Out of Bharat Theory (OBT)

I would prefer to call it Bharat (that is India, circa 3000 BCE).
Hence, I adopt the following arguments of Kazanas to suggest an OBT
and suggest further that more researches should be done on the
origins of Indo-Aryan and the waves of migrations out of Bharat.

Kalyanaraman

(p.46). The `Out of India' Theory (OIT). Even more important is
Hock's article which discusses the possibility of Old Indo-Aryan
being the PIE language and the possibility of IEs emigrating out of
India (1999). Hock rightly rejects the notion that PIE was Vedic,
but he is wrong in ascribing this view to Misra, who makes no such
claim as far as I know…he is careful throughout his study (1992) to
keep Sanskrit quite distinct from PIE…Then Hock, unaware of J.
Nichols's evidence which requires a locus of dispersal at Bactria-
Sogdiana (unlike his own vague "vast area from East central Europe
to Eastern Russia", p. 17), nonetheless indicates that there are no
substantial linguistic arguments against the proposition that IE
branches moved out of India. He states that apart from the gypsy
emigration, there are "three more IA languages moving out of India:
Gandhari Prakrit (in medieval Khotan and farther east), and Parya
(in modern Uzbekistan)…and Dumaki (close to present-day Shina)…to
the outer northwestern edge of south Asia" (also in Hock 1996: 82).
He states also that the PIE could `a priori' have been `originally
spoken in India' (p. 11) and rejects the idea not on linguistic but
archaeological (!) grounds (p. 13) of the kind usually employed by
invasionists (horse and chariot). This, as we saw (sect. VII) is no
real difficulty…He then invokes the `principle of simplicity' as an
additional difficulty (p. 16): one migration into India as against
many out of it. But he ignores the fundamental fact that there is
plenty of evidence of IE branches invading the areas they occupy but
there is none for India: this makes considerable difference, surely.
What is more, this `simplicity' applies equally to all proposed
homelands…

Bactria is not far from Saptasindhu and could be a first
concentration point for out-of-India travelers and subsequent
dispersals…

…palatalization began after the various branches moved to their
historical habitats (allow for some variation in the order): Hittite
leaving first westward, then Tocharian to the east, then Germanic
and Balto-Slavonic to the west and north-west, Celtic and Italic to
the west and south-west, and finally Thraco-Phrygian and Greek (with
the distinctive isoglosses they shared with the Indo-Iranians). Here
too we have the difficulty of the positions of the Balto-Slavs, but,
as was said, perhaps in the early period (in the 5th millennium?)
they were close enough to the Indo-Iranians. Thus palatalizatin
spread from the Indo-Iranian `core regions' to the adjacent Slavo-
Balts but not the extreme limits of the `periphery' (particularly as
many non-IE cultures intervened between the Indo-Iranians and the
Hittites, Phrygians and Greeks). Bryant discusses other possible OIT
scenarios (146-149).

The scenario with Saptasindhu as the urheimat seems much more
reasonable. Or so it would be, if I accepted the theories about
protolanguages and isoglosses. I don't – and this has little to do
with C. Melcher's arguing (1987) that Anatolian Luvian is neither
centum nor satem (where palatals have become affricates z and
sibilants s; see also Hock 1991: 13-15), or with the Himalayan proto-
Bangani (perhaps) being centum (Elst 1999: 122-123; Bryant, 142). We
know, or rather surmise, that there was a PIE language but we don't
know what it was, nor when, where and how it changed: we merely
conjecture and theorize about these phenomena – and writing
pseudoscientific texts just perpetuates the illusory knowledge,
which becomes deception…Nobody should dismiss or ignore linguistic
realities but everybody should avoid fantasies.

From Kazanas, 2002, JIES, Vol. 30, Nos. 3 and 4, Fall/Winter 2002