British India was the site of imperial innovation and intellectual endeavour, standing at the centre of numerous imperial circuits of exchange, including the expansive and dense personal, publishing, governmental and cultural networks that transmitted Aryanism from British India into South-East Asia, the Pacific and beyond.

Theosophist Charles Massey placed the "primitive" nature of Maori language next to the Negroid type as Massey rejected any Semitic connection as a "mirage." Echoing the branching narratives of Theosophy  used to establish the "inferiority" of Indo-Aryans (compared to the 5e sub race "white" Aryans), Massey argued that "savages" such as Maori and the "Kaffirs, Hottentots or Bushmen" showed evolution to be "undoubtedly a descending as well as an ascending progression." Although the "spiritual aristocracy" theosophists anticipated was not a particularly egalitarian replacement of a material power structure, theosophists predicated their vision of a new spiritual order on alternatively nonsexual ideals.

But as British interpretations of India increasingly privileged race, British scholars and administrators dwelt not only on racial differences between Indians and Europeans, but also placed greater emphasis on the clash between Aryan and Dravidian elements in Indian history as I pointed out in my article on this subject two days ago.

These various interpretations and counter-interpretations of the Aryan idea must be located within the specific cultural contexts from which they were fashioned.

When in the 1920s the exemption of South Asians from the immigration regime was under siege. Farming groups, newspaper editors and the newly formed White New Zealand Defence League launched a sustained attack on the morals, work discipline and intellect of the South Asian migrants, insisting that they would never be assimilated. Holding a dim view of Gujarati migrants, the editor of the Franklin Times bemoaned:

"Unfortunately, we in New Zealand know but little of the Aryans of India. A few of them come here and work for a while, but they do not settle in this country. Our knowledge of India is practically confined to inhabitants of Central India, a degraded race that would be exterminated tomorrow by the war-like Northerners, who detest and despise them."

Jones's work did not simply inscribe colonial authority by proclaiming British ascendancy over Indian knowledge. Rather, Jones's research incorporated in books widely sold today like "The Secret Doctrine" (1) established a new comparative framework for the writing of universal history, a model that located Asia, and India specifically, at the very heart of the history of civilization, shattering the images of a wild and exotic India that haunted the European imagination from the Renaissance through to the mid eighteenth century.

One can trace the intense battles over the implications of Aryan kinship, as administrators, historians, journalists and ethnographers attempted to impose order onto the Indian past and to reduce the complexity of South Asian culture into meaningful interpretations.

The localized bodies of knowledge examined here must also be read as part of an Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment project that attempted to produce a detailed picture of the "great map of mankind."

By 1800, European scholars had firmly established linguistic ties between north India and Europe and the fundamental affinity of the languages of the central and eastern Pacific, and had begun to explore the historical relationships between Eurasia and the Pacific.

Many of these individuals, institutions and networks were closely related to the agents of British expansion (the East India Company, the Royal Society, missionary organizations and colonial learned societies), and these imperial networks facilitated the rapid transmission of ideas and information. These networks thickened and multiplied in the nineteenth century, quickening the pace of the intellectual transactions within the empire.

There are also the divergent ways in which the Aryan idea was inserted into various forms of colonial nationalism, indigenous social reform and anti-colonial prophetic movements. For some Indian reformers, such as Dayananda Sarasvati, Orientalism's stress on the glories of the ancient Aryans was an important source for arguments that urged a return to the "pure" Hinduism of the Vedas. But it was a short journey from Dayananda's celebration of Indo-Aryan purity to the more militant proclamations of Hindu superiority made by later Arya Samajis and nationalists such as Har Bilas Sarda. (2)

That Bengali Hindu reformers of for example the Arya Samaji used it to attack British stereotypes of the effeminate babu, and also the Aryan theory was harnessed by a largely overlooked group of Indian Christians and administrators including Theosophy.

For these groups who had vested material and social interest in British power, the Aryan idea allowed them to construct a vision of a harmonious and egalitarian colonial society characterized by Indian loyalty to the Crown and racial fraternity as in the case of Annie Besant.

Thus, the notion of an Aryan racial community was both profoundly contested and highly flexible, and any attempt to see it simply as a metropolitan ideology that could be transplanted to colonial contexts to justify British superiority is misleading.

The complex conjuncture of economic and political change in Bengal from the 1760s, which allowed the East India Company to draw upon religious experts and scribal communities. Through the studious maintenance of Indo-Islamic courtly tradition, the Company cast itself as a patron of learning and an upholder of cultural continuity, while simultaneously exerting growing pressure on regional kingdoms and local economies.

In a similar vein, the shift to Indocentric interpretations of for example Maori culture in New Zealand initiated by among others Richard Taylor was dependent upon economic, technological and social forces that underpinned the textualization of Maori culture. Once collected, edited, translated and printed, Maori traditions were effectively disembodied and, as such, they were amenable to comparative analysis, allowing Taylor to identify a shared Aryan heritage as an antidote to racial conflict.

Richard Taylor's identification of Maori as fellow Aryans in the midst of the racial hatred unleashed by the New Zealand Wars was not only an attempt to counteract the centrifugal forces that threatened the colony, but also reoriented the analysis of Maori culture toward India.

The importance of the cultural traffic and imperial networks uncovered means that we must move beyond the nation-state as the organizing unit for the writing of the history of imperialism. In its place I am advocating a multi-sited imperial history that uses webs as its organizing analytical metaphor, an approach that views empires as integrative structures that knit, often forcibly, previously disparate and unconnected points together into a shared space.

The discourses of Aryanism are an important product of these new "connections." Born out of the colonial encounter in South Asia, the Aryan idea became a crucial element of the culture of empire, whether in British India, South-East Asia, the Pacific or in Britain itself, as it seemed to offer a powerful framework for explaining both the past and present of the empire.

We also can no longer presume that British understandings of India were the product of an "imposition" by the hegemonic colonial power onto a mindless and subordinate society. Local aspirations and colonial agendas were in a constant dialogue, a dynamic process of exchange where claim and counter-claim led each interest group to modify its position almost constantly.

Because of their very nature as colonial societies, the development of India or New Zealand as I took here as a short  example, was never solely driven by internal forces; rather the reality of their integration into the webs of empire continued to mould their economic fortunes, social structures and cultural patterns.

An imagined geography of Aryanism, which pictured the Pacific as being peopled by successive waves of Aryans culminating in British colonization, was replaced by a colonial nationalism intent on preserving the country's borders against the "threat" of Asian migrants. Today distant India, once imagined as the ancestral home of Maori, has no place in New Zealand's future.

However born out of the colonial encounter in South Asia, the Aryan idea became a crucial element of the culture of empire, whether in British India, South-East Asia, the Pacific or in Britain itself, as it seemed to offer a powerful framework for explaining both the past and present of the remains of the colonial empire.

The Aryas remain a key touchstone in South Asian culture and politics. Over the last two decades, the Hindu right, eager to proclaim both the Aryas and Hinduism as the product of the national soil, has launched numerous attacks on British Orientalism and the 'Aryan Invasion Theory'. Such attempts to construct 'nativist' visions of the South Asian past not only deny the complex networks and exchanges that have shaped the region's past, but also repudiate history altogether. The editorial of the December 1994 issue of Hinduism Today, a leading monthly journal aimed both at a domestic Indian market and the communities of the Indian diaspora, proclaimed that 'History' was a 'Hoax' and suggested:

“The good news is that India and Hinduism live beyond history ... Other faiths, excluding some tribal and pagan paths, are rooted in events. They began on such and such a day, were born with the birth of a prophet or the pronouncements of a founder. Thus they are defined, circumscribed by history. Not Hinduism. She has no founder, no birthday to celebrate. Like Truth, she is eternal and unhistorical.”

Professional historians hesitate to give credence to such views, but Hinduism Today has a circulation of around 150, 000 readers, and a host of recent texts proclaiming the Aryas as the 'autochthon of India' have been greeted with enthusiasm.

Most importantly, such arguments are currently promulgated as the basis of Hindu identity and the Indian nation-state. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which dominates if not controls Indian politics, casts itself as the defender of Hinduism and equates Hinduism and India, effacing the reality of religious difference. In upholding the Vedas as the basis for its social programme and its advocacy of Sanskritizing projects, the BJP forwards a narrow vision of the nation, disempowering 'secularized' Hindus, Dalits, tribals, Christians and Muslims. This vision of Hindu nationalism is only possible by denying the power struggles and imperial exchanges that both moulded the emergence of Indian nationalism and repeatedly reinscribed the meaning of the 'Arya' category.

In charting the transmission of Aryanism and the ways in which it was quickly reworked and indigenized in various colonial contexts including Theosophy, I suggest to construct a fuller picture of the long history of the idea, a global history that is fundamentally entwined with the British empire's reach including in the Asia-Pacific region.
 

1) Theosophy took the Aryan idea beyond the confounds of the British Empire to apply it on a worldwide scale, similar to British Israelists Blavatsky saw the future Race appearing in the USA. Theosophical leaders who followed in the footsteps of Madame Blavatsky claimed this would be in Southern California.

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