An Aum sign for Yoga Day

As a member of the Dutch-speaking Belgian Toga Federation, I received a copy of the booklet the Government of India issued for the United Nations' first-ever Yoga Day. It falls on 21 June, Summer Solstice, a day of mixed feelings: it is the longest day, alright, but it is also the start of the sun's decline -- the converse of the beginning of the sun's rise on Winter Solstice day, and that one is considered a reason for celebration.



Now, the booklet. It has a non-traditional drawing on the front page, and as was widely expected, no Aum sign is incuded anywhere in the logo. Not too important in itself, but significant for the mindset of the dominant faction within the ruling BJP: sucking up to the secularists as if these were still in power. In the secular worldview, India is a neutral entity, and its Government has no business promoting Hindu traditions such as Aum, the first word of the Rg-Veda. As we know, the Veda mentions neither Christ nor Mohammed, let alone Macaulay or Marx, so it was a communalist book denying the minorities a place in the sun. Therefore, a secular taboo rests on the Aum sign.



I noted this in a message on social media, and prompt came the reply from the Indian Embassy in Belgium: please look at the prayer on p.9, it has the Aum sign at the beginning of the Devanagari text. Even people who can't read Devanagari, like most Western practitioners of yoga, will recognize the Aum sign.



Indeed, Western yogis are very used to the Aum sign and adorn their halls and clothes and front pages with it. They don't know any better than that this is the sign of yoga and have no suspicion about the sinister communal reputation it has acquired among the various anti-Hindu lobbies in India. And though they would have expected an Aum sign on this brochure (of all places), they won't suspect that the brochure writers have omitted it out of ideological compulsions.



So, they had not entirely omitted it: it appears in a prayer which they had copy-pasted into the brochure. Alright, that is something: they didn't censor the prayer. Just imagine Christians printing the Lord's Prayer without any mention of the Lord. Good about it is that at least the brochure contains a prayer, a sign of yoga's embeddedness in a not-to-be-named culture. So, for Hndus there is a consolation prize: the link with Hinduism (of which the Aum sign serves as a token) is in the brochure, though tucked away in the small print on an inside page.



For the secularists, this would still make the brochure into a no-no. Hindus try hard to be secular and efface their own culture, but they should try harder. Come on, another little effort.



So, what has the BIP achieved by engineering the brochure the way it did? For the secularists and minorities, it remains Government promotion for a Hindu practice, ill-concealed by a non-Hindu logo. For the Hindus, it turns out to de a disappointment: the first Yoga Day, moreover under the first unrestrained Hindu Nationalist Government ("the first Hindu government in Delhi since 1192"), should have been an occasion for showing the world just what Hindu civilization has contributed. Instead, Hindu civilization is pushed out of the picture and falsely delinked from yoga.



And all for nothing: there is nothing threatening about the Aum sign for the minorities, no genuinely secular purpose is achieved by this manipulation, except for the further deconstruction of Hinduism. This is the real goal of the lobbies that swear by "secularism": the annihilation of Hinduism. Those who thought the BJP was aggressively pro-Hindu will be surprised to learn that the BJP is supporting this project. The result is that the BJP is having the worst of both worlds: it surely manages to displease its Hindu constituents, and it still fails to please its secularist masters.



I am aware of the laws of diplomacy, which are different from the laws of logic. Sometimes it is necessary to make a compromise; to concede something in order to acquire something else. In that case, it would have been defensible if yoga had been promoted at the cost of a mere sign. After all, it was not even present for yoga masters living in Himalayan caves or for Vedic seers practising an oral culture and doing without the stylized alphabet signs that have made up the classical Aum sign. But that is not the case here: the present brochure is still too Hindu for the secularists, is Hindu in spite of itself, and is at the same time uninspiring for Hindus, desirous of a proud self-assertion. Like so much in Hindu Nationalist discourse, it is neither here nor there.    

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A Hindu government and the minorities

(India Facts & Hindu Human Rights, 30 March 2015)


The United Minorities are waging a no-holds-barred campaign against Narendra Modi or against whomever is or can be pictured as a pro-Hindu power-wielder. One of their lines of attack is the blackening of the ruling party, the BJP, in the eyes of public opinion and of the world. An impression is being created that the Hindu activists are out to oppress the minorities ruthlessly, and are already doing so to some extent.

Thus, though the frequent rapes of Hindu women in Pakistan and Bangladesh are never worth a single line, I learned of the recent rape of a Catholic nun in the news programme of state television in distant Belgium. While a newspaper may contain hundreds of news items, the TV news has only a few, so they select what is truly important. Journalists normally use the “dead man per mile” rule: they treat an item as more newsworthy if it is closer to home or if the victimization is more dramatic. That means a “mere” rape in distant India only makes headlines if some circumstance makes the event extremely important. So, it seems that the anti-Hindu forces in India are strong enough to position their poster girl for “resistance against oppressive majoritarianism” as exceedingly important.

The missionaries and secularists exploited the rape all they could to accuse the Hindus of terrorizing the minorities and demonize the Modi government across the world. Yet, from the beginning, the rape was known to be an extension of a burglary, suspicions of a “hate crime” were doubtful and nothing indicated the involvement of Hindu activism. When the investigation progressed and led to the arrest of some Bangladeshi illegal immigrants “belonging to a particular community”, most commentators fell silent. When pressed, they suddenly insisted that this was a common human crime with no connection to religion.

It was but one example in a long line of false accusations levelled against Hindu nationalism, and this poisonous disinformation in turn is only one battlefield in a multi-pronged war. In the circumstances, it is imperative that the ruling BJP comes clean on where it stands vis-à-vis the minorities.
First of all, it is necessary that it knows its own mind about this. The Hindu Nationalist policy towards the minorities should be crystal-clear, first of all among the Hindu Nationalists themselves. Once they know what to think, they can decide what to say towards Indian opinion at large, and what to do.

The secularist alliance

The iron fist of the attack (the Zarb-e-Mo’min, “strike of the faithful”, as the Pakistani Army once named one of its exercises) is furnished by Christianity and Islam, who mean to expand worldwide and in the process destroy all heathen religions. They have a positive goal, viz. perpetuating and propagating themselves, and their negative goal of digesting or annihilating Hinduism only follows therefrom. This way, they have a very good conscience in doing their work of destruction: it is only meant to clear the way for the true religion.

So, they have inner strength, but they also have outer strength: they are huge and very wealthy, being only the Indian arms of two worldwide movements. It is ridiculous that they are called “minorities” at all, yet they carefully cultivate that status, for in the present-day mentality, any majority is deemed overbearing and oppressive. Their foreign roots not only make them very resourceful, they also give them a head-start in developing a coherent strategy with sustainable long-term goals.

But this iron fist is clothed in a velvet glove: secularism. Knaves claim and fools believe that this is the Indian instance of the worldwide phenomenon of secularism (separation of religion and politics) originating in the West, but it is not. Thus, Islamic militants who in Arabia would abhor secularism (meaning separation of religion and politics, e.g. democratic law-making separate from what Islam prescribes), emphatically call themselves “secularists” in India. The reason is that in India, the word has a very different meaning: anything that is anti-Hindu. Islamic militants are anti-Hindu, so they indeed qualify as “secularists”. But what animates them is not this profile of secularism but their heartfelt commitment to Islam; and similarly with Christian missionaries, who can rightly call themselves secularists under the Indian definition, though their real commitment is to Christianity. So when we say “secularists”, we don’t usually mean them, we mean the Hindu-born secularists, who genuinely intend to define their uppermost commitment when they call themselves secularists.

At one time the Marxists formed the backbone of Indian secularism, and even now that Marxism is waning, a Marxist afterglow continues to condition the secularist conceptual framework. However, at present the forces of commercialization and consumerism are in the ascendant. The easiness of this transmogrification from Marxist to consumerist follows from the real definition of secularism: both Marxism and consumerism are anti-Hindu and can wean Hindus away from their Dharma, and that is what counts.

Finally, the anti-Hindu coalition can avail of the services of several useful idiots, Hindu-born but turned against Hinduism. These include the Ambedkarite section of the Scheduled Castes; a minor section of the Scheduled Tribes that has come to parrot the missionary claim that “tribals are not Hindus”; the Dravidianist movement, at one time genuinely anti-religion but now only anti-Hindu; and some “progressive” and “enlightened” sections of religious Hinduism that prefer to distance themselves from Hinduism, either out of self-interest (to escape the legal discriminations against Hinduism) or out of snobbery.

Caving in to aggressive minorityism

The reaction of the BJP and the Hindutva forces behind it is just that: a reaction. Even what little ideology they once had, viz. a general commitment to Hinduism, has made way for a mere craving of approval from the hegemonic opinion-makers, the secularists. You would think that finally the BJP is securely in power, but this is only formally the case. Ideologically, the BJP still looks up to the secularists as the real power-wielders. It does not analyse the discourse of the secularists from a vantage-point of its own, from an alternative pro-Hindu worldview; it merely reacts to what it perceives as an unassailable and omnipresent secularist opinion.
Thus, when the secularists clamoured against Ghar Wapasi, BJP Ministers hurried to assure everyone that they too were very much against its “divisive” effects. Ghar Wapasi is the best chance Hindus (when thinking farther than the next election, especially about their survival) have to prevent the hostile takeover of their country. For a supposedly “Hindu nationalist” party, that is not a bargaining chip but a fundamental concern. There is also no reason at all to get caught on the back foot over it, certainly not in a country where conversion is legal and has always been defended by the secularists.

When the missionaries started disinforming world opinion that churches were systematically targeted by Hindu militants for vandalism and robberies, the Government assured that it would crack down on these “church attacks”, instead of questioning the whole notion of communally-motivated church attacks. These were only ordinary, non-ideological crimes, far surpassed in number by the vandalism against and robberies in Hindu temples. The BJP always swallows and then reproduces the presuppositions spoon-fed to it by its enemies.

Yet a silver lining can be discerned. The BJP’s palpable concern of “keeping the pot boiling”, of keeping its Hindu vote-bank happy with empty gestures of Hindu feeling, may translate into a real concern for Hindu interests. At present, it is mostly a cynical electoral policy of the BJP secularists, a generation of politicians who have “emancipated” themselves from the pro-Hindu inspiration that spawned their party. They remember how the party was defeated in 2004, when in spite of huge economic successes under Atal Behari Vajpayee, it had completely alienated its Hindu-minded voters by not showing any concern at all for the Hindu agenda. They realize they are totally dependent on Hindu-minded party workers and campaign volunteers for the power positions they enjoy.
So, this time around they intend to keep these Hindus actively involved with some much-publicized gestures, such as televised temple visits in India and abroad, or award ceremonies for Vajpayee, LK Advani, Vamadeva Shastri and Swapan Dasgupta. A masterstroke is their support to State laws against cow-slaughter: many ordinary Hindus not attuned to the precise legal discrimination against Hinduism, but full of feeling for Mother Cow, will certainly appreciate this. That it is not an empty measure is demonstrated by the rise in beef prices in Bangladesh.

Even the nasty anti-minority statements by some loose cannon in the BJP, though deplored out of either tactical calculation or genuine pro-secularist sentiment, are nonetheless chalked up as pleasing a hot-blooded section of the Hindu electorate. A section of Hindu society without too much discernment is already happy with any utterance that sounds pro-Hindu. The only way to rally that section around a more positive pro-Hindu programme is to offer such a programme in the first place.

This is all not very deep nor very meaningful, but it might remind ruling party politicians of their Hindu roots. Maybe they suffer from Hanuman’s curse: when the gods became afraid of him witnessing his strength, they cursed him to forget his strength until someone reminded him. Indeed, they need a reminder of the immense strength resulting from a commitment to Dharma. Instead of whining about the hurdles the secularists may put in their way and using these as an excuse to remain on the safe ground of “development”, they ought to remember the slogan they themselves used to intone: Dharmo Rakshati Rakshitah, “Righteousness, when protected, protects”. It is time to stand up for Dharma, and all will be well. If a party served by Hindu workers doesn’t serve Hinduism, it serves no purpose at all.

Dealing with aggressive minorityism

When we read the laws privileging the minorities, one thing that strikes us is the complete Hindu passivity in using these laws to their advantage. To be sure, those laws are unsecular as well as indefensible, but while they exist, Hindus could make the best of it. Thus, in several states and in many districts, Hindus as such are a minority. Moreover, the law also recognizes linguistic minorities, so Gujaratis in Tamil Nadu (etc.) could also demand minority privileges. As in other aspects of this problem, Hindus take it lying down.

There is also the dishonourable option of leaving the Hindu fold to fend for itself, and declaring oneself a non-Hindu minority. This is the usual Hindu disease of safeguarding one’s own little community at the expense of the whole. Rather than going around and telling these “ex”-Hindus just how contemptible their behaviour is, it is better and more effective to remove the temptation by restoring equality for the Hindus.

Even before amending the offending Articles, Hindu thinkers could question the very concept of “minority”. India consists only of minorities. Hinduism is a commonwealth of many communities, each a minority. One has to be very gullible (or so absorbed by “development”, as the present BJP team claims to be) to swallow this notion of “minority” with all the privileges that go with it.
Once they have fully understood the implicit definition and ramifications of “minority”, serious Hindu (and just secular) thinkers behind and ministers inside the government should proceed to scrap it from the laws and the Constitution. Or at least, unless those whiz kids discover anything unexpected, that would seem to be the logical conclusion. Down with the whole concept of minorities, starting with the Minorities Commission, an intrinsically anti-majority lobby-group with a legal status.

At the same time, though, one should be careful here: pampered and privileged communities might see the instauration of equality as a great injustice. For the time being, they are far better than the Hindus at selling their own view to the Indian public and to the world. So, they will shout that the minorities are being oppressed, that an overbearing Hindu majority is taking “rights” away from them, and all the other well-known whining and wailing. It is important to present the issue in terms of secularism and democracy, which constitute sufficient ground for equality, not in selfish terms of Hindu interests. Even then the other side can be expected to misrepresent the issue, so Hindus will need to be innocent as children and wise as snakes.

 

Satya about minority teachings

Towards the minorities, a policy is needed that could properly be called Gandhian. It does not mean being naïve and inconsistent, as students of the Partition might think. No, it means seriously applying the principles that Mahatma Gandhi talked about and remains associated with, though he himself failed to apply them. These are: satya/truth and ahimsa/non-violence.

Satya requires facing the truth concerning Christianity and Islam. This may require a mental leap for Hindus, who are not used to asking about the truth of a religion. When a Christian community was given asylum in Kerala, their Hindu hosts did not ask for the contents of their doctrine, let alone its degree of truth. Few people know the truth, and not many are even interested in it. Hindus were already satisfied if these newcomers lived in peace and respected certain basic norms such as not killing cows or Brahmins. It is not natural for Hindus to scrutinize religious doctrines.
In general, this is as it should be. However, this wilful ignorance should not arrogate to itself the pretence to somehow know these religions nonetheless. Gandhi, who was not a student of religious doctrines, claimed that all religions automatically deserve equal respect. While leaving undecided for now what he himself meant by it, the secularist sermonizers who venture to interpret his teachings for us, claim that it means the “equal truth of all religions”, and that “all religions lead to the same goal”. This, however, is blatantly untrue. One may refrain from judging the truth of a religion, but one should not speak untruth about religion, much less think it.

Anyone who is grown up and has the power of discrimination will have experienced that truth claims may be true or may be false, and that “1 + 1 = 2” is not equally true with “1 + 1 = 4”, nor do the two truth claims deserve equal respect. Someone who makes a false claim may deserve equal respect with someone who affirms a true statement (both equally deserve better than to be stoned or crucified), but it doesn’t follow that their statements deserve equal respect. Case in point: the core doctrines of Christianity are not true and deserve to be treated as mistakes. Extremely globalized mistakes by now, but still mistakes.

Oh, maybe some wily secularist or sentimental Hindu will now object that to say so or even to think critically of a belief held so dear by millions is a hate crime. Such a thing could only be opined by knaves and swallowed by fools. I have never heard a Hindu whine and wail because he himself was being considered as an errant soul, living a mistake, condemned to eternal hellfire, utterly doomed – yet that is what Christianity and Islam say and what billions of believers hold against him. Moreover, it is also what Christians think of Muslims and Muslims of Christians. It is no big deal if Hindus remain aloof from the superstitions at the core of Christian or Islamic doctrine.

Another objection, likely to be raised by politicians, is that it would be undiplomatic to say less than flattering things about Christianity or Islam. Many people never face the question of truth; when it distantly threatens to arise, they immediately disperse it or distract from it with the question in what company it might put them. That, for them, is far more important than an ivory-tower concern like the truth. Alright, thinking something is one thing, saying it is another. Holding an informed opinion is separate from voicing that opinion and facing the social consequences. I am well aware that politicians have to keep in mind power equations among the people and therefore have to adapt their utterances to what is socially feasible. Indeed, it is the genius of Hindu Dharma that it recognizes the differentiated duties of different groups. Intellectuals who settle for less than the truth are not living up to their duty, but politicians might have other interests to take into account.

 

In that case, let politicians say the desirable thing rather than the unpalatable truth, but let them at least realize the truth for and among themselves. There are two types of liars: the cynical or calculating ones who remain fully aware that they are shamelessly telling lies; and the more ordinary ones, who feel a pang of conscience when they hear themselves lying and who wish it would be otherwise – a discrepancy they resolve by bringing their false utterances and their intimate beliefs closer together by increasingly believing their own lies.

Among Hindutva stalwarts and BJP bigwigs, I have often seen this second tendency: interiorizing the beliefs that they think they have to voice in order to win that eagerly-desired yet ever-elusive pat on the back by the secularists.
 
Thus, they join the choir of secularist liars who confirm the Indian Christians in their belief that the Apostle Thomas had brought Christianity to India in 52 AD (a belief rejected by serious Christian historians and even by former Pope Benedict XVI), vainly thinking that this will win them the Christian electorate, but then they also start believing this sob-story and repeating it among themselves. Christians, by contrast, like Muslims and secularists, have never had any reservations about disparaging the belief in Rama’s birthplace and its temple, though these too were “dear to the hearts of millions”.

And consider again: why should Hindu politicians not say the unpalatable truth about things dear to the hearts of minority people? They are living in a fool’s paradise if they expect to get those minority votes (which some of them really do). But they have a more serious calculation: Hindus themselves, swayed by Gandhian upbringing or by secularist propaganda, are put off by a candidate whom the media label as “communal”. That attitude takes a long-term and cumulative remedy: making the Hindu masses used again to frankness and to independent judgment free from media bias. These are not half as brutal as the hostile thoughts which Christians and Muslims think, and also voice at least among themselves, about the Heathens.

But is there a strategic centre that oversees where Hindu interests lie and how they are best served? A centre that plans deeper and more distant evolutions instead of just winning the next election? The RSS flatters itself to be such a centre, but judging by the results – with a party that used to be Hindu-minded when in the opposition long ago but abhors being reminded of its “old-fashioned” Hindu roots when in government today, it is not very successful.

 

 

Ahimsa towards the minorities

While Christianity and Islam may be untrue in their basic beliefs, they themselves may believe these beliefs to be the truth and judge other religions as untrue. From this belief, they deduce a self-righteous privilege to persecute rivalling religions, though fortunately they oftentimes are less zealous about implementing this principle.

In modern India, they have largely been domesticated and their pursuit of their self-interests is channelled through institutional channels, so that it takes the form of cornering and then defending privileges in the Constitution, in legislation and day-to-day politics.

 

There are certainly elements in their conduct that come in for Hindu criticism, but that is not our concern in the present context. Here, we deal with the Hindu response to their challenge, particularly in situations where Hindus feel provoked to take the law into their own hands. Confrontation is sometimes inevitable, but a first solid precondition is that it should not be entered into lightly, viz. at one’s own initiative. If the other side opens hostilities, as frequently happens, the conflict can frequently be resolved through diplomatic means. Only when everything else has been tried, confrontation should be accepted as the only way forward. That is what Krishna did before accepting the Mahabharata war. That is the Hindu way.

While not advocating “turning the other cheek” and similar Gandhian extremism in non-violence (as when the Mahatma counselled Hindu refugees from Pakistan to go back and get killed), we should show reluctance in entering into hostilities. The beliefs of the minorities may not be ours, may be distasteful to us, but a certain magnanimity would be fitting. Hindus should indeed ensure that the minorities are safe in India, even if the distasteful secularists say just that. It doesn’t require secular moralizing, it is the normal way in Hinduism.

However, Hindus should not do that as a special favour to the minorities. This tolerance, this pluralism, should benefit a possible majority (which in India does not exist) as much as the minorities. Safety should be ensured for all communities. The minorities, if perforce we have to use that word, are just as much responsible for it.

So, of course a Hindu government means no harm to the minorities, and should not. As an old VHP slogan said: “Hindu India, secular India”. It is only secularist propaganda that claims an equivalence between Hindu activism and trouble for the minorities: the more Hinduism, the more oppression for the minorities. This is a false projection of the Pakistani situation: the more of the dominant religion, the more the Hindu minority suffers.

And that is why the word “minority” is so misleading: it might apply for the Protestants in Catholic France or the Catholics in Anglican England, who were second-class citizens, or to the Blacks in the US, who have a history of slavery, and for all those communities whose status of “minority” connotes misery and humiliation. Such is not the treatment the Hindus have ever given to the non-Hindu “minorities”. Ask the Parsis, the Jews, the Syrian Christians, the Armenians, the Tibetan Buddhists, even the Moplah Muslims: they all owe gratitude to Hindu society for its hospitality.

The Rajinder Sachar Committee (under PM Manmohan Singh) ruled that Muslims are entitled to huge privileges given their “minority” status, as if the Hindus have to compensate them for anything. These privileges would then solve the “exclusion” of the Muslim, as if this (to the extent that it exists) were the doing of the Hindus rather than of their own exclusionary theology. I am not in favour of historical entitlement, encashing compensations for what your grandfather suffered (didn’t the secularists in the Ayodhya controversy insist that Muslims should not pay for the guilt of their long-gone forefathers?); but if at all any compensation is to be paid, it is not the Hindu community that has a debt to service.

The only reason why the Muslim minority could feel done injustice to, is precisely that it is a “minority”: it wanted Pakistan because it wanted a state in which it could be a majority, and it still doesn’t like being a minority in India. The solution for being a “Muslim” in India is to become an “Indian” in India, not part of the 14% but part of the 100%. That would be real secularism, and it would take the (largely imaginary) threat of “violence against the minorities” completely away. True and profound non-violence would be: dropping the notion of “minorities” altogether, treating a Muslim simply as an Indian, giving him exactly the same rights and duties as Hindus.

From the secularists, the omnipresent “minorities” propaganda is to be expected, they will use any and every discourse that can put Hindus on the defensive. Not so expected is that many in and around the BJP have swallowed the notion of “minorities” hook, line and sinker, including even their entitlement to privileges. That is why they treat Hindu demands as “quaint” and denounce fellow party members who remember the Hindu roots of the party as “wackos”. That is why they argue that the abolition of the anti-Hindu discrimination is nothing but a hurdle in the way of “development”.
In reality, the abolition of discriminations is of one piece with the effort to combat corruption and red tape. It amounts to freeing up the public sphere and cleaning out artificial complications. It makes life a lot easier and lets the economy and the other dimensions of society flourish. A level playing field removes a constant source of friction. This way, simple equality contributes to social peace.

 

 

Time for action

The challenges before a Hindu government in the late-Nehruvian India are serious. Straightening out the Constitution by amending the anti-Hindu articles takes skill. First of all, it takes the will, which is not really in evidence. And once the proper motivation is found, the work only begins.

The time for waiting is over. The steps taken towards development, facilitation of investment and enterprise, and in the struggle against corruption, are already impressive. This proves that the Hindu activists can do it, even when they graduate to Cabinet posts. Slacking is of course possible, as the BJP ministers are proving regarding the Hindu agenda, but it is sure to exact a heavy price. As the oracle might have said: staying at home brings regret, crossing the great river brings good fortune. It is time to come clean on the challenge of the “minorities”.

Regarding such issues of principle, the Modi Government should get on Modi Time.

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India's intellectuals

From a lecture by former JNU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Kapil Kapoor before the Indore-based India Inspires Foundation, I have to relate a particularly relevant part, viz. about our Indian "intellectuals". Any mistakes in my rendering are of course mine.

These intellectuals are to be distinguished from Hinduism's traditional men of knowledge, or Rishi-s. The Rishi-s were devoted to the welfare of society, and they encouraged responsibility, self-reliance and cheerfulness. By contrast, our present "intellectuals" are only Buddhi-Jivi-s, those who "use their intellect to make a living". 

They have certain typical characteristics:

 

* They are worried, with a perennially worried look on their carefully careless-looking faces. They think that everything is bad, particularly all that really or allegedly stems from Hindu religion: caste, sati (eventhough the Sati after whom the custom was named, set herself on fire while her husband Shiva was alive, and eventhough all Hindu scriptures from the Rg-Veda on down condemn this rare Rajput practice), superstition etc. They worry about minorities and gender, and about the environment: whatever Hindus do, is polluting. Thus, while their consumerist lifestyles are above criticism, Hindus throwing around coloured powder on Holi are harming the ecosystem. Nowadays they worry about the farmers, eventhough they can't tell a hoe from a plough.

 

* They have a sense of bad luck. Thus, why did they have to be born in a poor "developing country" rather than in America? (Well, at least the status of "developing country" is useful in so far as it keeps the donations coming, which money is then funneled towards the established intellectuals so that their children can get Ph.D.s in America.)   They bemoan everything. They are like Rudali-s, professional mourners; except that Rudali-s only mourn at a occurrence of a real loss, a king's death or so, whereas these intellectuals mourn all the time. Shiites flagellate themselves on Muharram to mourn Hussain's defeat; these intellectuals have a Muharram every day.

* They suffer from a Hanuman complex. Hanuman was so strong that the gods were afraid of him and cursed him to forget his strength until someone would remind him. So, they forget about the past glories of their own civilization. The first European travelers wondered why the Indians had no maps; well, because maps are for people who have to go elsewhere because they need something from there, but Indians had everything in their own country. Our intellectuals see only the poverty that Islamic and British colonization and Nehruvian socialism have wrought (which they falsely attribute to Hindu influence, terming Nehruvian economic failure the "Hindu rate of growth"). They are always appealing for state intervention, like today’s middle class, who always ring up for help; or like the Devata-s (gods) in the Puranic myths, helpless before their Asura (demon) enemies. It is always the Asuras who are self-reliant, while the  Devata-s are only there to shower flowers.

* They have a Tittiri complex. The Tittiri is a Indian bird that sleeps on its back with its feet skywards, as if supporting the heavens so that they don't fall. Likewise, the intellectuals think that their enduring concern is needed to save India.


And a little extra to cap it all: intellectuals are good at talking about a book without having read it. This they call "meta-study". (Or as their hero Ayatollah Khomeini said about Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses: "You don't need to jump into a dungheap to know that it stinks.")

  

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The Indo-European, Vedic and post-Vedic meanings of Ârya

(abstract)

 

In debates on the politically controversial term Arya, we keep hearing from Hindus and Buddhists that it only means "noble", as in the Buddha's "four noble (Arya) truths". Following the Arya Samaj reinterpretation of the Vedas, many even insist that in the Vedic context, Arya meant “good” while its opposite Anarya meant “bad, immoral”. These moralistic and self-flattering readings bespeak a deficient sense of historicity, i.c. the realization that over time, terminology is susceptible to change. Attempts to derive Arya from a basic root *ar-, to which various meanings have been assigned, make good sense in principle, but bypass the Vedic age when from this ancient root, a far more precise meaning had crystallized.  

While it is now a matter of consensus that the term had no racial or linguistic meaning ("Nordic" c.q. "Indo-European"), it did have an ethnic meaning. Starting from different considerations, invasionist linguist JP Mallory and anti-invasionist historian Shrikant Talageri agree on this, and we will argue further in favour of this finding. In the earliest historical age, attested in the oldest literature in Indo-European languages, we find Arya or cognate terms used in the sense of "compatriot", "one of us", viz. by the Anatolians, Iranians and Paurava Indians. In the Iranian world, it retained its purely ethnic meaning, as evidenced at the World Aryan Fair in Tajikistan 2006. In India, it evolved to "one who shares the civilizational norms of the Vedic Paurava tribes", and since it was in the Paurava milieu that the Vedas were composed, it came to mean "Veda-abiding", "civilized", and thence "noble".

In the Vedic-Avestan age, a group that designated itself as Arya could be deemed Anarya by another group that considered itself Arya. In particular, the Iranians called themselves Arya but in the Vedas they were designated by various tribal names including Dasa (which has nothing to do with “Dravidian aboriginals”) but never as Arya, a term which the Vedic people reserved for themselves. So, this was a relative ethnic term, not having a fixed reference to a particular nation, but used in self-reference by different nations. But when a community strongly identified with the Vedic tradition settled in new lands, viz. the Brahmins who settled in South India, the name Arya (> Aiyar, Aiyangar) did acquire an absolute ethnic meaning accepted by both insiders and outsiders. This division between Northern “Aryans” and their Dravidian surroundings presented an instance of the contrast between Indo-European and non-Indo-European, and in the 19^th century, scholars prematurely generalized this into the assumption that Arya was an early synonym for “Indo-European”. This was a projection of a recent situation onto the proto-historic past, a childhood disease of the discipline of Indo-European philology.   

 

In debates on the politically controversial term Ārya, we keep hearing from Hindus and Buddhists that it only means "noble", as in the Buddha's "four noble (Ārya) truths" and his “noble (Ārya) eightfold path”. Following the post-Vedic reinterpretations of the Vedas by Hindus from the Purāna authors down to the Ārya Samāj and today’s travelling gurus, many even insist that in the Vedic context, Ārya meant “good, moral” while its opposite Anārya meant “bad, immoral”. These moralistic and self-flattering readings bespeak a deficient sense of historicity, i.c. the realization that over time, terminology is susceptible to change. They project, or so we will argue, a meaning common in later times on to the term Ārya in Vedic context. Others go to the opposite extreme: they first suggest a deep etymology of the term, situated in the proto-language’s register of extremely simple and fundamental concepts, and next pretend that this is the sense in which the Vedic people used it.

 

1. Deep etymology of Ārya

Let us consider the deep etymology approach first.  It is still in dispute, but one hypothesis has an edge over the others. Köbler [2000 48 ff.] gives a range of explanations that have been proposed in the past two centuries.

 Ārya has been analysed as stemming from the root *ar-, ‘plough, cultivate’ (cf. Latin arare, aratrum), which would make them the sedentary people as opposed to the nomads and hunter-gatherers; and lends itself to a figurative meaning of “cultivated, civilized”. Others, however, have connected it with the root of Latin ire, “to go”, so as to make it an apt name for a nomadic populations: the proverbial roaming warrior-bands that must have ransacked the Harappan cities.

A more surprising hypothesis derives Ārya as a lengthened form of Arya from a root *al-, “‘other” (cfr. Greek allos and Latin alius, “other”), hence “inclined towards the other/stranger”, hence “hospitable”. This could be similar in meaning to the name of the god Aryaman, “other-minded”, whose attribute is hospitality. From this sense, an ethnic meaning is tentatively derived: “we, the hospitable ones”, “we, your hosts”, hence “we, the lords of this country”. This too, admittedly, sounds rather contrived.

Also surprising is a meaning suggested in attempts to establish a deep historic connection (which the present author too considers very likely) between Indo-European and Semitic. Summarizing such attempts, Sūrya Kānta Śāstrī [n.d.:3] links Proto-Indo-European *h₂er-  (> ar, ārya) with “Arabic, Hebrew hrr, ‘to be free’”. This is the root of words like hurriyat, “freedom”, and tahrīr, “liberation”.

Alternatively, ārya could be from a root *ar, “possess, acquire, share” (cf. Greek aresthai, “acquire”), an interpretation beloved of Marxist scholars who interpret the Ārya class as the owner class. 

Another explanation, the most likely and most popular one, is from a root *ar-, “to fit; orderly, correct”, cf. Greek artios, “fitting, perfect”; and hence “skilled, able”, cf. Latin ars, “art, dexterity”; Greek aretè, “virtue”, aristos, “best”. This may in turn be the same root as in the central Vedic concept rta, Avestan arta, “order, regularity”, whence rtu, “season”, cf. Greek ham-artè, “at the same time”.

Attempts to derive Ārya from a basic root *ar-, to which various meanings have been assigned, make good sense in principle, but they bypass the Vedic age when from this ancient root, a far more precise meaning had crystallized.

 

 

1. Ancient Indo-European meaning of Ārya

While it is now a matter of consensus that the term Ārya had no racial meaning, whether “Nordic” or other [Ghurye 1932, Hock 1999], nor even a linguistic meaning ("Indo-European"), it did have a subjective ethnic meaning in the oldest attested Indo-European languages, viz. Hittite, Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit. Starting from different considerations, invasionist linguists like J.P. Mallory and anti-invasionist historian Shrikant Talageri agree on this, and we will argue further in favour of this finding.

 

1. Anatolian

In the earliest historical age, attested in the oldest literature in Indo-European languages, we find Ārya or cognate terms used in the sense of "compatriot", "one of us", viz. by the Anatolians, Iranians and Paurava (Vedic) Indians.

The use of Ārya cognates in the Anatolian languages Hittite and Lycian in the sense of “compatriot, fellow citizen” is given in some recent textbooks of Indo-European linguistics, e.g.:

“The most loaded term in the reconstructed lexicon is *h₄erós or *h₄eryós, ‘member of one’s own group’, which in Indo-Iranian is generally represented as ‘Aryan’. From *h₄erós we have Anatolian, e.g. Hittite arā, ‘member of one’s own group, peer, friend’, Lycian arus-, ‘citizens’, while *h₄eryós yields (perhaps) Old Irish aire, ‘freeman’, more certainly Avestan airya, ‘Aryan’, Sanskrit aryá, ‘kind’, ārya-, ‘Aryan’ (cf. arí-, ‘faithful’). The evidence suggests that the word was, at least initially, one that denoted one who  belongs to the community in contrast to an outsider; a derivative of the word is found in Hittite āra, ‘(what is) fitting’, and natta āra, ‘not right’, cf. the use of kosher which originally meant (in Hebrew) ‘what is fitting’.” [Mallory & Adams:266]

While the connection with older and deeper meanings is transparent, the operative meaning of these ārya-related words in Anatolian society was “compatriot”. It didn’t exactly mean “Hittite” or “Lycian”, at least it wasn’t a synonym of those ethnonyms, for their neighbours didn’t use those words to refer to these nations. They themselves used it in self-reference, as “us” in distinction from “them”.

 

1. Iranian

The same situation prevailed in ancient Iranian: “aryo-: self-designation of the Indo-Iranians. Perhaps a derivative of ar-.” [Watkins 2000:5] This root ar-, in turn, is explained as “To fit together”  [Watkins 2000:5] Further to aryo-: “1. Aryan, from Sanskrit ārya, compatriot. 2. Iran, […] from Old Persian āriya, compatriot.”  [Watkins 2000:5]

Likewise in to the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/, consulted June 2011), lemma Aryan, we read: “Ancient Persians used the name in reference to themselves (Old Persian ariya-), hence Iran. Ultimately from Skt. ārya- ‘compatriot’; in later language ‘noble, of good family’. Also the name Sanskrit-speaking invaders of India gave themselves in the ancient texts, from which early 19c. European philologists (Friedrich Schlegel, 1819, who linked the word with Germanic Ehre, ‘honor’) applied it to the ancient people we now call Indo-Europeans (suspecting that this is what they called themselves); this use is attested in English from 1851. […] German philologist Max Müller (1823-1900) popularized the term in his writings on comparative linguistics, recommending it as the name (replacing Indo-European, Indo-Germanic, Caucasian, Japhetic) for the group of related, inflected languages connected with these peoples, mostly found in Europe but also including Sanskrit and Persian. […] Gradually replaced in comparative linguistics c.1900 by Indo-European, except when used to distinguish IE languages of India from non-IE ones. […] As an ethnic designation, however, it is properly limited to Indo-Iranians (most justly to the latter) […].”

In his Behistun inscription, ca. 500 BC, Darius proudly called himself and his family since at least nine generations Airya, apparently in the caste sense of “noble”, “high-born”. The name Iran itself is from Airyānām Xśathra, “dominion of the Airya-s”. As a term in international usage, it soon became more than self-referential, it became a pure ethnonym also used by outsiders. 

Yet, until modern linguists launched the notion of an Iranian language family, the term was not coterminous with the set of all speakers of Iranian languages. Some wayward Iranian-speaking peoples were not considered Airya by the citizens of the Persian and Afghan heartland of Iranian culture. From the Avesta down to Firdausi’s Śāhnāmeh (ca. 1000 CE), Tūrya or Tuirya was the name of Iranian-speaking people living beyond the Oxus, roughly contrasted with the Airya as nomadic with sedentary, illiterate with literate, barbarian with civilized. They were generally deemed hostile though some of them also accepted Zarathushtra’s religion, which promoted agriculture and the domestication of the environment. As soon as Turkic tribes started replacing the Iranian Scythians as masters of the Central-Asian steppes, the term got increasingly identified with the Turks, but originally it marked an intra-Iranian distinction between barbarian and civilized speakers of the various Iranian dialects.

The name Ērān/Iran was restored by Reza Shah Pahlevi in 1935 as a more accurate replacement of Persia, which was a pars pro toto ever since the Persian Achaemenids united the Iranians under one sceptre.

At the World Aryan Fair held in 2006 in Tajikistan, declared “guardian of Aryan civilization”, the “Aryan” peoples represented were all Iranian-speaking: Kurds, Ossetes (Scythians), Pathans, Persians, Tajiks, Baluch, and Indian Parsis. After the World Avesta Conference in Dushanbe in 1992, this was another instance of open support by the newly independent Tajik state to the pan-Iranian movement. Though not officially anti-Islamic, the movement’s conspicuous Zoroastrian revivalism makes the Islamic governments in Iran and Pakistan distrust it. A striking feature of the Aryan Fair was the widespread use of swastika flags featuring two intertwined blue swastikas, termed “wheel of  Mithra”, the sun-god.

 

1. Vedic

“The Sanskrit word ārya- (…) was the self-designation of the Vedic Indic people”, according to a standard textbook of Indo-European linguistics. [Fortson 2004:187] This is approximately true, but Shrikant Talageri fine-tunes this definition: it applies to the Vedic people, but only to some Indic people, viz. those of the tribe that created the Veda.

When listing and discussing all 36 instances of the use of Ārya in the Rg-Veda, Talageri  concludes: “The word is used in the sense of ‘We, the Noble’. When an Iranian, for example, used the word Airya, he undoubtedly meant an Iranian, or even perhaps an Iranian belonging to his own particular tribe or community. He would never have dreamt of referring to a Vedic Aryan or an Irishman by the same term. The use of the word Ārya in the Rigveda must be understood in this sense: the Vedic Aryans used the word Ārya in reference to Vedic Aryans as distinct from other people, and not in reference to Indo-European language speaking people as distinct from non-Indo-European language speaking people. All other people, Indo-European or otherwise, other than themselves, were non-Āryas to the Vedic Aryans.” [Talageri 2000:154-155]

In the Rg-Veda, the ethnic horizon mainly consists of the “five peoples”, pañca janāh, conceived as descent groups of five patriarchs: Anu, Druhyu, Turvaśu, Yadu and Puru. These five were the five sons of Yayāti, himself a king belonging to the Aila lineage (from Ilā, daughter of Ur-patriarch Manu Vaivasvata) or Lunar dynasty. The term Ārya is used in the Rg-Veda for three individuals belonging to the Paurava tribe: king Divodāsa, his father Vadhryaśva, and his descendant Sudās, winner of the crucial battle of the Ten Kings. In a tribal sense, it always refers to the Paurava tribe or segments of it, the putative descendents of Puru, youngest and favoured among the five sons of king Yayāti. In nine cases, reference is to Ārya enemies. This means that politically, they were temporarily in the enemy camp, but ethnically they were of the same stock as the Vedic seers. They and the Dāsa-s are distinguished as sanābhi (kinsmen) c.q. nistya (non-kindred) enemies. Contrary to the moralistic interpretations by the Ārya Samāj and other moderns, Ārya did not mean “good” nor Anārya “bad”. Even a hostile reference to a traitorous fellow-Paurava will still call him Ārya, while non-Paurava friends whose virtues are praised do not get promoted to the Ārya category.

The Paurava-s considered all others, including Iranians (Dāsa, Dasyu, Pani) and non-Paurava Indians (Yādava, Aiksvaku, et al.), as non-Ārya. It is possible that the latter, like the Iranians, also considered themselves as Ārya and the Vedic Paurava-s as non-Ārya, but we simply don’t have their testimony for that period. Only when the Paurava-originated Vedic tradition became normative for the neighbouring tribes did Ārya gradually lose its Paurava exclusiveness and acquire the non-ethnic meaning of “Vedic”, “partaking of Vedic tradition”, “civilized”, “noble”; while Anārya became “barbarian”.

The one exception in the Rg-Veda where ārya seems to have a non-ethnic, generally moral meaning, is RV 9:63:5: krnvanto  viśvam āryam, “making everything ārya” or “doing every ārya (deed)”,  usually translated as “ennobling the world”.

 

 

1. The non-Aryans in the Rg-Veda

The Iranians were divided in tribes, some of which are mentioned in the Rg-Veda. Of these, some are also known through Greco-Roman sources: Dahae corresponds to Vedic Dāsa, Parnoi to Pani. Through Avestan and more recent Iranian sources, we know of the Dahyu, “nation”, the Vedic Dasyu; and of at least four of the tribes mentioned as opponents of Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings: Pashtu or Pathan, in the Veda Paktha; Persian or Parśu; Parthian or Prthu; and Baluch (living near the Bolan pass) or Bhalāna. Likewise, the Medes (now Kurds) are probably the Madra-s. That Persians and Medes are known historically as living in Western Iran while their confrontation with the Vedic people took place in what is now Pakistan, is not really problematic. From Mesopotamian sources we know of them as intruders from the East. The intervening centuries were sufficient to allow a migration or expansion from the Indo-Iranian border zone  to Mesopotamia.

It is a matter for wonder that so many authors have seen in the Dāsas and other opponents of the Vedic people the Dravidian or Munda “aboriginals” confronting the “Aryan invaders”. To the careful reader, the Iranian identity of most of them is simply obvious.      

For those who are inclined to dismiss Talageri’s views as discredited by his Hindu nationalism, note that in a number of respects, his position goes against the majority opinion among Hindu nationalists, e.g. his denying an implication of moral superiority to the Vedic Ārya-s. While many Hindu writers assume that “the battles between the Vedic Aryans and their enemies were somehow battles between Good and Evil (…) our analysis of the Rigveda and Vedic history is not based on this rosy viewpoint” . [Talageri 2008:368] In fact, “there is nothing to indicate that the Āryas were more civilized and cultured than the Dāsas, (…) nor that the struggles between the Āryas and Dāsas involved any noble social, moral and ethical issues.” [Talageri 2000:405]

In the context of Talageri’s identification of the Iranian tribes, we note that Hindu nationalist author N.R. Waradpande [2000:116-117] denies an ethnic meaning to Prthu and Parśu, preferring their literal meaning of “broad” c.q. “axe” (the latter actually translates the similar-sounding paraśu). Against this, Talageri [2008:] shakes the Hindutva pride further by arguing that the name Paraśurāma, “Rama with the axe”, is a misreading by Puranic authors of the Vedic name Parśurāma, “Persian Rama”, a nickname of Rāma Jāmadagnya, author of RV X.110, for whom he manages to demonstrate an Iranian ancestry. This means that the authors of the Purāna-s, treated as revelation by many Hindus, misunderstood the name of Vishnu’s sixth incarnation. More generally, it illustrates a point made repeatedly in Talageri’s work, explicitly and implicitly, that the Sanskrit literary tradition was as human and prone to changes and retroprojective reinterpretations as the religious text corpus of other civilizations.

 

1. Relative and absolute use of Ārya

It is possible and indeed likely that other Indian tribes contemporaneous with the Vedic Pauravas also called themselves Ārya (and the Paurava Anārya), but they have left us no texts to prove it. After the spreading of the Vedic tradition outside the Paurava tribe among these other tribes, such usage may have facilitated the adoption of the already familiar term Ārya in the (to them) new meaning of “Vedic”.

But sometimes a community strongly identified with the Vedic tradition settled in new lands, where no one was familiar with the term Ārya. In Northwest India, the neighbouring peoples, the Iranians and the non-Paurava Indo-Aryans, already knew the term and probably used it to designate themselves. But in South India, the term Ārya came to  designate the Northern immigrants who described themselves as such: Buddhist and Jaina preachers and Brahmin settlers. The latter's caste names Aiyar and Aiyangar are evolutes of Ārya. The local population took the name Ārya to be an objective designation, identified with Northerner and speaker of Indo-Aryan.

This division between Northern-originated “Aryans” and their Dravidian surroundings presented an instance of the distinction between Indo-European and non-Indo-European, with the former designated as Ārya. A similar situation had existed in the lands conquered by the Iranians, where the Semitic, Turkic, Uralic and other communities were non-Aryan in contrast with the Indo-European-speaking Iranian or “Aryan” conquerors. In the 19^th century, scholars prematurely generalized this into the assumption that Ārya was an early synonym for “Indo-European”. This projection of more recent situations onto the proto-historic past is now considered as a childhood disease of the discipline of Indo-European philology. 

 

2.6. A synonym for “Indo-European”?

If some Indo-European peoples used ārya or a cognate form as an ethnic self-designation, could this not be a remnant of a pan-Indo-European usage? Could it be that Slavic or Italic had the same usage originally but lost it over time?

In the 19^th century, many scholars explored this scenario, including claims of the use of an Ārya cognate as ethnic self-designation in Celtic (Eire) and Germanic, but these have been abandoned. So has the relation with German Ehre, “honour”, which is in fact from *aiz-, cognate with Latin aes-timare, whence English esteem. The etymon of Eire seems to be *iweriu, < piHwerion, “fat land”, “opulent country”. The Irish word aire, “freeman”, may be related to ārya, but it is a different word and is not known to have served as an ethnic self-designation. Thus far, only Anatolian, Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit are certified to have used it as a self-referential ethnonym.

So, there is no firm indication that Ārya, or *Heryo, ever was a pan-Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European self-designation and thus a valid synonym for “Indo-European”: “ Although in Indo-Iranian the word takes on an ethnic meaning, there are no grounds for ascribing this semantic use to Proto-Indo-European, i.e. there is no evidence that the speakers of the proto-language referred to themselves explicitly as ‘Aryans’.” [Mallory & Adams:266] But in theory, it remains a possibility.

 

1. Post-Vedic meanings
    
   1. Vedic standards

From meaning “belonging to the Paurava tradition”, “Vedic”, Ārya evolves in a trans-ethnic cultural sense. The Dharmaśāstra-s of Manu and Baudhāyana relate it to wider territory of North India, Āryavarta, but distinguish the Kuru-Pañcāla region, i.e. from the Saraswati eastward to the Ganga-Yamuna doāb, as the best: there, the people naturally observe the Vedic norms, so all others should seek to emulate their customs. To Manu, their defining ingredients are the Vedic sacrificial ritual and the observance of varnāśramadharma, the differentiation of society according to social function and age group, each with its own duties and privileges. The absence of order, i.e. of ritual (as, to a large extent, in modern society) and of functional differentiation (as in tribal societies with their supposed Ur-communism), counts as Anārya, uncivilized or barbaric.

Thus, the Manu Smrti [10.45] says that those outside the caste system, “whether they speak barbarian languages or Ārya languages, are regarded as aliens”, indicating that some people spoke the same language as the Ārya-s but didn’t have their status of Ārya because they disregarded the varnāśramadharma.

Note that we need not agree with the Śāstrakāra-s that the varnāśramadharma is truly “Vedic”, for we do not find it in the first nine books of the Rg-Veda. Even in the tenth book, the last and youngest one, we find it mentioned only once, and there only in the vaguest use, viz. the Purusa Sūkta’s recognition of the existence of four functions in society, without any details of how their personnel is recruited nor of how they should conduct themselves vis-à-vis one another, the very stuff that is the main focus of the Śāstra-s. Like medieval and contemporary Hindus, the Śāstra composers may have considered as ”Vedic” everything they held sacred, regardless of whether a particular norm or custom is indeed traceable to the Veda-s. 

 

1. Varna meaning

One resultant semantic development is "upper-caste", meaning those people who received the Vedic initiation. Since Ksatriya-s and Brahmins had their own more specific titles, the general honorific Ārya often designated the Vaiśya. It is also used as a form of address to any honoured person, which is probably the origin of the present-day honorific suffix -jī, evolved through the Prakrit forms ayya, ajja, 'jje.

The term distinguished those who had received the Vedic initiation symbolized by the sacred thread. In particular, it became a form of address for members of the Dvija (twice-born) castes, i.e. those whose members (or later, whose male members) wore the sacred thread. And among these, it was particularly in use among the lowest of the three, the Vaiśya-s. Whereas the Ksatriya-s and Brahmins further distinguish their own specific varna also setting themselves apart from the other Dvija-s, Vaiśya-s seem happy enough to set themselves apart from the non-Dvija-s.

We find a parallel situation in Western society too, mutatis mutandis. An employee or servant (Śūdra) has no title, he may even be addressed with his first name by his boss. The employer (Vaiśya), by contrast, is addressed as “Mister X” (from magister, “greater one, master”), or “Sir” (from senior, “elder”). These general forms of respectful address could in principle also be applied to Ksatriya professions, but in those cases you will normally specify as Captain, General, Minister, Excellency, Your Majesty. Likewise, people in Brahmin professions will be addressed as Doctor, Professor, Reverend, all the way up to Your Holiness. In their cases, just calling them “Mister” would be a slight on their specific state of merit, whereas it is perfectly fine to address a businessman as “Mister” regardless of the extent of his business achievement.         

Applied to communities and cultural patterns, Ārya came to mean “of Vedic tradition”, “conforming to Vedic norms”. For insiders to the Vedic tradition, it would consequently mean “up to standard”, “proper”, "civilized". To outsiders, it would still mean “Vedic”, and refer to those people or communities distinguished as adhering to Vedic norms. Those outsiders, who used the term not to designate themselves but to designate outsiders whom they saw observing or bringing the Vedic tradition, included the natives of South India, where the term acquired the ethnic connotation of “North-Indian”.

Soon enough, people started objecting that nobility or Āryatva is not a matter of birth but of character, e.g.: “O my Lord, a person who is chanting Your holy name, although born of a low family like that of a Candāla, is situated on the highest platform of self-realization. Such a person must have performed all kinds of penances and sacrifices according to Vedic scriptures many, many times after bathing in all the holy places of pilgrimage. Such a person is considered to be the best of the Ārya family." (Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 3.33.7)

 

The meaning of the term became vaguer, from conformity with a specific (viz. Vedic) code or with criteria of high birth to a general quality of character, “noble”. That is exactly parallel to the evolution of the European term "noble", which originally meant someone belonging by birth to the nobility class, the princes and dukes and earls. The same evolution also affected the Chinese word junzi. People can see for themselves that qualities of character appear in all classes and all religions, so the concept “noble” or ārya got delinked from its religious or sociological basis.

 

1. Ethical meaning
    

From the Hindu Epics on down, Ārya and Anārya are frequently used in the moral sense. People are sometimes classified as Ārya or Anārya based on their behavior, but the ethnic or caste meaning still tends to shine through.

In the Rāmāyana, the Vānara-s and Rāksasa-s call themselves Ārya. The monkey king Sugrīva is called an Ārya and speaks of his brother Vali as an Ārya. Rāvana regards himself and his ministers as Ārya, which is only natural as he is a Brahmin and descendent of the Vedic sage Pulastya. Likewise, Rāma’s being an Ārya may have as much to do with his Ksatriya status as with his exemplary moral conduct.

 

 In the Mahābhārata, the term is generally applied to people according to their behaviour. Duhśāsana, who tried to disrobe Draupadī in the Kaurava court, is therefore called Anārya. Vidura, the son of sage Vyāsa by a maidservant, was the only person in the assembly whose behaviour is called Ārya because he alone openly protested against Draupadi’s disrobing. The Pāndava-s reproached themselves for their Anārya conduct when they killed Drona through deception.

However, this should not be taken to prove, as Hindu reformists are wont to claim, that this ethical meaning supersedes and nullifies the social stratification meaning. Just as the metaphorical meaning of “crusade” or “jihād” as “moral struggle against the evil in oneself and society” presupposes the meaning of “holy war” and doesn’t nullify the underlying doctrine of religious war, so likewise the extended usage of Ārya in Sanskrit or “noble” in European languages presupposes and doesn’t discard its literal sociological meaning, viz. “characteristic of the hereditary upper class”.

 

1. “Noble” in Buddhism

Against the association of the anglicised form “Aryan” with colonial and Nazi racism, modern Hindus always insist that the term Ārya only means “Vedic” or “noble” and has no racial or ethnic connotation. This purely moral, non-ethnic meaning is in evidence in the Buddhist notions of the “four noble truths” (catvāri-ārya-satyāni) and the “noble eightfold path” (ārya-astāngika-mārga). So, the meaning “noble” applies for recent centuries and as far back as the Buddha’s age (ca. 500 BC), and contrasts with the Vedic age (beyond 1000 BC), when the ethnic sense prevailed, and post-Vedic Hindu society, when either Vedic sectarianism or caste pride animated the use of the term Ārya.

At least, this is what the Buddhists claim: that when the Buddha lived and taught, the term Ārya had a general psychological-ethical meaning, “noble”, larger than and not dependent on any specific cultural or religious tradition or social class. However, we must look at the historical data, even and especially when pertaining to a venerated person like the Buddha, without assuming modern and sectarian predilections.

Firstly, we must take into account the possibility that he too used the term in the implied sense of “Vedic”, broadly conceived. That after Vedic tradition got carried away into what he deemed non-essentials, he intended to restore what he conceived as the original Vedic spirit. After all, the anti-Vedicism and anti-Brahmanism now routinely attributed to him, are largely in the eye of the modern beholder. Though later Brahmin-born Buddhist thinkers polemicized against Brahmin institutions and the idolizing of the Veda, the Buddha himself didn’t mind attributing to the Vedic gods Indra and Brahma his recognition as the Buddha and his mission to teach. At the end of his life, he unwittingly got involved in a political intrigue when Varsakāra, a minister of the Magadha kingdom, asked him for the secret of the strength of the republican states. Among the seven unfailing factors of strength of a society, he included “sticking to ancient laws and traditions” and “maintaining sacred sites and honouring ancient rituals”. [Dīgha Nikāya 2:73, discussed in Elst 2010:197-199] So, contrary to his modern image as a “revolutionary”, the Buddha’s view of the good society was close to Confucian and indeed Brahminical conservatism. Far from denouncing “empty ritual”, he praised it as a factor of social harmony and strength.  In this light, his understanding of Ārya may have been closer to the Brahminical interpretation of the term as “Vedic” than nowadays usually assumed.

This even applies to the Buddha’s view of caste. When predicting the future Buddha Maitreya, he had him born in a Brahmin family; and he had over 40% Veda-trained Brahmins among his ordained disciples. His impact on his disciples was such that after his death, the messages by cities claiming a part of his ashes for veneration in stupas took the form of: “He was a ksatriya, we are ksatriya-s, therefore we are entitled to a share in his ashes.” Clearly, lay followers of the Buddha did not shed their caste pride, nor feel a need to even pretend to when speaking in a Buddha-related setting par excellence.

So, secondly, the Buddha may not have renounced the caste-related meaning of Ārya altogether. After all, determination by birth was not alien to the worldview of the Buddha, whose ascent to Awakening was predetermined by physical marks he was born with, according to common Buddhist belief. Buddhist scripture makes much of the Buddha’s noble birth in the Solar lineage, as a relative (and reincarnation) of Rāma. So, as Gómez [1999:132] points out, the Buddhist usage of Ārya is subject to “ambiguities”, e.g. in the Mahāvibhāsā: “The Buddha said, ‘What the noble ones say is the truth, what the other say is not true. And why is this? The noble ones […] understand things as they are, the common folk do not understand. […] Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those who own the wealth and assets of the noble ones. Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those who are conceived in the womb of a noble person.”  [cit. Gómez 1999:133]

To play devil’s advocate, we could even extend our skepticism of the Buddha’s progressive image to an involvement in the racist understanding of Ārya. Some pre-WW2 racists waxed enthusiastic about descriptions by contemporaries of the Buddha as “tall and light-skinned”. [Schuman 1989:194] That would seem to make him “Aryan” in the then-common sense of “Nordic”. Nowadays, some scholars including Michael Witzel [on his own Indo-Eurasian Research yahoo list] suggest that the Buddha’s Śākya tribe may have been of Iranian origin (related to Śaka, “Scythian”), which would explain his taller stature and lighter skin in comparison with his Gangetic fellow-men. It would also explain their fierce endogamy, i.e. their systematic practice of cousin marriage. Indeed, the Buddha himself had only four great-grandparents because his paternal grandfather was the brother of his maternal grandmother while his maternal grandfather was the brother of his paternal grandmother. The Brahminical lawbooks prohibited this close endogamy (gotra-s are exogamous) and like the Catholic Church, imposed respect for "prohibited degrees of consanguinity"; but consanguineous marriages were common among Iranians. (It was also common among Dravidians, a lead not yet fully exploited by neo-Buddhists claiming the Buddha as “pre-Aryan”.) The Śākya tribe justified the practice through pride in their direct pure descent from the Ārya patriarch Manu Vaivasvata, but this could be a made-up explanation adapted to the Indian milieu and hiding their Iranian origin (which they themselves too could have forgotten), still visible in their physical profile. So, that would make the Buddha an “Aryan” in the historically most justified ethnic use of the term, viz. as “Iranian”.

 

1. Ārya = Hindu?

The relative authoritative Hindu “law-book”  Manu Smrti  [10.43 ff.] claims that the Greeks and the Chinese had originally been Ārya-s too but that they had lapsed from Ārya standards and therefore lost the status of Ārya. So, non-Indians could be Ārya, on condition of observing certain cultural and ethical standards, viz. those laid down in the Manu Smrti itself. The term Ārya was culturally defined: conforming to Vedic tradition.

Nonetheless, Manu had a strong pro-Indian bias, and at least in the two millennia since the Manu Smrti, the only ones fulfilling the requirement of living by Vedic norms were Indians. In 1875, a socially progressive but religiously fundamentalist movement (“back to the Vedas”, i.e. before the “degeneracy” of the “casteist” Śāstra-s and the “superstitious” Purāna-s) had been founded under the name Ārya Samāj, in effect the “Vedicist society”. They used the term in an exclusive sense: it excluded many Hindus not by caste but by their degree of strict observance of the (putative) Vedic norms. It rejected all non-Vedic elements in Hinduism as Anārya, a distinction that has a certain historical justification in the Vedic identification of Ārya with the Vedic tribe.

But the modern age has also seen a rise in the inclusive use of the term, as referring to all Hindus, or indeed all Dharmic Indians. During India’s freedom struggle, philosopher and freedom fighter Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) wrote in English about “the Aryan race”, by which he meant “the Hindu nation”, nothing more nor less. In 1914-21, together with a French-Jewish admirer, Mirra Richard-Alfassa, he also published a monthly devoted to the cause of India’s self-rediscovery and emancipation, the Ārya. If the word Ārya had not become tainted by the colonial and racist use of its Europeanized form Aryan, chances are that by now it would have replaced the word Hindu (which many Hindus resent as a Persian exonym unknown to Hindu scripture) as the standard term of Hindu self-reference.

 

 

 

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(Vedic Venues 2, 2013)

 

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