prajapati
Cosmic Otter
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]Until the mid-19th century, no Indian had ever heard of the notion that his ancestors could be Aryan invaders from Central Asia who had destroyed the native civilization and enslaved the native population. Neither had South-Indians ever dreamt that they were the rightful owners of the whole subcontinent, dispossessed by the Aryan invaders who had chased them from North India, turning it into Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans. Nor had the low-caste people heard that they were the original inhabitants of India, subdued by the Aryans and forced into the prisonhouse of caste which the conquerors imposed upon them as an early form of Apartheid. All these ideas had to be imported by European scholars and missionaries, who thought through the implications of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AM, the theory that the Indo-European (IE) language family had spread out from a given homeland, probably in Eastern Europe, and found a place in Western and Southern Europe and in India as cultural luggage of horse-borne invaders who subjugated the natives.[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]One of the first natives to interiorize these ideas was Jotirao Phule, India’s first modem Mahatma, a convent-educated low-caste leader from Maharashtra. In 1873, he set the tone for the political appropriation of the AIT: “Recent researches have shown beyond a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins were not the Aborigines of India (…) Aryans came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted.”1 Ever since, the political reading of the AIT has become all-pervasive in Indian textbooks as well as in all kinds of divisive propaganda pitting high and low castes, North and South Indians, speakers of Indo-Aryan and of Dravidian languages, and tribals and non-tribals, against each other.[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]Today, out of indignation with the socially destructive implications of the politically appropriated AIT, many Indian scholars get excited about supposed imperialist motives distorting the views of the Western scholars who first introduced the AIT. They point to the Christian missionary commitment of early sankritists like Friedrich Max Müller, John Muir and Sir M. Monier-Williams and of dravidologists like Bishop Robert Caldwell and Reverend G.U. Pope, alleging that the missionaries justify their presence in India by claiming that Aryan Hinduism is as much a foreign import as Christianity. They quote Viceroy Lord Curzon as saying that the AIT is “the furniture of Empire”, and explain how the British colonisers justified their conquest by claiming that India had never been anything but booty for foreign invaders, and that the Indians (or at least the upper-caste Hindus who led the Freedom Movement) were as much foreigners as their fellow-Aryans from Britain.2[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]About the use of the AIT in the service of colonialism, there can be no doubt. Thus, during the 1935 Parliament debates on the Government of India Act, Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the following ground: “We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes [= the Scheduled Castes and Tribes], who are the native stock.”3 SO, the British Aryans had as much right to Aryavarta as their Vedic fellow-Aryans. Indian loyalists justified the British presence on the same grounds, e.g. Keshab Chandra Sen, leader of the reformist movement Brahmo Samaj (mid-19th century), welcomed the British advent as a reunion with his Aryan cousins: “In the advent of the English nation in India we see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race”4.[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]However, it doesn’t follow that the AIT was conceived with these political uses as its deliberate aim. The scholars concerned were children of their age, conditioned by prevalent perceptions and prejudices, but they sincerely believed that this theory explained the available data best.[/size][/font]
from
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/books/ait/index.htm
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]One of the first natives to interiorize these ideas was Jotirao Phule, India’s first modem Mahatma, a convent-educated low-caste leader from Maharashtra. In 1873, he set the tone for the political appropriation of the AIT: “Recent researches have shown beyond a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins were not the Aborigines of India (…) Aryans came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted.”1 Ever since, the political reading of the AIT has become all-pervasive in Indian textbooks as well as in all kinds of divisive propaganda pitting high and low castes, North and South Indians, speakers of Indo-Aryan and of Dravidian languages, and tribals and non-tribals, against each other.[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]Today, out of indignation with the socially destructive implications of the politically appropriated AIT, many Indian scholars get excited about supposed imperialist motives distorting the views of the Western scholars who first introduced the AIT. They point to the Christian missionary commitment of early sankritists like Friedrich Max Müller, John Muir and Sir M. Monier-Williams and of dravidologists like Bishop Robert Caldwell and Reverend G.U. Pope, alleging that the missionaries justify their presence in India by claiming that Aryan Hinduism is as much a foreign import as Christianity. They quote Viceroy Lord Curzon as saying that the AIT is “the furniture of Empire”, and explain how the British colonisers justified their conquest by claiming that India had never been anything but booty for foreign invaders, and that the Indians (or at least the upper-caste Hindus who led the Freedom Movement) were as much foreigners as their fellow-Aryans from Britain.2[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]About the use of the AIT in the service of colonialism, there can be no doubt. Thus, during the 1935 Parliament debates on the Government of India Act, Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the following ground: “We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes [= the Scheduled Castes and Tribes], who are the native stock.”3 SO, the British Aryans had as much right to Aryavarta as their Vedic fellow-Aryans. Indian loyalists justified the British presence on the same grounds, e.g. Keshab Chandra Sen, leader of the reformist movement Brahmo Samaj (mid-19th century), welcomed the British advent as a reunion with his Aryan cousins: “In the advent of the English nation in India we see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race”4.[/size][/font]
[font=Arial,Helvetica][size=-1]However, it doesn’t follow that the AIT was conceived with these political uses as its deliberate aim. The scholars concerned were children of their age, conditioned by prevalent perceptions and prejudices, but they sincerely believed that this theory explained the available data best.[/size][/font]
from
http://koenraadelst.voiceofdharma.com/books/ait/index.htm
.
