Picture this: a world where groups of families were fiercely rooted in their cattle and land. It’s a world of porous boundaries, high tempers and fluid identities. The date is circa 1500 BCE, and a great, urban civilisation on the banks of the River Indus was already rapidly declining.
During this time, a vast horde of people from Central Asia, travelling in long caravans, crossed the Hindu Kush mountains, where they came in contact with the indigenous people of the Indian sub-continent. Over the next millennium, these fair-skinned, horse-back ridden people – who proudly call themselves the Aryas – established their dominance over the entire land.
The stage is soon set for a grand confrontation between the natives and the foreigners. Although historians have interpreted this Arya (Aryan) migration in different ways, some even going to the extent of calling it an ‘invasion,’ we find no contemporary records for such a confrontation. The Vedas, the earliest literature of the subcontinent, were written during this time by these migrating Central Asians. In them, we find glimpses of how the Aryans were trying to assert their control over northern India.
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