Asia's Lost Tribe of Aryans

By Frederic Golden

An anthropologist finds a "living stone-age museum "

On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining his face with walnut dye in order to enter a region long forbidden to foreigners: the Dansar Plain of "Little Tibet," the no man's land of a legendary tribe known as the Minaro.

Unlike their neighbors in the mountains of Kashmir, the Minaro have curiously light complexions and sharp, high-cheeked faces almost European in character. The entire tribe consists of only about 800 people, but these hardy, isolated mountain folk may have a cultural significance far out of proportion to their small numbers.

Some scholars have speculated that they may be survivors of the Dards, an obscure tribe mentioned in ancient Greek chronicles. Others suspect that they are descendants of troops left behind by Alexander the Great on his invasion of India. The most intriguing theory is that their ancestors were the original Aryans, the prehistoric Indo-European people whose language and light skin linger on in the speech and appearance of modern Europeans. Fascinated by this possibility, Adolf Hitler in 1938 reportedly dispatched one of the Third Reich's racial experts on a personal survey of the Minaro region. It is said that Hitler even considered sending a number of blond German women to have children by these "pure" Aryans.

Peissel, 47, a onetime Harvard Business School student who turned to anthropology after a summer's roaming of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, is convinced that the Minaro are Aryans, but his reports hardly evoke the image of an Asian master race. In a book just published in Paris called L'Or des Fourmis (The Ants' Gold), Peissel argues that the Minaro constitute "a living museum of life in the days of stone-age men." They live in adobe huts, erect great druidic stone monuments and center their livelihoods on the ibex, a wild mountain goat that they hunt with arrows tipped with the poison wolfsbane (rock carvings of the ibex are scattered throughout their mountains). The Minaro also raise sheep and goats, grow grapes, from which they make wine, and in spite of an arid climate, plant a little grain.

Though white-bearded elders preside symbolically over village ceremonies, says Peissel, who spent six months studying them, the Minaro are a matriarchal society. Most married women have more than one husband. The women dominate the men and slap them around in public. The principal deities are female, goddesses of fortune and fertility, who preside over lesser goddesses that reign over time, the hunt and the village.

Unlike Hindus, the Minaro abhor cows and will not even touch them. Eating utensils are shunned if they have been used by such "impure" people as pregnant women, mothers who have recently given birth, menstruating women, and couples who have just had sexual relations. Occasionally the Minaro cleanse themselves with the smoke of burning juniper trees, but they almost never wash with water. Their Tibetan neighbors scorn them as "the dirtiest people in the world."

Peissel, who speaks Tibetan and has made frequent trips to the Himalayas, says: "The Minaro are indeed the last inheritors in Asia of Aryan, pre-Aryan and neolithic traditions." Beyond the physical and cultural clues, he cites evidence in the Minaro language, an archaic Indo-Aryan dialect called Shina, which contains a number of words that resemble those of modern European languages. Door, for example, is darr, hand is hath, time is tern, and knife (couteau in French) is cutter. Peissel believes that the Minaro managed to survive because their isolation and fierce independence enabled them to withstand the waves of Mongolian invasions that eventually engulfed the rest of Tibet.

Peissel admits that his ideas should be tested by further studies, though time may be running out. The Indian government is cutting roads into the region that will soon end its isolation. Says Peissel: "Like any tiny ethnic and cultural minority, the Minaro are doomed to disappear."

There is one ancient puzzle Peissel thinks he has solved for all time. It is a legend, first mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 B.C., that in northern India there was a species of gigantic ant ("bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog") that burrowed in gold-rich soil. Peissel asked the Minaro tribesmen about the story, only to be told that their ancestors did collect gold-bearing sand from the burrows of a local marmot, known scientifically as Marmota himalayanus. Peissel feels that the legend of the ants may have arisen because of etymological confusion between marmot and the Greek word for ant (murmex). In any event, says the irrepressible anthropologist, "I leave to others the task of collecting the gold." --By Frederic Golden. Reported by Thomas A. Sancton/Paris

With reporting by Thomas A. Sancton