The strange politics of a linguistic mystery

Hindu nationalists versus ancient DNA

This is, I promise, a post about politics, so bear with me.

I recently read two books on the subject of Proto-Indo-European, the proposed common ancestor of all Indo-European languages: Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” and J.P. Mallory’s “The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story.”

These are very different books — I would recommend Spinney for anyone not particularly familiar with historical linguistics and Mallory for those of us weirdos who follow these debates for fun.

Despite their differences, though, both books explain what we think we know about the language we’ve decided to call Proto-Indo-European and the longstanding debates over who exactly spoke it, where they lived, and what they were like. And both books come down on the side of a conclusion reached in David Anthony’s 2007 book, “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World,” which itself was a refinement of Marija Gimbutas’s Kurgan Hypothesis.

The upshot is that most modern scholarship supports the view that Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken in the Pontic Steppe in southern and southeastern Ukraine and the adjacent part of Russia.

This is hard to prove definitively and there is some credence given to alternate theories that locate the homeland in either Anatolia or the Caucus Mountains. But it’s probably the steppe.

And as so often happens, these historical debates have been inflected with politics.

There is a long tradition — associated with white supremacy — of locating the Indo-European homeland in Northern Europe. And it was to an extent backlash against Nazi archeology that originally put the steppe hypothesis in disfavor, because one of its premises is that mounted warriors from the steppe conquered Iran, most of Europe, and most of India, and this was seen as conceptually adjacent to the Nazi account. On its face, “several thousand years ago, Europe was conquered by mounted warriors” does not seem to have large implications for the merits of Nazism. But in the latter half of the twentieth century, it was held in somewhat ill-repute on those grounds, until more and more evidence was amassed on its behalf.

Interestingly, though, neither book really talks about the alternative theory that surely has the most weight by the numbers: the Out of India hypothesis, which holds that PIE is indigenous to Northern India and the spread of European tongues elsewhere is the result of outmigration from India.

There’s not really any evidence in support of this theory, and it doesn’t make sense logistically or line up with our knowledge of PIE vocabulary. So it’s understandable that two western writers would give it short shrift.

But a lot of people live in India, and the Hindutva political movement is deeply invested in Out of India. They strongly believe that the other hypotheses — all of which entail Northern India being conquered by outsiders — are politically “bad.” Because this is a major political movement in India and India has so many people, you are much more likely to encounter pushback on Steppe Theory from this quarter than from partisans of Anatolia.

I guess it would be rude for serious scholars to dunk on random politicized nonsense. But I write about politics for a living, and I find it fascinating, especially because it’s unclear to me why Hindu nationalists even read the politics this way.

Out of India

Whether or not the actual Proto-Indo-European language came from India (and to be clear, it did not), what definitely did come out of India was the notion that there ever was such a language.