The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate

The solution to the Indo-European problem has been one of the most consuming intellectual projects of the last two centuries. It has captivated the imagination and dedication of generations of archaeologists, linguists, philologists, anthropologists, historians, and all manner of scholarly, and not so scholarly, dilettantes. Predicated on the deduction that cognate languages necessitate an original protoform spoken by a group of people inhabiting a reasonably delineated geographic area, the problem has resulted in a massive amount of scholarship attempting to reconstruct this protolanguage, locate the original homeland where it was spoken, and conjecture on the social and cultural life of the protospeakers. Although the endeavor has very much been a preoccupation of European scholars, the belief in and pursuit of the origins of European civilization have required scholars to attempt to reconstruct and reconfigure the prehistory and protohistories of other civilizations whose languages happen to belong to the Indo-European language family.

This book is primarily a historiographical study of how various Indian scholars, over the course of a century or more, have rejected this idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans by questioning much of the logic, assumptions, and methods upon which the theory is based. The aim of the book is threefold. A primary aim is to excavate marginalized points of view reacting against what is perceived as a flawed and biased historical construct. As a corollary of this aim, this work will further complicate the Indo-European homeland quest by exposing the whole endeavor to a critique from scholars outside mainstream European academic circles who do not share the same intellectual history as their Western peers. A further aim of this book is to present a comprehensive exposition and analysis of views from within mainstream academic circles addressing the issue of Indo-Aryan origins.