The Aryan peoples swept down on India like a wolf on the fold, sweeping away all opposition with their powerful and swift chariots. Or did they?
The Aryan invasions of India and the different cultures and civilizations within the space we now know as India has come to be an accepted fact by generations of students. The basic concept is that a people emerging from somewhere on the Steppes or in Southwest Russia (or perhaps somewhere else) expanded into the fertile agricultural lands of the sub-continent, defeating the armies of all those who would stand before them. They were so successful in warfare because of their superior horses and their chariots. Although horse-drawn carts of various sorts had been known more or less wherever civilization had been established, it was not until the Aryans emerged that the boxlike wooden contraptions evolved into the rapidly-moving two-horse and two-wheel contraptions that enabled archers to launch volleys of arrows at their infantry enemy and then keep them sufficiently mobile as to avoid reprisals. Just like, in later days, it became the case that Mongols and other steppe nomad armies were able to overwhelm their more static but more numerous opponents through mobility and the ability to deliver devastating volleys of missiles, so too was it assumed that the Aryans cut through their enemies like butter. Consequently, the Aryans swept through the whole of India and even made an appearance in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) by virtue of their energetic warfare.
Of course, the chariot then went on to dominate the battlefield in Egypt and the lands described in the Bible, before, eventually, less-expensive alternatives were found to counter it. After all, the chariot requires at least two horses (and probably some in reserve) and one or two chariot drivers just to get one man to shoot arrows at the enemy – that is an expensive and essentially inefficient means of attacking with the efforts of just one man. Besides which, chariots can only really be effective in warfare on terrain which suits them – it must, in other words, be nearly uniformly flat and open. No problem on the Steppes, where the land extends flat and more or less even as far as the eye can see in all directions. Not so in India, therefore, with its hills, mountains, jungle and forest areas, swamps and all manners of non chariot-friendly terrain. So, was it really the case that the Aryans invaded the whole of the sub-continent (an area of land so large that it now contains more than 1,200,000,000 people)? Can a tribal group really have been so powerful and so resistant to disease that a few thousands could conquer all the powerful cities that existed in India even then? It seems unlikely and, increasingly, historians and architects are considering whether the ‘invasion’ was really a different kind of process, one in which a much slower and less violent form of integration and acculturation was more important. Historians and archaeologists can argue and rewrite all they wish, of course but it is the politicians and the politically-motivated who are willing to take crude arguments and half-developed hypotheses and to use these to batter over the head the enemies they have in India’s incredibly diverse and incredibly confrontational political system.
John Walsh, Shinawatra University, March 2007
