Skip to main content

Aryans

 



Book Review



Title: Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth

Author: Charles Allen

Publisher: Hatchette India, 2023

Pages: 387



This is a book that has the potential to enrage the Right wing of India. It subverts the entire attempt of Modi Inc to arrogate the roots of Aryan racehood to India. The Aryans did not originate in India, this book asserts with sufficient scientific proofs. They came to India across the Himalayas in a very natural process of migration. All migrations were not invasions necessarily. But all successful mass migrations do affect the native population adversely one way or the other. The Harappan and Mohenjo-Daro civilisations had nothing to do with Aryans unless we consider the possibility of their being driven to extinction by the Aryans.

This the 26th and the last book of Charles Allen, a traveller, historian and scholar on India. Allen – who says that his very name comes from the word ‘Aryan’ – died in 2020 without completing this book. His friend David Loyn did the job of editing and giving the conclusion to this scholarly work.

In his introduction to the book, Loyn says that Charles was motivated by three reasons to write this book. “The first was sorrow at the way professional historical research has been hijacked in modern India by some in the politico-religious Hindutva movement who are politically ascendant and have been looking for a founding narrative for a newly emerging power on the world stage.” Allen wanted to counter the falsehood of the history being fabricated by the mendacious Right wing in India.

“The second motivation for this book was to unpack how the word ‘Aryan’ became so twisted in the West.” Hitler thought that the Germans were the pure Aryans and his thinking created a lot of misery on the earth.

“Thirdly, Charles was driven to write Aryans by his love of archaeology.” There is a lot of proof coming in from archaeology in this book for the arguments and conclusions it makes.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part comprising two chapters tells us how the idea of an Aryan people was mythologised by the Nazis. India under the present leadership took over Hitler’s superiority complex and Messiah complex. In the attempt to show that India is the original land of Aryans, the present dispensation in the country discredits a lot of genuine research that was done earlier by such Europeans as Max Mueller.

Archaeology becomes the focus of the second part consisting of chapters 3 to 6. “Something dramatic happened in the steppe region around 3000 BCE,” argues this book. And that event, whatever it was, triggered massive migration from Europe and Eurasia. The Aryans spread to a lot of places including India. Since they were experts with horses, they managed to subdue the native people wherever they went. They also had better weapons. They were quite ruthless too.

‘India and the Aryans’ is the title of Part 3 – chapters 7 to 10. Here we are given a lot of evidence on the Aryan migration to India. The similarities between the Zoroastrian Avesta and the Hindu Rig Veda are unmistakable, though the Rig Veda is the oldest extant Indo-European text and it pre-dates Avesta by hundreds of years.

In this section, Allen gives us evidence “of a new culture arriving, almost certainly in the second millennium BCE that was utterly different from that which had previously shaped the Indus and Punjab region.” For example, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age began in India with the arrival of the Aryans, who brought with them not only their horses and chariots but also their metal workers and armours. Historical proofs for all the claims are aplenty in this book. The Rig Veda declared the Aryans as upper caste people and the others became Shudras and untouchables.

Chapter 10, the last of this section, examines the Hindu nationalism that has gripped India like a plague now. From Rammohun Roy to V D Savarkar, the major Hindutva proponents get brief introductions in this chapter titled ‘Holy Cows and Gurus.’

The last part has just one chapter in which we get a lot of the recent research and findings on the issue. DNA studies aplenty have been carried out on both ancient skeletons and present Indians groups. Lalji Singh and Kumarasamy Thangaraj collected samples from no less than 18,000 Indians belonging to 25 different groups for a DNA study which gave conclusive evidence “for the existence of two ancient populations ancestral to most Indians today but also genetically highly divergent from each other.” The North Indians and the South Indians have different DNA, in short. The North Indians share 70% of their genes with Europe while the South Indian share of the European DNA is only 30%.

The North Indian genes are closely related to Central Asian, Middle Easterners, Caucasians and Europeans while their southern counterparts “have greater ties to the subcontinent and with few links outside it.” This last chapter hurls at us some stunning scientific data. The present dispensation in Delhi won’t like it at all. Its own historians are busy rewriting history with the help of epics and myths while science is discredited again and again from public platforms by none other than the Prime Minister himself. Soon we will see this Prime Minister donning the robes of a priest and consecrating a temple dedicated to a prehistoric divine avatar.

Charles Allen’s book is extremely relevant and pertinent in today’s India. Those who are not interested in history and its inevitable jargon may find it a bit tedious. But it is not too academic in style. It is eminently readable. Those who prefer the consolations of myths should stay away from this book, of course.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    Am adding that one to my wishlist... I can highly recommend the writings of William Dalrymple as another who does much to keep history on track against the tide of those who would angle it their way. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have read only one book of Dalrymple. The Last Mughal. I loved it.

      Delete
  2. The genetic differences between North India and South India are fascinating. I wonder how it ended up like that. Aryan is such a fraught term nowadays. I wonder if the people who study the various ancient tribes might consider renaming them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The North - South difference is not surprising, given the Dravidian roots of the South.

      Delete
  3. They had Aryan nation church, not that far. But good thing they went bankrupt. I'm sure that church ideal of Aryan is different.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not very familiar with that. But I wonder why religions should seek out differences when they should be interested in unity.

      Delete
  4. Seems interesting. Will give it a go when possible.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It definitely is interesting. Many of us may not be aware of revent research and discoveries.

      Delete
  5. Wow. I will be adding it to my list. What makes me sad is that this book and its sound reasoning and facts will inevitably be seen as a "western" take and hence irrelevent to any true "Indian"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, that's exactly how it will be assaulted. I was just wondering why no reader has pounced on me yet with that argument.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...