Indo-Aryan peoples

Indo-Aryan peoples refers to both the pastoralist Indo-Aryan people migrating from Central Asia into South Asia in the second millennium B.C., introducing the Proto-Indo-Aryan language, as well as to contemporary ethnolinguistic groups speaking modern Indo-Aryan languages, a subgroup of the Indo-European language family.

History

The Indo-Aryan migration theory, proposed among others by anthropologist David W. Anthony (in The Horse, The Wheel and Language) and by archaeologists Elena Efimovna Kuzmina and J. P. Mallory, shows that the introduction of the Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent was the result of a migration of people whose culture originated in the Sintashta culture, moving through the Bactria-Margiana Culture and into the northern Indian subcontinent (modern-day India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka). These migrations started approximately 1,800 B.C., after the invention of the war chariot, and also brought Indo-Aryan languages into the Levantand possibly Inner Asia.

The Proto-Indo-Iranians, from which the Indo-Aryans developed, are identified with the Sintashta culture (2100–1800 B.C.), and the Andronovo culture, which flourished ca. 1800–1400 B.C. in the steppes around the Aral sea, present-day Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The proto-Indo-Iranians were influenced by the Bactria-Margiana Culture, south of the Andronovo culture, from which they borrowed their distinctive religious beliefs and practices. The Indo-Aryans split off around 1800–1600 B.C. from the Iranians, whereafter the Indo-Aryans migrated into the Levant and north-western India. This migration was part of the diffusion of Indo-European languages from the Proto-Indo-European homeland at the Pontic steppe which started in the 4th millennia B.C.

The Indo-Aryans were united by shared cultural norms and language, referred to as aryā, “noble.” Diffusion of this culture and language took place by patron-client systems, which allowed for the absorption of other groups into this culture, and explains the strong influence on other cultures with which it interacted.

While the Indo-Aryan linguistic group occupies mainly northern parts of India, genetically, all South Asians across the Indian subcontinent are descendants from a mix of South Asian hunter-gatherers, Iranian hunter-gatherers, and Central-Asian steppe pastoralists in varying proportion. Additionally, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burmese speaking people contributed to the genetic make-up of South Asia.

The Indigenous Aryans theory places the Indo-Aryans languages as being entirely indigenous to the Indian subcontinent and later they spread outside the subcontinent. Contemporary support for this idea is ideologically driven and has no support in mainstream scholarship.

List of historical Indo-Aryan peoples

Contemporary Indo-Aryan peoples

Contemporary Indo-Aryan groups

1978 map showing geographical distribution of the major Indo-Aryan languages. (Urdu is included under Hindi. Romani, Domari, and Lomavren are outside the scope of the map.) Dotted/striped areas indicate where multilingualism is common. show
Total population
~1.5 billion
Regions with significant populations
India	over 911 million
Pakistan	over 233 million
Bangladesh	over 160 million
Nepal	over 26 million
Sri Lanka	over 14 million
Myanmar	over 1 million
Maldives	over 300,000
Bhutan	over 240,000
Languages
Indo-Aryan languages
Religion
Hindu, Christians, Buddhist, Islam, (with Sikhand Jain minorities) including some non-religious atheist/agnostic