Ahh! The Joe Shearer theory.
Thank you kindly. I suppose this is fame, and I should get used to it. No royalties payable, nor commissions, I presume?
For years Indians have been fed the conventional Aryan invasion theory which had clear divisions between the North Indian Aryans & the South Indian Dravidians.
One basic issue which of course isn't big enough to raise Bang Galore's eyebrows is the existence of two hugely different language groups, with wholly dissimilar grammar, next to each other, each in its own continguous bloc, distributed among genetically identical people. But to Bang Galore, the existence of problems like this is not important. Rather like Sonia Gandhi; never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. With an issue like this in front of him, he would rather concentrate on the political character of the analysts dealing with the question, or the probable political character, or the possible political character. Whatever. An opportunity to miss out on the main issue, analysis of the facts available, not to be missed.
Quite typical of my dear friend. Although I haven't ever met him, and don't have much in common with him, he spends so much time in close proximity that he must either be a friend or otherwise attracted to me. As I am sixty and well past the age when my pheromones mattered, it must be friendship.
Then some research cast doubts on the racial separation because they found that when compared as a whole North Indians didn't look very different from South Indians.
The racial explanation, as Comrade BG fails (conveniently) to add, was a British explanation, and was thoroughly discredited by the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, the only place where it existed was in the wet dreams of the Nazis in Germany, and of the Brahmins in Indian society. Also in the minds of some of the more obnoxious elements in Muslim society who claimed superiority or better breeding because they were descended from Arab, or Turk, or Persian; the criterion being distinction from local Indian gene-pools. None of this is credible or supported by reasonable scientists any longer. In saying this, I am uneasily aware of technicians, even master scientist-technicians, like Robert Shockley as exceptions to this general rule.
The Aryan theory of driving the Dravidians to the South remained however till recently a favourite of the historians partial to left.
There was never a school of leftists or those partial to the left, whatever that curiousity of a phrase might mean, proposing that the Dravidians had been driven to the South by the Aryans. I can only surmise that in Bang Galore's clouded mind, his various enemies and imagined enemies have got inextricably intermingled, and given rise to this nonsense. This was, if anything, a Brahminical myth in north and south, glanced at in passing by historians of all shades of political persuasion.
The big problem that completely upset everyone's calculation was the genetic studies which suggest no major changes across the Indian population & suggests specifically that these have remained unchanged for 10's of thousands of years.
The big problem that completely upsets Bang Galore's Dungeons and Dragons view of history is that the Aryan race theory was overthrown some seventy-five years or so before the pioneering work of Cavalli-Sforza on race and genetics. To history analysts - for want of a better term: they will surely not want to be part of the impure left and be described even with a qualifying adjective as amateur historians - like Bang, if one may be informal with him, is that these minor gaps of nearly a century are easily bridged. Anne McCaffrey showed the way. Just close your eyes, enter the world of the past, and SUMMON the dragons. They will appear with a puff of smoke and a ravening appetite at your doorstep. I am ashamed to admit that I have not felt the need to replace historican analysis with this whizz-Bang school of getting results from contradictory facts, but there are those....many of those, one is tempted to say there are those Galore.
Where does that leave the conventional Aryan theory? In tatters certainly!
It was in tatters, as I mentioned earlier, and have mentioned many times earlier in many earlier writings on this subject, around the end of the 19th century, alas! All my writings in this forum, not so many that they may not be examined one at a time using the excellent tools left at the disposal of curious minds inhabiting this forum, have consistently maintained that Aryan is not a race-identification, it describes a linguistic group, period.
So much for the fanciful account of the conventional Aryan theory, something which never existed, and its being left in tatters.Just to make sure that there is no further embroidery of the facts to make another Bayeux tapestry, with as much foundation in fact as that original propaganda piece, let me remind readers that all that I have stated can be summed up very simply:
Various bands of tribes of mixed blood, speaking an Indo-Aryan language and separated from their kinsmen speaking Avestan Iranian, an eastern Indo-Iranian language, descended from the steppes around the Oxus and the Jaxartes down through the mountain slopes bordering Afghanistan and south Asia. They found opposition and dealt with it, according to their own self-serving accounts, militarily, apparently with great success, and in spite of internecine battles among themselves. While they were not so large in numbers as to affect the genetic structure of the population that they encountered, their use of iron, and the relative settled and peaceful nature of the settlements that they encountered enabled them to impose themselves and their language on the region in the Gangetic, the Indus and the Narmada Plains. The original inhabitants of the rest of south Asia, the Brahmaputra Plain, the Godavari Plain and the Kaveri Plain, remained more or less undisturbed, and continued to speak their original Dravidian languages.
The theory Joe is proposing is to somehow match the genetic facts with some hopeful conjectures. While his theory is plausible, that's about all it is.
The Oracle has spoken. We must be grateful for small mercies.
It brings with it different problems that defy many conventional notions & is in opposition to historical facts.
Ah! Historical facts raise their ugly heads. Stand by, folks! Another episode of Dungeons and Dragons coming our way.
Conventional notions, of course, being those notions that Bang Galore has held, and nobody has bothered to knock out of his head. I wonder why; could it be ennui?
The north Indian plains were known as Aryavarta; the land of tha Aryans. However going by the JS theory, there were never enough Aryans in the first place. So why call a land after an extinct people.
For the exact same reason as the Aryan languages spreading over what became known as Aryavarta; a small number of steppe-dwelling tribals speaking these languages using iron and the horse conquered a much larger, peaceful settled population with a much lower level of military technology. The conquered or compromising original populations, thought to have spoken Dravidian-Kol languages, accepted the conquerors' languages, and abandoned their own, except in the forests and village fastnesses; even today, these languages are alive and well in the forests and villages in Aryavarta.
Secondly, it was never an extinct people; it was a people that merged with the local population but never lost their memory of having been a different people. Similar things have happened before, and after. If evidence is required, it can be supplied - in great profusion.
In any case the references to conflict in the Rg Veda is not referring to the gangetic plains but further west..
This is what happens when confused minds try to deal with evidence, with an at best imperfect grasp of the evidence. The Rg Veda was one of four Vedas, and these were clearly, from internal evidence as well as from linguistic developments very clearly visible to trained linguists, composed at different times and reduced to writing in the same order that they were composed.
There is no historical record, in the accepted sense of historical record, about these incursions. The evidence that we have is literary, through the evidence of the literature available, which is NOT confined to the Rg Veda; archaeological, through some few archaeological remains available to us; and genetic, through the studies that have been conducted from the 60s on by Cavalli-Sforza and his group.
In the absence of historical evidence, we are reduced to a combination of linguistic and historical back-referencing, which usually makes most established historians very cross; we are not used to doing history based on such meagre and slip-shod record-keeping. Since this is what is needed to be done, however, it has been done. The literary sources available have been analysed, analysed threadbare, if that is of any consequence, and some information extracted. While a satisfactory historical record does not exist until we are able to calibrate events in south Asia with events in the rest of the world, for instance, with Europe by 323 BC, and with China by 290 BC, by back-calculation from here (largely from 323 BC) some dim outlines have emerged. These dim outlines depend not just on the Rg Veda but on the other bodies of writing, the other three Vedas, the Brahman, the Samhitas, the Upanishads, then the Puranas, and finally the two epics, which have a peculiar hallowed status in south Asia, unlike other epics in other parts of the world.
For these reasons, we need to take into account the entire body of literary evidence, using them with discrimination and with understanding of their context and their importance. The Rg Veda gives linguistic proximity with Avestan Iranian, geographical location around the Afghan mountain passes and the plains immediately to their east, and temporal location preceding all other literary evidence. They must be used in that connection and no other, not to predict what happened long after they had been frozen into customary form, and even written down.
It is clear from other written evidence, including Puranic evidence, and the evidence of the epics, that the narration that the Rg Veda started went on. It continued uninterrupted, though not visibly connected, requiring thorough and encyclopaedic knowledge of the rest of the literature. It goes on to describe the outlines of Aryavarta, and the struggles that the tribes went through in order to prevail, and they did have a drive to prevail.
If there were large populations already present in the gangetic plains (necessary in the JS theory to genetically absorb & nullify the impact of outsiders), why is there no large cases of disturbances in the 1st millennium BCE
And who said that there were no such records?
First, we need to correct your dates.
The Rg Veda covered events more or less within the period 1700 BC to 1100 BC, the others correspondingly later, down to 900 or 800 BC. 800 BC is the earliest ascribed date of the Mahabharata, and its final recensions may have been written as late as 600 or 800 AD.
If we are to watch for information regarding the spread of the tribals and their languages through Aryavarta, we are looking for information relating to the period 1700 BC to 600 BC, not later than that, so certainly the 1st millennium BC is a little later than we should be looking, although its beginning, 1000 BC to 600 BC, is fine. This is covered, if we observe, by the later Vedas, and the Puranas, and by the Mahabharata. This is what we should be looking at.
Do we find evidence? Remember, we are looking at quasi-historical evidence; evidence in literature that then has to be deconstructed to yield what we are seeking. And the literature doesn't let us down.
It is filled with instances in, for example, the epics. Who do you think was the evil forces destroying the yagnas of rishis and munis in their forest fastnesses, the evil forces that had to be quelled by Aryan warriors, the nobles of their tribes as the name implies, by force? Do you not see clearly in this the quelling of guerrilla action against isolated settlements of Indo-Aryan speaking tribals?
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or drink not of the Pierian spring.
& why do tribes already speak of aryavarta & being Aryan all the way to Nepal.(the Buddha's clan -the Sakyas)
It is anybody's guess what this reference is about.All this expansion and acceptance of the languages took place in the period 1700 BC to 600 BC. Where is the contradiction?
Are we to assume that whole populations meekly just bought the conquerors history & culture lock, stock & barrel. Boggles the imagination.
Ah, the man has a delicate imagination, and it should not have been rudely boggled. Fair enough. Let us look through our tomes and present him with some evidence.
1. A small handful of Attic Greeks conquered Greece and the islands; the original inhabitants, much larger in number, who spoke the lost language Pelasgian, were still in possession of their language in pockets as late as the sixth century BC. Herodotus' imagination boggled, too, but unlike our hero, he recorded this event faithfully.
2. A small number of Norman French conquered England. In spite of their numbers being minute, Norman French became the court language of England immediately.
It largely removed the native ruling class, replacing it with a foreign, French-speaking monarchy, aristocracy, and clerical hierarchy. This, in turn, brought about a transformation of the English language and the culture of England in a new era often referred to as Norman England.
Sounds familiar, eh? Now, for the Dungeons and Dragons lot, the total number of Normans involved, then and subsequently, was 8,000. Digest that number, and then think of this:
Large numbers of English people, especially from the dispossessed former landowning class, ultimately found Norman domination unbearable and emigrated.
The imagination of the writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles also boggled. However, to them, it was not a reason for disbelieving the evidence, but for calming their too-easily boggling imaginations.
This is getting boring. Last example:
3. A small number of Spaniards conquered the whole continent of South America. The number is estimated to be less than 2%.
Throughout the conquest, the numbers of people within the indigenous nations greatly exceeded the Spanish conquistadors; on average the Spanish population never exceeded 2% of the native population.
The imagination of the Incas must have boggled. However, South America became Spanish speaking for the most part (yes, Victoria, i can spell Brazil).
history books my god...
