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The Worlds Longest ‘Unknown’ War

That audacious armada of the religion of Hijaz –
Whose insignia reached every corner of the world
Which learnt no obstruction from any fear
Which felt no hesitation in Persian Gulf or faltered in the Red Sea
Which valiantly crossed all the seven oceans
Oh, drowned was that armada (of Islam), when it reached the mouth of Ganga!

–  Mawlana Khwaja Altaf  Husain

 

It’s argued that if the Muslim conquerors had practised such systematic, extensive, and continued terror against Hindus and Hinduism as has been recorded by the Muslim historians of medieval India, Hindus could not have survived as an overwhelming majority at the end of the long spell of Muslim rule.

The logic here is purely deductive (formal). Suppose a person is subjected to a murderous assault, but he survives because he fights back. Deductively it can be concluded that the person never suffered a murderous assault because otherwise he could not have been alive! But this conclusion has little relevance to the facts of the case.

My question, therefore, is: Did Hindus survive as a majority in their own homeland because the Islamic invaders did not employ sufficient force to kill or convert them, or because, though defeated again and again by the superior military skill of the invaders, Hindu princes did not give up resistance and came back again and again to reconquer their lost kingdoms, to fight yet another battle, yet another day, till the barbarians were brought to book?

Before I answer this question, I should like to warn against a very widely prevalent though a very perverse version of Indian history. In this popular version, Indian history has been reduced to a history of foreign invaders who were able to enter India from time to time – the so-called Aryans, the Iranians, the Greeks, the Parthians, the Scythians, the Kushanas, the Hunas, the Arabs, the Turks, the Pathans, the Mughals, the Persians, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the British. The one impression which this version of Indian history leaves, is that India has always been a no-man’s land which any armed bandit could come and occupy at any time, and that Hindus have always been a ‘meek mob’ which has always bowed before every ‘superior’ race.

Muslims in India and elsewhere have been led to believe by the mullahs and Muslim historians that the conquest of India by Islam started with the invasion of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 AD, was resumed by Mahmud Ghaznavi in 1000 AD, and completed by Muhammad Ghuri when he defeated the Chauhans of Ajmer and the Gahadvads of Kanauj in the last decade of the 12th century. Muslims of India in particular have been persuaded to look back with pride on those six centuries, if not more, when India was ruled by Muslim emperors. In this make-belief, the British rulers are treated as temporary intruders who cheated Islam of its Indian empire for a hundred years. So also the ‘Hindu Banias’, who succeeded the British in 1947 AD. Muslims are harangued every day, in every mosque and madrasah, not to rest till they reconquer the rest of India which, they are told, rightfully belongs to Islam.

The academic historians also agree that India was ruled by Muslim monarchs from the last decade of the 12th century to the end of the 18th. The standard textbooks of history, therefore, narrate medieval Indian history in terms of a number of Muslim imperial dynasties ruling from Delhi – the Mamluks (Slaves), the Khaljis, the Tughlaqs, the Sayyids, the Lodis, the Surs, the Mughals. The provincial Muslim dynasties with their seats at Srinagar, Lahore, Multan, Thatta, Ahmedabad, Mandu, Burhanpur, Daulatabad, Gulbarga, Bidar, Golconda, Bijapur, Madurai, Gaur, Jaunpur, and Lucknow fill the gaps during periods of imperial decline.

It is natural that in this version of medieval Indian history the recurring Hindu resistance to Islamic invaders, imperial as well as provincial, looks like a series of sporadic revolts occasioned by some minor grievances of purely local character, or led by some petty upstarts for purely personal gain. The repeated Rajput resurgence in Rajasthan, Bundelkhand and the Ganga-Yamuna Doab; the renewed assertion of independence by Hindu princes at Devagiri, Warrangal, Dvarasamudra and Madurai; the rise of the Vijayanagara Empire; the farflung fight offered by the Marathas; and the mighty movement of the Sikhs in the Punjab – all these then get readily fitted into the framework of a farflung and enduring Muslim empire. And the Hindu heroes who led this resistance for several centuries get reduced to ridiculous rebels who disturbed public peace at intervals but who were always put down.

But this version of medieval Indian history is, at its best, only an interpretation based on preconceived premises and propped up by a highly selective summarisation, or even invention, of facts. There is ample room for another interpretation based on more adequate premises, and borne out by a far better systematisation of known facts.

What are the facts? Do they bear out the interpretation that India was fully and finally conquered by Islam, and that the Muslim empire in India was a finished fabric before the British stole it for themselves by fraudulent means?

 

MUSLIM INVASIONS WERE NO WALK-OVER
The so-called conquest of Sindh first.

Having tried a naval invasion of India through Thana, Broach, and Debal from 634 to 637 AD, the Arabs tried the land route on the north-west during AD 650-711. But the Khyber Pass was blocked by the Hindu princes of Kabul and Zabul who inflicted many defeats on the Arabs, and forced them to sign treaties of non-aggression. The Bolan pass was blocked by the Jats of Kikan. AI Biladuri writes in his Futûh-ul-Buldãn: ‘At the end of 38 H. or the beginning of 39 H. (659 A.D.) in the Khilafat of Ali”Harras’ went with the sanction of the Khalif to the same frontier’ He and those who were with him, saving a few, were slain in the land of Kikan in the year 42 H. (662 A.D.). In the year 44 H. (664 A.D) and in the days of Khalif Muawiya, Muhallab made war on the same frontier’ The enemy opposed him and killed him and his followers’ Muawiya sent Abdullah’ to the frontier of Hind. He fought in Kikan and captured booty’ He stayed near the Khalif some time and then returned to Kikan, when the Turks (Hindus) called their forces together and slew him.,

Next, the Arabs tried the third land route, via Makran. Al Biladuri continues: ‘In the reign of the same Muawiya, Chief Ziyad appointed Sinan’ He proceeded to the frontier and having subdued Makran and its cities by force, he stayed there’ Ziyad then appointed Rashid’ He proceeded to Makran but he was slain fighting against the Meds (Hindus)’ Abbad, son of Ziyad then made war on the frontier of Hind by way of Seistan. He fought the inhabitants’ but many Musulmans perished’ Ziyad next appointed Al Manzar. Sinan had taken it but its inhabitants had been guilty of defection’ He (Al Manzar) died there’ When Hajjaj’ was governor of Iraq, Said’ was appointed to Makran and its frontiers. He was opposed and slain there. Hajjaj then appointed Mujja’ to the frontier’ Mujja died in Makran after being there a year’ Then Hajjaj sent Ubaidullah’ against Debal. Ubaidullah being killed, Hajjaj wrote to Budail’ directing him to proceed to Debal’ the enemy surrounded and killed him. Afterwards, Hajjaj during the Khilafat of Walid, appointed Mohammad, son of Qasim’ to command on the Sindhian frontier.’ That was in 712 AD.

Now compare this Arab record on the frontiers of India with their record elsewhere. Within eight years of the Prophet’s death, they had conquered Persia, Syria, and Egypt. By 650 AD, they had advanced upto the Oxus and the Hindu Kush. Between 640 and 709 AD they had reduced the whole of North Africa. They had conquered Spain in 711 AD. But it took them 70 long years to secure their first foothold on the soil of India. No historian worth his salt should have the cheek to say that the Hindus have always been an easy game for invaders.

Muhammad bin Qasim succeeded in occupying some cities of Sindh. His successors led some raids towards the Punjab, Rajasthan, and Saurashtra. But they were soon defeated, and driven back. The Arab historians admit that ‘a place of refuge to which the Muslims might flee was not to be found’. By the middle of the 8th century they controlled only the highly garrisoned cities of Multan and Mansurah. Their plight in Multan is described by AI Kazwin in Asr-ul-Bilãd in the following words: ‘The infidels have a large temple there, and a great idol’ The houses of the servants and devotees are around the temple, and there are no idol worshippers in Multan besides those who dwell in those precincts’ The ruler of Multan does not abolish this idol because he takes the large offerings which are brought to it’ When the Indians make an attack upon the town, the Muslims bring out the idol, and when the infidels see it about to be broken or burnt, they retire.’ (emphasis added). So much for Islamic monotheism of the Arabs and their military might. They, the world-conquerors, failed to accomplish anything in India except a short-lived raid.

It was some two hundred years later, in 963 AD, that Alptigin the Turk was successful in seizing Ghazni, the capital of Zabul. It was his successor Subuktigin who seized Kabul from the Hindu Shahiyas shortly before he died in 997 AD. His son, Mahmud Ghaznavi, led many expeditions into India between 1000 and 1027 AD. The details of his destructive frenzy are too well-known to be repeated. What concerns us here is the facile supposition made by historians in general that Mahmud was not so much interested in establishing an empire in India as in demolishing temples, plundering treasures, capturing slaves, and killing the kãfirs. This supposition does not square with his seizure of the Punjab west of the Ravi, and the whole of Sindh. The conclusion is unavoidable that though Mahmud went far into the heartland of Hindustan and won many victories, he had to beat a hasty retreat every time in the face of Hindu counterattacks. This point is proved by the peril in which he was placed by the Jats of the Punjab during his return from Somnath in 1026 AD.

The same Jats and the Gakkhars gave no end of trouble to the Muslim occupants of Sindh and the Punjab after Mahmud was dead. Another 150 years were to pass before another Islamic invader planned a conquest of India. This was Muhammad Ghuri. His first attempt towards Gujarat in 1178 AD met with disaster at the hands of the Chaulukyas, and he barely escaped with his life. And he was carried half-dead from the battlefield of Tarain in 1191 AD. It was only in 1192 AD that he won his first victory against Hindus by resorting to a mean stratagem which the chivalrous Rajputs failed to see through.


THE TURKISH EMPIRE WAS TEMPORARY


Muhammad Ghuri conquered the Punjab, Sindh, Delhi, and the Doab upto Kanauj. His general Qutbuddin Aibak extended the conquest to Ajmer and Ranthambhor in Rajasthan, Gwalior, Kalinjar, Mahoba and Khajuraho in Bundelkhand, and Katehar and Badaun beyond the Ganges. His raid into Gujarat was a failure in the final round though he succeeded in sacking and plundering Anahilwar Patan. Meanwhile, Bakhtyar Khalji had conquered Bihar and Bengal north and west of the Hooghly. He suffered a disastrous defeat when he tried to advance into Assam.

But by the time Muhammad Ghuri was assassinated by the Gakkhars in 1206 AD, and Aibak assumed power over the former’s domain in India, Kalinjar had been reconquered by the Chandellas, Ranthambhor had renounced vassalage to Delhi, Gwalior had been reoccupied by the Pratihars, the Doab was up in arms under the Gahadvad prince Harishchandra, and the Katehar Rajputs had reasserted their independence beyond the Ganges. The Yadavbhatti Rajputs around Alwar had cut off the imperial road to Ajmer. Aibak was not able to reconquer any of these areas before he died in 1210 AD.

Aibak’s successor, Iltutmish, succeeded in retaking Ranthambhor and Gwalior, and in widening his base around Ajmer. But he suffered several defeats at the hands of the Guhilots of Nagda, the Chauhans of Bundi, the Paramars of Malwa, and the Chandellas of Bundelkhand. Beyond the Ganges, the Katehar Rajputs had consolidated their hold which the Sultan could not shake. The Doab was still offering a very stiff resistance. His grip on Ajmer had also started slipping by the time he died in 1236 AD.

The Sultanate suffered a steep decline during the reigns of Razia, Bahrain, Masud, and Mahmud of the Shamsi dynasty founded by Iltutmish, though its dissolution was prevented by Balban who wielded effective power from 1246 AD onwards. The Muslim position in Bengal was seriously threatened by Hindu Orissa. Another Muslim invasion of Assam ended in yet another disaster in which the Muslim general lost his life and a whole Muslim army was annihilated, Hindu chieftains now started battering the Muslim garrison towns in Bihar. Near Delhi, the Chandellas advanced up to Mathura. The Rajputs from Alwar made raids as far as Hansi, and became a terror for Muslims even in the environs of Delhi. Balban’s successes against this rising tide of Hindu recovery were marginal. He suffered several setbacks. The Sultanate was once more reduced to rump around Delhi when Balban died in 1289 AD.

Dr. R.C. Majumdar has summed up the situation so far in the following words: ‘India south of the Vindhyas was under Hindu rule in the 13th century. Even in North India during the same century, there were powerful kingdoms not yet subjected to Muslim rule, or still fighting for their independence’ Even in that part of India which acknowledged the Muslim rule, there was continual defiance and heroic resistance by large or small bands of Hindus in many quarters, so that successive Muslim rulers had to send well-equipped military expeditions, again and again, against the same region’ As a matter of fact, the Muslim authority in Northern India, throughout the 13th century, was tantamount to a military occupation of a large number of important centres without any effective occupation, far less a systematic administration of the country at large.’

Jalaluddin Khalji failed to reconquer any land which had been lost by Muslims during the earlier reign. Alauddin was far more successful. His generals, Ulugh Khan and Nusrat Khan, were able to conquer Gujarat in 1298 AD. But they were beaten back from Ranthambhor which Alauddin could reduce only in 1301 AD. His conquest of Chittor in 1303 AD was short-lived as the Sisodias retook it soon after his death in 1316 AD. So was his conquest of Jalor in Rajasthan. His own as well Malik Kafur’s expeditions against Devagiri in Maharashtra, Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh, Dvarasamudra in Karnataka, and Madurai in Tamil Nadu, were nothing more than raids because Hindu princes reasserted their independence in all these capitals soon after the invaders left. And the Khalji empire collapsed as soon as Alauddin died in 1316 AD. Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq had to intervene in 1320 AD to save the remnants from being taken over by Hindus from Gujarat who had been nominally converted to Islam.

Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq was successful in conquering south and east Bengal.  But he could not completely subdue Tirhut in Bihar. His son Jauna Khan suffered defeat in 1321 AD when he tried to reconquer Warrangal, and had to mount another attack in 1323 AD before he could reduce it.  But by 1326 AD Prataparudra was back in power. In 1324 AD Jauna Khan had been beaten back from the borders of Orissa. He was more successful when he came to power as Muhammad Tughlaq. He consolidated his hold over Devagiri, conquered the small kingdom of Kampili on the Tungbhadra, and forced Dvarasamudra to pay tribute to the imperial authority of Delhi. Madurai also came to be included in his empire. He transferred his capital to Devagiri in order to keep a close watch on Hindu resurrection in the South, and for establishing another centre of Islamic power in India. But at the very start of his reign he had been defeated by Maharana Hammir of Mewar, taken prisoner, and released only after he ceded all claims to Ajmer, Ranthambhor and Nagaur, besides payment of 50 lakhs of rupees as indemnity. And his empire south of the Vindhyas was lost to Delhi in his own life-time, and Delhi’s hold over large areas even in the North disappeared soon after his death in 1351 AD.

Firuz Shah Tughlaq was able to keep together the rump for some time. His expedition to Orissa was nothing more than a successful raid. And he had to lead annual expeditions against the Katehar Rajputs north of the Ganges. Ms successors could not keep even the rump in the north. It broke down completely after Timur’s invasion in 1399 AD. Meanwhile, the great Vijayanagara Empire had consolidated Hindu power south of the Krishna. Rajasthan was ruled by defiant Rajput princes led by Mewar. Orissa had fully recovered from the devastation of Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s raid.

The Sayyids who succeeded the Tughlaqs were hardly an imperial dynasty when they started in 1414 AD. Their hold did not extend beyond Etawah (U.P.) in the east, and Mewat (Haryana) in the south. Khizr Khan tried to restore the empire in the north but without success. Mubarak Shah was able to recover the Punjab and Multan before the Sayyids were supplanted by the Lodis in 1451 AD.

Bahlol Lodi reduced the Muslim principality of Jaunpur in 1457 AD. But Sikandar Lodi failed to subdue Gwalior, Rajasthan, and Baghelkhand. He removed his capital to Agra in order to plan a conquest of Malwa and Rajasthan. But it bore no fruit. The Lodi ’empire’ more or less broke down under Ibrahim Lodi. By this time, Mewar under Rana Sanga had emerged as the strongest state in North India. Orissa stood its ground against Muslim Bengal to its north and the Bahmanis to its south. The power of Vijayanagara attained its acme under Krishnadevaraya (1505-1530 AD).

The situation during the 14th and the 15th centuries has been summed up by Dr. R.C. Majumdar in the following words: ‘The Khalji empire rose and fell during the brief period of twenty years (A.D 1300-1320). The empire of Muhammed bin Tughlaq’ broke up within a decade of his accession (A.D. 1325), and before another decade was over, the Turkish empire passed away for ever’ Thus barring two every short-lived empires under the Khaljis and Muhammad bin Tughlaq’ there was no Turkish empire in India. This state of things continued for nearly two centuries and a half till the Mughals established a stable and durable empire in the second half of the sixteenth century A.D.’

 

MUGHAL EMPIRE: A JOINT VENTURE
 

Babur won some renowned victories but hardly established an empire. Humayun lost to Sher Shah Sur, and failed to win back most of what Babur had won. Sher Shah added Ranthambhor and Ajmer to his empire in north India. But the fierce fight he faced in Marwar made him confess that he had almost lost an empire for a handful of millet. His rule lasted only for a brief span of five years (1540-1545 AD). The Sur ’empire’ became a shambles soon after, so much so that the Hindu general Himu was able to crown himself as Hemachandra Vikramaditya at Delhi in 1556 AD.

The Mughal empire founded by Akbar in 1556 AD proved more stable, and endured for 150 years. It also expanded in all directions till by the end of the 17th century it covered almost the whole of India except the extreme south. But the credit for Mughal success must go largely to Akbar’s recognition of power realities, and reconciliation with the Rajputs by suspension of several tenets of a typically Islamic state. It was the Rajput generals and soldiers who won many of the victories for which the Mughals took credit. The Rajput states in Rajasthan and Bundelkhand were vassals of the Mughal emperor only in name. For all practical purposes, they were allies of the Mughals who had to keep them in good humour. And Mewar kept aloft the flag of Hindu defiance throughout the period of effective Mughal rule.

The Mughal empire started breaking up very fast when Aurangzeb reversed Akbar’s policy of accommodating the Hindus, and tried to re-establish a truly Islamic state based on terror, and oppression of the ‘non-believers’. Rajasthan and Bundelkhand reasserted their independence during his life-time. So did the Jats around Bharatpur and Mathura. The Marathas dug Aurangzeb’s grave when they made imperial seats such as Ahmadnagar and Aurangabad unsafe in spite of large Mughal garrisons, and invaded imperial territory as far as Khandesh and Gujarat. This Hindu resurgence shattered the Mughal empire within two decades of Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 AD.

 

THE PROVINCIAL MUSLIM PRINCIPALITIES
 

Amongst the provincial Muslim principalities established by rebels and adventurers after the break-up of the Tughlaq empire, those of Bengal, Malwa, Gujarat, and the Bahmanis were notable. Hindu Orissa battled against Bengal till both of them were taken over by the Mughals. The Sisodias of Mewar engaged Gujarat and Malwa, and almost overcame them in the reign of Rana Sanga. Gujarat recovered for a short time only to be taken over by the Mughals. The Vijayanagara Empire contained the Bahmanis from southward expansion in a fierce struggle spread over more than two centuries, in which fortunes on both sides waxed and waned. The destruction of the metropolis at Vijayanagara did not lead to the destruction of the Vijayanagara Empire. It barred the path of Bijapur for another seventy years. Meanwhile, the Marathas had come to control large parts of South India as nominal vassals of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur even before Shivaji appeared on the scene. And they were soon to deliver death blows to the remnants of the Bahmani empire which the Mughals hastened to incorporate in their own empire.

 

THE PROPER PERSPECTIVE
“Let us transcend the barren Deccan and conquer central India. The Mughals have become weak, insolent, womanizers and opium-addicts. The accumulated wealth of centuries in the vaults of the north, can be ours. It is time to drive from the holy land of Bharatvarsha the outcastes and the barbarians. Let us throw them back over the Himalayas, back to where they came from. The saffron flag must fly from the Krishna to the Indus. Hindustan is ours”. Peshwa Bajirao 1st

Reviewed as a whole, the period between the last decade of the 12th century and the first quarter of the 18th – the period which is supposed to be the period of Muslim empire in India – is nothing more than a period of long-drawn-out war between Hindu freedom fighters and the Muslim invaders. The Hindus lost many battles, and retreated again and again. But they recovered every time, and resumed the struggle so that eventually the enemy was worn out, defeated, and dispersed in the final round which started with the rise of Shivaji.

As we read the history of medieval India we find that only a few Hindu princes made an abject surrender before the proved superiority of Muslim arms. Muslim historians cite innumerable instances of how Hindus burnt or killed their womenfolk, and then died fighting to the last man. There were many instances of Muslims being defeated decisively by Hindu heroism. Many of the so-called Muslim conquests were mere raids which succeeded initially but the impact of which did not last for long. The account which Assam, Rajasthan, Bundelkhand, Orissa, Telingana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and the Punjab gave of themselves in successive waves of resistance and recovery, has not many parallels in human history.

It is, therefore, a travesty of truth to say that Islam enjoyed an empire in India for six centuries. What happened really was that Islam struggled for six centuries to conquer India for good, but failed in the final round in the face of stiff and continued Hindu resistance. Hali was not at all wrong when he mourned that the invincible armada of Hijaz which had swept over so many seas and rivers met its watery grave in the Ganges. Iqbal also wrote his Shikwah in sorrowful remembrance of the same failure. In fact, there is no dearth of Muslim poets and politicians who weep over the defeat of Islam in India in the past, and who look forward to a reconquest of India in the future. Hindus have survived as a majority in their motherland not because Islam spared any effort to conquer and convert them but because Islamic brutality met more than its equal in Hindu tenacity for freedom.

Nor is it anywhere near the truth to say that the British empire in India replaced an earlier Muslim empire. The effective political power in India had already passed into the hands of the Marathas, the Jats, and the Sikhs when the British started playing their imperialist game. The Muslim principalities in Bengal, Avadh, South India, Sindh, and the Punjab were no match for the Hindu might that had resurged. The Mughal emperor at Delhi by that time presented a pitiful picture of utter helplessness. The custodians of Islam in India were repeatedly inviting Ahmad Shah Abdali from across the border to come and rescue Islam from the abyss into which it had fallen.

By Sita Ram Goel

Also Read

 

The Myth of “1000 Years of Hindu Slavery”

What if India had turned Islamic ?

 

(8954)

Categories
Academic Negationism

A Nazi Out-of-India Theory?

[box_light]While we were working on the argumentation against the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), an improper and utterly false argument against the presumed association of the rivaling Out-of-India Theory (OIT) with Nazi Germany was being prepared in high places. This becomes clear from a refutation of the latter in a paper published by the International Journal of Hindu Studies (no.16 = 2012, p.189-252), and written by the German scholar Reinhold Grünendahl (Göttingen): “History in the making: on Sheldon Pollock’s ‘NS Indology’ and Vishwa Adluri’s ‘Pride and prejudice’”.[/box_light]

The homeland debate

Ultimately, a question of ancient history, such as the location of the homeland of the Indo-European language family inside or outside of India, will not be decided by its real or putative association with political tendencies in the modern age. Thus, when Hindus are writing for the umpteenth time that the AIT stems from colonialism and racism, they may be wrong or they may be right, but at any rate they are wasting their breath. Historians know that even a theory generate History plays out in a time when other concerns were at stake than in the present  by the wrong motives may prove to be right, and even a point of view stemming from noble political positions may be wrong. We all would like to domesticate history into political usefulness for today, but have to acknowledge that it doesn’t work that way.

All the same, the AIT school do occasionally try to blacken the Hindu nationalist movement’s new found enthusiasm for the OIT with a wrong political association, viz. by fitting it into their well-established narrative that somehow this is a “fascist” movement. Thus, in a newspaper column, Robert Zydenbos (“An obscurantist argument”, Indian Express, 12-12-1993) tried to associate Navaratna Rajaram’s arguments for the OIT with Adolf Hitler’s National-Socialism. More crassly, Yoginder Sikand (“Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993) likewise tried to link the OIT with Nazi Germany, playing on their common concern for (but diametrically opposite interpretation of) the term Arya.

Of course, nobody who follows the debate, closely or even from afar, can be taken in by this. Very obviously, the Nazis themselves never believed in the OIT but were more ardent than most in espousing the AIT. Practically all Westerners at the time, and many Indians as well (including the Hindu nationalist leader of Congress, Balagangadhara Tilak, and the ideologue of the Hindutva movement, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar), took the AIT for granted. The Nazis had an extra reason for putting their faith in it, viz. that the AIT served as the perfect illustration to the Nazi worldview. The Aryan immigrants had demonstrated their superiority, they had sought to protect it by instituting a colour-based (to the Nazis: race-based) caste system, and they had lost part of their European quality by succumbing to race-mixing nonetheless. So, if anyone should be likened to Hitler, it is the AIT advocates themselves, including Zydenbos and Sikand. The OIT school rarely misses a chance to highlight this political identification of the AIT: with British imperialism as well as with European racism epitomized by the Nazis.

We may assume that Zydenbos was a newcomer to this debate, that he objected to the OIT in good faith and that he hadn’t informed himself of the Nazi view on the homeland question. But two decades down the line, the AIT belief has definitely lost its innocence. And already back then, a specialist like Columbia professor Sheldon Pollock published a paper titled: “Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and power beyond the Raj” (in Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds.: Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, UPenn Press 1993, p.76-133), which includes a chapter titled “Ex Oriente Nox: Indology in the Total State” (p.86-96). He and his acolytes have since kept on elaborating this thesis, viz. that Germany invested much in Indology and used it in its project of self-definition as “Aryans” contrasting with the “Semites”. A recent example of this polemic is Vishwa Adluri’s paper in Pollock’s defence, “Pride and prejudice: Orientalism and German Indology” (International Journal of Hindu Studies, 15 (=2011), p.253-294).

While we, both in the OIT and AIT camp, were concentrating on the scientific evidence pertaining to the homeland and to the direction of the Indo-European expansion, someone somewhere was working on a large-scale and truly daring attempt to finally link the OIT to the National-Socialist regime. Nonetheless, a Hindu industrialist recently donated Pollock a fabulous sum of money for his work on Sanskrit literature, trusting him more with this heritage than other Indologists including the native scholars, both traditional and university-trained, who are far better at home in Sanskrit and financially far cheaper than an American academic. So, this highly reputed Sanskrit specialist sharpened his long-standing hatred of the Hindu nationalist movement into a paper alleging that Indology in general and the OIT in particular was much beloved of the Nazi establishment.

Edward Said

In this paper, Pollock at first seeks to supplement Edward Said’s unjustly famous thesis Orientalism (1978) with the German chapter which Said purposely left out. If truthful, such a chapter would have refuted Said’s whole theory, viz. that “Orientalism” was nothing but the intellectual chapter of the political-economic colonial entreprise. The mainstay of “Orientalist” scholarship was Central Europe, then thoroughly German-speaking at least at the intellectual level. Prussia only had colonies at a late date and far from the lands that interested the Orientalists, while the other countries involved, including the Austro-Hungarian empire, had no colonies at all. In the colonial countries too, many Orientalists were by no means part of the colonial entreprise (pace Said’s conspiracy theory), but in the German-speaking world, there was not even a colonial entreprise to integrate the Orientalist endeavour in; yet Orientalism flourished there like nowhere else. Moreover, Orientalism took wing when the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Oriental neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, was by no means a colony but a threat and an equal trading-partner.

Indeed, even in its better-developed “British” part, Said’s theory was deeply flawed from the beginning, and the numerous errors of detail as well as the general error of his theory  have ably been pointed out by Robert Irwin (For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and Their Enemies, Allan Lane, London 2006) and Ibn Warraq (Defending the West. A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Prometheus, Amherst NY, 2007). A comprehensive work on German-language Oriental scholarship has been produced by Suzanne Marchand (German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Scholarship, German Historical Institute, Washington DC, and Cambridge University Press, 2009). With the benefit of hindsight, we can now pass judgment on Said’s influential publication which has seriously damaged the fair name of the academic discipline called “Orientalism”.

Academics who still rely on Said’s thesis, actually rely on a profoundly mistaken and highly politicized piece of scholarship. His thesis is a thin attempt at justification for anti-Westernism. Much as this is in vogue among Hindus, they are only making fools of themselves by espousing Said’s conspiracy theory. For everyone, it is  academically weak and factually full of mistakes, but for Muslims at least, they would be supporting their own man. They would be cheering for a Dhimmi, someone upholding Islamic causes, in that as well as in other books. In supporting Said, Pollock is true to his own camp, i.e. the anti-Hindu coalition. But for Hindus, there is nothing in it, they are cheering for someone serving a declared enemy.

What Nazi rule really meant for Orientalism

Grünendahl cites  many examples where Pollock and his defender Adluri manipulate quotations to make past authors witnesses for their accusations. I vaguely knew that Pollock was wrong in associating the OIT with National-Socialism, but not that he was so spectacularly wrong. His thesis is first of all that India was a central concern for the Nazis. This is put forward most emphatically (but only with bluff) by Pollock and, on his authority, generally taken for granted. Adluri elaborates that Germany was very worried about building its “identity” as contrasting with the Semitic heritage and the Semitic people in their midst, and used India for that purpose.

But Grünendahl shows from old and neutral sources that the Indology departments received no special attention, that they were small compared to Ancient Near-Eastern Studies, Sinology etc., and that the Nazi period showed no special interest in Orientalism in general or Indology in particular. If anything, they suffered in their orientation on India from the reigning emphasis on “Indo-Germanic studies”.

Marchand notes that the number of German Oriental scholars as a whole fell from 360 in 1931 to 180 in 1940. [2009:488] What connection she cites between Indology and the Nazis [2009:499] is wholly based on Pollock, who estimates that one-third of the (only!) ca. twenty-five Indology professors in the Third Reich were active in the National-Socialist party or in the SS. This is the only time she cites him in her 526-page book. (She also naïvely gives credence to other anti-Hindu scholars such as Reza Pirbhai, p.311.) According to her: “Worst of all among the Indologist collaborators was Walter Wüst, the Vedic specialist at the University of Munich who became the director of the SS Ahnenerbe.” [p.499] But Wüst is not known to have championed the OIT, on the contrary. The Nazi regime’s favourite historian H.K.F. Günther believed the homeland lay in Southeastern Europe. This was the reigning opinion in Europe, challenged only by some Nazis who insisted on Germany or Scandinavia as the homeland. All of them agreed that the Indo-European language family had only reached India through an Aryan invasion.

Let us add that Marchand agrees to include among the Nazi Indologists Paul Thieme, the revered teacher of Michael Witzel; and he was, like his more militant pupil, a believer in the AIT. According to Marchand, one of the Nazi concerns in Oriental scholarship was “the refutation of the Jewish origins of monotheism” (p.489) namely in Mazdeism. The picture of religion in National-Socialism was complex and diverse, but belief in the superiority of monotheism was unchallenged. Like racism, it was then part of the general consensus.

She also notes that: “Among the Islamicists, there were also numerous collaborators (…)  things looked rather promising for this bunch  in the period 1936-39” when the Nazi leaders Joseph Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach toured the Middle East, and the Islamologists were used to liaise with Muslim leaders like the Jerusalem Mufti, so that they “successfully disseminated Nazi ideas throughout the Middle East”. [2009:490] Wouldn’t that be a good topic for Orientalist scholars: Islamic-Nazi similarities as the reason for Nazi-Muslim friendships?

The Nazi concern for “Aryans” speaking “Indo-Germanic” (innocently so named after its two extremes: Indo-Aryan in Bengal and Germanic in Iceland) or Indo-European, now and originally conceived as a language family but then also conceived as a racial unit, couldn’t seriously be bothered with India.  Their main concern was with the North, so Grünendahl argues:

“The fundamental flaw of Pollock’s narrative is that it hinges entirely on the exact reverse of the ‘Nordic’ notion. This reversal, which provides the basis for the ‘founding myth’ of the entire discourse machinery he set in motion, is enshrined in the grotesque proposition that ‘the Germans… continued, however subliminally, to hold the nineteenth-century conviction that the origin of European civilization was to be found in India  (or at least that India constituted a genetically related sibling)’ (1993:77) Even to the Romantic period [end of 18th, early 19th century, when this notion was upheld by Johann Herder], this assertion only holds with considerable qualifications (…) To make it the basis for theorizing any aspect of the NS period is rendered absurd by the above-mentioned texts alone”. [p.199]

Hitler on the Hindus

Reference is to texts revealing Hitler’s position on the Hindus. In 1920 already, he laid his cards on the table, and would never waver from this position, not in Mein Kampf, which disparages Hindus as also German neo-Pagans, not in his speeches nor in his wartime table talks. There he had evolved to mocking religion in general and his native Catholicism specifically, though he appreciated its organization and mass psychology and its anti-caste way of recruiting its priests from the people rather than from a separate priestly caste (yes, Hitler was also a comrade-at-arms of Pollock in their common anti-Brahminism). He only knew of the Hindus through the lens of the AIT:

“While Hitler does refer to ‘the Hindus’, he does so not with the intent to employ them as distant relatives in the ‘creation of Indo-German as counter-identity’ (Pollock 1993:83), but merely as an illustration of ‘racial decline’ (Rassensenkung) due to the destruction of ‘national purity’ (nationale Reinheit.)” (p.218, with reference to Adolf Hitler 1980 (1920): “Warum sind wir Antisemiten?” in Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn, eds: Hitlers sämtliche Aufzeichnungen, 1905-1924, p.184-204: specifically p.195-196)

So, Hitler’s rare utterance on the Hindus was a racial interpretation of the AIT. These are his own words (1980/1920:195): “Wir wissen, dass die Hindu in Indien ein Volk sind, gemischt aus den hochstehenden arischen Einwanderern und der dunkelschwarzen Urbevölkerung, und dass dieses Volk heute die folgen trägt; denn es ist auch das Sklavenvolk einer Rasse, die uns in vielen Punkten nahezu als zweite Judenheit erscheinen darf.” (“We know  that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry.”)

For Grünendahl, this is merely an example of how the primary sources of German history contradict the free-for-all that amateur historians make of it, in this case the manipulated narrative by Sheldon Pollock. He sounds like defending Germany’s true history against American (and then, by imitation, Indian) distortions. Probably he doesn’t realize that this distortion, about the presumed Nazi love for the OIT, constitutes Pollock’s ultimate motive. We don’t want to pretend to read inside a man’s skull, so we will not speak out on his intimate motives. But the objective finality of his thesis is at any rate to blacken the OIT by associating it with National-Socialism. Reality, however, is just the opposite: more even than other Europeans, the Nazis espoused and upheld the AIT. Hitler-Pollock, same struggle!

 

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Categories
Analysis

Colour Prejudice in India : A History

[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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Categories
Academic Negationism

Time for Aryan Invasion Theory to Invade the Dustbin of History

Crass racist theories which are both laughable and offensive are thankfully a thing of the past. Or are they? The Holocaust put the nail in the coffin that race theory could be anything other than murderous and beyond the pale. Yet apartheid was instituted in South Africa only 3 years later. Western democracies remained by and large on friendly terms with the apartheid regime until almost the very end. The irony was not lost on the anti-apartheid lobby which struggled long and hard against official racial discrimination in South Africa. Western democracies had fought Nazism. But Hitler’s New Order in Europe was a masterplan to have inferior Slavs segregated into native reservations where they would provide a ready source of labour for the master race of Aryans to exploit. While apartheid may not have actually had slaves or carried out an extermination program, the black homelands were established so that the white master race could exploit black labour on the cheap. It was this idea of a master race which had actually culminated in Nazism and caused global conflict.

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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