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Müller was a Christian missionary; therefore he looked to undermine the superior civilization and religion of India, Hinduism.
The theory itself has a complex history — initial acceptance, subsequent modifications, and currently new challenges in terms of counter theories. No single conclusive theory now prevails. Rather, combinations of theories are generally accepted.
According to one fully developed late nineteenth-century form of the theory, as expressed by Charles Morris in his 1888 book "The Aryan Race", a Caucasian race of nomadic warriors known as the Aryans, originating in the Caucasus mountains in Central Asia, invaded Northern India and Iran, somewhere between 1800 and 1500 BC. The invaders entered the Indian sub-continent from the mountain passes of the Hindu KushThe Hindu Kush or Hindukush is a mountain range in Afghanistan as well as in the Northern Areas of Pakistan. It was named during the times when Mughals were making influx into greater India, hence the name Hindu (meaning Indian). It is the westernmost ext, possibly on horseback, bringing with them the domesticated horse. The theory further proposes that this race displaced or assimilated the indigenous pre-Aryan peoples and that the bulk of these indigenous people moved to the southern reaches of the subcontinentThe Indian subcontinent is the peninsular region of larger South Asia in which the nations of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka as well as parts of Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and some disputed territory currently controlled by China are located. It is al or became the lower castes of post-Vedic society. The Aryans would have brought with them their own VedicThe Vedas are part of the Hindu Shruti these religious scriptures form part of the core of the Brahminical and Vedic traditions within Hinduism and lay the inspirational, metaphysical and mythological foundation for later Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra and even Bh religion, which was codified in the Vedas around 1500 to 120014th century BC 13th century BC 12th century BC other centuries) ( 1300s BC 1290s BC 1280s BC 1270s BC 1260s BC 1250s BC 1240s BC 1230s BC 1220s BC 1210s BC 1200s BC other decades) ( 3rd millennium BC 2nd millennium BC 1st millennium BC) Events 1295 BC En BC. Upon arrival in India, the Aryans abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and mingled with the native peoples remaining in the north of India. The victory of the Aryans over the native civilization was quick and complete, resulting in the dominance of Aryan culture and language over the northern part of the subcontinent and considerable influence on parts of the south.
The theory was first proposed on linguistic grounds, following the discovery that Sanskrit was related to the principal languages of Europe (the Indo-EuropeanIndo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of language group). It was assumed that Northern India, in which languages derived from Sanskrit were spoken, must have been occupied by migrants speaking Indo-European languages. The dominant languages in Southern India, known as " Dravidian", were assumed to have been spoken by autochthonous pre-Aryan peoples, who had been displaced southward. Hence the Aryans were said to have supplanted the Dravidians in the north of the subcontinent.
Initially Max Müller assumed that the migrants would have been farmers, but later writers envisioned an invasion by nomadic warriors. It was proposed, on the basis of passages in the Rig-Veda and assumptions about surviving racial hierarchies, that these invaders were light-skinned people who had subdued darker aboriginal people and then mixed with them. The theory fit some existing ideas that justified contemporary European colonization. Initially, the aboriginal 'Dravidian' occupants of India were assumed to have been primitive, and the achievements of ancient India were credited to the descendants of the Aryan invaders. In the 1920s, however, the Indus Valley Civilization was discovered. It was obviously advanced for its time, with planned cities, a standardized system of weights and bricks, etc, and it was understood that if the Aryans had invaded, then, regardless of their later achievements, they had in fact overthrown or at least supplanted a civilization more advanced than their own.
The association of Aryans with a physical "race" also has been slowly dropped. Max Müller clarified late in his career that by Aryan, he only meant a group of languages and not a race. Romila Thapar also maintains that Aryan never meant race in the Rig Veda and that the Proto-Indo European speaking people were already "a mixed bunch" and not a purely Caucasian race.