Imagine the Indians rewriting the history of the West. Even more interesting, imagine the Dharmics interpreting the Bible and then propagating their interpretation of it to the Christians, including and not limited to changing their textbooks; middle, high-school and university level. That’d be something. Possible? Not only possible, but it’s a fact. That is what the British, German, and other western colonial scholars did to the history and scholarship of India. They deliberately distorted the Indian history and texts to establish their Christian and colonial hegemony.
The Aryan Invasion of India is the poster child example of the damage done to the India psyche. In short, here’s the narrative that the British imposed on the Indians through their historians and education system – India was inhabited by the dark-skinned, short, uncultured and backward race of humans called the Dravidians. The fair and light-skinned people from Central Asia, called the Aryans, invaded and settled in the north. The Aryans brought with them a new language Sanskrit, culture, weapons, texts, and everything majestic you can think of. They ran over the Dravidians, uprooted them from their cities, and pushed them into South India. The archeological ruins discovered in Mohenjo-daro lay witness to the invasion. And, the modern population of India is a inter-racial byproduct of the natives and the western people.
The Aryan invasion theory served many masters. Prominent amongst them were the British. It was the crown-jewel in their strategy to control and convert India without much use of gun-powder. Eradicating the indigenous identity of the Dharmics (Hindus) and painting most things Indian, including the ancient Dharmic texts as derivatives of or rooted in Greek, Christian, and Biblical texts psychologically distanced the Indians from their own identify. Rather they started to identify themselves as the sons and daughters of the West. It even facilitated the appropriation of Indian science (thousands of years old) under the monicker of Greek and other European bodies of work.
Political control of the Indian subcontinent became easier for the British with the divide and rule strategy. Although done on caste and religious lines, the biggest wedge was hammered in between the North and South Indians. Aryan-Dravidian divide was the flag pole of that strategy.
The big question that still remains, “How did the Aryan Invasion Theory still survive in independent India?” That credit goes to the Marxists, who with support from the Soviet Union and the blossoming Communist ideology during the Cold War era infiltrated even the higher-education system of India. Caste system, that was leveraged by the British was subsequently adopted by the Marxists and distorted just a tad to project the fair-skinned, educated Brahmins as the oppressors of the dark-skinned, indigenous Indian and labeling them as Shudras and untouchables for eons. The Aryan invasion narrative bolstered the Marxists position as the Messiahs for the oppressed, who had been done wrong for thousands of years by the “invading” foreigners.
The Eurocentric encroachment of the Indic civilization also continues to serve a purpose for the contemporary evangelist. It helps them demonize and discard Eastern spirituality as a rotten and discarded offshoot. Marxists and the Christians, especially the Catholics have to now worry less about the romance and intriguing of the East wishing their own followers, if they can create a narrative of the East’s inferiority. Flight of Christians from the Catholic church, rise of Buddhism in the West have created a fear of decline in the West. The theory of “Adam as the original man” loses its superiority if the identify of an indigenous, culturally rich, and advanced Indian civilization is accepted by the masses.
The missionaries find the narrative of a weaker-darker-uneducated-indegenous, who is in need of being saved to be the perfect pitch for religious conversion. Along the same lines, even today, when some Muslim clerics talk about Ghazwa-e-Hind, they are partially rooted in the same mindset – Islamic (originally from the West) domination of the less capable Eastern cultures, with the ultimate goal of then either converting or decimating them. Racial bias is of course not the only sentiment behind this sinister goal. That credit will go to the political philosophy of Islam – establishment of the Islamic Caliphate. Read more about it here.
धार्मिक छवियाँ 