UNITED STATES, June 20, 2018 (DCF USA by Kundan Singh): The Roundtable discussion at the World History Association Conference examined the ongoing problems associated with the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory, and the controversies involving the late 18th and 19th-century origins of this theory and its explicit service to European national and colonialist interests and agendas. This historiographical controversy centers on academic arguments that still dominate the field, continuing outmoded Western Orientalist paradigms that persist in today’s area studies, despite a rich and growing body of evidence and scholarship to the contrary. The problem is deeper than that of historiographical and cultural misrepresentation, however, involving a kind of intellectual ownership of the historical narrative. Grounded in European Indology and imposed on the history of India, the Aryan Invasion / Migration Theory, emerges as an ideological and less-than rational set of ideas.
The Aryan Invasion Theory has been replaced by the Aryan Migration Theory – but whether invasion or migration, essentially it is the same Aryans coming from outside the Indian subcontinent who have given the Indians any semblance of civilization, however other-worldly or material that it may be. School textbooks across the USA and India continue to serve up as near scientific objective truth of a supposed Aryan migration / invasion into India that took place sometime around 1500 BCE, masquerading the racist underpinnings of the earlier theory under the politically correct linguistic version of Aryans as people carrying Indo-European languages from one place to another as they migrated from some place in Europe. Such is the mainstream academic blind-spot i.e. its patent racism, that despite almost all nationalities in Europe having claimed the origins of the Aryan people in their land, it does not question the veracity or the “scientific” truth of the migration of the Aryan people from Europe to the Middle-East to India. Portrayals of world cultures and history remain central to the goals of World History with an aim to restore–or to establish for the first time–Indigenous agency to the historical narrative, respect for traditional cultures and values,
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