Thread by @shrikanth_krish

Vir Sanghvi makes the cardinal error of mistaking the possible transformation of the lingual landscape in North India caused by the influx of a small minority, with transformation of culture, and the people themselves

Language can change, while cultural continuity remains

https://twitter.com/JoeAgneya/status/1086976679044558848

For eg : Today, English has emerged very strongly as the lingua franca in much of Urban India, with close to 10% of the population speaking it in some form

This happened despite there being practically zero genetic influx from Saxon lands in the past 300 years

Even if one accepts a certain degree of the so-called Aryan migration in the first half of 2nd millennium BCE, it does not imply an abrupt cultural discontinuity from the earlier mature Harappan phase

What's undeniable is the lingual impact of migrations. Which was also two-way

The cultural continuity on the other hand v much remained

The recently deceased Iravatham Mahadevan made this point v well in a 1999 interview

Quoting him -

"The modern speakers of Dravidian languages are the result of millennia long intermixture of races. There are no Aryans in India, nor are there any Dravidians. Those who talk about Dravidians in the political sense, I do not agree with them at all"

"You cannot racially segregate any element of Indian population. There is no sense in saying that the people in Tamil Nadu are inheritors of Indus Valley culture. You could v well say that people living in Harappa today are more likely to be the inheritors of that civilization

"I often say that if the key to the Indus script linguistically is Dravidian, then culturally the key to the Indus script is Vedic. What I mean is that the cultural traits of the Indus Valley civilization are likely to have been absorbed by the successor Indo-Aryan civilization"

"if you are looking at the survival of cultural and social traits of Harappan civilization they are likely to be all over the subcontinent, overlaid with centuries of transformation in culture and of language"

"modern Hinduism as we know it is a composite of both pre-Aryan, native, animistic and tribal religions and the incoming Aryan religion. Perhaps when the Indus script is deciphered, I would not be surprised to find that the greater part of modern Hinduism has a Harappan lineage"