Charles Allen’s ‘Aryans’: So, who among us is an Aryan

PK Basant

WHO were the Aryans? Nowadays, the Aryan question is related to our notions of identity, culture and religion. It is interesting to know that 200 years ago, nobody knew anything about the Aryans. ‘Aryans’ by Charles Allen gives us answers to many such questions. He bridges the gap between the world of specialised scholarship and common reader. Completed just before he passed away, this is a work of epic ambition.

Allen’s narrative begins with the discovery of the Indo-European languages by William Jones in 1784. He discovered that words having similar sounds were used for mother, father, brother, cows, horses and dogs in languages like Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, English, German, Hindi, Kashmiri or Persian. These languages had a similar grammatical structure too. These similarities could not be explained by contacts with Europeans in modern times as many languages were in use 2,000-3,000 years ago. The explanation was that the ancestors of the speakers of these languages shared the same geographical space in the distant past. The ancestors migrated to different parts of the world, carrying their language with them. The oldest available text of those people is the Rig Veda. Its authors called themselves Aryans. This led to the search for an Aryan homeland, which led to some fascinating discoveries.

These researches broadly moved in three directions. Linguists tried to create dictionaries of words that were shared across many Indo-European languages. The assumption was that the shared words were formed before the speakers of these languages moved to different parts of the world. Such a collection of words might have descriptions of the flora and fauna. A careful study might direct us to places where such vegetation and animals were found. Schrader, a linguist, pointed out that the Indo-European languages shared the names of animals like horse, cow, goat and swine. Wild horse is not found in India. The names of animals found in the Indian subcontinent, like elephant, monkey or tiger, were not shared by these languages. Thus, the likely home of the Aryans was the Eurasian steppes.

Archaeologists tried to develop a set of characteristics that could be equated with the Aryan traditions. They believed that horses, chariots and fire worship characterised the Aryan communities. Scholars like Marija Gimbutas have shown that areas around the Caspian Sea saw the emergence of a large number of communities that bred horses from about 4500 BCE. These people migrated to different parts of the world in waves.

The third direction of research connects with genetics. Geneticists tried to isolate characteristics of the genetic material from skeletal remains found in excavations. Based on an analysis of the DNA of 523 individuals, Narshimhan et al claimed in an article published in Science in 2019 that there was a movement of people from the steppes to South Asia, and that Indians represent a mixed bag of characteristics of different population groups.

Many scholars in India are used to invoking the birth of our nation-state from the mystical Aryans, a pure race with a language of gods and unblemished rituals. There has been a long tradition of swamis and gurus claiming that India was the original Aryan homeland. Their argument is that the Vedas do not refer to any migration. The problem is that the evidences used against this hypothesis are based on the discovery of the Indo-European languages that refer to the prehistory of the Vedic language. In their anxiety to prove the out-of-India theory about the Aryans, some scholars claim that the Harappans represented an Aryan civilisation. This argument is untenable. A study of the Rig Veda indicates that its authors were primarily pastoral people with limited practice of agriculture. The Harappans, on the other hand, represented an urban civilisation. They had planned cities, craft specialisation and long-distance trade. The complex social divisions associated with urban centres are not reflected in the Rig Veda. Similarly, the religious practices of the Harappans seem to have given importance to mother goddess cults and worship of Pashupati and phallus. The early Vedic religion focused on the worship of male gods like Indra, Agni and Varuna. Mother goddesses were very marginal in their belief system.

The Aryan theory was supported by people like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bharatendu Harishchandra, who hoped to be treated as equals by their British masters. Keshub Chandra Sen could proclaim that the coming of the British to India was like the meeting of two lost cousins. To Dayananda Saraswati, Vedas represented the primordial Hindu identity where all castes were equal. Dalit movements in South India proclaimed that the Aryans were outsiders who had subjugated the indigenous population. Jyotirao Phule and Periyar identified the Aryans with Brahmins and launched powerful anti-Brahmin movements.

‘Aryans’ begins with an introduction by David Loyn that has a picture of the ‘QAnon Shaman’ atop the Capitol in Washington DC, a storm trooper of Mr Trump, trying to overturn the results of the presidential election. He must be a votary of the right-wing politics that believes in the racial supremacy of the Whites. They believe they are pure-bred Aryans. They despise African-Americans as much as Indian Indians. It is important because many Indians believing themselves to be Aryans assume that they would be treated as equals by White supremacists. The reason why Charles Allen wrote this book was “sorrow at the way professional research has been hijacked in modern India by some in the politico-religious Hindutva movement…”

When politics and scholarship become intertwined, they are fatal for scholarship as well as politics. The lynch mobs in India reminded him of Hitler. Hitler believed that the Germans were pure-bred Aryans and others like Jews, Russians and Poles were inferior races who deserved to be subjugated and killed. Ultimately, Hitler’s Germany was destroyed but not before he had killed crores of people inside and outside Germany.

Allen’s book reads like a Russian novel having an incredibly large list of names like William Jones, Max Mueller, Uvarova, Gimbutas, Cavalli-Sforza. It shows how modern knowledge is a project that transcends boundaries of nations, communities and classes. This is not a book about certainties. The study of Aryans is a project of knowledge that has been fed by different streams of research. It is not useful to go on cursing Max Mueller or William Jones for their errors. With all their failings, they pushed the frontiers of knowledge about the Indo-European communities. Theirs was an unended quest and that is the mark of scholarship.

And who among us is an Aryan? It is not a race, it is not a religion… it is all of us reading this piece and everyone who speaks the Indo-European languages.