Indo-Aryan migration theory, a controversy for the ages, is fueling discussions once more in India after an article published in The Hindu newspaper highlighted the genetic evidence that the Indo-Aryan peoples came from Central Asia and Europe to South Asia.
Indo-Aryan peoples are an ethonolinguistic group of people that speak diverse Indo-Aryan languages and currently live predominantly in the South Asian region. The population of the modern descendants of this group is more than 1 billion, or a seventh of world's population.
There has been a long tug-of-war between those who are for and against the theory that Indo-Aryans arrived to India from outside. Among opponents of the theory in India are Hindu nationalists — who sometimes cast it as a product of colonialism designed to denigrate India — as well as some researchers.
The alternative theory proposed by opponents based on Rigveda, one of the oldest religious sculptures of Hinduism, suggests that the Aryans were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. The idea of a pure Aryan race and the social division that many Hindu scriptures recommend based on one's race has pushed the conflict even further.
Mainstream researchers tend to reject this theory on the basis of linguistic and genetic studies. Instead, they say evidence points to Indo-Aryans and Iranians originating from the Proto-Indo-Iranians. After this split during the period 1800-1600 BCE, the latter group was settled around Iran while the former migrated to Anatolia (most of modern-day Turkey), Pakistan, northern India, and Nepal. The classic Indo-Aryan models attempt to explain how migrations would have happened around 1500 BCE from Central Asia and Eastern Europe to South Asia and Anatolia, which possibly brought the ancestors of the Indo-Aryan peoples and their language Sanskrit to India.
A detailed article published on June 16 in The Hindu, titled “How Genetics Is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate”, touches upon many other societal aspects linked to the hypothesis, such as the patriarchal social structure in India and how the Sanskrit language came to the Indian subcontinent along with the Aryans.
‘Aryan’ migration into India around 2000 BC is no longer a theory. A flood of DNA data settles the debate. My piecehttps://t.co/ZnG7ZNv0Mc
— Tony Joseph (@tjoseph0010) June 17, 2017
The article cites multiple instances of research carried out in different countries, both approving and disavowing the theory. One citation is of a recent piece of research done by 16 scientists that led to the publication of a peer-reviewed journal paper titled “A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-Biased Dispersals” published in the journal “BMC Evolutionary Biology”:
In particular, genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages, a smaller fraction of autosomalgenome-wide variation and an even smaller fraction of mitogenomes across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5and 3.5 ka.
Harvard Professor David Reich, who has been working for a long time on this subject favoring the Indo-Aryan migration theories, is also mentioned. In 2009, he published the paper “Reconstructing Indian Population History“, and later in 2016 in an interview highlighted the mixed races of the Indian subcontinent:
In the beginning of 2007, we started studying at the whole genome level, the whole organism level, the DNA from initially twenty-five diverse Indian populations. It’s now more than 200 that we’ve studied. We picked these populations to be as diverse as possible, capturing the linguistic diversity of India. […]
[…] the great majority of Indian groups today are descended from a mixture of basically just two ancestral populations, one which we call the ancient ancestral North Indian and one which we call the ancestral South Indian. Everybody is mixed in India without exception. Even the most isolated groups, which are hunter-gatherers living in the forest or isolated places, everybody is mixed with at least 20 percent of each of these ancestries.

Scheme of Indo-European migrations from c. 4000 to 1000 BCE according to the Kurgan hypothesis. Image via Wikimedia Commons by DBachmann. CC BY SA 3.0
‘If the evidence has really changed, I will also change my view’
Audrey Truschke, assistant professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University in the US, tweeted out the article:
The linguistic evidence for the #AryanMigration theory is very strong. For those that need hard science also: https://t.co/AigrwNS4wX
— Audrey Truschke (@AudreyTruschke) June 16, 2017
Sitaram Yechury, a veteran leader of the Community Party of India, and Devdutt Pattanaik, a mythologist and writer, similarly hailed the article:
The historical evidence of Aryan migration and the confluence that India is. Brilliant piece by @tjoseph0010 https://t.co/wCZvoPY4pm
— Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) June 17, 2017
Excellent article . Scientific so will upset myth-haters. https://t.co/8xxXpIMe9e
— Devdutt Pattanaik (@devduttmyth) June 17, 2017
However, Anand Ranganathan, a consulting editor at the Indian news outlet Newslaundry.com, attacked the article in the Hindu:
A few quick points on the interesting piece on Aryan Migration published today in the Hindu. pic.twitter.com/UjaBmEdZx9
— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) 17 de junio de 2017
Nityanand Jayaraman, a Facebook user, also pointed at the possibility of a close connection of north Indians with the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Interesting article on how Yogi Adityanath and Vishnu Bhagwat may be more closely related to their brothers in Pakistan and Afghanistan than they care to acknowledge. And about India's multiculturalism.
Sanjeev Sanyal, a writer who earlier opposed the Aryan invasion theory, has written on Facebook that he would read the recently published papers and is ready to change his opinion if there is a changed evidence:
The genetic evidence on “Aryan Invasion” appears to have shifted to support a migration around 2000 BC (according to this article anyway). Have not closely followed the latest papers, will need time to read the new papers on this. If the evidence has really changed, I will also change my view. Only way to do research.
The debate on whether Indo-Aryans migrated from outside India and brought their oldest language Sanskrit to the South Asian region continues to rage and pave the way for more anthropological research on the people, cultures and languages of the region. There are over 780 languages across India which makes India one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world. However, of these languages, only 22 enjoy constitutional protection while over 196 languages are endangered.
6 comments
The article produced in ‘The Hindu’ by Tony Joseph is misleading. Many of the Geneticists quoted in the article by Tony Joseph never drew the conclusions which Tony drew in his article. Tony unprofessionally after taking the views of the Geneticists decided to edit them and spin them to suit his ‘Aryan migration’ narrative. Below are some of the rebuttals of Tony’s article.
https://swarajyamag.com/culture/here-we-go-again-why-they-are-wrong-about-the-aryan-migration-debate-this-time-as-well
Here We Go Again: Why They Are Wrong About The Aryan Migration Debate This Time As Well
https://www.myind.net/Home/viewArticle/is-it-ignorance-or-yet-another-mischievous-attempt-at-proving-the-never-existent-aryan-invasion-of-india
Is it Ignorance or yet another Mischievous attempt at proving the never existent Aryan Invasion of India?
http://indiafacts.org/propagandizing-aryan-invasion-debate-rebuttal-tony-joseph/
Propagandizing the Aryan Invasion Debate: A Rebuttal to Tony Joseph
The unfortunate thing about the ‘Aryan migration’ debate is that it has been Politicised by both the “Psudo-Liberals” / “Psudo-Secularists”/’Marxists” on the one hand and “Hindu Nationalists” on the other.
Genetic, Textual and Anthropological evidence as it stands now do not support ‘Aryan Migration to India’ theory. Its only support comes from largely Western Linguists who continue to argue in support of AMT. But Indian experts like Srikanth Talageri dispute the conclusions drawn by the Western Linguists.
Indians come from India!! Fix your English! ‘peoples’… it seems! Low quality article… seems like it was written just for the sake of writing and does not add value in anyway to the subject matter or to the concerned reader. Europeans migrated from India originally to Europe… there is evidence in the vedic literature.
This is true, Tony Joseph is correct. It is not that complicated. Once you do dna analysis you will see it. There is migration out of India. There have been multiple migrations into India by Indo European or Proto Indo European type people. We have ancestry from North Eastern Europe but they don’t have ancestry native to South Asia. It is pretty clear
AIT is completely wrong and indus people has travelled fomr india to other places most of the indus script resembles modern day english
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3027873/How-white-skin-evolved-Europeans-Pale-complexions-developed-region-8-000-years-ago-study-claims.html
The map of Indo-European migrations (Image by Joshua Jonathan) is not that accurate. Greek is Balkan. And furthermore there are countries labeled under Greece that are not Greek. So at least make sure to do some minor research before posting stuff.