Indigenous Aryans

The hypothesis of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of are "" to the. The hypothesis is that the and pre-Vedic language evolved out of an earlier stage, somewhere in. The "Indigenous Aryans" position may entail an Indian origin of, and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the mainstream model of which posits that  tribes migrated to.

identifies three major types of revisionist scenario:
 * 1) a "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the Punjab in the tradition of and ;
 * 2) the "" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland;
 * 3) the position that all the world's languages and civilizations derive from India, represented e.g. by or

Historiographical Context
Indigenous Aryans is usually taken to imply that the people of the were linguistically Indo-Aryans. In any "Indigenous Aryan" scenario, speakers of  must have left India at some point prior to the, when first mention of  is made in Assyrian records, but likely before the 16th century BC, before the emergence of the  which is often identified as a Proto-Iranian culture.

Proponents of "indigenous Aryan" scenarios typically base their understanding on interpretations of the, the oldest surviving Indo-Aryan text, which they date to the 3rd millennium BC (in some cases much earlier), in particular based on arguments in involving the , and sometimes.

Political significance
Repercussions of these divisions have reached n courts with the, where according to the historian and president of the Indian History Congress,  in a "crucial affidavit" to the superior court of the state of California,  "[g]iving a hint of the Aryan origin debate in India, [...] asked the court not to fall for the 'indigenous Aryan' claim since it has led to 'demonisation of Muslims and Christians as foreigners and to the near denial of the contributions of non-Hindus to Indian culture'".

Pseudoscience and Postmodernism
argues that the at the core of Hindu nationalism was unwittingly helped into being in the 1980s by the  embraced by Indian leftist "postcolonial theories"  like  and  who rejected the universality of "Western"  and called for the  "indigenous science". explains how this relativization of "science" was employed by Hindutva ideologues during the 1998 to 2004 reign of the :
 * any traditional Hindu idea or practice, however obscure and irrational it might have been through its history, gets the honoric of "science" if it bears any resemblance at all, however remote, to an idea that is valued (even for the wrong reasons) in the West.

Criticism of the irrationality of such "Vedic science" is brushed aside by the notion that
 * The idea of 'contradiction' is an imported one from the West in recent times by the Western-educated, since ‘Modern Science’ arbitrarily imagines that it only has the true knowledge and its methods are the only methods to gain knowledge, smacking of Semitic dogmatism in religion.

traces the "indigenous Aryan" idea to the writings of and. Golwalkar (1939) denied any immigration of "Aryans" to the subcontinent, stressing that all Hindus have always been "children of the soil", a notion Witzel compares to the Nazi  mysticism contemporary to Golwalkar. Since these ideas emerged on the brink of the internationalist and socially oriented Nehru-Gandhi government, they lay dormant for several decades, and only rose to prominence in the 1980s in conjunction with the relativist revisionism, most of the revisionist literature being published by the firms Voice of Dharma and Aditya Prakasha.

Bergunder (2004) likewise identifies Golwalkar as the originator of the "Indigenous Aryans" meme, and Goel's as the instrument of its rise to notability: The Aryan migration theory at first played no particular argumentative role in Hindu nationalism. [...] This impression of indifference changed, however, with Madhev Sadashiv Golwalkar (1906–1973), who from 1940 until his death was leader of the extremist paramilitary organization the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS). [...] In contrast to many other of their openly offensive teachings, the Hindu nationalists did not seek to keep the question of the Aryan migration out of public discourses or to modify it; rather, efforts were made to help the theory of the indigenousness of the Hindus achieve public recognition. For this the initiative of the publisher Sita Ram Goel (b.1921) was decisive. Goel may be considered one of the most radical, but at the same time also one of the most intellectual, of the Hindu nationalist ideologues. [...] Since 1981 Goel has run a publishing house named ‘Voice of India’ that is one of the few which publishes Hindu nationalist literature in English which at the same time makes a 'scientific' claim. Although no official connections exist, the books of 'Voice of India' — which are of outstanding typographical quality and are sold at a subsidized price — are widespread among the ranks of the leaders of the Sangh Parivar. [...] The increasing political influence of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s resulted in attempts to revise the Aryan migration theory also becoming known to the academic public.

Literature

 * Bergunder, Michael Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist reconstructions of Indian prehistory, Historiographia Linguistica, Volume 31, Number 1, 2004,  59-104.
 * Bryant, Edwin, The indigenous Aryan debate, diss. Columbia University (1997). (abstract)
 * ,, , : New Light on Ancient India Quest Books (IL) (October, 1995) ISBN 0-8356-0720-8
 * , Against Communalising History, Social Scientist (1998).
 * S. Guha, Negotiating Evidence: History, Archaeology, and the Indus Civilization, Modern Asian Studies 39.2, Cambridge University Press (2005), 399-426.
 * Lal, B. B., The Sarasvati flows on: The continuity of Indian culture, Aryan Books International (2002), ISBN 8173052026.
 * , The politics of history : Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) ISBN 81-85990-28-X.
 * Talageri, S. G.,, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0
 * Stephanie Jamison, Review of Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. (2005), Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 34 (2006) copy courtesy of editor of JIES
 * Trautmann, Thomas (ed.), The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8.
 * , The politics of history : Aryan invasion theory and the subversion of scholarship (New Delhi : Voice of India, 1995) ISBN 81-85990-28-X.
 * Talageri, S. G.,, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0
 * Stephanie Jamison, Review of Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. (2005), Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 34 (2006) copy courtesy of editor of JIES
 * Trautmann, Thomas (ed.), The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8.
 * Talageri, S. G.,, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi in 2000 ISBN 81-7742-010-0
 * Stephanie Jamison, Review of Laurie L. Patton & Edwin Bryant, The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. (2005), Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 34 (2006) copy courtesy of editor of JIES
 * Trautmann, Thomas (ed.), The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8.
 * Trautmann, Thomas (ed.), The Aryan Debate in India (2005) ISBN 0-19-566908-8.