Also ties into modern Indian politics.
For some obscure reason some Indians find the notion that the Indo portion of the Indo-European languages were brought in by invaders to be degrading to India. I’ve never quite been able to figure out why. These languages were equally brought to Persia and Europe by invaders, and nobody in these countries finds the notion disturbing in any way.
But many Indians subscribe to the somewhat idiotic notion that the IO languages originated in India and spread by migrations out of India. Despite the fact that we have thousands of years of history of dozens or hundreds of migrations/invasions into India and none in the other direction.
Gee, Sherman, I hate to break this to you: DNA proves that theory of an invasion from the north in India to be false. It was the other way ‘round!
Yeah, the 20th c claim that the Aryans were indigenous is just anachronistic nationalist (and isolationist) agitprop.
IndoEuropean languages have no common word for large bodies of water (IOW, each language borrowed a word from whatever locals they found when they first saw the sea); added to the fact that some odd practices described in their own ancient literature have been found only in archaeological contexts in Central Asia, and used plants that only grow there, it’s no coincidence that the Aryan invasion of India (also found in their own ancient literature) came down out of the central Asian highlands — just as Alexander the Great did later, and in fairly recent times, the Muzzies.
The Indus Valley scripts of the Harappan civ, though still unread, appear to have been used to record an agglutinative language (Sumerian, or something related, is a possibility, as the Sumerians themselves came from the east, by their own account), and there’s no sign of the all-important horse — all-important to the Aryans, that is. IOW, regardless of the colonization pattern of the Harappans (recent study has shown the northwestern sites are not older, but newer), the Aryans came from Central Asia. :’)