At Nuremberg, twenty men were tried and eleven were executed for their active involvement in the brutal mechanism of the Third Reich. Alfred Rosenberg, an early Nazi and editor of the party organ, the Voelkischer Beobachter, was tried in his capacity as Reich Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories.

Der Mythus des Zwangzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930)
Rosenberg's chief work, Der Mythus des Zwangzigsten Jahrhunderts (1930)
and Hitler's Mein Kampf, provided the "philosophical" bases of the National Socialist movement.

In the Mythus, Rosenberg explicated how world history consisted of nothing but an unending struggle between the Nordic spirit and the corrupting influence of inferior races. This superior and creative Aryan race originated in a lost semi-Arctic continent. Rosenberg traced the historical development of the Aryan race in its numerous branches among the Amorites of the Middle East, the Aryans of India, the early Greeks, and the Romans.

Upon entering India, the Aryans segregated themselves from the dark indigenous populations." As a natural consequence of this separation, they formed the caste system. Caste gave meaning to blood, as it pertained to color (farbig blutvollen Sinn). Although the caste system soon lost its initial meaning, becoming technically tied to the organization of professions (Rosenberg 1937: 30), it nevertheless promoted racial segregation and a worldview that has never been surpassed by any other philosophy (Rosenberg 1937: 28). In places like Goa, where Indian Aryans took on the Portuguese, we can see how they must once have been a people of stern mettle. But, just as Goa was overrun by the jungle and snakes, so too was the Aryan race overrun by half a million mixed breeds (Mischlingsbevoelkerung). Humanity degenerated in the swamps and fever of India. White blood intertwined with the dark, thick, and unfruitful native racial strength (Rosenberg 1937: 664). Except for a small group of survivors, the racial soul that had created Aryan thought and civilization disappeared.

Rosenberg traced the golden age of the Aryan to the Vedic period, when the ksatriyas waged a spiritually brave and resistant battle against degeneration (Rosenberg 1937: 488). Theirs was a life of action. Rosenberg contrasted the heroics described in the Veda to the later decadent Hindu reliance on magic, ecstatic cults, and blood sacrifices. Whereas the Aryans had held lofty belief in Brahman, their degenerated descendants worshipped magic and demons. Although the Aryan spirit tried at times to reassert itself, it could not rise above the non-Aryan superstitious mire under which it was submerged. The aristocratic, kingly, and warrior ethos of the Aryan, vainly maintained by brahmins, ultimately succumbed to racial decay (Rosenberg 1937: 29).

The Indian myth of Aryanhood was utilized to bring about the mobilization of powerfull sentiments of affinity and solidarity. Through a transformation of consciousness, segments of the Indian population could consider themselves on a par with their conquerors rather than their subjects. With this myth, privileged segments of Indian society were able to frame an embattled Aryan 'We," which purportedly existed before the arrival of the British and could be rallied in the rearticulated tradition. This construct allowed specific groups of Indians to assert a cohesive social identity and declare their cultural superiority in response to colonial domination. The social identity activated by the Aryan myth fostered estrangement from British colonial authorities and thus functioned as an effective instrument of resistance. It was instrumental in the eventual expulsion of the colonial authorities.

Outside the brahmin elite, groups on the periphery subverted the Aryan myth for social reform. Thus, the myth was employed both to reassert the social and religious stability of the elite and undermine its hegemony. After independence, reconfigured versions of the Aryan myth became instrumental in destabilizing caste authority and, most recently, fomenting communalism.

Also in India: speculation regarding the Aryan provided essential information concerning the past; it promised to reveal the state of civilization that was closest to the supposed common ancestors of all Indo European peoples. For those seeking to distance themselves from a Hebrew heritage, Aryan India provided an attractive alternative. Germans, in particular, believed that the study of Vedic mythology could elucidate the history and fate of the Indo-German Volk, a national collectivity inspired by a common creative energy, that was promulgated as the unique essence of the German people. German Indology's valorization of the Aryan past and an idealized vision of India further contributed to the identification of this Volk with the mythic Aryan.

 India became a projection of the German racial situation. Once the metaphorical cradle of German civilization, India now became its symbolic grave. Through the Aryan myth, India functioned both as an example and a warning to the Nazis. Just as the Aryans in India fell, so would those in Europe if racial purity were not recreated. In both the East and the West, the search for the "original" India became bound up with a search for a superior race living in an unchanging utopian past.

European theories of the Aryan race developed out of scholarly inquiry into the origin of languages, the study of myth, and the historical study of religion. The quest for an original language from which other languages derived involved a search for unity in diversity. The quest for linguistic unity reflected the need for an ultimate textual authority. However, once that authority was identified, something curious occurred. The horizon of the text was virtually swept away-, its integrity ignored.

The text was treated by interpreters as almost nonexistent; they made it up to suit their needs. In a similar fashion, the horizon of the reader became pure ideology, expressing itself in emotional appeals to return to some golden age or true spirituality of the text.

Western Orientalist scholars focused on the superiority of the Indian Aryans and their legacy of excellence as manifest in their modern European descendants. In the Enlightenment, the Aryans provided an alternative to the Hebrew model. For the Romantics, the Aryan past confirmed those aesthetic and spiritual values that were cherished and promoted in the European present. Among certain nineteenth-century cultural critics, however, an Aryan theory of race inspired counter-hegemonic reveries of degeneration. Gobineau's Arierdaemmerung heralded the twilight of the gods. It was Nietzsche's task to transform these gods into idols. In the writings of Chamberlain and Rosenberg, notions of who comprised the Aryan race exhibited an endemic feeling that Christianity had empowered a sickly underclass and corrupted German religion. The fall of the Aryan resonated in the infectous post-World War I story of betrayal by Jewish materialists and the vindictive Allies.

In India, theories of Aryan unity ingeniously ignored discrepancies in racial and cultural development. Rammohan Roy and Daydnanda focused on the Aryan religious tradition as a basis for Hindu spiritual revival. For Tilak and Ranade, the Aryan's racial superiority could be witnessed in their survival in modern times as caste Hindus.

Ranade took a cosmopolitan perspective; he contrasted the Aryan to the Semite and the Dravidian. For Vivekananda, the Aryan was superior both to the Dravidian and the West. Tilak valorized the Aryan past to promote the nationalist cause. Vivekananda held expansionist designs: he saw itinerant Indian preachers setting forth to perfect (Aryanize) the world. Phule and Ambedkar challenged the myth of the Aryan, bringing back into discussion what nationalist discourse had excluded.

Discussions of Aryanhood were thus either system-maintaining or counter-systemic. The system in question was the caste system, and specificly the role of brahmins as disseminators of the Veda, it’s legitemate readers, and (ab)users of secular and religious power. There was some suggestion that the Veda had been corrupted by barbarian influences and the intolerance of ruthless conquerors. It was also believed that the process of textual degradation could be reversed. In those cases where the discourse was systems-maintaining, brahmins jealously guarded their access to the text and their right to interpret it. In those instances where Aryan discourse was counter-systemic, reformers desperately sought to wrest the texts away from their brahmin custodians.

These nineteenth-century quests for the Aryan past can be viewed as forms of popular culture, susceptible to the political and institutional forces that inform cultural criticism. They collaborate in the political structure that they inhabit and in their position and complicity within the power structure.

Popular culture, even when Marxist in inspiration and populist in spirit, is defined by the mechanisms of exclusion. Like all quests for origin, it expresses moments in time when elites feel themselves threatened. When a culture has lost its means of self-defense, it turns to the ethnologist and the archaeologist.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Indian history bear out this maxim. The myths of the Aryan articulate this fear of impotence and present, a geography of the eliminated, or "a negative silhouette" formed from the political and symbolic distributions of power.

But who should read or interpret texts of authority? Who is the legitimate reader?

Are those "legitimate" readers of the Veda in the nineteenth century so unlike the modern critics? Both claim positional knowledge. Both, laboring notions of voicelessness and absence, can license the neglect of texts that contradict their master narratives. Both claim privilege to speak for the Other. The brahmin custodian of the Veda received his hermeneutical mandate from God. Critics are self-anointed and legitimized by their peers. The nationalist reformer defined the Aryan in order to reassert sociopolitical power and retain traditional lines of control. The critic, impotent through alienation from real political action, compensates by a posture of powerlessness vis a vis representation. Political parallels may well be drawn between extravagant claims in the mythology of the Aryan race and the more sober evocations of colonial discourse analysis. We have seen how the problem of identity finds no dear resolution. Identity, both individual and national, continues to be problematic

Little over a year after my seminars about religion and Nationalism, riots in Gujarat/India, claimed more than a thousand lives, many of them Muslim.  Investigations by human rights groups into the violence have accused police and local BJP Governement officials of failing to intervene to halt the rioting, in some cases actually colluding with the attackers.

Contemporaneously with European flights of scholarly imagination within the domains of linguistics and philosophy, India was creating its own autochthonous myth of origin in the Aryan past. A myth of a Vedic Golden Age was first promulgated by the Brahmo Sama, J. Rammohan's reinterpretation of the Indian socioreligious tradition led to conflict on two fronts: against Christian missionaries on the one hand and Hinduism on the other. It was Rammohan's belief that Hinduism had strayed from its true model, the ancient Vedic period. He condemned the later period, identified as that of Hindu idolatry, for destroying the texture of society.

The belief that India had degenerated from Aryan ideals also found support in the commentaries and debates of Dayanand Saraswati. Dayanand's cure for India's political subjugation was to recover past vision and glory. Like Rammohan, who based his version of the Aryan myth on the interpretation and authority of canonical sources, Dayanand also sought a textual basis to reconnect with the Aryan past. The Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 by Dayanand, provided a social context for interpreting the Vedic canon. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, a myth of the Aryan, grounded in arbitrary readings and authoritative definitions of what was considered "Vedic," was used by social reformers to mobilize public opinion. Reformers devised interpretations of the Aryan tradition in order to diffuse Western missionary propaganda, battle against modernity, and combat social inequity. Out of a need to reassert self-esteem under colonialism, caste Hindus regarded themselves as descendents of ancient Aryans and stressed the continued historic superiority of their culture.

Since philology had deciphered the relationship between Sanskrit and Greek, the Indo Aryans could now be recognized as the true originators of civilization. The historian Romila Thapar has correctly noted that the theory of the Aryan race was the most influential theory to come out of nineteenth-century Indology.

In Dayanand's discourse regarding the Veda, the loss of Aryanhood and the degradation of values from the Vedic Golden Age was intimately bound up with textuality and the hermeneutic process.

He proposed a plan for the revival of that glorious past through the restoration of Vedic textual knowledge and readership. In short, he assigned to the Veda an authority that far exceeded its traditional status within orthodoxy. While still the locus of truth and authority, it now became the measure of all knowledge and the only tool whereby the reversal of India's sociocultural decline could be effected. Prior to his interpretation, Dayanand felt that the Veda had either been foreclosed or incorrectly read. "Unworthy' modern Hindus had limited access to the text or intentionally misinterpreted it. All Indians were entitled to the text. Through a correct reading for which Dayanand provided the hermeneutic tools, they would be guided back to its true meaning and its ideal Weltanschauung.

Dayanand's myth of the Aryan brings into focus the larger reformulation of Indian masculine identity in nineteenth-century social reform. Ashis Nandy has shown just how, in coming to terms with India's subjugation, certain Indian thinkers both attributed England's use of power to masculine superiority and India's defeat to the loss of the ideals of Aryan manhood. The task now was to seek in Indian tradition those "cultural differentiae" that enabled the West to stay on top. Dayanand found these values, or rather read these values, into a flexible Vedic canon.

By distinguishing the modern brahmin from the ancient Aryan, Dayanand justified the need for a new social order and provided a model for redefining authority. His ideology of the Aryan became a means of redefining the role and position of the brahmin elite. By liberating the text from its traditional custodians, and offering an alternative reading, Dayanand rewrote the caste system as a meritocracy and "Aryanized" Hindu masculinity.

British colonial rule was the symptom, not the cause, of India's real tragedy. The cause was to be found in the loss of Aryan manhood.

Also Tilak read the Vedas literally. Both Dayanand and Tilak believed that they could be read as plain and simple points of fact. Both denied the poetic nature of these texts and sought to find in the Vedas factual information.

But as a realpolitiker, Tilak realized that textual legerdemain was no longer an option. What had been acceptable for a holy man such as Dayanand was not accept able for a politician. If the texts themselves could not be manipulated, the history they told was still open to revision.

In The Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas (1893), Tilak rewrote the history of the Aryans. He began by calculating the age of the Rig Veda from astrological data. By examining the zodiacal positions culled from the Vedic hymns, he placed the Aryans on the plains of Central Asia between 5,000 and 6,000 B.C. In a subsequent work, The Arctic Home of the Vedas (1903), Tilak turned to the specific mythological descriptions found in the Rig Veda to determine the Aryan's original home and describe their lifestyle. Rejecting the theories of Western racial theorists of the time whose conclusions, he believed, were formed by their personal ethnic identities rather than "objective" truth," Tilak proposed that the original home of the Aryans was situated near the North Pole. He based this conclusion on meteorological data supplied by the hymns of the Rig Veda themselves: The poetry of the Veda described physical phenomena only visible in Arctic regions.

Commentators such as Yaska and Sayapa could not have known anything about the Aryans' Arctic region, since the key to this discovery had only been recently unearthed. The ignorance of earlier interpreters had seriously compromised their readings and subsequently India's entire understanding of its Aryan ancestors. Previous commentators had been forced to rely on explicating the verbal texture of passages. Because opaque passages could not be explained, the general impression made by these commentaries was that the Aryans and their product, the Veda, were illogical. This judgment was clearly erroneous. Earlier interpreters just did not possess the necessary scientific data, and they misread plain and simple points of fact as metaphor. Armed with the proper interpretive tools, Tilak could read the Veda, analyze the fate of the Aryans, and predict the proper course of action for their descendants.

When the Aryans lived in the Arctic zone, they flourished. They were able to thrive because, at the time in question (that is, interglacial period), the polar regions were mild and temperate like a perennial spring. The Aryans led a happy life, only inconvenienced by the long polar night. Around 8,000 B.C., however, catastrophe struck: The mild climate was destroyed by the onslaught of the glacial period. The land became covered by ice and the Aryans were forced to abandon the Arctic region. For the next three thousand years, they wandered through Northern Europe and Asia searching for a suitable new home, cherishing throughout this period memories of their civilization.

Through religious zeal and industry during their exile, the Aryans incorporated their traditions in religious hymns, making them the exclusive preserve of a few to hand down scrupulously to future generations. By oral tradition, the Aryans were thus able to maintain their culture intact for thousands of years. Tilak dated the oldest Vedic hymns at 4,500 B.C. Whatever shortcomings the texts may exhibit must be understood within the larger context of the Aryans' catastrophic loss of home, forced migration, and fragmentation during the Neolithic age.

It is only when Tilak elaborated upon this chronology that the ideological parameters of his thesis become clear. Tilak presented the Aryans as the first globally victimized people. He discounted any "shortcomings" attributable to the Aryans of the hymns as a natural relapse into barbarism following great catastrophe. They were simply unable to preserve in a pure form their civilization among non-Aryan savages, Only the Asiatic Aryans, the ancestors of the Hindus, significantly maintained their civilization. Considering what they had undergone since the Neolithic age, the intrinsic superiority of the Aryans is a foregone conclusion. It is not customary for a race to suffer such a catastrophic loss of home and forced migration. What we have in the Veda are the necessarily degenerated expressions of a truly superior antediluvian civilization. The very fact that, even after compulsory dispersion from their motherland, the Aryan survivors could carry with them fragmented culture and establish supremacy over all the races that they encountered in their migrations is significant. That they were able, under such adverse circumstances, to "Aryanize" these peoples in language, thought, and religion proves just how superior these Aryans were to the non Aryan races that they encountered in their colonization of northern Europe. Their superiority manifested itself in an ability to preserve Aryan civilization by conquering and ruling over others.

Although the culture of the Neolithic Aryans was but a relic or imperfect fragment of pre-diaspora Arctic Aryans, it was exponentially greater than that of modern savage races. The very fact that so much of this sophisticated culture can be discerned in the Vedas, and that the Vedas, representing merely a fragment of Aryan genius, are so well preserved, further indicates the mettle of these people. The Vedas exist, therefore, as testimony to the temporary regression of the Neolithic Aryans when exiled from their antediluvian home. More importantly, even in their fragmented form, they testify to the interglacial glory of the Aryan race.

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