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By David Frawley
The British ruled India, as they did other lands, by a divide-and-conquer strategy. They promoted religious, ethnic and cultural divisions among their colonies to keep them under control. Unfortunately some of these policies also entered into the intellectual realm. The same simplistic and divisive ideas that were used for interpreting the culture and history of India. Regrettably many Hindus have come to believe these ideas, even though a deeper examination reveals they may have no real objective or scientific basis. One of these ideas is that India is a land of two races - the lighter- skinned Aryans and the darker-skinned Dravidians - and that the Dravidians were the original inhabitants of India whom the invading Aryans conquered and dominated. From this came the additional idea that much of what we call Hindu culture was in fact Dravidian, and later borrowed by Aryans who, however, never gave the Dravidians proper credit for it. This idea has been used to turn the people of south India against the people of north India, as if the southern ers were a different race.
Racial Theories
The Nineteenth century was the era of Europeans imperialism. M any Europeans did in fact believe that they belonged to a superior race and that their religion, Christianity, was a superior religion and all other religions were barbaric, particularly a religion like Hinduism which uses many idols. The Europeans felt that it was their duty to convert non-Christians, sometimes even if it required intimidation, force or bribery. Europeans thinkers of the era were dominated by a racial theory of man, which was interpreted primarily in terms of color. They saw themselves as belonging to a superior 'white' or Caucasian race. They had enslaved the Negroid or 'black' race. As Hindus were also dark or 'colored', they were similarly deemed inferior. The British thus, not surprisingly, looked upon the culture of India in a similar way as having been a land of a light-skinned or Aryan race (the north Indians), ruling a dark or Dravidian race (the south Indians). About this time in history the similarities betweeen Indo-European languages also became evident. Sanskrit and the languages of North India were found to be relatives of the languages of Europe, while the Dravidian languages of south India were found to be another language family. By the racial theory, Europeans natuarally felt that the original speakers of any root Indo-European language must have been 'white', as they were not prepared to recognize that their languages could have been derived from the darker-skinned Hindus. As all Hindus were dark compared to the Europeans, it was assumed that the original white Indo-European invadors of India must have been assimilated by the dark indigenous population, though they left their mark more on north India where people have a lighter complexion. Though the Nazis later took this idea of a white Aryan superior race to its extreme of brutality, they did not invent the idea, nor were they the only ones to use it for purposes of exploitation. They took what was a common idea of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe, which many other Europeans shared. They perverted this idea further, but the distortion of it was already the basis of much exploitation and misunderstanding.
used by Buddhists, Jains and Zoroastrians as well as Hindus. Religions that have called themselves Aryan, like all of these, have had members of many different races. Race was never a bar for anyone joining some form of the Arya Dharma or teaching of noble people. Aryan is a term similar in meaning to the Sanskrit word Sri, an epithet of respect. We could equate it with the English word Sir. We cannot imagine that a race of men named sir took over England in the M iddle Ages and dominated a different race because most of the people in power in the country were called sir. Yet this is the kind of thinking that was superimposed upon the history of India.
from southern Europe to north India. Similarly the M ongolian race is not yellow. M any Chinese have skin whiter than many so-called Cauca- sians. In fact of all the races, the Caucasian is the most variable in its skin color. Yet many identification forms that people fill out today in the world still define race in terms of color.
Western or European sense that we should remember is quite apart from its traditional Sanskrit meaning, and implies a racial bias that the Sanskrit term does not have. We can speak of Indo-European and Dravidian languages, but this does not necessarily mean that Aryan and Dravidian must differ in culture, race or religion. The Hungarians and Finns of Europe are of a different language group than the other Europeans, but we do not speak of them as of a Finnish race, or the Finns as being non-Europeans, nor do we consider that their religious beliefs must therefore be unrelated to those of the rest of Europe. Even though Dravidian languages are based on a different model than Sanskrit there are thirty to seventy per cent Sanskrit words in south Indian languages like Telugu and Tamil, which is much higher percentage than north Indian languages like Hindi. In addition both north and south Indian languages have a similar construction and phraseology that links them close together, which European languages often do not share. This has caused some linguists even to propose that Hindi was a Dravidian language. In short, the language compart- ments, like the racial ones, are not as rigid as has been thought. In fact if we examine the oldest Vedic Sanskrit, we find similar sounds to Dravidian languages (the cerebral letters, for example), which are not present in other Indo-European tongues. This shows either that there were already Drvidians in the same region as the Vedic people, and part of the same culture with them, or that Dravidian languages could also have been early off-shoots of Sanskrit, which was the theory of the modern rishi, Sri Aurobindo. In addition the traditional inventor of the Dravidian languages was said to have been none other than Agastya, one of the most important rishis of the Rig Veda, the oldest Sanskrit text.
there are not only traditions that make the Dravidians descendants of Vedic rishis and kings, but those that make the Aryans of north India descendants of Dravidian kings. The two cultures are so intimately related that it is difficult to say which came first. Any differences between them appear to be secondary, and nothing like the great racial divide that the Aryan-Dravidian idea has promoted.
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