Re: Aryan invasion theory and race

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "shivkhokra" <shivkhokra@...> wrote:

> Regarding Manu Smriti you are again reading it with an assumption
> that Yavans mentioned there are Greeks. As has been shown from the
> Mbh thread on this list Yavanas were just not Greeks. This term was
> used for Indic people from the north-east in Mbh.

You haven't "shown" anything. You have merely kept reiterating a single moot point about "Bhagadatta, king of the Yavanas", who is also described, in the Mbh itself, as a ruler "of the West" (like Varuna, the Lokapala of the West), an overlord of the northern tribes called Chinas and Kiratas, the ruler of the undescribed Pragjyotisha kingdom (equated with certitude to Kamarupa/Assam only in *later* Hindu works), a "dweller of the Eastern Sea", and one who, along with his Yavana army, presents king Yudhishthira with "purebred horses, fast as wind" (which could hardly have come from Assam -- in fact, horse breeding is said in ancient Indic texts to be a speciality of the peoples of the NW). Such a vast empire, extending from the NW of the Indian sub-continent to the Bay of Bengal across the northern Himalayan region, is not known to have ever existed in ancient India. Therefore, any hypothesis on the ethnicity of the Yavanas based on the contradictory references to the countries being ruled over by king Bhagadatta found in the Mbh is doomed to failure. You can't just decide as to *where* Bhagadatta's Yavana subjects were residing, for his "empire" is a literary creation!

This topic, as far as I am concerned, is by now closed unless you come up with some further evidence supporting your claim that the term Yavana "was used for Indic people from the north-east in Mbh."

> Manu is also using it in similar lists as given in Mbh.

What Manu says (10.43-45) -- see the text at

http://tinyurl.com/l3eddj

-- is that Yavanas were considered "Dasyus", i.e., according to the tradition in vogue in his time, people not born from the mouth, arms, thighs, and feet of the mythic Mahapurusha (from which the four varnas originated according to the Rigveda). These "Dasyus", as defined by Manu, include the Yavanas (Indo-Greeks), Sakas (Indo-Scythians), and Pahlavas (Indo-Parthians), and are said to be of two types:

1) "Dasyus" who speak an Arya (= Indic) language;

2) "Dasyus" who speak a mleccha (= non-Indic) language.

You might now suggest that there is no way to decide as to which ones of the "Dasyu" groups listed by Manu spoke an Arya language, and which ones spoke a non-Aryan language; yet, the Mahabharata (1.165.35-37) explicitly states that the Yavanas, Sakas, Pahlavas, and other peoples listed in that passage were classified as "mlecchas" -- viz., they spoke foreign languages (the Sanskrit term mleccha, indeed, mainly pertains to the linguistic sphere) and did not conform to the usual Hindu institutions:

http://tinyurl.com/mqloxm

I recall there are other textual references to Yavanas, Sakas, and Pahlavas being classified as mlecchas in ancient Sanskrit literature, yet I have no time to locate all of them right now. What I mean to stress here is that there is good evidence that the Yavanas, Sakas, and Pahlavas were classified by the Indians, both linguistically and religio-culturally, as outsiders (although, as I have made clear in the course of this discussion, they were, at the same time, regarded as kshatriyas degraded to the condition of shudras due to their neglect of the brahmins -- i.e., they already had a place in the caste hierarchy). Consequently, your attempt at making the Yavanas an "Indic" (or "Arya"?) group finds no support in ancient Sanskrit sources.

> Can you explain what Hinduisation of Saka stands for? I have asked
> you this before (who, when, how?). And just for the record
> Siddharta who later became Buddha also belonged to a group called
> Shakyas and they were Hindus.

That Gautama Siddharta's Shakya clan was of Saka origin is very unlikely, although some scholars still adhere to this old hypothesis. As for the Hinduization of (some of) the Sakas, that is known, for instance, from the adoption of Hindu names by certain 2nd century CE Saka rulers of the Western Kshatrapa kingdom such as the _mahakshatrapa_ Rudradaman and Dakshamitra, daughter of the _kshatrapa_ Nahapana. Moreover, as I have already pointed out Rudradaman married some Hindu princesses.

Actual inscriptional evidence for this process is scanty, but is, however, there. For instance, we also have the Garuda pillar inscription of Heliodoros at Besnagar (c. late 2nd century BCE). Heliodoros, son of Dion (both being Greek names) and a self-styled resident of Taxila, was a Greek ambassador (yona-duta) of the Indo-Greek king Antialkidas to the court of the Shunga (?) king Bhagabhadra. The inscription seems to be referring to Heliodoros as a Bhagavata, i.e. a devotee of Vasudeva (Vishnu-Krishna). Heliodoros' adoption of the Bhagavata religion shows that the latter was in vogue among the Yonas (prakrit for Yavanas) of the Indo-Greek kingdom from some time before.

As for the (later) Hunas, it is known from his coinage that their king Mihirakula (early 6th century CE) was a Shaiva, a fact that was later on referred to by the historian Kalhana.

Nevertheless, as a matter of fact, most of Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian rulers patronized Buddhism, as is clear from a wealth of inscriptions of theirs that have been handed down to us -- for the relative inscriptional evidence see at

http://tinyurl.com/mjkk7r

Yet, this doesn't imply at all that their genes, along with those of their presumably Buddhist Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Indo-Parthian subjects (nobles, soldiers, administrators, and common people at large) did never get diluted, in subsequent epochs, into the gene pool of different Hindu caste populations (see next point).

In my latest post I had posed Shivraj the following question:

> > What was the fate of the descendants of the Yavana, Saka,
> > Pahlava, Kushana, Huna etc. invaders of India, if they never
> > intermarried with Hindu caste populations as per your hypothesis?
> > Were they extinguished, exterminated, exiled by the "pure Hindu
> > race", or did all of them become sterile so that they left no
> > progeny, or what else?

Shivraj replied:

> Each group most likely did some of the following:
>
> a) If these groups were able to establish themselves in a
> geography, soon enough they got their women to join them, if they
> were not already travelling with them.

Fine enough. But did *all* of them marry with women of their own ethnic stock?

> b) Local women were captured.

This is also fine for me. Thus, they begot children from these "local women", which is precisely what I have been arguing from the start of this painful discussion. I have also added that some of these Yavanas, Sakas, Pahlavas, Hunas gradually become Hindu and evidently begot children of 'mixed caste' from their Hindu wives (who were possibly mainly of shudra extraction, but who could also have been, at least in principle, of kshatriya extraction as is shown by the case of the _mahakshatrapa_ Rudradaman discussed above), but let us leave this argument aside now. The fact is that, even in the unlikely case that not a single Yavana, Saka, Pahlava, Huna etc. could ever convert to Hinduism as you seem to think, their Buddhist progeny and their descendants (whose physical existence you cannot certainly deny) continued to live in South Asia until Buddhism was reabsorbed into Hinduism through a socio-religious process that began in the second half of the first millennium CE. Thus, whatever their religious affiliation and possibility of intermarriage with Hindu caste groups, the genetic fingerprints of those people, initially foreign to South Asia, must still linger in the genetic pool of certain Hindu caste populations!

There appears to be no escape to this logical conclusion, Shivraj...

Regards,
Francesco