Book Opinion: Aryans, Jews, Brahmins. Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity

Consider that there are two parties A and B. Party A proposes a "scientific" hypothesis and forces part B to provide an explanation this specific hypothesis. This is exactly the framework for the "Aryan Invasion" myth. Aryan Invasion refers to a hypothesis which briefly states that Aryans were the "white" foreigners who came to India on horse drawn carts and "invaded" the cities of India, driving the original inhabitants, called Dravidians to the south. I call Aryan Invasion as myth neither in a literary philosophical term that folks with English PhD talk about nor as a set of mythological stories that are used in popular culture. I mean myth as something that people literally invented without any scientific basis. The whole "theory" of Aryan Invasion does not have any scientific leg to stand on. Even the religious followers of Aryan Invasion such as Romila Thapar et. al. just switched their stance to Aryan Migration, as if the explanation is vastly better. Having read the literature recently, I was appalled that cheap marketing tricks like "bait and switch" were used in scientific pursuits.

Having that out of the way, this book deals with Aryan myth as a literary construct. The construct that European Indologists developed to explain the common aspects of Indian and European languages and also the origin story of Europe. While initial translations from Sanskrit to French and other European languages were received positively (by Voltaire and some of his contemporaries), and praised Sanskrit as a source of knowledge, the later translations (or rather, mistranslations) were used for nefarious purposes. Selective interpretations of slokas in Rigveda were used to postulate the Aryan Invasion theory. Further, the varna system was cast as a theory of racial purity and finally, it was inferred that the "fall" of Indian society was because of racial intermixing. The appropriation of Aryan myth to German public was primarily done by German Indologists and we all know where that lead. The first part of the book talks about Europen perspective of this Aryan myth and the way it was used for constructing the racist notions that plagued pre WWII Germany. Since I have not read further sources on these European sources, I cannot judge the scholarship of this part.

The second part of the book deals with how Indians saw this Aryan myth and how they had to deal with it. Here the book deals with two groups across time periods ranging from 1830 to 1950. The first camp included Ram Mohun Roy, Dayanand Saraswati, and even Swami Vivekananda that are supposed to identify themselves as a part of the Aryan myth and how they used Aryan myth to perpetuate the differences. The second camp was Jyothirao Phule and Ambedkar. It is in this section that I find the authors work really shoddy and frankly un-scholarly. I find the classification into these two classes as haphazard. Roy, Saraswati, and Phule accepted the Aryan Invasion whereas Vivekananda and Ambedkar rejected it. Logically, the first three would be a better class because they were also social reformers, unlike Vivekananda and Ambedkar.

I have read the complete works of Vivekananda and the selective quoting of Vivekananda to project him as a defender of caste system is frankly, abhorrent! Forget defender, this chapter casts him as a defender of inequality and as a supremacist that wants to keep the downtrodden people down. Plain and simple, it is a lie. Vivekananda never accepted Aryan Invasion theory. He definitely mentioned that there was possibly a racial diversity among people from the north and the south. Nowhere in the talk, (Reference 8:241-243) does he mention Dravidians as shudras. This is a blatant lie and a perversion of the author! I looked up the reference and he mentions Dravidians, but not sudras. While this may seem trivial, it is actually not. At Vivekananda's time, Aryan Invasion was merely a linguistic theory and having read the Vedas, Vivekananda said that there is no textual evidence for any invasion of any sort. He also said that the Indologists interpreted vedas incorrectly (hindsight 2020, it turns out to be true). Vivekananda's argument was that there were several ethnic groups, other than Aryans, in the Indian subcontinent and all these were eventually assimilated into the Aryan culture. This is unlike the European culture that exterminated the natives that they encountered in Americas. The chapter on Vivekananda seems like a massive exercise in cherry-picking for supporting an ideology of the author that Vivekananda wanted the "status quo" to continue. This is far from truth. Had the author invested time to read at least one book completely by Vivekananda, she would have come to a different conclusions. 

More worryingly, the references in the complete works of Vivekananda seem to be very haphazard as well. The sentences jump from one book to another. It seems like the author just did a search of Aryan or Dravidian in the complete works and jumped across the citations without any coherent order to construct a narrative fitting her own ideology. If there is any consolation, I find her coverage of Ambedkar to be fair. Of course, that is also because it fits her ideology directly. She was also very charitable with respect to Jyothirao Phule.

In addition to the blatant mis-characterization of Vivekananda, I found the book to be fairly pointless. The book does not start with a scientific fact that AIT does not have any concrete archaeological evidence. Second, given that the colonials set the frame of dialogue that there are Aryans and Dravidians, the intellectuals in India where forced to give an explanation which was only in this frame. Even when intellectuals like Vivekananda opposed it, eminent scholars like the author distort his views and publicize that he was an oppressor. The irony is that while talking about misinterpretations of Europeans and Indians, the author herself misinterprets Vivekananda. Instead of investigating the more interesting question that how would a community of intellectuals cope when a patently absurd and false theory like AIT is imposed on the community, this book somehow tries to equalize the misinterpretations of both Europeans and Indians of the same order. I am sorry, you are wrong. When a colonial power asserts a theory, the subjects do not have the same tools at their disposal. Finally, the conclusion is straightforward for anyone with common sense. Identity is obviously a political tool, especially for a political topic such as Aryan race. However, instead of proposing a reconciliation or a path for reconciliation, this book feels like a under-developed teenager taunting the adults trying to find a way forward. Finally, you cannot equate the Aryan debate on European and Indian sides on the same footing, the European counterpart caused a mass genocide, whereas nothing of that sort happened in India. What does that tell about these two nations, you decide. 

I would not recommend you to read this book and waste your time. I have already wasted mine. I am devoting additional time to write this blog so as to active discourage people from reading such poor works. I would rather be reading primary accounts of travelers and go through archives.