The "Indo-European" influence

There has been considerable discussion in recent years as to the sources of the culture and religion that eventually comes to be known as “Vedic.” There are basically two points of view: the traditional view is that there was a migration of “Indo-Europeans” that influenced the Indian subcontinent (as well as Iran and other cultures); the other is that much of that culture is, in fact, indigenous to India.

The traditional hypothesis, based on the comparisons of languages and religions, is that there were migrations of nomadic pastoral peoples that occurred, starting around 2000 bce, which eventually affected the Indian subcontinent. These peoples, usually called “Indo-European” were thought to have been a widely spread and loosely connected confederation of tribes wandering the steppe lands of Eurasia. That some of those migrated west is suggested by their apparent influence on the culture and language of the Nordic, Germanic, Greek, and Slavic regions. Others, known as Indo-Iranian, were thought to have moved south and east across Afghanistan and to have influenced both Iranian and Indian cultures. These tribes are believed to have had several features in common; they had little sense of the sacrality or creativity of the earth; rather as pastoral nomads, the sky served as the model for the community’s sense of direction. Their deities were gods of the sky, virtually all of them male inasmuch as the tribes were patrilineal. At night, the community centered around the fire that served as the focal point of ritual, and the agency, or messenger, by which peoples could have access to the gods. Fire could also transform and served as the center for sacrificial libations, most commonly of a sap known in ancient Iran as hoama and in India as soma. The communities were believed to have practiced cremation of the dead.

In addition, Georges Dumezil, a French scholar, influenced by Durkheim, hypothesized that the Indo-Europeans were organized into a tripartite social order: those who did the teaching and priestly tasks were thought to be at one level; at another were those who filled positions associated with tribal leadership, warfare, and protection; at yet another level, were those who were the maintainers or “fecundators” of society who performed the necessary work of daily life.¹³ These social roles, Dumezil further maintained, led these communities to infer a cosmic order which was similarly tripartite: a supra-atmospheric level of the cosmos in which “high gods,” roughly homologous to the role of priestly/teaching functionaries, presided (e.g., Odin, Ouranos, Varuna); an atmospheric level wherein gods of storm and warfare presided (e.g., Indra and Thor); and a sub-atmospheric order in which one found those gods who maintained the everyday functions of the cosmic order. The socio-cosmic contract between the realm of the gods and that of humans was thought to be maintained through the sacrificial ritual system centered on the fire.

Some Indian scholars insist this idea of a migration into India was a construction of colonialist European discourse and that the subsequent developments on the subcontinent were of purely indigenous origins. These indigenous origins, which might be called “proto-Vedic,” are said to have been a part of the early civilizations of Northwestern India, possibly including the valleys of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers. These claims are based on various fragments of evidence: archaeological finds that suggest there were settlements (for example, at Mehrgarh) datable several centuries prior to the Indus civilizations; references in the Rg Veda to astronomical events (for example, eclipses) that are said to have occurred some centuries earlier; references in the Rg Veda to the river Saraswati, which is said to have dried up around the nineteenth century bce; and others. These kinds of evidence have emboldened some scholars and Hindu nationalists to claim that the Rg Veda should be dated several centuries earlier than traditionally thought and that India was, in fact, the source of “Indo-European” culture. It is still too early to conclude that this view should supplant the traditional one relative to the origins of the “Indo-Europeans,” but clearly a number of questions wait to be resolved.¹⁴