Despite Wheeler's comments, it is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley Civilization, which on this hypothesis would… - Colin Renfrew

The linguistic designation of a category of “Indo-European/Aryan” languages is not the question here. However, the historical, and prevailing, use of the language designation is the issue. For two centuries, scholars concentrating on the South Asian data have described an Indo-European/Aryan migration/invasion into South Asia to explain the formation of Indian civilization. The conflating of language, people/culture, “race” to maintain the “myth of the Aryan invasion” continues, perhaps, as Leach so cogently notes, due to the academic prestige at stake. The distinguished scholar Colin Renfrew (1987) opts to distort the archaeological record rather than to challenge it. Failing to identify archaeological evidence for such a migration in the European post-Neolithic periods, Renfrew argues instead for an Indo-European/Aryan human migration associated with the spread of food production economies from Anatolia. In doing so, he ignores critical archaeological data from Southwest Asia and South Asia. The South Asian archaeological data reviewed here does not support Renfrew’s position nor any version of the migration/invasion hypothesis describing western population movement into South Asia. Rather, the physical distribution of prehistoric sites and artifacts, stratigraphic data, radio- metric dates, and geological data describing the prehistoric/proto-historic environment perhaps can account, in some degree, for the Vedic oral tradition describing a cultural discontinuity of what was an indigenous population movement in the Indo-Gangetic region.

The balance of the evidence, as recently usefully reviewed by Shaffer, is in favour of the presence of an Indo-European speaking population during the Harappan civilization, and not exclusively later. At the same time, the strong continuities between that Harappan civilization and its antecedents, right back to the earlier Neolithic, are becoming more and more evident.

This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium ec has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages of Europe. It also emphasizes the continuity in the Indus Valley and adjacent areas from the early Neolithic through to the floruit of the Indus Valley Civilization~ point that Jarrige has recently stressed. Moreover the continuity is seen to follow unbroken from that time across the Dark Age succeeding the collapse of the urban centres of the Indus Valley, so that features of that urban civilization persist, across a series of transformations, to form the basis for later Indian civilization. A number of scholars have previously developed these ideas of continuity.