I'm sure that there was an element of "us vs. them" between the Aryans and the indigenous peoples of India, but again, the issue that we run into is that these are highly amorphous groups who may themselves have had significant overlap. John Keay in "The History of India" posits that the Aryans may have integrated themselves into the IVC by working as traders and mercenaries. On top of that we don't really know whether IVC itself was fully "Dravidian" or whether it had Aryan elements of its own. "Aryan" and "indigenous" themselves are somewhat nebulous terms too, as there were likely a multiplicity of Dravidian, Austronesian, and other groups already present in the subcontinent. And for all we know, there were already "Aryan" groups in India who preceded the authors of the Rigveda themselves.
John Keay's book is 8 years old and does not line up with the archaeogenetic data. As far as anyone has been able to tell thus far, the IVC had absolutely no steppe admixture. In fact, we don't start to see steppe admixture appearing in Southwest Asia until considerably later, after the collapse of the BMAC and the Tazabagyab-Andronovo complex. The steppe admixture we do see filtering into the region around this time is associated with the Andronovo cultural horizon which represents a successor group to the Sintashta, after the people of the Uralic-speaking easterly Corded Ware-derived Abashevo culture had in large part supplanted the original Pre-Indo-Iranian Sintashta genetically while adopting their language... after a fashion, anyways. This is around the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, which also coincides with the appearance of the horse-drawn (as opposed to onager-drawn) chariot in the Near East, which may coincide with a migration of Indo-Aryans into that region, which we know from some contemporary onomastic data from the Akkadian, Ur III, and Old Assyrian period (names like
Artašarrī, which is most probably a Semiticization of an Indo-Aryan name featuring an Akkadian loanword in the form of
šarru, which is known to have been loaned into both Elamite and Hurrian) as potential predecessors of the Mitanni.
Now, we do know that there was some degree of intermixture between the Old Iranian Neolithic farmers who were the primary genetic contributors to the BMAC (though they also carried lesser degrees of genetic markers from Anatolia and the Caucasus) and the migrating Indo-Aryans, but the genetic data tells us that the most likely scenario, as seen in Western Europe with the expansion of the Bell Beaker Culture, is that the incoming Indo-European-speakers who, on average (there may have been some exceptions of course, but exceptions do not make rules) would have looked very different from contemporary peoples in North India at the time, experienced a widespread genetic expansion either associated with conflict or a higher population density/higher reproductive success as they migrated in that was later complimented by an expansion of older, indigenous genetic clades. So, as I said, conquest and incorporation... probably. You can see the same thing happening in the United States as some Native American nations have grown exponentially in numbers since their conquest by White/European-Americans, like the Navajo, who now have 350,000 registered members of their nation.
The Ancestral North Indians or ANI group are a mix of the Old Iranian Neolithic farmers who migrated in (maybe bringing Dravidian with them or maybe adopting Dravidian as they came) quite a bit earlier and the Ancient Ancestral South Indians or AASI who in turn mixed with Indo-European-speaking peoples coming in from Central Asia who derived most of their DNA from the Uralic-speaking Abashevo (via a process of linguistic/cultural assimilation and population replacement) and thus clustered closely with modern Eastern Europeans who had themselves mixed ever so slightly on the way in (and more so later) with the Old Iranian Neolithic farmers who made up the BMAC. As this is the case, when the Indo-Aryans came into North India, they probably looked considerably different, as I said, more like people in Badakhshan, Chitral, or Nangarhar as these areas show the
least admixture from Iran and India.
But in reality, even if they didn't look that different, that wouldn't have mattered. The peoples of India at the time spoke different languages, practiced different religions and had different cultures. You don't need to look incredibly different from other people to contrast yourself to them, and one of the primary ways that people contrast themselves to other people from a VERY early age research tells us is in language. So, I simply cannot imagine that, in ancient times, before there was any notion of human rights or "equality", that there was not a period or alternating periods of conflict as the Indo-Aryans migrated into North India. The conflict might have been complicated, fine. Conflicts are normally complicated and lines are often blurred. However, just because the lines are blurred doesn't mean that you don't have opposing sides. Over time of course, conflicts have a tendency to diffuse, and so they seem to have here. You could use WWII as a fine example of a very complicated conflict, despite the fact that the average understanding of even the most well-read people of that war often borders on being as cartoonish as what you see in the Vedas between the Aryans and the Dasyus, except it lacks the clear religious overlay. Hitler is Vritra, the Nazis are his Dasyus, and anybody who sided with them is also a Dasyu. Obviously, what happened isn't so clear cut. The Nazis had a series of motivations, even for their most atrocious acts, while different people who fought alongside them had their own motivations that may have been entirely unrelated, or related indirectly. Many Eastern European partisans helped the Nazis round up and even murder Jewish people because they associated Jews with the rising threat of communism in Russia, while others, like those in Ukraine saw the Nazis as liberators, having already experienced the Holodomor. We like to think of the French as our "allies" and the Italians as our "enemies", but we fought the French under the Vichy Republic in the Mediterranean and we fought WITH scores of Italian partisans who helped us overthrow the fascist regime. That fun little scene in
Dunkirk where everyone is wondering whether the quiet guy is German and then he exclaims in French that he's French and that somehow absolves him of all suspicion... yeah, no. Not that early in the war and not by the end of it either. All of the people involved in that conflict by the way, or at least that theatre of it, were White/Europeans.
So yes, I get it. Nobody was trying to simplify things and call what happened between the Indo-Aryans and the rest of India in the Bronze Age a "race war" and argue that we know that it was exactly that because the Vedas say so. We know very little about this period, and we can only ascertain what archaeogenetics, linguistics, and the archaeological record tell us. We don't know for sure for absolute sure if there was a conflict, or a series of conflicts with intermediate periods of peaceful interaction. But then, archaeogenetics seems to indicate something like a conflict and the Vedas outright describes one. Why would the Vedas refer to a conflict at all? The Vedas specifically refer to driving people out of
somewhere, and given that it is in the context of the foundation myth of a people I have a seriously hard time buying the assertion that Vritra and his Dasyus are not meant to stand in for people with whom the Indo-Aryans would have fought over Northwest India. People in the past were not always as concerned with recording the precise details of historical events as they were with trying to extrapolate meaning from them. History was meant to tell you something about life today, and if you had to simplify or embellish (or both) the story so as to get the desired meaning out of it, you did so, but in many ancient stories there is a core narrative underneath many layers of allegory that is either literally or metaphorically true. It may have involved more osmosis later on, but I cannot imagine there was not conflict, and that that conflict is what is being referred to however fantastically in the Vedas.
You could very well be completely right, but the issue is that we have no way of knowing whether your interpretation is any more or less valid than the thousands of other interpretations of the Rigveda. Asko Parpola believes that the dasyus ("aboriginals) actually referred to Central Asians from the BMAC culture. Michael Witzel believes that the dasyus were another Iranian group. And many Hindu authorities argue that the dasyus were never meant to be human beings at all, but instead represent compulsions and obstacles on the spiritual path. This IMO is a perfectly valid explanation. Indra is portrayed as a god of wisdom, enlightenment, and spiritual attainment as much as he is a war god. Him killing a "dragon" (Vritra) that represents sin or lust or what-have-you seems more realistic than the dragon Vritra representing the aboriginal peoples of India.
The latter point is relevant because it is a persistent theme in Hinduism. A lot of Hindu literature concerns the conflict between the eternal Self and the illusory world of maya -- between selflessness and selfishness, restraint and hedonism, and immersion in God vs the seeking of material pleasures. In all of these contexts, demons, rakshasas, and asuras are representations of pride, lust, compulsion, and other negative attributes. I see no reason why the dasyus could not have just been the first example of this literary device, especially since they included "six-eyed, three headed" kings and were led by a "Dragon who beset the waters". The same actually goes for the Hindu caste system. While the caste system was used as a way to segregate society by occupation and class, it also refers to various stages of spiritual progress. By this metric, the kshatriya is supposed to be someone who is able to do battle with his compulsions, lusts, etc while a shudra is someone who is just beginning on the spiritual path.
This issue gets even more complicated (as if it needed more complication) when you consider that the translation of these verses isn't always accurate. What Griffith (the original Rigveda translator) translated as the word "black" (to describe the dasyus), a different scholar translated as "born from a dark womb", which has a completely different connotation. The reality is that the Aryan invasion hypothesis was constructed during a time when Europeans actually were colonizing and invading non-European countries. To scholars of the time, it seemed logical that this was just the extension of a process that had happened thousands of years ago. To British colonizers, it helped justify white rule in India. There's a clear agenda with this line of thinking. It becomes even more obvious when you consider the thousands of other (and equally valid) interpretations of the verse that don't mean anything similar.
Sure, that's possible. Maybe it is referring to the period of pronounced tribal conflict that we know was taking place in Central Asia during the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE as the permanent settlements of the Indo-Aryans were abandoned and there was a return to a more nomadic pastoral lifestyle. But, then... I guess it would seem a little bit odd that a god that we are almost positive was loaned into Indo-Iranian religion by the BMAC and later incorporated characteristics of an earlier god would come out as the hero of the story. That would be like the Romans describing their conquest of the Carthaginians using Baal as their protagonist... I guess it's possible, but it would definitely run contrary to the usual pattern of placing your god on top of the vanquished gods of the conquered.
I don't really see why that's relevant. Guys like you would argue that the Afghan I posted belongs to a monolithic and separate race from the Telugu guy I posted. I'm arguing that they don't belong to distinct genetic and physical blocks, as you can obviously see. The two people I posted have a pretty typical look for their ethnicity and don't look that different from each other. Neither of them would really stand out anywhere between Kabul and Chennai.
I don't really either, cuz I was making a simple point that Indo-Aryans would have looked very different from North Indians in the Bronze Age (who may well have looked more like most South Indians do now) and that because of this, put together with other features by which people contrast themselves to each other including language, religion, and culture that I saw your offhand comment about "osmosis" that is now dragging us way off topic to be unlikely. A guy like me however, would argue that the Afghan you posted and the Telugu you posted are probably of mixed genetic background, and that they likely exist on the peripheries of a more homogenous core of a given genetic cluster, as is usually the case. When thinking about race or population groups or whatever, it is best to think about it like the color wheel on Microsoft Paint. You can't necessarily draw a clear line and show me where yellow turns into green and green turns into blue, and you can take anywhere in-between and run it up to the lightest selection or the darkest selection, but the core areas of green, yellow, and blue are still distinct from each other. As I said, the rate of admixture between peoples of the steppe, the Old Iranian Neolithic farmers and the AASI and later the ASI and ANI groups differs depending on what area you're in. The people with the most steppe admixture (clades associated with Indo-European and Uralic) in Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North India look
very European. The people with more admixture look less so. The boundaries blur for sure as there is a slow transition into more admixed areas, but the core is still distinct.
Islamic piracy could trigger more Chola activity on the WIO if it became a real menace or annoyance. But even this is a difficult POD since most Islamic raids came via the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan. Relations with South India were a lot more peaceful since the Abbasid Caliphate benefited heavily from the sea trade. I guess if the Abbasids tried to use naval power to attack the Cholas and plunder their cities, you might see some naval retaliation from the Cholas. This could lead to preemptive strikes on southern Arabia and the Cholas trying harder to muscle in on the trade with East Africa to punish the Abbasids.
These kinds of PODs really just require one ruler to have a change of mindset. You would literally need one Chola emperor or Abbasid caliph with a weird interest in the other party for there to be more interaction. The Cholas from the looks of it were passive trading partners with the Arabs and had next to no interactions with Islamic invaders to the north.
Back on topic, finally
Ok, so I guess that's not really that tall of an order. A more zealous Abbasid Caliphate, perhaps something more akin to the Almohads could do the trick here. Were there Islamic missionaries in the Chola Kingdom? I know next to nothing about it, honestly. If so, might the Cholas try to shutdown Islamic proselytization in their domains, perhaps in a manner that would get the attention of people with enough fervor elsewhere to justify the kind of raiding that Muslims engaged in in the Mediterranean in Southwest India? The region as many have pointed out here is rich and full of licentious heathens from the Muslim perspective. Why not at least a raid on one of their cities that mirrors the Arab Raid of Rome in 846? It could very well be a more profitable venture.