The notion of Indigenous Aryans posits that speakers of Indo-Aryan languages are "indigenous" to the Indian subcontinent.
The "Indigenous Aryans" position may entail an Indian origin of Indo-European languages, and in recent years, the concept has been increasingly conflated with an "Out of India" origin of the Indo-European language family. This contrasts with the mainstream model of Indo-Aryan migration which posits that Indo-Aryan tribes migrated to India from Central Asia.
Witzel (2006, p. 217) identifies three major types of revisionist scenario:
- a "mild" version that insists on the indigeneity of the Rigvedic Aryans to the North-Western region of Indian subcontinent in the tradition of Aurobindo and Dayananda;
- the "out of India" school that posits India as the Proto-Indo-European homeland, an idea revived by the Hindutva sympathizer Koenraad Elst (1999), and further popularized within Hindu nationalism by Shrikant Talageri (2000);
- the position that all the world's languages and civilizations derive from India, represented e.g. by the astrologist David Frawley.
Read more about Indigenous Aryans: Historiographical Context, Political Significance, Genetic Studies, Pseudoscience and Postmodernism
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“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)