Inventing the Aryan Race. Excerpts from the book 'Breaking India'

Raymond Schwab in his seminal book The Oriental Renaissance published in 1984 explains that in the late 1700 the widespread arrival of the translation of the Bhagavad Gita of the Hindus provided the west with the first idea of the advanced level of eastern philosophy and spiritual message independent of the Bible and other classical traditions like the Greeks and the Romans. Hinduism became a source of many theological debates and arguments. The publication of Kalidasa' Shankutala  proved the proverbial last straw. The Europeans had to appropriate a superior civilisation to keep their superior religion and race status intact and thus started the greatest re-writing and retrofitting of culture, religion, language and history of the world.

The evolution of Aryan race theory and racism in general evolved out of two factors. One was, Germans seeking national identity separate from the classical traditions (Greece and Rome) as they were already appropriated by the French with whom the German had running feud. The second was imperialistic ambitions and colonial goals of the Britain and other European countries with an overlay of missionary sponsorship.

It was with the discovery of Sanskrit that Philology, i.e. study of languages was born. We can safely say that Europeans obsession with the use of Sanskrit in the construction of a linguistic origin for the European people and their culture gave birth to Philology. To understand why Europeans fell over each other to appropriate Sanskrit stems from the work done by William Jones a judge in the Calcutta court of the East India Company. He says...

The Sanskrit language ... is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greeks, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity... than could possibly have been produced by accident

A century later Max Muller one of the most influential figure wrote:

Thanks to the discovery of Sanskrit ancient language of India and thanks to the discovery of the close kinship between this language an the idioms of the principal races of Europe...a complete revolution has taken place in the method of studying the worlds primitive history

What he actually meant was, with the chance discovery of Sanskrit with its similar sounding words we can now re-write our history and the world history as we choose. Once the Indian texts had been mined for their treasures had been processed through mistranslations, plagiarism, rejection and extrapolations and the Indian knowledge securely retrofitted into the Bible and European history, the Indian source lost its earlier glamour and was discarded.

German scholars like Johann Gottfried Herder, Hegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel were working on creating a separate identity for the German people away from their bitter enemies the French and in fact wanted to elevate it beyond the French. They romanticised India to the level that Schlegel built India as the historical motherland of the German people and claimed that the ancestors of the German people were Indians who migrated to Germany. He describes India as a land of 'happiness and fertility'. He states that the first wave arrived into north Europe from India and another wave much later went to Egypt, Greece and Rome.

While the Germans adopted the Sanskrit and Aryan identity as their national essence, the British had a different relationship with it, in light of the fact that they ruled over the Indians they used it to legitimise their rule as a reunion of a long lost brothers, helping out his downtrodden brethren.

Some of the scholars who lent a helping hand in this fraud were Ernest Renan who created the Aryan Christ, Friedrich Max Muller, Adolphe Pictet, Rudolph Friedrich Grau, Joseph Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and few others.

The Aryan Christ

As Christians in Europe struggled to break free from Judaism, Sanskrit & Aryan race theory provided them the escape vehicle. Renan in his inaugural speech in College de France said 'The victory of Christianity was not secure until it completely broke out of it Jewish shell and again became what it had been in the exalted consciousness of its founder, a creation free from narrow minded bonds of the Semetic spirit.' He further wrote 'Originally Jewish to the core Christianity over time rid itself of nearly everything it took from the race, so that those who consider Christianity to be the Aryan religion par excellence are in many respects correct'.

After reading this and many such attempts to divorce Christianity from Judaism I am more and more convinced that the Jews never persecuted and crucified Christ. It was the Romans who did it. Its obvious Christ may have been preaching against the Roman gods, extolling his people to rise and over throw the occupiers, becoming a pain in the back side for the administrators. Once they themselves converted  to Christianity a few years later it may have become uncomfortable for the new converts to be seen as the murderer of the founder of their new found religion. The case of murder was then made out against the Jews and how they connived and schemed to have the renegade killed. Since the Bible came much after it was easy to spread this spurious tale of Jews crucifying Christ. By the way notice that Christ in no way looks least bit Jewish but every bit a European.

People like Pictet and Grau justified colonisation of India as the only way to bring long lost Aryan brothers together. Both viewed the world composed of two races, the Aryans and the Semitic. While the Europeans were Aryans the Jews were Semitic. Indians were considered polluted Aryans who had to be converted to the true faith of Christianity. Gobnieau promoted the Aryan invasion theory and caste theory basing his work on Karl Marx's assumption that India had no history other than a series of foreign invasions. One wonders if Karl Marx was really as clued in and profound as he is made out to be?

Wilhelm Halbfass explains how the Aryan construct shifted over time:

During Gobnieau's lifetime, the old theory of the Asian origin of the European languages and traditions and of cultural movements from the East to the West, increasingly gave way to speculations on primeval movement from West to the East and on Aryan migrations from Europe, specially Northern Europe or even the North pole to India. According to these speculations, the Europeans gave their superior culture to the Indians and then lost their superiority through the mixing with the local inhabitants and perished in a climate for which they were not suited. In 1903 E. de Michelis summarised this by stating that Asia and India in particular was not the cradle of civilisation but the grave of the Aryans.

Chamberlain: Aryan-Christian Racism

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) was a British author who wrote the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1899. Though English he wrote it in German to emphasise his Aryan-Teutonic heritage. The book was a Europe wide best seller. This book linked Indian caste with race and projected Aryan heritage as the most evolved. He wrote in his book:

...wherever the Aryans went they became masters. The Greeks, the Latin, the Kelts, the Teutons, the Slavs - all were Aryans: of the aborigines of the countries which the overran scarcely a trace remains. So too in India, it was 'varna' colour which distinguished the white conquering Arya from the defeated black man, the Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of the caste. It is to the Teutons branch of the Aryan family that the first place in the world belongs, and the story of the 19th century is the story of the Teutons triumph.

But in time Chamberlain became aware of the limitations of the Biblical basis of the Aryan myth, and even had a premonition that one day the notion of a historical Aryan race might be fully disproved. Yet he felt that the notion was important for Europe. He wrote:

Though it were proved that there never was an Aryan race in the past, yet we desire that in the future that there may be one. That is the decisive standpoint for men of action.

Chamberlains work went on to become an authoritative influence on the Nazi leadership which had devastating consequences for Europe as real authentic history tells us.

Note: All scholars mentioned in this article have never seen or met an Indian let alone been to India. All their papers and books was based on second hand information, hearsay, translations, mistranslations. At best their books and theories can be called 'conjecture' with no scientific foundation.

Source:
Breaking India by Rajiv Malhotra and Arvindan Neelakandan