summary of chapter one

1. 1.1. Imperial Evangelism
Shapes Indian Ethnology
Biblical stories were imposed as historical facts
to impose cultural and theological dominance.

2. The first section of this chapter will explain :
 Biblical Indology based on Biblical Myths
• The Noah’s Deluge
• The Curse on Ham
• The Tower of Babel
 Application of Biblical Myths
• Application to Africa
• Application to India
 Indological Legacy

3. Biblical Framework
When European colonialists captured various parts of the
world, their missionaries and merchants encountered
unfamiliar non-western cultures.
Very soon, European accounts were constructed to fit all
the populations of other cultures into the Biblical
framework.

4. 1.1.1. Biblical Myths

5. Mosaic Ethnology / Biblical Narrative
 Biblical myths were used to interpret Asian and African
societies.
 The Noah’s Deluge
 The Curse on Ham
 The Tower of Babel

6. 1. The Noah’s Deluge
 Great Flood of the Bible.
 Descendants of Noah repopulated the earth.
 Noah’s three sons were Ham, Shem and Japheth.
 European mapping of unfamiliar non-western cultures with the Biblical
framework.
 Debate to assign non-European community the status as per Biblical
hierarchy.
 The narratives of natives were dismissed as ‘myths’ and ‘superstitions’.
 The Europeans considered it their moral authority, and indeed, responsibility,
to compose the ‘true history’ of all cultures.

7. 2. The Curse on Ham
 Noah’s three sons were Ham, Shem and Japheth.
 Ham was cursed because he laughed on the nudity of Noah.
 He was cursed to live in servitude to the descendants of the other two
sons.
 This Biblical account - accepted as veritable history in Europe.
 The descendants of Ham – all dark-skinned peoples.
 Hamitic culture - barbaric, uncivilized and immoral.

8. Stephen R Haynes
on The Curse on Ham
For over two millennia, Bible readers have blamed Ham and his
progeny for everything from existence of slavery to serfdom to
the perpetuation of sexual license and perversion, to the
introduction of magical arts, astrology, idolatry, witchcraft and
heathen religion. They have associated Hamites with tyranny,
theft, heresy, blasphemy, rebellion, war and even deicide.

9. Martin Luther
on The Curse on Ham
 Ham and his descendants were possessed by ‘Satanic and
bitter hatred’.
 Using the physical attributes of the body as the basis for
moral degeneration and justification for servitude.

10. Origen of Alexandria (185–254 CE)
on The Curse on Ham
Look at the origin of the race and you will discover that their
father Ham, who had laughed at his father’s nakedness
deserved a judgment of this kind that his son Chanaan should
be servant to his brothers, in which case the condition of
bondage would precede the wickedness of his conduct. Not
without merit, therefore, does the discolored posterity imitate the
ignobility of the race.

11. 1.1.2. Applications of
Biblical Myths

12. The Bible’s Hamitic myth, in which the
descendants of Ham were cursed by Noah into
perpetual slavery, was used by the Europeans as
the established truth to interpret the skin color of
Blacks and justify the institution of slavery.
Africa witnessed armed expeditions as well as
slave raids from Europe, transferring large
numbers of captured African peoples to distant
lands.
The institution of slavery became a major
constituent of European and American
economies.
Application to Africa

13. Application to Africa
 Between 1517 and 1840, it is estimated that twenty-million
Africans were captured, transported to the Americas, and
enslaved in a manner that can only be considered a holocaust.
 The Hamitic myth - provided justification for slavery.
 Respected professionals such as doctors, lawyers, politicians,
clergymen and professors’, regarded the ‘Curse of Ham’ as
historical fact.

14. Africans accepting Biblical Narrative
 The slave and black poetess, Phyllis Wheatley, wrote in 1773:
‘Remember Christians, Negroes black as Cain may be
refined and join the angelic train’.

16. William Jones
 Jones mapped Indians as the offspring of Ham, Arabs as the offspring of
Shem, and Tartars as the offspring of Japheth.
 Jones used his newly discovered Sanskrit materials to claim that the
Hindus had the character of Ham, and that Sanskrit literature was linked to
Biblical events.
 Thus, Indian linguistics was mapped onto Biblical ethnology.

17. Mapping Sanskrit literature onto
Biblical master narrative
 Ram – Raamah
 Kusa – Cusa (the grandson of Ham)
 Manu – Adam
 Narasimha – Nimrod

18. Biblical time-scales
 God had created the world in 4004 BCE, and the flood of Noah had taken place in
2349 BCE.
 Indian yugas had to be rejected because they involved huge time-spans running
into millions and billions of years.
 Mythology - Sanskrit texts that did not fit into the Bible,
 History - Whatever could fit Bible.
 Vedic and Puranic texts were digested into Biblical chronology.
 To establish his dates for the so called Aryan invasion of India, which influences
scholars to this day.

19. Eurocentric constructions of Indian
history.
 William Jones’s philology became a theological project to fit Hindu
texts into a Biblical mythology.
 Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva as the degraded version
of the Christian Trinity.
 Appropriator of Hinduism in order to enhance the credibility of
Christianity.
 The chronology of events found in non-western texts had to fit the
time-periods mandated by the Christian officials.

20. In this part :

21. 1.1.3. Indological Legacy

22. Indological legacy
 The earliest speakers of Sanskrit belonged to the Aryan ‘race’.
 Initial Aryan invasion from Europe to the Indian subcontinent had
brought an infusion of civilization, the Indians had later
degenerated.
 Europeans were needed to lift the degraded Indian brothers to their
past glory – then and now.

23. Indological institutions
 These Indologists set up various institutions in India in order to
interpret India from colonial perspective.
 They employed Indians as collaborators.
 Many of these institutions were created to weaken the Indian
civilization and strengthen the British side.
 Colonial Indology was based on collaborations between Western
academics and Indian scholars.

24. Indian ethnology shaped by Imperial evangelism
Colonial Indological infrastructure perpetuates
Mosaic ethnological categories
• Indian communities viewed through biblical prisms
transformed to ethnicities
• Justification of British colonialism
•1784 Asiatic Society, Calcutta
•1800 College of Fort Williams, Calcutta
•1806 East India College, England (Charles Grant had key role)
•1818 Serampore Seminary, Calcutta
•1827 Establishment of Boden Chair for studying Sanskrit (Oxford)
•1862 Haileybury and Imperialist Service College
•1883 Indian Institute at Oxford (Set up by Monier-Williams)
Asia/India

25. Monier Williams (1819 - 99)
Col Boden stated most explicitly in his will (dated Aug. 15, 1811)
that the special object of his munificent bequest was to promote
the translation of the scriptures into Sanskrit; so as to enable
his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives
of India to the Christian religion.

26. Monier Williams (1819 - 99)
When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahmanism are
encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the
cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and
complete.

27. 1.2. Inventing
the Aryan Race

28. Idealized & romantic view of India
The Sanskrit language . . . is of a
wonderful structure; more perfect than
the Greek, more copious than the
Latin, and more exquisitely refined
than either, yet bearing to both of
them a stronger affinity . . . than could
possibly have been produced by
accident.
William Jones

29. The second section of this chapter will explain
:
 How the West’s interpretation and treatment of the Indic
materials shaped the study of Sanskrit, and
 Churned out the ‘Aryan’ racial construct, which itself would
undergo dramatic transmutations in the Western psyche.
 Devolutions of European needs and politics, rather than the
result of an objective academic study of the ‘Orient
 Resulting in ethnic conflicts and genocidal wars.

30. 1.2.1. The Study of India
European intellectual history concerning India

31. Euro-centric Colonial Construct : Aryan EUROPE
Study of India
European Romanticists Colonial Indologists
AryanPro- India
European U-Turn from
glorifying to demeaning
India
Aryan race
German Identity need
Race science
Nazism
Holocaust
World War-II
Rejection of Aryan race
theory in European
context

32.  European Romanticists -
 to escape the rigid framework of Judeo-Christian monotheism due to new challenges from the
modern period.
 India was discovered, and quickly became the premier vehicle for this search for their own golden
origin.
 Indologists –
 historicized classical India in a way that served colonial needs as well as the needs of the emerging
nation-states in Europe.
 Created the notion of Aryans as harbingers of civilization to all humanity.
 A glorified European ancestry was traced to these idealized Aryans.
 The European Aryans were seen as racially pure and blessed with the spiritually superior Christianity.
 A Master Aryan Race -
 German nationalist thinkers.
 European anti-Semitism used the Aryan construct to separate Europeans from Jews.
 The notion of ‘Aryan Christ’ became popular in Europe.

33. India inspired European
academic activity
1) Sanskrit : The discovery of Sanskrit had liberated Europeans
from their exclusive focus on the Mediterranean area as the
source of their cultural heritage.
2) Obsession for an Aryan race : Search for the origin of the
Aryans and the Hebrews, the imagined speakers of the Aryan
and Semitic language-groups.

34. The Translations of Sanskrit Texts
 The translations of the Zend Avesta, the Zoroastrian seminal
text, and the Bhagavad Gita (in the late 1700s) : first
approach to an Indian text
 The 1789 English translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala by
William Jones.
 Retranslated into German influenced many prominent
intellectuals such as Herder, Goethe, and Schiller.

35. Similarities among
Indo-European languages

36. Similarities among
Indo-European languages

37. The birth of Philology & Quest for
Origin
 The birth of new academic discipline - Philology - was born, and
essentially owed its beginnings to Sanskrit studies.
 How these languages are connected? It provided a great impetus to
the European quest for the origins of peoples.
 The discovery of Sanskrit had liberated Europeans from their exclusive
focus on the Mediterranean area as the source of their cultural
heritage.
 Quarrel over ancestry - Aryans, lndo-Germans, Indo-Europeans, and
Caucasians.

38. Sanskrit revolutionized the social
sciences
Thanks to the discovery of the ancient
language of India, Sanskrit as it is called
. . . and thanks to the discovery of the
close kinship between this language
and the idioms of the principal races of
Europe . . . a complete revolution has
taken place in the method of
studying the world’s primitive
history.
Friedrich Max Muller

39. Sanskrit revolutionized the social
sciences
Europe’s ‘discovery’ of India
was a ‘re-discovery’ of
Europe’s own foundation it had
forgotten. Using this trajectory,
the East was not the ‘other’ of
the West, but its origin.
Herder ( 1744 – 1803 )

41. India was the mother of all
advanced civilizations
Sanskrit was the mother of Indo-European languages

42. Aryans (or Indo-Europeans) as
the most powerful race.
Philology to hunt the ‘birthplace of the world’s most powerful race

44. 1.2.2. Western Indology
shaping European Identity
German Identity
Legitimizing British Rule over India

46. Imagining the
German Past

47. Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829)
 Germans vs France rivalry
 France – A Renaissance nation – inheritor of
Greco-Rome Civilization
 Germans – A barbarian tribes
 Schlegel wanted to prove Germans as highly
civilized nation.
 The origin of Germans from India.

49. Intellectual Fashion
Romanticism & Pantheism
European Politics
German-French enmity
F. Schlegel’s Second Indological U-Turn (1804-12)
Start: India was mother of all civilizations; Germans migrated from India; French are degraded
versions of Indian migrants
End: Abandons the Indian origins of all civilizations and the superiority of Indian civilizations.
Germans did not originate in India.
F. Schlegel’s First Indological U-Turn (1802-5)
Start: India superior to Greco-Roman culture and to Christianity
End: Indian religion misunderstood the original Revelation; Indian ascetics are self-destructive,
superstitious and appalling.
German Barbarian Complex
•Renaissance made France superior
•Germans declared barbarians

50. Rejection of Reason, Reformation, Protestantism, Enlightenment
Conversion to Catholicism
Rejection of Pantheism
Rejection of Indian Religion
F. Schlegel’s First Indological Project
Passion for India as Mother of all Civilizations

51. Legitimizing British
rule over Indians
A sort of family reunion

52. Aryan origins and superiority.
A favored race, blessed with ‘innate
beauty’ and ‘gifts of intelligence

54. Adolphe Pictet (1799 -1875)
 Aryan mind was monotheism.
In Europe - Aryans marched towards perfect monotheism.
In India - Lapsed into polytheism in India.
 Christianity - reviving the seed of monotheism in India.
 Justification for colonization of India. It is ethical.
 Civilization has to spread through Christian colonization.

55. Aryans as the most powerful
race.
Philology to hunt the ‘birthplace of the world’s most powerful race

56. Jesus is
Aryanized Christ
Ernest Renan
A Hebrew Scholar

58. Ernest Renan and Aryan Christ
 Jesus was decoupled from Judaism; Christianity was declared to
be ‘less purely Semitic’.
 Jesus is Aryanized Christ
 Renan used philology to put Christianity on a scientific footing, by
discarding superstition and integrating it with the Enlightenment.

59. The danger of favoring Aryans
was that Christ
would be forgotten.
R.F. Grau (1835–93)

60. R.F. Grau (1835–93)
 Emphasizing the Semitic inheritance of Christianity
 Semites as the sole link between God and his new-chosen
people, the Christian faithful.
 Without Christian monotheism, the unbridled dynamism or
uncontrolled creativity of Aryans would descend into chaos.

61. R.F. Grau (1835–93)
‘…The marriage between Semitic spirit and Indo-
Germanic nature is sealed in heaven’. Separately,
neither had the backbone supposedly provided by
Christianity, but thanks to this wedding, they were
destined to rule the world…’

62. 1.2.3. Arya Becomes
a Race in Europe

63. Arya Becomes a Race in Europe
 The word ‘Aryan’ was first coined as the name of family of
languages and peoples by Max Mueller.
 The British used the Aryan race concept to legitimize British
rule over Indians as a sort of family reunion or love affair in
which the superior British were trying to help the inferior
Indians.
 In less than a century, philology turned into a source of
racism.

64. Joseph Arthur Comte
de Gobineau (1816–82)
 Three races – white yellow and black.
 Whites were at the top - ability to create and
spread culture.
 Superiority of the white type and, within that
type, of the Aryan family.
 Aryans invasion to explain the caste system.

65. Gobineau :
Caste and Race Science
 All civilizations emerged from the White race, but declined
everywhere because of intermarriages, except northern Europe.
 European Aryans, after invading India, had become debased by
mixing with the darker native races.
 In India this degeneration was slow because the invading Aryans
created caste system which prevented the racial bastardization
and degeneration of Aryans.
 Caste was made by pure whites to slow down the intermixing of
their race with inferior peoples. Indian Brahmins were degraded
Aryans.

66. H S Chamberlain:
linking Caste with Race
. . . wherever the Aryans went they became
master. The Greek, the Latin, the Kelt, the
Teuton, the Slav – all these were Aryans: of
the aborigines of the countries which they
overran scarcely a trace remains. So too
in India, it was ‘varna’ colour which
distinguished the white conquering
Arya from the defeated black man, the
Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of
caste.

67. Anthropologist Kenneth A.R. Kennedy :
 Both Gobineau and
Chamberlain transformed the
Aryan concept, which had its
humble origins in philological
research conducted by Jones
in Calcutta at the end of the
eighteenth century, into the
political and racial doctrines
of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

68. Ever-Shifting Aryan construct –
from noble to race to caste
“During Gobineau’s lifetime, the old theory of the Asian origin of the European
languages and traditions, and of cultural movements from the East to the
West, increasingly gave way to speculations on primeval movements from
the West to the East, and on Aryan migrations from Europe, specifically
Northern Europe, or even the North Pole, to India. According to these
speculations, the European or Northern invaders gave their superior
culture to the Indians and then lost their superiority through mixing with the
local inhabitants and perished in a climate for which they were not suited. In
1903, E. de Michelis summarized this view by stating that Asia, and India in
particular, was not the ‘cradle’, but the ‘grave of the Aryans’.”
William Halbfass

69. Cradle of Civilization ???
Mining Indology to build histories of civilizations and races
in a manner that fit European supremacy.

70. Nazis and Aryans
 A journal called Ostara
 1908 - two issues : dedicated to Manusmriti
and race cultivation among the ancient ‘Indo-
Aryan’.
 Hitler - a reader of journal. Veritable textbooks
for the Third Reich.
 ‘India is invoked in order to articulate and justify
ideas and programs of unparalleled arrogance
and destruction’

71. Blaming the Indian Civilization for
Nazism
 Shifting the blame from Europeans to Indians.
 ‘high Brahminism’ as represented by the
Mimamsa school, contributed to the ‘ideological
formations of precolonial India’, and
 Nazism tried implementing this ‘at home’ in
Germany.
 Led to the ‘legitimation of genocide’.

72. ‘deep Nazism’ or ‘deep Mimamsa’?
Would it not be equally permissible
to identify this underlying structure
as ‘deep Nazism’ or ‘deep
Mimamsa’? And what will prevent us
from calling Kumarila and William
Jones ‘deep Nazis’ and Adolf Hitler a
‘deep Mimamsaka’?

73. After the Second World War, European
academic and social institutions made a great
effort to exorcize the Aryan race theory from
the European psyche, but they still continue to
apply these ideas to
the study of India.

74. 1.3. Morphing
Jati-Varna into Race

75. In this part :
Race Science and Nasal Index
 Emergence of Race Science in Europe
 Based on vague Biblical reference points.
 Imposing it on regional and linguistic communities in India.
 Max Muller’s interpretation of Vedic literature - two racial groups -
physical features - nose-length.
 Herber Hope Risley – Nasal Index – tool for Race Science
 Separating Aryans from Non-Aryans (= black workers)

76. 1.3.1. Converting Jati
into Race

77. On Jati :
Before Max Muller
 Jati is a highly localized & intricately organized social structure.
 Dynamic nature – allowing social mobility as well as occupational
diversification.
 More horizontally organized than vertically stratified.
 Distinctions based on traditional or inherited social status derived
from work roles.
 Gandhi - model of ‘oceanic circle’ for the ideal Indian village society,
rather than the Western pyramidal model.
 The jati-varna system not connected with any race, ethnicity, or
genetics.

78. Max Muller
on Caste
(caste). . . which has hitherto
proved an impediment to
conversion of the Hindus, may
in future became one of the
most powerful engines for the
conversion not merely of the
individuals, but of whole
classes of Indian society.

79. Converting Jati into Race
Western Agenda

80. Max Muller’s Work
on Anasa
 He made only one incidental reference to physical differences –
that noses were described differently for different tribes in the Rig
Veda.
 He based this notion on a single Sanskrit word, anasa (Rig Veda:
V.29.10), that was used infrequently.

81. Max Muller letter to Risley
…It may be that in time the classification of skulls, hair, eyes,
and skin may be brought into harmony with the classification of
language. We may even go so far as to admit, as a postulate,
that the two must have run parallel, at least in the beginning of
all things.

83. 1.3.2. Racial Science of
Nasal Index

84. Racial Science of Nasal Index

85. Sir Herbert Hope Risley (1851–1911)
 Aryans ‘often spoke’ of the noses of the
aborigines.
 Vedic nose-reference as the centerpiece
of his racist ethnology of India.
 Risley became the leading authority on
Indian ethnology.
 In 1910, Risley became president of the
Royal Anthropological Institute.

86. Risley’s Race Science
 He adopted the popular Race Science
measurement methods.
 Anthropometry, which measured various parts
of the head to characterize different peoples.
 The ‘gradations of type’ - the ‘gradations of
social preference’.
 “Scientific method” to detach non-Aryans from
the general body of Hindus’.

87. Risley’s Nasal Index
 1891 - measured Bengali heads and
noses.
 Dravidians, Santhals, and other
communities, based on nose dimensions.
 Graded various castes according to the
Nasal Index.

88. Risley’s Nasal Index
 Jatis as Hindu, and tribes as non-
Hindu.
 Vedas were interpreted – Aryan vs
Aborigines
 Aborigines – Vedic Dasas and Dasyus
 White vs Black Race
 North – South Divide : South America
/ South Africa

89. Thomas Trautmann
“…The racial theory of Indian civilization
alludes to racial attitudes of whites
towards blacks, found in the segregated
southern United States after the Civil War
and in South Africa, as a constant of
history, or rather as a transcendent fact
immune to historical changes that is as
operative in the Vedic period as it is
now….”

90. Aryan vs Dravidians
 Seven Races
 Aryan at the top
 Dravidian at the bottom
 Aryan intermixing with
Dravidian leading to the Caste
System

91. Risley:
A hierarchy was constructed and made official.
 He became commissioner of the 1901 census of India
 Wrote on caste in Imperial Gazetteer of India. It became Template
for academicians & colonial administrators.
 Indians - 2,378 main castes and tribes (with sub-castes), and 43
races.
 Hierarchy of castes - ‘social preference’ based on his evaluation
of ‘native public opinion’.
 Translating the dharma of Jatis as ‘race sentiment’. American
Slavery is his framework.

92. Critics were marginalized
and ignored.

93. Ambedkar Demolishes Nasal Index
Racism
‘…The measurements establish that the
Brahmin 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. If the
Brahmins are Nagas, the Untouchables are
also Nagas. Such being the facts, the
theory . . . must be said to be based on a
false foundation….’