The dominant paradigm concerning the presence of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo‑European language family is the so-called Aryan invasion theory, which claims that Indo-Aryan was brought into India by "Aryan" invaders from Central Asia at the end of the Harappan period (early 2nd millennium BC). Though the question of Aryan origins was much disputed in the 19th century, the Aryan invasion theory has been so solidly dominant in the past century that attempts to prove it have been extremely rare in recent decades, until the debate flared up again in India after 1990. The main attempt to prove the Aryan invasion (presented in Bernard Sergent : Gen�se de l'Inde, Paris 1997) uses the archaeological record, which, paradoxically, is invoked with equal confidence by the non‑invasionist school (e.g. B.B. Lal : New Light on the Indus Civilization, Delhi 1997). Here we will consider the sparse attempts to discover references to the Aryan invasion in Vedic literature, and argue that these have not yielded any such finding.

A first category consists of old but still commonly repeated cases of circular reasoning, e.g. the assumption that the enemies encountered by the tribe with which the Vedic poet identifies, are "aboriginals" (e.g. in Ralph Griffith's translation The Hymns of the Å–gveda, 1889, still commonly used). In fact, there is not one passage where the Vedic authors describe such encounters in terms of "us invaders" vs. "them natives", even implicitly.

Among more recent attempts, motivated explicitly by the desire to counter the increasing skepticism regarding the Aryan invasion theory, the most precise endeavour to show up an explicit mention of the invasion turns out to be based on mistranslation. Michael Witzel ("Ŗgvedic History", in G. Erdosy, ed.: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, Berlin 1995, p.321) tries to read a line from the "admittedly much later" Baudh�yana Shrauta S�tra as attesting the Aryan invasion: "Pr�n ayuh pravavr�ja, tasyaite kuru-panch�l�h k�sh�videh� ity, etad �yavam, pratyan am�vasus tasyaite g�ndh�rayas parshavo'ratt� ity, etad �m�vasyam" (BSS 18.44:397.9). This is rendered by Witzel as: "Ayu went eastwards. His (people) are the Kuru- Panch�la and the K�sh�-Videha. This is the Ayava (migration). (His other people) stayed at home in the West. His people are the G�ndh�r�, Parshu and Aratta. This is the Am�vasava (group)."

This passage consists of two halves in parallel, and it is unlikely that in such a construction, the subject of the second half would remain unexpressed, and that terms containing contrastive information (like "migration" as opposed to the alleged non-migration of the other group) would remain unexpressed, all left for future scholars to fill in. It is more likely that a non-contrastive term representing a subject indicated in both statements, is left unexpressed in the second: that exactly is the case with the verb pravavr�ja "he went", meaning "Ayu went" and "Amavasu went". Amavasu is the subject of the second statement, but Witzel spirits the subject away, leaving the statement subjectless, and turns it into a verb, "am� vasu", "stayed at home". In fact, the meaning of the sentence is really quite straightforward, and doesn't require supposing a lot of unexpressed subjects: "Ayu went east, his is the Yamuna-Ganga region", while "Amavasu went west, his is Afghanistan, Parshu and West Panjab". Though the then location of "Parshu" (Persia?) is hard to decide, it is definitely a western country, along with the two others named, western from the viewpoint of a people settled near the Saraswati river in what is now Haryana. Far from attesting an eastward movement into India, this text actually speaks of a westward movement towards Central Asia, coupled with a symmetrical eastward movement from India's demographic centre around the Saraswati basin towards the Ganga basin.