This raises another dimension that the Indigenous Aryan critique forces us to confront: What constitutes authority in areas of knowledge, particularl… - Edwin Bryant

Indeed, one might well wonder how much research would have been invested in the Indo-European problem in the first place, had it not been for its relevance to European imperialism and nationalism.

Neglected viewpoints do not disappear. They reappear with more aggression due to frustration at being ignored. The Indigenous Aryan viewpoint has been around for over a century. It has been stereotyped and, on the whole, summarily dismissed and excluded from academic dialogue. It has hovered, until recently, on the periphery or outside of mainstream academic circles. Since, over the course of the last decade, it has become representative of many scholars within the Indian academy, it is now clamoring for attention more than ever before. It deserves a response articulated in a rigorously critical but fair and respectful fashion. If the claims of the Indigenous Aryanists cannot be decisively disproved, then they cannot be denied a legitimate place in discussions of Indo-Aryan origins. The opinions of significant numbers of Indian intellectuals about the history of their own country cannot simply be ignored by those engaged in research on South Asian history or be relegated to areas outside the boundaries of what is con- sidered worthy of serious academic attention.

I agree that a plausible explanation has yet to be given as to how, if there were indeed no actual invasion of Indo-Aryans but only the migratory ‘trickle’ into which it has been reconfigured, the newcomers could have completely eradicated the pre-existing language of the entire North of the subcontinent in the short interval normally allotted between their arrival and the composition of the Rgveda, in which the local topography is Indo-Aryan. When one considers that, in these proposed two or three centuries, such hypothetical migrants managed even to Sanskritize practically all of the names of rivers and places, the most conservative aspect of a substratum, in the N.W. of the subcontinent, but yet failed to do so in the East of the subcontinent despite Aryanizing it for well over two millennia, and the accomplishment is remarkable (and, of course, they failed to even displace the Dravidian languages in the South despite extensive interaction for almost as long). Add to this that their predecessors were the highly sophisticated and urbanized residents of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the incoming Indo-Aryans typically construed as pastoralist nomads, and Kazanas has a right to wonder how and why would the Indus Valley dwellers have so thoroughly and completely adopted the language of these illiterate herdsmen if the latter were not invaders — a status denied them by archaeology?