Children of the Indus

[satvikAcer]

Or Greeks with ancient non-Christian Greeks?

Besides Indians have 0 connection with IVC. Barely geographical. If anything, the culture (Vedic) they claim to have inherited -- its people violently put an end to the IVC civilization + any other non-Vedic civilization in the vicinity.

Even then I wouldn't ask Indians to apologize, because most Indians genetically belong to non-Vedic stock, despite cultural appropriation!

Bharati hindus are the only people to have any connection to all the ancient civilizations of the sentiment. Period.

 

[Bharat Muslim]

YA LOL

Aryans migrated from so far but Indus Valley people didn't move an inch .
Migrations are a big part of human history .
Early Humans migrated from Africa to all parts of the world but Indus Valley people didn't moved a muscle .
Those early humans who moved from Africa don't look like Modern human living at every corner of the Earth .
Modern Africans don't look like Europeans nor Indians .

Indus Valley was often invaded by outsiders , be it Persians , Greeks or Arabs .
Migration is caused by Natural and Man made factors .
But Indus Valley people didn't migrated despite constant flooding of Indus , drying or Rivers , Desertification , Climate Change and Continuous wars .

Look at the amount of Syrians and other people from Middle east Migrating into Europe and America .
Countries with less birth rate will one day be overtaken by those ME with high birth rates .
Kashmiris migrated to Punjab before independence .
Muslims from India and Non Muslims from Pakistan Migrated at the time of partition .
Pakistanis and Indians overtaking the natives of UAE

INDUS People are indeed a Mystery

They may argue that these migrations are happening bcoz of modern transportation technology and say that since these technologies were absent then, the migrations didn't happen then. If you try to reason that during Mughal period, if Brahuis were involved in long distance migration from South India to Baluchistan, it is plausible that mass movement of people happened even before, they will come up with fake studies by Western researchers on the genetics of populace of South Asia. And they will say that since the studies was conducted by Westerners, it is neutral, unbiased, reliable and correct. It doesn't matter that it's doubtful whether Westerners even conduct any such studies in the first place.

 

[Kashmiri Pandit]

Where did you get that? The vast majority of Indians in UAE are Hindus.

Internet BABA

Indians in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) constitute the largest part of population of the country. Over 2.2 million Indian migrants (mostly from the Kerala and other south Indian states) are estimated to be living in the UAE, who form over 30% of the total population of the UAE.

Stats belong to year ????

 

[django]

@Kaptaan @save_ghenda @Tergon18 @Talwar e Pakistan @Mentee
Now these Gangadeshis are claiming that they were responsible for the rest of mankind, and they claim to have evidence lol, from RSS sources I suspect lol. Opinion gentleman

Genetics and the Aryan Debate
By Michel Danino



Background

Along with the birth of anthropology, the nineteenth century saw the development of semi-scientific to wholly unscientific disciplines, such as anthropometry, craniometry or phrenology. Unquestioningly accepting the prevalent concept of race, some scientists constructed facial and nasal indexes or claimed to measure the skull’s volume for every race, of course with the result that the white race’s cranium was the most capacious and its owner, therefore, the most intelligent; others went further, insisting that amidst the white race, only the Germans were the “pure” descendants of the “Aryan race” which was destined the rule the earth.

In India, from 1891 onward, Herbert H. Risley, an official with the colonial government, set about defining in all seriousness 2,378 castes belonging to 43 “races,” all of it on the basis of a “nasal index.” The main racial groups were Indo-Aryan, Turko- Iranian, Scytho-Dravidian, Aryo-Dravidian, Mongoloid and Mongolo-Dravidian.

Unfortunately, this imaginative but wholly unscientific work weighed heavily on the first developments of Indian anthropology; in the 1930s, for instance, B. S. Guha studied skeletons from Mohenjo-daro and submitted a detailed report on the proto- Australoid, Mediterranean, Mongoloid and Alpine races peopling the city, all of them “non-Aryan” of course. Long lists of such fictitious races filled academic publications, and continue to be found in Indian textbooks today.

In the wake of World War II, the concept of race collapsed in the West. Rather late in the day, anthropologists realized that race cannot be scientifically defined, much less measured, thus setting at naught a whole century of scholarly divagations on “superior” and “inferior” races. Following in the footsteps of pioneers like Franz Boas,1 leading scientists, such as Ashley Montagu,2 now argued strongly against the “fallacy of race.” It is only with the emergence of more reliable techniques in biological anthropology that anthropometry got a fresh chance; it concentrated not on trying to categorize noses or spot “races,” but on tracing the evolution of a population, on signs of continuity or disruption, and on possible kinships between neighbouring populations.

In the Indian context, we are now familiar with the work of U.S anthropologists Kenneth Kennedy, John Lukacs and Brian Hemphill.3 Their chief conclusion, as far as the Aryan debate is concerned, is that there is no trace of “demographic disruption” in the North-West of the subcontinent between 4500 and 800 BCE; this negates the possibility of any massive intrusion, by so-called Indo-Aryans or other populations, during that period.

Die-hard proponents of such an invasion / migration have therefore been compelled to downscale it to a “trickle-in” infiltration,4 limited enough to have left no physical trace, although they are at pains to explain how a “trickle” was able to radically alter India’s linguistic and cultural landscape when much more massive invasions of the historical period failed to do so.5 Other proponents still insist that “the Indo-Aryan immigrants seem to have been numerous and strong enough to continue and disseminate much of their culture,”6 but do not explain how the “immigrants” failed to leave any trace in the anthropological record.

A powerful new tool

In the 1980s, another powerful tool of inquiry came on the scene: genetics, with its growing ability to read the history contained in a human body’s three billion bits of information. In particular, techniques used in the identification of genetic markers have been fast improving, leading to a wide array of applications, from therapeutics to crime detection to genealogy. Let us first summarize the basic definitions relevant to our field.

In trying to reconstruct ancestry, biologists use two types of DNA, the complex molecule that carries genetic information. The first, Y-DNA, is contained in the Y- chromosome, one of the two sex chromosomes; it is found in the cell’s nucleus and is transmitted from father to son. The second, mtDNA or mitochondrial DNA, is found in mitochondria, kinds of power generators found in a cell, but outside its nucleus; this mtDNA is independent of the Y-DNA, simpler in structure, and transmitted by the mother alone. For various reasons, all this genetic material undergoes slight alterations or “mutations” in the course of time; those mutations then become characteristic of the line of descendants: if, for instance, the mtDNAs of two humans, however distant geographically, exhibit the same mutation, they necessarily share a common ancestor in the maternal line.

Much of the difficulty lies in organizing those mutations, or genetic markers, in consistent categories called “haplotypes” (from a Greek word meaning “single”), which constitute an individual’s genetic fingerprint. Similar haplotypes are then brought together in “haplogroups,” each of which genetically identifies a particular ethnic group. Such genetic markers can then be used to establish a “genetic distance” between two populations.

Identifying and making sense of the right genetic markers is not the only difficulty; dating their mutations remains a major challenge: on average, a marker of Y- DNA may undergo one mutation every 500 generations, but sudden changes caused by special circumstances can never be ruled out. Genetics, therefore, needs the inputs from palaeontology and archaeology, among other disciplines, to confirm its historical conclusions.

India’s case

Since the 1990s, there have been numerous genetic studies of Indian populations, often reaching apparently divergent conclusions. There are three reasons for this: (1) the Indian region happens to be one of the most diverse and complex in the world, which makes it difficult to interpret the data; (2) early studies relied on too limited samples, of the order of a few dozens, when hundreds or ideally thousands of samples are required for some statistical reliability; (3) some of the early studies fell into the old trap of trying to equate linguistic groups with distinct ethnic entities — a relic of the nineteenth-century erroneous identification between language and race; as a result, a genetic connection between North Indians and Central Asians was automatically taken to confirm an Aryan invasion in the second millennium BCE, disregarding a number of alternative explanations.7

More recent studies, using larger samples and much refined methods of analysis, both at the conceptual level and in the laboratory, have reached very different conclusions (interestingly, some of their authors had earlier gone along with the old Aryan paradigm8). We will summarize here the chief results of nine studies from various Western and Indian Universities, most of them conducted by international teams of biologists, and more than half of them in the last three years; since their papers are complex and technical, what follows is, necessarily, highly simplified and represents only a small part of their content.

The first such study dates back to 1999 and was conducted by the Estonian biologist Toomas Kivisild, a pioneer in the field, with fourteen co-authors from various nationalities (including M. J. Bamshad).9 It relied on 550 samples of mtDNA and identified a haplogroup called “U” as indicating a deep connection between Indian and Western-Eurasian populations. However, the authors opted for a very remote separation of the two branches, rather than a recent population movement towards India; in fact, “the subcontinent served as a pathway for eastward migration of modern humans” from Africa, some 40,000 years ago:

“We found an extensive deep late Pleistocene genetic link between contemporary Europeans and Indians, provided by the mtDNA haplogroup U, which encompasses roughly a fifth of mtDNA lineages of both populations. Our estimate for this split [between Europeans and Indians] is close to the suggested time for the peopling of Asia and the first expansion of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia and likely pre-dates their spread to Europe.”

In other words, the timescale posited by the Aryan invasion / migration framework is inadequate, and the genetic affinity between the Indian subcontinent and Europe “should not be interpreted in terms of a recent admixture of western Caucasoids10 with Indians caused by a putative Indo-Aryan invasion 3,000–4,000 years BP.”

The second study was published just a month later. Authored by U.S. biological anthropologist Todd R. Disotell,11 it dealt with the first migration of modern man from Africa towards Asia, and found that migrations into India “did occur, but rarely from western Eurasian populations.” Disotell made observations very similar to those of the preceding paper:


“The supposed Aryan invasion of India 3,000–4,000 years before present therefore did not make a major splash in the Indian gene pool. This is especially counter-indicated by the presence of equal, though very low, frequencies of the western Eurasian mtDNA types in both southern and northern India. Thus, the ‘caucasoid’ features of south Asians may best be considered ‘pre-caucasoid’ — that is, part of a diverse north or north-east African gene pool that yielded separate origins for western Eurasian and southern Asian populations over 50,000 years ago.”


Here again, the Eurasian connection is therefore traced to the original migration out of Africa. On the genetic level, “the supposed Aryan invasion of India 3000-4000 years ago was much less significant than is generally believed.”

A year later, thirteen Indian scientists led by Susanta Roychoudhury studied 644 samples of mtDNA from some ten Indian ethnic groups, especially from the East and South.12 They found “a fundamental unity of mtDNA lineages in India, in spite of the extensive cultural and linguistic diversity,” pointing to “a relatively small founding group of females in India.” Significantly, “most of the mtDNA diversity observed in Indian populations is between individuals within populations; there is no significant structuring of haplotype diversity by socio-religious affiliation, geographical location of habitat or linguistic affiliation.” That is a crucial observation, which later studies will endorse: on the maternal side at least, there is no such thing as a “Hindu” or “Muslim” genetic identity, nor even a high- or low-caste one, a North- or South-Indian one — hence the expressive title of the study: “Fundamental genomic unity of ethnic India is revealed by analysis of mitochondrial DNA.”

The authors also noted that haplogroup “U,” already noted by Kivisild et al. as being common to North Indian and “Caucasoid” populations, was found in tribes of eastern India such as the Lodhas and Santals, which would not be the case if it had been introduced through Indo-Aryans. Such is also the case of the haplogroup “M,” another marker frequently mentioned in the early literature as evidence of the invasion: in reality, “we have now shown that indeed haplogroup M occurs with a high frequency, averaging about 60%, across most Indian population groups, irrespective of geographical location of habitat. We have also shown that the tribal populations have higher frequencies of haplogroup M than caste populations.”

Also in 2000, twenty authors headed by Kivisild contributed a chapter to a book on the “archaeogenetics” of Europe.13 They first stressed the importance of the mtDNA haplogroup “M” common to India (with a frequency of 60%), Central and Eastern Asia (40% on average), and even to American Indians; however, this frequency drops to 0.6% in Europe, which is “inconsistent with the ‘general Caucasoidness’ of Indians.”

This shows, once again, that “the Indian maternal gene pool has come largely through an autochthonous history since the Late Pleistocene.” The authors then studied the “U” haplogroup, finding its frequency to be 13% in India, almost 14% in North-West Africa, and 24% from Europe to Anatolia; but, in their opinion, “Indian and western Eurasian haplogroup U varieties differ profoundly; the split has occurred about as early as the split between the Indian and eastern Asian haplogroup M varieties. The data show that both M and U exhibited an expansion phase some 50,000 years ago, which should have happened after the corresponding splits.” In other words, there is a genetic connection between India and Europe, but a far more ancient one than was thought.

Another important point is that looking at mtDNA as a whole, “even the high castes share more than 80 per cent of their maternal lineages with the lower castes and tribals”; this obviously runs counter to the invasionist thesis. Taking all aspects into consideration, the authors conclude: “We believe that there are now enough reasons not only to question a ‘recent Indo-Aryan invasion’ into India some 4000 BP, but alternatively to consider India as a part of the common gene pool ancestral to the diversity of human maternal lineages in Europe.” Mark the word “ancestral.”

After a gap of three years, Kivisild directed two fresh studies. The first, with nine
colleagues, dealt with the origin of languages and agriculture in India.14 Those biologists stressed India’s genetic complexity and antiquity, since “present-day Indians [possess] at least 90 per cent of what we think of as autochthonous Upper Palaeolithic maternal lineages.” They also observed that “the Indian mtDNA tree in general [is] not subdivided according to linguistic (Indo-European, Dravidian) or caste affiliations,” which again demonstrates the old error of conflating language and race or ethnic group.

Then, in a new development, they punched holes in the methodology followed by studies basing themselves on the Y-DNA (the paternal line) to establish the Aryan invasion, and point out that if one were to extend their logic to populations of Eastern and Southern India, one would be led to an exactly opposite result: “the straightforward suggestion would be that both Neolithic (agriculture) and Indo-European languages arose in India and from there, spread to Europe.” The authors do not defend this thesis, but simply guard against “misleading interpretations” based on limited samples and faulty methodology.

The second study of 2003, a particularly detailed one dealing with the genetic heritage of India’s earliest settlers, had seventeen co-authors with Kivisild (including L. Cavalli-Sforza and P. A. Underhill), and relied on nearly a thousand samples from the subcontinent, including two Dravidian-speaking tribes from Andhra Pradesh.15 Among other important findings, it stressed that the Y-DNA haplogroup “M17,” regarded till recently as a marker of the Aryan invasion, and indeed frequent in Central Asia, is equally found in the two tribes under consideration, which is inconsistent with the invasionist framework. Moreover, one of the two tribes, the Chenchus, is genetically close to several castes, so that there is a “lack of clear distinction between Indian castes and tribes,” a fact that can hardly be overemphasized.

This also emerges from a diagram of genetic distances between eight Indian and seven Eurasian populations, distances calculate on the basis of 16 Y-DNA haplogroups (Fig. 1). The diagram challenges many common assumptions: as just mentioned, five castes are grouped with the Chenchus; another tribe, the Lambadis (probably of Rajasthani origin), is stuck between Western Europe and the Middle East; Bengalis of various castes are close to Mumbai Brahmins, and Punjabis (whom one would have thought to be closest to the mythical “Aryans”) are as far away as possible from Central Asia! It is clear that no simple framework can account for such complexity, least of all the Aryan invasion / migration framework.

The next year, Mait Metspalu and fifteen co-authors analyzed 796 Indian (including both tribal and caste populations from different parts of India) and 436 Iranian mtDNAs.16 Of relevance here is the following observation, which once again highlights the pitfalls of any facile ethnic-linguistic equation:

“Language families present today in India, such as Indo-European, Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic, are all much younger than the majority of indigenous mtDNA lineages found among their present-day speakers at high frequencies. It would make it highly speculative to infer, from the extant mtDNA pools of their speakers, whether one of the listed above linguistically defined group in India should be considered more ‘autochthonous’ than any other in respect of its presence in the subcontinent.”

We finally jump to 2006 and end with two studies. The first was headed by Indian biologist Sanghamitra Sengupta and involved fourteen other co-authors, including L. Cavalli-Sforza, Partha P. Majumder, and P. A. Underhill.17 Based on 728 samples covering 36 Indian populations, it announced in its very title how its findings revealed a “Minor Genetic Influence of Central Asian Pastoralists,” i.e. of the mythical Indo- Aryans, and stated its general agreement with the previous study. For instance, the authors rejected the identification of some Y-DNA genetic markers with an “Indo- European expansion,” an identification they called “convenient but incorrect ... overly simplistic.” To them, the subcontinent’s genetic landscape was formed much earlier than the dates proposed for an Indo-Aryan immigration: “The influence of Central Asia on the pre-existing gene pool was minor. ... There is no evidence whatsoever to conclude that Central Asia has been necessarily the recent donor and not the receptor of the R1a lineages.” This is also highly suggestive (the R1a lineages being a different way to denote the haplogroup M17).

Finally, and significantly, this study indirectly rejected a “Dravidian” authorship of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, since it noted, “Our data are also more consistent with a peninsular origin of Dravidian speakers than a source with proximity to the Indus....” They found, in conclusion, “overwhelming support for an Indian origin of Dravidian speakers.”

Another Indian biologist, Sanghamitra Sahoo, headed eleven colleagues, including T. Kivisild and V. K. Kashyap, for a study of the Y-DNA of 936 samples covering 77 Indian populations, 32 of them tribes.18 The authors left no room for doubt:

“The sharing of some Y-chromosomal haplogroups between Indian and Central Asian populations is most parsimoniously explained by a deep, common ancestry between the two regions, with diffusion of some Indian- specific lineages northward.”

So the southward gene flow that had been imprinted on our minds for two centuries was wrong, after all: the flow was out of, not into, India. The authors continue:

“The Y-chromosomal data consistently suggest a largely South Asian origin for Indian caste communities and therefore argue against any major influx, from regions north and west of India, of people associated either with the development of agriculture or the spread of the Indo-Aryan language family.”


The last of the two rejected associations is that of the Indo-Aryan expansion; the first, that of the spread of agriculture, is the well-known thesis of Colin Renfrew,19 which traces Indo-European origins to the beginnings of agriculture in Anatolia, and sees Indo-Europeans entering India around 9000 BP, along with agriculture: Sanghamitra Sahoo et al. see no evidence of this in the genetic record.

The same data allow the authors to construct an eloquent table of genetic distances between several populations, based on Y-haplogroups (Fig. 2). We learn from it, for instance, that “the caste populations of ‘north’ and ‘south’ India are not particularly more closely related to each other (average Fst value = 0.07) than they are to the tribal groups (average Fst value = 0.06),” an important confirmation of earlier studies. In particular, “Southern castes and tribals are very similar to each other in their Y-chromosomal haplogroup compositions.” As a result, “it was not possible to confirm any of the purported differentiations between the caste and tribal pools,” a momentous conclusion that directly clashes with the Aryan paradigm, which imagined Indian tribes as adivasis and the caste Hindus as descendants of Indo-Aryans invaders or immigrants.

In reality, we have no way, today, to determine who in India is an “adi”-vasi, but enough data to reject this label as misleading and unnecessarily divisive.

Conclusions

It is, of course, still possible to find genetic studies trying to interpret differences between North and South Indians or higher and lower castes within the invasionist framework, but that is simply because they take it for granted in the first place. None of the nine major studies quoted above lends any support to it, and none proposes to define a demarcation line between tribe and caste. The overall picture emerging from these studies is, first, an unequivocal rejection of a 3500-BP arrival of a “Caucasoid” or Central Asian gene pool. Just as the imaginary Aryan invasion / migration left no trace in Indian literature, in the archaeological and the anthropological record, it is invisible at the genetic level. The agreement between these different fields is remarkable by any standard, and offers hope for a grand synthesis in the near future, which will also integrate agriculture and linguistics.

Secondly, they account for India’s considerable genetic diversity by using a time- scale not of a few millennia, but of 40,000 or 50,000 years. In fact, several experts, such as Lluís Quintana-Murci,20 Vincent Macaulay,21 Stephen Oppenheimer,22 Michael Petraglia,23 and their associates, have in the last few years proposed that when Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa, he first reached South-West Asia around 75,000 BP, and from here, went on to other parts of the world. In simple terms, except for Africans, all humans have ancestors in the North-West of the Indian peninsula. In particular, one migration started around 50,000 BP towards the Middle East and Western Europe:

“indeed, nearly all Europeans — and by extension, many Americans — can trace their ancestors to only four mtDNA lines, which appeared between 10,000 and 50,000 years ago and originated from South Asia.” 24

Oppenheimer, a leading advocate of this scenario, summarizes it in these words:

“For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe.”25



We will not call it, of course, an “Indian invasion” of Europe; in simple terms, India acted “as an incubator of early genetic differentiation of modern humans moving out of Africa.”26

Genetics is a fast-evolving discipline, and the studies quoted above are certainly not the last word; but they have laid the basis for a wholly different perspective of Indian populations, and it is most unlikely that we will have to abandon it to return to the crude racial nineteenth-century fallacies of Aryan invaders and Dravidian autochthons. Neither have any reality in genetic terms, just as they have no reality in archaeological or cultural terms. In this sense, genetics is joining other disciplines in helping to clean the cobwebs of colonial historiography. If some have a vested interest in patching together the said cobwebs so they may keep cluttering our history textbooks, they are only delaying the inevitable.

 

[Joe Shearer]

@django

Michel Danino is one of the Caucasian groupies of the RSS-inspired school of revisionist "historians". They form the Out Of India (OOI) school, opposed to a ghost from the past that no longer exists, the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory; now there is no Aryan as race, no "invasion", and no theory. However this aging group still stumbles along charging every windmill that appears, real or imagined.

 

[django]

@django

Michel Danino is one of the Caucasian groupies of the RSS-inspired school of revisionist "historians". They form the Out Of India (OOI) school, opposed to a ghost from the past that no longer exists, the so-called Aryan Invasion Theory; now there is no Aryan as race, no "invasion", and no theory. However this aging group still stumbles along charging every windmill that appears, real or imagined.

He is currently a professor at an IIT and a primary go to source for RSS "Sanghis".Kudos Joe and good to see you back.

 

[My-Analogous]

Very briefly, Indian civilisation might be said, in one sense, to have been built around river systems. Starting from the centre, these would be:
a-

1. The Ganga-Yamuna rivers;
2. The Brahmaputra River;
3. The Mahanadi River;
4. The Godavari River;
5. The Krishna River;
6. The Kaveri River;
7. The Tungabhadra River;
8. The Narmada River;
9. The Indus River.

A commonly recurring characteristic of these systems and the culture that grew around them is the gradual change and transformation that takes place between these, for instance, from the Ganga-Yamuna rivers to the Brahmaputra and its confluence with the Ganga-Yamuna. Taking any two proximate rivers will yield the same picture, of gradual shading off from the full-blown cultural manifestation at one point of the river to the equally full-blown culture at another point of a neighbouring river-centred cultural centre. The same thing happens between different points of the same river, too.

However, along with this differentiated and subtly shaded cultural diffusion, there is the common cultural binding that existed through the bulk of the three and a half thousand years of Indian history; the common themes of literature, poetry, philosophy, architecture, metaphysics and proto-scientific investigation. These cannot be wished away; they can be assigned, in the case of dance alone, to unique river systems; The Bharata Natyam is centred around the Kaveri; Kuchipudi around the Krishna and Godavari, and in their estuaries. Odissi is to be found on the Mahanadi, Manipuri in the hinterland of the Brahmaputra and Kathak on the Ganga-Yamuna. Three of the systems are not represented by dance, but they more than make up through their musical, culinary and architectural contributions; the rich and varied coast of Kerala is also linked to the Kaveri system through very many links and since the language itself split from Tamizh only three centuries ago, it is convenient to view that rich heritage as a cognate of the Kaveri culture.

Viewed in this light, the argument of Aitzaz Ahsan sahib can be seen in its proper perspective.

India don't exist on that time but river Indus do and India stole name from it so that it can claim that civilization but you guys can't change the geography of that. Indus river is in our side and it is Pakistani history not Indian.

 

[Joe Shearer]

India don't exist on that time but river Indus do and India stole name from it so that it can claim that civilization but you guys can't change the geography of that. Indus river is in our side and it is Pakistani history not Indian.

Thank you for your illumination of this seemingly difficult subject.

 

[Joe Shearer]

India don't exist on that time but river Indus do and India stole name from it so that it can claim that civilization but you guys can't change the geography of that. Indus river is in our side and it is Pakistani history not Indian.

@Pakistani Exile

You do realise how difficult it is to have a rational discussion with yobs slobbering all over the place?

 

[Pakistani E]

@Pakistani Exile

You do realise how difficult it is to have a rational discussion with yobs slobbering all over the place?

I agree with you. And I consider myself even below rank of that of a student yet I try in my failing way to post what I find to be of interest and relevant, without being too disruptive or insulting. But I find all this jingoistic **** measuring highly distracting and redundant. It does not support any point either side of the debate makes but only makes them look more silly.

 

[Joe Shearer]

I agree with you. And I consider myself even below rank of that of a student yet I try in my failing way to post what I find to be of interest and relevant, without being too disruptive or insulting. But I find all this jingoistic **** measuring highly distracting and redundant. It does not support any point either side of the debate makes but only makes them look more silly.

That really won't wash, dear Sir. Far too self-deprecating. Your posts are certainly interesting and relevant.

If I might cavil, sometimes your turns of phrase cause confusion to the sub-continental reader. [emoji12]

 

[My-Analogous]

i mean are you people really this much dumb, "india" is a name given by foreigners, indus is a name given by foreigners and so the word "hindu", please don't degrade the quality of content by fantasising thoughts of yours

any dumb guy from this world will know that entire northern india+present day pakistan are decendents of the indus people, though some changed religion, many migrated to india, many migrated to pakistan, and uncounted kept migrating centuries before partition. Nothing controversial just the simple truth.
Pakistan was born in 1947, even its name was decided few years earlier, simple blunt truth.

First of all you are not only idiot(because you don't know a $hit about history) but also notorious in behavior (because you don't have right to insult 200 million people and your thinks is you are smarter then all, which is insane claim, so grown up and respect everyone). I don't accept your personal opinion and if you have any statement to prove words show it to us.

Now come to real point
Historically the name India may referred to either the region of Greater India and the Indian subcontinent. Today it refers to the contemporary Republic of India located therein. But originally the name is derived from the name of the Sindhu (Indus River) which is in Pakistan today, and it has been in use in Greek since Herodotus (4th century BC)
http://www.ancient.eu/article/203/
http://scroll.in/article/723351/was-the-ramayana-actually-set-in-and-around-todays-afghanistan
https://www.quora.com/How-and-when-did-the-name-India-come-into-use
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-India-called-bharat-in-Hindi-and-India-in-English

Even you guys claim Hindu as a religion is not exist and it was actually sindhu and it later S with H and the terms was used as people who lived near Sindhu river and that is a fact. Infect they stole everything from sindhu peoples to cover their identity crisis and every historian know this fact. Prove me wrong with proper reference and not from your mind dilation. I want independent historian references please

 

[Joe Shearer]

First of all you are not only idiot(because you don't know a $hit about history) but also notorious in behavior (because you don't have right to insult 200 million people and your thinks is you are smarter then all, which is insane claim, so grown up and respect everyone). I don't accept your personal opinion and if you have any statement to prove words show it to us.

Now come to real point
Historically the name India may referred to either the region of Greater India and the Indian subcontinent. Today it refers to the contemporary Republic of India located therein. But originally the name is derived from the name of the Sindhu (Indus River) which is in Pakistan today, and it has been in use in Greek since Herodotus (4th century BC)
http://www.ancient.eu/article/203/
http://scroll.in/article/723351/was-the-ramayana-actually-set-in-and-around-todays-afghanistan
https://www.quora.com/How-and-when-did-the-name-India-come-into-use
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-India-called-bharat-in-Hindi-and-India-in-English

Even you guys claim Hindu as a religion is not exist and it was actually sindhu and it later S with H and the terms was used as people who lived near Sindhu river and that is a fact. Infect they stole everything from sindhu peoples to cover their identity crisis and every historian know this fact. Prove me wrong with proper reference and not from your mind dilation. I want independent historian references please

@Adiyogi
@My-Analogous

It is a sad sight to see two intelligent people wrangling over somewhat trivial issues. Both of you are more or less saying the same thing; a moment's reflection will make that clear and make more engaging discussion possible.

1. @My-Analogous is perfectly correct in his (her?) tracing of the name India from Sindhu, pronounced by the trans-riparians without the sibiland as 'Hindu', again distorted one step further by the Greek component of the Achaemenid urban melange without the aspirate as 'Indu', or, correctly (I think @Kaptaan has already reminded us of this) as 'Indike'.
2. This does not, however, make two very important points; first, there was that name for the general region (greater India, or the Indian sub-continent), a geographical name; second, there was the name taken as the English/international version of the State name in 1947, as a successor name to the British colony, whose successor it was, legally. This second instance was a joint name; the name that Indians call their state when not speaking a European language should be Bharat.
3. That it was greater India or the Indian sub-continent was established as early as Megasthenes, who was clearly not referring to the frontier zones.
4. That Hindu was not originally what the followers of a particular polytheistic faith system called themselves is widely known and accepted. It is not clear how they are asserted to have 'stolen' the name, as they never used it for themselves. Foreigners did use it for all inhabitants of India, irrespective of religion, and the usage became attached to polytheism only by the broad overlap between the inhabitants and those religious forms. In short, Hindus were Indians first (cf., Persian use of the word, and also the allusion to 'dark' in using that word), and the name extended to their polytheist religions because those religions lacked any other name. By default, as it were.
5. Culturally speaking, the IVC spread by stages into northern India, from the IVC sites in the Punjab and Haryana to the succeeding pottery-denoted cultures of the Indus, Yamuna and Ganges basins nearest these sites. There may have been a similar diluted diffusion - only some aspects, such as pottery, seem to have travelled, and there is no evidence of city architecture, organisation, social organisation that is similar or the typical IVC seals or measurement systems in any successor site - from Gujarat (as we call it in modern times) as well.
6. Language has come in as an army of red herrings (that is the correct collective noun, btw!!!). Language and culture are NOT associated. Similarly, ethnicity and culture are NOT associated. Or rather, in both cases, they are, but not inevitably; there are very many variations.
7. People speaking Indo-European on the steppes were not ethnically consistent, if we are to go by the identification of the Scythians as the closest to that culture.
8. There is no reason to believe that the rapid spread of Indo-Aryan (the original language of the Vedas, not the 'sanskrit' created in laboratory conditions by Panini) throughout northern India was linked to a series of conquests by migrating races and tribes.
9. There is every reason to remember @Pakistani Exile (he has re-ethnicised himself and I cannot remember the name) who reminded us that the Anglo-Saxons only formed a thin layer on top in Britain, after their conquests of the autochthonous Britons.
10. There is also no reason to believe that the existence of Dravidian (NOT Tamil) language forms as a sub-stratum in Aryan languages in north India meant that an existing population of 'Dravidians' migrated en masse to south India after their lands in the north were conquered. There is every reason to believe that there was very little movement of populations; there was, however, promotion of one language system over another. We have linguistic evidence of Austric languages lying at the roots; of Dravidian languages being dominant thereafter (with no clues about the duration and tenure); and of their submergence under a thousand-year wave of Aryan languages in north India.
11. The importance in the context of the IVC becomes evident immediately.
    1. Those who created the IVC were quite clearly local inhabitants, not migrants from Mars, and most probably stayed on in those areas after the final decline and fall of the IVC. Some may well have migrated; travel and movement was far more common in those days than we can imagine; after all, IVC artifacts have been found in Central Asia.
    2. Their culture, degraded by urban decline and the desiccation of their original homeland, did travel. Those who took it up may not have had any ethnic links to the IVC people, whoever they were.
    3. Those who are to be found in north India are unlikely to have been lineal descendants of the IVC people.
    4. Those who are to be found in south India are unlikely to have been lineal descendants of the IVC people. They retained the language spoken (perhaps) by the IVC people but they were not those people.
    5. Indo-Aryan, and Prakrit, may have spread widely. Dravidian may have receded widely. It is not to be said that Tamils inhabited the valley of the Indus, and they retreated, taking all the culture with them.
12. I hope those notes and jottings will help you raise the right questions and explore them in a rational frame of mind.

All the best.

 

[SoulSpokesman]

Dada,

Language and culture are NOT associated.

Good point. Both you and DJT spk the same language. But no one who knows you well wud insinuate that you and he have the same culture (nauzubillah)

Regards

 

[Mamluk]

@Joe Shearer got a question for you.

I know that Europe was populated by waves of Indo-Euro invaders (Celts, Latin, Germanic, Slavic etc.) over centuries, so was Western Asia (Medes, Persians etc.).

How many waves of Indo-Euro invaders/migrants came to the subcontinent since the Vedic people arrived (assuming they were the first one)? The Jats would be a latecomer right?

@Tergon18 feel free to chip in.

Dada,

Language and culture are NOT associated.

Disagree. Language carries culture. Flow of language is accompanied by flow of culture.