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Jun-07-2008
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(Author is an independent researcher, and freelance contributor based in New Delhi, India)
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A dead end for Aryan Invasion Theory"s Racism - Part I
A dead end for Aryan Invasion Theory"s Racism - Part II
The Christian worldview of early Indologists
The beginning of Indological studies in India was out of British curiosity towards Indians, especially Hindus. The British had a fair idea of Islam, but they had never encountered Hindus and Hinduism (the non Islamic religions) from such close quarters before. The formation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal was the first step in that direction. William Jones through his profound study on the languages of India came to the conclusion that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit all came from a common root; which was undoubtedly lost. Sanskrit was also more perfect than Greek and more copious than Latin. Indeed, the formulation is remarkably modern says Trautmann. However, to queer the pitch Jones had also postulated that Sanskrit was related to Peruvian and Japanese, among various other languages. This was ignored, and the reason Chakrabarti (Colonial Indology) believes was the idea of a relationship between Sanskrit with the Classic languages offered a perspective which was related to the premise of the origin of the Caucasian racial group somewhere in the high mountainous regions of the east.
Jones during those years was a devout Christian who believed completely in the authenticity and infallibility of Biblical History. This was the beginnings of the one of the deepest tragedies of Indian History where its timelines have had always to be sandwitched in archetypal timescapes to the liking of Western literary history, and not its own. Jones was aware that Puranic history gave a chronology of events 4,320,000 years back; but he brushed it aside and instead replaced it with a dubious Mosaic timeline where the history of the world begins from 4404 B.C and all men descend from Noah! He simultaneously through some text torturing and specious speculations arrived at identification of the chief biblical characters from Puranic genealogies.
Jones despite being a natural unquestioning Christian did not feel any inner conflict because the Biblical scheme of creation prevalent in the 18th century was based on the simple premise that all human families were mutually related.
Jones never estimated Indian sciences and philosophy to be of value to the present world. Its importance lay only in the past; and he fervently believed in the superiority of European civilization from the times of the Greeks. His work assured the missionary fanatics that it would complement the invasion of the sacred in India, and not in any way hinders its advances.
In his defense one may consider that all men are ultimately children of their own age. For Europeans who were reveling in renewal of the renaissance, and on the threshold of discovering ideas of liberty and equality; the customs, culture and quality of living of Indians was nothing but a rude shock. Also, India"s feudal, decadent and emasculated status, was a living reality and it cannot be wished away by wishful jingoism of some misguided nationalists or stultified anti imperialist thinking of the leftists. Perhaps, the greatest native intellectual of the 19th century; Bankim Chandra had no hesitation in viewing the English as a superior civilization. He viewed the meeting of two civilizations as a diffusion process, where values naturally flow from the superior to the inferior civilization, and it was for the latter to assimilate and profit from them. The problem was only when this process continued ad infinitum.
Jones colossal contribution to Indology would usher in a new wave of interest in Indological studies rightly dubbed as indomania by Trautmann. Although it was restricted to a few elite Britons its output was astonishing. In a few years, Holwell had written an account of Christianity which was completely Hinduized. This view was vehemently criticized by other indologists in the fray.
Meanwhile; John Playfair put forward his hypothesis that the antiquity of Indian astronomy was remarkably consistent even 5000 years ago [at the birth of the age of Kali]
Yet, the pendulum would swing to the opposite direction and indophobia was the next stage of orientalism. Charles Grant made the first vicious attack on those Orientalists who had dared to claim a common descent between Hindu, Greek, and Teuton, for that would amount to allowing that there was no difference in the faculties of the people that produced Homer and Shakespeare and those that have produced nothing better than the authors of the Mahabharat and Ramayana; no difference between the home-keeping Hindus who never made a foreign conquest of any kind, and the nations who discovered, conquered, and peopled a new world
Grant and later Mill were convinced that civilization followed an upward trajectory. They believed that ancient Hindu civilization was characterized by abject slavery and unparalleled depravity. True, the Hindus had been subject to Muslims, but even before the Muslim intervention they were subsiding in a despotic environment which was impressive to an occidental visitor like Megasthenes but the people he conjectured had nothing to wear but a loin cloth, and subsided in the harshest poverty. His critique runs exactly on missionary lines - the Hindu is depraved for he does not repent; his laws are unequal for different castes; the theory of reincarnation promotes fatalism; the temple architecture is immoral with their sexually repugnant depictions and the worship of the Lingam; and the patronization of temple prostitutes is positively perverse.
The cure of this pathological process was to be the introduction of light giving English knowledge. There was one small hiccup that its introduction might also usher the desire for liberty but he thought that would be counteracted by the maddening Indian heat which would keep the lethargic native in an incessant inertia.
This desire for Indian Anglicization was partially consummated through the introduction of Macaulay"s minute on education, 1935 the details of which are too well known to be reproduced here. But one cannot agree with Trautmann in giving Macaulay and Grant a clean chit against charges of racism, and that they really believed that the Indians espousing the English way of education [and religion] were the proper means for ameliorating their present condition. Macualay in India wanted a breed of Indians, brown in colour but white in outlook who would trace all their intellectual capacities to Europe. It was in the British parliament on Feb 2. 1835 that he made the not too surprising admission; "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, such caliber that I do not think we would ever conquer this country unless we break this very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem and their native self culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." The veracity of the claims may be contested, but the motive in designs cannot!
The height of indophobia was reached probably in the writings of Dugald Stewart in his Elements of the philosophy of the Human mind where he claimed to have made the sensational discovery that Sanskrit was a hoax! His conjecture briefly was that the Brahmins in coming in contact with Greeks brought to a systematic perfection an artificial language of their own, having for their guide the richest and most regular tongue that was ever spoken on earth-a tongue too abounding in whatever abstract and technical words their vernacular speech was incompetent to furnish.
Trautman sums it up well; that Indomania did not completely vanish and some of its essence was assimilated in ideas like vegetarianism, pacificism, and theosophy. Even Mahatma Gandhi could appreciate the Bhagavad Geeta only because of the British people"s fascination with the scripture. Indomania did not spring up naturally from the soul of Britain; it was deliberately build upon. India was very different from Britain; but Britons did not believe that until Grant taught them to think so.
Why Indomania to Indophobia?
Indomania had unwilling served a purpose - to discover the ancient Aryan who was falsely constructed as white, and the doyenne of the ancient races. In time, the concept of the Aryan race had been restricted to a whiteness index and the fallen Aryans like Indians were to be excluded from it. The latter served no purpose in the new order of things which was essentially promotion of a political idea of white race, especially amongst Germans. This explains why Hitler showed no sympathy towards Indians in his Mein Kampf, which was crudely revealed to Subhash Bose when he sought to enlist support for the Indian cause of independence. Nazis repressed the Gypsies like Jews even though the then extant philological and ethnological studies had conclusively proven their links with the ancient Aryan land of India. Fitting in the inhabitants of an enslaved, brown colonized nation with their grand scheme of mass indoctrination in superiority of the white race or legitimization of their hegemony over black masses was politically too grotesque to be even considered.
The origin of the race theories
Max Muller was the creator of the theory of the Aryan race who had invaded the native Negroes and barbarians of India. Yet, in later years he deeply regretted the theory of race science, and instead suggested a schism between philology and ethnology. It was too late before he realized that language does not determine racial kinship.
As a sanskritist, Max Muller"s contribution to at least the popularization of Indian scriptures and enhancing the quality of studies on the same is immense, practically unsurpassable for any other scholar of the 19th century. Even his modern day critics like Rajaram have credited him for being the first publisher of the Rig Veda.
Trautmann has unfortunately steered clear of the controversies generated through discovery of Muller"s private letters. One of them to his wife reads "The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years." [Müller, Georgina, The Life and Letters of Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller, 2 vols. London: Longman, 1902] Hindu sympathizers and revivalists have in recent years increasingly accused Max Muller of harbouring a missionary agenda of conversion based on such letters. It is to be conceded that the translation of the Rig Veda by Muller has had several shortcomings especially because of its simplistic naturalistic bent. Muller never visited India in his lifetime, and he could not understand even a sentence of chaste, spoken Sanskrit [Nirad C Chaudhari] Yet, his immense contribution received critical appreciation from contemporary Indians like Swami Vivekananda who called him nothing short of Sayana reincarnated. There is a possibility that Muller had undergone a change in his missionary outlook, if it ever existed with the vicissitudes of time. He had also penned a touching biography of the great Hindu mystic Ramakrishna Paramhansa. Naturally, such outpourings were diametrically opposed to any subtle missionary agenda. Also, while he is accused of deliberately underestimating the Vedic antiquity to suit European interests, is it not true that in his "Six Systems of Indian Philosophy"; he had recanted his original observations and stated "Whether the Vedic hymns were composed in 1000, 1500 or 2000 or 3000 B.C, no power on earth will ever determine"
N S Rajaram contradicts us at this point by reminding us that this move of Muller again owed more to winds of change in European politics than to science or scholarship. Britain had been watching the progress of German nationalism with rising anxiety that burst into near hysteria in some circles when Prussia crushed France in the Franco-Prussian war in 1871. This led to German unification under the banner of Prussia. Suddenly Germany became the most populous and powerful country in Western Europe and the greatest threat to British ambitions...Max Muller though found himself in an extremely tight spot. Though a German by birth he was now comfortably established in England, in the middle of his lifework on the Vedas and the Sacred Books of the East..With his background as a German nationalist, the last thing Max Muller could afford was to be seen as advocating German ideology in Victorian England. He had no choice but to repudiate his former theories simply to survive in England. He reacted by hastily propounding a new "linguistic theory." [2]
The Racial theory of the Indus civilization and its consequences on Indian History
In the most interesting and relevant part of the book; Trautmann writes that "the racial theory of Indian civilization was constructed by narrativizing the encounter of the polar opposites of the Victorian racial thought, the fair skinned civilized Aryan and the dark skinned savage.." The leading texts were those of Max Muller and John Muir"s original Sanskrit texts. The culmination of this racial theory is found in Vedic Index by Macdonell and Keith where the word dasa of the Veda was identified with the original aboriginal population of India. The touchstone of this theory was extrapolating the ideas of white supremacy to mystical documents which were more than 3000 years old. Despite the fact that the dasyu was identified as rich and powerful, and his demarcation from the so called white foreigner Aryan foe was not in terms of any whiteness index. Trautmann revisits the original theories and is astounded to discover the manner in which the dark skinned savage is extracted from a very recalcitrant Vedic text - the image is drawn from all but two passages referring to dark skin, and another referring to a flat nose [anasah] All these images, Trautmann identifies having been derived from a consistent degree of text-torturing both substantive and adjectival in character.
In addition there is often the support of the much abused connotation of varna as colour or complexion but Trautmann dismisses the notion since Varna is also the word for the four main castes who are evidently not racially segregated among themselves, so it is by no means obvious how varna signifies complexion.
One sincerely hopes that Trautmann"s work spells the death knell for the racist Aryan concept in Indian Histories. So pernicious has been its influence that even a balanced author like Stanley Wolpert in his "New History of Ancient India" [2000; Page 24] continued toeing the old racist line claiming varna for colour based racial divisions and the white skinned Aryan invader defeating the indigenous dark skinned natives. The enigma of the situation is truly baffling to the unbiased reader. In a scathing attack on B B Lal"s article in "The Indo Aryan Controversy" [ed. Patton]; the linguist cum historian Stephanie Jaminson called his contribution as amateurish, hostile and outdated. And yet, even a cursory reading of the article [7] conveys the impression that he apart from contesting the linguistic fraud applied in identifying the Helmand in Afghanistan as the Saraswati ridicules the Eurocentric hyperbole in applying racism to the alleged invasion of the Aryans. I do not remember the likes of Jaminson ever contesting the racial interpretation of the AIT[see footnote 8], and it was left to Trautmann to sort out this genuine mess. In the same review, she once even throws the term invasion around as a bullying tactic. Jaminson should be aware that in identification of water body like Saraswati linguistics is only secondary, perhaps tertiary and it is only the archaeological evidence which will be the guiding and deciding factor. A sustained scheme in obfuscation of the villainary involved in the racist construction of AIT has had the blessings of the likes of Thapar, Jaminson and Witzel because the truth has bitter and ugly connotations. They have given surrogate support in upholding racist constructions especially Witzel, but point them out the lampoonery and fraud involved in construction of the same and the common sanctimonious reaction is the erection of the scarecrow of "outdatism". If the theory of the racist AIT is indeed outdated, why is it still being taught as gospel truths even in California textbooks and probably 9 out of 10 introductory texts on Indian History.
The racist AIT: A century of national rejection
Sir John Marshall, the pioneering archaeological in the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization attributed its downfall to the invading Aryans on the basis of a group of few skeletons huddled in a hole. This was later substantiated on virtually no empirical evidence by professional English archaeologists like Piggott (Prehistoric India) Marxist historians like D D Kosambi also conveniently imagined a series of ancient dams which Indra detonated to release the waters and inundate the harappans.
Trautmann"s conclusion may have signaled what could be the ultimate demise of the Eurocentric historian"s obsession with identifying imaginary Aryan enemies. But he does not care to answer why it has taken over a hundred years for an eminent international scholar to arrive at this position when Hindu Indian scholars had dismantled the foundation of these racist interpretations of Indian History more than a century ago. Swami Vivekananda had not only read the back projection of systems of racial segregation but also their inherent egregiousness. He thundered to the crowd at Madras in 1898; "Then there is the other idea that the Shudra castes are surely the aborigines. What are they? They are slaves. They say history repeats itself. The Americans, English, Dutch, and the Portuguese got hold of the poor Africans, and made them work hard while they lived, and their children of mixed birth were born in slavery and kept in the condition for a long period. From that wonderful example, the mind jumps back several thousand years and fancies that the same thing happened here, and our archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryan came from-the Lord knows where." He was not too impressed with the Aryan Invasion theory either; "As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryan ever came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-Aryans and they were a multitude, is equally illogical and equally irrational. It could not have been possible in those days that a few Aryans settled and lived there with a hundred thousand slaves at their command. These slaves would have eaten them up. Made "chutney"" of them in five minutes." [3]
However, an even more systematic refutation of the charges of racism against the ancient Aryan Indian came from Sri Aurobindo in his "Secret of the Veda". He contends that the dasyus have been identified with darkness and the Aryans with light and the light of the sun in the veda is called the Aryan light in contradistinction to the dasyu darkness. The Dasyus are powers of darkness and ignorance who oppose the seeker of truth and immortality. The gods are the powers of Light, the children of Infinity, forms and personalities of the one Godhead who by their help and by their growth and human workings in man raise him to the truth and the immortality Vashishta speaks of the Aryan people being jyotirgrah, led by the light! [VII.33.7]
His final conclusion is "The indications in the veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of any such invasion. The distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan on which so much has been built, seems on the mass of the evidence to indicate a cultural rather than racial difference. The language of the hymns clearly points to a particular worship or spiritual as the distinguishing sign of the Aryans - a worship of light, and of the powers of light and a self evidence based on the culture of truth and the aspiration to immortality. There is no reliable indication of any racial difference."
Sri Aurobindo had definitely anticipated what a historian like Trautmann would conceptualize a century later.
Even K D Sethna, a contemporary of Trautmann in his "The Problem of Aryan Origins" published over 25 years ago consistently disapproved of the racial theory. Basing his theory on the Aurobindonian vision he discovers in Rik V.14.4 the master clue as to the real nature of the dasyus in general..agnir jato arochate ghnan dasyun jyotisa tamah avundad ga apah svah [Agni born shone out slaying the Dasyus, the darkness by the light..he found the cows, the waters, the saw.] All dasyus are here identified with the darkness and Agni the god of fire brings about their destruction through the advent of light! But unfortunately Trautmann seems to be also unaware of Sethna"s work.
Trautmann can of course take heart in the fact that the Aryan theory had several native Indian Historians in its support. B R Ambedkar, the dalit leader denounced the Aryan theory to be a hoax and its continued propagation as a Brahmanical conspiracy. In recent times, Romila Thapar in "Early India" uses the same argument, while Dilip Chakrabarti in "Colonial Indology" quotes a vast array of nationalist Indian Historians like R C Dutt, Majumdar, Nilakantha Shastri, Pandey who all upheld the Aryan Invasion theory. But even he would agree that they were all without exception ready to reconsider the AIT in the light of fresh evidence and were generously open to new ideas on the subject. One may add it is only the Marxists and dalit historians who remain rudely recalcitrant in rejecting their unconcealed love for the AIT until today.[6] The queerly querulous tones of Thapar et al are definitely sounding sanctimonious to me.
In the History and culture of the Indian People, Volume I, the Vedic Age; Majumdar presents briefly the opposite view of autochthonous origin of the Aryan but admits his inability to side with it in the light of extant evidence but is willing to wait for the decipherment of the Indus script, which if proved to be Sanskrit would definitely overthrow the AIT. Even the others, hardly ever considered the Aryan to be a persecutor of the native and instead suggested them to be migrants, and their interaction with the former leading to a cultural fusion or synthesis. We are certain that the majority did not believe the Aryans to be the torch bearers of civilization in India especially after the discovery of the Indus valley civilization. Panikar in his "Survey of Indian History" is most explicit on this account. The differences between Aryan and Non Aryan subsisted according to them in cultural and not necessarily racial differences, although unlike Vivekananda and Aurobindo they were not wholly emphatic on this point. One should be sympathetic and not discount the burden of Western scholarship which they were pitted against and the mere ring of unorthodoxy could sound the death knell of professional careers through academic apartheid. One may add that in the absence of modern genetic, anthropological and archaeological evidence they were compelled to rely on colonial experts on the same who more often that not were subject to their own racial biases, and sometimes had a distinct political axis to grind. These racial sentiments were acutely perceived by Indian Historians of the day like Majumdar who in his preface to Ancient India in 1927 wrote with observation with respect to the writings of Vincent Smith "These sentiments which are echoed in other books, are not only uncalled for and misleading, but are calculated to distort the vision and judgment of modern readers. Those who cannot forget, even while writing the history of ancient India, that they belong to an imperial race which holds India in political subjection, can hardly be expected to possess that sympathy and broad- mindedness which are necessary for forming a correct perspective of ancient Indian history and civilization...But they (European scholars) would hardly be in a position to write the History of India; so long as they do not cast aside the assumptions of racial superiority and cease to regard Indians as an inferior race."
Trautmann has also not dwelled into the disastrous consequences that the western approbation of this regressive racial theory of the Indus civilization has had on the Indian psyche. They have been the chief instigators in the rise of Dravidian nationalism, the ardent votaries of which have consistently brainwashed a generation of students with the horrifying tales of these Aryan invaders. History which was at best a construction out of myth was forced onto impressionable young minds initially by colonial indologists, and now Marxists, masquerading as secularists to foment a racial divide in the new India. The excuse of Trautmann that the colonial historians warped in their racial ideologies were influenced by the inherent Indian preference for whiteness based on some clumsy contemporary evidence is untenable, for even the current preference for fairness is nothing more than a colonial hangover. In William Dalyrmple"s "White Mughals" there is conclusive evidence that native Indians, especially Hindus were not too impressed with the white British woman. The renowned Hindi writer Premchand in his novel "Karmabhoomi" is extremely pained at the negative perception of the English woman amongst his people. Even in the Indian Mutiny, recent studies are of the view that the Brahmin soldiers did not molest British women [Our Bones are scattered, Andrew Ward] in contrast to the thousands of native women who became victim to the English soldier"s excesses. Even the ancient smritis do not indicate any preference for fair skinned women. If any, the desirability for fairness is restricted to the groom, and not to the bride which is absolutely at variance with the contemporary Indian eligibility criterion for marriages.
Archaeology triumphs over bad linguistics
Gregory L Possehl in his recent book "The Indus Valley Civilization: New Discoveries" certifies that no group of invading Aryans was responsible for the killing of the men behind the skeletons which used to be the cornerstone of the Aryan Invasion theory. To quote "Wheeler implied that some of the humans whose remains were found at MohenjoDaro may have died as a part of a massacre associated with the abandonment of the city and the decline of the Indus civilization. This has been thoroughly debunked by Dales and Kennedy (also B B Lal) Whatever, their cause of deaths, its association with war and then abandonment of Mohenjodaro or the eclipse of the Indus civilization cannot be proved. Neither Indra, nor the Aryan beliefs stands accused of their death"
Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, the pioneering archaeological expert involved in excavation at Harappa confirms that "One of the major misconceptions is that invasions of so-called Aryans destroyed the Indus cities and established a totally new culture and language in the subcontinent. It should be noted that most scholars have rejected the invasion hypothesis for the end of the Indus cities because there is no archaeological, biological or literary reference to support this theory" [4] I do suspect that Trautmann and others have been influenced, even if subliminally by these archaeological discoveries which had tested the very raison d"être of the racist Aryan Invasion theory.
In summing up, the reader is warned that this work is not an attempt to demean the value of orientalism in understanding Indian History. Indian history will remain forever grateful to men like James Princep who recovered Indian History"s greatest but lost king Ashoka or Cunningham, the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India who preserved whatever was good, beautiful and left standing in Indian History [5] The value of the current breed of orientalists - we"ll know in time.
Completed.
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References & Notes:
[2] http://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/aryan-invasion-history.html
[3] The Future of India, Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, Volume III
http://webtechstore.hypermart.net/nirmal/hws/vedanta/futindia.html
[4] http://www.harappa.com/indus/industext.html
[5] An excellent introduction is found in John Keay"s "India Discovered"
[6] http://www.ivarta.com/columns/OL_051220.htm
[7] www.geocities.com/ifihhome/articles/bbl002.html
[8] When I refer to the AIT, it is only in the context of its racist interpretation in which pseudolinguistics were applied and upheld by western (with Marxist and dalit) scholars for over a century. Their application to Indian History was left uncontested by most modern linguists like Witzel who at one time even allied with its contemporary and probably most fanatical votary, Steve Farmer. On the contrary, a scheme for relatively peaceful entry of Aryan migrants into the subcontinent can at best be subject to review and it"s beyond objection that these same experts of comparative linguistics like Witzel have erected a truly scholarly, complex and erudite, but by no means infallible argument in support of the same.
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