I have a coworker who is Indian and recently I was chatting about history and two things came up that made me question what I know about history.
First, I said that Sanskrit was connected to European languages and that there was a migration of peoples from the Caucasus into the Indian subcontinent. He said that this theory was a product of British imperialism and completely false and had been disproven. What is the truth of this?
Second, I mentioned that Peppers were from the new world exchange so they had to come over at some point after contact with the new world. He said that Peppers have been in India forever and their most ancient texts talk about them. How is this possible if Chili Peppers are from the new world ? Was India trading with the new world prior to European arrival ?
Yes, Sanskrit is part of the Indo-European language family, and yes, its speakers migrated there from the steppes of what is now Ukraine and Kazakhstan. However, Indo-Iranian moved into its modern range by way of Bactria, not the Caucasus. There are libraries of literature on Indo-European, and the idea that it is "false and disproven" is itself a myth perpetrated by Hindu nationalists. Indic languages are very clearly part of the Indo-European family--this is obvious to anyone with some basic acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and has been known to scholars since the late 18th century. We also can be sure that Indo-European did not originate in India for a few reasons. First, India contains only one branch of Indo-European, while linguistic homelands generally contain or are proximate to several different branches. For example, Taiwan, the homeland of Austronesian, contains anywhere from 4 to 9 separate branches. Second, Indic languages (and this dates back as far as Sanskrit) contain features clearly derived from contact with Dravidian languages, like a distinction between dental stops (made with the tongue on the back of the teeth) and retroflex ones (where the tongue is curled back towards the hard palate) or a historic confusion of /l r/. Third, there's a pretty clear relationship between where language families show up geographically in the historic record and the features they share. This map gives you a good picture of that. There's basically no linguistic evidence consonant with the idea.
I'll let someone who knows more about the Columbian Exchange tackle the question about peppers.
I'd like to summon someone better qualified to talk about this, but it's possible the idea about "pepper" is based on some sort of misunderstanding. Maybe.
The genus that contains all the "chile peppers" that people eat is Capsicum. Despite some confusing naming conventions, all the species in this genus are native to the Americas, and were introduced to Asia sometime in the early 16th century. In the hundreds of years since then, chile peppers have been wholeheartedly adopted by local farmers and chefs, and new varieties better suited to local conditions and needs have been developed.
Some species of chile pepper like Capsicum chinense have Linnean names that are a artifact of where they were first described by scientists, but that's not where they are now known to have originated.
In contrast, the black pepper, Piper nigrum, is a flowering vine in a totally differnent family and order, but which is native to the Indian subcontinent. Today black pepper is still widely used in the cuisines of India, and it's believed that it's use was even more widespread before the introduction of chile peppers to South Asia.
