“We see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race.”
Kenshub Chandra Sen, 1877
In the opening part of this series, I examined the roots of the notion of the Aryans in the work of Sir William Jones and Freidrich Max Müller. In the second post, I briefly outlined the emergence of nineteenth-century racial science, and how the concept of Aryans became associated with white supremacy and racial hierarchies.
Aryan racial theory, as it developed, seemed to raise as many issues as it purported to solve. If Indians and the British shared a common ancestry, this threatened the belief that Indians were inferior to Europeans. The answer, for some, lay in a Darwinian notion of racial degeneration. This led to the notion that whilst the European Aryans had maintained their vitality, the Indian Aryans had degenerated, by intermingling with the aboriginal natives – weakening their bloodlines and adopting superstitions and primitive practices. In the pens of the European racial theorists, India’s Aryan past became a kind of golden age, from which India had sadly declined into superstition and idolatry. These ‘explanations’ had far-reaching consequences.
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