For a man whose books were placed in the Indian subcontinent, it isn’t hard to understand why Charles Allen waited all his life to tackle one of the most polarising topics of all time—the Aryans. The book was completed and brilliantly edited after he passed away in 2020 by David Loyn.
Like all of Charles’s writing, this book too is grand in scope, deep in research and laced with anecdotes. It is truly worthy of a final magnum opus for its meticulous approach towards the topic from all sides and angles. It is divided into four parts. The first deals with the myths of the Aryans. Charles dives into this complex set of stories with confidence cleaving through to expose and overlay the various myths. He works his way backwards in time from the Aryan mythos of the Nazis to the writings of Max Mueller. He looks critically at the latter’s sources, especially the linguistic ones and the ones dealing with ‘fire-worshippers’. He looks at the work of Anquetil du Peron and at the various inferences from Comparative Philology before arriving at the Uhremat—the original Proto-Indo-European language of the Aryans and their original homeland.
The second part deals with this common homeland and possibly mother language. Charles takes us 13,000 years ago to the Pontic-Caspian steppe from where most modern scholars believe the ancestors of the Aryans emerged. This is a vast land from the Black Sea to Kazakhstan and from the Ural Mountains to the Caucasian peaks. Charles takes us through a story that harks back to the melting of the last great glaciers and the end of the Ice Age, which led to the formation of wide grasslands where horses, cattle and the ancestors of all the Aryans thrived. Collecting the work of archaeologists such as Vere Gordon Childe and Maria Gimbutas, he pieces together a series of three critical migrations: a Neolithic one in 3500 BC; a more advanced copper tool- wielding Chalcolithic one in 2700 BC; and finally the 2300 BC migration of the Yamanaya peoples. For Charles, it is clear that the main breakthroughs were the domestication of cattle, the ability to digest milk and the domestication of horses, which allowed the Aryans to emerge as a force majeur.
In the third part, Charles trains his vision and skills to the Indian subcontinent and takes the main reason for the move into the region to be a terrible split between the Iranian Avestan speakers and the subsequent Indian Vedic Sanskrit speakers. To him, it is the similarities between Latin-Avestan-Rig Vedic Sanskrit that are the clearest evidence of a common origin. He laces together expertly the Late Harappans, the Sinauli Ochre Coloured Pottery (OCP) peoples, the earliest arrivals at Kaushambi, and sees them clearly as the arrival of the 2300 BC migration into the Ganga plains at long last around 2000-1800 BC. He then looks at the rise of Zoroastrianism, especially the cult of Anahita (the Goddess of the Waters) and sees parallels in the Saraswati of the Rig Veda. From the 15th century BC Mitannis and 12th century BC Hittites, he traces the origins of the Aryans of Ariyana Vaeja aka Iran. He traces the rise of the Aryans of India, and refers to controversial figures like Madame Blavatsky. He also looks at the ‘it all happened in India/Asia’ theories of Dayananda Saraswati and Lokmanya Tilak. He traces the fires of Hinduism in modern India to the trio of Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, and then proceeds to critically analyse Savarkar and the rise of the RSS and its brand of Hindu Nationalism. Charles is clear of the appropriation of the Hindu Aryan identity by the Hindutva elements of the RSS, VHP and the BJP.
The fourth part is the shortest, but the most ‘scientific’. The author looks at Palaeo-Genetics and the research done on the basis of DNA and blood group mapping as well as the retrieval of ancient DNA, especially the sample recovered from Rakhigarhi, Haryana. He concludes with the observation that it is obvious from DNA research, both ancient and modern, that there is no unique Aryan genetic signature and that the Aryans in their migrations have intermingled, absorbed and admixed with the greatest abandon. His final thought is that it is only the language that can be said to be Aryan and not necessarily the people.
Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth
By: Charles Allen
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 400
Price: Rs 799