PROJECT SARASWATI :The Aryans were Indigenous Neither Invaders nor Immigrants

SOURCE:   
https://www.academia.edu/33633317/The_Aryans_were_indigenous_neither_invaders_nor_immigrants_BB_Lal_2017           

  PART ONE IS : 

 http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2017/06/project-saraswati-how-genetics-is.html   

                                                                       
                PART TWO  OF TWO PARTS

                             PROJECT  SARASWATI

         The Aryans were Indigenous:
         Neither Invaders nor Immigrants

                                                By 
                                                                                     
                                                                                              
                                                                              
                                       BB Lal,       

                   Former Director General,
            Archaeological Survey of India

Uploaded by
Srini Kalyanaraman


My attention has been drawn to an article published by Tony Joseph
 in The Hindu,dated June 17, 2017, which, in essence, tries to say
 that The Vedic Aryans came toIndia from outside.
 I would like to apprise the readers of the reality of the situation.
I have published many books on the subject, each one dealing with a specific
aspect of the issue. The latest book,The Rigvedic People
: Invaders?, Immigrants?  Or Indigenous?,published in 2015 by
 Aryan Books International, New Delhiclearly explains, using evidence
 of archaeology, hydrology, C-14 dating andliterature, why the 
Aryans were neither Invaders nor slow Immigrants, but were  
indigenous. I present here my arguments, as briefly as possible . 





 At the root of the trouble lies the dating of the Vedas to 1200 BCE
 by theGerman Scholar Max Muller. He did it on a very ad hoc basis 
and when his  contemporaries,    such as Goldstucker, Whitney and
 Wilson, challenged his methodology, he surrendered by saying, 
“Whether the Vedas were composed in 1000 or 2000 or 3000 BC
 no one on earth can ever determine.” The pity is that inspite of such
 a candid confession by Max Muller himself many of his followers
  even today stick to this date, or at the most give concession to 
1500 BCE



In 1920s the Harappan Civilization was discovered and 
dated to the3rd  millennium BCE on the basis of the occurrence of
 many Indus objects in the  already dated archaeological contexts in
 Mesopotamia. This led to the immediate  conclusion that since, 
according to Max Muller, the Vedas were not earlier than1200 BCE,
 the Harappan Civilization could not have been the creation of  the 
Vedic people.  




In 1946 Mortimer Wheeler (later knighted) excavated
 Harappa and discovered a fort over there. On learning that in the
 Vedic texts Indra has been  described    as    puramdara   i.e.
 ‘destroyer of  forts’, he jumped to the conclusion that  the
 Vedic Aryans, represented by Indra, invaded India and destroyed 
the Harappan Civilization.  But, it must be stressed that there no
 evidence of any kind of destruction at Harappa.  








    In support of  his Invasion  thesis, however, Wheeler  referred to some  skeletons at  
Mohenjo-daro which he said represent the people massacred by the 
 Invading Aryans. But the fact is that these skeletons had  been found
 in different  stratigraphic contexts, some in the Middle levels, some in the
 Late and some in thedebris which accumulated after the desertion of
 the site. Thus, these cannot be ascribed to a single event, much less

 to an Aryan Invasion.




The ghost of ‘Invasion’ re-appeared in a newavatara, namely that
of ‘Immigration’.Said Romila Thapar in 1991: “If invasion is
 discarded then the  mechanism of   migration  and   occasional contacts    come   into  
 sharper   focus. These   migrations   appear to have been of  pastoral        
cattle    breeders   who are prominent in theAvesta andRigveda. 
Faithfully following   her,  R. S. Sharma elaborated:     “The     pastoralists who moved to the Indian
 border   land   came from   Bactria-Margiana    Archaeological        
                                 Complex      or         BMAC which saw the genesis of the culture of the
Rigveda.” 




 These  assertions of Thapar and Sharma are baseless. In the first place,
the  BMAC is not a product of nomads. It has fortified settlements and
 elaborate   temple-complexes. It has yielded  a very rich  harvest of
 antiquities which include  silver axes, highly ornamented human and
 animal figurines and excellently carved seals. But what is more important
 is that no element of the BMAC has ever been  found east of the Indus 
which was the area occupied by the Vedic people. So  there is no case
 whatsoever for the BMAC people having migrated into India.



Now, if  there was     no Aryan Invasion or an Aryan Immigration, were the Vedic people
 indigenous? To answer this question we must first find out   the correct
  chronological  horizon of the Rigveda. It refers to the river Sarasvati
 nearly seventy times. The river dried up before the composition ofthe
Panchavimsa Brahmana, as this text avers.Today this dry river is
 identifiable  with the Ghaggar in Haryana and Rajasthan.
 On its bank stands Kalibangan, a siteof the Harappan Civilization. 
An Indo-Italian team, under the leadership of Robert Raikes, bore holes in the
 dry bed to find out its history. Raikes wrote an article in Antiquity (UK), 
captioning it: ‘Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes.  C-14 dates show
 that the flourishing settlement was suddenly abandoned because of  the
drying up of the Sarasvati around 2000 BCE.  What  are the implications of 
this discovery?  Since the Sarasvati was a mighty flowing river during the
 Rigvedic   times, the Rigveda has got to be earlier than that date. Thus, at least
 a3rd  millennium-BCE horizon is indicated for the Rigveda.



We   now pass on to  another   very important statement in theRigveda Verses 5
 and 6 of Sukta 75 of Mandala 10 enumerate all the rivers serially from the
 Ganga and Yamuna on the east to the Indus and its  western   tributaries  on
 the west.   Inother   words, this was the area occupied by the Rigvedic people in
 the 3 rd millennium BCE (the minimal date arrived at for theRigveda, 
referred to in the previous paragr aph.  Now, if a simple question is 
as ked, ‘Which archa eological culture flourished in this very area
 in the millennium BCE’, the inescapable answer shall have to be,
 ‘The Harappan Civilization’.  In other words,the Rigved and  Harappan 
Civilization are but two faces of    the   same   coin.

The Harappan Civilization, which attained its maturity in the 
3 rd millennium BCE, had its formative stages at  Kunal  and Bhirrana 
in the Sarasvati valley itself,   taking  the beginning 
back to the    5th-6th   millennium    BCE.      In other words, the Harappans       

4

were the ‘sons of the soil’. And since, as alr eady established,
 the HarappanCivilization and the Rigved are but two faces of
 the same coin,the Vedic Aryansipso facto were indigenous. They were
 neither invaders nor immigrants.


The application of DNA research to the Aryan debate is nothing new.
 The      re nowned   scientist Sanghamitra Sahoo and colleagues had 
declared: “The sharingof some Y-chromosomal haplogroups 
between Indian and Central Asian  populations is    most parsimoniously
 explained by   a deep, common    ance s try   between the two r  egions, 
with the diffusion of some Indian-specific lineages   northward.”

This north-westward movement of the Vedic people is duly supported

 by both literature and archaeology. The Baudhayana Srautasut, 
a later Vedic text,mentions that Amavasu, a son of Pururavas and 
Urvashi, migrated westwards and  his progeny are the Gandharas,
 Persians and Arattas. Moving through these regions, a section of the 
Vedic people reached Turkey where a 1380-BCE inscription from
 Boghaz Koi refers to a treaty between the Hittite and Mitanni kings
 mentioning as witnesses the Vedic gods Indra, Varuna,
 Mitraand Nasatya.Further, there a treatise on horse-training
 by one Kikkuli, which uses Sanskrit terms  likeekavartana,
 dvivaratanaandtrivartana,meaning thereby that  the horses 
under training should be made to make one, two or three rounds
 of the  prescribed course. What more evidence is nee ded to support  a
           westward   migration  of the Vedic Aryans themselves?


Let us, therefore, analyze the facts coolly and not  remain 
glued to the19thcentury paradigms!