is Dravidian, Vishnu is Aryan !). Whatever migrations may have taken place to and from India, a rigid break between pre- and post- Aryan India finds justification neither in early literature nor in archaeology. The Aryans were an Indo-European group whose arrival in the Indian subcontinent around 1500 BCE fundamentally transformed the region’s cultural, linguistic, and religious landscape. Aryan is a designation originally meaning “civilized”, “noble”, or “free” without reference to any ethnicity. “ Aryan ” traditionally refers to speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Theories include the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (modern-day Ukraine/Russia) and Central Asia as the Aryans ’ place of origin.
