Accordingly, archaeology cannot deny the possibility that Indo-Aryan and Iranian (which were preceded by Indo-Iranian) languages might have been spoken in the area of the Punjab, Pakistan/Afghanistan, southeast central Asia/northeast Iran since the second, third or even fourth millennium B.C.E. The problem is chronological. In fact, archaeologically at least, South Asian archaeologists often draw attention to a cultural continuum that can be traced as far back as Mehrgarh in the seventh millennium B.C.E. within which innovations and developments can be explained simply by internal developments and external trade. If there were no constraints stemming from the date commonly assigned to the Veda, this whole area could have included urbanites and agriculturists from the South, as well as nomads and pastoralists from the North, interacting together in the millennia B.C.E. as they always have been and still do in the present day. Both steppe dwellers and urban farmers could have been speakers of related Indo-Iranian dialects in protohistory just as they are today and have always been in recorded history. There could have been invasions, migrations, trade, cultural exchanges, all manner of interactions—cultural evolution and devolution (followed sometimes by renewed evolution)—as well as all manner of diversification in chronological time. And all within a large, heterogeneous ethnic and cultural area of people who nonetheless spoke related dialects—whether living in towns, mountains, or agricultural plains—just as has always been die history of the subcontinent.

Nonetheless, those who do find die aforementioned linguistic exigencies compelling must find some way of getting the Indo-Aryans speakers into the subcontinent by some means or another. Mallory (1998) feels comfortable enough ascribing some form of Indo-Iranian identity to the Andronovo culture but admits that, "on the other hand, we find it extraordinarily difficult to make a case for expansions from this northern region to northern India . . . where we would presume Indo-Aryans had settled by the mid-second millennium BCE" (191). Referring to the attempts at connecting the Indo-Aryans to such sites as the Bishkent and Vakhsh cultures, he remarks that "this type of explanation only gets the Indo-Iranian to Central Asia, but not as far as the seats of the Medes, Persians or Indo-Aryans" (192). He points out that suggesting an Indo-Aryan identity for the BMAC requires a presumption that this culture was dominated by steppe tribes. However, "while there is no doubt that there was a steppe presence on BMAC sites, . . . this is very far from demonstrating the adoption of an Indo-Iranian language by the Central Asia urban population" (192).

Archaeologists point out that there is not a single cultural element of central Asian, eastern European, or Caucasian origin in the archaeological culture of the Mitannian area.... In contrast to this lacuna, Brentjes draws attention to the peacock element that recurs in Mitannian culture and art in various forms (to be eventually inherited by the Iranians), a motif that could well have come from India, the habitat of the peacock. Since this motif is definitely evidenced in the Near East from before 1600 B.C.E., and quite likely from before 2100 B.C.E., Brentjes (1981) argues that the Indo-Aryans must have been settled in the Near East and in contact with India from well before 1600 B.c.E.32 The corollary of this is that the Indo-Aryans "could not be part of the Andronovo culture [a culture dated around 1650-1600 B.C.E. with which they are usually associated], but should have come to Iran centuries before, at the time when the Hittites came to Anatolia".

Jarrige (1985) specifically mentions that the existence of the Indo-Aryans has "so far only been deduced on the basis of linguistic evidence" (62; ). Otherwise, "what we see is a dynamic system of multidirectional contacts and 'influences' extending throughout a vast area from southern Central Asia to the Ganges valley and continuing from the beginning of the 2nd millennium into the 1st millennium BC" (62).

It is this evidence concerning the western contribution which persuaded workers to advocate the view that the Andronovo culture area was the original home of the Indo-Iranians, from where they marched into Iran and India as two separate groups by the end of the 2nd millennium B.C. or the beginning of the 1st millennium B.C. (Smirnov and Kuzmina 1977). The Andronovo hypothesis was nevertheless faced with a serious shortcoming from the very beginning. The cultures of the Timber-frame Andronovo circle took shape in the 16th or 17th century B.C., whereas the Aryans already appeared in the Near-East not latter than the 15th to 16th century B.C., and their occupation was intensive there by the 14th century B.C. The influx of the Indo-Aryan names appeared there as well as Indo-Aryan methods of and terms for chariot-driving and treaty swearing by the names of Indo-Aryan gods Mithra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatyas (Mayrhofer 1966, 1974; Kammenhuber 1968; Gindin 1972; Abaev 1972). These regions contain nothing reminiscent of Timber-frame Andronovo materials; in fact, the latter could not have been there at so early a date.

The status quaestionis is still, more than ever, that the Vedic corpus provides no reference to an immigration of the so-called Vedic Aryans from Central Asia. This need not be taken as sufficient proof that such an invasion never took place, that Indo-Aryan was native to India, and that India is the homeland of the Indo-European language family. Perhaps such an invasion from a non-Indian homeland into India took place at a much earlier date, so that it was forgotten by the time of the composition of the Rg-Veda. But at least, such an “Aryan invasion” cannot be proven from the information provided by the Vedic narrative itself.

The Iranians may have been an offshoot from India.

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?

This hypothesis that early Indo-European languages were spoken in north India with Pakistan and on the Iranian plateau at the sixth millennium BC has the merit of harmonizing symmetrically with the theory for the origin of the Indo-European languages in 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.

Rather, the Iranian division of society has a similar origin as the same division in Indian society. The Iranians came from India, as Shrikant Talageri has convincingly demonstrated. Moreover, the division is a natural one, present in every society. It may be tempting to push responsibility far from you, preferably to a foreign source, but in this case the Iranian option doesn’t fulfil your wish. Their status of “foreigner” is ambiguous, given that they came from India and are one of the “five peoples” alongside the Vedic tribe, deemed to descend from the two brothers Anu c.q. Puru, two of the five sons of Yayati. Iranians are quite present in the Veda, such as through the sages Bhrigu and Cyavana.

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.

This raises the immediate objection that if archaeology cannot trace any consistent material culture identifiable as Indo-Aryan arriving into the subcontinent from outside, it most certainly cannot identify any such culture emanating out. Accordingly, as far as archaeology is concerned, we have reached a stalemate (although from a Migrationist perspective there is, arguably at least, some kind of chronological sequence of archaeological culture that at least heads toward the general direction of the subcontinent, even if it does not penetrate it). Ultimately, however, the Aryans cannot be satisfactorily identified in the archaeological record as either entering or exiting. The trajectory of the Indo-Aryans, indeed the necessity of their very existence, is a linguistic issue that archaeology, as most archaeologists are well aware, cannot locate in the archaeological record without engaging in what, to all intents and purposes, amounts to special and often complicated pleading. On the basis of the present evidence, linguistics cannot decisively determine with any significant degree of consensus where the original home- land actually was. And archaeology can only hope to be productive in identifying the material remains of a linguistic group if linguistics has already done the groundwork of pinpointing its geographic area of origin with a reasonable degree of precision.

The simplest explanation of the presence of a Centum language in Central Asia would be to regard it as the last survivor of an original Asiatic Aryan stock. To identify a wandering of Aryans across Turkestan from Europe in a relatively late historical period is frankly difficult.

There may be instances in world history where a dominant or highly influential elite who were few in number were nonetheless able to impose their language on a subject population. (I suspect that could have happened where the conquered population was also small in number and ravaged by war, disease, and the like. But then, would they have survived at all?). North India, Pakistan and Afghanistan 3500 years ago have been suggested as examples of such a scenario, with a relatively small number of Aryan warriors supposedly being able to impose Indic languages upon the native population. In light of the above discussion, I find this to be an unconvincing explanation of how IE languages entered the subcontinent. The fact that a significant portion of the population in these countries possesses blue eyes, fair skin, and brown or even blond hair (where the environment makes these traits which are more suited to northern latitudes disadvantageous from the standpoint of survival) would seem to indicate that sizeable numbers if IE speakers actually did intrude upon the subcontinent and have left not only their linguistic but their genetic imprint upon it as well.