Sections of British society up in arms about demographic whitewashing, that it paints a false picture and false history of people of African descent being in Britain since prehistoric times.
Yet the same detractors, and their ‘woke’ opponents are united in claiming that India was invaded in 1500BC by white skinned Aryans who spoke Sanskrit and subjected the original Dravidian population to the caste system.
In fact the Aryan invasion myth is taught as fact in institutions to this day. Any challenge is denounced as being racist, Hindu nationalism, right wing Hindutva, fascism and nazism. Ironic because the very idea of Aryan race and invasion is itself racist.
On 1 July 1935, at the SS offices in Berlin, the pseudo-academic wing of the SS was formed to propagate this Aryanised racist version of history, archaeology and culture. This was the Ahnenerbe which would push scholarship more in keeping with Nazi thinking.
Centuries of careful research and academic rigour would be swept away in the desire to prove how the tall, white, blond master race of Aryans brought civilisation to the darker inferior races.
From the first, ideas of western science, scholarship and academic rigour were openly flouted in the desire to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. Dr. Walther Wüst, an authority on the ancient literature and religion of India, who had learnt Sanskrit, Vedas and philosophy.
On 1 February 1937, Himmler appointed him president of the Ahnenerbe. He was impressed by his racial interpretation of Vedic text, and his talk of a blond haired, blue eyed white master race ruling India. Wüst saw the Rig Veda as an important document of the Nordic race.
The Reich’s most famous racial pseudo-academics, Hans FK Günther said that India’s ruling Aryan race mixed into native families thus losing their blond hair, blue eyes and white skin. Nevertheless he claimed to discern Nordic traits in India’s ruling Brahman elite.
There are parallels. The Hamitic invasion myth of the 19th century maintained that light-skinned peoples of Egyptian or Indo-European origin had in times past spread across Africa, where they still formed an elite in many societies.
As they gradually interbred with subject peoples they themselves degenerated. This was the explanation put forward for the apparent decline of a number of African societies from Yorubaland to Benin or Great Zimbabwe.
A Rhodesian government White Paper of 1970 formally ordered that no official publication could state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe had been created by blacks. This was despite the evidence of oral traditions of the Shona, and even Portuguese visitors to the Zambezi.
It suited the Belgian colonists to believe in and foster the myth of the Tutsis as black Aryans, men not too dissimilar to Europeans, more noble than savage, who could be trusted to carry out the orders of the white men. The result was genocide in 1959 and 1994.
The horrific massacres between Hutu and Tutsi were a direct result of colonial-missionary myth making. In India too Max Muller was far from the only missionary involved in racial construction of identity.
The school pf Dravidianist thought was the brainchild of nineteenth century Bishop Caldwell, who unlike Muller was not even a sound linguist. the Aryan invasion theory was the result of a century long striving by the Christian Europe to give itself an identity that was free from the taint of its Judaic heritage.
The resulting historical scenario was also seen as an expedient device that was seized upon by the British colonial authorities to control India by dividing her people. It has now acquired a life of its own and a following of intellectuals with a strong political stake in the status quo. Its shelter was politics then and it is politics today. It never had anything to do with the history of the ancient world, let alone of India. The homeland of the Vedic Aryans was India itself.
The seas and rivers of India were lauded in scared hymns, notably the region of Saraswati which is praised as the mother of the Aryans and a goddess. The river itself dried up in 1900BC and this marks the end of the Vedic Age and beginning of decline of what was once called the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Afghanistan and adjoining regions of South Asia were never looked upon as the ancestral home. Instead, as made clear in Mahabharata, north-east areas such as Mount Kailash and Lake Manas were the spiritual and ancestral home.
(This article has been compiled from the tweet thread posted by @RanbirS11414092 on September 14, 2023, with minor edits to improve readability and conform to HinduPost style guide)
