Aryan race

The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept which emerged in the late 19th-century to describe people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping. Anthropological, historical and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept.

A

The Aryan race theory is so absurd that it ought to have been dead long ago. But far from being dead, the theory has a considerable hold upon the people. . . . The first explanation is to be found in the support which the theory receives from Brahmin scholars. This is a very strange phenomenon. As Hindus, they should ordinarily show a dislike for the Aryan theory with its express avowal of the superiority of the European races over the Asiatic races. But the Brahmin scholar has not only no such aversion but most willingly hails it. The reasons are obvious. The Brahmin believes in the two nation theory. He claims to be the representative of the Aryan race, and he regards the rest of the Hindus as descendants of the non-Aryans. The theory helps him establish his kinship with the European races and share their arrogance and their superiority. . . . it helps him maintain and justify his overlordship over the non-Brahmins.
- Ambedkar, B. R. 1946. Who Were the Sudras? Bombay: Thacker., quoted from Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 2

The theory of the Aryan race set up by Western writers falls to the ground at every point… the theory is based on nothing but pleasing assumptions and inferences based on such assumptions… Not one of these assumptions is borne out by facts… The originators of the Aryan race theory are so eager to establish their case that they have no patience to see what absurdities they land themselves in… The assumption is that the Indo-Germanic (sic) people are the purest of the modem representatives of the original Aryan race.
- Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 7 edited by Vasant Moon, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra Publications, Mumbai, 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

Western Philology has converted it [the word arya] into a racial term, an unknown ethnological quantity on which different speculations fix different values.
- Sri Aurobindo, 1910-1914, quoted from Sri Aurobindo, ., Nahar, S., Aurobindo, ., & Institut de recherches évolutives (Paris). India's rebirth: A selection from Sri Aurobindo's writing, talks and speeches. Paris: Institut de Recherches Evolutives. 3rd Edition (2000). [1]

B

In modern linguistics the term Aryan is sometimes used to refer to all Indo-Germans, but the term Indo-Germans or Indo-Europeans is preferable [to describe the European Aryans], since in linguistics the term Aryan is usually only applied to the Indian and Iranian Indo-Germans.
- The 14th edition of the popular Brockhaus encyclopedia, 1896, Entry Aryan, p 870. In Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe

C

Though it were proved that there was never an Aryan race in the past, yet we desire that in the future there may be one. This is the decisive standpoint for men of action.
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), vol. 1, p. 266. Quoted in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, p. 530.

The word ariane, Aryan, had taken on an equally bizarre meaning when applied to Fascist Italy: a swarthy Southern Catholic was Aryan whereas a blond and blue-eyed Milanese Jew was not. . . . Fascist words certainly pushed [the] ridiculous to the limit: one could become Aryan, which would seem to be biologically impossible. Children of mixed marriages who had been baptized by a certain time were officially Aryan . . . But trying to be Aryan or discriminated had a price . . . The idea of an Italian Aryan race, already laughable was rendered more absurd by the possibility of being Aryanized. All one had to do was prove that one's father was not Jewish but Aryan and one did that by claiming that one was born as a result of one's mother's adultery.
- Kate Cohen, The Neppi Modona Diaries: Reading Jewish Survival Through My Italian Family By Kate Cohen . quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

Aryan people first emerge from the gloom of prehistory on the northern borders of the Fertile Crescent of the Ancient East... (the first Aryans were racially Nordics and) the Nordic's superiority in physique fitted them to be vehicles of a superior language.
- V. Gordon Childe, in 1926, quoted in Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia?” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. George Erdosy

E

Race theories conquered the intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark-haired Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned Indians. The linguistic "aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.
- Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". I.244

G

The prophecy which the Führer made about them for having brought on a new world war is beginning to come true in a most terrible manner. One must not be sentimental in these matters. If we did not fight the Jews, they would destroy us. It's a life-and-death struggle between the Aryan race and the Jewish bacillus.
- Joseph Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels' diaries 27 March 1942

All the peoples of Europe and, to begin with, those which were originally related and which gained supremacy at the cost of many wanderings and dangers, emigrated from Asia in the remote past. They were propelled from East to West by an irresistable instinct (unhemmbarer Trieb), the real cause of which is unknown to us.... The vocation and courage of those peoples, which were originally related and destined to rise to such heights, is shown by the fact that European history was almost entirely made by them.
- Jacob Grimm quoted in Poliakov, L. (1974). The Aryan myth : a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe, 198

H

Skepticism in scholarly circles grew rapidly after 1880. The obvious impossibility of actually locating the Aryan homeland; the increasing complexity of the problem with every addition to our knowledge of prehistoric cultures; the even more remote possibility of ever learning anything conclusive regarding the traits of the mythical "original Aryans"; the increasing realization that all the historical peoples were much mixed in blood and that the role of a particular race in a great melange of races, though easy to exaggerate, is impossible to determine, the ridiculous and humiliating spectacle of eminent scholars subordinating their interests in truth to the inflation of racial and national pride—all these and many other reasons led scholars to declare either that the Aryan doctrine was a figment of the professional imagination or that it was incapable of clarification because the crucial evidence was lost, apparently forever.
- Frank J. Hankins, "Aryans", in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1948), p. 265, quoted by E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001), Ch. 1

K

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.
- Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, quoted from Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines Kennedy, Kenneth A.R. ‘Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia?’ Vol. 1, in The Indo-Aryans of ancient South Asia: Language, material culture and ethnicity Vol 1 of Indian philology and South Asian studies , by Kenneth A.R. Kennedy. Walter de Gruyter, 1995.

How could one recognize an Aryan, living or dead, when the biological criteria for Aryanness are non-existent?
- Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia?” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. George Erdosy,.,p. 61.
- quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009

M

To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar.
- Max Müller, Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas: And the Home of the Aryas (1888), ch. 6. As quoted in The New Yale Book of Quotations, p. 578.

There are Aryan and Semitic languages, [but] it goes against all rules of logic to speak, without an expressed or implied qualification, of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, or Aryan skulls.
- Max Muller, (1880, cited in Leach 1990: 234 Leach, E., 1990. “Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia.” In Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches, edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney. Stanford, CA: Stanford: University Press.). quoted in Jim Shaffer. South Asian archaeology and the myth of Indo-Aryan invasions in : Bryant, E. F., & Patton, L. L. (2005). The Indo-Aryan controversy : evidence and inference in Indian history. Routledge

It is in their ambience that racialism really emerged both as an ideology and a sociological theory. Scholars from Sir William Jones by way of the brothers Grimm and Max Muller produced not merely the genealogy of the Indo-European languages but the atmosphere in which Aryan language could be identified with an Aryan culture and even an Aryan race in whose names crimes could be committed ... much mid-nineteenth century philological speculation is already tinged with racial ideology.
- D. G. MacRae 1960, page 79, quoted from Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.,55

The new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race . . . If you examine the bases proposed for common nationality before the new knowledge growing out of the study of Sanskrit had popularized in Europe, you will find them extremely unlike those which are now advocated and even passionately advocated in part of the Continent.
- Henry James Sumner Maine, Sir H.S. Maine, ‘The effects of observation of India on modern European thought’, 1875 Rede lecture – quoted in (Trautman, Aryans and British India, 2004, 2), quoted in :Malhotra, R., Nīlakantan, A. (Princeton, N.J.). (2011). Breaking India: Western interventions in Dravidian and Dalit faultlines

N

The Latin malus ["bad") (beside which I set melas ["black"]) may designate the common man as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man ("hie niger est-"), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a precisely similar case- fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguished word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, quoted in Lincoln, Bruce (1999), Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press., p 104-5

P

In a prehistoric era lost in the mists of time, a whole race, destined by Providence to reign one day supreme over the entire earth, was slowly growing in the primeval cradle, in which it was preparing for a brilliant future…. Favoured among all others by the beauty of its blood and the gifts of its intelligence, … this was the race of the Aryas, blessed from the beginning with the very qualities which the Hebrews lacked in order to become civilizers of the world…. The religion of Christ was destined to become the torch of humanity: the Greek genius welcomed it; the power of Rome propagated it far end wide, Germanic energy it new strength. Through a thousand battles, the whole race of the European Aryas … came to be the main instrument of God’s designs for the destiny of mankind.
- Adolphe Pictet, in 1859, quoted in Danino, M., & Nahar, S. (1996). The invasion that never was (1st ed). Mother’s Institute of Research & Mira Aditi, Mysore, India.

Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited os a useful concept in human biology…. There is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.
- G. Possehl, quoted in Danino, M., & Nahar, S. (1996). The invasion that never was (1st ed). Mother’s Institute of Research & Mira Aditi, Mysore, India.

Articles under the heading Arier were included in the big popular encyclopaedias of Brockhaus and Meyer from 1864 and 1867 respectively, and the Arier is defined from the start as Indo-Germanic. The 14th edition of Brockhaus states specifically that it is better to apply the term Arier only to "Asian Aryans" and to use the term Indo-Germanic or Indo-European to describe the "European Aryans".
- Leon Poliakov - The Aryan myth A history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe-Sussex University Press (1974)

R

To speak of an Aryan race of three thousand years ago is to put forward a gratuitous hypothesis; but to speak of it as if it still existed today is quite simply absurd.
- Salomon Reinach, quoted by Léon Poliakov in The Aryan Myth, p.344
- quoted in Danino, M. (2009). A BRIEF NOTE ON THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY. PRAGATI| April-June 2009

Reinach challenged the very concept of an Aryan race—“To speak of an Aryan race … is to put forward a gratuitous hypothesis; to speak of it as though it still existed today is quite simply to talk nonsense” (1892: 90).
- Reinach S. 1892. L’origine des Aryens: histoire d’une controverse [The origin of the Aryans: history of a controversy]. Paris: Ernest Leroux.
- quoted in Michel Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence

T

The invention of an Aryan race in nineteenth century Europe was to have, as we all know, far-reaching consequences on world history. Its application to European societies culminated in the ideology of Nazi Germany. Another sequel was that it became foundational to the interpretation of early Indian history and there have been attempts at a literal application of the theory to Indian society. Some European scholars now describe it as a nineteenth century myth. But some contemporary Indian political ideologies seem determined to renew its life. In this they are assisted by those who still carry the imprint of this nineteenth century theory and treat it as central to the question of Indian identity. With the widespread discussion on 'Aryan origins' in the print media and the controversy over its treatment in school textbooks, it has become the subject of a larger debate in terms of its ideological underpinnings rather than merely the differing readings among archaeologists and historians.
- Romila Thapar, "The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics", Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 3.

Taylor rejected the association between race and language altogether. He found the theory of a single Aryan migration out of Asia “extremely shadowy … [resting] on no solid grounds whatever” (1890: 17).
- Isaac Taylor quoted in Michel Danino, in : Walimbe, S. R., & Schug, G. R. (2016). A companion to South Asia in the past. chapter 13. Aryans and the Indus Civilization: Archaeological, Skeletal, and Molecular Evidence
- Taylor I. 1890. The origin of the Aryans: an account of the prehistoric ethnology and civilization of Europe. New York: Scribner & Welford

W

As the children [of the Gods], these Germanic tribes burst forth into the midst of Semitico-Roman culture and lent it the pure strength of their blood. . . . As soon as they entered history, with the frankness of their blue eyes, their proud heroic stature, their simple patriarchal customs, their free communal associations, their loyal warlike confederations, their representations of the gods and their simple, honest, heroic traditions, they must undoubtedly have appeared from the outset as the true manifestation, without blurring or mixing, of the most noble ancient branch of the white race. Such is the Aryan.
- Count Hans von Wolzogen. Wolzogen, 1882, p. 85 (cited in Römer, 1985, p. 66). quoted in Jean-Paul Demoule - The Indo-Europeans_ Archaeology, Language, Race, and the Search for the Origins of the West

External links

Encyclopedic article on Aryan race on Wikipedia