It is not widely known that the European quest to appropriate the highly prized library of Sanskrit's ancient spiritual texts motivated the construction of the "Aryan" race identity, one of the ideological roots of Nazism. The Sanskrit word "arya" is an adjective that means noble or pure. For example, the famous Buddhist Four Noble Truths are described as the Four Arya Truths or catvāri āryasatyāni in Sanskrit. Arya does not refer to a race, but a cultural quality venerated in Sanskrit texts.
German nationalism turned this word into a noun, "Aryan," and capitalized it to refer to an imagined race of people that were the original Sanskrit speakers who had composed its great texts. Early romantic claims that Indians were the ancestors of the Europeans were gradually replaced by the new myth that a race called "Indo-Aryans" was the common ancestors to both. Their origin was thought to be in the Caucasus Mountains, hence the term "Caucasian." Later, the "Indo" was dropped and the white Aryan Race Theory emerged. Thus, from the European desire to be seen as the inheritors of the Sanskrit civilization, the notion of a European super-race was born, with Germany as its highest manifestation.
How did this come about? In the late 1700s, European identity was shaken when scholars discovered that Sanskrit was closely related to the European languages, though much older and more sophisticated. At first, this discovery fed European Romantic imagination, in which India was glorified as the perfect past. Herder, a German Romanticist, saw Europe's "discovery" of India as a "re-discovery" of its own foundation. India was viewed as Europe's mother civilization by Frederick Schlegel in Germany and by Voltaire in France. William Jones, a British colonial administrator, considered Sanskrit the most marvelous product of the human mind. Sanskrit and Indology entered most major European universities between 1800 and 1850, challenging if not replacing Latin and Greek texts as a source for "new" ideas. Many new disciplines were shaped by the ensuing intellectual activity, including linguistics, comparative religion, modern philosophy and sociology.
With European nations competing among themselves for civilizational legacy, many rival theories emerged regarding the origins of the original Sanskrit speakers and their civilization. German nationalists found in the affinity between Sanskrit and German the possibility of a newly respectable pedigree vis-à-vis the French, and claimed the heritage of the treasure trove of Sanskrit literature to bolster their cause. The British interpreted India and Sanskrit in a manner that would strengthen their own role as empire-builders, with India as the jewel in the crown. Because Indians were not participants in European forums, there was widespread plagiarism of Indian texts, as well as much distorted interpretation.
By "becoming" the Aryans, Europeans felt that they were the rightful custodians of the massive corpus of Sanskrit texts that were generating new breakthroughs in the humanities and liberal arts. Germans took their newly adopted Aryan identity to extremes, and most of the influential European thinkers of the time colluded. Their racist theories often had an anti-Semitic dimension, seeking to reconstruct the Bible in Aryan terms. Ernest Renan, a philologist and Hebrew scholar, drew sharp distinctions between Semitic and Aryan languages and peoples. He proposed that though Aryans began as polytheists they were later transformed into Christian monotheists, and that Semitic peoples comprised an entirely different (and inferior) civilization. Adolphe Pictet, a Swiss linguist and ethnographer, was fully committed to the notion of European Aryans who were destined to conquer the world being blessed with "innate beauty" and "gifts of intelligence." He separated Jesus from Judaism, and turned him into the Aryan Christ.
The nascent discipline called "race science" was reinforced by such ideas. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, a French diplomat, philosopher and historian argued in his hugely influential Essay on the Inequality of Human Races that Adam from the Bible was the "originator of our white species." He wrote of the "superiority of the white type and within that type of the Aryan family." His thesis on India claimed that white Aryans had invaded India and subsequently began to intermarry with the local population. Realizing the danger of intermarriage, the Aryan lawgivers invented the caste system as a means of self-preservation. India was held up as an example of how interbreeding with an inferior race could bring about the decline of a superior one. Hitler's idea of "purifying" the Aryans was born out of this, and it culminated in the Holocaust.
Houston Chamberlain was a British historian whose magnum opus, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (written in German), also projected Aryan-Germans as the most evolved among Aryan races. He introduced Christian, scientific and philosophical arguments to lend credibility and explained the benefits that Christianity would derive by supporting German racism. Anthropologist Kenneth Kennedy concludes of Gobineau and Chamberlain, that they "transformed the Aryan concept, which had its humble origins in philological research conducted by Jones in Calcutta at the end of the eighteenth century, into the politics and racial doctrines of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich."
In 2007, I played a role in a historic milestone when I was invited to address the first Hindu-Jewish Summit. I spoke on the Aryan myth and the suffering that it had inflicted on both religious communities. Contrary to earlier apprehensions of some Hindus that this was a "risky" topic to bring up, the head of the Jewish delegation, Rabbi Rosen, member of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's Commission for Inter-religious Dialogue, was very impressed. The Jewish delegation decided to appoint a team of scholars to study the issue and the references I had supplied. As a result, at the following year's Summit, a joint declaration was signed, which included the following language from my draft:
"Since there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory of an Aryan invasion/migration into India, and on the contrary, there is compelling evidence to refute it; and since the theory seriously damages the integrity of the Hindu tradition and its connection to India; we call for a serious reconsideration of this theory, and a revision of all educational material on this issue that includes the most recent and reliable scholarship."
Today, the Western mainstream has made special efforts to remove the notion of an Aryan race from the vocabulary and the public psyche. However, as my recently released book, Breaking India, explains, the damage in India has worsened. The Dravidian Race Theory was formulated by British missionaries in the 1800s in parallel with the Aryan theory, and it divides the peoples of India into racial categories of "Aryans" and "Dravidians." Western scholars and institutions continue to support Dravidian racism, which is dependent upon acceptance of the Aryan race construct. In a future blog I will explain how Christian missionaries are now exploiting these dangerous constructs.
Aryan race - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Who Were the Aryans? Hitler's Persistent Mythology
How does this addresses the history of Aryan pride in Hinduism?
Hindu leaders like BG Tilak themselves expressed Aryan pride in search of the pure Aryan race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Arctic_Home_in_the_Vedas
In this book Tilak invokes Aryan pride and discovers that Aryans were not native to India -and were the invading ancestors of high-caste Hindus who gave them Vedas.
It seems that the objective of preserving the Arya race has been the quest of Casteism that is fundamentally based on blood purity. So how did the Europeans got it wrong?
Did he make any reference in the puranic texts to support his views??
Did he make any reference in the Canonical Hindu texts to support his views??
All that he makes claims are from a single line that he read and understood to be the setting of sun in artic for 1 month - there is clear scientific evidence that even in India, during the penultimate cracatoa eruption some 15000 years ago, the dust from the volcanic ash was spread till India and fell even in the deccan plateau ( where it is still available even today ) - this dust cloud was so thick that it prevented the sun from shining for 1 month.
This could well be mentioned as sun not rising in Vedas. So, what is BG Tilak's strong points in support of this argument.
His basis for the texts are not well supported and hence could not be taken as in this argument.
Even if he himself comes - I would debunk his theory with facts and figures.
Also, regarding your assertion about Caste being "fundamentally based on blood purity" you still haven't brought ANY proof, citation, or scholarly opinion to the table. You have also continuously avoided my questions on how, if caste is based on blood-purity (in your white supremacist dreams), did Hindu scriptures end up having so many instances of inter-caste marriages, inter-social exchanges, and even untouchables being worshipped as gods and sages.
"With all due respect to Tilak "
Whoaa!! "due respect??"
Respecting Aryan Supremacists and Caste hierarchist surely can't be racism..right?
The erroneous Aryan theory projected India as uncivilized. However with the discovery of the Indus Valley in 1920, the history of India certainly has to be re-written.
All your arguments are supported by authors of European connection and hence get invalidated due to the above point that I have mentioned.
there is a need to re-write the Indian history to eschew away the aryan invasion myth and bring the connection of the Indus-Saraswathi civilization and its continued presence even today throughout India.
The temple architecture, communal bathing ghats, drainage systems, village set ups, bazzars that were pioneered in the Indus-Saraswathi civilization more than 10,000 - 15,000 years ago - are still present in the 'proper indian villages'.
The western media show cases those villages inhabited by the immigrants who came to india only during the british raj - and got intermingled with indians. this still happens in the India - Bangladesh border.
India is the pinnacle of civilization, bio-diversity, education, moral intelligence and the best natural way of life for the upkeep of the planet.
Saying that Indians are appropriating Sanskrit is like saying you are taking your mother away fro me. I have concluded this about your entire thesis so far.
1 - Hinduism isn't really anything. It's just a combination of a lot of things.
2 - Many of these "things" can be made to look similar to Christianity by mixing and matching words and phrases from here and there.
3 - Therefore, it can be concluded that Indian tradition is rooted in Christian teachings. This is obvious because the question of Christianity having been influenced by Hinduism is simply unthinkable.
European scholars were enthralled with the ideas of Darwin and the "discovery" of the relation between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit was re-examined in the light of the possibility that languages, like species, can evolve. Therefore, taken to its scientific conclusion, there will be a common source for this variation which will have developed over a larger period of space and time. In any case, this is the view from linguistics. Languages are not races/ethnicities.
I will defer to your expertise, and say that I had read it sometime back (can't remember where) that Dravidian, Finnish, Hungarian languages had remarkable similarities which were confounding to linguists. As I looked at the wiki entry (below), I see that there have been attempts to make other connections too, on linguistic similarity grounds. I wonder what you think of that, and especially the connections between Dravidian and Indo-European as mentioned there. "Nonetheless, while there are no readily detectable genealogical connections, there are strong areal features linking Dravidian with the Indo-Aryan languages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dravidian_languages
I checked a reference book I have on languages of the world and the hypothesis that Dravidian and Uralic languages might be related is weak. The claim is based on a few lexical similarities. Historical linguists have to be really careful with that kind of thing. It can easily (and most likely does) mean that these groups had cultural contact at some point and one group borrowed the words in prehistoric times from the other group. Really solid evidence depends on something called linguistic reconstruction. That is a rather difficult and time consuming task.
There is also a hypothesis that Dravidian languages are related to Australian Aboriginal languages. This is due to a very unusual sound contrast they and few other languages share.
cont. --
Notice the difference between the N's (the same difference exist for T's as well in Malayalam)
It changes the meaning of the word if the tongue is against the back of the teeth, or the alveolar ridge, or retroflexed back on itself. That same difference is illustrated here, now for T but in an Australian Aboriginal language: http://www.cogsci.jhu.edu/courses/325-F2004/ladefoged/vowels/chapter13/nunngubuyu.html
(This might not play in every browser, so switch browsers if it doesn't work for you).
So it is the sharing of these unusual sounds that supports the hypothesis that these language families might be related. Retroflex consonants (the ones where the tongue is curled back on itself) are found in many languages of India and are believed to be due to a sustained period of cultural contact between the two language families so that something called: diffusion happened, which spread these sounds into the Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages in the region. The linguistic situation in India is unique because of the long period of cultural contact, sometimes in the same village between different languages. Do to this, a lot of sharing/diffusion has happened.
cont.--
thanks,
piyush
Of course, modern archaeological expeditions have blown these preposterous Christo-centric theories out of the water. Really, the only reason to cling to the Aryan Invasion Theory is either ignorance, racism, or the belief that the Christian Bible is an infallible source of historical "evidence." Anyone who studies these issues will quickly see that the Out of India Theory is the logical conclusion.
Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the ground: “We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes who are the native stock”. The British trick/strategy did work and many groups within India supported the British on both the counts and stated quarrelling among themselves. Since then the debate on the racial character of the term “Aryan” gathered pace and chugged along.
During the early thirties, the “Aryan” found unexpected supporters in the form of Nazis who employed it as a racial term designating the purest segment of the White race. Nazis put the theory into a highly destructive operation. The holocaust that followed is rather too well known to be recounted here.
The Nazis pointed out to the British that Nazis were doing exactly the thing they (British) themselves were doing in India, subjugating an inferior race. Nazi schoolbooks included lessons on British rule in India .This caught the British on wrong foot. British were embarrassed to find themselves bracketed with Nazis. The British spin-doctors then came up with an explanation that that the Indians were “brown Aryans” and there was no subjugation of Indian people. The British thereafter soft peddled the Aryan theory and slowly receded from it.
Their worth is only for 'indentured labor' that he supported and he was even a chief supporter of 'Eugenics' program which was a white supremacist idea which said only christian european race should survive and all other races and specifically Indian should be sterilized and allowed to die out a natural death without help.
That was what he did during the world war to India - the accounted deaths of Indians during the mid 19s during the world war is more than 9 million ( which is on record ) by off record, the estimates are more than 15 million.
An estimated 10 million starved to death in India from North to South and East to West - while their supplies were rationed to the european allies and european public for the idiotic wars they were fighting in their own country.
I agree; the term Aryan has been much abused. I remember having read another version of the events.
It is said Aryan theory was, initially, developed by Danish and German scholars of the romanticism era, like R. Rask and F. Bopp (1816) . The German linguists such as the Leipzig Junggrammatiker school members further developed it. The theory of an immigration into or invasion of South Asia by speakers of Indo Aryan language based on the familiar concept of the Hunnic and Germanic invasions of the Roman empire, emerged late in the 19th century.
The British latched on to the theory of an invasion by superior Indo Aryan speaking Āryas (‘‘Aryan invasion theory’’) as a means to justify British policy and their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule. In both cases (Hunnic/Germanic and British), a 'white race' was subduing the local darker-colored population. In a single stroke AIT negated the legacy and traditions of entire subcontinent; and told them they lived on borrowed glory.
Further, the British also employed it, as a tool of their “divide and rule” policy, to drive a wedge between the various groups in the Indian people, by propagating that the Aryan invaders from Central Asia destroyed the native civilization and enslaved the native population. The strategy was to set one class / region against another and let them fight it out. The then Viceroy of India Lord Curzon called this policy “furniture of the Empire.”
1. Linguistic similarities between Indian and European languages. There are multiple explanation possible, none of which fit all the evidence. Hence there has been a playing field of identity politics, the Eurocentric identities dominating in controlling the discourse.
2. Archeological evidence such as summarized in: http://micheldanino.voiceofdharma.com/indus.html This does NOT indicate any foreign migrants bringing the civilization, because the cities on the Indus-Saraswati region are far older and larger than anything elsewhere, making it impossible that these were imported. In particular nothing in Ukraine (the latest fashionable origin of the so-called Aryans) of similar antiquity, size, sophistication has been found. What is found by archeologists are isolated pieces here and there, not like entire cities and town (over 2,000) as in Indus-Saraswati.
(continued in Part 2)
3. Caste formations going back to antiquity need not be the result of foreign migrants but rather an internal social dynamics of separate professional specializations and deities for each community. It was wild speculation that foreign Aryans came and made this caste system.
4. There is no evidence in the Sanskrit texts referring to their migration. Given their sophistication, it would be surprising that none of them bothered to document the thousands of miles of journey to reach India, given how major such a project would have been. On the contrary, the Sanskrit texts refer to creatures native to India such as peacocks, and to massive mountains and the ocean - none of which exist in Central Asia,
5. DNA - studies show that Indians have a small percentage of DNA overlap with Europe compared to a very large commonality amongst various Indian groups. Furthermore, there have been recent foreign migrations such as during the colonial period. These were influxes of European DNA because most such persons settled in India. So when I meet an India who is proud of their European looks, I remind them it could easily be the result of a European lady in their ancestor's home some generations back - nothing to do with any ancient Aryans.
Each of the above belongs to a formal discipline of research. Historians catering to a chauvinistic clientele like to conflate a "possible" explanation of one with a "possible" explanation of another and build sweeping theories.
Maybe you haven't read the latest evidence but the caste system has its racial roots as found by the scientists of Utah University
http://www.ahc.umn.edu/bioethics/genetics_and_identity/case.html#caste
“Analysis of these data demonstrated that the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes. Collectively, all five datasets show a trend toward upper castes being more similar to Europeans, whereas lower castes are more similar to Asians. We conclude that Indian castes are most likely to be of proto-Asian origin with West Eurasian admixture resulting in rank-related and sex-specific differences in the genetic affinities of castes to Asians and Europeans.”
The right wing Hindutva groups in India and abroad are trying to refute the evidence in order to perpetuate the caste slavery.
Which Hindutva groups? BJP? RSS? Something else?
Most right wing Hindutva groups in India were founded on the promise that they would banish untouchability and caste-based discrimination. It is easy to slyly imply that there is something Hitlerian going on in the absence of facts. But I hope you do bring proof the next time you decide to spew rubbish about "Hindutva groups in India perpetuating caste slavery".
Infact, the Indian prime Minister has likened caste to racism and Apartheid.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/dec/28/india.mainsection
The outasts, the Black Untouchables are lynched, harassed with vitriolic terms and murdered on a frequenct basis by the Upper-caste Hindus in India out of racism and yet it is deplorable thatit is being sanitized.
I see that you have not referred to the book "THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS - Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends" by Lokamanya Bâl Gangâdhar Tilak, published in 1903. His interpretations are different from yours. Do you brush this work of Tilak, as one of the 19th century euro-minded sanskrit scholars?
Keshav Mysore
Also a good read on the same topic, at his blog is at: http://micheldanino.voiceofdharma.com/indus.html