Re: Technical adstrate in Indo-aryan?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:

> How does the presumed settlement area of incoming pastoral Indics
> (on the basis of the earliest Rig Veda books) correspond to present
> day political boundaries?

"Greater Panjab", the region in which the Rgveda was composed, indicates the area from the Kabul Valley, Peshawar and the Swat Valley in the west to Delhi and the Upper Doab in the east, from the lower Pamir/Himalayan ranges in the north to the borders of Sindh and the Bolan Pass in the south; however, the clear center of the Rgvedic area is western and eastern Panjab plus Haryana. Hence, the core Rgvedic area lay on either side of the present India-Pakistan border (half in Pakistan and half in India!).

A map of Greater Panjab is shown here based on the river-names mentioned in the Rgveda (from the Kubha in the west to the Yamuna, and even the Ganges -- mentioned twice in the Rgveda -- in the east):

http://www.bharatvani.org/books/rig/img21.jpg

Compare with the present boundaries of states and provinces included in both India and Pakistan; the aforesaid "core Rgvedic area" comprised Rawalpindi, W. Panjab and S. Panjab in Pakistan (actually unified administratively in the Province of Punjab), and the States of Punjab (called "E. Panjab" on the map) and Haryana in India:

http://www.aniksdimension.com/india.JPG

> I ask because it seems to me (perhaps wrongly) that this initial
> settlement (and we know from many other cases how archaeologically
> elusive the presence of nomads can be) was largely in an area which
> is not politically "Indian" today.

Of course, in the prevalent theory, the "initial settlement" of Indo-Aryan speakers in South Asia was on the Pakistan versant of the present international boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan, in proximity of which the two main passes -- the Khyber and the Bolan -- are situated. Yet, this is not recognized as the "core Rgvedic area" (on which see above).

> If so the protestations of contemporary Indians against AIT might
> be paradoxically understandable, in that their areas were joined to
> expanding "Aryan" territory less by genetic than by linguistic and
> religious osmosis. Are Pakistani scholars as adamantly anti-AIT as
> some Indians?

I am not aware of any Pakistani scholar defending the "authochthonous Aryan" theory, but this could be simply due to my ignorance of scholarly debates in Pakistan. What I know for sure is that there are certain minor Pakistani scholars, apparently nationalist ones, who have tried to suggest that the Indus Civilization (which they regard as a pre-Aryan one) was a precursor of the modern Pakistani nation! See, for instance, the article at

http://tinyurl.com/l3s942

Best,
Francesco