seals; the other looks to have been derived from the Aramaic script of western Asia.
Illiterate and ignorant of many basic agrarian skills, the arya yet knew all, and more, about livestock. While the Harappans used ox-transport and may have found totemic roles for bulls and many other animals, they do not seem to have had a passion for dairy farming or horse-racing; in fact the horse was probably unknown to them, India’s lack of native bloodstock being then, as ever after, the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders. The arya, though, were veritable cowboys. As well as advertising their prowess in the rustling of cattle and the driving of two-horse chariots, they spattered their verses with metaphors about affectionate cows and fiery steeds. In the Rig Veda storm clouds invariably ‘gallop’ across the heavens; their thunder is as the neigh of a stallion. Rivers rush from the hills like cattle stampeding towards pasture; and when the Beas river is joined by a tributary, ‘one the other licks, like the mother-cow her calf’. Cattle were also currency, value being expressed in so many cows; and go, the Sanskrit root for ‘cow’, also features in the word used to indicate warfare, evidence that strife originally resulted from competition not for land and territory but for cows and wealth.
The arya were therefore originally pastoralists and, assuming a migration into India, plus the herdsman’s need to be forever seeking new pastures, they must have been semi-nomadic. We may infer that, like pastoralists the world over, they lived an itinerant outdoor life. Much exposed to the elements, they may have been inclined to discover divine powers in the forces of nature and to assume a ready communion with these powers. The names of their gods predate arrival in India, many (e.g. Indra, Agni, Varuna) being almost synonymous with their counterparts in Persian, Greek and Latin mythology; but their attributes and achievements relate to the Indian environment. It would seem, also, that the basic unit of human society was initially the small nomadic group rather than the settlement. The word grama, although it soon came to mean a village, was originally indicative of a troupe of wagons and their perhaps three or four related families, plus livestock.
During the monsoon months, when pasture became plentiful and transhumance difficult, the arya must have formed their first temporary settlements. No doubt they then also planted their grain crop which, watered by the rains and fertilised by the manure from their cattle pens, would have been harvested during the winter months. The grain was probably barley. Rice, although apparently cultivated by the Harappans, does not feature in the earliest of the Vedas. Nor is the word used to designate it Sanskritic. It, too, was probably acquired from one of India’s aboriginal peoples. Later, however, after the arya had adopted a settled life, rice receives its first mention, and later still, following their colonisation of the middle Ganga in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, the cultivation of irrigated padi would become crucial to their pattern of settlement.
That they initially settled in the Panjab and astride what is now the Indo–Pakistan frontier is clear from references in the Rig Veda to the Sapta-sindhu, ‘the Land of the Seven Rivers’. Each of these rivers has been identified, and most were tributaries of the Indus. They are mentioned frequently, and must therefore have been familiar to the arya (although the most important, the Saraswati, has since dried up). On the other hand, there is only one mention of the mighty Ganga, and that in what is thought to be the latest of Rig Vedic compositions. Subsequent works, like the Brahmanas and Upanisads (C900–600 BC), confirm a shift in geographical focus to the east and specifically to the Doab, the crescent of land between the Jamuna and the Ganga (immediately east of Delhi). As the setting for the Mahabharata, the Doab became arya-varta, ‘the land of the arya’. If one accepts C950 BC as the probable date of the Bharata war, this migration, or colonisation, may therefore have occurred C1100–1000 BC. It would be followed by a further move into the valley of the Ganga itself before the arya, much changed in the interim, began founding states, building cities and rediscovering the trail of civilisation which the Harappans had trodden two thousand years earlier.
As to when the arya made their initial debut in India there remains grave doubt. Nearly two hundred years ago Mountstuart Elphinstone, one of the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company, headed the first British mission into Afghanistan. He failed to reach Kabul, but from Peshawar in what was then Afghan territory Elphinstone got a look at the Khyber Pass and formed some idea of the harsh lands whence the Aryans supposedly came. Years later, having declined the governor-generalship to concentrate on his studies, he produced a magisterial History of India. In it he devoted much attention to Sanskrit tradition, and recalling that dramatic contrast between the arid Afghan hills and the smiling gardens of Peshawar, he for the first time threw serious doubt on the central Asian provenance of the Aryans.
Neither in the code of Manu [the survivor of the flood, who was later credited with compiling a standard compendium of Hindu law] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any other book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence, or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no farther than the Himalaya chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.7
To Elphinstone it was quite incredible that the Aryans could have made the transition from mountain desert to monsoonal paradise and yet failed to record it. He also noted that, throughout the ages, civilisation had more commonly spread from east to west than vice versa. Perhaps, therefore, the Aryans had originated in India.
Although this idea currently derives no credibility from its aggressive repetition in Hindu nationalist publications, and although it is flatly denied by the arya’s familiarity with horses (typically central Asian) and their ignorance of elephants (typically Indian), it is certainly curious that the Vedas say nothing of life in central Asia, nor of an epic journey thence through the mountains, nor of arriving in the deliciously different environment of the subcontinent. The usual explanation is that, by the time the Vedas were composed, this migration was so remote that all memory of it had faded; and on this basis a tentative chronology is proposed. Allowing, then, first for a major time-lapse (say two hundred years) between the Late Harappan phase and the Aryan arrival in India, and then for a plausible memory gap (say another two hundred years) between arrival and the composition of the earliest Vedas, it looks as if the arya must have entered India some time between 1500 BC and 1300 BC. Most authorities now suppose several waves of migration rather than a single mass movement. These waves probably consisted of different tribes and, on linguistic evidence, may have been spread over centuries. So possibly the entire period was one of Aryan incursion.
As to whether all or any of these incursions constituted invasions rather than migrations it is impossible to say. We may, though, speculate. Considered in the light of later incursions into north-west India by Alexander the Great and a host of other intruders, including those afire with the spirit of Islam, the Aryan coming has traditionally been seen as a full-scale invasion. The indigenous people ‘naturally resisted the newcomers, and a fierce and protracted struggle ensued’. In a standard textbook on ancient India, R.C. Majumdar goes on to identify the indigenous resistance as coming from ‘Dravidians’, the assumption being that the indigenous dasa spoke a Dravidian, as opposed to a Sanskritic, language.
It was not merely a struggle between two nationalities. The Dravidians had to fight for their very existence … But all in vain … The Dravidians put up a brave fight, and laid down their lives in hundreds and thousands on various battlefields, but ultimately had to succumb to the attacks of the invaders. The Aryans destroyed their castles and cities, burnt their houses, and reduced a large number of them to slaves.8
Recent theories of multiple migrations have somewhat softened this picture. Perhaps some of the Aryan clans were invited into India as allies, mercenaries or traders; the indigenous dasa may not have been ‘Dravidians’ but earlier Indo-Aryan arrivals; there is nothing to suggest that they ever constructed ‘castles and cities’; and the archaeological evidence, being almost entirely ceramic, gives no hint of the sudden change one would expect from the conquest and suppression of an entire ‘nationality’.
There is, though, another explanation. Seen in the context not of later invasions in the north-west, but of later extensions of arya influence