Aryans and Dravidians

[czm1 at cornell.edu]

        Loathe as I am to get into this particular controversy, I would
like to make some clarifications.  The original question was about the
supposed "discredited Aryan invasion theory." What is certainly discredited
is the old theory of Wheeler that the Indus civ. was destroyed by invading
"Aryans", and that the find on an upper level of Mohenjo Daro of a roomful
of skeletons who had received no proper burial was evidence of this "sack."
 This theory has  long ago been exploded, but please note that to say the
speakers of Indo-Aryan languages did not invade and demolish the Indus
civ.is not the same thing as denying that the Indo-Aryan languages and at
least some elements of their associated cultures migrated into South Asia
from someplace else, which we suppose because of the findings of historical
linguistics.
        The first two ideas mentioned by Sax, Renfrew's and Parpola's, both
suggest that the speakers of Indo-Aryan languages migrated into South Asia
in a series of waves.  Renfrew argues they arrived very early, bringing
settled agriculture with them, I believe.  Thus in this picture the
"Aryans" become a "kindler, gentler" people. 
        It is a fact that there is not perfect accord between what we know
about the arrival of the "Aryans" from historical linguistics and what we
know from archaeology.  All the same, the speakers of the Indo-Aryan
languages are still thought to have at some stage arrived in South Asia
from elsewhere.  This is far different from the view of the last reference
of Sax, which appears to argue a sort of neo-Vedic nationalism, viz. that
the Vedas, eternally based in India, are the original culture, from which
all other world cultures are developments and of which the "Aryans" as a
distinguishable racial group are the original custodians. It is this
position which appears to assert that to draw attention to the scanty
evidence for a single, violent, "Aryan" invasion is to prove that the
"Aryans" have always lived in India.  To discredit Max Muller, [who is in
any case, not the originator  of the invasion theory or the migration
theory,] because he is a Christian and therefore incapable of dispassionate
rationality, in favor of a view like this, which claims on the contrary to
be objective and scientific, appears to me just a little bit disingenuous.
        And by the way, my physical anthropologist colleagues tell me that
there is no archaeological evidence that allows for drawing racial and/or
racialist distinctions in the skeletal remains of the pre-historic period
in Indus-Ganges region, nor in the later periods for that matter.  But the
terms need to be defined, and mercifully, that subject is not at all my
area.  Whether the languages and cultures current in Northern South Asia
when the "Aryans" arrived were "Dravidian" is a theory that has been
suggested, but not proved, I do not think.
      
But I would be glad to be corrected,
Yours,
C. Minkowski, Cornell U.