R.C. Majumdar's view that Indians knew little of their history in the early nineteenth century, prior to the impact of Western scholarship, may seem brusque. However, the impact of English-language texts documenting, and English-language education diffusing, discoveries and speculations in philology and archaeology was nevertheless monumental. From the mid-nineteenth century, but especially after the early 1870s, this was evident in the conscious cultivation of the 'memory', indeed affective remembrance of India's archaic Hindu past by numerous societies and writers, in the burgeoning print media (newspapers, periodicals and journals), by nationalist and religious leaders and by British colonial officers and administrators and Western religious societies, such as the Theosophists.

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. This centrality of race was enshrined in the Imperial Gazetteer of India: in the 1909 edition British understandings of India were so racialized that even the geology of India was divided into Dravidian and Aryan periods.

The Aryan ‘invasion’ provided the key starting point for this national narrative and many Britons imagined India’s history as essentially the story of the changing fortunes of the Indo-Aryans.

Colebrooke already constructed a dichotomized image of Hinduism: the beef-eating Aryas of the Vedas, whose rationality was evident in their monotheism and their village republics, were contrasted with modern Hindus who had degenerated into idolatry, polytheism and sensuality.  Jones posited a similar argument, contrasting contemporary Hinduism with the Vedic golden age: ‘how degenerate and abased so ever the Hindus may now appear ... in some early age they were splendid in arts and arms, happy in government; wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge’.

Thus Company Orientalism, exemplified by Jones and Colebrooke, created a ‘Sanskritocentric’ vision of Indian culture that celebrated Sanskrit and the Vedas, but decried contemporary culture as debased and backward. This latter attitude is not only evident among Indologists but also in wider read books like “Human Devolution.” by Michael Cremo.

 

Tilak and Annie Besant

Where Dayananda was primarily concerned with the spiritual renewal of Hindu Aryas, nationalist leaders cooped the Aryan theory in their search for a cohesive ideological tool to reify Hindu/Indian nationhood. Of the early nationalists, Balwantrao Gangadhar Tilak, co-founder of the Indian Home Rule Leagues where he was supported by Annie Besant.  In line with Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, Tilak published two works, Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas (1892) and The Arctic Home or Vedas (1903), which set out his argument.

Tilak, drawing on a Hindu cosmogony with a vast temporal scope, had no trouble accepting the ‘latest and most approved geological facts and opinions’, which greatly extended the timescale of history. He suggested that the ancient home of the Aryas was not central Asia but rather in the Arctic during the ‘Tertiary period’. Originally, the Arctic was temperate, but the advent of an ice age between 10 000 BCE and 8000 BCE transformed it into an ‘icebound land unfit for the habitation of man’. From 8000 BCE the Aryas left their Arctic home moving south into Europe and central Asia and by 6000 BCE had settled in the southern tracts of the central Asian steppes, displacing pre-existing communities and carrying with them an advanced culture: this was the Vedic culture carried south into India in the final southern push of the great migration.

These Indo-Aryans retained their cultural sophistication and military superiority, but those Aryas who settled in northern Europe began to slide into barbarism. The sophistication of the Indo-Aryans was enshrined in the Vedas that were transmitted ‘accent for accent’ for maybe as long as six millennia. Therefore the Indo-Aryans, Tilak argued, were precociously civilized, attaining a level of civilization that was commensurable with the glories of Egypt at the height of its power, but predating the peak of Nile civilization by several thousand years.

Thus Titak extended and reinterpreted the work of European Indologists, rebutting arguments that European culture developed earlier and more quickly than Indian culture, and asserting the sophistication of Vedic culture.

Tilak wrote much of The Arctic Home of the Vedas while imprisoned for sedition. Tilak supplemented Theosophy and Max Mueller with Rhys and Taylor’s works on Aryan origins and Warren’s research on ancient languages. Most importantly, Tilak extended the image of a Vedic Golden Age created by Jones, Colebrooke and Theosophy, using it to assert the primacy, vigour and superiority of Indo-Aryan culture.

Elsewhere, Tilak suggested that this superiority was manifest in the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit and later Hindi. He argued that all Indian languages should be written in a standardized script and Devanagari was best suited for this purpose. He noted that European Sanskritists had ‘declared the Devanagari alphabet is more perfect than any which obtains in Europe’. He firmly rejected suggestions that the Roman script might be the best tool for standardization as it was ‘entirely unsuited to express the sounds used by us ... sometimes a single [Roman] letter has three or four sounds, sometimes a single sound is represented by three or four letters.’ Devanagari, he argued, could be used to build a pan-Indian community by uniting ’the Aryan ... and the Dravidian or Tamil character’ and promoting linguistic comprehension across regional boundaries.

Thus Tilak’s contributions to debates over language and history were central to his programme that proclaimed Arya superiority, reclaimed national self-esteem and posited potential Indian unity. Here it is important to note that Tilak drew upon an older Indian astrological and geographical tradition as well as the latest Indological research. His periodization of Arya history in The Arctic Home was based on an astrological calendar. The period between 8000 and 5000 BCE was termed the Aditi period as in this period the ‘vernal equinox was then in the constellation of Purvasu, and ... Aditi is the presiding deity of Punarvasu’. The two subsequent periods were named after the Orion and Krittika vernal equinoxes.” Astrological knowledge thus became a key tool for Tilak as he pushed back the date for the composition of the Vedas from Max Mueller’s 1200 BCE to before 4000 BCE.

This debate over the dating of the Vedas can be read as a skirmish in the ongoing contest between Indian astral sciences and western historians over Indian chronology. Tilak believed that rationalist European science was not necessarily inimical to Hinduism, arguing that science could be easily accommodated into pre-existing Indian traditions. Bayly has therefore suggested that Tilak was able to command social and political respect because he spanned both long-existing indigenous and newly founded colonial knowledge communities.sl This observation illuminates Tilak’s researches into the Vedas, which clearly show his attempts to synthesize Indian and western traditions to create a history that established the sophistication and superiority of Vedic India.

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