Aryan Theory

One fine day I was sitting at my work station and our supervisor went out saying he would be back in an hour. Given the opportunity I started a conversation with one of my colleagues sitting next to me. She is from China. I was talking about India and she was telling me about mighty China. Then somehow we came to a point where we were talking about discrimination within the country. Let us see a condensed form of how the conversation went

Xi : Within Hindus I have heard there is some caste based discrimination in India.

Me : I don’t know. I have read about it but haven’t seen anything happening in real life. Nor can I remember any of my friends talking about it. “Maybe” in rural parts it is still prevalent.

Xi: Oh! That’s nice.

Me: Yeah… But there is some discrimination between north Indians and south Indians.

Xi: What is the difference between them?

Me: North Indians are from the northern part of India and south Indians are from the southern part. (*Me gets happy at getting an opportunity to crack a silly joke)

Xi: But what is the difference. (*Completely ignoring the joke)

Me: Well… I think South Indians and north Indians were parts of different civilizations. I am not sure though. (*Me feels sad at the shallowness of his knowledge about his origins… and his sad sense of humour)

Xi: ok!

Due to this episode, I thought I will find out a little bit about the “Aryan civilization” and the “Dravidian civilization”, because I thought these were the two civilizations that north Indians and south Indians came from. I started reading and realized that the whole Aryan theory is extremely controversial and pretty interesting. (and also that no civilizations with above names ever existed…DAMN)

In the 19^th century, the British imperialists who ruled India during that time came up with the theory of “Aryan invasion” with the purpose of turning the people of south India against the people of north India, as if they were some other race. According to this theory, Dravidians were the original inhabitants of India. The Aryans invaded the country and drove the Dravidians down south. During the same time, research revealed similarities between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages and it became evident that these languages had the same origin. Europeans being all whites conveniently assumed that the original speakers of the common root language must have been whites.

According to the theory, most of the Aryans who had invaded India had settled in the north and hence they explained north Indians being fairer than south Indians. Slowly this racial card was being linked to the battle between the “white” and the “black”, the battle between the “good” and the “evil”, depicted in Rigveda. The Europeans went all the way to claim that the Vedas were never written in India.

Fortunately recent research and various discoveries from the Indus valley civilization era have made the Aryan invasion theory fall flat on its face. The way in which the British rulers used (fake) cultural heritage as a tool to deploy ‘divide and rule’, was very sad.

The good news is ...we are out of that confusion and mess and are going to leave UK behind in terms of GDP by 2020(Gartner’s prediction).