In India, the founders or creators of the Vedic culture – which was diametrically opposed to the Harappan civilization – were the Aryans, probably an immigrant people, whose first arrival in India is dated between 2000 and 1500 BC. After settling in India the Aryans composed a series of religious hymns, which were eventually compiled into a text known as Rigveda.

Our knowledge of the Aryans in India during this earliest period is based primarily on this work. The great German scholar Max Muller, who initially believed that Aryans belonged to a race, later detracted and declared emphatically that the term “Aryans, in scientific language, is utterly inapplicable to race.

It means language and nothing but language. “In 1786, Sir William Jones, in his famous address to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, tried to prove a definite relation between the Vedic Sanskrit and some of the principle languages of Europe and Asia such as Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, Lithuanian, German, Persian etc.

The scholars have given a common name ‘Indo- European’ to this group of languages and the people speaking them were known as the Indo-Europeans or Indo-Aryans. On this basis it has been surmised that the people who spoke the common language and shared the common home, dispersed or immigrated to various parts of the world, including India.

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The Aryans, whose presence in North-western India or the region of Sapta Sindhu as documented by the Rig-Veda, had reached the territory through a migration or a succession of migrations, from outside the subcontinent.

The Aryan migration of India is recorded in no written document, and it cannot yet be traced archaeologically, although recently some advances have been achieved in this respect too.

But it is nevertheless firmly established as a historical fact on the basis of comparative philology the Indo-European languages of which Sanskrit in its Vedic form is one of the oldest members, originated outside India, and the only possible way by which a language belonging to this family could be carried all the way to India was the migration of the people speaking it.