Aryans, Jews, Brahmins:

Dorothy M. Figueira, Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity, New Delhi, Navayana Publishing Pvt Ltd. (2002), Reprint 2017

Preface

…However, from a solely literary perspective, identifying the Aryan is a challenging task, since the texts used to delineate this figure are elusive; they function as absent authorities, often evoked but rarely cited.  Moreover, the Aryan is not just the figure that historians and linguists have sought to isolate, situate and follow in its migrations, but has also been the subject of myth-making….—p.vii

…Voltaire sought in India a sophisticated culture as far removed as possible from that of the ancient Hebrews. In this respect, ancient India provided him with an alibi in the true sense of the term, an elsewhere upon which he could superimpose his critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), who proclaimed ancient India to be the earliest human civilization, believed that the study of ‘ancient Indians’ could bring Europe closer to finding its roots. The Enlightenment project of seeking the potential similarity in all human beings and forging freedom from intolerance did find support in Herder’s delineation of Aryan practices and poetry. Ancient India here became synonymous with the ideal primitive world from which Enlightenment Europe felt it had much to learn….—p. vii

               As canonical Sanskrit texts were gradually translated into European languages and disseminated, nineteenth-century mythographers sought to read the history of the Aryans through their myths. Aryan India was cut to fit the Romantic ideals of a revealed monotheism (p.vii) and the development of a people’s unique character, and their gradual degeneration…..—pp. Vii-viii

….In the West this “discovery” of the Aryans through the Veda effectively displaced the Jews from their central position on the world stage. The Jews could now be assigned a subaltern role in history.  For the remainder of the nineteenth century, this myth of the Aryan was employed to construct an ideal imaginary past for Europe. It fostered nationalism and, in the process, identified a mythic scapegoat in the figure of the Jew. The Jew and the Aryan would now become the operative dyad….—p. viii

…In order to affect his reform, Rammohan Roy felt that this literature needed to be liberated from its Brahmin custodians. Toward this end, the Raja sometimes even rewrote texts to depict an ideal Aryan past in which certain religious practices (such as idolatry and sati) did not exist. With his translations, he established rules for textual validity and corrected the excrescences that he felt had led to extreme practices….—p. viii

…In order to portray the Aryans as sophisticated, Dayananda {Saraswati} “translated” the Veda to show that they had knowledge of telegraphy and chemistry. The myth of the Aryan Golden Age promulgated by both these Hindu reform movements set the stage for the development of Hindu nationalism.—p. viii

…He hoped to reactivate Aryan genius and implement it in the Indian present. Unlike other Indian reformers, Vivekananda did not limit his campaign on behalf of the Aryans to the domestic front but exported it abroad.  It was before Californian and Chicagoan society matrons that he detailed his vision of an Aryan future grounded in a racialist argument. This narrative played well with Westerners enthralled by the exotic India he was marketing. For Vivekananda, as for {B.G.} Tilak, discussions of the Aryan past tended, under the guise of orthodoxy, to mask a refusal to change the status quo of caste politics. In the Indian glorification of Aryan India, it was clear that the Brahmin descendants of the Aryans would be the only true beneficiaries of this myth-making.—p. ix

…Phule turned the myth of the Aryan back upon the elite, by taking just those strengths and virtues attributed to the Aryan by Western Orientalists and Brahmin reformers and transferring them to the lower castes. Instead of appealing to an Aryan Golden Age, Phule called for the reestablishment of an alternative mythical age—a non-Aryan Golden Age during the reign of King Bali. More importantly, by challenging the myth of a utopian Indian past, he introduced the new category of reason into the discussion. Phule thus unmasked how Aryan revivalism had occluded the hegemonic projects of brahminical reformers.—p. ix

               B.R. Ambedkar began his mission where Phule left.  Ambedkar started by challenging the authority of the Veda as the source of Aryan identity. He called into question its canonicity and infallibility and rejected its racial portrayal of the Aryans. He also questioned textually-based social reform that clearly served the needs of the privileged, lettered castes. Ambedkar concluded that all privileged-caste Hindu speculation regarding the Aryan was nothing but a strategy devised to support Brahmin superiority, justify their overlordship over non-brahmins and satisfy Brahmin arrogance….—p. ix

               It is important to note that all these constructions of identity are truly mythic, but not in the sense of an anthropological inquiry or as a component of literary culture.  Rather they attest to humanity’s continued insistence on carrying on quasi-mythical modes of thought, expression, and communication into a supposedly scientific age….—p. x

…Myths can be understood as collective representations.  Their purpose is in recording and validating institutions….—p. x

…It is this “underside” of myth that is examined in these pages, how Europeans and Indians deployed myths regarding the ancient Aryans in their various reform and nationalist projects. In both the East and the West, the resulting conclusions were, unfortunately, the same.  If you did not possess Aryan blood, you could not be civilized and those peoples identified as non-Aryan “others” needed to be neutralized or even destroyed….—p. x

Anything can be believed if one cites the authority of the Veda, if one takes some passage from the Veda, juggles it, gives it the most impossible meaning and murders everything reasonable in it.  If one presents one’s own ideas as ideas meant in the Vedas, “all fools will follow me in a crowd.”—Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.—no page number, but before introduction.

Introduction

The present is fractured; it consists of competing pasts. By positing the past as a special case of the present, one not only remakes the present, but creates a new past and redefines identity (as kind, race, family) through an act of memory. The past thus possesses socio-political instrumentality when perceptions of “history” are made relevant to the present. Conflicts concerning the past are, in fact, struggles suggesting the proper shape the present should take.  In such instances, history may be elevated to myth, when the needs of the present are read into the past and an image of the past is imposed on the present. History, once transformed into myth, becomes an instrument to construct social forms. It shapes the present through an evocation of the past and specific groups that inhabit it.—p. 1

…Myths concerning the Aryan race also served the ideological interests of Europe. The history of India could be appropriated as a means of expressing nineteenth-century European concerns with origins.—p. 1

…it {Rig Veda} provided a rather peculiar canon: open yet unerring, complete yet subject to reinterpretation. It posed multiple problems from a hermeneutical point of view.—pp. 1-2

…When we speak of rhe reception of the Veda in pre-nineteenth-century Europe and India, we are referring to either an absent or a falsely present text. In critical terms, the Veda functioned as an aporia. It also served as a metaphor since the Vedic tradition was often culled from texts that were not strictly “Vedic,” but “Vedantic” or even later.  Various Sanskrit texts function therefore as mediators of knowledge between the Aryan and its Other. On the level of history, they recount truth.  On the level of the text’s own production, the reader mediates this truth through idiosyncratic readings and authoritative definitions of what was considered “Vedic.”—p. 2

…I focus on how myths of identity can be tied to textualities….—p. 3

…I am indebted to Cassirer’s {Cassirer, Ernst.  Language and Myth. Trans.  Susanne K. Langer.  New York: Harper and Brothers. 1946} analysis of myth as a political tool constructed to confront or abet the overriding influences of the occult or irrationalism….—p. 3

               My working definitions of myth, therefore, is a composite of several approaches: Myth functions as a narrative which possesses credibility and authority and whose charters are manipulated to elicit sentiments which, in turn, construct social formations or legitimize changed social and political conditions. A myth can be restructured to activate “latent” symbolic meanings that play upon the sentiments of affinity to effect political reform…..—p. 3

…Following Thapar, I view the Aryan myth as a myth of descent, a narrative that can both serve to integrate diverse groups by providing common origins as well as be used for the reverse process of distinguishing one group from the other (Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.1992:142). By positing an authoritative beginning, a myth of descent uses the past to explain the present.—p. 3

…I am indebted to Michel de Certeau’s understanding of history as a staging of the past (Certeau, Michel de. The writings of History.  Trans. Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press,  1988: 9): Historians translate (“carry over”) elements of the past embedded in present-day consciousness and repackage them to figure in their own interpretative system. The historian thus creates a heterology or a discourse of the Other, wherein strategies are employed to convert alterity into something assimilable to the prevailing configuration of knowledge.—p. 4

…The Aryan as a mythic construct only exists in relation to its non-Aryan Other….—p. 4

…The time frame of part II encompasses the period during the solidification of British colonial rule, when Indian elites became concerned with the threat from above all well as from below. The desire for change, whether along lines of modernization or tradi-(p.4)tion, was motivated by the desire not to lose one’s position in the hierarchy….—pp. 4-5

…Presented consistently as the central sacred book, the various “Vedas” offer the reader a literary rather than historical construct of a single Hindu community that implies multiple imagined communities based on various identities (Thapar, Romila Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.  1992:84-85)….—p. 5

…The remaining chapters examine a curious situation in which the Vedic text, although present and available, recedes from its reader’s grasp. These readings are more evocations than models of reception. The “Vedic” text all but disappears or surfaces as an optical illusion. Beyond the mirage of the text, all that remains are the aspirations of readers who feel themselves marginalized under existing social structures. Their evocation of an Aryan canon, their call to the authority of an “Aryan” text, becomes the means whereby they confront their sense of estrangement and assert a reified Self. Whether the text is present, absent, or symbolic, these readings are no less “textual.”  Each use of a “Veda” to construct an Aryan identity is concerned with key literary issues of reading, canonicity, textual accessibility, hermeneutic strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The reception of the Veda in India and Europe is ultimately grounded in a discourse of readership and, as such, suggests the broader theoretical concerns of textually-bound identities and hegemonic textualities.—p. 5

Ch. 1 The Enlightenment and Orientalist Discourse on the Aryan.

…Voltaire found no difficulty in reconciling the sublimity of Indian religion with its modern superstitions: the Vedic Indian had simply been made soft by the climate (Voltaire. Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations. 2 vols. Paris: Garnier Freres. 1963:1.235-37). The climate’s effect was so pernicious that India’s conquerors even became weak under its influence (Voltaire. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Garnier Freres. 1885:13.158). Thus, human frailty (Voltaire 1963: 2.325) and nature (Voltaire 1963: 1.61) conspired to render man idolatrous.

               By disengaging a fictive Urform of Hinduism from all superstition and fanaticism, Voltaire effectively set up an ideal against which all other religions could be measured to their disadvantage….—p. 11

…In other words, Voltaire’s employment of India concentrated on four problems: it allowed him to call into question the chronology of the sacred book, the chosen status of the Jews, the origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the diffusion of our mythology, all of which challenged the historical importance of the Jewish people (Hawley, Daniel S.  “L’Inde de Voltaire.”  Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century. Vol. 120. Edited by Theodore Besterman, 139-77. Oxfordshire: Therpe Mandeville. 1974: 139-40).—p. 11

…a fictive India and fictional Aryan ancestors were constructed in the West to provide answers for questions regarding European identity. India enabled Europe to discover its “true” past.  Nowhere is this more true than in Voltaire’s attempt to rewrite the history of religions….—p. 16

….Voltaire also claimed that the Aryans originated the concept of the Devil, who, as the agent of sin, animated all Judeo-Christian theology(Voltaire. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Garnier Freres. 1885:

 29.484).  If this was indeed true, why, Voltaire asked, did Christianity bother to use a source as tenuous as a Jewish apocryphal book to explain the existence of evil(Voltaire. 1885: 29.172-73 )?  Why did Christianity seek to base itself solely on a myth that did not even appear in the Old Testament (Voltaire. 1885: 28.139)?

               Voltaire posed these questions with a clear response in mind.  By inserting this fundamental myth into an apocryphal book, the Jews contrived to claim authorship and displace the true founders of our faith. It was the Aryans, the Vedic brahmins, who had first developed these truths. The Jews subsequently repeated this mythology, after stealing it from its ancient Indian source. Just as the Jews stole the source of religions, so too did they steal the idea of Adam as the progenitor. (Voltaire. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Garnier Freres. 1885: 19.59) (p.16)

Such is Voltaire’s polemic: The Jews stole what was of worth in their religion from the Aryans, people whom they called Gog and Magog (Voltaire. 1885: 29.471). They then conspired to keep their fraud a secret. We, as Christians, have not dared to reveal this fraud, as our own beliefs are implicated (Voltaire. 1885: 29.481). We have to believe the Jews, although we detest them, because they are regarded as our precursors and masters (Voltaire. 1885: 11.47)—pp. 16-17

               The Veda was never more than a symbolic text for Voltaire. Nevertheless, it supplied him with an effective tool to launch a considerable attack: it combated idolatry, introduced Adam to the world, and provided an alternative scenario for the fall of Man. In short, the Veda provided “all the principles of theology” (Voltaire. Oeuvres completes. Paris: Garnier Freres. 1885: 11.192) that Voltaire needed or desired: baptism, the immortality of the soul, metempsychosis, the identification of Abraham with Brahm (sic), and of Adam and Eve with Adimo and Procriti. The description of the revolt of the angels found in Holwell’s Shastra prefigured the biblical account of Lucifer’s fall.—p. 17

…The Jews did not set the stage for Christianity; rather it was the Aryans who bequeathed to us a religion based on universal reason that the Jews subsequently distorted. In a late letter to Frederick the Great (December 1775), Voltaire reiterated that Christianity was founded solely on the ancient religion of “Brama” [sic].—p. 18

…The belief in a linguistic affinity of the Aryans with Persians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Tuscans, Goths, Celts, Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians implied that these peoples all proceeded from some central site of origin (Jones, Sir William. “Their Anniversary Discourse.” Asiatic Researches 1: 415-31. 1788: 431). That they all possessed languages structurally similar to our own became politically significant. Scholarship could now be enlisted in the service of empire. By rediscovering India’s Aryan past, England could subsequently presume that it was helping India help itself. This motive, explicit in Jones’s translation efforts (Figueria, Dorothy. Translating the Orient. Albany: State University of New York Pres.  1991: 25), also informed the portrayal of the Aryan in the scholarship of Henry Thomas Colebrooke (Muller, Friedrich Max.  “Discourse at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.” Miscellaneous Essays. 2 vols. London: William H. Allen and Co.  1837: 1.2). Colebrooke’s assessment of the Vedic materials was, however, more directly instrumental in defining the British colonial mission.—p. 23

Ch 2 The Romantic Aryans

…During the Enlightenment, the source of myth was believed to reside in humanity’s subjective inwardness, imagination, and fantasy. Myths were seen as intentionally and arbitrarily invented by the individual. Created out of an arbitrary freedom of consciousness, myths were viewed as trans-empirical.

               The Romantics (beginning with Schelling and culminating with Bachofen) shifted the origin of myth from the individual sphere into the collective, from the conscious into the unconscious. Under the influence of the historical school and its founder and leader Karl von Savigny, myth was thought to emanate from unconscious necessity and the regulation of natural instinct, out of a general human need or within specific national Volksgeister (Geimm and Bachofen). Historically real and concrete myth traditions mediated the unconscious nature of humanity. Through myth, the greatest nations put their stamp upon all history.

               Although situated in geographical and time-specific points of empirical history, myth expressed itself as renewing repetitions of divine revelation….By placing the source of myth in the collective unconscious, Romantic myth theorists such as Gorres, Kanne, Grimm, and Bachofen presupposed a unified mythical Weltanschauung among all peoples, epochs, and generations that evidenced (p.27) objectively knowable and legitimate Truth. This mythological sensus communis developed unmistakably from the Enlightenment construction of natural religion and vision of common beliefs in a common humanity.—pp. 27-28

               For the Romantics, therefore, myths was viewed in the ethical sense as an internal embodiment of the summum bonum: uncontrived, original, and nature….It read myth as an index of internal and external life, a medium whereby modern society and culture could be analyzed. The childlike, pure, and innocent virtues found in myth appeared as a positive Gegenbild to the rotten and degenerative affectedness of modern civilization.  The past was better than the present; the mythical past functioned as a model for an ideal form of present and future society. Romantic mythography presented a flight before worldly, artistic, and political difficulties and duties of the modern world into a sentimental romanticized and idealized past.  Grounded as it was in historical traditions, the valorization of myth necessarily entailed the valorization (and mythologization) of national cultures as a favoured worldly site of the Divine….—p. 28

…{Schlegel}…His insistence on linguistic polygenesis led him to group languages either as inflected or agglutinative. The former possessed divine origin; the latter, animal….( Schlegel, Friedrich. Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Edited by S. Timparero. Amsterdam: John Bengamins, 1977:41-59, 65-70)….Schlegel postulated that German and other languages developed from Sanskrit because they possessed inflection (ibid. 3.35-36, 71, 62, 66).  He believed that other languages, such as Chinese and Hebrew, lacked this inflection and were agglutinative by means of affixes joined to the roots (ibid. 33, 44ff, 48, 50ff). Because of inflections, Sanskrit and its derivative languages were seen as living organisms, capable of penetrating intelligence (ibid. 68-69)…. (p.29)

               This erroneous linguistic theorizing served Schlegel as a metaphorical edifice constructed to isolate Sanskrit from other languages and support his belief in its perfection and divine origin….—pp. 29-30

…Although Schlegel presented India as a problematic locus of the Divine in the philosophical, religious, and translation sections of Uber die Sprache, { Schlegel, Friedrich. Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Edited by S. Timparero. Amsterdam: John Bengamins, 1977} in the linguistic chapters India emerges as the cradle of humanity and Sanskrit appears as the mother tongue of Indo-European languages.—p. 30

…Thus, Schlegel {Friedrich of German} offered to use philological research, rather than the mythology lost with the Veda, or the religion he found distasteful, to argue his thesis that India and Europe formed an indivisible whole.—p. 30

…The purest cult of Jehovah, as practiced by Abraham, would then represent nothing more than an isolated branch of old “Brahmanism” (Creuzer, Georg Fredrick. Symbolik und Myuthologie der alten Voker, besonders der Griechen. 6. Vols. Leipzing and Darmstadt. 1819-23: 1.570). With such assertions, Creuzer went further than other polemicists in deemphasizing the role of Judaism in the history of religions. The jews were not the only recipients of the true doctrine (ibid. 2.375-76). This logic called into question the authority, even for someone like Schlegel, of the Old Testament.  For Creuzer, Israel became an equal partner with Aryan India (ibid. 1.575).—p. 32

…The hermetic books of Egypt, a land once colonized by the Hindus, derived from it as did all vestige of what was positive in Greek thought. Gorres also reduced the religion of Judea to primitive “Brahmanism” imparted by Brahma-Abraham (Gorres, Joseph. Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt. Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer, 1810:2.329, 435-36, 556).  The Jews owe their entire religion to the Vedic Indians, and Christians worship the Aryan Brahma as Christ (ibid. 571).  According to Gorres’s schema, the center of gravity has once again shifted from Judea to India (ibid. 1.xxxiv-xxxvi), and the Hebrews have become a subgroup of the elected people. Gorres characterized Aryan religion by its innocence.  This golden age lasted but a short time manifested primarily in its custom of bloodless sacrifices of fruit offerings. Its adherents suffered persecution.  This pure and simple faith was eventually replaced by wild orgiastic phallic worship (ibid. 1.570-71, 576)…..—p. 32

               While Herder tried to incorporate India within his exegesis of the Old Testament and Creuzer { Creuzer, Georg Fredrick. Symbolik und Myuthologie der alten Voker, besonders der Griechen. 6. Vols. Leipzing and Darmstadt. 1819-23} posited the equivalence of India and Judea, Gorres { Gorres, Joseph. Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt. Heidelberg: Mohr and Zimmer, 1810} elevated Indian religion above Judaism.  He associated other prophets (Toth, Zoroaster, Fohi, Theut, and Othin) with Brahma (Abraham) only to the degree that their doctrines reflected those of the Oupnek ‘hat. Creuzer and Gorres (as well as other Romantic mythographers such as Majer and Kanne) attributed the universality of myth to divine revelation. They all situated this revelation in India. But, the idea of the existence of a purely Indo-European religious community did not enter their formulations. It was Karl Ritter who developed the first features of Indo-European primitive religion.—p. 33

               Ritter {Ritter, Carl. Die Vorhalle der Europaischen Volkergeschichte vor Herodots, um den Kaukaus und an den Gestaden des Pontus. Eine Abhandlung zur Alterthumskunde. Berlin: G. Reimer.} grounded the religious, linguistic, and racial community of Indo-Europeans in a vision of monotheistic religion originating in India….—p. 33

…For Muller, as for others we have examined in these pages, the quest for the Aryan exhibited a cultural attempt to restore one’s won tradition.

I wished that the Veda and its religion and philosophy should not only seem to you curious or strange, but that you should feel that there was in them something that concerns ourselves, something of our own intellectual growth, some recollections, as it were, of our own childhood, or at least of the childhood of our own race. (Muller, Friedrich Max. India, What Can It Teach Us? London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1892: 254)

More importantly, it offered “solutions to some of the greatest problems of life, and the needed corrective for the inner life of Europe” (Muller 1892:6).

The Aryans

Were the true ancestors of our race; and the Veda is the oldest book we have in which to study the first beginnings of our language, and of all that is embodied in language. (Muller Friedrich Max. Chips from a German Workshop. 5 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1895:1.4)—p. 34

…As we have seen throughout our examination of the Veda’s reception in the West, even when it was not an issue of translation conventions, the Veda always engendered discussions on race and ethnicity and exhibited a European attempt both to appropriate the Aryan worldview and to dissociate it from anything Indian….—p. 35

…The crux of the matter was as follows: The (p.35) Aryan tradition was lost to the Indians in the post-Vedic period, but not to the European who, no matter how far removed from the tradition, was never far removed from its vision (Tull, Herman W. “F. Max Muller and A. B. Keith—Orientalism versus Indology—Twaddle, the Stupid Myth and the Disease of Indology.” Numen 38, n. 1:27-58,  1991:40). The German Romantics had adequately set the stage for European readers to believe that, through the science of language, they could access an identity that was theirs alone and foreign to modern Indians.—pp. 35-36

               It is to be remembered that the Romantics held that the simplicity of religious dogmas defined the original state of man and its corollaries that monotheism was anterior to polytheism and primitive revelation had progressively degenerated….Muller’s conclusions concerning the Veda recapitulated this central Romantic thesis.—p. 37

…It is (p.40) through an analysis of these common roots that Muller reconstructed the original Aryan home through a mosaic picture of their fauna, flora, agriculture, food, drink, family life, political organizations, arts, morality, and mythology (Muller, Friedrich Max. Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryans. London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1888:126-27). Since there had been no exchange between the Aryans who went toward Persia and India and those who went to Europe, all the common words, especially those of mythology and religion, could be claimed as common property of the whole Aryan race before the initial dispersion (Muller, Natural Religion. London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1889: 295).—pp. 40-41

               Within the fold of the Aryan race, Muller included the Hindus, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Slavs, the Celts, and “last, not least, the Teutons” (Muller, Friedrich Max. India, What Can It Teach Us? London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1892: 116).  Certain groups, however, did not belong to his schema. For example, Muller excluded from the Aryan family the “really barbarian races” such as Africans and American Indians (Muller, Friedrich Max. History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature so far as It Illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans.  New York: AMS Press.  1978: 558) as well as the Turanian and Semitic races, over all of whom the Aryans historically ruled (Muller 1978: 15). Even before the initial dispersion, the Aryans lived separately from the Semities and Turanians (Muller 1978: 14).  Therefore, Europeans need claim no parent with these races. (p.42)

We are by nature Aryan, Indo-European, not Semitic: our spiritual kith and kin are to be found in India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Germany; not in Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Palestine. (Muller Friedrich Max. Chips from a German Workshop. 5 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1895: 1.4).—pp. 42-43

Until the deciphering of the Veda, there has been “but one oasis in the vast desert of ancient Asiatic history, the history of the Jews.”  The Veda now offers another such oasis (Muller Friedrich Max. Chips from a German Workshop. 5 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.  1895: 1.5-6) as well as another instance of revelation (ibid. 1.17), “the wisdom of Him who is not the God of the Jews alone( (Muller, Friedrich Max. History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature so far as It Illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans.  New York: AMS Press. 1978: 3). Our knowledge of universal history is imperfect if we narrow our horizon to history of Greeks and Romans, Saxons and Celts, with a dim background of Palestine, Egypt, and Babylon, and leave out of sight our nearest intellectual relatives, the Aryas of India, the framers of the most wonderful language, Sanskrit, the fellow-workers in the construction of our fundamental concepts, the fathers of the most transparent of mythologies, the inventors of the most subtle philosophy, and the givers of the most elaborate laws (Muller, Friedrich Max. India, What Can It Teach Us? London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1892: 15).—p. 43

               In the contest between Sanskrit and Hebrew, it was necessary for Sanskrit to prevail. To do so, Muller first demoted Hebrew from its position as the Ursprache (Muller, Friedrich Max, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India. London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1879: 246-67). Next, he sought to isolate Sanskrit from any filiation with Hebrew….—p. 43

               Similarly, in the contest between the Rig Veda and the Old Testament, it was clear which text Muller preferred. Since he could not fix the date of individual books of the Old Testament, Muller just dismissed them as the basis of our ideas on ancient history or religion (Muller, Friedrich Max, Physical Religion. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1891: 214). The Old Testament merely revealed the extent to which decay was prevalent in the religion of the Jews. Although Old Testament writers had tried to hide the traces of degeneration, by placing the religion of the Jews before us as readymade from the beginning, perfect, revealed, and incapable of improvement, they only succeeded in highlighting its pervasive decay (Muller, Friedrich Max, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India. London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1879: 125)

…To create a self entailed distinguishing an Other, lacking those qualities one attributed to the Self….—p. 44

               However, Muller’s myth of the Aryan throughout the thirty-odd years of editing the Rig Veda entailed the very type of categorical mixing that he condemned in the Strassburg lecture.  How do we explain this paradox?  I have tried to show how it was far less an issue of Muller’s blindness toward his methodology (though that too was at issue) than his adherence to a Romantic emplotment of India. His need to construct the Vedic Aryan from the text and identify with this Aryan stemmed from religious and aesthetic concerns far more akin to the aims of Romanticism than nineteenth-century race theory.

               Muller would be shocked at an assessment of his work in the light of Romanticism….—p. 46

               One can see a pattern in Muller’s classifications of language, gods, and mythology. His analyses move from the material to the immaterial, the concrete to the abstract, the simple to the complex, and the single to the general….—p. 46

…By placing mythology and polytheism at the door of language, he continued a tradition begun by Friedrich Schlegel. He retooled the methodology of Romantic linguistics into his science of language.  Muller’s reading of the Veda verified the Romantic claim that India was the original seat of true poetry and primitive revelation, and the site of its degeneration….(p.46)

               This Indologist, a final avatar of Romanticism in service of linguistics, popularized an ideal vision of the Aryan that would bear fruit.  Although he himself tried to resist the “patriotic: impulses, Muller had to admit that he would be as proud as anyone to look upon “Germany as the cradle of all Arya life (Muller, Friedrich Max. Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryans. London: Longmans, Green and Co.  1888: 127) and “Teutonic speech as the fountain of all Aryan thought” (ibid. 154).  So, indeed, did the nonspecialists who expanded upon his theories.—pp. 46-47

…Enlightenment thinkers idealized the Vedic past in an attempt to find a utopia outside Europe and as an alternative to the biblical tradition. Romantic mythographers not only accepted Aryan genius, but prioritized it. Speculation regarding the Aryan provided a means whereby Indian history could be used to create a “fresh historical tradition” that expressed specifically European political and ideological interests (Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1992: 2).  While Evangelicals, Utilitarians, and colonial administrators could only envision India’s salvation through a rejection of its irrational culture, conversion to Christianity, and embrace of British rule, scholars sympathetic to Indian culture, epitomized by the figure of F. Max Muller, effectively promulgated an idealized portrait of the Aryan in order to counter those who championed this backward view of the Indian past. By focusing on the common descent and the legitimate relationship between the Hindu and the Anglo-Saxon, however, Muller adopted a strategy that would have serious repercussions.—p. 47

…What Europeans sought in India was not Indo-European religion, but a reassessment of Judeo-Christianity. The development of the concept of an Aryan religion proved to be a consequence, rather than the goal of these metaphorical journeys to the East.—p. 48

               The discovery that there existed in India a tradition older or at least as old as the biblical tradition was regarded as an event of the first magnitude, only to be compared in its consequences to the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance. Through the study of India’s past, it was hoped that scholars could reconstruct the history of mankind’s origin and past, the development of religions and philosophies. By giving Vedic Aryans a place in universal history, a crucial displacement of the Jews was (p.48) effected.  Much of the discourse concerning the Veda effectively resulted in assigning the Jews a subaltern role in history….—p. 48-49

…We can acknowledge, however, that the European discourse on the absent Veda created a portrait of pure and cultivated Aryan ancestors which wielded such authority that the subsequent discovery of the text could not alter the welter of assumptions and fantasies that formed its initial interpretation This ideology of the Aryan participated in the formation of a new mythology of the past.  This mythology was fuelled by irrational impulses growing out of anxiety regarding questions of national identity and mission.  Themes which resonate in the works of the authors we investigated found their way into the new mythology: the displacement of the Jews from a central position on the stage of history; theories regarding the degeneration of peoples and religions from unity and purity to multiplicity and polytheism; and the idealization of imaginary ancestors and their fictitious descendants. Thus, the myth of the Aryan was employed not only to construct the origins of society, but also to foster nationalism.  In its latter configuration, it could eventually be used to disarticulate existing society and rearticulate an alternative noteworthy for its identification of a mythic scapegoat.—p. 49

Ch. 3 Nietzsche’s Aryan Ubermensch

               {Louis} Jacolliot had been stationed as a French colonial official near Calcutta.  His publications were of a nonspecialist nature.  He was a populizer of the “fantastic” school who believed that all intellectual and spiritual thought could be traced back to India (Etter, Annemarie. “Neitzsche und das Gesetzbuch des Manu.” Nietzsche Studien 16: 340-52, 1987: 345-46).  Jacolliot’s Manu is a product of the India that had been codified in the Enlightenment. Jacolliot’s anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity (directed primarily against Rome) have their precedent in Volaire’s fulminations, as does his notion that Christianity is a pale copy of brahminism….Jacolliot suppoied Nietzsche with the significant and erroneous notion that Manu was the oldest sourcebook of the Aryan world, dating its compilation at 13,000 B.C.  It was, therefore, thanks to Jacolliot that Nietzsche’s entire understanding of Manu was flawed….—p. 53

…Priests turned away from action and combined brooding with emotional volatility, as seen in the anti-sensual and enervating metaphysics of the Brahmins.

With priests, everything becomes more dangerous: not only cures and therapies, but also arrogance, revenge, perspicacity, extravagance, love, desire to dominate, virtue, illness. (Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals.  Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966,I.6)

Priestly claims to power did not stem from naivete or self-deception.  “Fanatics” do not invent such carefully thought-out systems of oppression.  The most cold-blooded reflection was at work. Manu provides the classic model in a specifically Aryan form of priestly ambition. It presents the most fundamental lie ever formulated, a lie that, copied almost everywhere, has corrupted the whole world (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.142)

               In particular, this Aryan spirit of the priest corrupted the Jews and Christians.  The ideal of a state run by priests (“Semitism”) consists of reviving the Aryan order of caste (Will to Power 143).  Nietzsche felt that caste should be reinstated, since modern society had been overrun by scum, criminals, and the mentally ill.  Because of Christianity, modern society is no longer a society at all, but a “sick conglomerate of candalas” without the strength to excrete (Will to Power 50).  The establishment of equal rights had created a social hodge-podge, where the canaille of all the castes had mingled their blood. After two or three generations of mixing, race was no longer recognizable and everything had become a mob (Will to Power 864).

               The Brahmin priest and the candala outcaste became pregnant symbols for Nietzsche.  He equated the candala with all that was wrong with society.19  However, Nietzsche also identified the candala with the figure of the philosopher (The Antichrist. In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Viking Penguin. 13) and, by extension, with himself. Finally, he established the candala as the antithesis to the Ubermensch and identified the brahmin with the Aryan.  Thus, the philosopher’s fascination with caste regulations had wide-ranging significance for his moral system.—p. 55

19. It is important to note that Nietzsche’s references to the candala are not found in Manu, but were inventions of Jacolliot.

…Europe needed a new order lest Christian values of mercy and compassion destroy it.  Without an order of rank, the sick and the weak flourish, and culture becomes “the sum of zeroes, with every zero having equal rights” (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. 53).  Nietzsche found a propitious model for such a highly stratified social and political system in the aristocratic “Aryan” society that he discovered in Manu.—p. 56

               Nietzsche clearly equated morality with the improvement of man as a species. He viewed such improvement taking two possible forms: through taming (as in the case of an animal in a zoo or a human in the Church) or (p.56) through breeding of a definite race.  Judging the latter option preferable, he viewed its most grandiose example revealed in Manu.  Nietzsche understood Manu as a text primarily dealing with the task of breeding four races.  He found the Aryans who developed Manu’s “breeding” morality a hundred times more gentle and rational than the Christians who had devised a taming morality (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols. The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Viking Penguin. 1982, 7.3).  To enter the Aryan utopia described in Manu was akin to escaping the fetid air of the Christian sick house and dungeon (Kranken–und Kerkerluft).  Quite literally, the New Testament “stinks” when compared to Manu.  Juxtaposed to the law book of the ruling class of Aryan India, it represented a paltry (armselig) tradition.—pp. 56-57

               In Christianity, the individual had become so important that he could no longer be sacrificed.  According to Nietzsche, nothing was more dangerous than when all types became equal before God (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.246). Christianity, as a counterprinciple to selection, represented the anti-Aryan religion par excellence: a total subversion (Umwerthung) of Aryan values and a victory of candala values (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols. The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Viking Penguin. 1982, 7,4).  With Christianity, the masters had been defeated by common men. Their victory entailed blood poisoning (Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals.  Trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966, I.9). As the religion for the poor and downtrodden, the wretched, ill-constituted and underprivileged, plebeian Jewish Christianity defeated race (ibid. I.9).  Although it passed itself off as a religion of love, Christianity represents nothing but the revenge of the candala (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols. The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Viking Penguin. 1982, 7.4). It denies the enslavement necessary to bring about the emergence of a higher type (Will to Power 259).

               In order for Christianity to function as a candala religion, it had to have originated among a candala people.  And indeed, Nietzsche speculated that the Jews were once candalas under the servitude of Hindus….(p.57) In other words, the Jews recognized their candala status, embraced it, and turned it to their advantage. They incorporated animosity against the aristocratic, noble, and proud into their religion.  They institutionalized their hatred against power and the ruling classes (Will to Power 184).  Their revolt ultimately resulted in the creation of the true candala religion, Christianity (Will to Power 145), when the Jewish priestly caste itself became a privileged aristocracy and was overthrown. Christ was the ultimate candala, a figure who rejected the Jewish priests in order to be redeemed (Nietzsche Friedrich, Kritische Studienausgabe.  Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter.1986: 13. 396)….—pp. 57-58

…Nietzsche felt that, had it been their predeliction, the Jews could have conquered Europe.  Their priority lay elsewhere—in finding a homeland—and Nietzsche called upon Europe to accommodate the Jew in this legitimate quest (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Randaom House, 1966,  261). He feared the increasing violence directed against Jews (Nietzsche Friedrich, Human, All Too Human. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 1.475). In other words, Nietzsche (p.58) admired both the contemporary Jew and the prophets of the Old Testament.  It was the priestly, prophetic strand of Judaism that he despised.—pp. 58-59

               Nietzsche found it significant that the Aryans had sought to regulate morality through human law rather than through divine scripture. He felt that by creating a law book like Manu and imbuing it with superordinate authority, the Aryans were willing to concede for themselves the right to become masterful and perfect.  Nietzsche, in fact, viewed them as a master race (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House.145). Through experimentation, they had perfected their way of life.  The caste system, the supreme dominating Aryan law, was made to appear as a natural law sanctioning a natural order, exempt from arbitrary caprice and “modern ideas” (The Antichrist. In The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann.  New York: Viking Penguin.  57). The highest caste represented this nobility.

…They rule not because they want to but because they are, they are not free to be second….—p. 59

…He considered the brahmin as the highest type of man, the complete antithesis of the candala (Nietzsche, Friedrich, Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Random House. 139). Brahmins incarnated for Nietzsche the abstract Aryan virtues of strength, duty, power, and order (Nietzsche Friedrich, Kritische Studienausgabe.  Edited by G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: de Gruyter. 1986: 13.381). Their asceticism consisted of moderation in diet and sexual activity. Their disdain for wealth and worldly power enabled them to rule over others.  Nietzsche even endowed his ideal brahmins with a will to power.  Nietzsche claimed that the brahmins were emancipated from the senses and dignified, as opposed to the savage, who was an unclean and incalculable beast (Will to Power 237). The brahmin was a terror-inspiring animal-tamer towards his beasts.—p. 60

…As Wilhelm Halbfass has shown, an historical refusal to engage Indian philosophy has contributed to the Eurocentrism of the institutional discourse of philosophy. India was excluded both from the genetic context of the European history of philosophy and from the domain to which the concept of philosophy is applicable (Halbfass, Wilhelm. i. Albany: State University of New York Press,  1988: 155)….—p. 61

…There are great dangers in reading literature in the service of ideological rewritings of history. Literary works should not be dissected and mined for what they can offer by way of a specific thesis, nor should they be made to fit dogmatic institutional scripts. When this occurs, criticism becomes brahmanical: it hierarchizes a caste of readers wielding priestly power in the temples of academe.—p. 63 [beautiful—db]

Ch. 4 Loose Can[n]ons

…The European quest for origins and desire to minimize their indebtedness to the Hebrews motivated the initial modern theories of race.—p. 64

…In the Vie de Jesus (1863), Renan went further when he purged Jesus of his Jewishenss…..—p. 66 [I cannot trace any reference to Renan, E. In the bibliography—db]

…Before 1850, many placed the original home of the Aryan in India.  However, when racial anthropologists applied their various sciences to the problem of origins, they found linguistic, archaeological, and anatomical reasons for situating the Aryan homeland in their own backyards, whether that be north or central Germany, Scandinavia, or the Baltic region. They also invariably claimed pure descent. The myth of the Aryan was fundamentally Manichaean. Borrowing from the social Darwinists the vision of humanity in a constant struggle for survival, the Aryan myth explained the world in terms of a relentless combat between the forces of good and evil. The Aryan was solidly identified with everything good….—p. 67

…From this hymn, {Rig Veda x. 129.7} Chamberlain concluded that Aryan moral speculation did not narrow itself to questions of good and evil, as did that of the Jews (Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Howard Fertig.  1968: 2.109). Rather, the Aryan was motivated in all matters by the will.—p. 79

               Moreover, the Aryans invented monotheism in the Rig Veda (i.164.46) and provided its most sublime form. The Jews stole monotheism from the Aryans. In fact, all Christian dogma found its source in Aryan religion. The Rig Veda supplied Christianity with the concept of God becoming man. The Aryan doctrine of the Atman became a tenet of the religion of Jesus and later found expression that essentially Aryan author Meister Eckhart (Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Howard Fertig.  1968: 2. 412-13).  The notion of the Virgin birth also derived from Vedic nature symbols, as did the altar and sacraments originate in Vedic nature cults rather than in Jewish peace offerings to any angry god (ibid. 2.26).

               As a figure overflowing with life (that is, attending banquets, forgiving sins of the flesh, proud, and combative), Jesus was specifically Aryan (ibid. 1.259).  In no way could he be considered a Jew (ibid. 1.256)….(p. 79) most important teaching of Christ was linked to the idealist religion of the Aryans and not the legalistic and materialistic faith of the Jews. In his attitude and religious thinking, Jesus was the “God of the young Indo-European peoples” (ibid. 1.245)….Unfortunately, the Jews, “men of chaos,” disfigured these Aryan elements and bequeathed them to Christianity in their present distorted form (ibid. 2.23-27; 109-10),²³ making Christianity a mere annex of Judaism (ibid. 1.417).—pp. 79-80

23. Chamberlain did not, however, reject the Old Testament outright. He felt that some Protestant scholars of his time had made it possible to sift out the Indo-Aryan myths that had been engulfed by Semitic concepts.—p. 175

…Through miscegenation with Jews, Teutonic Aryans had broken all the laws of racial breeding and brought on their own destruction. Chamberlain {Chamberlain Houston Stewart. Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York: Howard Fertig.  1968}, therefore, implored Germans to undertake a valiant fight and recapture their heritage from the alien grasp of hte Jew, volkerchaos, and the Semitized Church.—p. 80

…It was Rosenberg’s task not only to condemn the distortion of Christianity (primarily in its Roman Catholic configuration), but also to set the record straight. The most important error that needed to be rectified pertained to Jesus’ true identity. {Rosenberg, Alfred. Der Mythus des Zwangzigsten Jahrhunderts.  Munich: Hoheneichen. 1937}

…Christ, in fact, was an authentic Aryan rather than a Jew. He was not of Jewish stock because the inhabitants of Galilee were descendants of Amorites, Aryans who had come to the region around 700 B.C.  By 100 BC., the Jews had established hegemony over the Aryan city of Jerusalem, forcing the non-Jews into the Gentile district of Galilee. When Joseph returned to Bethelem, he was returning not as a son of the tribe of David, but as the son of Aryan exiles who had been driven out by Jews.

…What we moderns understand as the word of God is actually a gross distortion of His actual message. The Jew Paul totally subverted Christ’s teachings by Judaizing them. Paul replaced the true, Aryan, and heroic Christ with a weakling seeking to mediate human salvation through love, humility, and brotherhood.—p. 83

…The new Nordic Christian Church that the Nazis sought to establish aimed at leading men back to a heroic supherhumanity. To return to the original Aryan faith, it was also necessary to restore the feeling of individuality that had previously existed.  Aryan individuality had first been destroyed by the hazy monism of the post-Aryan Indians (Rosenberg, Alfred. Der Mythus des Zwangzigsten Jahrhunderts.  Munich: Hoheneichen. 1937: 389)  It reasserted itself in Christ, only to be destroyed again by the Roman Church (Ibid. 390).³⁰  The new Aryan religion of National Socialism sought to reinstate the individual will and commitment to action that Germans had lost during the post-Vedic era.—p. 84

30. Hitler left it to Rosenberg to launch the attack on Catholicism. Rosenberg hated the “black, international” Roman Catholic Church as much as he hated Judaism. It had corrupted the Germans from the start.—p. 176

…We have come full circle from the Enlightenment and Romantic authority of an absent text to the authority vested in a virtual text. The myth of the Aryan gained authority in the West as a text-centered construct even before “Vedic” texts were discovered and deciphered.  Later, when these texts became present, their authority remained on the level of the imaginary, unmediated by any bonds of textuality.  The Aryan was initially and remained an object of pure fantasy.  We are all aware of the dire consequences that resulted.  All that was needed was an historical grudge and a demagogue to activate this phantasm.—p. 88

Ch. 5 Rammohan Roy

…It was the subject of nine complete commentaries {on Manu} and more frequently cited than any other dharmashastra. In theory, Indians have always taken Manu very seriously.  Whether its privileged status extended to actual use in legal courts is another matter….—p. 94

… {Raja Rammohan} Roy gave centrality only to those texts that could be read to support universalist and modern interpretations. Toward this end, the Raja drew primarily from those texts that easily lent themselves to reinterpretation suiting his immediate concerns for social reform….—p. 94

…Moral precepts that he found present in his “Veda” appeared only in scattered form. Since he felt Christian ethics presented the same system of morality in a manner better suited for the discharge of social duties, {Raja Rammohan} Roy incorporated the precepts of Jesus into his canon as a basis for teaching morality.  He continued to champion the validity of “Vedic” texts, but acknowledged the unacceptable errors that they had accrued over time, clouding their moral focus.—p. 95

…Although eternal and immutable, this Veda could be employed to explain a process of change and provide a fluid sacred authority upon which an interpreter could impose a personal thematic.  Canonical gerrymandering and free translation techniques restructured the authoritative texts. They could now be read “objectively,” that is, to support the pillars of Rammohan’s reform: the condemnation of sati and polytheistic idolatry (Roy, Rammohun. The English Works of Rammohun Roy. 2 vols. Edited by Jogendra Chunder Ghose.  Calcutta: Cosmo Publications.1906:5).  The Raja read and sometimes rewrote the “Vedic” canon to depict an ideal Aryan past where these practices did not exist.—p. 95

…Roy’s condemnation of sati rests, therefore, upon three claims of validity.  Passages are first assessed according to intent. A text, whatever its status, that promotes superstition, idolatry, or the promotion of selfish ritual must be discarded. Secondly, passages are judged by authenticity and reliability.  These factors are judged by corroborative textual evidence.  Thirdly, corroboration is sought in the most authoritative text.  Barring Vedic corroboration, it is to be found in the next most authoritative source.  Roy reads Manu as inviolate and claims a text valid only insofar as it agrees with Manu (Roy, Rammohun. The English Works of Rammohun Roy. 2 vols. Edited by Jogendra Chunder Ghose.  Calcutta: Cosmo Publications.1906: 343)  Manu, therefore, can overrule all other lawbooks and, in this case, the Veda itself.  At the expense of the Rig Veda, Manu is  deemed truly “Vedic.”  As such, Manu’s assessment is deemed valid and original.  Roy reads Manu’s enjoinder for widows to live virtuous lives as the legitimate condemnation of the rite.  The condemnation of sati thus pivoted upon the rhetorical use of scripture, its shifting authority, and conflicting truth claims.  Rammohan Roy’s critique of idolatry further developed this line of argument.—p. 96

…Upon closer inspection of {Rammohan} Roy’s translations, one realizes the extent to which he editorialized scripture to promote his reform agenda….—p. 99

…He {Rammohan Roy} sought to establish a means whereby Hinduism, whose conventional sacred duties had been confined to ceremonial rites and offerings, might be transformed and brought into the service of the community. He expressly sought to promote the comfort of his people and unite them by reviving the “Vedant” and disseminating religion in book form.—p. 101

6 Text-based Identity: Dayanand Saraswati’s Reconstruction of the Aryan Self.

…Although Hindus paid homage to the Vedas, the Puranas were the scriptures used by the masses and the elites alike.  Even for rituals, priests did not rely on the Srauta Sutras, but on medieval glosses of their commentaries that had been written in Sanskrit (Sen, S. P. Social and Religious Reform Movements in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.  Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies.  1979: 328).  The perception of scriptural value was often more important than content or authorship.—p. 107

…The most notable book disputation took place in Benares in 1869.  Here, Dayanand {Saraswati} challenged the pundits to prove that idol worship had Vedic sanction by demanding that they physically produce references. They, of course, could not prove Vedic authority for idolatry. Only the Puranas sanction it, and Dayanand’s opponents based their claim on this authority.

…Although the topic was idolatry, the ensuing debated ended abruptly in the  midst of a discussion concerning whether the Puranas were an expression of the same religion as was found in the Vedas Legend has it that one of the pundits produced some pages containing the term purana (“old”), and while Dayanand was reading them, the pandit declared victory. Dayanand was pelted with stones and police whisked him away (Jordens, J. T. F. “Dayanand Saraswati and Vedanta: A Comparison of the First and the Second Editions of his Satyarth Prakash.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9: 367-79.  1978: 68)……—p. 107

…It was a curious move on his {Dayanand Saraswati} part to posit the Vedic samhitas as the sole authority, since they were historically viewed as ritualist text….—p. 108

               Regarding the rest of Hindu scripture, Dayanand {Saraswati} only considered those texts written before the Mahabharata War in the Vedic Golden Age, the arsha literature, as authoritative….

               In an exhaustive statistical analysis of Dayanand’s use of source material, J. E. Llewellyn has further shown to what degree Dayanand relied on arsha (p.108) literature when the samhita portions of the four Vedas did not offer sufficient material to substantiate an idealized vision of Aryan reality.  Llewellyn has quantified the extent to which Dayanand based his portrait of the Aryans on a limited Vedic canon supplemented by alternative authorities from arsha literature that were not Vedic as Dayanand defined it, but could be used canonically in conjunction with the Veda to support argumentation (Llewellyn, J. E. The Arya Samaj as a Fundamentalist Movement. Delhi: Mahohar.  1993: 207).  In order to develop a full theory of polity, for example, Dayanand relied primarily on Manu.  Expediency overrode his self-imposed canonical strictures. The important point in this regard is that, textually, Dayanand’s Vedic world was no more “Vedic” than Rammohan Roy’s translations of the Upanishads. Moreover, in order to read this “Veda: in support of an idealized vision of the Aryan world, Dayanand devised a series of hermeneutical ploys that further facilitated his thesis that the Vedas embody a totality of truth.

               Llewellyn has shown how, in general, Dayanand was not truly consistent in his use of citations (ibid. 231).  References to sources frequently did not even follow the authority quoted (ibid. 240).  In the great majority of cases, Dayanand presented his own interpretation of the Vedic passage without any reference to supporting material (ibid. 231, 238).  When he chose to support hsi readings, he prominently featured non-Vedic arsha texts noteworthy for their interpretive flexibility (ibid. 235-37).  Dayanand also allowed himself considerable freedom through an impressionistic treatment of verbs…. It virtually liberated his “authoritative” reading of the ultimately canonical text from any bonds of textuality.

               However, Dayanand’s most effective strategy for reading the Veda to support his argument was to be found in his fanciful etymologies and translations. Creative etymology allowed Dayanand to draw his rather baroque conclusions—that the Aryans possessed sophisticated scientific data regarding air filtration and wter purification techniques. (Dayanand, Saraswati. Rgvedadibhashya-Bhumika.  Trans. Parmanand. Delhi: Mehardhand Lachmandas. 1981: 327), the science of aeronautics (ibid. 264), and techniques of medicine (ibid. 2676).  Grammar and semantics were enlisted to support Dayanand’s unique notion that the Vedas were the repository of all scientific truth (Jordens, J. T. F. “Dayanand Saraswati and Vedanta: A Comparison of the First and the Second Editions of his Satyarth Prakash.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 9: 367-79.  1978: 272).  Creative translations also allowed Dayanand to reveal the Aryans’ historical commitment to social progress. The Yajur Veda (p.109) text 20.10 is literally translated thus: “I take my stand on princely power and kingship.”  Dayanand renders this passage:

I live in a kingdom which is administered righteously and in the country which is awakened, due to the widespread literacy and morality.

Two sentences later in the same passage, the Sanskrit can be rendered thus: “I stay on welfare, on upper regions and earth and I recline on sacrifice,” to which Dayanand offers the following reading:

Those who carry on duties of government regarding me as their supreme Lord, achieve always triumph and progressive prosperity. All government officials therefore should strive to enlighten the people with knowledge and justice and should protect them so that injustice and ignorance may be uprooted. (Dayanand, 1981:293).—pp. 109-110

…In other words, Dayanand’s interpretive strategies established a hermeneutical structure that foreclosed all competing value systems: scientific, religious, and, finally historical.—p. 110

…In short, Dayanand used a “shadow” Veda or alternative canon, miscitations, creative etymologies, and mistranslations to support his central thesis of the Veda’s universal applicability ad usefulness as a protomodernist tool for reform. This methodology had far-reaching implications: It ultimately allowed him to mythologize history and demythologize myth.—p. 111

…Dayanand discouraged belief in concepts such as transmigration and karma because he felt that their determinism made people lazy and indolent. There were no shortcuts through ritual or devotion.  Action alone led to moksha. In his estimation, passivity sanctioned by religion had deprived the Indians of their independence, happiness, wealth, political power, and learning.  They sit idle, praying for relief and charity that is never forthcoming. Such behaviour, he maintained, had completely ruined Aryavarta (Dayanand, Saraswati. Satyarth Prakash. Trans. Chiranjiva Bharadwaja.  Agra and Oudh: Arya Pratinidhi Sabha. 1915: 318)

…For the 1881 census, Dayanand gave the direction that Arya Samajists should enter themselves as “Arya” in the column on community or race and should note (p. 115) “Vedic Dharma” in the column on religion.  When he once inadvertently used the term “Hindu” in one of his sermons in Poona, he immediately corrected himself. He urged his audience to give up the name “Hindu” and take pride in “Arya” and “Aryavart.”….—pp. 115-116

…In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, a myth of the Aryan, grounded in arbitrary readings and authoritative definitions of what was considered “Vedic,” was used by social reformers to mobilize public opinion. Reformers devised interpretations of the Aryan tradition in order to diffuse Western missionary propaganda, battle against modernity, and combat social inequity. Out of a need to reassert self-esteem under colonialism, caste Hindus regarded themselves as descendents of ancient Aryans and stressed the continued historic superiority of their culture.  Since philology had deciphered the relationship between Sanskrit and Greek, the Indo-Aryans could now be recognized as the true originators of civilization. The historian Romila Thapar has correctly noted that the theory of the Aryan race was the most influential theory to come out of nineteenth-century Indology (Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.1992:3).—p. 117

…Ashis Nandy has shown just how, in coming to terms with India’s subjugation, certain Indian thinkers both attributed England’s use of power to masculine superiority and India’s defeat to the loss of the ideals of Aryan manhood. The task now was to seek in Indian tradition those “cultural differentiate” (Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.  Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983: 25) that enabled the West to stay on top. Dayanand found these values, or rather read these values, into a flexible Vedic canon.—p. 118

               Through an idiosyncratic reading of essentially non-Vedic sources, Dayanand revealed the Vedic truth of active masculinity that had been destroyed by distortion and Brahmin greed. This truth revealed the character of the Aryan as a cosmic force to be reckoned with—a figure engaged in good works and fearlessly bold. This ideology of the Aryan was not intended as an alternative frame of reference by which Indians might confront their colonizers. For Dayanand, colonialism did not represent an absolute evil. Britain did not appear as a juggernaut, but merely as one conquerer among others who had profited from Aryavarta’s decline.  Dayanand’s aetiology posited the crises of Indian identity not as a result of colonialism, but as an ongoing degeneration dating from ancient (mythological) history.—p. 118

…Dayanand represents a subaltern voice railing against home-grown oppression, reordering society through the rearticulation of myth, and building a hermeneutic structure to assert a new national identity. By distinguishing the modern Brahmin from the ancient Aryan, Dayanand justified the need for a new social order and provided a model for redefining authority. His ideology of the Aryan became a means of redefining the role and position of the Brahmin elite.  By liberating the text from its traditional custodians, documenting their misreading, and offering an alternative reading, Dayanand rewrote the caste system as a meritocracy and “Aryanized” Hindu masculinity.

               British colonial rule was the symptom, not the cause, of India’s real tragedy. The cause was to be found in the loss of Aryan manhood….—p. 119

Ch. 7. Aryan Identity and National Self-Esteem.

…It is important to note that Ranade did not attribute loss of Aryanhood to Brahmin corruption. Aryan institutions had been pure and healthy until they were assailed by the Scythians from the north and attacked by the aboriginal Dravidians in the south (Ranade, Mahadev Govind. Religious and Social Reform. Edited by M. B. Kolaskar.  Bombay: Gopal Narayan and Co. 1902:230-31).  Hindu institutions had even tried to revive and return to their old pristine glory, only to be assailed by the Jains and Buddhists, who sapped Aryan spirituality with the introduction of idol worship (ibid. 221)….—p. 125

…He pinpointed two distinct stages in the development of the present practice.  First, there existed the old, venerable, and noblest stage in the Vedic age. This epoch was followed by the period of arrested growth, when the internal decay caused by foreign invasions had paralyzed activity. It was in this second (and degenerate) stage that Indian society in Ranade’s time was living (Ranade, Mahadev Govind. Religious and Social Reform. Edited by M. B. Kolaskar.  Bombay: Gopal Narayan and Co. 1902: 29)….—p. 126

….The government remained passive until 1890, when the eleven-year-old Phulmani Bai died from injuries sustained during sexual intercourse with her considerably older husband.

               The Legislative Council decided to act, since Phulmani Bai’s husband was not liable to any criminal charge. {Behramji Merwanji} Malabari {the Gujarati reformer} saw in this tragedy the test case with which to take his cause to London and enlist government support for reform. {Bal Gangadhar} Tilak’s contention was that the English as foreigners had no jurisdiction over matters of religion, a strategy he applied also to the Parsi Malabari (Wolpert, Stanley A. Tilak and Gokhale: Revolution and Reform in the Making of Modern India.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  1962: 49).  Moreover, Tilak defended his position by resuscitating the claim that legal treatises from the pure Aryan past did not support reform (ibid. 51).  Tilak positioned law books as the ultimate religious authority, invoking them as male texts written against the female body. Tilak claimed that Phulmani Bai died from having “an unusually dangerous organ.”  Her husband had justifiably omitted “to speculate upon the comparative dimensions and vigour of the sexual organs of both either before or at the time of his marriage or intercourse.”  Tilak blamed the girl’s death on her being one of those “dangerous freaks of Nature.”  How, he asked, could a husband reasonably be punished because of “defective female organs” and persecuted “diabolically for doing a harmless act?” (cited in Wolpert 1962: 53-54).

               The Scoble Bill (1891) settled the infant marriage debate by raising the marriageable age of consent from ten to twelve years. Its passage represented a significant defeat for Tilak. As a consequence of this debacle, Tilak may have felt the need to reassert his position of authority and competence within the orthodox community (Wolpert 1962: 63). His subsequent Aryan scholarship might well be viewed in this context: as a means of enhancing his tarnished reputation as the most vocal and effective supporter of orthodox Hinduism. By rewriting the history of the Aryans, Tilak continued his nationalist efforts in a more subtle vein.  He had learned a valuable lesson from the Age of Consent battle. The Orthodox community did not suffer defeat gladly. It was now the moment to pamper its wounded collective male ego.  To do so, Tilak needed to reaffirm his community’s respect for Sanskrit scholarship and their identification with their Aryan forebears.  What better way to achieve both ends than by reading the Veda and deciphering the true story of Aryan glory?  By valorizing those ancestors with whom his people identified, he effectively valorized his own community.  Moreover, glorification of the Aryan past validated nationalist faith in present-day India (read: brahmin) capabilities and future potential.—p. 130

               The message of The Arctic Home of the Vedas {by G. G. Tilak} was tailor-made to appeal to the chauvinism of the orthodox community….—p. 132

…His reform, while primarily directed toward the domestic front, was also intended for export abroad. The West, possessing mere techniques in the form of technology, work ethic, and organizational skills, was in dire need of Hindu spirituality. Vivekananda proposed to remedy this deficiency by spreading Indian wisdom throughout the world. His mission was all the more necessary because the Aryan God was the true Father to all peoples, while the Semitic God was “only  a thunderer, only a terrible one’ (Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 8.151).—p. 133

…Creation comes out of the Vedas; they represent “authority with a vengeance” (Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 2.336-37).  All things exist in the Vedas. If one thinks that there exists something not found in the Vedas, then one is prey to delusion (ibid.  1.148)….—p. 134

               Vivekananda recognized, as did others, the textual limitations of his blueprint for the future: The Vedas provided a damaged source of reference.  One must, therefore, use caution in reading them, adopting as revelation only what agrees with reason (Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 5:315), since its knowledge arises at the beginning of each cosmic cycle and degenerates with time (ibid. 5:411).  Moreover, since most of the Vedas have disappeared (ibid. 3:232), what remains is a mere fragment. For this reason, Vivekananda claimed that the Vedas’ canonicity was malleable. They could be altered to suit the needs of the reader.  Anything sanctioned by the Vedas that proved to be problematic could be dismissed as a degenerate distortion. The Vedas were thus absolute, sacrosanct, and eminently interpretable.—p. 134

…Calling upon the authority of the Veda, Vivekananda created an idealized myth of the Aryan in a negative manner. His conception of the absolute malleability of the Vedas is as striking as the way he restricted the canon to fit his needs. The Aryan could be anything that was not specifically proved to the contrary in the Veda. The issue of Vivekananda’s use of the Veda as a negative authority is, however, a moot point. At no time does he refer to any text to support his ideology of the Aryan. An absent authority, the Veda is invoked rather than cited.—p. 134

               The Aryans originally lived to the North and possessed a warm, poetic nature ((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 1:492). Vivekananda inferred this knowledge from the existence in the Himalayas of a unmiscegenated brahmin type, pure in thought, deed, and action. This pure brahmin-Aryan is honest and beautiful. In fact, he represents the most handsome human specimen in the world, a being so perfect that degenerate Westerners can only dream of his existence (p.134) (ibid. 5:466).  Aryans, Vivekananda noted, possess regular features and dark eyes. They dress well.  Their hair and skin are “like drops of milk.”  Aryans are kind and generous. They dedicate themselves to elevating persons of brutish habits (ibid. 2:482). They possess superhuman genius. Beastly practices have never found a place in their world (ibid. 5:537). The Aryan is, by nature, totally untainted and unsexist (ibid. 8:28).  His wife’s dowry belongs to her alone. These Aryan-brahmins possess trusting natures; they allow their women to circulate within the community. Since they live in isolation, few people know of the survival of this hidden Aryan tribe of supermen in modern times. Missionaries have not found them nor have they suffered Muslim influences (ibid. 3:506).

               While Vivekananda’s understanding of the historic Aryan was as fictitious as any other, he did take the argument one step further by specifically identifying his mythic Aryan with racially “pure” modern brahmins….—pp. 134-35

…The North, Vivekananda maintained, belongs to the great Aryan race to which all Europeans (except the Basques and the Finns!) belong. The South stemmed from the same race as did the ancient Egyptians and Semites ((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 8:241-42), racially and culturally distinct from the Aryan center.  While the great Aryan race comprises the top three castes, the non-Aryan race consists of shudras, aborigines (who aspired to become civilized), and the Dravidians.

               This racialist argument foregrounds the larger political concern of validating caste distinctions.  Rather than evolving toward a civilized mode of existence, non-Aryans are presented as “schemers” trying to live as did the Aryans, coopting their lifestyle by entering schools and colleges, wearing the sacred thread, performing ceremonies, and enjoying equal rights in religion and politics ((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 3: 520). Too many different uncivilized and uncultured races tried to flock to the Aryan fold with their superstitions and hideous forms of worship. While appearing civilized, they clearly  were not. These barbarians wreaked havoc by introducing “mysterious rites and ceremonies: to the old faith. They destroyed Aryan vigor and chaste habits.  They defiled India with their superstitions (ibid. 3:263).  Their rank imitation of the Aryan lifestyle initiated a process of decay.  The central Aryan core, forced to succumb to the allurements of sensual forms of worship prevalent among these various low races, lost its integrity. In the past, when contact with “outcastes” had threatened to “destroy Aryan civilization,” the Aryans had struck out in a natural reaction of self-preservation, as when they destroyed Buddhism (ibid. 6:164).  But, the successful seduction of the Aryans by sensualists resulted in blind allegiance to usages “repugnant to the spirit of the Sastras” and ultimately destroyed the Aryan race (ibid. 6:182).  Aryavarta became a deep and vast whirlpool of the most vicious, most horrible, and most abominable customs. It lost all internal strength and became the weakest of the weak (ibid. 4:445). (p.136)

               The racialist tone of these passages starkly contrasts with the nationalist script where Vivekananda presents Aryans warmly embracing others within their fold, despite their cultural superiority, or where, by mixing with the  blood, speech, manners, and religions of Dravidians, shudras, and aborigines, the northern Indian Aryan emerged as a stronger and more organized race….—pp. 136-37

…Civilization meant adherence to the Veda.  In fact, only a child whose conception and birth proceed according to the Vedas can be called an Aryan. The very fact that fewer such “Aryan” children are being produced these days in every country accounts for the mass of evil in the modern world ((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 3:409).  Vivekananda’s vision of progress is thus tied to the production and maintenance of Aryan racial types.—p. 137

…Thus, while ostensibly supporting the equal rights, Vivekananda focuses on the racial distinctions between Aryans and non-Aryans, civilized and barbarian, northern Indian and Dravidian, caste Hindus and Tribals, and the threat of diluting Aryan blood in a process of racial degradation.

               This racialist script should not be confused with the political script directed against the West.  The former aimed at maintaining the caste status quo; the latter evoked the fiction of Indian social and religious superiority to (p. 137) the West….—pp. 137-38

…Vivekananda viewed caste as one of the greatest social institutions that the Lord gave men (((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 4:299). Although it evinces some unavoidable defects (which Vivekananda blames on foreign persecutions and underserving brahmins),22 it has worked wonders in India and “is destined to lead Indian humanity to its goal.”  Exactly what Vivekananda envisioned to be India’s goal was clear.—p. 138

22. Vivekananda admitted that some brahmins had immorally abused their custodianship ((((Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 7:17).  Selfish Brahmins had also introduced a large number of strange, non-Vedic, and immoral doctrines to bolster their prestige.—p. 185

…He could maintain that the (p.138) common people who suffer oppression and misery have become vital through suffering. He could claim that their strength derived from their pure and moral lives.  He could even portray the common people as possessing unparalleled love, power of incessant work, and manifestation of strength (Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991:7:327).  But such claims were most often made at a safe distance, among Californian and Chicagoan society matrons.  Effective reform or actual amelioration of the disenfranchised was never an issue at home.  Vivekananda held to the status quo, camouflaging his orthodox politics in a mystification of caste.  Without caste reform, any romanticization of the downtrodden is foreclosed. What remains is a glorification of an India in which the brahmin descendants of Aryans are the only real beneficiaries.—pp. 138-39

…The West is guided by self-interest.  The goal of Western society is individual independence attained by a language of money-making, education, and politics (Vivekananda. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.  Calcutta: Advaita Ashram.  1991: 4:476). Vivekananda presented the Aryan ideal as an alternative to the decadent West.  India will lead the world in the regeneration of man the brute into man the god (ibid. 4:315).  For the colonized, this message was, indeed, uplifting. However, behind the rhetoric of the holy man lies a disingenuous will to power: the determination to maintain traditional structures of power and domination.—p. 139

…It has been our intention to show that the Aryan presented in Indian social reform and nationalism functions as an icon of popular culture. This figure inhabited an idealized past, and its textual rediscovery enabled interpreters to bring into supposed conformity diverse segments of the population without publicizing the politics behind their production of authenticity.—p. 140

…The belief that the white masters were distant cousins of their Aryan subjects provided a salve for the egos of the Indian intellectual elite and bolstered cultural self-confidence. It provided the Indian elite with a forceful psychological weapon against British power politics. Through identification with the aggressor, the Indian elite raised morale under colonialism. Justice Ranade viewed colonialism as a predestined event in order that a pristine Hinduism might be reborn from the model provided by English Aryan customs (Ranade, Mahadev Govind. Religious and Social Reform. Edited by M. B. Kolaskar.  Bombay: Gopal Narayan and Co. 1902: 101)….—p. 141

…Justice Ranade believed that the Aryans were the chosen race whose civilization had been submerged by lower Dravidians, Huns, and Moslems. Hindus who had been contaminated, for example, by contact with the Moslem world and customs needed to restore former healthy Aryan practices. This belief expressed itself in the knowledge that the conquest, assimilation, and extermination of non-Aryans proved Aryan superiority….—p. 141

…When reformers and nationalists called for the racial unity of all Hindus, they inevitably defined Hindu culture as Vedic, Aryan, and upper caste.—p. 141

…Whereas Dayanand {Saraswati}, (Justic M.G.} Ranade, and {B. G.} Tilak sought support for their notion of the Aryan past in the letter of the text, Vivekananda eschewed basing his vision of Aryan superiority on any textual reference. On the one hand, Aryan superiority was a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, the Vedas were so distorted that they afforded no reliable reference. As in the case of Dayanand, Vivekananda’s pronouncements on scripture had credibility due to his status as a holy man. Laymen were held to a different accountability when invoking scripture.  Tilak and Ranade refered to specific texts when they described their Aryans.  Whether supported by textual evidence or not, nationalist discourse presented the Aryans and their scripture as exempla of high culture.—p. 142

Ch 8. The Anti-Myth

               It has been noted that the Western quest for origins received its initial formulation in the late Renaissance when philological similarities were noticed between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other languages of Europe. We have seen how in the Enlightenment, theories concerning Aryan culture developed out of such linguistic theorizing and were never really discarded.  They resurfaced in Orientalist scholarship, Romantic mythography, nineteenth-century linguistic science and race theory. Once philology had showed the relationship between Sanskrit and Greek, it was assumed that the Indo-Aryans were the originators of civilization.  Nineteenth-century Indian racial theorists and reformers allowed themselves to be guided by this then-current and flawed philological thesis.—p. 145

…In the Vedic context, arya only signified one who spoke Sanskrit and observed caste regulations (Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press.1992: 4).  The textual criteria for difference between the arya and anarya were determined not by race but by language, observance of the varnasharmadharma, appearance, and religious worship.—p. 145

…This racial interpretation of the arya/dasa as white/black largely prevailed among scholars and is still a common scholarly perception (Hock 1999: 4).  The linguist Hans Hock has recently shown, through an examination of Rig Vedic passages in which the terms white/black appear, that a racial interpretation is “not required by the textual evidence” (ibid. 6). The Sanskrit terms in question are elastic.  In the passages customarily cited to support a racial reading, Vedic terms of “white” can equally be translated as “light,” with the sense that the Aryans were forces of light or goodness. Similarly, the Sanskrit term for “black” (most often, krsna) can signify “darkness.”  In an “ideological” reading, those terms racially translated white/black can justifiably be rendered good/evil. […]

               Racial interpretations based on skin color do not generally play a significant role in premodern societies. They are more “an invention of (early) modern European colonialism and imperialism” (Hock ibid. 15) and its construction of racial superiority….Nor is it surprising that the racial interpretation of arya/dasa persists among Indian Indologists, given modern India’s color prejudice.—p. 146

Hock, Hans Henrich.  “Through a Glass Darkly: Modern ‘Racial’ Interpretations vs. Textual and General Prehistoric Evidence on arya and dasa/dasyu in Vedic Society.” In Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, edited by Hohannes Bronkhorst and Madhav Deshpande.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

…Finally, he {Phule} suspected that opposition to the West, another key component of revivalism, often masqueraded as patriotism when, in reality, it masked hegemonic desire on the part of high-caste reformers.—p. 150

               Ambedkar understood fully the extent to which his people were persecuted. He suspected that behind the rhetoric of reform was the caste Hindus’ concern with maintaining control. In the case of Gandhi, this control took the form of usurping the role of spokesman for the subaltern and directing their future in an eventually free India.  Many of Ambedkar’s efforts in the years leading up to Independence involved campaigning against what he felt to be the hypocrisy of the Congress Party and Gandhi toward the Untouchable community.  While Gandhi proceeded with his method of pleading with caste Hindus to abolish untouchability, Ambedkar sought to secure basic rights that his community continued to be denied despite Congress’s promises: He sought to obtain his people’s rights of a temple entry, use of community wells, and other basic human rights.  But here too, he failed.—p. 151

…Given the damage produced by the Purusha Sukta, Ambedkar felt that to preach the Veda as the basis of everything, as did the Arya Samaj, was pure mischief. Throughout his writings, Ambedkar sought to destroy the Veda as the basis of society and debunk its eternality, status as revelation (Ambedkar, B.D.  Writings and Speeches. 9 vols. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1987: 4.29,40), infallibility, and stationary view of society (Ambedkar 1990:7.14).  He challenged the Veda’s moral and spiritual value in the past (Ambedkar 1987:4.41) as well as its authority (4.37,39) and philosophical worth (4.44) in the present.—p. 152

               It was thought that the Aryans invaded India, conquered the Dasas, and made them slaves  Ambedkar claimed that the Aryan invasion myth was also (p.154) unfounded (Ambedkar, B.D.  Writings and Speeches. 9 vols. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1987: 3.419).  Rather, the evidence shows the contrary, that India is the home of the Aryans. While there does exist in the Rig Veda many descriptions of the Dasa as the enemies of the Aryans, these passages make no reference to their conquest and subjugation, but rather to sporadic fighting. The Rig Veda also speaks of the Dasas and the Aryans standing against a common enemy, suggesting to Ambedkar that their conflict was of a religious rather than a racial nature (ibid. 1990:7.76).  The Aryan invasion theory was contrived to support Brahmin superiority, justify their overlordship over non-brahmins, and satisfy Brahmin arrogance (ibid. 1990:7.80).—pp. 154-55

               Ambedkar read the Veda to suggest that the Aryans were not a single homogeneous people, rather two groups with distinct cultures. One group, the Aryans of the Rig Veda, believed in sacrifice, traced their descent through man, and produced the Brahmans, Sutras, and Aranyakas. The other group, the Aryans of Atharva Veda, believed in magic, traced their descent through Prajapati, and produced the Upanishads (Ambedkar, B.D.  Writings and Speeches. 9 vols. Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1990: 7.291).  These two separate ideologies were fundamentally different and irreconcilable: the former believed in the caturvarna and the latter did not (ibid. 1990:7.97).  The two groups were eventually consolidated with the Rig Vedic ideology prevailing. The term dasa, therefore, denoted persons not observing Aryan forms of religions; they were Aryans of a different sent or class (ibid. 199:7.107).—p. 155

…Ambedkar’s rewriting of the Aryan myth was no less fanciful than Brahmin-authored versions. It differed, however, in one important respect. It was potent enough to enable him to lead millions of Indians out of the slavery into which they had been born.—p. 157

               In India, the Aryans could represent either the true and pure Hindu (Thapar, Romila. Interpreting Early India.  Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1992:81) or the foreign invader. In the former instance such a characterization was achieved through a process wherein the periphery was indentified and set apart.  In the latter circumstance, the center appears as a construct against which the margin (or in the case of Phule and Ambedkar, the melding of margins) is reshuffled or undergoes reinterpretation.  This redefinition of the margin necessarily plays a role in shaping the center.—p. 157

Afterword

…An examination of the Aryan myth thus addresses a fundamental concern of postcolonial criticism, namely that the West needed to constitute the Orient as its Other in order to constitute itself and its own subjective position (Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.  Bombay: Oxford University Press,  1993: 182). By idealizing the Indian past, Europe “colonized” the Other in an attempt to define the Self….—p. 160

…German Indology’s valorization of the Aryan past and an idealized vision of India further contributed to the identification of this Volk with the mythic Aryan.  Subsequent racial hygienists would invert this Aryan myth: India became a projection of the German racial situation. Once the metaphorical cradle of German civilization, India now became its symbolic grave.  Through the Aryan myth, India functioned both as an example and a warning to the Nazis. Just as the Aryans in India fell, so would those in Europe if racial purity were not recreated. In both the East and the West, the search for the “original” India became bound up with a search for a superior race living in an unchanging utopian past.—p. 161

…The truth regarding the Aryans was less to be found in their literature than in what it was no longer able to express.  Truth was not to be discovered in (p.161) words, but rather in the lacunae, the message that had been lost through decay, inaccessibility, and the loss of ability to read correctly.—pp. 161-162

               European theories of the Aryan race developed out of scholarly inquiry into the origin of languages, the study of myth, and the historical study of religion.  The quest for an original language from which other languages derived involved a search for unity in diversity. The quest for linguistic unity reflected the need for an ultimate textual authority.  However, once that authority was identified, something curious occurred.  The horizon of the text was virtually swept away; its integrity ignored.  The text was treated by interpreters as almost nonexistent; they made it up to suit their needs. In a similar fashion, the horizon of the reader became pure ideology, expressing itself in emotional appeals to return to some golden age or true spirituality of the text.

               Western Orientalist scholars focused on the superiority of the Indian Aryans and their legacy of excellence as manifest in their modern European descendants. In the Enlightenment, the Aryans provided an alternative to the Hebrew model.  For the Romantics, the Aryan past confirmed those aesthetic and spiritual values that were cherished and promoted in the European present….

               In India, theories of Aryan unity ingeniously ignored discrepancies in racial and cultural development.  Rammohan Roy and Dayanand {Saraswati} focused on the Aryan religious tradition as a basis for Hindu spiritual revival.  For {B.G.} Tilak and {Justic M. G.} Ranade, the Aryan’s racial superiority could be witnessed in their survival in modern times as caste Hindus….For Vivekananda, the Aryan was superior both to the Dravidian and the West.  Tilak valorized the Aryan past to promote the nationalist cause.  Vivekananda held expansionist designs: he w=saw itinerant Indian preachers setting forth to perfect (Aryanize) the world. Phule and Ambedkar challenged the myth of the Aryan, bringing back into discussion what nationalist discourse had excluded….—p. 162

…When a culture has lost its means of self-defense, it turns to the ethnologist and the archaeologist (Certeau, Michel de. Heterologies: the Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  1986: 123).  Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Indian history bear out this maxim. The myths of the Aryan articulate this fear of impotence and present what Certeau in another context has termed a “geography of the eliminated” or “a negative silhouette” formed from the political and symbolic distributions of power….—p. 163