Cycles of Time and the History of Root Races by Asiananda: Introduction and Part One

A paper situating the 'Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of Indian Civilization' within a Mega-cyclical view of Indian History - A subjective, intuitive attempt to address the Theosophical idea of Helena Blavatsky's seven Root Races and humanity's present stage as the Fifth Root Race.

Editors notes: Professor Asiananda was a college and good friend of Dr. Diane M. Rousseau and of The Institute of Spiritual Sciences (ISS). The following is a paper he presented at the international conference on 'Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of Indian Civilization' at the University of Massachusetts (Dartmouth) 23-26 June 2006. The lecture is presented here in an adapted format by permission of the author. Professor Asiananda (known to his friends and close acquaintances simply as “Sebastian”) passed in 2008; his keen intellect, generosity and quick laugh are very much missed. -RJR

Cycles of Time and the History of Root Races
Abstract, Introduction and Part One
by Professor Asiananda

Abstract

The reality of Indian civilization is not its surface but Time, which like the Vedas is without beginning and end; hence the author has evolved 'Mega-cyclical View of Indian History' in course of his writings which are listed at the end. 'The Aryan/Non-Aryan Origins of Indian Civilization' is valid only at the surface. The Fundamental Unity of the Indian subcontinent is grounded in this paper drawing from quantum physics, depth psychology and mysticism, history and philosophy. A 'South Asian Home' was definite and irreversible at the end of the British period in 1947, its abortion was an aberration of Indian History equaled only to Aurangzeb's re-islamization at the end of the Mughal period; building on the Theosophical idea of Helena Blavatsky's Seven Root Races which describes humanity's present stage as the Fifth Root Race and assigns special roles for the US and India in building up the coming Sixth Root Race guiding human future towards greater humanity and divinity, the Paper wants us to outgrow ruling conflictual paradigms such as 'clash of civilizations', 'Aryan invasion theory', etc. and re-launch the 'US-India Strategical Partnership' inaugurated by the Bush Administration truly on a 'Pax Indica of the Spirit' and 'Pax Americana of Hope' building up a six-root-race-level of 'all-inclusive global partnership' that is truly the PAX HUMANA.

Introduction: India's Fundamental Unity & Timelessness

Any reflection on the 'origins of Indian civilization' leads us to look at its more ancient Aryan and Dravidian components; Indo-Aryan and the Proto-Dravidian are world's two major language families, obviously they have also racial overtones. Yet the Indian subcontinent being history's most total racial melting pot they have indeed fused across the millennia and emerged upon the socio-political and anthropological surface of the subcontinent as a common Indic race and civilization with an underlying negroid proto-australoid mongoloid autochthonous underpinning, later adding up also an Indo-Islamic and Indo-British over pinning at the roof. In a sense Indian civilization is beginningless and endless as humanity and human civilization itself. If its origins can be traced is a disputable issue; this is what the paper attempts to elaborate and reconcile within my 'Mega cyclical view of Indian History'.

This unique capacity of fusing all diversities and contradictions as UNITY proves the beginninglessness and unbroken continuity of India civilization which is a treasure India has preserved and has to preserve for man's civilizational future upon this planet. The focus of the conference in limiting it to 'Aryan/Non-Aryan' binaries makes the issue scientific and maybe politically correct! But has Indian civilization an origin? If so, can this origin be situated in a specified time frame? While anyone with a sense of history can turn the clock backwards to proto-historic and pre-historic mythological and geological times of millennia and eons, we know our recorded history is no older than two thousand years or at best three! Nothing is normally acceptable to our society and above all to our institutions of knowledge that is not 'scientific'. But the empirical world of time and space in which science's mandate runs is only skin deep! I want to show that the intuitive method I adopt here could be a reliable assessment providing us with a rule of game for exploring trans-temporal reality offering scope for an all-inclusive belonging and human planetary identity for all.

Science conducts itself within the realm of causality and objective facts of the classical physics. But we have now already entered the frontiers of the quantum cosmos of the particle physics: what rules here is Heisenberg's, Uncertainty Principle, Bohr's 'Particle-wave Complementarity' and Bell's Theorem of non-causality. Just like water could be as hard as the glacial ice and as fluid as the running brook or as gaseous as the heavenly clouds, in the quantum universe matter is 'substantive particle' and 'substance-less wave' losing itself in utterly non-physical and dimensionless Field or vacuum; what ceaselessly happens there has been characterized by many a noted physicists as the “Dance of Siva” here in trillionths of a second sub-atomic particles are born and destroyed by their anti-particles, at their inter-junction matter is quanta, soul, Consciousness, i.e. the external extension of space collapses in the for us ungraspable in-centric vacuum (Sunnya, zero womb) of eternity (condensation of space as Time, Citta/Mind); eternity here is measured by the trillionth of trillionth of a second, the yogis encounter here the silence/vacuum the ether of Prana, which is the non-physical Field of Quantum Physics, the Atman that is personal and universal the Quantum Brahman.

Admittedly this quantum universe is also the hatching ground of all science fictions, artificial intelligence and cyborgs, super-conductivity and all nano technologies that have made our lives instantaneous in this miraculous global village of cell phones and internet screens; and the years and decades to come are going to bring for us terrific singularities - promising both planetary destruction or planetary salvation! And in this quantum cosmos we are outside the linearity of the clock time and predictable historical times; History has also entered a correspondingly accelerating stadium of quantum leaps, the civilizations that were for centuries and millennia maintaining their isolated regional existence are converging into a single Global Civilization, Teilhard deChardain spoke of Planetization and Noosphere, the emergence of the world mind and Omega, and Sri Aurobindo revealed it as the 'Descent of the Overmind'; but it could also very well be AI and the cyborg Terminator!

What is decisive is to trace the universal origins and human or teleological end of civilization so that we as humanity succeed opening up history and civilization towards their quantum horizons of beginningless and endlessness that redeems cosmos (order/dharma) from its underlying chaos. My 'Vedico-Quantum Megacyclical Conception of History' rises from a unifying ground of the meta-psychic and quantum -psychic ground and expands limitlessly in tune with our expanding cosmos.

The Universe Einstein knew as a child was thought of having been made up of a single galaxy, the Milky Way! But the universe as we know today runs up to 14 billion light years, the region unknown and unknowable to us is said to be stretching to a radius of 58 billion light years! And the universe is disturbingly accelerating faster than the speed of light and even NASA is without a clue!! Shouldn't this acceleration and infinite expansion also impact our civilization and history beyond our familiar three-dimensional world and outside our clock time? Is this universe bereft of life outside our planet? Weren't there past civilizations upon this earth and elsewhere in cosmos? Is there extra-terrestrial intelligence anywhere in this infinitely vast and apparently inert universe?

We humans run our lives for three scores and ten, and then we die! But when I look back to my forefathers and their forefathers, do I know if the chain ever ends? I for one feel that my age is not my present three score years, but I am in a sense as old as the continuity of life upon our planet which is ca 4.5 billion years! If I am so old, can the age of an unbroken civilization like India's be any lesser? How old are the Vedas? Do our notions of yugas and kalpas and the constantly self-creating and self- dissolving Brahman have any reality? If they are myths, do they have any archetypal substantiality? Don't they also vibrate with our presently unfolding quantum physical and astrophysical universes? Can't we speak of a 'New Vedico-Quantum New Conception of History' that is in tune with this fast beating quantum beat of our presently globalized planetary life? Why to embroil ourselves in a perceived 'Aryan/Non-aryan dispute' which is a long-settled fact for those who do not care for the so-called Aryan invasion theory?

This is where I thought I have to come out with this Mega-cyclical interpretation of Indian history with a Pre-vedic, Post-vedic and Trans- vedic Megacycles, and I must argue with all my respects for science that this Pre-vedic megacycle is just beginningless, because Indian history or for that matter our human history I argue is just beginningless. Ergo also endless. So I do not fully share the revisionist reactionary Post-colonialist historiography that imputes 'divide and rule' as the 'hall mark of the imperialists' and the project of 'buying back the pride and self-respect of the once colonized Indians' by such popularly flattering gimmicks: renaming say Bombay as Mumbai or the Sindhu-Sarasvati replacing 'Indus Valley Civilization', etc. If science is our yardstick, we do know all humans originated in Africa migrating to other continents. Is it a reason for shame for us and for humanity? Or is it necessary to prove or disprove that Africans originated in some other continent?

If we know that Indian civilization archetypally is the Mother of all civilizations and humanity, there is no shame to cover and no self-respect to be retrieved by revisionist historiography when it is also motivated! So, I shall highlight and situate the 'Aryan/Non-Aryan origins of Indian civilization' in a Mega cyclical, Quantum view of Indian History grounded on the subcontinent's fundamental unity, unbroken continuity, and its sheer endlessness and beginningless.

Mega cyclical Quantum View of History- India's Santana Dharma

Matsya, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, protecting the Manu and the seven sages at the time of the last pralaya; pralaya from Sanskrit meaning “dissolution”.

We can trace history to proto-history and pre-history which in turn relate to human memory and consciousness to dynamically living religious mythologies and cosmologies; myths are but the emanations of forgotten or irretrievable history, Pralaya is a universal myth recurring differently in all cultures and civilizations - Atlantis is the myth of a sunken continent with all Western peoples, the 'Atlantic Charter' giving birth to the United Nations attests to its world historical and millennial revalidation. Kumari Kandam and Lemuria are its counterparts in Dravidian mythology, and Airyanem Vaejah its Avestan and Paradise and Noah's Arc etc. its Judeo- Christian counterparts. As Freud established Dreams as opening the gates of our individual psyches, Carl Gustav Jung showed how myths emerge from our Collective Subconscious and Collective Unconscious and are founded on specific Archetypes. Beyond the collective Unconscious are the Inconscient regions which mostly manifest as the physiological and biological instinctive natural behaviors of our animal past with its drives and brutalities of ego sex aggressive possessiveness and dominating will. Regressing further we inevitably 'collapse' ourselves into the Unconscient, which is the return of our physical body back to the inert matter, i.e., Thanatos, un-returnable Death the cosmic black hole that is our psyche's last inert frontier! Reversely there is also our ascending collective Superconscious guiding us from our base nature of the vital regions to the mental, higher mental, supramental, spiritual, subliminal and luminous Superconscious regions truly to the Superman-hood as Sri Aurobindo saw.

When we look at the process of history and civilization from the quantum level of non-causality (intuition) and synchronicity, which ipso facto implies the oneness of humanity and its paleo-cosmic unity, history and civilization simply cannot be the violence, bloodshed, killings and world wars it was! It can never be the 'clash of civilizations' Samuel Huntington during 1990s sold to the world, hatching the 'axis of evil' and 9/11 and the present jihadist will of global terrorism; civilizational process can and must end in a truly eschatological expectation of the converging world civilizations in human unity and planetary fulfilment. Classical physics has no value or purpose for civilization, the vedic-quantum has an eschatological imperative, this is the need of the hour and the highest priority of Indian history and civilization, a motivated reviving of the Aryan invasion theory is going to serve none. If India's civilizational experience and her unbroken historical continuity is anything, it proves this civilizational convergence, the civilizational synthesis of the subcontinent in the unity of diversity affirming the right of the race to emerge as the heralders of the true Vasudhaivakutumbakom. Indian civilization withstood and maintained its unbroken continuity because unlike other civilizations it refused to function in the ordered Newtonian mechanistic cosmos of the classical physics, but opted for the chaos of the quantum universe.

There is no other race and civilization that has categorically declared that the empirical reality (Samsara) is but Maya the secondary reality, Truth alone is the transcending ONE that holds the transient Many on the surface. No matter that India remained by and large a conquered or mutually warring subcontinent without realizing an enduring nationhood until late; admittedly she finally submitted to an enslavement lasting a thousand years to Islam and West, but there is also no other civilization of history that has assimilated and reconciled all the dialectically opposing racial-religious-linguistic forces of history as Indian civilization has done. Thus was achieved in a unique symbiotic civilizational amalgamation of the Aryan and Dravidian components providing the backbone of a common subcontinental ethos upholding a timeless India in time, an 'India that is Bharat' which is a Nation a State a Race and great 'Civilizational Home' that along with the House of Europe (EU) could emerge as the second pillar of a Con-federative New United Nations which indeed is 'nuclear weapon free millennial Global PEACE Order' India has always stood for.

The same concordance also at the level of religions I believe was an accomplished fact of Indian civilization but for the aberration of 1947 partition, which was a failure not of civilization but of individuals. Redeeming its vivisected collective subconscious is redeeming the Indic towards its quantum possibilities and cosmic destiny. So, the question we ought to be asking here is not the binary Aryan/Non-Aryan origins but the human origins and end of Indian civilization. The Dravidian pride is bought not by renaming Madras as Chennai but by tuning up the Dravidian cosmos to the rhythm of the expanding quantum rhythm of Indian history and human history, which is the second part of this paper. The rest of this section will then be devoted to:

1. Contextualizing the 'Two Aberrations' resulting in the abortion of a possible - Hindu-Muslim-Western civilizational confluence in 1947.
   
2. Tracing the evolution of Indo- European studies upon the British rediscovering India's classical past and civilizational heritage which post colonialist revisionist historiography seems to have baptized as 'Aryan Invasion Theory'. Such an Aryan invasion theory which is not an alibi for something else has no place and justification in Indian history.
   

Part One

Two Aberrations in the unbroken 'Indic-Civilizational' Convergence

The Fundamental Unity of the subcontinent I believe is as much enduring and eternal as the ‘beginninglessness' and endlessness of its Civilization. Mother India embraces all her children as she has embraced the Aryans and the Dravidians; such a fusion was definitely also under way between Hinduism and Islam, ergo also between-them-both and the West progressively under the Raj; it was consummating under the Mughals after Akbar the Great and his successors; Akbar's great grandson Dara Shikoh was as much a syncretic Indian as say Nehru was one source of the Indo -European studies was the Upanishads Dara Shikoh translated to Persian which reached Paris in 1775 giving Western scholars clue about the inter- connectedness of Avestha and Sanskrit, elaborated further below - but Shah Jahan's succession went not to his favorite and chose DARA but to the fanatical Aurangzeb whose re-islamization put the clock back by centuries to the early Sultanate times.

This was a historical regression that destroyed much of the promise and fulfilment of the seven centuries of Indo-Islamic civilizational cycle [elaborated in my Post-vedic Megacycle] and represents a fundamental reversal of the converging trend of Indian history and its fundamental unity. And an equally gigantic reversal or regression “ the second aberration “ was to repeat when the nineteenth century consensus of the Raj and its method of constitutional evolution which the Congress upheld till the coming of the Gandhian era was reversed, the Gandhi-Jinnah personality conflict was blown up to be the nationality conflict, and the possibly glorious Indo-British civilizational cycle ended in such bitterness, bloodshed and partition of what would truly have emerged the subcontinental home, the Commonwealth of South Asia, the Indo-Islamic-Western civilizational convergence of history.

A thousand years of enslavement under the Muslim and British rule has so deeply wounded the Hindu psyche that it has still not stopped bleeding. But we should not fail to differentiate their ruling principle: the first the Muslim left no other option but to be converted or be enslaved/killed, the other the Brit was bound by his belief: that all men are created equal. He upheld the idea of Freedom, equality, impartiality of justice, the values of humanism and liberalism vindicating in such a way the he co-founded the Indian National Congress and elected an Indian in the House of Commons as early as 1892! with a free and sovereign British constituency voting for him in majority.

The difference is gigantic: Islam ruled on the right of its conquest and the right of enslaving the conquered, the Brit also ruled India on the same right but subconsciously and consciously recognized the sacredness and ancient glory of a fallen civilization and wanted to rule it as a trust reposed on them to be given back in due time. They certainly treated Indians as collaborators and participants not as the enslaved and victimized and saw the purpose of British rule as preparing the Indians for the same freedom which was theirs and is inalienable to every human. The Indian side gratefully accepted; the Raj by and large was an enterprise of consensus of the rulers and the ruled until the Gandhian era.

Mahatma Gandhi with Dr. Annie Besant en route to a meeting in Madras, India; September 1921.

If Gandhi had gone with his non-cooperation against say Aurangzeb he would forthwith have been hanged and put to show at Chadni Chowk! Gandhi succeeded because the British sympathies were with him, i.e. India's Freedom; what they did in 1942 after Quit India at the worst hour of their history and when the Japanese army stood at the Indian border, they could have done to Gandhi and our Freedom movement also in 1920 and 1930! India the Brit unconditionally admitted had a moral right to her Freedom; this was totally out of question for the Muslim to admit: this is what fundamentally differentiates the Islamic and British periods of Indian history.

Gandhi simply made capital out of this civility: non-violence was but a strategy that ensured his supremacy of the Congress, he knew the imperative of driving the Brits out and gaining India's freedom on “the right of conquest”, as was finally tried in 1942 at the Quit India, and miserably failed. India's freedom is not re-conquered, it was what the Brits left behind in their goodness, and the partition was a result; if we are not willing to honestly analyze and sort out historical truths, we will have to create alibis like the “myth of the Aryan invasion theory” in the act of self-justification. It is a prima facie fact that the unity of India and its constitution functions on the legacy left behind by the Brits, until they pulled out, they spoke alone of a “United India”, partition was voted in by Congress on 3 June 1947.

The British who ruled India were motley opposing groups as it was in democracies the world over now. The East India Company cared for nothing but the returns of its profit, the Parliament resisted and ruled that the company possessions in India belonged not to the merchants but to the Crown, and subjected the Company under numerous Charter Acts and India Acts beginning with the 1773 Regulating Acts and 1883 Pitts India Acts; in India itself the interests of the Orientalists, the Evangelists, the Utilitarians, the Administrators who toed the Whig or Tory lines clashed. The Company was anti-Christian and anti-missionary, the late eighteenth century administrators who were inclined to an Indian way of life and often had Indian mistresses, were swayed by Orientalism; William Jones pioneered the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1784) and Governor General Wellesley the Fort William College (1800) for promoting education in native languages and legal systems.

It was out of the sheer logic and compulsions of the 1832 Reform Bills and the Slavery Emancipation Acts passed in the British Parliament and the reformist campaigns of the leading Indians of the time like Raja Ram Mohan Roy that India was also pushed on to the same reform course. Accordingly, Macaulay's famous Minutes on Education that opted for English language for India and his equally erudite and enduring “Indian Penal Code” that abolished the separate legal jurisdictions for Hindus Muslims and Westerns laying the foundations for the common citizenship later became the law of the land. Though the abolition of the Shariah and Persian which were the relics of the Muslim rule favored the Hindus and neglected the social status and income chances of the Muslims, both the communities continued to live in peace as can be seen from the acceptance of the Muslim ruler by the Andhra people (Hyderabad), Hindu ruler by the Kashmiri Muslims Nepalese etc.

It is true that the Muslims were not spontaneously attracted to the Congress at its founding, but it must be remembered that the Muslim League was founded not as a direct reaction to Congress but in countervailing the Hindu agitation to the 1905 Bengal partition in which Muslims generally perceived a sense of security and balancing of their lost position. Again, a high watermark of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation was achieved with the signing of the 1916 Lucknow Pact under the patronage of the great Lokmanya Tilak, but then the whole national course was derailed when Gandhi took up the discredited course of the Sultan of Turkey and captured the Congress leadership through the backdoor under the banner of Khilafat and the money and street power provided by the fanaticized ulema backed Islamist wing of the Indian Muslims under the leadership of the Ali Brothers.

In 1920 it was the life and death struggle of the survival of Islam's Khalifah an office that unified both its Crown and Umma since the Prophet's days. Not the Arabs who were fighting to come out of the Turkish rule and even claiming the Caliph's office for themselves, not even the Turks who wanted get rid of the Ottoman trappings and become a republic for themselves, which Kemal Pasha was soon to do by abolishing both the offices of the Emperor and the Caliph, but alone the Indian Muslims were there to rise in a Jihad in defense of the Ottoman emperor the Khalifah! The action route was one of destroying the British rule in the subcontinent! Of course, the Amir of Afghanistan would march on British India backed by the “Exile Government of India in Kabul” coinciding with a revolutionary uprising on the Indian side, the Third Anglo-Afghan War that began 1 May 1919 was this ingenious plan! Jallianwala Baugh uprising happened just a fortnight before this on 13 April. Naturally, Gandhiji was offered to lead this Khilafat movement, he not only accepted it but promised to secure Independence within one year, strictly before 31 December 1921! None of the Congress leaders could grasp the wisdom of this Gandhian step, but Gandhi was so convinced about his captainship of the Khilafat that he was simply ready to go it alone, of course with the backing of the Ali brothers in company of the ulema and the street power and money power they were able to instantaneously organize on this emotive issue in jihadi pitch. Gandhi emerged as the new Congress leader, mass leader, Gandhian era was born, but what happened to the traditional Congress leaders who were generally pro-western liberals and chamber room politicians?

Of the pre-Gandhian Congress triumvirate leadership, Tilak died the night before the Khilafat-Non-cooperation was launched, Jinnah revolted and broke away, Annie Besant withdrew to her ashram like Sri Aurobindo and Tagore; and after it was clear that Gandhi could not deliver Freedom before 31 December 1921, Malavia Lajpat Rai et al veered to form the Hindu Mahasabha; liberals like Surendranath Banerjea, Sapruet al formed the Liberal Party of India, Motilal Nehru CR Das et al formed the Swarajist Party, and Gandhi himself, after he was to be charge sheeted for deception and betrayal, saved face by turning to his khadi and village uplifting work in which he remained until the end of that decade. This Gandhian reversal of the 35-year long Congress politics may not have been an aberration and regression as spectacular as the Aurangzeb one, but it reversed the constitutional reform process which had the sanction of more than a century of consensus of the rulers and the ruled under the Raj and if partition and its havoc and what was to follow since then is also considered, is it not an aberration any less?

After a millennia of enslavement under the Muslims and Christians it is understandable that the Gandhian course in 1920 was the natural gush of a wounded collective psyche, it does good to our collective soul to celebrate the anniversaries of Quit India and currently also the 150th anniversary of the “First War of Indian Independence” but we are presently six decades away from the Gandhian century, it is indeed a time to objectively and justly evaluate our national past for the sake of Truth and for the sake of building up a collective national personality of India the Superpower, one of the two corner stones of the Asian century. Wasn't it the Brits in 1920, who virtually acknowledged India's Independence by admitting her at the League of Nations as a sovereign entity, the Brits who in 1919 gave us a Government of India Acts providing for diarchy in the provinces and the majority of elected representation in the Central Legislative Assembly: were they unworthy of cooperation? Partition was nothing but the Muslims using the same weapon which Gandhi used against the Brits.

So, it is good at this distance of time to objectively evaluate the British period of Indian history which I believe is a way to heal our collective wounds as the Indic race which is but also the act of healing our partition wound and problems it has bequeathed to us. Alternatively, we shall keep our blinds and harp on the so-called Aryan invasion theory, which was not there and is no more the psychological projection of our deep very deep collective psychic wounds across a millennium. The Chinese worked the catharsis of their bitter Cultural Revolution by re-labelling it as the sheer Mao madness, all the dictators of the twentieth century have long been through the drainages, Gandhi of course was different, the moral dictator of Congress, Congress that claimed to have represented all India which in turn was represented by this one person, the “moral dictator”. Partition that clipped both the wings of the subcontinent was the result of this firmly held pre-1947 myth. Not looking at it honestly is the most firmly established collective Indian taboo, if we fail to emulate the Chinese, we might always continue to live under make- believes, of which Aryan invasion theory is only one manifestation.

The Aborted Hindu-Muslim-Western Convergence of History

It is not the purpose of this paper to upgrade one period of Indian history and downgrade the other. But how could it be forgotten that the enslavement of the Hindu during much of the Muslim period, the destruction of thousands of temples and the suppression of all forms of his self-expression over the centuries, dehumanized the Hindu personality society and the great Hindu civilization in such a way that the Hindu identity and its sense of past was totally obliterated, Hindus as centuries passed totally forget their past, forgetting that they had a Chandragupta or Ashoka, forgetting that they had a vedic-vedantic-Buddhistic inheritance, etc.

Like Europe during the Dark Ages forgot that it had a Greco-Roman inheritance and its rediscovery of that past gave birth to the great European Renaissance, India was reconnected to her past by the British Orientalists, above all William Jones; that contact with the West was indeed Mother India's rebirth and Renaissance. If the seven centuries of Turk-Mongol savagery enslaved and utterly destroyed a great civilization, it was providential that the Brits came as redeemers as the great Victorian Indians of the early Congress believed, the civilization was unearthed from its graves and stupor of abject slavery and self-condemnation and self-negating superstitions that accrued on it over the centuries. It is a shame a travesty of truth if the post colonialist revisionist historiography equates the British period with conversion and Aryan invasion theory.

If the Brits really wanted, they could have done what the Muslims did, even more ferociously and atrociously on the conversion front, but the 2% of India's Christian population was what was there when the Brits came in! Europeans except the early Portuguese we know were anti-religion, the East India Company expressly forbid missionaries from its territory until 1813 when the Parliament in the Charter Act of that year earmarked an education fund and opened room for a restricted entry of the missionaries as part of the reformist and anti-slavery campaigns of great liberals like Edmund Burke, Wilberforce and Charles Grant. The post Napoleonic Britain now emerging as Pax Britannica was ready to take upon itself the “white man's burden” producing also this time a galaxy of great Orientalists, Evangelists, Utilitarians and Administrators, who were convinced that India should also be benefited from the great Reform Bills and Emancipation Proclamation of 1832 back at home.

Generations of Indian intellectuals have heaped opprobrium on TB Macaulay but why don't we remember that the Brits could have ruled India unchallenged for long if they let the Sharia law and Persian language continue? It is his Minutes and the Penal Code based on the equality of citizenship that has unified India and prepared it for the unfolding Indian (twenty-first) Century. His father, Zachary Macaulay, Governor of the then slave colony Liberia, along with Wilberforce was the leader of Britain's anti-slavery movement, Macaulay writes in his Autobiography how touched he was being transported in palanquin at his arrival in Madras in December 1833 to Coonoor by virtually “degenerated” mass of human beings, without any right or freedom in life, condemned by their karmas! On whom he was determined to repose their human dignity and equality that was their natural right. His so called “racial arrogance” of having said that all India's literature could be put in one little cup board has been repeated time without number by our “patriots”, but was this not a time that India's classical past was still lying buried and waiting for the orientalists to unearth? Macaulay deserves to be remembered better than our Aryan invasion theories are ready to admit, the 12- member Public Instruction Committee that voted on his Minutes was divided 6:6, and the Minutes were adopted by Macaulay's casting vote! With that vote Britain will lose her Empire he said, but so shall she save an “Empire of the Idea' eternally which is today our worldwide inheritance. No Aryan invasion theory, but this “Empire of the Idea” is what is underlying it all.

How it all happened was told by Max Mueller in the Introduction of his own Translations of the Upanishads:


It was after seeing this the great German philosopher Schopenhauer wrote:


The late eighteenth century European mind was outgrowing its straight-jacketing rationalism bequeathed by the Age of Enlightenment. Spinoza, Leibniz, Jakob Boehme were back on the philosophical agenda with mystical intuition and inner experience, Vico and Herder speculated on “universal history”, Kant wrote his last Treatise on Ewige Frieden, the American and French Revolutions put the individual at the center, the heroic vision of human Progress now heralded the age of Romanticism. As Reason gave way to this Romantic mood, language as the medium of self-expression emerged at the center of human reality, it was becoming clear after comparing the structures of Greek Latin Celtic Germanics that there should have been a common Indo-European root language, Zend-Avesta that now arrived as the medium of the Dara Shikoh Upanishads confirmed this, and William Jones's studies of the Sanskrit and the newly translated Bhagavat Gita, and such other Hindu scriptures and legal codes more than re-confirmed and consolidated the conclusions.

Comparative Philology was becoming a very prestigious subject in European universities, more so in Germany, soon also in the United States, almost as prestigious as the study of particle physics today!; like the quantum cosmos the particle physics point to, here was evolving an “Indo-European cosmos” giving new speculative material and angles to European and human reality. The maximum prestige was now going to India, Sanskrit seemed to be closest to the original Indo-European, conjuncture was now made about an “Indo-Aryan Race” that should have been its original speakers. The Vedic Aryans were seen as its most original exemplar. But where could have been the real roots: somewhere central Asia? Caucuses? Around the Black Sea? Could it be India?

Early German Sanskritists, notably Friedrich Schlegel, were willing to tip that status on India, “Indo-Germanic” as against Indo- European or Indo-Aryan language family also came to vogue; as Eurasian migratory movements were scrutinized, it was apparent that pre-historic, proto-historic and historic times had to be included; here the living Germanic historical memory was of the Voelkerwaenderung of the first millennium CE. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest of 9 CE stopping the Roman expansion at the Rhine and Visigoth conquest of the West Roman Empire (476 CE) indicated a Germanic migratory movement southwards from Scandinavia and/or westward movement from Central Asia.

Obviously, the Vedic Indo-Aryans were an Indo-European people as Sanskrit proved, but evidently of migratory movement millennia before. The issue was not race but scholarship, the orientalists simply were not willing to break their heads speculating on the racial issues, their concerns were alone the research contributing to reconstruct reality as it ought to be.

As we know, the racialization of the Aryan theory played a vehement role in Germany since the founding of the Second German Empire (1871); with the pre-Germanic collective myths now asserting in the Christian present, the romantic heroism of the German historicism and Nietzsche's cult of the Superman, etc. playing central roles. Theosophy and Freemasonry flourished, and they postulated an Aryan Germanic past, and worshipped the Swastika or Hakenkreuz in preference of the Christian Cross - something which Hitler and the Nazis who were unified under Hakenkreuz (Swastika) were to take advantage to the hilt later. But this Germanic Aryan myth and racist mania of the twentieth century and the Vedic Indo-Aryans were seen as different as cheese and chalk, with their migratory movements setting them apart by millennia. The orientalists by and large remained untouched by this racial mania, though people by inclination may be more liberal or less on their color convictions, the truth here must be seen as Max Mueller's unequivocal utterance:


I have lived all my professional life in Europe, German has almost become my mother tongue, I have read in German philosophy European history and their British and Indian counterparts all my life, I have to yet to come across a German British or European school of thought provoking or advocating the “Aryan Invasion Theory” as projected by the revisionist post-colonialist Hindutva historiography in India, the only finger as far as I can see has been pointed against Max Mueller. But having read so much about him from various sources and knowing his personality and his times in and out and knowing how he was persecuted in his times as a “Hindu” and the enemy of the “Christian civilization”, and how he in 1860 was denied the Boden Professorship at Oxford which went to the mediocre Monier Williams due to latter's stronger Christian orientation, I can only attempt below a telegraphic summary of German Indology whose first Chair at the University of Bonn was instituted in 1818 and was known as the Benares on the Rhine. William Jones, Macaulay, Max Muelle etc. were the authors of the “Empire of the Idea” that would have brought about, as I believe, a Hindu-Muslim-Western civilizational confluence in the Indian subcontinent in the promise and fulfilment of universal history which is the end human pilgrimage upon the sands of time.

Benares on the Rhine

Bhagavad-Gita; Krishna speaks to Arjuna on the battlefield and counsels Arjuna to fulfill his Kshatriya (warrior) duty to uphold the Dharma through “selfless action”.

Orientalism of course was born with William Jones and the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1884) and that of the Fort William College by Governor General Wellesley (1800); the latter was to be the study center of Indian languages, legal and social systems, etc. for the British administrators, which until Macaulay was invariably envisaged in vernacular lines. It was from here the first translation of the Bhagavat Gita by Sir Charles Wilkins with a Foreword by the then Governor General Warren Hastings shocked and enthralled the Western world releasing the tides of a second European Renaissance, the Oriental Renaissance, as Claus Schwab calls it.

The rationalism of Enlightenment is now overwhelmed by a new mood of romanticism and Asiatic oriental expansiveness, in the time spirit was pulsating with a coming sense of the Universal History, which comes to expression in William Jones words that has an eternal ring to India's Sanskrit past:


With its pioneering role in the Zend-Avesthan studies, Paris was the “capital of nascent Indology” in the West, with Eugene Burnouf, Louis Matthieu Langles, Claude Fauriel being the first generation scholars during the last decade of the eighteenth century, who were lucky enough to have Alexander Hamilton, a Sanskrit scholar and employee of the East India Company, presently detained in Paris on the suspicion of being a spy (1803), England then being the arch enemy of the Napoleonic France.

A leading German romantic poet, Friedrich von Schlegel also joined this group; from Hamilton he learned enough Sanskrit to translate excerpts from the Indian epics and the Laws of Manu, Schlegel producing his path breaking book for the Western mind, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians: A Contribution to the Foundation of Antiquity (Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder), in 1808, introducing to the questing European romantic mind a new understanding of God and other ways of spiritual knowing and experiences. Schlegal articulated in clearest terms (p.471):


The first Chair for Sanskrit Studies was founded at the University of Bonn, right on the wide banks of the Rhine, which all through the nineteenth century were known as Benares on the Rhine. It was founded in 1818 with Friedrich's brother August Wilhelm Schlegal becoming its original holder; and such Chairs were soon replicated also in the other classical German Universities - Jena, Weimar, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Tuebingen - today numbering something like thirty. The many translations of Indian texts produced by the Asiatic Society at Calcutta were available to these German scholars. Charles Wilkins' translation of the Bhagavad-Gita had become a favorite book throughout Europe finding its widest audience in Germany. Apart from the series Indische Bibliothek ('Indian Library') from Bonn since 1820, August Wilhelm Schlegal translated Gita also in Latin (1823), which drew the attention of the great philosopher Hegel (1770--1831) and an equally great scholar diplomat/statesman and the then Minister of Education of Prussia,

Wilhelm von Humboldt, (1767--1835). As part of his own Indo-European studies, Humboldt was already familiar with the Upanishads, the Manusmriti, Burnouf's extracts from the Padmapurana and all translated works of Wilkins and Colebrooke, so he was able to appreciate Gita's philosophy so well as to commend: “this episode of the Mahabharata is the most beautiful, nay, perhaps even the only true philosophical poem which we can find in all the literatures known to us,“ Humboldt chose Bhagavad-Gita for his 1826 Lecture at the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences, which was followed up the next year elaborating the advaitic structure of Gita's philosophy and its great and timeless philosophic and poetic value. Some of the greatest of the German minds being Humboldt's peers and contemporaries - Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer in Philosophy and Goethe and Schiller in literature above all - this discovery of the classical and Vedic India was nothing short of a quantum revolution to the German mind, especially to the philosophical school of German Idealism. Romanticism, Nationalism, Patriotism, Historicism, Clausewitz and militarism, Bismarck and the Second German Empire were the result, the year was 1871 and the Second German Empire was proclaimed from Paris!

Equally influenced were also the greatest of England's romantic poets and novelists - Shelly, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, down to their Edwardian and Georgian successors - Yates, Joyce, Virginia Wolf, Lawrence, Greene, Huxley, to name only the top. Late nineteenth century, Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) was mysteriously drawn to mystic India. In 1885, exactly one hundred years after Sir Wilkins' English translation and publication of the Bhagavad Gita, Sir Arnold's blank verse translation of the sacred scripture appeared as The Song Celestial building bridge for the great Mahatma Gandhi to his own roots, as he notes in his Autobiography:


Alone a specialist in American Transcendentalism could perhaps estimate the impact of this discovery of India on the nineteenth century America, the bridge was built by no one lesser than Ram Mohan Roy himself as part of his association with the Unitarian Church, both while he was in India and in England (1830-33); Unitarians deny the Christian doctrine of Trinity and found in India's Vedantic Monism the God of their quest and of humanity's common search then now and all the time to come.

Emerson, the leader of American Transcendentalism, emerged as the great interpreter, describing the romantic and spiritual mood of his time:


According to Swami Vivekananda, Emerson's greatest source of inspiration was:


There are hundreds and thousands of names and books available in any library or on the internet on the phenomenon of American Transcendentalism, so we need remember here alone Henry Thoreau who most of his life lived in the Emerson household and was perhaps more imbibed by India's spirit and influenced Gandhi with his ideas of 'Passive Resistance' no less than Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi in his non-violent struggle for the US civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The depth of what Thoreau imbibed comes out in this oft quoted passed from Walden:


Books have yet to be written to exploring the metaphor and mystique of “Vishnu the White Whale” in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, which we just skip here to come to the crowning of American Transcendentalism in Walt Whitman's, Passage to India. Published in 1870 we see in it verily our today's internet world and the prophecy of utter certitude that Christopher Columbus who made his westward voyage from the European shores in 1492 and stays midway till today in the external continent of America is bound to reach out to his original destination of the Indies, the internal continent of Mother India. Whoever can fathom the profundity of this Whitman passage:


This I think was the 'Passage to India' the Hippy generation of the late 1960s wanted to have crossed, which in turn brought H.H. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and countless other Gurus to the American shores, the planetary Aquarian new consciousness of the Postmodern New Age sets the tone of the times, the Quantum Physics is coming of age, and linking backwards the passage the Orientalists and Indologists began with William Jones and Warren Hastings and Wilkins to the 'Dance of Siva' of the Fritzj Capra generation verily is the “Passage to India” Whitman promised. The web life, the Field underlying matter and the breathe of the Atman are all one and the same, the choice of the twentieth century is invariably between the Terminator or the Quantum Brahman, America that is the symbol of the New World and Mother India that is the symbol of the timeless and eternal Vedic Cosmos must join hands, Columbus must complete his onward voyages to the predestined Indies, the inner continent of the ultimate Truth and humanity.

Now to come back to Benares on the Rhine. Franz Bopp Uber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprachen (On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic), then a decade later1827 saw Bopp's magnum opus, Ausfuhrliches Lehrgebaude der Sanskritsprache, (The Completed Architectonics of the Sanskrit Language) consummating in his six part Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic and German, Berlin, 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849, 1852). It was Bopp, along with Hermann Brockhaus, the founder of the great German Encyclopedia of that name, who introduced Max Mueller to Sanskrit, with Max Mueller taking up now the challenge of exploring the religious cosmos of Vedic India, whose end product is the immortal compilation of his 50-volume SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST.

If Macaulay made his condescending remark that a little cup board could store all the Hindu books, Max Mueller showed the Sacred Books of the East in itself makes up a whole library. Max Mueller had in this venture the collaboration of the Queen Victoria and the British Royal House, one of the famous students at the University of Bonn when Sanskrit came to vogue there was Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, later to be the husband of Queen Victoria. It has become by now clear what a sense of reverence and holiness the Benares on the Rhine imprinted on the early generation of Indologists and Orientalists, Prince Albert with his personal association with the University of Bonn was no different, it was the personal concern both of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert until his death in 1861 to inspire the British administrators on the spot in India to control their attributed “racist superiority” and treat India not as a conquered land but as a trust, and treat it as a wise and noble civilization whose people has had but a temporary fall.

India for the Western scholars and great minds of this time was but the Benares on the Rhine, it was not to be a pagan country so people could be converted and brought under Rome or Canterbury. It is such a shame that the post colonialist revisionist Hindu revivalist scholars throw on Max Mueller such opprobrium and conversion charges citing some piece of letter he must apparently have written to his wife, fully taking that out of context - which paradoxically is the same letter which his opponents cite to prove the anti-Christ in this great scholar and lover of human heritage. He obviously wanted to see Hinduism reformed - liberating it from its fatalism, its derailed sense of the Karma that condemned such a vast chunk of social bottom to such inhumanity and brutality, he was horrified with such evil customs as the sati, child marriage, illiteracy, inequality, that repressed society and denied any chance of life to millions.

But such reforms are also what Rammohun, Vidyasagar, Ranade, Phule, Gokhale and everyone else wanted. As a human being, he openly confessed his Christianity, its faith and traditions, he was a Lutheran by confession, but this brought him to no conflict in embracing the Truth he found in the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Truth of the Brahman that is the indwelling force and spirit in the potential divinity of every human being. Let alone the reader decide if Max Mueller could have been capable of the Aryan Invasion Theory he is charged with after reading his sentiments for the country and people he loved as expressed by himself:


Indians certainly owe a gratitude to this early generation of Orientalists and Indologists. They connected her to her infinite past and heritage, which was broken and forgotten during the 700 years of the Muslim enslavement of the Hindu civilization; equally we have to be grateful to the great first generation evangelists like William Carey, Alexander Duff, Charles Grant, who certainly were not after conversion, but came to serve Indian people driven by the best motive of humanist secular and brotherly solidarity born out of deeply convinced Christian inspiration and charity. There is prima facie evidence that the Christian population in India did not grow even by a per cent in spite of the one and a half centuries of British rule, how could we throw conversion mud on these men, when we have there the clear comparison of India's experience of the Islamic rule? These were mostly the men who enriched our regional languages by codifying their grammars and creating their early dictionaries: Carey (Bengali), Henry-Martyn (Hindustani), De Nobili (Sanskrit), Bulcke (Hindi), Gundert (Malayalam) Beschi and Pope (Tamil), Cladwell (Dravidian) Kittel (Kannada), Reibero (Konkani) - this is just a very partial list, and can be extended by scores by including other languages dialects above all tribal studies. These men who gave their lives in the total dedication of their work I believe were driven by the same urge and motivation as was the case with the Schlegals Emerson or the Humboldt's, they all served the same ideals of civilization and human spirit which the Vedas Upanishads and the Gita uphold, so do all the other racial-religion-civilizational inheritances of man.

This certainly was the spirit and worldview of the Raj which the British Crown took over in 1958 under Queen Victoria's pledge:


It was on the legitimacy of this declaration that Gandhi Jinnah Savarkar et al could become equally-treated and dignified law students in London, men like Dadabhai Naoroji was raised to the House of Commons with majority British vote from the Finsbury constituency defeating his white opponent; the Empire was open for Indian emigration to Africa, West Indies, East Indies, Oceania, and the rule of the Raj after the 1858 Government of India Acts were being progressively Indianized through the decennial Council Acts since 1861 all converging in the Government of India Acts 1909 and 1919 when the free India was admitted as a sovereign member of the League of Nations with independent delegation and voting rights, and more than half places was provided to elected representatives in the then envisaged Parliament under the 1919 Acts. In 1920, with the World War I behind, India was certainly being launched on the road of independence. The Indo British period could certainly have ended in a greater goodwill and cooperation as the Hindu-Muslim-Western civilizational confluence. The Brits may very well have been 'exploiters, racialist and arrogant' but going by the example of the nineteenth century orientalists, Indologists, evangelists, and the great liberals we know civilization is a great act of give and take, and that it is to serve the spirit of man which is but one.

I have now covered much terrain but I wonder if we could ever detect the proponents and perpetrators of the so called “Aryan Invasion Theory”. I for one could not, and I do not believe there ever was one. If the post colonialist historiography wants to project one for itself, it is part of individual freedom and plurality of opinion that are sanctioned in democracies. If some people wanted to believe that Aryans originated in India and migrated westward spreading the world over, they are free to do so and are perfectly within their rights in democracies, the only caution that is called for is the dangers of erroneous collective perception: remember what happened to the Aryan theories of the Nazi Germany!

May the light and love of God prevail. Please let us know how we can help.

Tags: wisdom in ancient teachings