Rani Chennamma

Rani Chennamma sent a letter to Governor at Bombay to plead the cause of Kittur, but Lord Elphinstone turned down the request leading to all out war. The British tried to confiscate the treasure and jewels of Kittur (valued around Fifteen Lakhs of rupees) and attacked with a force of 200 men and four guns, mainly from the third troop of Madras Native Horse Artillery. In the first round of war, during October 1824, British forces lost heavily with St John Thackeray, Collector and Political agent, killed by the Rani’s forces. Two British officers, Sir Walter Elliot and Mr. Stevenson^[ were also taken as hostages.

Rani Chennamma released the hostages with an understanding with Chaplin that the war would be terminated. But Chaplin treacherously continued the war with even more soldiers. Chennamma fought fiercely with the aid of her lieutenant, Sangolli Rayanna, but was ultimately captured and imprisoned at Bailhongal Fort, where she died on 21 February 1829. Sangolli Rayanna continued the guerrilla war up to 1829 until his capture, but it was in vain, and was caught due to treachery and hanged.

Chennamma was born 56 years before the 1857 rebel Rani of Jhansi, and was thus the first woman to fight against British governance and the kappa tax. Her legacy and first victory are still commemorated in Kittur, during the Kittur Utsava of every 22–24 October. On 11 September 2007 a statue of Rani Chennamma was unveiled at the Indian Parliament Complex by Pratibha Patil, the first woman President of India. Her statues are installed at Bangalore and Kittur also. Rani Chennamma’s samadhi or burial place is in Bailhongal taluk, but is in neglected state with poor maintenance and the place is surrounded by a small park maintained by Government agencies.

Rani Chennamma’s samadhi or burial place

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With the increasingly negative image given to Islam through the media Sufism is held up not only as the alternative but often the original model before the faith was corrupted by intolerant strains of Salafism and Khomeinism. This is very similar to the emphasis given to the Islamic contribution to western civilisation from everything to science and mathematics, to foodstuffs like the lemon. Sufism has indeed come under increasing pressure in Iran where its centres of worship have been demolished and its adherents arrested.

With its decentralised and mystical approach Sufism is an anathema to Saudi Arabia ’s Wahhabis and their more extreme Salafi offspring. Through petrodollars the Sufism of Pakistan has become deemed as un-Islamic event though Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah and Madho Lal Hussain were figures of great respect in South Asian Islam. The same pressure is now being placed on analogous traditions such as that of the marabouts in West Africa . But Sufism also felt the wrath of the modernist secular reforms of Ataturk as he strove to build a European style state on the ashes of the defeated and discredited Ottoman Empire .

Sufism however does not describe a single set of doctrines but a disparate set of spiritual practices and mystical techniques which added a new dimension to Islam. In this the Sufi masters imbibed ancient spiritual traditions of the Greeks, Jews, Zarathustrians and Hindus which predated Islam. Nevertheless Sufis could be as fanatic as any mullah or army on the march of jihad. The history of Islam in South Asia demonstrates this very clearly. Like David Livingstone was to do in Africa these missionaries for the one true jealous male demiurge called ‘God’, acted as sappers and miners for the colonialism which was devastating ancient civilisations without mercy.

The Chishtiyya school was foisted on India by Muin-ud-din who had settled down in Ajmer in the twelfth century and converted some Hindus to act as his agents. He then made special demands from Prithvi Raj Chauhan and when they were ignored he immediately invited Muhammad Ghuri to invade and despoil the land in the name of Islam. Literature on the true fanatic nature of Sufis such as that of the Chisti order abound. Sculpted stones, apparently from a Hindu temple, are incorporated in the Buland Darwãza of Muin-ud-din’s shrine and his tomb is built over a series of cellars which may have formed part of an earlier temple. A tradition, first recorded in the ‘Anis al-Arwãh, suggests that the Sandal Khãna is built on the site of Shãdî Dev’s temple. Four Islamic mystics namely Moinuddin (d. 1233 in Ajmer ), Qutubuddin (d. 1236 in Delhi ), Nizamuddin (d.1335 in Delhi ) and Fariduddin (d.1265 in Pattan now in Pakistan ) accompanied the Islamic invaders in India . All of them were from the Chistiya order of Islamic mysticism.

Amir Khusru was one of the foremost disciples of Nizam-ud-din Awliya of Delhi who is counted among the five great sufis of the Chishtiyya school. He is himself regarded as an outstanding sufi on whose mazar in Delhi urs is held every year. His Hindi verses are cited as a proof positive of his love for the land of his birth. The great poet, sufi and artist Amir Khusro, full name Muhammad Hassan Yaminuddin (1253-1325) said to be a great human being because, he was the father of Qawwali, and its claimed he even  invented the sitar and tabla, he loved India, and of course was tolerant and mystical.

Yet in his own words he glorified how Islamic hordes had despoiled India , sacking the infidel Hindu shrines for the glory of the true faith, saturated the land with the blood of idol-worshippers, and jizya imposed. Khusro lamented that the sultans had adopted the Hanafi code because it allowed them to categorise Hindus as dhimmis; which meant a third-class existence as opposed to outright extermination. The Sufi preacher Sayyid Ali Hamdani came from Hamdan in fourteenth century to Kashmir where after making converts made moved to stop Hindus building temples and restrict their religious practices as they were forced into dhimmi status, including payment of jizya.

Sufis fully supported the oppression and often forcible conversion of Hindus to Islam, accepting the gifts of adolescent boys and young women to their khanqahs and dargahs. Dara Shikoh, eldest son of Shah Jahan and rightful heir to the Mughal throne was perhaps the exception in trying to marry mysticism within Islam and Hinduism, such as translating the Upanishads into Persian.

Of course he was killed by his younger brother Aurangzeb who was himself a Sufi, a follower of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi method and disciple of Khwaja Muhammad Masoom, the third son and successor of the founder of Mujaddidi order Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi.  Soon after his coronation, Aurangzeb wrote to his shaykh that due to the duties of the empire, he was unable to attend his shaykh’s company, therefore he should send one of his noble sons to the capital for spiritual and Islamic guidance to Aurangzeb. The shaykh sent his son, Khwaja Saif ad-Din Sirhindi (5th son) who was a scholar and Sufi shaykh by himself . He not only guided Aurangzeb to observe the Islamic law properly, he was also the source of most of the Islamic rules Aurangzeb implemented in the empire. One of those is the ban on musical instruments throughout the country, which was initially suggested by Khwaja Saif ad-Din in accordance with the Sharia law.

Many other famous Sufis also revered Aurangzeb, including the Punjab Sufi Sultan Bahu who wrote ‘Aurang-i-Shahi’ praising the emperor as a just ruler. Now Aurangzeb or Alamgir is notorious in history as the Mughal who tried to annihilate Hinduism completely, destroying temples and suppressing religious practices. Guru Tegh Bahadur and his two close companions Bhai Matti Das and Bhai Fateh Das were executed for refusing to convert to Islam. Aurangzeb’s tomb is in Khuldabad in Maharashtra within the courtyard of the shrine of the Sufi saint Shaikh Burham-u’d-din Gharib.

This association of the most fanatic and intolerant of Mughal emperors with Sufism will shock many who have been fed the belief that all Sufis were purveyors of a soft version of Islam. But the Naqshabandis had always stood for strict interpretation of sharia law. Khwaja Mohammad Baqi Billah Berang whose tomb is in Delhi introduced Naqshbandi order in India and due to common Turkic origins with the Mughal invaders this Sufi order always remained steadfast in its political loyalty right from the invasions of Babar.

His grandson Akbar is often portrayed as a tolerant ruler. Yet it was Akbar who made an annual pilgrimage to the Dargah of Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer as he believed it was through the blessings of the Chishti saint through which he begot a son. Yet Moinuddin was of course the foremost symbol of Islam’s ceaseless war on Hinduism. Akbar was however more pragmatic than most which explains practical steps to involve powerful Hindu groups such as the Rajputs into becoming pillars for Mughal rule, such as abolishing the jizya poll tax. This of course earned the wrath of many, including the Sufis.

The mission of Shaikh Sirhindi(1564-1624) was to purify Islam from the influence of Akbar. He proclaimed himself the Mujaddid-i-alf-i-sãnî, ‘renovator of the second millennium of Islam’ and his Maktûbãt-i-Imãm Rabbãnî have been collected and published in three volumes. n letter No. 163 he wrote: “The honour of Islam lies in insulting kufr and kafirs. One who respects the kafirs dishonours the Muslims… The real purpose of levying jiziya on them is to humiliate them to such an extent that they may not be able to dress well and to live in grandeur. They should constantly remain terrified and trembling. It is intended to hold them under contempt and to uphold the honour and might of Islam.”

In Letter No. 81 he said: “Cow-sacrifice in India is the noblest of Islamic practices. The kafirs may probably agree to pay jiziya but they shall never concede to cow-sacrifice.” After Guru Arjun Deva had been tortured and done to death by Jahangir, he wrote in letter No. 193 that “the execution of the accursed kafir of Gobindwal is an important achievement and is the cause of the great defeat of the Hindus.” Sirhindi viewed mystics like Guru Nanak and Sant Kabir despicable, as they did not follow Sharia, he wanted to encourage the sacrifice of cows and revelled in the execution of Guru Arjun Dev.

Shah Waliullah, a prominent Muslim thinker of 18th century and the son of Shah Abdur Rahim, a Sufi who was employed by Aurangzeb for compiling the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri. This Sufi fanatic was of the Naqshabandi order and elevated Mahmud Ghuri as the greatest figure in Islam after the four righteous caliphs. No mention of Rumi here. Wali Ullah invigorated the practice of his Naqshbandi Sufi order, synthesising the disciplines of the three major Sufi orders namely Qadari, Chisti and Naqshbandi with a view to uniting the Muslim society against the Hindus.

Like Shaikh Ahmad Sirhind, he was also against the presence of Hindu employees in the administration of Muslim rulers as he viewed it harmful to the purity of Islam. His attempt was to purify Islam from the spiritual influence of Hinduism. In this context he invited Ahmad Shah Abdali to lead an Afghan invasion into India to save Islam from the infidel Hindus. He was therefore not open to the spiritual tradition of local Hindus in any form.

Sayed Ahmad Barelvi (1786-1831) was a disciple of Waliullah’s son, Abd al Aziz, and continued the tradition of by launching armed jihad with a view to restoring Darul-Islam but was killed in the battle of Balkot against Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Indian Muslims continue to regard him as martyr for the cause of Islam. Karamat Ali, a disciple of Sayed Ahmad Barelavi further developed the ideology for purifying Islam from the influences of Hindu custom and tradition.

Viewed in this historical perspective it is not only easy to see past the politically correct whitewash of Sufism but also realise that Sufis were merely a long line in salesmen for an intolerant belief system. There is therefore no real contrast between the aforementioned Sufi preachers and schools of thought, and that of more modern ideologies as represented by Wahhabism and Salafism in Sunni Islam, or Khomeinism among the Shia.

Indeed with modern technology and the organs of a modern state funded by petrodollars, media savviness and sophisticated use of social networking the neo-imperialist forms of Islam are merely doing what was beyond the reach of the Sufis.

While the compositions of Rumi and Ibn Arabi remain an inspiration to all humanity, they like the much-vaunted Islamic contributions to science were in many ways an exception, a temporary flickering light enveloped in uncompromising darkness. As Averroes (Ibn Rushd) discovered when asked to explain his knowledge of the heavens, and froze in terror because his scientific discoveries would contradict theological dogma, the mystical aspects in Islam had more to do with the legacy of civilisations which had been crushed underfoot than anything within the one true faith.

As the poetry of Rumi and Ibn Arabi demonstrate the spirit of antiquity had yet to be fully snuffed out. Freethinkers could still survive for now without being deemed infidels and heretics. It is that spirit which needs to be recaptured not the reconstruction of some non-existent past simply because the truth about Sufism is to inconvenient.

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[box_light]In India the preference for lighter skin is well known. In Bollywood lighter actresses such as Katrina Kaif find that the right skin tone outweighs talent and ignorance of Hindi. Skin lightening products do roaring trade. But what lies at the root of all this? Many people assume it is because over three thousand years ago India was invaded by lighter skinned Indo-European speakers known as Aryans. But this idea was actually manufactured by German Indologist Max Muller in order to justify British rule.

As Marx said if Indian history was merely that of a series of invasions, then the question was not if foreigners would rule India, merely which set of invaders imposing their rule. Muller later retracted his thesis saying that by ‘Aryan’ he meant language and not race. But by then the damage had been done and to this day the idea remains regretfully mainstream and is rarely challenged unlike the Hamitic Invasion Theory of Africa which dates to around the same period but has now been dropped for the racist idea it was.[/box_light]

When ‘Brother-in-Law’ means Rape

If we cannot blame the aforementioned non-existent ‘Aryans’ then could it be due to two centuries of British colonialism? Certainly this favoured lighter skin and there was even a mixed race of Anglo-Indians deliberately created as a buffer between the Raj and the masses. But anyone familiar with Indic languages knows that the preference for lighter skin just seems too deep. For example in Punjabi the phrase “kali mu vaaliya” (one with black face) has extremely derogatory connotations. No, we must look at other clues in this search.

Released in 1975 Sholay remains among the greatest films of Hindi cinema. One cinema in Mumbai ran the movie for 286 weeks straight (more than five years). Dubbed a ‘curry western’ Sholay achieved a still-standing record of 60 golden jubilees (50 consecutive weeks) across India and may well have been the highest grossing film ever produced by Bollywood. Now it is the famous scene of Russian roulette we are concerned with here. Leading a band of dacoits, Gabbar Singh (played by Amjad Khan) puts a pistol to the head of three of his men who are sent back empty handed from the village of Ramgarh.

Putting the gun to the head of his first subject Gabbar pulls the trigger only to find the chamber empty. He utters the now immortal words “bach gaya saala” in his menacing voice.

This is usually translated into English as “the bastard survived”.

But in Hindi and Punjabi the word ‘saala’ does not mean ‘bastard’. It means ‘brother-in-law’. So how to explain this? Using the exact translation would not make sense. But in the cultural and linguistic context it makes perfect sense.

The term ‘saala’ can be one of family endearment.But in this and many other contexts is means something very specific, namely ‘I slept with your sister’. This also implies ‘you can now take her back’.

In his 1992 book Negationism in Indian History, Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst mentions this:

“It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs)….. The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.”

Jaago, meaning “wake up” a marriage folk dance in the Punjab, taking place at night where girls dance through the village streets carrying a pot (gaggar) decorated with lightened candles and singing jaagu songs.

It is the last sentence that should interest us because it explains why ‘saala’ is such an abusive term. In fact it is merely the tip of a massive politically incorrect and rarely explored iceberg.

The Blackness of Servitude in India

In his 1994 book The Muslim Slave System in Medieval India,  KS Lal has detailed how right from the invasion of Muhammad bin Qassim in the seventh century Hindus were subject to enslavement as an integral part of Islamic conquest, rule and forcible conversion. Females were especially targeted to fill the harems of sultans and their nobles. As mentioned by Dr. Elst, this is the origin of Hindu marriages being celebrated at night. It also led to jauhar, the mass self-immolation by which Rajput women preserved their honour rather than be capture. This was done by lighting  a huge fire in a pit into which women and children then jumped in order to avoid rape and enslavement.

In more recent years similar desperate action was taken by Sikhs avoiding humiliation through rape and forcible conversion and marriage when Pakistan was formed. For example in the village Thoha Khalsa of Rawalpindi District in 1947 only three women survived because there was not enough water in the well to drown them as they sought to evade capture by Muslim marauders intent on exterminating the unbelievers in their midst.

What Pakistan perpetrated on its Hindu and Sikh inhabitants from its very inception was merely a replay of centuries of Islamic colonialism, genocide, demographic upheaval and cultural dislocation. It was something that was to burst with full fury in 1971 as East Pakistan fought to break free as the independent state of Bangladesh. The Pakistani military and ruling caste was from the west composed of mainly Punjabis and Pathans such as Ayub Khan who saw their darker-skinned Bengali eastern brethren as mere Hindu converts to Islam, while they were descendants of great conquerors such as the Mughals.

Indeed the Islamic conquests were constantly wracked by internal racial strife. Afghans, Arabs, Turks and Iranians occupied the higher echelons of government. Hindu converts and African slaves were considered as inferior. Lal:

“D.B. Davis in his Slavery and Human Progress attempts to estimate the number of blacks that would have been sold as slaves and imported into India. According to him “the importation of black slaves into Islamic lands from Spain to India constituted a continuous large-scale migration that in total numbers may well have surpassed, over a period of twelve centuries, the African diaspora to the New World”.

The absence of a large population of black survivors can be explained by their high mortality rate; by assimilation with other peoples; and by the fact that many male slaves had been castrated. Even so in central part of India and on the western coast, there are communities of blacks who are descendants of African slaves. On some Western Coast Islands also there live descendants of black slaves. The Jinjeera Island, so called because of mispronunciation by Marathas of Jazeera meaning island, or Zanzeera meaning land of Zanj or Blacks, is their main abode. It is also called Habsan or the land of Africans or Habshis. In the seventeenth century these islanders, called Sidis of Jinjeera, served as admirals of the Mughals and were at constant war with the Marathas.”

The writer continues:

“However, in contrast to the foreign imported slaves, whose market price was rendered high by cost of transportation and deaths in transit, the price of Hindu slaves, sold abroad remained low. For example, Hindu Kush (Hindu-killer) mountain is so named because thousands of enslaved Hindus died in crossing it. But their numbers were so large that the price of survivors remained low in foreign markets.”

( http://voiceofdharma.org/books/mssmi/ch10.htm )

The Mughals continued this export of  Hindu slaves to Iran and Central Asia. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited Mughal India during the reign of Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. He made this observation on the ruling class:

“They were called Moguls, that is, white of complexion . . . the natives being all brown or olive colour.”

The physician François Bernier also noted the skin colour of the ruling elite:

“…to be considered a Mogol, it is enough is a foreigner have a white face and profess Mahometanism.”

The Mughals were in fact Chagatai Turks. But it was the Iranians who dominated the Muslim regime oppressing India’s toiling Hindu masses. The Iranians looked down upon the Mughals and Indians as barbarians and were helped in their superior status by a preference for lighter skin colour. Indeed Bernier said that as successive generations of Iranian immigrants became darker, they lost the respect accorded to newcomers and all fair-skinned Muslim immigrants as part of the ruling class. Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci said that Iranians constantly referred to Indians as “slaves” or “blacks”. Afghans, though part of the ruling class, were portrayed as crude and vulgar.

Racial and ethnic strife had existed from the very advent of Islam, between slaves and free, even between northern and southern Arabs. But the Arabs had always formed a hereditary ruling caste over the vanquished from the time of the Ummayads. Any Muslims who had Iranian, Berber, Aramaen or other undesirable blood was classified as Mawl? and excluded from the dominant racial caste. Strict social barriers were maintained between the Arab ruling racial caste and the non-Arab oppressed masses. Embracing Islam was no escape from this badge of inferiority. While Arabs could take wives from the indigenous people, the converse was not true. The non-Arabs resented their treatment as racially inferior.

For example, Mawálí soldiers were led by Arabs generals only on foot with their weaponry being limited to a baton. As a reward for defeating the Ummayad army outside Mosul was to have the Arabs massacre the 7000 mawálíinhabitants of Kufa. From the late seventh century, black slaves from East Africa were used in the marshland of Mesopotamia to cultivate cotton and sugar on plantations. Housed in very harsh conditions of camps of up to five thousand captives, they rebelled in 694 which was crushed. These were known as the Zanj. The Zanj rebellion resulted in extremely racist attitudes towards blacks, as expressed in Arabic literature, by poets of Ethiopian descent, known as the “black crows of the Arabs”, such as Suhaym (d. 660), Nusayb ibn Rabah (d. 726), and Abu Dulama (d. c.776), pointing to clear evidence that black slaves had the lowest position in Muslim society. Racism was in fact as central to Arab slavery as it was in the western system which developed later. Arabs saw their own olive pigmentation as preferable to lighter Greeks and Iranians as well as darker people of the Horn of Africa. Early Arabic poetry describes the many nuances of human coloration. In fact the name of the seventh century poet, Suhaym, literally means “little black man”, and he penned verses such as the following:

“Though I am a slave my soul is nobly free Though I am black of colour my character is white.”

Nusayb ibn Rabah responded to a racist attack on him by an Arab poet, because he was black:

“Blackness does not diminish me, as long as I Have this tongue and this stout heart.

Some are raised by means of their lineage; the Verses of my poems are my lineage!

How much better a keen-minded, clear-spoken Black than a mute white!”

By the fourteenth century, the Arabic word “abd” as used to mean black slave, while “mamluk” meant a white slave. Black Africa remained a major source of slaves for the Islamic world until well into the twentieth century. Blacks came to be seen as natural slaves when compared to other races. It was this prejudice against darker skin which was imported into India and has been entrenched their over the centuries. But the other legacy of Islamic slavery and racism was even worse.

Hindu Kush means Hindu Slaughter

The numbers of Hindus enslaved and exported from India by various Islamic invaders and imperialists was staggering, to such an extent that it gave the name to the mountains in Afghanistan as so many died en route. In Iran these Indian slaves were forced to work in the mines while slaves were also imported from Africa in huge numbers. In 1849 and 1850, Lady Mary Eleanor Sheil wrote from the British embassy that black slaves known as Nubees or Habshees were highly esteemed and well treated. However racial prejudice appears to have increased after slavery ended, as reported by Joseph Harris in 1967 in several cities. An Afro-Iranian community near Bandar Abbas complained of racism by other Iranians.

As well as colour prejudice towards darker skin in India and Iran, Islamic slavery had other negative influences which are only just being uncovered. In his 1979 book Roma: The Gypsy World, Dr. SS Shashi challenged the belief that Europe’s Gypsies had their origins in any of India’s “untouchable” castes. Instead he traced the Roma to various castes including Rajputs, Banjara, Jat, Ahir, Dhangar, Dom and Sansi. Iranians still refer to Gypsy groups of Indian descent as Luri. Arabs call them Zott while in Syria they are referred to as Nawar. Nineteenth century Dutch historian MJ Goeje wrote that the Arabs brought tens of thousands of Indian peasants from the Indus region as slaves to be settled in Iraq. These Zotts became powerful enough to challenge the Abbasid Khalifate and hence Baghdad sent its forces against them in 820. The Zotts were defeated in 834, and the entire population deported to Syria. South African born scholar and anti-apartheid activist Ronald Segal mentions this slave revolt by the Zotts or Djatts, which he said were Indian slaves deported from the Lower Indus to the swamps of Lower Mesopotamia, to breed water buffalo while living in extremely impoverished conditions, which led to their rebellion. He says that their defeat led to them being deported to various parts of the Abbasid caliphate. This may explain why Gypsy groups of obvious Indian descent remain in the region, continuing to be disclaimed by the Arabs, Iranians and Turks as being part of their respective communities. They  are known as the Domari.

Professor Ian Hancock from the University of Texas , scholar of Hungarian Roma and British Romanichal descent,  concludes that the Roma are therefore most likely the descendants of high-caste Hindu Rajputs and not the Doms. Romani vocabulary points to a one time settled rather than nomadic population. In India there are nomadic groups such as the Banjara which claim descent from Rajputs, and left their homeland of Rajputana after the defeat by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. At the Second World Romani Congress in April 1978, Ranjit Naik stated that Rajputs had fled these invasions into Central Asia. Then in 1998, B Shyamala Devi Rathore submitted a paper at the Romani Studies conference at Greenwich University, in which she mentioned Banjara historians that wrote about Rajputs leaving their homeland of Rajasthan due to the Ghaznavid raids, and spreading out in all directions.

Hindu Rajput warriors were captured in warfare by the Ghaznavid Turks who invaded India during the eleventh century. From the Ghaznavids, the Seljuk Turks also took them as slaves. This Indian population then found themselves brought to Europe in the thirteenth century as slaves and also in military battalions by the invading Ottoman Turks. These were to become the Roma or Gypsies. Hancock in his 2002 book We are the Romani People:

“The first Romanies that the Europeans met were very different from any of the local populations – far more distinct than we are today. They were mostly dark-skinned, and wore unfamiliar clothing and spoke a language nobody recognised. They were neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim and seemed to have no country of their own. And most of all, they were extremely reluctant to let outsiders – the gadže – get too close.”

As the Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire and advanced into Europe, Roma were reduced to slave status. They were also enslaved by the landlords in Christian populations of the Balkans, especially Wallachia and Transylvania. Female Roma were subject to horrendous sexual exploitation right up until the abolition of Gypsy slavery after the creation of the modern state of Romania in 1864. It is unknown how this slavery began. Some may have already been slaves of the Ottoman Turks, or even the Tatars who had invaded Europe earlier. By the early 1300s, Roma in the Balkans were being included as property given as payment, even to monasteries. As non-indigenous people, as non-Muslims, and as slaves, Roma were at the bottom of the social scale in the Balkans, especially in that all conquered non-Muslims could be treated as property.

By the sixteenth century, the word for Gypsy in Romanian, tigan, had come to mean slave specifically of Roma origin. For this oppressed minority dislocated from their Indian homeland through distance and the centuries elapsed when their Hindu ancestors had been enslaved by the armies of Islam there was to be no happy ending. Half of the European Roma population died in the Holocaust in what is known in the Romani language as Porrajmos, a powerful world which translates as devouring or rape.

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South Africa was but the most glaring and long-lasting example of how colonialism put its stamp around the world. It was a time when not only was Europe the master but whites were recognised as the master race. Exterminating or severely depleting the indigenous peoples of Australasia and the Americas, in Africa and Asia they established themselves as rulers even if the demographic disaster was not as high. Nevertheless colonisation by white settlers was prevalent in many parts of Africa, as it was in Australasia and the Americas. Hence was born the idea of the Aryan race and Aryan Invasion Theory. It took many forms. Most notable was that Aryans had conquered India and imposed the caste system on the dark natives. But we also had the Hamitic invasion of Africa where a primeval lighter skinned race had brought the light of civilisation to the inferior dark-skinned ‘Negroes’. The stone structures of Zimbabwe built by the ancestors of the Mashona, were attributed to the Phoenicians. Ancient Egyptians were said to have been wholly white. Then there were the lost Israelites which turned up all over the place: from the Zulus, to Maoris and Native Americans. Even whites were not spared. Superior Anglo-Saxons were said to have cleansed Britain of its native Celts.

These various race theories were inevitably laden with incredible contradictions. Brown and black people could suddenly be categorised as ‘white’ if their ancient past was deemed too civilised. Even when the Nazis conquered Poland in order to enslave and deplete the native Slaves, Poles who agreed to be Germanised became part of the Volk. Blond haired Polish children were seen as especially important to the Aryan gene pool. Of course children taken in this way from their natural parents had to have all links severed with their Polish past. Hence orphanages were special targets of this racial policy. Because Poles were officially deemed as racially inferior the whole adoption and Aryanisation project was kept secret. It was also an incredibly sick joke in that many of this Slavic children had more Aryan feature’s than much of the ruling Nazi leadership. The only actual Aryan invasion to have taken place was therefore a racial fiasco where demographic warfare and enslavement went hand in hand with assimilating members of the inferior race into the Volk by virtue of hair and eye colour. All of this was done under a symbol used in many ancient cultures including that of India: the swastika.

I said the ‘only’ Aryan invasion to take place because while colonialist race theories such as the Hamitic invasion of Africa have been quietly discarded that of a primeval white race invading and conquering India lives on and is taught as mainstream. Any attempts to counter it with facts is denounced as itself racist. So here we have the incredible paradigm of denouncing as Nazi anyone who refutes the Aryan Invasion Theory and idea of an Aryan race. Can intellectual bankruptcy and stupidity go any further? The Aryan Invasion Theory of India is a toxic resin which unites both the old colonialist mentality which looks upon anything Hindu as obscurantist and irrational, with the spawn of Leftist dogma who take it upon themselves to define what is racism while simultaneously keeping quiet their dirty little secret of Marx himself supporting colonialism in India. In this poisonous vice like grip of suffocation any scholar exposing the idea of Aryan invasion and an Aryan race is labelled racist, Hindu extremist and Nazi, and the discussion is shut down by academia’s very own Gestapo.

However this should to detract the seeker of truth from pursuing a higher aim. It must be remembered at the time when the idea of ‘Aryans’ was manufactured racism was mainstream thinking. It was only a relentless struggle from the end of the nineteenth century which detoxed anthropology, biology, history and other disciplines from the stranglehold of racist thought. It took the Holocaust to reveal the full nightmare of what would happen if such ideas were to run rampant.

Nevertheless the struggle by no means ended with the discovery of mass killing of millions of decent innocent men, women and children in gas chambers such as those of Auschwitz, just because they were deemed to be of an inferior non-Aryan race. The post-1945 White Australia immigration policy explicitly stated that people of Aryan background should be given preference. Apartheid put stringent laws on preventing race mixing that would have had Hitler smiling in his grave. Even the Hamitic invasion theory did not fully die as the killing fields of Rwanda in 1959 and 1994 demonstrated in their full horror.

The horrific massacres between Hutu and Tutsi were a direct result of colonialist racial myth making. The idea of outside origin came to be used by the majority Hutu to massacre Tutsis, using the words “final solution” to make it obvious what the intentions were in both 1959 and 1994. The Hutu were labelled as the indigenous Bantu, truly African inhabitants, who were oppressed by the “Hamite” invaders known as Tutsi, who remained the unnatural foreign element.

Hence the Aryan Invasion Myth is not just a theoretic concern of ivory tower intellectuals who are inherently hostile to Hindu civilisation, culture and beliefs. It has manifested itself in caste conflict over scarce resources in India where quotas are imposed for those deemed to be non-Aryan natives. It has inspired a whole genre of anti-Hindu, anti-Semitic and racist literature from western-sponsored academics such as Kancha Iliaih of Osmania University and VT Rajashekar of Dalit Voice.

Most of all it has stunted India’s political and economic development through policies of excessive state interference, crushing of intellectual creativity and the emergence of an effective civil society via the psychological cul-de-sac which has been created. Just like the swastika to reclaim not just their sacred symbols but also their sacred past from the western academics and Indian Marxist allies who continue to use colonialist theories in order to interpret and impose a racist theory of Indian history. It is not just offensive. It is not even accurate. It therefore belongs in the loony bin of ideas along with the myth of Atlantis, inter-galactic beings carving UFO landing pads in the Atacama Desert, or alien lizards ruling the earth as illuminati.

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In our modernist parlance science and religion are held to be polar opposites. Scientific is equated with being rational, logical and in tune with reason. Religion however is seen as backward, laughable and regressive, as well as totally obscurantist. Yet how does this equate with the fact that many of the scientific strides came from India, a land and civilisation which has endured from ancient times and retains its core spirituality?

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