parasites," including gays, Gypsies, and one other targeted groiup.

Scientific racism is real.

New states with money economies even flirted with democratic ideas. New hybrid cultures arose from the mixing of Indo-Aryans, post-Harappans, and ethnic groups whose ancestors had come to [proto-] India much earlier.

They forged new trades, lifestyles, and a thriving marketplace of spiritual and religious ideas.

This prolific age — of the early Upanishads, the Buddha, Mahavira [Jainism], Carvaka, Panini — would profoundly shape later Indians.

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY/FOR FURTHER READING

• Anthony, David W, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, Princeton, 2010
• Bryant, Edwin, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, OUP, 2001
• Devy, G N, Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation, Aleph, 2022 Doniger, Wendy, The Hindus: An Alternative History, Penguin, 2009
• Jha, D.N., The Myth of the Holy Cow, Navayana, 2010 Joseph, Tony, Early Indians, Juggernaut, 2018
• Khan, Razib, The character of caste; Stark Truth About Aryans: a story of India; Stark Truth About Humans: a story of India, 'Unsupervised Learning' Substack, 2021
• Kristiansen, K., Kroonen, G., & Willerslev, E. (Eds.), The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited: Integrating Archaeology, Genetics, and Linguistics. CUP, 2023
• Kuz'mina, Elena E., The Origin of the Indo-Iranians, Brill, 2007
• Mohan, Peggy, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages, Penguin, 2021
• Modi, Jivanji Jamshedji, ‘The antiquity of the custom of Sati’, Anthropological Papers, 1929
• Ollett, Andrew, Language of the Snakes: Prakrit, Sanskrit and the language order of premodern India, UC Press, 2017
• Olsen, Birgit Anette (editor), Tracing the Indo-Europeans: New evidence from archaeology and historical linguistics, Oxbow Books, 2019
• Parpola, Asko, The Roots of Hinduism, Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 96–7
• Reich, David, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past, OUP, 2018
• Sen, Sudipta, Ganga: The Many Pasts of a River, Gurgaon, Viking, 2019
• Shinde, Vasant, et al., ‘An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers’, Cell, Vol 179, Issue 3, Oct 17, 2019
• Silva, Marina, et al., ‘A genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals,’ BMC Evolutionary Biology, 2017
• Singh, Upinder, Political Violence in Ancient India, Harvard UP, 2017
• Thapar, Romila, Early India, Penguin, 2002 Thapar, Romila, et al, Which of Us Are Aryans?, Aleph, 2019

Indians (Namit Arora)

Research, script, and narration by Namit Arora. Producer: The Wire. Director: Natasha Badhwar. Camera: Ajmal Jami. Video editor: Anam Sheikh.

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