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.

To back up a little, you have almost certainly noticed that some languages are quite similar to others. Spanish and Portuguese are like brothers, Italian is their cousin, and French — maybe a cousin once removed. The similarities between all those Romance languages are obvious, even if you learn just a few dozen common words.

English, for various reasons, sounds pretty different from almost every other language (except Scots), but if you look at written Dutch, some striking similarities are apparent, as in the infamous Geert Wilders “we hebben een series probleem” tweet. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are very similar to each other. Czech and Slovak are incredibly similar, to the point where, when the two were united as Czechoslovakia, there was a movement to declare a single “Czechoslovak” language. Polish is different, but notably similar. Part of the fraught history of Russia and Ukraine is that their languages are similar enough that Russian nationalists characterize Ukrainian as a nonstandard dialect of Russian.

In the days before mass education, people talked a little bit differently from town to town, and there was no firm dividing line between a regional dialect of Italian and a different-but-similar language also descended from Latin. It’s schools and mass literacy that make it necessary to officially demarcate standard languages. Even here, though, convention rules. It’s “centre” in London but “center” in New York, but we’ve agreed that it’s the same language, and Canadians seem to get by swapping between British and American spellings.

Educated Europeans used to all learn Greek and Latin. And they could tell that though these two ancient languages are pretty different, they had some notable similarities, and that some of these commonalities also seemed to hold for the oldest (albeit much less old than the Greek and Latin texts) written documents in Germanic languages.

Sir William Jones was a classically educated Englishman with a knack for languages who went to India as a judge in 1783. He already knew Persian as well as Latin and Greek, and in India, he learned Sanskrit and studied the ancient Vedic texts.

Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, and in his third annual address, he spoke of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit and said that, “no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” He claimed similar, but less forceful, evidence linked ancient Germanic, Celtic, and Persian languages to the same common source. The Rigveda talks about Aryas (who follow the Vedic religious traditions) fighting Dasas and Dasyus who do not. The Avesta, the core holy text of Zoroastrianism, also talks about Aryans. So Jones decided that there had existed people — the Aryans — who spoke the original language and who conquered India from Iran, and that the Indians who speak languages that aren’t descended from Sanskrit (we call these Dravidian languages today) were the conquered Dasas.

Old Europe and its fall

So Indo-European languages entered India from the northwest, but where did they come from originally? One theory is that they came from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey).

Even though Turkish is not an Indo-European language, the very oldest attested Indo-European texts were found on the Anatolian peninsula. What’s more, the archeological evidence makes it clear that agriculture entered Europe from Anatolia and radiated out from the Balkans. In the post-WWII context, this seemed like an appealing pacifistic story about the spread of Indo-European culture: Farming is a peaceful occupation, and the outward spread of farming was relatively slow, so maybe there was a kind of nice cultural diffusion, where people decided it would be cool to settle down and picked up farmer lingo. Farming could spread both west and east from Turkey, problem solved.

The leading alternative — dominant today — was proposed by Gimbutas. She believed that the Early European Farmers spoke non-Indo-European languages (of which Basque is the only survivor today) and that they were conquered by steppe warriors who spoke PIE.

This theory also gained momentum for political reasons. She postulated, based on studying the farmers’ various figurines and the contrasting burial rituals of farmers and steppe peoples, that what she called Old Europe had a matriarchal social order. Patriarchy, according to her, was a later imposition of the Yamnaya steppe conquerers. Second Wave feminists liked this idea because it de-naturalized patriarchy, though nowadays you’re most likely to hear echoes of it among the online right who invoke the terror of the female-dominated “longhouse” and idolize the masculine virtues of the steppe.

Beyond politics, linguistic evidence for the steppe hypothesis centers two points:

• As far as we can tell from the pace of language change, the original Anatolian farmers moved into Europe way too early to have been the speakers of PIE.

• The PIE vocabulary we’ve been able to reconstruct has words for “horse” and “wheel” and lots of things related to pastoralist lifestyle.

The Anthony take, updating Gimbutas, is that steppe dwellers developed the technology of horse riding and carts and this let them move incredibly fast by ancient standards, which explains how PIE languages spread so broadly from Portugal to Sweden to India, and even to part of western China. The weak link in this theory (according to me) was that while the archeological evidence that farming spread into Europe from Turkey is rock-solid, it just wasn’t clear that this steppe conquest actually took place. Gimbutas was making some pretty bold assertions based on the spread of different pottery styles.

Since 2007, though, we’ve uncovered ancient DNA evidence, as discussed in papers like “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European Langues in Europe,” that largely confirms the Gimbutas/Anthony account. The paper shows that a group of people (Early European Farmers) moved in from Turkey and largely but not entirely replaced the former inhabitants of Europe (the Western Hunter Gatherers). But then around 4,500 years ago, there was a big influx of steppe genes, especially into Northern Europe but to a notable extent in Southern Europe as well. We also see an influx of steppe pastoralist genes into India.

So even though there are some outstanding puzzles, like about the relationship between Greek and Armenian, the mystery is basically solved — DNA evidence supports Gimbutas’s claim about the Yamnaya conquest.

Hindu nationalists hate this

A particularly cool piece of ancient DNA evidence relates to the population structure of India. David Reich, the leading figure in this field, shows that modern Indians’ ancestry can generally be characterized as the blending of two once distinct population groups, the Ancestral North Indians and the Ancestral South Indians. The ANI have genetic links to the steppe, and today, you see a higher share of ANI ancestry both in speakers of Indo-European languages and also in members of higher castes. The ASI ancestry is more prevalent with Dravidian speakers and members of lower castes.

I’m not particularly well informed about Indian history, but I did remember this bit about the Aryas and the Dasas from a world religions class I took in school. So when I heard about this genetic and linguistic evidence I thought, “Oh, weird, science has vindicated ancient Hindu religious texts.” Such things happen. The Swahili oral tradition long recorded an origin in the arrival of people from Persia hundreds of years earlier. Europeans were skeptical of this, but something like that does seem to have happened, according to ancient DNA.

Except it turns out that Hindu nationalists do not at all agree with my half-remembered interpretation of the Rigveda from eighth grade.

A prominent view in Hindutva circles is that the Aryan Invasion Theory is a colonialist plot. As French-born scholar Michel Danino puts it, AIT “allowed India’s British masters to portray themselves as ‘one more Aryan wave’ destined to bring about a ‘reunion of the great Aryan family.”

If you think about the history of imperialism, I think it’s pretty clear that European powers were quite comfortable colonizing places that were never conquered by Indo-European steppe nomads, so this was probably not a major motivation. Nevertheless, there is a robust tradition in India, associated with B.B. Lal and Shrikant Talageri, of arguing that the Rigveda is thousands of years older than mainstream scholars believe, that there is total continuity of Vedic India with the earlier Harappan civilization, and that Indo-European culture developed in India and spread west.

Part of what I find puzzling about this is that while I do understand the general concept of national pride, nobody disputes that India was conquered in historical times by the Islamic Mughal and then later by the British.

But this 2017 blog post by Out of India proponent Abhijit Chavda explains that this is the point. Aryan Invasion Theory puts Hinduism on a par with Islam and Christianity as just another conquerer’s religion rather than being the indigenous faith of India. Chavda argues that AIT is a leftist plot that “portrays Indo-Aryan (Hindu) culture as hegemonic, racist, intolerant, rapacious, and inegalitarian, imposes an Indian version of ‘white guilt’ on persons of Indo-Aryan ancestry, and engenders deep resentment and a desire to right historical wrongs among persons of Dravidian and ‘Dalit’ ancestry — which manifests itself in various forms such as separatism and rejection of Hinduism and Indian culture, among others.”

What’s interesting about this to me, as an outsider, is not so much that political considerations would lead people to buck the evidence. It’s that the relationship between the politics and the view of history seems so arbitrary

Here in America, we have people re-inventing the old pro-Confederate “positive good” account of slavery, except this time as a left-wing case for reparations. Before my time, there were a lot of triumphant “cowboys and Indians” narratives about how the west was won; after my time, the vibe is more land acknowledgments.

But either way, people are actually agreeing on the historical facts — what they’re disagreeing about is politics. The idea that Aryan Invasion Theory would be a left-wing or British colonialist account of Indian pre-history never occurred to me, since I didn’t learn about it from Indian leftists or advocates of British colonialism. Indeed, the fact that Hindu nationalists can see it as somehow simultaneously a leftist and an imperialist narrative should probably be seen as evidence that it is neither. But the nature of highly politicized approaches to factual questions — certainly something that we’re familiar with here in the west — is that you become blind to the possibility that anyone else might just be interested in the actual question.