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Voices of Dissent

"All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography." 

- Ralph Waldo Emerson in Essays: History.

***

All kinds of divisive forces have jumped on to the Aryan Invasion theory as the perfect tool to cut slices out of Hindu society and out of the Indian state. This theory became the basis of attempts to pit "Dravidians" against "Aryans", high castes against low castes, tribals against mainstream Hindus, Vedic orthodoxy "imposed by the foreign invaders" against heterodox sects "which emerged as a native reaction against the Aryan occupiers". It was also used to neutralize Hindu criticism of the Islamic occupation, as "Hindus themselves have entered the same way the Muslims have". Till today, Christian, Islamic, Marxist and "secularist" forces continue to promote the theory and make propagandistic capital out of it.

(source: Indigenous Indians : Agastya to Ambedkar - By Koenraad Elst p. 1-2).  Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

The French archaeologist Salomon Reinach (1858-1932) a Hebrew scholar and critic, first published work was a translation of Arthur Schopenhauer's Essay on Free Will (1877). 

Writing in 1892 at the height of the Aryan myth, was perhaps the first to reject the very notion of an Aryan race:

"To speak of an Aryan race of three thousand years ago is to put forward a gratuitous hypothesis; but to speak of it as if it still existed today is quite simply absurd." 

(source: Saloman Reinach, quoted by Leon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth, p. 344 (French original). The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 50 - 51). 

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) was one of the first dissenters. He was aware of the kinship in language between Sanskrit and European tongues, but found the theory of their "spread from a central point...a gratuitous assumption." In his History of India, 1841, he observed, "Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book...is there any allusion to a prior residence ....out of India...There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one."

(source: Quoted by Devandra Swarup in "Genesis of the Aryan Race Theory and Its Application to Indian History" op. cit. p. 33. The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 50-51). 

Lord Elphinstone, one of the early historians of India, writes exploding the myth of the Aryan culture:

"It is opposed to their foreign origin, that neither in the code of Manu nor I believe in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further than the Himalayan chain in which is fixed, the habitation of Gods. It is unthinkable and beyond all canons of logic and common sense that the Hindus had forgotten their original home even at the time of the composition of the earliest Vedas. Christians look to Jerusalem for the origin of their religion, Muslims to Arabia, and Jews to Palestine, but the Hindus have all their sacred places within India itself. If they really had come from outside India, they should have some place of pilgrimage like Mecca or Benares."

"To say that it (emigration) spread from a central point is a gratuitous presumption and even contrary to analogy for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle but from east to west."

Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) English sea captain, writer and court favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, in his 'History of the World' strongly suggests that the Paradise of the Bible was in India, as according to Hindu hypothesis regarding the locality of the nursery for rearing mankind, 'India was the first planted and peopled countries after the flood (p. 99). This book was held in high esteem at that time. Both Cromwell and John Locke recommended his book. 

(source: The Aryan Hoax: That Dupes The Indians - By Paramesh Choudhary p.226 and Hinduism in The Space Age - By E. Vedavyas p. 82-83 and 108-109).

Two years later, the German Sanskritist Hermann Jacobi based his objections on astronomical data in the Rig-Veda, which he found pointed clearly to a date between 4500 and 2500 B.C. Jacobi inferred that the Rig-Veda could not be more recent that this last date, in contradiction with the invasionist school. A later German scholar, Moritz Winternitz, agreed with the date of 2500 BC on literary grounds: "We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great (Sanskrit) literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its starting point."

British scholar F. E. Pargiter in his  Ancient Indian Historical Tradition yet his inquiry into historical data from the Puranas led him, in 1972, to conclusions opposite to the accepted theories. With a rare commonsense, he first noted that 

"there is a strong presumption in favor of (Indian) tradition; if anyone contests tradition, the burden lies on him to show that it is wrong." 

He also observed, with dry humor: " Indian tradition knows nothing whatever of the Aryans' invasion of India through the north-west....All this copious tradition was falsely fabricated, and the truth has been absolutely lost, if the current theory is right; is that probable? If all this tradition is false, why, how, and in whose interests was it all fabricated.?"

Pargiter went even further, for he was convinced that Indian tradition clearly recorded "an outflow of people from India before the fifteenth century BC." and thought that the Iranians may have been an offshoot from India." He pertinently observed that in the famous nadi sukta, the Rig Veda lists rivers of the subcontinent from east to west, and remarked: "If the Aryans had entered India from the north-west, and had advanced eastward through the Punjab only as far as the Saraswati or Jumna when the Rigvedic hymns were composed, it is very surprising that the hymn arranges the rivers, not according to their progress, but reversaly from the Ganges which they had hardly reached. 

" Imam me gange yamune sarasvati sutudri stomam sacata parusnaya asiknya marudvrdhe vitastayarjikiye srnuhya susomaya "  (x 75.05)

O Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Sutudri (Sutlej), Parushini (Ravi), hear my praise!

Listen to my call, Asikni (Chenab), Marudvridha (Maruvardhvan), Vitasta (Jhelum) with Arjikiya, Sushoma (Sohan). 

Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975), British biologist and author, who achieved renown both as a scientist and for his ability to make scientific concepts clear to the public through his writings. He served as the first director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Huxley was knighted in 1958. 

He warned against the Aryan Invasion Theory long ago: 

"In 1848 the young German scholar Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) settled in Oxford. ...About 1853, he introduced into English usage the unlucky term Aryan as applied to a large group of languages. ...Moreover, Max Muller threw another apple of discord. He introduced a proposition that is demonstrably false. He spoke not only of a definite Aryan language and its descendants, but also of a corresponding 'Aryan race'. The idea was rapidly taken up both in Germany and in England."

(source: Caste and Science: Hot Air and Cold Fusion - By N. S. Rajaram).

Writing as far back as 1939, Huxley, one of the great natural scientists of the century, observed: 

"In England and America the phrase 'Aryan race' has quite ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature. In Germany, the idea of the 'Aryan' race received no more scientific support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to local vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special conditions."

(source: Origins Of The Aryan Dravidian Divide - By N. S. Rajaram).

Yet one of the loudest European voices against the whole Aryan construct was none other than Max Muller, one of its chief creators! In 1888, forty years after he had first hammered the concept of an Aryan race, he conceded that "the home of the Aryans" could not be pinpointed more precisely than "somewhere in Asia." 

He flatly denied having ever spoken of an Aryan race:

"I have declared again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak an Aryan language...To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is a great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar."

Max Muller also disowned the short chronology he himself had arbitrarily fixed for Indian scriptures, a chronology still in vogue today among Western Indologists. 

(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar p. 29-30). Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser. Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge  


Indian Protests

"In the dogmatic rigid world of Western academic philosophy, rarely are outsiders (namely Indian scholars) fully appreciated."

***

Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883) was perhaps the first Indian to dispute the Aryan myth: 

"In none of the Sanskrit of history textbooks," he wrote, "has it been stated that the Aryans came from Iran, vanquished the aborigines...and became rulers." 

He stressed that the word arya referred in the Veda to a moral or inner quality, not to any race or people, and insisted that India was Aryavarta, the home of the Aryans- a word he used purely in its original sense of "Vedic Indians."

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) was the one who was quick to see through the gaps in the Aryan edifice. In a lecture in the U.S.A., he remarked scornfully: 

"And what your European Pandits say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign lands snatching away the land of aborigines and settling in India by exterminating them, is pure nonsense, foolish talk. Strange that our Indian scholars too say "Amen" to them." 

In another lecture, this time in India, he was in a more sarcastic mood, but mercilessly to the point:

"Our European archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came from - the Lord knows where. According to some they came from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia... Of late, there was an attempt made to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and all." 

(The contrast between civilized and barbaric is known in ancient Greece, where the term barbaroi was coined, - meaning "babblers" semantically akin to Sanskrit, mrdhravak and mlechchha. Similar concepts existed in imperial China, in colonial Europe, and also in Hindu India: arya, "civilized, participating in the Vedic culture", vs. anaraya or mlechchha).

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) - The first systematic refutation of the Aryan invasion theory had to wait until Sri Aurobindo.

"So great is the force of attractive generalizations and widely popularized errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder talking of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions." How prophetic, if we consider that this was written some twenty years before the growth of Nazism with its claims to "Aryan kinship." 

"...the Teutonic sin of forming a theory in accordance with their prejudices and then finding facts or manufacturing inferences to support it."

(source: On the Mahabharata - By Sri Aurobindo  - Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry. 1991 p. 10).

Refer to Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America - By Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee.

In his Secret of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo called on Indians not to be

"haunted by the unfortunate misconstruction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on the modern mind." "The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in their significance. There is no actual mention of such an invasion..." 

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891 - 1956) also offered his views:

He concluded: "the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to the same race."

Only one among our great political leaders saw through the hollowness of the Aryan theory. 

In his book Who were the Shudras? in 1946 B. R. Ambedkar famous for his work on the Indian Constitution, as well as his campaign in support of the Harijans, studied the Vedas. He devoted a complete chapter - Shudras versus Aryans -to an examination of the issue. 

Citing extensively the Vedic sources which suggest that the distinction between an Arya and Dasa/Dasyu was not a racial distinction of color and physiognomy and thus the origin of Sudra could not have anything to do with race, Ambedkar conclusion are unequivocal, though regrettably they are largely ignored. This is what he said:


"The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the modern representation of the original Aryan race. The theory is perversion of scientific investigation. It is not allowed to evolve out of facts. On the contrary, the theory is preconceived and facts are selected to prove it. It falls to the ground at every point. '


Dr. Ambedkar concludes:

  1. "The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race.
  2. There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of India by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and Dasyus supposed to be the natives of India.
  3. There is no evidence to show that the distinction between Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction.
  4. The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryans were different in color from the Dasas and Dasyus....."

"If anthropometry is a science which can be depended upon to determine the race of a people...(then its) measurements establish that the Brahmins and the Untouchables belong to the same race. From this it follows that if the Brahmins are Aryans the Untouchables are also Aryans. If the Brahmins are Dravidians, the Untouchables are also Dravidians...." 

Ambedkar was aware of the hold of this theory over the masses and scholars alike. He offered a succinct explanation. 

"why the Aryan race theory is not dead because of the general insistence by European scholars that the word varna, means color and the acceptance of that view by a majority..."

"The British were visualized as being the last of the invaders in a chain beginning with the Aryans. He could clearly see the implications of such ill-founded hypotheses which colonial Indology imposed on India and which Indian scholars went on repeating ad nauseam. 

(source: The Invasion That Never Was - By Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches. Reprint of Pakistan or The Partition of India. Education Department. Government of Maharashtra 1990 Vol. 7 p.302). Refer to chapter on First Indologists and European Imperialism.


Challenging the infallible façade of Western scholarship 

Ramchandra Bapuji Jadhav Rao (1880) voiced his incredulity at the opinions of his day in the Theosophist (Puzzles for the Philologists,1880 volume 1 March p 161): 

“We are told that the Aryan family, which lived in Central Asia, were a civilized people; and that their religion was that of the Vedas. They had chariots, horses, ships, boats, towns and fortified places before the separation took place. They were therefore not nomads. Max Muller adds that the younger branch left first and emigrated into Europe ….the oldest quitted its ancestral abode last of all, for a new home in India. The inference to be drawn, then, is that the old home was abandoned by every soul, and left to become a dreary and a desolate place as we now find it…the efforts of philology….can hardly succeed in metamorphosing a vague theory into real Simon Pure, but must remain as they are – a hollow farce.” (306 – 307). 

In his opinion, the whole Aryan invasion theory was “nothing but a varnished tale ..utterly undeserving of the name of traditional history." (305). 

Similar misgivings were voiced in 1901 by one Aghorechandra Chattopadhyaya in Calcutta. In his book, one can sense the author seriously struggling to make sense of the conclusions of Western scholarship, yet unable to conceal his own bewilderment at the theories that he was encountering: 

“Whatever might be the credibility the scholars are blessed with, we can hardly reconcile ourselves with such an easy faith on a manner like this.” Commenting on the spectacular achievements of the sub branches of the Indo-European family, such as the Vedic Indians, Greeks, Romans, and Persians, he wondered, with remarkable acumen for his time and sources, how the main trunk of the Indo-European tree could have produced such conspicuous fruits that survived for millennia, and yet leave no trace of itself: 

“While the major branches of the main trunk gathered strength, looked healthy, and spread far and wide, the latter, at the same time, withered, shriveled, and failed to show any indication of life and vitality and disappeared from sight and was lost for ever without leaving any trace or mark that might lead to its identification, nor could nay fossil remains of it be detected or found out, so that it could be inferred that such a society in such a stage of development existed at one time, on the surface of the earth…A story so imperfect in every important respect is put forward seriously for people to believe in and accept as an authentic account of the ancient history of the Indo-European race.” (59). 

Chattopadhyaya also struggles to make sense of what appeared to him to be the contradictory proposals that the Indo-Europeans were wandering nomads and yet were held to have originated from a specific abode, and that they were primitive tribesmen and yet were able to formulate and utilize a language as intricate and complex as Indo-European. 

The first prominent notes of discord between traditional exegesis and Western scholarship was sounded because of the lack of explicit mention, in the Vedic texts, of a foreign homeland of the Aryan people. This conspicuous silence was noted even by 19th century Western scholars (eg. Elphinstone 1841).This absence of any mention of external Aryan origins in traditional Sanskrit sources is, to this day, perhaps the single most prominent objection raised by scholars claiming indigenous origins of the Aryan culture.   

The Vedas themselves make no mention of any Aryan invasion or immigration reveals a major epistemological concern in this debate.

Srinvas Iyengar in 1914, was not convinced of this theory: 

“One solitary word anasa applied to the Dasyu has been quoted by…Max Muller…among numerous writers, to prove that the Dasyus were a flat nosed people, and that, therefore, by contrast, the Aryas were straight-nosed. Indian commentators have explained this word to mean an-asa, mouthless, devoid of fair speech….to hang such a weight of inference as the invasion and conquest of India by the straight nosed Aryans on the solitary word anasa does certainly seem not a very reasonable procedure…”  

 

Lord Vishnu on the serpent of Infinity.

The Vedas themselves make no mention of any Aryan invasion or immigration reveals a major epistemological concern in this debate.  

"With all their orientation towards “culture” the Western Indologists positively dislike Hinduism when it stands up to defend itself. They prefer museum Hinduism, or an innocent Gandhian kind of Hinduism, and they readily buy the secularist story that an assertive Hinduism is not the “real Hinduism”.

Watch Scientific verification of Vedic knowledge

(source: Ayodhya and After: Issues Before Hindu Society - By Koenraad Elst  p 83).

***

Iyengar is equally unimpressed by the racial interpretations of other passages in the Veda that had been given by Western scholars.  

“The only other trace of racial reference in the Vedic hymns is the occurrence of two words, one Krishna in seven passages and the other asikini in two passages. One of the meanings of these two words is “black”, but in all the passages, the words have been interpreted as referring to black demons, black clouds, a demon whose name is Krishna, or the powers of darkness. Hence to take this as evidence to prove that the invading Aryans were fair-complexioned as they referred to their demon foes or perhaps human enemies as black is again to stretch many points on behalf of a preconceived theory.” (6-7). 

Iyengar makes some more penetrating and well researched arguments: 

“The word…Arya occurs about 33 times (in the Rig Veda)…the word Dasa occurs about 50 times and Dasyu about 70 times…The word Arya occurs 22 times in hymns to Indra and 6 times in hymns to Agni, and Dasa 50 times in hymns to Indra and twice in hymns to Agni and Dasyu 50 times to Indra and 9 times to hymns to Agni. This constant association of these words with Indra clearly proves that Arya meant a worshipper of Indra (and Agni)…The Aryas offered oblations to Indra…The Dasyus or Dasas were those who opposed to the Indra Agni cult and are explicitly described thus in those passages where human Dasyus are clearly meant. They are avrata without (the Arya) rites, anyavrata of different rites, ayajavana, non-sacrifices, abrahma without prayers, also not having Brahmana priests, anrichah, without Riks, brahmadvisha, haters of prayers of Brhamnans, and anindra without Indra, despisers of Indra. They pour no milky draughts, they heat no cauldron. They give no gifts to the Brahmana…Their worship was but enchantment, sorcery, unlike the sacred law of fire-worship, wiles and magic. In all this we hear but the echo of war of rite with rite, cult with cult and not one of race with race.” (5-6). 

Others have voiced just as penetrating critiques: 

Bhupendranath Datta, in Vedic Funeral Customs and Indus Valley, part I and 2, Man in India writes: 

“In the attempt to ransack the latter-day Sanskrit text for proofs of Nordic characteristics…we forget that if in latter day Sanskrit texts sentences such as “Gaura (white, yellowish),…pingala (reddish, brown, tawny, golden), kapikesa (brown or tawny hair)” are to be found in Patanjali’s Mahabhasya (v.1. 115) and if Manu has said that a Brahmana should not marry a girl with pingala hair (38) there are other sentences in previous ages which contradict the strength of these characteristics. But with the help of these two sentences attempt is being made to prove the existence of Nordic characteristics amongst the Indian people….The God Rudra is described to have possessed golden hair…yet we cannot make a Nordic Viking out of him, and he had brown-hued skin-color and golden-colored arm….Surely we cannot take the god Rudra as a specimen of race miscegenation…we beg to sate that these allegories should be accepted as poetic fancies. They cannot be used as scientific data, for the anthropological purpose. (Datta 1936. 248 – 252). 

Interestingly, almost a full century after Indian scholars started objecting to the racial interpretations imposed on the Arya-Dasa dichotomy, Western scholars have recently also started drawing attention to 19th century philological excesses. Michael Witzel comments on the same term that “while it would be easy to assume reference to skin color, this would go against the spirit of the hymns: for the Vedic poets, black always signifies evil, and any other meaning would be secondary in these contexts.” 

(source: The Quest for the Origin of Vedic Culture - By Edwin F Bryant  p. 51 – 62). Refer to Communist Historians: The Enemy Within – By Yvette Rosser.

The Knowledge Filter

David Lewis in the book Forbidden History– Edited By J Douglas Kenyon has observed that:

“India epic poem the Ramayana, dated by non-Westernized Indian scholars to five thousand years before Christ, contains references to its hero Rama, gazing from India’s present-day west coast into a vast landmass now occupied by the Arabian Sea, an account supported by the recent under water discoveries. Less celebrated Indian texts even mention advanced technology, in the form of aircraft used to transport the society’s elite and wage war.

The writings describe these aircraft in detail and at great length, puzzling scholars and historians. The great Indian epics, what’s more, vividly describe militaristic devastation that can be equated only with nuclear wars. Was there, at one time, not just an ancient civilization in India, but an advanced ancient civilization?

Flying machines…lost continents…are these mythical tales of mythological lands or do these ancient references provide us with a historical record long forgotten and then dismissed by Western science as fantasy?

Since the 19th century Western scholars have dismissed the historical significance of the cultural traditions of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric bias, the expert’s reinterpreted history as it was taught in the East. Having found, for example, that root words of India’s ancient Sanskrit turn up almost universally in the world’s major languages, Western scholars devised an ethnocentric scheme to explain the phenomenon – one that modern Indian intellectuals have come to accept.

A previous European people must have once existed, the scholars imagined – an Indo-European race upon which the world, including India, drew for its linguistic roots and genetic stock. The scholars also expropriated the Aryans of ancient India to flesh out this scenario. This Aryan race, they told us, derived from Europe and then invaded the Indus Valley in the north of India – making Sanskrit and Vedic culture relatively young and a product, rather than a progenitor, of Western civilization.

The “Aryan invasion” theory has since fallen into disrepute. Southern India, a land whose cultural roots are said by some to stretch into an even more profound antiquity than do those of the north, suffered a similar fate. Speakers of a proto-Dravidian language, the forerunner of a family of languages spoken in the south – and some say of Sanskrit itself – entered India from the northwest, the Western scholars insist. Both invasion theories were necessitated by Western beliefs, at first about the Garden of Eden theory of origins and the, with the arrival of the Darwinists, beliefs about the worldly held out-of-Africa theory.

But the Aryan theory has been debunked. No skeletal evidence shows any difference between supposed invaders and the indigenous peoples of India. And satellite imagery now shows that the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley, and Mohenjo-Daro, probably declined and disappeared due to climatic changes, the drying up of the mythical Saraswati River, rather than to the descent of imaginary invaders. The demise of the Aryan invasion theory, though, and the recently discovering underwater ruins opens a Pandora’s box for orthodox scholars regarding the past – not just India’s past, but that of the human race. If Sanskrit predates the world’s other languages, and if ancient civilization existed where there are now seas, how can prehistory be explained in modern Western terms?

And how much of the actual history of India is still obscured by ethno-centrism, colonialism, or scientific materialism? The demise of the Aryan invasion theory may represent only the tip of the iceberg of misconception about the age and nature of ancient India, her culture, her people, and her accomplishments.

It is long been claimed that Mother India was born in a time before all myth began, when rishis, men of great wisdom and phenomenal spiritual attainment, walked on Earth. This ancient India dates to the times out of which the epic poems the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, and the ancient traditions of Tamil Nadu in the south grew. The Tamil Nadu was a land whose culture is said by some to predate that of the north, having once existed as part of Kumari Kandam and dating to a staggering 30,000 B.C.E.

The Knowledge Filter

Since the 19th century Western scholars have routinely dismissed the historical significance of ancient peoples, those of southern Asia included. With a decidedly ethnocentric base – the intellectual step-child of Western colonialism – the experts reinterpreted Eastern history, casting whole systems of ancient philosophy and science, in the experts mind, into the historical dustbin. This historical dustbin is the repository of all things conflicting with European models, such as biblical Christianity and scientific materialism. Here we find the very inception of the “knowledge filter,” now well known to students of alternative archaeology, geology, and other disciplines involved with the search for lost origins.

India, with her treatment by the West and her acquiescence to that treatment, typifies the way in which Western intellectualism conquered the world. Call it the “West is best” model: a strict adherence to European doctrines that deny traditions and attempt to offer decidedly more ancient theories regarding the origins of civilization than those of the Western scholars. On top of this, add a scientific materialism that denies all nonmaterial theories regarding the origins of man, life, and reality. 

(source: The Enigma of India’s Origins – By David Lewis in the book Forbidden History– Edited By J Douglas Kenyonp. 78 - 188).

Aryan Invasion Theory: Neo-colonial captive minds

“India is a prime example of a once great civilisation with an incredibly rich spiritual, literary, artistic, cultural and intellectual heritage … a heritage that Indian academic and political leaders honour more in the breach than in the observance.”  

The age of colonialism may be over, but not that of neo-colonial captive minds in India as elsewhere in the former colonial territories. Nations struggled for and won political liberation from imperialist thraldom. But their tertiary institutions of higher learning hardly ever (with rare indigenous exceptions) displayed any compelling urge to free themselves from the restrictive, Eurocentric disciplinary paradigms inherited from western universities, or to delve into their own unique native spiritual, cultural and intellectual resources that, even if not altogether annulled, were rendered more or less obsolete. And it was precisely from the corridors of domestic academia that the dangerous and divisive infection of captive minds spreads to all fields of the public life of a once subject nation.

To give just one illuminating illustration, we might mention the nearly universal and quite uncritical acceptance by both Indian politicians and the generality of national and international academics, of the 19th Century myth of the “Aryan invasion of Dravidian India” and of the arbitrary classification of the population into Aryan and Dravidian ethnic types. The damage inflicted on the political perceptions of the population poses a threat to the very integrity of India as a unique political and cultural entity. Witness the two most dominant political parties of Tamil Nadu, the DMK and the AIADMK (the ‘D’ standing for ‘Dravida’). They swallowed hook, line and sinker the shallow, ill-researched “findings” of 19th Century European Indologists. Even India’s present national anthem perpetuates the Aryan/Dravidian divide by referring to ‘Dravida’. It was a wrong-headed decision to discard the original national anthem Vande Mataram (“Salutation to the Mother”) for the land of Bharatmata was originally conceived, not as a merely secular/geographical abstraction, but as Mother India Herself). It was the mantric potency of Vande Mataram that ignited the fiery beginnings (1905-1910) of the Indian aspiration for complete independence from British rule after Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal. And the man who picked it out from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s classic Bengali novel Anandamath was no less a leader than Sri Aurobindo himself. To the surprise and consternation of the British Viceroy and his officials, thousand-throated cries of Vande Mataram rent the skies of India during the inspiring beginnings in those dramatic years of the national independence struggle.

(source:  Aryan Invasion Theory: Neo-colonial captive minds – By Devan Nair).

 

 

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