Aryan

Indo-Iranian ar- is a syllable ambiguous in origin, from Indo-European ar-, er-, or or-.[17] The Indo-Iranian root arya- is probably derived from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *h₂erós or *h₂eryós, which means a 'member of one's own group', that is to say a 'peer' or a 'freeman'.[18][19][8] Proposed cognates include:

• Early PIE: *h₂erós, a 'member of one's own group', in contrast to an outsider,[8]
  • Anatolian: ʔor-o-,[20]
    • Hittite: arā-, 'member of one's own group, peer, friend',[8]
    • Lycian: arus-, 'citizens';[8]
  • Classic PIE: *h₂eryós,[8]
    • Indo-Iranian: *arya-, 'Aryan, Indo-Iranian',[8][2]
      • Old Indo-Aryan: árya-, 'Aryan, faithful to the Vedic religion'; ari-, 'faithful, devoted person, kinsman'; aryá-, 'kind, favourable, devoted',[8][2]
      • Avestan: airya-, 'Aryan', 'Iranian' in the larger sense;[8][2]
    • Celtic: *aryo-, 'freeman, noble',[21][22]
      • Gaulish: arios, 'freeman, lord',[21][22]
      • Old Irish: aire, 'freeman, noble, chief';[21][22][8]
    • Germanic *arjaz, 'noble, distinguished, esteemed',[23]
      • Old Norse: arjosteR, 'foremost, most distinguished'.[23][24]

The original PIE meaning had a clear emphasis on the "in-group status" as distinguished from that of outsiders, particularly those captured and incorporated into the group as slaves. In Anatolia, the base word has come to emphasize personal relationship, whereas it took a more ethnic meaning in Indo-Iranian.[25] The word *h₂er(y)ós itself may have come from the PIE root *h₂er-, meaning 'to put together'.[25][26] Oswald Szemerényi has also argued that it could be a Near-Eastern loanword from the Ugaritic ary ('kinsmen').[19][27]

According to Bryant, no evidence for a Proto-Indo-European (as opposed to Indo-Iranian) ethnic name like "Aryan" has been found. The word was used by Herodotus in reference to the Iranian Medes whom he describes as the people who "were once universally known as Aryans".[28]

In Sanskrit and related Indo-Aryan languages, ārya means "one who does noble deeds; a noble one". Āryāvarta ("abode of the āryas") is a common name for the northern Indian subcontinent in Sanskrit literature. Manusmṛti (2.22) gives the name to "the tract between the Himalaya and the Vindhya ranges, from the Eastern Sea to the Western Sea".[29] The title ārya was used with various modifications throughout the Indian Subcontinent. Kharavela, the Emperor of Kalinga in second century BCE, is referred to as an ārya in the Hathigumpha inscriptions of the Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The Gurjara-Pratihara rulers in the 10th century were titled "Maharajadhiraja of Āryāvarta".[30] Various Indian religions, chiefly Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, use the term ārya as an epithet of honour; a similar usage is found in the name of Arya Samaj.

The usage of self-designation Arya was not limited to north India. The south indian emperor of Chola kingdom Rajendra Chola I gives himself the title Aryaputra (son of arya).

In Ramayana and Mahabharata, ārya is used as an honorific for many characters including Hanuman.

Indo-European language throughout Europe and the Middle East.

Unlike the several meanings connected with ārya- in Old Indo-Aryan, the Old Persian term only has an ethnic meaning.[31][32] That is in contrast to Indo-Aryan usage, in which several secondary meanings evolved, the meaning of ar- as a self-identifier is preserved in Iranian usage, hence the word "Iran". The airya meant "Iranian", and anairya [17][33] meant "non-Iranian". Arya may also be found as an ethnonym in Iranian languages, e.g., Alan and Persian Iran and Ossetian Ir/Iron[33] The name is itself equivalent to Aryan, where Iran means "land of the Aryans,"[17][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] and has been in use since Sassanid times.[36][37]

The Avesta clearly uses airya/airyan as an ethnic name (Vd. 1; Yt. 13.143-44, etc.), where it appears in expressions such as airyāfi; daiŋˊhāvō "Iranian lands, peoples", airyō.šayanəm "land inhabited by Iranians", and airyanəm vaējō vaŋhuyāfi; dāityayāfi; "Iranian stretch of the good Dāityā", the river Oxus, the modern Āmū Daryā.[32] Old Persian sources also use this term for Iranians. Old Persian which is a testament to the antiquity of the Persian language and which is related to most of the languages/dialects spoken in Iran including modern Persian, the Kurdish languages, Balochi, and Gilaki makes it clear that Iranians referred to themselves as Arya.

The term "Airya/Airyan" appears in the royal Old Persian inscriptions in three different contexts:

1. As the name of the language of the Old Persian version of the inscription of Darius I in Behistun
2. As the ethnic background of Darius I in inscriptions at Naqsh-e-Rostam and Susa (Dna, Dse) and Xerxes I in the inscription from Persepolis (Xph)
3. As the definition of the God of the Aryans, Ahura Mazdā, in the Elamite language version of the Behistun inscription.[17][32][33]

For example in the Dna and Dse Darius and Xerxes describe themselves as "An Achaemenian, A Persian son of a Persian and an Aryan, of Aryan stock".[39] Although Darius the Great called his language the Aryan language,[39] modern scholars refer to it as Old Persian[39] because it is the ancestor of modern Persian language.[40]

The Old Persian and Avestan evidence is confirmed by the Greek sources.[32] Herodotus in his Histories remarks about the Iranian Medes that: "These Medes were called anciently by all people Arians; " (7.62).[17][32][33] In Armenian sources, the Parthians, Medes and Persians are collectively referred to as Aryans.[41] Eudemus of Rhodes apud Damascius (Dubitationes et solutiones in Platonis Parmenidem 125 bis) refers to "the Magi and all those of Iranian (áreion) lineage"; Diodorus Siculus (1.94.2) considers Zoroaster (Zathraustēs) as one of the Arianoi.[32]

Strabo, in his Geography, mentions the unity of Medes, Persians, Bactrians and Sogdians:[35]

The name of Ariana is further extended to a part of Persia and of Media, as also to the Bactrians and Sogdians on the north; for these speak approximately the same language, with but slight variations.

— Geography, 15.8

The trilingual inscription erected by Shapur's command gives us a more clear description. The languages used are Parthian, Middle Persian and Greek. In Greek the inscription says: "ego ... tou Arianon ethnous despotes eimi" which translates to "I am the king of the Aryans". In the Middle Persian Shapour says: "I am the Lord of the EranShahr" and in Parthian he says: "I am the Lord of AryanShahr".[36][42]

The Bactrian language (a Middle Iranian language) inscription of Kanishka the Great, the founder of the Kushan Empire at Rabatak, which was discovered in 1993 in an unexcavated site in the Afghanistan province of Baghlan, clearly refers to this Eastern Iranian language as Arya.[43][44] In the post-Islamic era one can still see a clear usage of the term Aryan (Iran) in the work of the 10th-century historian Hamzah al-Isfahani. In his famous book "The History of Prophets and Kings", al-Isfahani writes, "Aryan which is also called Pars is in the middle of these countries and these six countries surround it because the South East is in the hands China, the North of the Turks, the middle South is India, the middle North is Rome, and the South West and the North West is the Sudan and Berber lands".[45] All this evidence shows that the name arya "Iranian" was a collective definition, denoting peoples (Geiger, pp. 167 f.; Schmitt, 1978, p. 31) who were aware of belonging to the one ethnic stock, speaking a common language, and having a religious tradition that centered on the cult of Ahura Mazdā.[32]

In Iranian languages, the original self-identifier lives on in ethnic names like "Alans", "Iron".[33] Similarly, The word Iran is the Persian word for land/place of the Aryan.[46]

The word Arianus was used to designate Ariana,[47] the area comprising Afghanistan, Iran, North-western India and Pakistan.[48] In 1601, Philemon Holland used 'Arianes' in his translation of the Latin Arianus to designate the inhabitants of Ariana. This was the first use of the form Arian verbatim in the English language.[49][50][51] In 1844 James Cowles Prichard first designated both the Indians and the Iranians "Arians" under the false assumption that the Iranians as well as the Indians self-designated themselves Aria. The Iranians did use the form Airya as a designation for the "Aryans," but Prichard had mistaken Aria (deriving from OPer. Haravia) as a designation of the "Aryans" and associated the Aria with the place-name Ariana (Av. Airyana), the homeland of the Aryans.[52] The form Aria as a designation of the "Aryans" was, however, only preserved in the language of the Indo-Aryans.

The approximate extent of Āryāvarta during the late Vedic period (ca. 1100-500 BCE). Aryavarta was limited to northwest India and the western Ganges plain, while Greater Magadha in the east was habitated by non-Vedic Indo-Aryans, who gave rise to Jainism and Buddhism.[53][54]

The Sanskrit term ā́rya- (आर्य)[4] was originally used to designate those who worshipped the Vedic deities (especially Indra) and followed Vedic culture (e.g. the performance of sacrifice, Yajna).[55][56] In early Vedic literature, the term Āryāvarta (आर्यावर्त, 'abode of the Aryans') was the name given to northern India, where the Indo-Aryan culture was based. The Manusmṛiti (2.22) locates Āryāvarta in "the tract between the Himalaya and the Vindhya ranges, from the Eastern (Bay of Bengal) to the Western Sea (Arabian Sea)".[9][57]

The term Arya is used 36 times in 34 hymns in the Rigveda. While the word may ultimately derive from a tribal name, already in the Rigveda it appears as a religious distinction, separating those who sacrifice "properly" from those who do not belong to the historical Vedic religion, presaging the usage in later Hinduism where the term comes to denote religious righteousness or piety. In RV 9.63.5, ârya "noble, pious, righteous" is used as contrasting with árāvan "not liberal, envious, hostile":

índraṃ várdhanto aptúraḥ kṛṇvánto víśvam âryam apaghnánto árāvṇaḥ

"[the Soma-drops], performing every noble work, active, augmenting Indra's strength, driving away the godless ones." (trans. Griffith)

Arya and Anarya are primarily used in the moral sense in the Hindu Epics. People are usually called Arya or Anarya based on their behaviour. Arya is typically one who follows the Dharma. This is historically applicable for any person living anywhere in Bharata Varsha or vast India. According to the Mahabharata, a person's behaviour (not wealth or learning) determines if he can be called an Arya.[58][59]

The word ārya is often found in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain texts. In the Indian spiritual context, it can be applied to Rishis or to someone who has mastered the four noble truths and entered upon the spiritual path. According to Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, the religions of India may be called collectively ārya dharma, a term that includes the religions that originated in the Indian subcontinent (e.g. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and possibly Sikhism).[60]

Swami Dayananda founded a Dharmic organisation Arya Samaj in 1875. Sri Aurobindo published a journal combining nationalism and spiritualism under the title Arya from 1914 to 1921.

The word ārya (Pāli: ariya), in the sense of "noble" or "exalted", is very frequently used in Buddhist texts to designate a spiritual warrior or hero, which use this term much more often than Hindu or Jain texts. Buddha's Dharma and Vinaya are the ariyassa dhammavinayo. The Four Noble Truths are called the catvāry āryasatyāni (Sanskrit) or cattāri ariyasaccāni (Pali). The Noble Eightfold Path is called the āryamārga (Sanskrit, also āryāṣṭāṅgikamārga) or ariyamagga (Pāli).

In Buddhist texts, the ārya pudgala (Pali: ariyapuggala, "noble person") are those who have the Buddhist śīla (Pāli sīla, meaning "virtue") and who have reached a certain level of spiritual advancement on the Buddhist path, mainly one of the four levels of awakening or in Mahayana Buddhism, a bodhisattva level (bhumi). Those who despise Buddhism are often called "anāryas".

The word ārya is also often used in Jainism, in Jain texts such as the Pannavanasutta. In Avaśyakaniryukti, an early Jaina text, a character named Ārya Mangu is mentioned twice.[61]

The term Arya is used in ancient Persian language texts, for example in the Behistun inscription from the 5th century BCE, in which the Persian kings Darius the Great and Xerxes are described as "Aryans of Aryan stock" (arya arya chiça). The inscription also refers to the deity Ahura Mazda as "the god of the Aryans", and to the ancient Persian language as "Aryan". In this sense the word seems to have referred to the elite culture of the ancient Iranians, including both linguistic, cultural and religious aspects. [28][62] The word also has a central place in the Zoroastrian religion in which the "Aryan expanse" (Airyana Vaejah) is described as the mythical homeland of the Iranian people's and as the center of the world.[63]

The Avestan term airya ('venerable'; Old Persian ariya) was likewise used as self-designations by ancient Iranian peoples, in contrast to the anairya ('non-Arya').[64][17] In the sacred Avesta scriptures, the root is also found place names like Airyanem Vaejah (the 'stretch' or 'plain of the Aryas'), the mythical homeland of the early Iranians, or airyō šayana, the 'dwelling of the Aryas'.[17][65][3] The self-identifier lives on in several ethnic names in later Iranian languages, such as Iranian, Alan or Iron, and in place names like Iran, the Persian word for the land of the Iranians, and Alania, the medieval kingdom of the Alans.[4][11][66]

One of the earliest epigraphically attested reference to the word arya occurs in the 6th-century BC Behistun inscription, which describes itself as having been composed "in arya [language or script]" (§ 70). As is also the case for all other Old Iranian language usage, the arya of the inscription does not signify anything but "Iranian".[67]

All these terms derive from the reconstructed proto-Indo-Iranian root *arya-,[4][18][19] alternatively spelled *aryo-.[64] It was probably the name used by the Indo-Iranians to designate themselves.[68][4][64] According to archeologist J. P. Mallory, "[a]s an ethnic designation, the word [Aryan] is most properly limited to the Indo-Iranians".[11] The root is also found in the Indo-Iranian god *Arya-man (Vedic Aryaman; Avestan Airyaman), the deity in charge of welfare and the community, connected to the building and maintenance of roads or pathways, but also with healing and the institution of marriage.[69][70] If the Irish hero Érimón and the Gaulish personal name Ariomanus are also cognate (i.e. linguistic siblings sharing a common origin), a deity of Proto-Indo-European origin named *Aryomen may be posited.[69][22][70]

The name for the Sassanian Empire in Middle Persian is Eran Shahr which means Aryan Empire.[71] In the aftermath of the Islamic conquest in Iran, racialist rhetoric became a literary idiom during the 7th century, i.e., when the Arabs became the primary "Other" – the Aniran – and the antithesis of everything Iranian (i.e. Aryan) and Zoroastrian. But "the antecedents of [present-day] Iranian ultra-nationalism can be traced back to the writings of late nineteenth-century figures such as Mirza Fatali Akhundov and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani. Demonstrating affinity with Orientalist views of the supremacy of the Aryan peoples and the mediocrity of the Semitic peoples, Iranian nationalist discourse idealized pre-Islamic [Achaemenid and Sassanid] empires, whilst negating the 'Islamization' of Persia by Muslim forces."[72] In the 20th century, different aspects of this idealization of a distant past would be instrumentalized by both the Pahlavi monarchy (In 1967, Iran's Pahlavi dynasty [overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution] added the title Āryāmehr Light of the Aryans to the other styles of the Iranian monarch, the Shah of Iran being already known at that time as the Shahanshah (King of Kings)), and by the Islamic republic that followed it; the Pahlavis used it as a foundation for anticlerical monarchism, and the clerics used it to exalt Iranian values vis-á-vis westernization.[73]

The name Aryan (including derivatives such as Aaryan, Arya, Ariyan or Aria) is still used as a given name or surname in modern South Asia and Iran. There has also been a rise in names associated with Aryan in the West, which have been popularized due to pop culture.[74] According to the U.S. Social Security Administration in 2012, Arya was the fastest-rising girl's name in popularity in the U.S., jumping from 711th to 413th position.[75] The name entered the top 200 most commonly used names for baby girls born in England and Wales in 2017.[76]

Western notions of an "Aryan race" rose to prominence in late-19th- and early-20th-century racialism, and the notions of an "Aryan race" became closely linked to Nordicism, which posited Northern European racial superiority over all other peoples, an idea most notably embraced by Nazism.[note 3] By the end of World War II, the word 'Aryan' had become associated by many with the racial ideologies and atrocities committed by the Nazis. By then, the term "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European" had made most uses of the term "Aryan" superfluous in the eyes of a number of scholars, and "Aryan" now survives in most scholarly usage only in the term "Indo-Aryan" to indicate (speakers of) North Indian languages.

The term "Aryan" came to be used as the term for the newly discovered Indo-European languages, and, by extension, the original speakers of those languages. The meaning of 'Aryan' that was adopted into the English language in the late 18th century was the one associated with the technical term used in comparative philology, which in turn had the same meaning as that evident in the very oldest Old Indo-Aryan usage, i.e. as a (self-) identifier of "(speakers of) Indo-Aryan languages".[51][note 4] This usage was simultaneously influenced by a word that appeared in classical sources (Latin and Greek Ἀριάνης Arianes, e.g. in Pliny 1.133 and Strabo 15.2.1–8), and recognized to be the same as that which appeared in living Iranian languages, where it was a (self-)identifier of the "(speakers of) Iranian languages". Accordingly, 'Aryan' came to refer to the languages of the Indo-Iranian language group, and by extension, native speakers of those languages.[80]

During the 19th century, it was proposed that "Aryan" was also the self-designation used by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, a hypothesis that has since been abandoned due to a lack of evidence outside the Indo-Iranian branch.[4] "Language" was considered a property of "ethnicity", and thus the speakers of the Indo-Iranian or Indo-European languages came to be called the "Aryan race", as contradistinguished from what came to be called the "Semitic race". Linguists still supposed that the age of a language determined its "superiority" (because it was assumed to have genealogical purity). Then, based on the assumption that Sanskrit was the oldest Indo-European language, and the (now known to be untenable)[81] position that Irish Éire was etymologically related to "Aryan", in 1837 Adolphe Pictet popularized the idea that the term "Aryan" could also be applied to the entire Indo-European language family as well. The groundwork for this thought had been laid by Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron. [82]

In particular, German scholar Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel published in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and the German languages under the Aryan group.[83][84] In 1830 Karl Otfried Müller used "Arier" in his publications.[85]

Madison Grant's idea of the distribution of "Nordic" (red), "Alpine" (green) and "Mediterranean" (yellow) races in Europe.

Drawing on misinterpreted references in the Rigveda by Western scholars in the 19th century, the term Aryan was adopted in the 1850s as a racial category by French writer Arthur de Gobineau, whose ideology was based on an idea of blond northern European "Aryans" who had migrated across the world and founded all major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with local populations. De Gobineau supposed that "Aryan" corresponded to the suggested prehistoric Indo-European culture (1853–1855, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races). Further, de Gobineau believed that there were three basic races – white, yellow and black – and that everything else was caused by racial mixing, which he believed was the cause of chaos. The "master race", according to de Gobineau, were the Northern European "Aryans", who had remained "racially pure". Southern Europeans (including Spaniards and Southern Frenchmen), Eastern Europeans, North Africans, Middle Easterners, Iranians, Central Asians and Indians he considered to be racially mixed, and thus less than ideal.

By the 1880s, a number of linguists and anthropologists argued that the "Aryans" themselves had originated somewhere in northern Europe. A specific region began to crystallize when the linguist Karl Penka (Die Herkunft der Arier. Neue Beiträge zur historischen Anthropologie der europäischen Völker, 1886) popularized the idea that the "Aryans" had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of blond hair and blue eyes. The distinguished biologist Thomas Henry Huxley agreed with him, coining the term "Xanthochroi" to refer to fair-skinned Europeans (as opposed to darker Mediterranean peoples, who Huxley called "Melanochroi").[86]

This "Nordic race" theory gained traction following the publication of Charles Morris's The Aryan Race (1888), which touches racist ideology. A similar rationale was followed by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in his book L'Aryen et son rôle social (1899, "The Aryan and his Social Role").

In India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau's arguments along another line, and had fostered the idea of a superior "Aryan race" that co-opted the Indian caste system in favor of imperial interests.[87][88] In its fully developed form, the British-mediated interpretation foresaw a segregation of Aryan and non-Aryan along the lines of caste, with the upper castes being "Aryan" and the lower ones being "non-Aryan". The European developments not only allowed the British to identify themselves as high-caste, but also allowed the Brahmins to view themselves as on-par with the British. Further, it provoked the reinterpretation of Indian history in racialist and, in opposition, Indian Nationalist terms.[87][88]

An intertitle from the silent film blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915). "Aryan birthright" is here "white birthright", the "defense" of which unites "whites" in the Northern and Southern U.S. against "coloreds". In another film of the same year, The Aryan, William S. Hart's "Aryan" identity is defined in distinction from other peoples.

Through the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau's ideas later influenced the Nazi racial ideology which saw the "Aryan race" as innately superior to other putative racial groups.[12] The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg argued for a new "religion of the blood", based on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its "noble" character against racial and cultural degeneration. Rosenberg believed the Nordic race to be descended from Proto-Aryans, an hypothetical prehistoric people who dwelt on the North German Plain and who had ultimately originated from the lost continent of Atlantis.[note 5] Under Rosenberg, the theories of Arthur de Gobineau, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Blavatsky, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Madison Grant, and those of Hitler,[89] all culminated in Nazi Germany's race policies and the "Aryanization" decrees of the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s. In its "appalling medical model", the annihilation of the "racially inferior" Untermenschen was sanctified as the excision of a diseased organ in an otherwise healthy body,[90] which led to the Holocaust.

Arno Breker's sculpture Die Partei (The Party), depicting a Nazi-era ideal of the "Nordic Aryan" racial type.

According to Nazi racial theorists, the term "Aryans" (Arier) described the Germanic peoples,[91] and they considered the purest Aryans to be those that belonged to a "Nordic race" physical ideal, which they referred to as the "master race".[note 6] However, a satisfactory definition of "Aryan" remained problematic during Nazi Germany.[92] Although the physical ideal of Nazi racial theorists was typically the tall, blond haired and light-eyed Nordic individual, such theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair and eye colour existed within the racial categories they recognised. For example, Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials had dark hair and were still considered members of the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine, because the determination of an individual's racial type depended on a preponderance of many characteristics in an individual rather than on just one defining feature.[93]

In September 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws. All Aryan Reich citizens were required to prove their Aryan ancestry; one way was to obtain an Ahnenpass ("ancestor pass") by providing proof through baptismal certificates that all four grandparents were of Aryan descent.[94] In December of the same year, the Nazis founded Lebensborn ("Fount of Life") to counteract the falling Aryan birth rates in Germany, and to promote Nazi eugenics.[95]

In academic scholarship, the only surviving use of the word "Aryan" among many scholars is that of the term "Indo-Aryan", which indicates "(speakers of) languages descended from Prakrits". Older usage to mean "(speakers of) Indo-Iranian languages" has been superseded among some scholars by the term "Indo-Iranian"; however, "Aryan" is still used to mean "Indo-Iranian" by other scholars such as Josef Wiesehofer and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. The 19th-century meaning of "Aryan" as (native speakers of) Indo-European languages" is no longer used by most scholars, but has continued among some scholars such as Colin Renfrew, and among some authors writing for the popular mass market such as H.G. Wells and Poul Anderson.

By the end of World War II, the word "Aryan" among a number of people had lost its Romantic or idealist connotations and was associated by many with Nazi racism instead.

By then, the term "Indo-Iranian" and "Indo-European" had made most uses of the term "Aryan" superfluous in the eyes of a number of scholars, and "Aryan" now survives in most scholarly usage only in the term "Indo-Aryan" to indicate (speakers of) North Indian languages. It has been asserted by one scholar that Indo-Aryan and Aryan may not be equated and that such an equation is not supported by the historical evidence,[96] though this extreme viewpoint is not widespread.

The term "Aryan language family", while rarely used, may thus designate all Indo-Iranian languages, that is to say the Indo-Aryan (including Dardic), Iranian and Nuristani languages.[97] However, the atrocities committed in the name of the Aryanist racial ideology have led academics to avoid the use of "Aryan", which has been replaced in most cases by "Indo-Iranian", with only the South Asian branch still being called "Indo-Aryan" in scholarship.[3] The term "Iranian", which stems from Aryan, also continues to be used to refer to specific ethnolinguistic groups:

• Indo-Aryan: refers to the populations speaking an Indo-Aryan language or identifying as Indo-Aryan.[98] These ethnolinguistic groups, which form the predominant group in Northern India,[99] are often used to attribute caste and ethnicity, and they are still implemented in the Reservation in India and the Quota system in Pakistan. An estimated ~1.3 billion people identify as Indo-Aryan today.
• Iranian (or Iranic): used to designate the speakers of Iranian languages or the peoples who identify as "Iranians", especially in Greater Iran. Modern Iranian ethnolinguistic groups include Persians, Pashtuns, Kurds, Tajiks, Baloch, Lurs, Pamiris, Zazas, and Ossetians. An estimated 200 million identify as Iranian peoples.

The use of the term to designate speakers of all Indo-European languages in scholarly usage is now regarded by some scholars as an "aberration to be avoided."[3] However, some authors writing for popular consumption have continued using the word "Aryan" for "all Indo-Europeans" in the tradition of H. G. Wells,[100][101] such as the science fiction author Poul Anderson,[102] and scientists writing for the popular media, such as Colin Renfrew.[103] Echoes of "the 19th century prejudice about 'northern' Aryans who were confronted on Indian soil with black barbarians [...] can still be heard in some modern studies."[96] In a socio-political context, the claim of a white, European Aryan race that includes only people of the Western and not the Eastern branch of the Indo-European peoples is entertained by certain circles, usually representing white nationalists who call for the halting of non-white immigration into Europe and limiting immigration into the United States. They argue that a large intrusion of immigrants can lead to ethnic conflicts such as the 2005 Cronulla riots in Australia and the 2005 civil unrest in France.

Translating the sacred Indian texts of the Rig Veda in the 1840s, German linguist Friedrich Max Muller found what he believed was evidence of an ancient invasion of India by Hindu Brahmins, a group which he called "the Arya." In his later works, Muller was careful to note that he thought that Aryan was a linguistic rather than a racial category. Nevertheless, scholars used Muller's invasion theory to propose their own visions of racial conquest through South Asia and the Indian Ocean. In 1885, the New Zealand polymath Edward Tregear argued that an "Aryan tidal-wave" had washed over India and continued to push south, through the islands of the East Indian archipelago, reaching the distant shores of New Zealand. Scholars such as John Batchelor, Armand de Quatrefages, and Daniel Brinton extended this invasion theory to the Philippines, Hawaii, and Japan, identifying indigenous peoples who they believed were the descendants of early Aryan conquerors.[104]

In recent decades, the idea of an Aryan migration into India has been disputed mainly by Indian scholars, who claim various alternate Indigenous Aryans scenarios contrary to established Kurgan model. However, these alternate scenarios are rooted in traditional and religious views on Indian history and identity and are universally rejected in mainstream scholarship.[105][106][107][108][note 7] According to Michael Witzel, the "indigenous Aryans" position is not scholarship in the usual sense, but an "apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking":[111] A number of alternative theories have been proposed. Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis suggests a much earlier date for the Indo-European languages, proposing an origin in Anatolia and an initial spread with the earliest farmers who migrated to Europe. It has been the only serious alternative for the steppe-theory, but suffers from a lack of explanatory power. The Anatolian hypothesis also led to some support for the Armenian hypothesis, which proposes that the Urheimat of the Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus. While the Armenian hypothesis has been criticized on archeological and chronological grounds, recent genetic research has led to a renewed interest. The Paleolithic Continuity Theory suggests an origin in the Paleolithic period, but has received very little interest in mainstream scholarship.

The most recent study on this subject, led by geneticist David Reich and co-authored by 92 scholars from around the world, provides strong evidence that the Aryans did indeed migrate into India, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan.[112]