Indo-Aryan migrations Quotes

“An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth.”

“No tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India.”

“It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material culture has yet been identified in India.”

“The question of Indo-European migrations into the subcontinent of India can, at best, be described as enigmatic.”

“Wikipedia: Indo-Aryan migrations”

“I have always felt that the idea underlying this theory has a basis other than the purely scientific or historical one.”

“There is no indication from the Rigveda that the Aryans were conscious of entering a new country when they came to India.”

“A diffusion or migration of a culturally complex ‘Indo-Aryan‘ people into South Asia is not described by the archaeological record.”

“Indian tradition knows nothing of any Aila or Aryan invasion of India from Afghanistan, nor of any gradual advance from thence eastwards.”

“The Indo-Aryan problem is likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future, so we might as well attempt to address it in a cordial fashion.”

“It is against the stereotype of overbearing macho invaders, but the Aryans secretively stole their way into India, careful not to leave any traces.”

“[T]here is only one solution left to save the invasionist model, or at least the concept of an “arrival of the Indo-Iranians”: invisible migrations.”

“The linguistic "aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.”

“In the Indian subcontinent, the archaeological assemblages considered to reflect the coming of the Aryans... do not provide any stable or consistent picture.”

“Nothing, in the present state of archaeological research ... enables us to reconstruct convincingly invasions that could be clearly attributed to Aryan groups.”

“If the so-called “invasion” of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology, it must be stressed that such movements rarely leave clear physical traces.”

“In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around.”

“The Aryan invasion of India is recorded in no written document and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically but it is nevertheless established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology.”

“The association of these groups with early bearers of the Aryan tongue is without warrant. If a word of warning is appropriate, it is on the desirability of avoiding an excessively Aryan 'preoccupation'.”

“Certainly the assumption that the Aryas were recent ‘immigrants’ to India, and their enemies were ‘aborigines’, has done much to distort our understanding of the archaeology of India and Pakistan.”