“India is the cradle of human race, the birth place of
human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great
grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most constructive materials in
the history of man are treasured up in India only - Mark
Twain
రెండేళ్ల క్రితం భారతదేశం, మట్టి
విశేషం అని అన్నతరువాత, latest science revelations ని చెప్తూ నేను
అనుకున్న దానిని చాలా strong justification తో close
చేద్దామని మొదలెట్టి, రకరకాల logic లు, theory లు paper మీద పెట్టి ఇంకెటో వెళ్లిపోయాను. ఎంతో శాఖా చంక్రమణం చేసి
కూడా విషయం తెమలలేదు. దానికి అంతం కనపడలేదు. మధ్యలో ఏవో రెండు మూడు కవితలు వ్రాసి
ఊరుకున్నాను. ఇంటా బయటా తగులుతున్న దెబ్బలకి exhaust అయిపోయిన
energy levels మళ్ళీ తేరుకుంటే తప్పితే నేను వ్రాసింది, మళ్ళీ
చదివితే నాకే అర్ధం కాదేమో అనిపించింది. కొద్దిగానైనా వ్రాయాలంటే పూర్తిగా depression
mode లోంచి బయట పడితే గాని కుదరదనిపించింది. అంటే సమాధానం పూర్తిగా
తేలిందని కాదు. తెలిసినది, ఆలోచనకి, అంతరంగానికి అందినది,
కలగలిపి అదే pattern లో paper మీదకి తేవడం కోసం
పడే బీభత్సం తెమలటం లేదు. ఆ corrections కి బోలెడు time పట్టేలా ఉంది.
ఈ
మధ్యలో Rk
నన్ను అడిగింది గుర్తుకు
వచ్చింది.
“Who according to you
destroyed this country? We are subjected to a lot of invasions from times
immemorial. Nothing stopped the flow of knowledge. The invader may have looted
the material wealth but he never was able to grasp our intellectual wealth.
దీనికి
సమాధానంగా నేను అంతకు ముందే మొదలుపెట్టిన History duping continue చేద్దామనుకున్న నాకు, నేను కూడా ఆర్యులు, ద్రావిడులు అని అనడం గుర్తుకు వచ్చింది. నేను Rajiv Malhotra అన్న ఆయన వ్రాసిన ఈ క్రింద essay చదివే వరకు ఒక రకంగా అర్ధమైన చరిత్ర ఇంకో
రకంగా అర్ధమైంది. See
the copy paste below
It is
not widely known that the European quest to appropriate the highly prized
library of Sanskrit's ancient spiritual texts motivated the construction of the
"Aryan" race identity, one of the ideological roots of Nazism. The
Sanskrit word "arya" is an adjective that means noble or pure. For
example, the famous Buddhist Four Noble Truths are described as the Four Arya
Truths or catvāri āryasatyāni in
Sanskrit. Arya does not refer to a race, but a cultural quality venerated in
Sanskrit texts.
German
nationalism turned this word into a noun, "Aryan," and capitalized it
to refer to an imagined race of people that were the original Sanskrit speakers
who had composed its great texts. Early romantic claims that Indians were the
ancestors of the Europeans were gradually replaced by the new myth that a race
called "Indo-Aryans" was the common ancestors to both. Their origin
was thought to be in the Caucasus Mountains, hence the term
"Caucasian." Later, the "Indo" was dropped and the white
Aryan Race Theory emerged. Thus, from the European desire to be seen as the
inheritors of the Sanskrit civilization, the notion of a European super-race
was born, with Germany as its highest manifestation.
How
did this come about? In the late 1700s, European identity was shaken when
scholars discovered that Sanskrit was closely related to the European
languages, though much older and more sophisticated. At first, this discovery
fed European Romantic imagination, in which India was glorified as the perfect
past. Herder, a German Romanticist, saw Europe's "discovery" of India
as a "re-discovery" of its own foundation. India was viewed as
Europe's mother civilization by Frederick Schlegel in Germany and by Voltaire
in France. William Jones, a British colonial administrator, considered Sanskrit
the most marvelous product of the human mind. Sanskrit and Indology entered
most major European universities between 1800 and 1850, challenging if not
replacing Latin and Greek texts as a source for "new" ideas. Many new
disciplines were shaped by the ensuing intellectual activity, including
linguistics, comparative religion, modern philosophy and sociology.
With
European nations competing among themselves for civilizational legacy, many
rival theories emerged regarding the origins of the original Sanskrit speakers
and their civilization. German nationalists found in the affinity between
Sanskrit and German the possibility of a newly respectable pedigree vis-à-vis
the French, and claimed the heritage of the treasure trove of Sanskrit
literature to bolster their cause. The British interpreted India and Sanskrit
in a manner that would strengthen their own role as empire-builders, with India
as the jewel in the crown. Because Indians were not participants in European
forums, there was widespread plagiarism of Indian texts, as well as much
distorted interpretation.
By
"becoming" the Aryans, Europeans felt that they were the rightful
custodians of the massive corpus of Sanskrit texts that were generating new
breakthroughs in the humanities and liberal arts. Germans took their newly
adopted Aryan identity to extremes, and most of the influential European
thinkers of the time colluded. Their racist theories often had an anti-Semitic
dimension, seeking to reconstruct the Bible in Aryan terms. Ernest Renan, a
philologist and Hebrew scholar, drew sharp distinctions between Semitic and
Aryan languages and peoples. He proposed that though Aryans began as
polytheists they were later transformed into Christian monotheists, and that
Semitic peoples comprised an entirely different (and inferior) civilization.
Adolphe Pictet, a Swiss linguist and ethnographer, was fully committed to the
notion of European Aryans who were destined to conquer the world being blessed
with "innate beauty" and "gifts of intelligence." He
separated Jesus from Judaism, and turned him into the Aryan Christ.
The
nascent discipline called "race science" was reinforced by such
ideas. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, a French diplomat, philosopher and
historian argued in his hugely influential Essay on the Inequality of Human
Races that Adam from the Bible was the "originator of our white
species." He wrote of the "superiority of the white type and within
that type of the Aryan family." His thesis on India claimed that white
Aryans had invaded India and subsequently began to intermarry with the local
population. Realizing the danger of intermarriage, the Aryan lawgivers invented
the caste system as a means of self-preservation. India was held up as an
example of how interbreeding with an inferior race could bring about the
decline of a superior one. Hitler's idea of "purifying" the Aryans
was born out of this, and it culminated in the Holocaust.
Houston
Chamberlain was a British historian whose magnum opus, Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century (written in German), also projected Aryan-Germans as the
most evolved among Aryan races. He introduced Christian, scientific and
philosophical arguments to lend credibility and explained the benefits that
Christianity would derive by supporting German racism. Anthropologist Kenneth
Kennedy concludes of Gobineau and Chamberlain, that they "transformed the
Aryan concept, which had its humble origins in philological research conducted
by Jones in Calcutta at the end of the eighteenth century, into the politics
and racial doctrines of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich."
In
2007, I played a role in a historic milestone when I was invited to address the
first Hindu-Jewish Summit. I spoke on the Aryan myth and the suffering that it
had inflicted on both religious communities. Contrary to earlier apprehensions
of some Hindus that this was a "risky" topic to bring up, the head of
the Jewish delegation, Rabbi Rosen, member of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's
Commission for Inter-religious Dialogue, was very impressed. The Jewish
delegation decided to appoint a team of scholars to study the issue and the
references I had supplied. As a result, at the following year's Summit, a joint
declaration was signed, which included the following language from my draft:
"Since
there is no conclusive evidence to support the theory of an Aryan
invasion/migration into India, and on the contrary, there is compelling
evidence to refute it; and since the theory seriously damages the integrity of
the Hindu tradition and its connection to India; we call for a serious
reconsideration of this theory, and a revision of all educational material on
this issue that includes the most recent and reliable scholarship."
Today, the Western mainstream has made special efforts to remove the notion of
an Aryan race from the vocabulary and the public psyche. However, as my
recently released book, Breaking India, explains, the damage in India has
worsened. The Dravidian Race Theory was formulated by British missionaries in
the 1800s in parallel with the Aryan theory, and it divides the peoples of
India into racial categories of "Aryans" and "Dravidians."
Western scholars and institutions continue to support Dravidian racism, which
is dependent upon acceptance of the Aryan race construct. In a future blog I
will explain how Christian missionaries are now exploiting these dangerous
constructs.
