Invasion of the Bread People

Here is a fascinating post (Sepia Mutiny) and discussion of some genealogical analysis of castes in India. Before I discuss it, though, I would like to make some points about the “Aryan Invasion Theory”.

There are some people in India who, for some reason, think it really matters to India today what might have happened to their culture thousands of years ago. And, for some reason, many of these people have their hearts set on a notion of denying that India was ever invaded and conquered by some Proto-Indo-European people (henceforth referred to as the bread people). We know that India was conquered by the British, and by various Moslem people, and even invaded by the Greeks (Alexander) so why would it break your heart if you found out that the bread people invaded and conquered India?

I don’t have a dog in this fight but I do have an opinion: at the end of the day, there is no way to deny the invasion of the bread people. Why? There are two reasons: there is bread in India and there is the bread people’s language.

These deniers like to create a straw man argument: there is no archeological evidence for any invasion. You mean there is no archeological evidence for bread making in India? There is no archeological evidence for Sanskrit in India? What else would you be looking for? We don’t really know what else the bread people had besides bread and Sanskrit so absence of anything else really proves nothing.

The genetic evidence above seems to suggest that most of the distant ancestors (I think about 95%) of all caste members in India can be traced right back to India. This is presented as a counter argument to the idea that the bread people invaded and conquered India. This is nonsense. In fact, I would bet that 75% of the genes of the bread people – once they got to India – could be traced to India. Let me explain.

Let us suppose the bread people discovered this wonderful new grain and new food that gave them a nutritional advantage over other tribes. Over time, the bread people would have grown more prosperous and numerous than other tribes in the area. There would have been the temptation to conquer the neighboring tribes and take over their land so they could grow more wheat and make more bread.

Suppose they succeeded. Typically, there are more conquered people than conquerors. The conquerors would have wanted the land but there would be too few of their own people to work that land. There would have been plenty of the conquered to work the land. But if they didn’t speak the same language, how could they work together? It could be that the conqueror would think, “There are more of them than there are of us, let us learn their language.” Or he might have thought, “If I keep whipping him, he will eventually catch my meaning.” My guess, “Everyone learns the language of the guy with the whip.”

So the language spreads and the knowledge of wheat growing and bread making spreads. Does that mean that the bread people just wiped out the other people? No. It never happens. The conqueror counts on the conquered to be his peasants and other jobs as well. What happens is that the conqueror begins noticing that some of the younger female peasants are kind of cute. As Amit would say, fun happened, (from the conqueror’s viewpoint). Mixing of genes happened. After a few hundred years, a new ethic group happened. If you don’t think that could happen – just look at Mexico.

This process repeats itself many times over. One fine day, the bread people arrive at modern day Pakistan. By this time, they have already crossed though all of Persia. Already, there has been much mixing of genes and maybe mixing of cultures as well. By this time, the bread people look to everyone like just another Indian ethnic group and most of their ancestors could be traced right back to India. They would have had tanned skin. They would have had dark hair. They would look very much like Pakistanis do today.

The invasion deniers will argue that maybe the bread simple passed from one people to another by trade and the language along with it. Both of these are far-fetched but the second claim is ridiculous. Can you image a people saying, “Our language stinks. Let’s learn their language?” But even the idea of trade leading to bread making is not so likely – there is no evidence that this happened in ancient times. Just look at how reluctant South Indians are to eat bread today when they can get it in the market. Can you imagine how hard it would be to convince a people who never ate bread before to change their whole economy from some other grain production to wheat and bread production?

Here is an interesting point: if there is no bread in south India and since the Dravidian languages are clearly not the language of the bread people, why do people think that the high-caste Hindus in the South were bread people? It is ridiculous. If these people were bread people they would have brought their bread and their language with them. There ample evidence that they brought neither: the South still speaks Dravidian and they still don’t eat bread (for the most part). Therefore, I would guess that the high-caste Hindus in the South are as Dravidian as anyone else.

There is really no evidence that the bread people brought the caste system. First, they didn’t bring anything like a caste system to any of the other places that the bread people conquered. Second, the caste system exists in the South where the bread people never came. My guess is that the caste thing was always an Indian thing. The bread people were unable and/or unwilling to change it much like the British.

Also, there is little evidence that Hinduism, as it is practiced today, originated outside of India. In fact, quite the contrary, it almost could not have originated outside of India. What ever was the religion in India 5000 years ago, it has vanished long ago. The Hinduism of today is probably a complete rework of the ancient belief as a reaction to Buddhism. And since Vishnu and Shiva are both worshipped in the South, which the bread people never conquered, my guess is that these two are both 100% Indian deities (if that matters to you).

So who are the Dravidians and where did they come from? Their dark skin indicates that they have probably been in India a long time – maybe 30000 years. Their round eyes indicates that they are not related to any of the east Asian people and are probably related to the people who later settled in Europe. But not too much can be made of this – the Europeans and the Indians probably don’t share any common ancestors for 30000 years.

If anything I have written breaks anyone’s heart, I apologize. But I think that if Indians spent less time thinking about where they have been and more time thinking about where they are going, they would be further along by now. (This last idea was suggested by this comment).