Who Are You?

There’s a line from Who Are You?, the title track of English rock band The Who’s 1978 record, that goes: I remember throwing punches around/And preachin’ from my chair/Well who are you?!

While the song is mostly about Pete Townshend’s heavy drinking with the anarchic Sex Pistols band, for some reason whenever I hear it, I am reminded of the debates surrounding the Aryan migration theory. Maybe it’s because of the incongruous Meher Baba references that Townshend was always weaving into his songs, including the final verse of Who Are You?

I know there’s a place you walked/Where love falls from the trees…

How can I measure up to anyone now/After such a love as this?/Well, who are you?

Tell me, who are you? Are you of Aryan stock, tracing back to wending migrations from the Eurasian steppes, or of more urbane Dravidian stock, claiming heritage from the sprawling, sophisticated Harappan civilisation? Or perhaps one of the many eastern and north-eastern Indians whose paternal lineage hearkens back to prehistoric China? Or you could be unlucky like me and have to trace your roots back to horse-fetishist, ‘predatory nomads’ like the Scythians/Sakas.

But again, the free-flowing love that Meher Baba tried to instil in Pete Townshend is not what drives The Who’s rocking jam; rather, what really drives this song is its bellicosity, the preaching at others and throwing punches around. And it is precisely that preachiness and aggression that characterises how people today tend to discuss early Indian history. There are few academic debates with more animus. I have plenty of anecdotal evidence.

For example, although I have uploaded 100 video lectures on my YouTube channel where I discuss topics as crazy as cannibalism, UFOlogy, and dry fasting, or as controversial as Indian political thought or constitutional law, the one video that always attracts the most acerbic, indeed vicious, comments is the one where I treat different views on the Aryan migration theory -- trolls assault me merely for voicing scepticism about the out-of-India hypothesis.

In case you don’t know, the out-of-India hypothesis, which the vast majority of social scientists regard as untenable, posits that the Vedic Aryans, as well as the Indo-European language that they spoke, originated within the Indian subcontinent, and not, as is almost universally held, from the Eurasian steppes.

In some ways, this animus, if not the vicious aggression, is understandable. The Aryan migration hypothesis emerged within the wider context of European colonialism alongside pseudo-scientific theories of racial superiority used to legitimise subjugation. And we are a wounded civilisation. Moreover, the very concepts by which Vedic Aryans themselves distinguished their own clans from the other peoples inhabiting ancient India are flashpoint issues even today: religion, language, and ‘race’.

Ancient Aryans critiqued their rivals, Dasas or Dasyus (were they Dravidians, former inhabitants of the Indus Valley civilisation(s), Mundas, or none of these?) for their swarthy complexion, their inability to pronounce Sanskrit words properly, their refusal to perform sacrifices, their worship of linga instead of Indra, Agni, or other Aryan gods, and many other differentiating characteristics. In some ways, Vedic Aryan ideology was an early prototype for 20th century muscular Hindutva — although, of course, the Aryans ate beef.

Then there is also the internal differentiation within the Aryan clans themselves; these, too, overlap with contemporary flashpoint issues: Varna, or later caste, that are also tangled up with other controversial binaries, like fair (Aryan, northern) versus dark (Mleccha, southern), Savarna versus Avarna, Brahman versus Shraman. And we are a highly fractured nation.

All these open wounds, internal factions and divisions do not support a scientific, apolitical study of origins. But to be more optimistic, it did first take Pete Townshend hitting total rock bottom before The Who were finally able to relentlessly demand Well, who the f*** are you? Cause I really wanna know!