Tantra’s Primordial Past: The Aryan Invasion Theory – I
As a follow-up to the series of essays on Theosophy and Race, and the Red Flags posts, I will now turn to a more complex and contentious subject, generally known as the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (AIT). How does this relate to the tantras? The origins of the tantras, according to some authors, can be traced to an ancient people, peaceful, agrarian, and goddess-worshipping, who were invaded and suppressed by patriarchal, warlike Aryans. Their cities were destroyed, and their tantric practices were driven underground or preserved, in secret by occult adepts. This narrative draws on the Aryan Invasion Theory.
The basic idea is that the Aryans, an ancient Indo-European people who originated from Central Asia, invaded Northern India in the period 1800-1500BCE and subjugated, displaced (& eventually assimilated) the indigenous people (sometimes called the Dravidians) and their culture. This theory has, to a large extent, become an accepted ‘fact’ and is commonly found in popular texts on Indian history. It is often treated as a done deal – that it actually occurred. Unfortunately, the situation is far more complex. It is a long and tangled tale, twisting through the labyrinthine debates of linguistics, the interpretation of archaeological and textual evidence, racial theories, and politics.
The ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit
During the Renaissance, European scholars became increasingly vexed with the issue of the original language spoken in Eden. Hebrew was, of course, widely held to be the original human language since antiquity, but there was a clamor in favour of other tongues. In 1688, Andreas Kempe published a satirical pamphlet, The Languages of Paradise, humorously declaring that God himself spoke Swedish, whilst Adam spoke Danish, and Eve fell to the blandishments of a French-speaking Serpent. Some years later, Georg Leibniz produced a treatise on the new science of comparative linguistics, opining that the languages of Europe had originated on a continent named Scythia. In the late 1700s, Johann Herder wrote an important work – Ideas on the Philosophy of Human History (1784-1791) that raised some questions and claimed to answer others. Herder followed the tradition of linking philology and the geography of Paradise but pointed out that it was futile to locate Paradise in any one nation. He also disputed the long-held notion that Hebrew was the language of Paradise, although he did regard it as one of the ‘eldest daughters’ of the primal tongue.
A consequence of the age of expansion and the first phase of colonialism was that the historicity of biblical chronology was brought into question. The belief in the monogenic descent of all human beings from Adam, and of all languages from the sons of Noah, became the subject of much debate. Attempts were made to unify Hindu chronology with that of the Bible, and it was the work of Sir William Jones (see this post) that first managed this task, demonstrating that Sanskrit literature corroborated the Biblical account of history. Jones’ greater work though, was the affinity between Sanskrit and European languages (although he was not the first to make such a connection). Others followed Jones. John Z. Holwell, in his Interesting historical events, relative to the provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan (1765-71) argued that not only were the Hindu scriptures of equivalent stature to the Bible but that they completed it. Through the study of language, scholars hoped to uncover not only a common ancestral language of all humanity but to be able to accurately describe early human culture.
The correlation between language and race, already present in the biblical accounts of history, continued throughout the nineteenth century and still can be found today. But India very quickly came to be regarded, by some (such as Voltaire and Schlegel) as the cradle of civilization, long before Madame Blavatsky appeared. It was considered by some scholars that European languages such as Greek and Latin were descended from Sanskrit. This view – that the ancient Greeks and Romans shared a common ancestry with the inhabitants of India met, as one might expect, with strident opposition.
Indomania meets Celtomania
In 1799, Reuben Burrow published a paper titled ‘A Proof that the Hindoos had the Binomial Theorem’, arguing that Indians had an advanced knowledge of algebra comparable to that of modern Europe. He also advanced the theory that Indian religion had spread far and wide; that Stonehenge, for example, was a Buddhist temple, and that ‘the Druids of Britain were Brahmins is beyond the least shadow of a doubt’. This idea was taken up by Thomas Maurice in one of the volumes of his Indian Antiquities.
In his ‘A Dissertation on the Indian Origin of the Druids and on the Striking Affinity which the Religious Rites and Ceremonies, Anciently Practised in the British Islands, bore to those of the Brahmins’ (1812). Maurice argued that it was the Brahmin devotees of the Buddha, originating in Tibet, who had migrated through Asia, mixing with the Celtic peoples, until they brought their religion to Britain. According to Maurice, the etymology of ‘Druid’ was derived from the Celtic word for ‘oak’, and he goes to great effort to demonstrate that the various Welsh derivatives can be related to the Sanskrit ‘forest of gandharvas’. He further demonstrates the kinship between the Brahmins and Druids in terms of their dress (white robes and head-dresses); their long periods of study prior to initiation, and their common belief in the transmigration of the soul. The idea that the Druids came from India is often mentioned in popular works on Tantra – and remains an article of faith amongst many contemporary Druids.
Other efforts to demonstrate the India-Celtic connection include Henry O’Brien’s 1834 essay The Round Towers of Ireland (see this post).
A French scholar, François Catrou, proposed that “the Brahmins” had originated in ancient Egypt. But it was Max Mūller who proposed that the linguistic similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Iranian and European languages were evidence of a common racial heritage and by extension, a common geographical origin. They proposed that what was originally an Ur-tongue – Proto-Indo-European – developed later into the Indo-European language group. This idea – quite radical at the time – was to have far-reaching consequences.
In the eighteenth century, Hinduism was widely believed by Europeans to be essentially monotheistic, with the worship of ‘idols’ as a popular form of religion. Quentin Craufurd for example, in his 1790 work, Sketches chiefly relating to the history, religion, learning, and manners of the Hindoos, asserts that the religion of the Brahmins ‘inculcates the belief in one God only’. Luke Scrafton, in his Reflections on the government of Indostan (1761) holds a similar view, proposing that the worship of images was popularized by the Brahmins in order to make their doctrines understood by the common people. Already then, there is the germ of the idea that there are two forms of Indian religion: one advanced, the other popular, and lesser in status.
From Indomania to Indophobia
This romantic view of India had withered by the middle of the nineteenth century (especially after 1857). Indomania was replaced by Indophobia, particularly by those voices who firmly rejected any notion of commonality between India and Europe, such as the influential Charles Grant (see this post). In 1840, the Reverend Alexander Duff stated that ‘Hindus have no will, no liberty, no conscience of their own. … They launch into all the depravities of idol worship. They look like the sports and derision of the Prince of Darkness.”
Max Mūller’s proposal that the common language origin Proto-Indo-European meant that Indians and Europeans shared a common racial origin was firmly rejected by racial scientists, who argued that Aryan races were diluted and weakened by interbreeding with the lesser races that they had subjugated. Nor did Mūller’s proposal find much favour with the British, whose colonialist perspectives on India were rooted in the belief that its inhabitants were inferior to Europeans.
The concept of the Indo-European language group (a term first coined by the linguist Thomas Young in 1816) was derided by racial theorists. Isaac Taylor, in his 1899 book The Origin of the Aryans was particularly scathing: ‘It cannot be insisted upon too strongly that identity of speech does not imply identity of race, any more than diversity of speech implies diversity of race … Max Mūller, owing to the charm of his style, his unrivalled power of popular exposition, and to his high authority as a Sanskrit scholar, has done more than any other writer to popularise this erroneous notion.’
Mūller himself made his first reference to the ‘Aryan Race’ in his 1861 lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Mūller later tried to correct the confusion between language and race, but his protests fell on deaf ears. What emerged was a distinction between two races: a light-skinned Caucasian race and a darker-skinned, savage race. The lighter-skinned race is of course the Aryans, a vigorous warrior-people who vanquished and subjugated the dark-skinned savages – the Dravidians, who were pushed into Southern India. Gustav Oppert for example, advanced the theory of a pre-Aryan Semitic race he called the Bharatas. The Bharatas were of Finnish-Hungarian origin and had settled in India prior to the Aryans. The Bharatas were inferior to the Aryans, according to Oppert, as their society was matriarchal, and they lacked the capacity for abstract thought.
It has long been argued that this distinction between the two races served British colonial interests. In his Annals of Rural Bengal (1897), W.W. Hunter writes that the ‘Aryan population of India have been subdued by successive waves of conquerors, inferior to them in their boasted intellect, but able to wield the sword with a more powerful right hand than is given to a people who shift the labour life on to servile shoulders.’ Others agreed, making the British presence in India into a ‘rescue mission’ of sorts, with the British ‘Aryans’ bringing regeneration and civilization to the descendants of their forebears.
In the next part of this series, I’ll take a closer look at the philological approach of Max Mūller.
Sources
Subrata Chattopadhyay Banerjee. 2019. The Development of Aryan Invasion Theory in India: A Critique of Nineteenth-Century Social Constructionism. Springer.
Edwin Bryant. 2001. The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate.Oxford University Press.
Sharada Sugirtharajah. 2003. Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective. Routledge.
Thomas R. Trautmann. 1997. Aryans and British India. University of California Press.
