Why did Aryan-speaking people migrate?

Some modern historians say that Man’s intelligence has developed rapidly in parts of the world where natural conditions (climate, soil, mineral, wealth, vegetation) make it possible for men to live without too great a struggle, and yet not too easily. If the natural conditions make life too easy (as in places where food can be easily gathered, and does not have to be planted, watered and looked after carefully), men become lazy and do not develop intelligence and skill to overcome difficulties. On the other hand, if natural conditions are too hard (as in the dense equatorial forests and the ice covered regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, or on very high mountain), men have to struggle so hard to get food and keep themselves alive that they have no strength or leisure for other things and so do not develop a civilization. It seems true that the most favorable conditions for men to develop their intelligence and to improve in civilization are conditions of moderate difficulty. In such places the challenge of the problems which men have to solve in order to live develop their strength of character, just as we can develop our bodies best by moderate exercise not by laziness or overstrain. Such challenges were met by the men who first lived in northern Egypt (where they had to clear the banks of the Nile for their crops), in Mesopotamia, India and China (where they had to dig wells and irrigation canals), and in coastal regions where sea was the challenge and also the source of food supply and of articles exchanged with other people.

A good example of a natural challenge causing civilization to develop is Ceylon. The south-west of Ceylon is the most fertile and most thickly populated; but the ancient civilization of the Sinhalese developed in the dry parts of the island, the north and east, where the people constructed great irrigation tanks and canals to bring water to their paddy fields. When those tanks and canals were neglected and destroyed, that ancient civilization broke down.

If men had no desire to go out of the countries in which they were born, there would be less trouble in the world, but it would be a sleepy kind of existence. Three chief causes seems to make men move from their own countries

1. A desire for change , for experience of new things
2. An increase in their numbers which makes the supply of their food not enough for all
3. A long change in the weather conditions so that year after year their crops fail.

Possibly all the above three causes led the Aryan-speaking tribes to invade other lands.

The word ‘Aryan’ does not mean a special race or nation. In every country to which they went, the Aryan-speaking people intermarried with the people of that country and in thousands of years they have become so completely mixed that it is not possible to say that ‘this man is Aryan’ or ‘this man is not Aryan’, except in countries where people of other races such as Mongolians and Negroes are in much greater number and intermarriage is not common.

The word ‘Aryan’ is now rightly used only in connection with language. We may use the term ‘an Aryan speaking people’ for in most of the countries they invaded. The Aryan speaking invaders gave their ideas, and ways of doing things were taken over too; for example the Dravidians, who were living in South India before the Aryan speaking people came, took over the religious ideas of Hinduism and also the caste system.