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The Aryan
Invasion of Europe
By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar
(source: The Invasion that never Was. p. 28-33)
What
is not so well known in India is that our footloose Aryans, not content with
overrunning the Indian subcontinent, invaded Europe too! And thereby hangs an
instructive tale. For Christian Europe, long uncomfortable with what it thought
to be a Hebrew ancestry, was eager, to find for itself an identity distinct from
the Jewish; the sudden appearance of the Aryan race
out of the misty plateaus of Central Asia was seen as a godsend,
especially in the strong anti-Semitic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Thus
was born one more myth, this time of the Aryan European, Christian of course,
and preferably Germanic. It had the added advantage of confirming the
“natural” supremacy of the white race. As a Swiss linguist wrote in 1859
with some élan: “ Before history began, a whole race was destined by
Providence to reign one day supreme over the entire earth….They were the race
of the Aryans, endowed from the beginning with very qualities which the Hebrews
lacked….. The former was destined to absorb the other. The religion of Christ
became the torch of humanity. The genius of Greece adopted it. The power of the
European Aryas…came to be the main instrument of God’s plan for the destiny
of mankind.
That there was not a shed of
evidence in support of this bloated rhetoric was not to deter these daydreaming
scholars. The “European Aryas soon became the “Indo-German,” and the
growth of the Aryan invasion theory became intimately linked with that of
nineteenth-century theories of racial supremacy, especially of a Teutonic or
Nordic sort. Dissenting voices, which pointed out that the Aryan doctrine was
“ a figment of the professional imagination,” were drowned in the enthusiasm
generated by the delirious rise of German nationalism. Ernest Renan, the
French historian of religion, wrote in 1860, “The Semites are incapable of
doing that which is essential. Let us remain Germans and Celts; let us keep our
‘eternal gospel,’ Christianity….(After) the Semitic race declined, the
Aryan race alone was left to lead the march of human destiny.”
Linguists vied with anthropologists, and historians with craniologists,
in depicting the features of the Indo-Germans: they were of course “a noble
race of fair-haired, blue-eyed people,: asserted Posche, a German author, and
whole treatises were devoted to the Aryans’ cranial features, “nasal
index” and other such will-o’-the-wisps.
It is not widely known that this
racial element contributed in no small measure to the spread of the theory of an
Aryan Invasion of India. “Max Muller (in his lectures in London)
repeatedly hammered away at the idea that the terms Indo-European and
Indo-Germanic must be replaced by Aryan,” writes the American historian Louis
B. Synder, “because the people who invaded India and who spoke Sanskrit
called themselves Arya. This primitive Aryan language indicated that there was
an Aryan race, the common ancestor of Germans, Celts, Romans, Slavs, Greeks,
Persians, and Hindus.” Yet, stresses Synder, “all attempts to correlate the
Aryan language with the Aryan race was not only unsuccessful, but absurd.
Years later, when Germany was
reunified following its victory over France in 1870-71 and began ominously
growing in power, people like Max Muller and Renan did make a brave attempt to
reject this racial aspect of the Aryan theory to which they had earlier lent
their full support. They now argued that the word “Arya” only referred to a
linguistic group, not to a race.
The heady vision of these glorious ancestors endowed with “nobility of blood
and gift of intelligence” continued to gain momentum. Year after year, raging
debates went on across borders to determine which European people was the true
descendent of the Aryan “master-race,” and therefore which nation could
claim a divine right to dominate others. Europe witnessed “the ridiculous and
humiliating spectacle of eminent scholars subordinating their interest in truth
to the inflation of racial and national pride.” The most vociferous were
undoubtedly the pro-Germanic.
Pseudo-scholars like the Count de Gobineau
(a noble Frenchman later revered by the Nazis as one of their prophets),
non-scholars like the composer Wagner, all and sundry added their voices to the
swelling wave. “After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, Aryanism became a
nationalist dogma in the newly unified German state.” In fact it came to be
doubted that the Aryans’ “original homeland” was at all in Central Asia,
and several scholars sought to prove on “scientific grounds” that it really
was Germany (Central and Western Germany, to be precise!). When in 1924 Hitler
wrote in his Mein Kampf, “The Aryan alone can be considered as
the founder of culture….a conqueror who subjugated inferior races,” he was
merely echoing and amplifying dozens of nineteenth-century savants who had
written as many thick tomes to buttress their fantasy. A few years later,
full-blown Nazism was no more than a monstrous – but in a way perfectly
logical-application of their race theories, with consequences we know. With the
Second World War, all these scholarly castles in the air collapsed with a thud,
and no one dared speak of an Aryan race any more: “The belief in an Aryan
‘race’ had become accepted by philologists who knew nothing of
science…What these men have written on the subject has been cast by historians
into the limbo of discarded and discredited theories.” Wrote the British
biologist Julian Huxley. “Aryan has no validity as an
ethnological term,” says the Webster dictionary (1980).
This was the end of the Aryan Myth
– but only as far as Europe was concerned. For the Aryan invasion theory was
still good enough for Indian: the same Webster declares in the same breath that
the word Aryan was “used (in India) as tribal name to distinguish from
indigenous races”! This is like saying that,
all right, the Earth now revolves round the Sun, but the planets are still
revolving round the Earth. The ways of the human mind are unfathomable.
But the reason for this apparent paradox is simple: in India the mainspring of
the Aryan invasion theory – the aim of perpetuating the domination of the
Western view of the world over the Indian – remains very much alive today.
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