Out of India theory Totally Explained

Everything about The Out Of India Theory totally explained

The Out of India theory (OIT, also called the Indian Urheimat Theory) is the proposition that the Indo-European language family originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations. A notable proponent was Friedrich Schlegel. Originally proposed in the late 18th century in an attempt to explain connections between Sanskrit and European languages, it's today deprecated by academics who favor the Kurgan model.
   The Out of India theory builds on the idea that Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and its recent revival in Hindu nationalist writing has made it the subject of a contentious debate in Indian politics. had a firm belief in this and essentially created the idea that India was the Urheimat of all Indo-European languages. Most scholars, such as William Jones, however realized from earliest times that instead, Sanskrit and related European languages had a common source, and that no attested language represented this direct ancestor.
   The development of historical linguistics, specifically the law of palatals and the discovery of the laryngeals in Hittite, shattered Sanskrit's preeminent status as the most venerable elder in this reconstructed family. The demotion of Sanskrit to the status of one daughter language among many eroded the remaining support of India as the Indo-European homeland.
   The ethnologist and philologist Robert Gordon Latham was the first to state that, according to the principles of natural science, a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity which, in the case of Indo-European, is roughly in Central-Eastern Europe, where the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of the Indo-European language family are attested, as opposed to South Asia, where only the Indo-Aryan branch is. Lachhmi Dhar Kalla responded by arguing that the greater linguistic diversity of Indo-European in Europe is the result of absorbing foreign linguistic elements, and that a language family's point of origin should be sought in the area of least linguistic change, since it has been least affected by substrate interference. Dhar's line of argument has a history in Western debates in the Indo-European homeland (for example Feist 1932 and Pissani 1974 as cited in ) where it has been used to locate the Indo-European homeland near the area where the Lithuanian and Anatolian branches of Indo-European are attested.

1999 "revival"

An Indian Urheimat has been promoted more recently by and, which led to an exchange of criticisms with Michael Witzel.
In what its editor J. P. described as a "sense of fair play," the Journal of Indo-European Studies waived peer review in order to publish Kazanas' (2002, 2003) defence of the "Indigenous Indo-Aryan" viewpoint — which cited and . Mallory's reasoning for this exceptional omission of peer-review was as follows:
The debate consisted of an article by, nine highly critical reviews by referees, and Kazanas' (2003) response to those criticisms.
warned:

Chronology

Neolithic and Bronze Age Indian history is periodized into the Pre-Harappan (ca. 7000 to 3300 BC), Early Harappan (3300 to 2600), Mature Harappan (2600 to 1900) and Late Harappan (1900 to 1300 BC) periods.
The Indian Urheimat proposal put forward by, which he dubs the "emerging non-invasionist model," is as follows: During the 6th millennium BC, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were living in the Punjab region of Northern India. As the result of demographic expansion, they spread into Bactria as the Kambojas. The Paradas moved further and inhabited the Caspian coast and much of Central Asia while the Cinas moved northwards and inhabited the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, forming the Tocharians group of I-E speakers. These groups were Proto-Anatolian and inhabited that region by 2000 BC. These people took the oldest form of the Proto Indo-European (PIE) language with them and, while interacting with people of the Anatolian and Balkan region, transformed it into its own dialect. While inhabiting Central Asia they discovered the uses of the horse, which they later sent back to Urheimat. Later on during their history, they went on to take Western Europe and thus spread the Indo-European languages to that region. During the 4th millennium BC, civilization in India was evolving to become the urban Indus Valley Civilization. During this time, the PIE languages evolved to Proto-Indo-Iranian Some time during this period, the Indo-Iranians began to separate as the result of internal rivalry and conflict, with the Iranians expanding westwards towards Mesopotamia and Persia, these possibly were the Pahlavas. They also expanded into parts of Central Asia. By the end of this migration, India was left with the Proto-Indo-Aryans. At the end of the Mature Harappan period, the Sarasvati river began drying up and the remainder of Indo-Aryans split into separate categories. Some travelled westwards and established themselves as rulers of the Hurrian Mitanni kingdom by around 1500 BC (see Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni). Others travelled eastwards and inhabited the Gangetic basin while others travelled southwards and interacted with the Dravidian people.

Linguistics

� See also linguistics or historical linguistics.

According to, OIT proponents tend to be linguistic dilettantes who either ignore the linguistic evidence completely, dismiss it as highly speculative and inconclusive (for example Chakrabarti 1995 and Rajaram 1995, as cited in ), or attempt to tackle it with hopelessly inadequate qualifications; this attitude and neglect significantly minimizes the value of most OIT publications.
and have adapted the language dispersal model proposed by Johanna Nichols (in ) to support OIT by moving Nichols' proposed Indo-European point of origin from Bactria-Sogdiana to India. These ideas have not been accepted in mainstream linguistics.
argues that it's altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form. This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Comparative linguistics

There are twelve accepted branches of the Indo-European family. The two Indo-Iranian branches, Indic (Indo-Aryan) and Iranian, dominate the eastern cluster, historically spanning Scythia, Iran and Northern India. While the exact sequence in which the different branches separated or migrated away from a homeland is disputed, linguists generally agree that Anatolian was the first branch to be separated from the remaining body of Indo-European.
Additionally, Graeco-Aryan isoglosses seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian may have shared a common homeland for a while after the splitting of the other IE branches. Such a homeland could be northwestern India (which is preferred by proponents of the OIT) - or the Pontic steppes (as preferred by the mainstream supporters of the Kurgan hypothesis).
According to Hock, if evidence like linguistic isogloss patterns is ignored, then the hypothesis of an Out-of-India migration becomes "relatively easy to maintain".

Substratum influences in Vedic Sanskrit

Evidence of a pre-Indo-European linguistic substratum in South Asia is solid reason to exclude India as a potential Indo-European homeland. Burrow compiled a list of approximately 500 foreign words in the Ṛgveda that he considered to be loans predominantly from Dravidian. Kuiper identified 383 Ṛgvedic words as non-Indo-Aryan—roughly 4% of its liturgical vocabulary—borrowed from Old Dravidian, Old Munda, and several other languages. Thieme has questioned Dravidian etymologies proposed for Vedic words, most of which he gives Indoaryan or Sanskrit etymologies, and condemned what he characterizes as a misplaced “zeal for hunting up Dravidian loans in Sanskrit”. Das contends that there's “not a single case in which a communis opinio has been found confirming the foreign origin of a Rgvedic (and probably Vedic in general) word”. Burrow in turn has criticized the "resort to tortuous reconstructions in order to find, by hook or by crook, Indo-European explanations for Sanskrit words". Kuiper reasons that given the abundance of Indo-European comparative material—and the scarcity of Dravidian or Munda—the inability to clearly confirm whether the etymology of a Vedic word is Indo-European implies that it's not. argues that the earliest level of the Rigveda shows signs of para-Munda influence and only later levels of Dravidian, suggesting—against the older widespread two century old belief—that the original inhabitants of Punjab were speakers of para-Munda rather than speakers of Dravidian, whom the Indo-Aryans encountered only in middle Rgvedic times.
   Dravidian and other South Asian languages share with Indo-Aryan a number of syntactical and morphological features that are alien to other Indo-European languages. Phonologically, there's the introduction of retroflexes, which alternate with dentals in Indo-Aryan; morphologically there are the gerunds; and syntactically there's the use of a quotative marker ("iti"). Several linguists, all of whom accept the external origin of the Aryan languages on other grounds, are quite open to considering that various syntactical developments in Indo-Aryan could have been internal developments (Hamp 1996 and Jamison 1989, as cited in ) rather than the result of substrate influences, or have been the result of adstratum (Hock 1975/1984/1996 and Tikkanen 1987, as cited in ). About retroflexion states that "in view of the strictly areal implications of retroflexion and the occurrence of retroflexes in many early loanwords, it's hardly likely that Indo-Aryan retroflexion arose in a region that didn't have a substratum with retroflexes."
   Another concern raised is that there's large time gap between the comparative materials, which can be seen as a serious methodological drawback.
    proposes that any Dravidian in Sanskrit can still be explained via the OIT. He suggests through David McAlpin's Proto-Elamo-Dravidian theory, that the ancient homeland for Proto-Elamo-Dravidian was in the Mesopotamia region, from where the languages spread across the coast towards Sindh and eventually to South India where they still remain. According the Elst, this theory would support the idea that Early Harappan culture was possibly bi- or multi-lingual. claims that the presence of the Brahui language, similarities between Elamite and Harappan script as well as similarities between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian indicate that these languages may have interacted prior to the spread of Indo-Aryans southwards and the resultant intermixing of races and languages.
   Elfenbein (as cited in ) argues that the presence of Brahui in Baluchistan is explained by a late immigration that took place within the last thousand years.
   Elst believes that there's evidence suggesting that Dravidian influences in Maharashtra and Gujarat were largely lost over the years. He traces this to linguistic evidence. Some occurrences in Sangam Tamil, or ancient forms of Tamil, indicate small similarities with Sanskrit or Prakrit. As the oldest recognizable form of Tamil have influences of Indo-Aryan, it's possible that they'd Sanskrit influence through a migration through the coastal regions of western India.
   Writing specifically about language contact phenomena, state that there's strong evidence that Dravidian influenced Indic through "shift", that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages. Even though the innovative traits in Indic could be explained by multiple internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once – it becomes a question of explanatory parsimony; moreover, early Dravidian influence accounts for the several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.
    states that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Old Indo-Aryan is that the majority of early Old Indo-Aryan speakers had a Dravidian mother tongue which they gradually abandoned.

Hydronymy

Indo-Aryan languages are the oldest source of place and river names in northern India - which Shrikant G. Talageri sees as an argument in favor of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest documented population of that area.
   According to Witzel, river names are conservative, and "in northern India, rivers in general have early Sanskrit names from the Vedic period, and names derived from the daughter languages of Sanskrit later on." Talageri cites this in support of the Out of India theory,
   However, Witzel argues exactly that: "The failure to preserve old hydronomes even in the Indus Valley (with a few exceptions, noted above) indicates the extent of the social and political collapse experienced by the local population."
   Kazanas argues that linguistic stability corresponds to geographic stability, claiming that if " the Indo-Aryans were on the move over many thousands of miles (from the Russian steppe, Europe and/or Anatolia) over a very long period of centuries encountering many different other cultures", their "language should have suffered faster and greater changes".
    points out that this reasoning can be countered by arguing that Vedic retained the Indo-European accent because, as a sacerdotal language, it artificially preserved forms that would otherwise have evolved in a normal spoken language. Vedic Sanskrit is, like other sacred languages, an extinct language, having evolved into Classical Sanskrit by the 6th century BC, reaching stability long after Northern India had been settled by Indo-Aryans.
   By contrast, Lithuanian is a living, vernacular language that has preserved Indo-European archaisms to the present day, thousands of years longer than Vedic did.

Philology

The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its consequences for the Indo Aryan question. The oldest text, the Rigveda, is full of precise references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Punjab and Haryana, and was unmistakably recorded in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm terminus ante quem for the presence of the Vedic Aryans in India. In the academic mainstream view it was composed the mid to late 2nd millennium BC (Late Harappan) and OIT proponent propose a pre-Harappan date.
OIT proponents propose that bulk of Rigveda was composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization by linking archaeological evidence with data from Vedic text and archaeo-astronomical evidence.

Sarasvati River

Many hymns in all ten Books of the Rig Veda (except the 4th) extol or mention a divine and very large river named the Sarasvati, which flows mightily "from the mountains to the [Indian] Ocean”. Talageri states that "the references to the Sarasvati far outnumber the references to the Indus" and "The Sarasvati is so important in the whole of the Rigveda that it's worshipped as one of the Three Great Goddesses".
   According to palaeoenvironmental scientists the desiccation of Sarasvati came about as a result of the diversion of at least two rivers that fed it, the Satluj and the Yamuna. "The chain of tectonic events … diverted the Satluj westward (into the Indus) and the Palaeo Yamuna eastward (into the Ganga) … This explains the ‘death’ of such a mighty river (the Sarasvati) … because its main feeders, the Satluj and Palaeo Yamuna were weaned away from it by the Indus and the Gangaa respectively”. This ended at c 1750, but it started much earlier, perhaps with the upheavals and the large flood of 1900, or more probably 2100. P H Francfort, utilizing images from the French satellite SPOT, finds that the large river Sarasvati is pre-Harappan altogether and started drying up in the middle of the 4th millennium BC; during Harappan times only a complex irrigation-canal network was being used in the southern region of the Indus Valley. With this the date should be pushed back to c 3800 BC.
   The Rig Vedic hymn X, however, gives a list of names of rivers where Sarasvati is merely mentioned while Sindhu receives all the praise. This may well indicate that the Rig Veda hymn from the latest mandala X RV 10 could be dated to a period after the first drying up of Sarasvati (c 3500) when the river lost its preeminence. It is agreed that the tenth Book of the Rig Veda is later than the others.
   The 414 archeological sites along the bed of Saraswati dwarf the number of sites so far recorded along the entire stretch of the Indus River, which number only about three dozen. About 80 percent of the sites are datable to the fourth or third millennium B.C.E., suggesting that the river was in its prime during this period. If this date were used, then the Indo-Aryan migration scenario wouldn't be able to logically occur. If the Indo-Europeans were in India in the 4th millennium BC, it would be likely for that the spread of Indo-European languages after this point began within India.

Items not in the Rigveda

The Indus Valley Civilization was quite advanced and urbanized for its era. Based on the IAM, the migrating Aryans, who wrote the Rig Veda, would have had some contact with the Harappans before settling in their lands. The Aryans would also have begun to use some of the resources the Harappans possessed, however, the Rig Veda possesses some gaps which indicate it was composed prior to the first use of these resources in India.

The Rig-Veda knows no silver. It knows ayas (metal or copper/bronze) and candra or hiran-ya (gold) but not silver. Silver is denoted by rajatám híran-yam literally ‘white gold’ and appears in post-Rigvedic texts. There is a generally accepted demarcation line for the use of silver at around 4000 BC and this metal is archaeologically attested in the Harappan Civilization

The Harappan culture is also unknown to the RV. The characteristic features of the Harappan culture are urban life, large buildings, permanently erected fire altars and bricks. There is no word for brick in the Rig Veda and iswttakaa (brick) appears only in post-Rigvedic texts. (Kazanas 2000:13) The Rigvedic altar is a shallow bed dug in the ground and covered with grass (for example RV 5.11.2, 7.43.2-3; Parpola 1988: 225). Fixed brick-altars are very common in post-Rigvedic texts.

The RV mentions no rice or cotton. A compond term is used which later referred to rice cakes used for sacrificial purposes, but the word vrīhí, meaning 'rice', doesn't occur. Rice was found in at least three Harappan sites: Rangpur (2000 BCE - 1500 BCE), Lothal (c 2000 BCE) and Mohenjodaro (c 2500 BCE) as Piggott, Grist and others testify. Yet, despite the importance of the rice in ritual in later times, the Rig Veda knows nothing of it. The cultivation of cotton is well attested in the Harappan civilization and is found at many sites thereafter.

Nakshatra were developed in 2400 BCE, they're important in a religious context yet the Rig Veda doesn't mention this, which suggests the Rig Veda is before 2400 BCE. The youngest book only mentions constellations, a concept known to all cultures, without specifying them as lunar mansions.

On the other hand, it has been claimed that the Rigveda has no term for "sword", while Bronze swords were used aplenty in the Bactrian culture and in Pirak. Ralph Griffith uses “sword” twelve times in his translation, including in the old books 5 and 7, but in most cases a literal translation would be more generic "sharp implement" (for example ), the transition from "dagger" to "sword" in the Bronze Age being a gradual process. The fore-mentioned features are found in post Rigvedic texts – the Samhitas, the Brahmanas and fully in the Sutra literature. For instance, brick altars are mentioned in Satapatha Brahmanaṇa 7.1.1.37, or 10.2.3.1 etc. Rice (vrihi ) is found in AV 6.140.2; 7.1.20; etc. Cotton karpasa appears first in Gautama’s (1.18) and in Bandhāyana's (14.13.10) Dharmasūtra. The fact of the convergence of the post-Rigvedic texts and the Harappan culture was noted long ago by archaeologists. Bridget and F. Raymond Allchin stated unequivocally that these features are of the kind “described in detail in the later Vedic literature” (1982: 203).
Based on these set of statements, OIT proponets argue that the whole of the RV, except for some few passages which may be of later date, must have been composed prior to Indus Valley Civilization.

Memories of an Urheimat

The fact that the Vedas don't mention the Aryans' presence in India as being the result of a migration or mention any possible Urheimat, has been taken as an argument in favour of the OIT. The reasoning is that it isn't uncommon for migrational accounts to be found in early mythological and religious texts, a classical example being the book of Exodus in the Torah, describing the legendary migration of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.
   Proponents of the OIT, such as Koenraad Elst, argue that it would have been expectable that migrations, and possibly an Urheimat were mentioned in the Rigveda if the Aryans had only arrived in India some centuries before the composition of the earliest Rigvedic hymns. They argue that other migration stories of other Indo-European people have been documented historically or archaeologically, and that the same would be expectable if the Indo-Aryans had migrated into India.
   From the mainstream academic viewpoint, concern is the degree of historical accuracy that can be expected from the Rigveda, which is a collection of hymns, not an account of tribal history, and those hymns assumed to reach back to within a few centuries of the period of Indo-Aryan arrival in Gandhara make for just a small portion of the text.
   Regarding migration of Indo-Aryans and imposing language on Harappans, Kazanas notes that " The intruders would have been able to rename the rivers only if they were conquerors with the power to impose this. And, of course, the same is true of their Vedic language: since no people would bother of their own free will to learn a difficult, inflected foreign language, unless they'd much to gain by this, and since the Aryan immigrants had adopted the “material culture and lifestyle” of the Harappans and consequently had little or nothing to offer to the natives, the latter would have adopted the new language only under pressure. Thus here again we discover that the substratum thinking is invasion and conquest." "But invasion is the substratum of all such theories even if words like ‘migration’ are used. There couldn't have been an Aryan immigration because (apart from the fact that there's no archaeological evidence for this) the results would have been quite different. Immigrants don't impose their own demands or desires on the natives of the new country: they're grateful for being accepted, for having the use of lands and rivers for farming or pasturing and for any help they receive from the natives; in time it's they who adopt the language (and perhaps the religion) of the natives. You can't have a migration with the results of an invasion."

Material archaeology

Haüsler (as cited in ) found that archaeological evidence in central Europe showed continuous linear development, with no marked external influences.
grants that "there is at least a series of archaeological cultures that can be traced approaching the Indian subcontinent, even if discontinuous, which doesn't seem to be the case for any hypothetical east-to-west emigration."

Physical anthropology

There is no clear genetic evidence for a prehistoric migration out of India. There is no evidence of widespread genetic displacement in Europe after the Paleolithic. And finds "no support for any model that calls for the ultimate origins of north Bactrian oasis Oxus Civilization populations to be inhabitants of the Indus Valley."
   The virtual absence of India-specific mtDNA haplogroups outside of India precludes a large scale population movement out of India. Tracing a possible "out of India" migration therefore focusses on Y-chromosome haplogroups.
   The Y-chromosome haplogroup R2 is characterized by genetic marker M124, and is rarely found outside India, Pakistan, Iran, and southern Central Asia. Outside of southern Eurasia, M124 was found at an unusually high frequency of 0.440 among the Kurmanji of Georgia, but at a much lower frequency of only 0.080 among the Kurmanji of Turkmenistan. The M124 frequency of 0.158 found among Chechens may be unrepresentative because it was derived from a sample size of only 19 Chechens. Outside of these populations and the Gypsies, M124 isn't found in Eastern Europe.
   The spread of the Indo-European languages is associated with Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a1, which is identified with genetic marker M17. "suggests that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup". However, the Genographic Project

conducted by the National Geographic Society states that M17 arose "in the region of present-day Ukraine or southern Russia." Geneticist and anthropologist Spencer Wells states that "The Aryans came from outside India. We actually have genetic evidence for that. Very clear genetic evidence from a marker that arose on the southern steppes of Russia and the Ukraine around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. And it subsequently spread to the east and south through Central Asia reaching India." M17 "shows that there was a massive genetic influx into India from the steppes within the past 10,000 years. Taken with the archaeological data, we can say that the old hypothesis of an invasion of people – not merely their language – from the steppe appears to be true."
A recent study by S. Sharma et al, published in the ASHG Abstracts 2007, argued for an Indian origin of R1a1 lineage among Brahmins, by pointing out the highest incidence of R1a*, ancestral clade to R1a1, among Kashmiri Pandits (Brahmins) and Saharias, an Indian tribe.

Criticism

The linguistic center of gravity principle states that a language family's most likely point of origin is in the area of its greatest diversity. Only one branch of Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, is found in India, whereas the Italic, Venetic, Illyrian, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Thracian, and Greek branches of Indo-European are all found in Central-Eastern Europe. Because it requires a greater number of long migrations, an Indian Urheimat is far less likely than one closer to the center of Indo-European linguistic diversity.

The Indic languages show the influence of the Dravidian and Munda language families. No other branch of Indo-European does. If the Indo-European homeland was located in India, then all Indo-European languages would show influence from Dravidian and Munda.

To postulate the migration of PIE speakers out of India necessitates an earlier dating of the Rigveda than is normally accepted by Vedic scholars in order to make a deep enough period of migration to allow for the longest migrations to be completed.Further Information

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