S.Kalyanaraman:
> The points are also being debated on another yahoogroup
> (IndianCivilization)
This group is too loud, too overrun by nutcase nationalists. It's like
trying to talk about the US Civil War on a group run by the Sons of
Confederate Veterans.
This is my understanding:
All the evidence says the Indic language stock got to India from
Europe, via Central Asia, and then, upriver from the Aral, into
Afganistan and down into present Pakistan/NE India. The 'second wave'
of IndoIranian expansion (as well as the expansion of other languages)
replaced Indic **everywhere** except in India-Pakistan.
They were mainly stockherders practicing some agriculture (ranchers in
the American sense). They had horses, war chariots, and good
metallurgy.
In the wreck of the Indus River civilization, where urban centered
agriculture failed, herders filtering down from Afganistan had a
better economic model to fit the local ecology. They quickly came to
dominate what is now NE Pakistan/NW India, in areas never really
controlled by agriculturalists, or which had been largely abandoned by
them.
The shift of the headwaters of the Sarasvati to the Ganges also
shifted the center of civilization to the Ganges valley. From my
reading, I gather the Ganges valley was thinly populated until this
time (and heavily forested, if I recall correctly).
At a certain point in certain areas, the invading/migrating Indics
may have been almost on an equal demographic footing with those
pioneering in the Ganges valley, with a critical mass of
native-speakers behind them to the west. They bore better military
technology, and were willing to use it. This is a recipe for a lingua
franca leading to language replacement. If we say that Dravidian (and
whatever other language families were there at the time) were
fragmented, and combine this with political fragmentation, then the
conditions for language replacement become stronger.
Mainly, the incoming Indics were lucky. The conditions were just
right.