The debates on Aryan origins in Maharashtra in the nineteenth century occurred on the background of the emerging Western education in the region under the auspices of the British colonial authorities and the traditional self-definitions by the Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical communities. The Brahmins of the region traditionally viewed themselves as one of the five Drāviḍa Brahmin groups residing to the south of the Vindhyas, with the exception of the Gauḍa Sārasvata Brahmin community from the region of Goa. This community considered itself to be one of the migrant groups from the region to the north of the Vindhyas, a region occupied by the five Gauḍa Brahmin groups. While the Gauḍa-Drāviḍa distinction was traditionally held to be very ancient, brought about by migrations etc. prompted by the epic sage Paraśurāma, both the divisions among Brahmins looked upon themselves to be authentic Āryas in the Dharmaśāstric sense. While the Dharmaśāstras generally considered the three upper Varṇas as belonging to the Ārya group, the Śūdras and others being the non-Ārya groups, the Brahmins in the region of Maharashtra, in the pre-colonial period, came to argue that there were only two Varṇas left on earth in the post-Paraśurāma period. Paraśurāma, according to the epic narratives, is believed to have killed off all the Kṣatriyas on the earth twenty-one times, and hence the Brahmins came to believe that there were no true Kṣatriyas left on earth. The Vaiśya identity was also summarily dismissed in this region, and the Brahmins came to believe that there were only two Varṇas left, the Brahmins and the Śūdras. This belief of the Brahmins played an important role in the emergence of the new theories of Aryan origins in the nineteenth-century Maharashtra. The ruling families of the region, though rejected by the Brahmins as being Śūdras, strenuously attempted to assert their Kṣatriyahood, and in the process a great tension between the Kṣatriyas and the Brahmins developed in the pre-colonial period, and continued into the colonial and post-colonial period. The classes who were below the ruling Kṣatriya families developed their own conceptions, and there emerged competing conceptions and interpretations of Aryan origins in the nineteenth century.
As the British took over the rule of the Maharashtra region from the Brahmin Peshwas in 1818, the colonial authorities initially began sponsoring educational efforts both for traditional Sanskritic learning and vernacular languages. The support for exclusively traditional Sanskrit learning first emerged in the form of setting up a Sanskrit Pāṭhaśālā in Pune providing for the study of traditional Sanskritic subjects. Here, the British authorities attempted to de-emphasize the Vedic studies and encouraged the Śāstric studies, particularly the fields of Astronomy, Mathematics, and Law, hoping that this would gradually push the traditional community of Brahmins in more rational and useful directions. Increasingly, over a few decades, the British were dissatisfied with the management of this Sanskrit College in Pune. This Sanskrit College was eventually closed, and the British authorities opened a modern college, the Deccan College, in Pune in 1860. It was in this college, where modernity and western knowledge first made a major entrance into the consciousness of the Brahmin and non-Brahmin communities of the region. While the first half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of modernizing Brahmins like Bal Shastri Jambhekar, a more serious turn in the direction of modern education and dissemination of western ideas began with the establishment of the Deccan College. The establishment of the Deccan College and the reduction of the official governmental support for the traditional Sanskrit education was perceived by the Brahmin community of Pune as a threat to the survival of the Sanskritic traditions, and this led to the emergence of purely native Brahmin institutions like the Vedaśāstrottejaka Sabhā and the new Sanskrit Pāṭhaśālā. The emergence of vernacular education with governmental and missionary support also saw another development. In addition to the traditionally educated Brahmin class, this period also saw, even though on a small scale, the emergence of a class of educated non-Brahmins. While the availability of modern western ideas was shared by the newly educated Brahmin as well as the non-Brahmin, given the traditional rivalries between these groups, the Brahmins and the non-Brahmins developed different conceptions of history, and sought support for different political and social movements. Emergence of Indian nationalism in the late nineteenth century also contributed to these conceptual developments. Different interpretations of the Aryan origins owe themselves to these different historical factors.
After Bal Shastri Jambhekar, who is generally considered to be the first Brahmin promoter of modern education in the vernacular languages, there appeared several Brahmins who carried forward the torch of modern education. Among these, we must count the figures of Bhau Daji Lad, Kashinath Telang, Ramkrishna G. Bhandarkar, and Mahadeo Govind Ranade. They constitute a generation of modern Brahmins which dominated the field of modern historical and Indological studies in the second half of the nineteenth century, and trained later generations of native scholars like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, and M. M. Kunte. Bhau Daji, Telang, Bhandarkar, and Ranade were nationalists in their own right and yet were political moderates who saw the benefits of British education and governance toward the emergence of modern India. Among these, Bhandarkar was the only scholar who paid a great deal of attention to the question of Aryan origins, and the linguistic and social history of ancient India.
Bhandarkar's contribution toward an understanding of the Aryan origins may be seen most profoundly in his Wilson Philological Lectures on Sanskrit and the Derived Languages delivered in 1877 in Bombay, and published in the form of a book in 1914. In his introductory remarks, Bhandarkar refers to his departure from the traditional Sanskritic modes of thought and the precarious position he had reached among his contemporaries:
A Shastri or Pandit is esteemed and treated with respect and consideration by his countrymen; the English-knowing Indian may be feared if he holds some Government appointment, but if none, he enjoys no consideration. . . . In one branch of learning, however, viz. Sanskrit, an English-knowing Indian may meet with appreciation and esteem at the hands of the learned in Europe. . . . Among his own countrymen he will find sympathy only if he has studied Sanskrit exactly in the old way, but even in this case his heterodoxy, which is the result of his English education, would stand in the way. But there are indications that a more sympathizing and appreciating body of men is growing about us, and the circle will go on widening as education advances. In this, as in other matters, there are hopes that our countrymen will, in the course of time, chiefly through the agency of Government education, adapt themselves to their altered circumstances; and the Hindu's inherent love of learning will gradually extend and engraft itself on the branches of knowledge to which he has been newly introduced by the European.
(1914: 2)
This is the best description of the predicament of the emergence of modernity in Indian education. This modernity and its predicament is here to stay with us in the reception of the new theories of Aryan origins in this region in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
Referring to the developments in historical and comparative linguistics since the days of William Jones, Bhandarkar says:
The discovery of Sanskrit and the Indian grammatical system at the close of the last century led to a total revolution in the philological ideas of Europeans. . . . But several circumstances had about this time prepared Europe for independent thought in philology. . . . The languages of Europe, ancient and modern, were compared with Sanskrit and with each other. This led to comparative philology and the classification of languages, and a comparison of the words and forms in the different languages led scholars into the secrets of the growth of human speech, and the science of language was added to the list of existing branches of knowledge. The progress made within about fifty years is marvelous, and affords a striking instance of the intellectual activity of the Europeans. In the cultivation of Philology and the elaboration of this new science the Germans, of all other nations, have been most prominent, and have done by far the greater portion of the work.
(Ibid.: 5)
Bhandarkar openly acknowledges his debt to this new European philology and is consequently advocating views on Indian history which come as a serious departure from the traditional Indian views.
While his Wilson Philological Lectures were specifically focused upon Sanskrit and the derived languages, and not on the Indo-European pre-history of Sanskrit, Bhandarkar acknowledges the essential validity of the construction of the Indo-European language family and the place of Sanskrit within this family: “The languages of the civilized nations of the world have been divided into three families, the Aryan or Indo-European, the Semitic and the Turanian” (Bhandarkar 1914: 15). Bhandarkar then gives a detailed description of languages belonging to the various branches of Indo-European including the Indian branch “consisting of Sanskrit, Pali and the Prakrits, and the modern vernaculars of Northern India and of Ceylon” (Bhandarkar 1914: 15). Referring to the Turanian family of languages, Bhandarkar says that it consists of “the Turkish and the languages of the Mongolian tribes. To this last family the dialects spoken in Southern India are also to be referred” (Bhandarkar 1914: 15). Making general observations, Bhandarkar says: “The Zend approaches Sanskrit the most, but the affinities of this latter with Greek and Latin are also very striking, and such as to convince even a determined skeptic” (Bhandarkar 1914: 15–16). The very historical approach to the study of Sanskrit, not just its pre-history, is a new development in the days of Bhandarkar. With a new historical approach to the study of Sanskrit grammarians, Bhandarkar asserts:
It therefore appears clear to me that the language in Pāṇini's time was in a different condition from that in which it was in Kātyāyana's. . . . In Pāṇini's time a good many words and expressions were current which afterwards became obsolete; verbal forms were commonly used which ceased to be used in Kātyāyana's time, and some grammatical forms were developed in the time of the latter which did not exist in Pāṇini's.
(Ibid.: 29)
For Indian intellectuals of the nineteenth-century Maharashtra, the notion that the pre-history of Sanskrit was connected with languages like Persian, Greek, and Latin, and that Sanskrit itself had a changing history of its own, were revolutionary ideas. These ideas remained revolutionary for quite some time and did not attain universal acceptance.
Bhandarkar, in examining the relationship between Sanskrit and Pali, begins to develop historically oriented explanations:
Though [the speakers of Pali] heard conjunct consonants and the diphthongs ai and au pronounced by the speakers of Sanskrit, as correctly as the other letters which they did not corrupt, their organs were not fitted to utter them. These peculiarities may have been natural or acquired. If natural, the people who first corrupted Sanskrit into Pali must have belonged to an alien race which came into close contact with the Āryas and learnt their language. . . . And there is another instance in History of an alien race having treated the sounds of the language of a civilized community in just the same way. The Barbarians who overran Italy and developed the Italian from the Latin, showed the same inability to pronounce the Latin conjuncts, and assimilated them as our Pali ancestors did.
(Ibid.: 47)
The process of the emergence of the Prakrits is accounted for by Bhandarkar by referring to the migration of the Āryas from “the land of the five rivers” to “the country known afterwards as Brahmāvarta and Kurukshetra.” This is the country about Thaneśvar, where “they formed a consolidated community in which an aboriginal or alien race was incorporated and the language represented by the Pali was the language of that race” (Bhandarkar 1914: 88). The idea of the Āryas, the speakers of Sanskrit, coming into contact with non-Āryas, and such a contact leading to a degenerative transformation of Sanskrit into Prakrits is an idea not inherently alien to the Sanskritic tradition. But the same tradition does not admit any notion of history for this divine and eternal language, and here Bhandarkar's efforts to find historical origins of and developments in Sanskrit did not go well with his contemporaries. These were departures from the Sanskritic tradition. If the speakers of Sanskrit were Āryas, and if Sanskrit itself resulted from a process of transformation from its Indo-European precursors and underwent later transformations of its own, were the Āryas themselves subject to transformative processes? If the transformations of Sanskrit into Pali were caused by the alien speakers trying to learn the Aryan language, what was it that caused the transformations which resulted into the very existence of Sanskrit itself, and what caused transformations within the very history of Sanskrit? Such questions indeed raise unpalatable issues, and Bhandarkar's own wording suggests that he, as a Brahmin, was himself caught in the middle. Bhandarkar's wording would suggest a belief that the Āryas were not in contact with non-Aryans in “the land of the five rivers.” Even admitting that the Indus civilization was not excavated by this time, one still finds this belief difficult to accept, particularly in view of the fact that there are north western Prakrits in Aśokan inscriptions, a fact which was known to Bhandarkar by this time. Bhandarkar finds that the northwestern Prakrits like Paiśācī,
appear to be truly Aryan. Perhaps then this was the language of an Aryan tribe that had remained longer in the original seat of the race, and was connected with the ancestors of the Teutons, so as to develop a phonetic peculiarity resembling theirs, and emigrated to India at a very late period and settled on the borders. Or it might be that the tribe came to India along with the others, but living in the mountainous countries on the border in a sort of rude independence, it developed this peculiarity of pronunciation. . . . Since under this supposition they could not have come in very close contact with their more civilized brethren of the plains, their language did not undergo some of those phonetic modifications which Sanskrit underwent in the mouth of the aboriginal races.
(Ibid.: 94)
So the speakers of northwestern Prakrits were truly Aryan, uncontaminated by contact with the non-Aryans, but not as civilized as the speakers of Sanskrit who did come in contact with the “aboriginal races.” Bhandarkar almost seems to believe that the Aryans were not in contact with aboriginal races until they moved from “the land of five rivers” into the interior of India. Thus the linguistic deviations from Sanskrit in the direction of Pali and other Prakrits are caused by the contact of the Āryas with the non-Āryas, while the linguistic deviations from Sanskrit in the direction of the northwestern Prakrits and other IE languages are to be explained by “isolation” at best. This creates an interesting tripartite division: the ethnically pure but less civilized Āryas of the northwest, the pure civilized Āryas of the “land of the five rivers,” and the uncivilized non-Āryas of the rest of the Indian subcontinent.
The notion that the ancestors of the Vedic Aryans came to India from outside was acceptable to Bhandarkar. Referring to the Mitanni inscriptions dated to 1400 BC, Bhandarkar (1933: Vol. I, 96) points out the proximity of the Mitannis to the Assyrians. He connects the Assyrians with the Asuras of the Vedas. He says that Atharvaveda (10.3.11: sa me śatrūn vi bādhatām indro dasyūn ivāsurān) puts the Dasyus and Asuras together, and comments:
Is it not unlikely that just as in India the progress of the Aryans was contested by the Dasyus, so was it contested by the Asuras of Assyria and they were thus compared with the Dasyus in some of the passages quoted above. . . . In later times especially when Aryans settled in the regions of the five rivers, . . . the reminiscences of the human Asuras and the fights of the Aryans with them and their civilisation led to the whole subject having transformed itself into a myth of the determined enmity between the Devas and the Asuras.
(1933: Vol. I, 97)
Citing Brunnhofer in support, Bhandarkar argues that “all hymns (of the Ṛgveda) were composed not in the Punjab; but Vedic poetry began when the Indian Aryans lived in a more northerly region. It is the work of poets of North Iran from Caspian Sea to the Punjab” (Bhandarkar 1933: Vol. I, 99). In his lecture in 1888 delivered at the Free Church College in Bombay, Bhandarkar expresses his complete support for the “critical, comparative, and historical method”:
The critical, comparative, and historical methods began to be well understood and employed about the end of the eighteenth century, and within a hundred years since that time, an equally amazing progress has been made. . . . Before the application of the comparative and historical method the beliefs that the world was created in six days and that the Hebrew was the primitive language of which all the rest were offshoots were equally prevalent.
(Ibid.: 363–4)
He wholeheartedly subscribes to the construction of the IE language family:
Besides, from all the observation that the great founders of comparative philology have made, they have come to the conclusion that the affinity between the Sanskrit and the European languages dates from prehistoric times, i.e., is due to the fact that the ancestors of us all spoke one and the same language before they separated and formed distinct nationalities. This was long before the time when the Vedas were composed.
(Ibid.: 377–8)
Bhandarkar was a political moderate and, though a nationalist, saw the benefits brought to India by the British rule, and especially by modern education. Even while appreciating the contribution of the Europeans in the development of modern knowledge, Bhandarkar wanted Indians not to lag behind:
Why should discoveries be made in France, Germany and England, and not in India? . . . Surely no costly laboratories are required to enable us to study the ancient literature of our country. . . This is a field in which we may successfully compete with Europeans, and in which we enjoy certain peculiar advantages. But these advantages can be turned to account only if we follow their critical, comparative, and historical method. . . . And here I feel myself in duty bound, even at the risk of displeasing some of you, to make a passing allusion to the most uncritical spirit that has come over us of praising ourselves and our ancestors indiscriminately, seeing nothing but good in our institutions and in our ancient literature, asserting that the ancient Hindus had made very great progress in all the sciences, physical, moral, and social, and the arts,. . . and denying even the most obvious deficiencies in our literature. . . . As long as this spirit exists in us, we can never hope to be able to throw light on our ancient history.
(Ibid.: 391–2)
Bhandarkar was fond of referring to the leading western Indologists as Ṛṣis: “Let us. . .sitting at the feet of the English, French, and German Ṛṣis,1 imbibe the knowledge that they have to give, and at least keep pace with them, if not go beyond them” (Bhandarkar 1933: Vol. I, 393). Bhandarkar's liberal political views, his active participation in the movement for social reform, and his open-ended academic approach were not easily palatable to his contemporaries, including many of his students. Vishnushastri Chiplunkar and Bal Gangadhar Tilak were students of Bhandarkar at the Deccan College, and yet their more militant Hindu nationalism and their support of the conservative social agenda led them to frequently differ from Bhandarkar. However, in spite of the tensions between them and Bhandarkar, it is evident that the roots of modern education were planted in the soil of Pune. Of these two, B. G. Tilak went on to develop excitingly new ideas about the original home of the Aryans. But before looking at Tilak's ideas, we need to consider another pioneering figure in the nineteenth-century Maharashtra, Mahadeo Moreshwar Kunte.
Mahadeo Moreshwar Kunte (1835–88) was a remarkable person. In 1859, Kunte finished his high school matriculation and in 1864 received a BA degree from the University of Bombay. In 1867, he was appointed as the head master at a high school in Kolhapur. Until that point, he had not studied Sanskrit. In Kolhapur, he studied Sanskrit in the traditional way, and moved as a head master to Pune in 1871. He started a Marathi publication, Śaḍdarśanacintanikā, to introduce the philosophical systems in Sanskrit to Marathi readers, and most remarkably, in 1880 he wrote a book, The Vicissitudes of Āryan Civilization in India, which was submitted for a competition in Italy where it won a prize. Kunte, though a graduate of the University of Bombay, was not as well trained in Sanskrit philology as R. G. Bhandarkar, and yet his book encompasses many subjects demonstrating his wide reading. Kunte was a political moderate, but opposed the cause of social reform. His 1880 book is dedicated to “James Braithwaite Peile, Esq., C.S., M.A., Acting chief secretary to the Government of Bombay. . . as a token of appreciation of his sympathies with the natives of this country.”2 The book opens with a remarkable motto:
There is a glorious future before the Āryas in India, now that their activities, dormant for centuries and threatening to become petrified, are likely to be revived and quickened by the ennobling and elevating many-sided civilization which the western Āryas have developed, and which is brought to bear upon them.
(Kunte 1880)
This remarkable statement calling the British “Western Āryas,” brothers of the “Indian Āryas” is reminiscent of the statement inscribed on the foundation stone of the Old Indian Institute Building, Oxford, dated to May 2, 1883:
śāleyam prācyaśāstrāṇāṃ jñānottejanatatparaiḥ /
paropakāribhiḥ sadbhiḥ sthāpitāryopayoginī //1//
ālbarṭeḍvarḍitikhyāto yuvarājo mahāmanāḥ /
rājarājeśvarīputras tatpratiṣṭhāṃ vyadhāt svayam //2//
aṅkarāmāṅkacandre ’bde vaiśākhasyāsite dale /
daśamyāṃ budhavāsare ca vāstuvidhir abhūd iha //3//
īśānukampayā nityam āryavidyā mahīyatām /
āryāvartāṅglabhūmyoś ca mitho maitrī vivardhatām //4//
This Building, dedicated to Eastern sciences, was founded for the use of Āryas (Indians and Englishmen) by excellent and benevolent men desirous of encouraging knowledge. The High-minded Heir-Apparent, named Albert Edward, Son of the Empress of India, himself performed the act of inauguration. The ceremony of laying the Memorial Stone took place on Wednesday, the tenth lunar day of the dark half of the month of Vaiśākha, in the Saṃvat year 1939 (= Wednesday, May 2, 1883). By the favor of God may the learning and literature of India be ever held in honour; and may the mutual friendship of India and England constantly increase!3
While Bhandarkar had deep respect for Western Indologists and was generally a political moderate, I have not detected a reference to “Western Āryas” in his writings. In this respect, Kunte has gone a step ahead. However, Bhandarkar, though not using the expression “Western Āryas,” had already gone in the direction of what Thomas Trautmann (1997: 190ff.) calls “The Racial Theory of Indian Civilization.” Kunte, however, extends this racial affinity argument beyond Bhandarkar, either out of conviction or to earn favor with his British bosses, or both. In general, Kunte was treated with biting sarcasm by his contemporaries, especially by Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (Chiplunkar 1926: 1039; Rajwade 1980: 12–13).
Besides the notion of racial affinity of the Indians with the British, Kunte repeatedly speaks of “Āryan invasion,” “Āryans before invasion,” and “India before the Āryan invasion.” His 1880 book opens with this introductory comment: “Before the Āryas invaded India, the country was inhabited by races philologically and religiously allied with one another to a considerable extent” (Kunte 1880: xxi). The Āryas, who subjugated the non-Āryas, had a history consisting of important epochs:
their establishment in India after a long and continued struggle for centuries, the development of their activities by struggle, their prosperity and the consolidation of their power,. . .their expeditions into the different parts of India, their expansion and their attempts at the Āryanization of the enterprising aboriginal races.
(Ibid.: xxi)
The first chapter of Kunte's book is titled “Antecedents of the Ancient Indian Āryas” and it discusses
the questions of their origin, their mythology, their philology, and their sacrificial system, and shows how they spread out toward the countries of Europe – entering into the history of the Mazdayasnians, and pointing out the causes of the dissensions between them and the Indian Āryas.
(Ibid.: xxv)
The general stages in the development of the history of the Āryas according to Kunte (1880: 2) are:
1 The early history of the Āryan tribes, constituting the Āryan race as a whole.
2 The separation of the tribes and their migration into the western regions.
3 The great schism among the Āryans in Āriana itself and its features.
4 The consequent invasion of India.
In order to reconstruct these stages, Kunte promises to use “materials which can be obtained from the Rik-Sanhitā, Comparative Philology, Comparative Mythology, the Zendavesta and the very extensive sacrificial literature of the Brahmavādins” (Kunte 1880: 3–4). Through his theory of gradual growth, Kunte hopes to demonstrate the rise of the Āryas “from barbarism, to pursue, for some time, pastoral and agricultural life, and when prepared, to form a feudal confederacy, though spontaneous and tacit, and in the fullness of time to develop grand schemes of the invasion and occupation of India” (Kunte 1880: 6–7). His last phrase “grand schemes of the invasion and occupation of India” almost parallels his description of the British rule.
How barbarous were the “original” Āryas as compared to the Āryas in the Ṛgveda? Kunte indeed wants to make a clear distinction between their states of civilization.
The ancient Āryas were at first, that is, long before they invaded India, savages who hunted wild beasts and lived upon their flesh, the whole animal being cooked. Some of them formed a gang, and intoxicated with the Soma-juice, went a-shooting, yelling as frantically as possible, brandishing their rude javelin-like poles, and overcame their wild adversary in the recesses of a jungle more by dint of a furious onslaught, than by a sustained effort. They had not constructed even rude huts to live in.
(Ibid.: 7)
However, Kunte wants to assure us that references in the Ṛgveda (1.164.43) to cooking a spotted ox are “old or ancient” practices belonging to “times that had long past away” (Kunte 1880: 7, fn. 1). But, while the Ṛgveda retains memories of an ancient past, very different from the civilized Ṛgvedic present, this civilized Ṛgvedic present was evidently a continuity of the civilized state attained by the no-longer-barbarous Āryas already in their “mother country” before they launched their invasion of India. In India, when the now-civilized Āryas reached its borders, they had to fight the uncivilized Dasyus:
When the long war with the Dasyus ended, when kingdoms on the model of those in their mother country were formed, when the tribes settled, maintaining the same social, religious and political relations with one another as before, when the Āryans were duly respected by the aborigines who had learnt submission, when the prestige of Āryan gods was completely established and when Āryan society in India was thoroughly consolidated, it was significantly observed by a poet who naturally expressed a national feeling, that Dhātā – the god of stability – arranged society as it once existed. . . . The Āryans attempted at least to reproduce on the banks of the five rivers of the Punjab all that they once possessed and cherished in the plateau of Ariana.
(Ibid.: 21–2)
For Kunte, the Āryas of the Ṛgveda were fully civilized already before they entered India, where they transplanted their already developed social, religious and political institutions, “as the colonists in America transplanted institutions, the growth of the English soil to the banks of the Mississippi and the Hudson” (ibid.). However, there were those pre-Āryan uncivilized Dasyus to deal with in India. Thus a division between the civilized Ārya of the Ṛgveda and the uncivilized Dasyu was at the core of ancient Indian history, and with it the mission to subjugate and civilize the uncivilized. That burden obviously fell on the shoulders of the civilized Āryas, as it did on the shoulders of the civilized British, “the Western Āryas.”
Now, let us view “the character of the invading ancient Āryas” through Kunte's narrative. The second chapter of Kunte's book has the title: “The Invasion of India and the Period of Occupation.” From their original home, Ariana,
the Āryas who had resisted all temptations of emigrating from their homes and who had made progress in some arts of peaceful life were compelled to abandon their native country and all that they cherished most, their lands, and pastures, and depart, never to return, toward the East. . . . They marched en masse with their families, with their servants, with their military bands, with their hordes of husbandmen, with their shop-keepers, and their artisans, clinging to their social institutions, and their sacrificial customs. . . . The Āryan community soon came in contact with the aborigines of the Punjab – the Dāsas and the Dasyus.
(Ibid.: 111–12)
However, there was no match between the civilized Āryas and the uncivilized Dāsas and Dasyus. While the Āryas could organize an expedition and use weapons of warfare and “invent new machines,” the Dāsas had no weapons “worthy of notice” and they merely congregated “in villages without any social organization.” The Āryas had plans and justifications for their actions, while the Dāsas “impulsively declared their intentions, made attacks, or surrendered at discretion.” The Āryas were “well-built, strong, fair, attractive in their features,” while the Dāsas “were dark, ill-proportioned and repulsive” (Kunte 1880: 113–14). There was every reason for the Āryas to be boastful, their “boastfulness was encouraged and confirmed by the inferiority of the aboriginal races,” and Kunte perceives a similar situation in modern India: “The ancient Āryas spoke of their heroes as being the special care of their gods, and magnified their enterprises. The Englishman speaks with pride, glory and self-complacency of his Indian heroes.” But there is one major difference: “The ancient Āryas settled in India. The modern Englishman is only a sojourner till [he] makes his fortune” (Kunte 1880: 147–8). This discussion of the significant difference between the ancient Āryas who invaded India and became Indians and the modern Western Āryas who are there just to make a fortune shows that Kunte is not averse to making a political point. With all the appreciation of the help offered by the Western Āryas, Kunte, the politically moderate author, is still a nationalist at heart.
Finally, Kunte is a Brahmin scholar and his Brahmanical approaches to historical reconstruction become gradually clear toward the end of his book. While dealing with the ancient periods, his term “Indian Ārya” is inclusive of the three higher Varṇas, the Śūdra being relegated to the non-Ārya. However, coming closer to modern times, Kunte expresses a pervasive Brahmin belief. Note how the history moves from ancient to modern times in his narrative:
The Āryas are essentially superior to the non-Āryas. The social history of India is the history of the relative bearing of the two races on one another. . . . The division of the Āryas into Brāhmaṇas, Kṣatriyas, and Vaishyas has become obsolete. It is distinctly asserted that there are now only two castes – the Brāhmaṇas and the Shūdras.
(Ibid.: 509)
Thus, looking at the broad picture painted by Kunte, it would seem that there are the Western Āryas, that is, the British, the Indian Āryas, that is, the Brāhmaṇas, and the non-Āryas, that is, all non-Brāhmaṇa communities, all lumped in the Śūdra category. There is clear affirmation in Kunte's work that the “civilizing influences” (p. 516) and the “civilizing power” (p. 517) of the Western Āryas with respect to Indians are similar to the civilizing role of the Ārya Brāhmaṇas with respect to non-Ārya non-Brāhmaṇas. Such roles necessarily involve what Kunte himself calls the “principle of graded subordination” (Kunte 1880: 509). However, Kunte says that there are large
aboriginal races like the Jats in the Punjab, the Santhals in Bengal, the Gonds and Khonds between the valleys of the Godavari, and the Mahanadi, the Mahars and Dheds of Maharashtra, the Kolis generally on the banks of the rivers, and the Bhills in Central India and the Todors in the Nilgiris – all these are without the pale, both of the Moslems and the Brāhmaṇas. . . . Their elevation depends on the civilizing power of the Europeans.
(Ibid.: 517)
While much of Bhandarkar's methodologically sound historical work is still respected by scholars, Kunte's magnum opus, because of its ideological orientation and lack of sound historical methodology, has fallen by the way side. However, in its own days, it had its detractors like Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1926: 1039) and admirers like Rajwade (1980: 12–13). Vaman Balkrishna Ranade (1925: 53), a contemporary of Kunte who has written a brief account of Kunte's life, praises Kunte's Vicissitudes very highly: “Anyone who has had a chance to read this book can attest to the high scholarship and searching intelligence of Mr. Kunte.” In its own times, Kunte's book was very influential.
A contemporary of Bhandarkar and a participant in the social and religious reform movements and liberal politics was Justice Mahadeo Govind Ranade. Ranade's historical work focuses more on the period of the Maratha kingdoms, though one sees his treatment of ancient history in some of his writings. In his “Introduction to Mr. Vaidya's Book” one finds the most elaborate references to the period of the ancient Āryas. Here, Ranade is mainly concerned with issues related to social reform, and yet he is making his statements about the need for social reform in the context of reviewing the ancient history of social institutions: “There is abundant reason for hope that an historical study of these institutions will dispel many a false conception of the antiquity and sanctity of the existing arrangements” (M. G. Ranade 1915: 71). In his presentation of the need for reform of the Hindu social practices like child-marriage and ban on widow re-marriage, Ranade points out the similarities of practices among the Hindu Āryas and the Roman Āryas:
The rise and fall of female rights and status in Hindu Āryan society has a history of its own, at once interesting and suggestive in its analogies to the corresponding developments in the institutions of another kindred stock, the Roman Aryans, who have so largely influenced European ideas. Both began by a complete subordination of the women in the family to the men, and of the men themselves to the head of the family.
(1915: 72–3)
Here, it is clear that Ranade accepts the bond of common ancestry between the Hindu Āryas and the Roman Āryas, something that was common knowledge for his western-educated generation. Ranade likes to argue that the ideals of social reform were already practiced by the ancient Āryas during some early period. However, a decay sets in due to the conflicts of the Āryas with the non-Āryas:
The Aryan ideals lost their charm, and a lower type of character and morality asserted its predominance as the down-trodden races, which had been driven to the hills, issued from their haunts, and fell upon the demoralized and disunited Aryan kingdoms on all sides.
(Ibid.: 74)
Thus, Ranade would like to believe in a sort of ideal golden period of the ancient Āryas when they were practicing a sort of modern morality and were politically united. All this came to an end through internal demoralization as well as through the external attacks by the non-Āryas. These non-Āryas were a degrading influence upon the Āryas. This was compounded by the degradation which occurred during the rule of the Muslims. Ranade looks upon the British rule as a golden opportunity to return to the ancient ideals of the pure Āryas:
Fortunately, the causes which brought on this degradation have been counteracted by Providential guidance, and we have now, with a living example before us of how pure Aryan customs, unaffected by barbarous laws and patriarchal notions, resemble our own ancient usages, to take up the thread where we dropped it under foreign and barbarous pressure, and restore the old healthy practices.
(Ibid.: 76)
It is clear that Ranade looks upon the social customs of the British as continuities from the common ancestral Aryan period “unaffected by barbarous laws and patriarchal notions,” and the newly found association of the British Aryans with the currently degraded Indian Aryans as an opportunity for the degraded Indian Aryans to go back to their ancient glory.
At the same time, Ranade, the nationalist, is proud of his Āryavarta-India:
I profess implicit faith in two articles of my creed. This country of ours is the true land of promise. This race of ours is the chosen race. It was not for nothing that God has showered his choicest blessings on this ancient land of Aryavarta. We can see His hand in history.
(Ibid.: 125)
This is what Ranade said in 1893 during his speech at Lahore on the occasion of the Seventh Social Conference. Making such a pro-Ārya and pro-Āryāvarta statement seemed appropriate in a place like Lahore in the very Aryan land of the five rivers. However, Ranade changed his rhetoric in just one year. Speaking in 1894 in Madras at the Eighth Social Conference, Ranade realized that he was speaking to the representatives of the non-Aryan Dravidian south: “Your Dravidian civilization has been always very strong enough to retain the stamp of its individuality in the midst of Aryan inundations, which submerged it for a time” (M. G. Ranade 1915: 133). The benevolent character of the Aryan migration and the superiority of the Aryans of the Āryāvarta became a political liability in the land of Dravidian pride, and Ranade, the emerging politician, quickly changed his rhetoric to fit the changed circumstances. A few years later, in 1899, now speaking to the Thirteenth Social Conference in Lucknow, Ranade said:
Far in the South, which is now the stronghold of Brahmanical ideas uninfluenced by outside contact, the Aryan civilisation no doubt made its way, but it continued to be an exotic civilisation confined to a small minority of Aryan settlers, so few in numbers that they were overwhelmed by the influences of the earlier Dravidian domination.
(Ibid.: 215)
The political use of history gets more and more confused. If the British Aryans are supposed to help the Indian Aryans to go back to a purer form of Aryan social institutions, what is supposed to happen to the non-Aryan Dravidians of the south? The division of the Brahmin-Ārya from the non-Brahmin non-Ārya, and the division of the Aryan north from the Dravidian south posed complicated problems for the British Aryans, who had to face different demands from these groups. Were they supposed to Aryanize the Indian non-Aryan and re-Aryanize the Indian Aryan, or were they supposed to save the non-Aryan Indian from the domination of the Indian Brahmin-Aryan?
The above dilemmas become more evident when considered from the point of view expressed by a rare non-Brahmin author, Jotirao Phule (1827–90). Phule was born in the Mali “gardener” caste which is traditionally held to be above the untouchables, but below the Maratha castes. In the Brahmin ideology of the period all non-Brahmins were Śūdras, because it was believed by the Brahmins that the true ancient Kṣatriyas and Vaiśyas had not survived. Thus, the Brahmins were the only representatives of the ancient Āryas, and all other castes, including the ruling Maratha houses were considered as belonging to the Śūdra groups. It is evident from my presentation of the views of Bhandarkar, Kunte, and Ranade that such views had percolated even into the writings of the modern Brahmins of Maharashtra, who perceived their dominant role as analogous to the role of the new colonial rulers, the British Āryas. Phule's writings provide a unique glimpse into the way these relations were viewed by individuals from the non-Brahmin communities. There indeed was no unanimity among the various non-Brahmin groups on such issues. There is enough evidence to show that the ruling Maratha houses of Maharashtra considered themselves to be Kṣatriyas and claimed to belong to the three upper Varṇas, eligible for Vedic ceremonies. Traditionally, the Brahmins of the region did not easily accept this claim. Such issues were raised in 1676 when Shivaji, after establishing a successful kingdom of his own, wanted to be coronated as a Kṣatriya king according to Vedic rites of coronation. The local Brahmins refused to perform this ceremony, claiming that there were no true Kṣatriyas in the world any longer. Finally, a Brahmin from Banaras, Gāgābhaṭṭa, was brought to perform this ceremony for Shivaji. This tension continued into the nineteenth century, when the Maratha king of Kolhapur insisted on having Vedic rites performed for him. These Kṣatriya ruling houses would certainly have claimed to represent the Aryan warrior class. However, there are clear indications that the same ruling Kṣatriya houses would not accord the same Kṣatriya status to other caste groups who were accorded a lower Śūdra status by both the Brahmins and the Kṣatriya houses. Phule's position in this complicated social structure is important. He would like to have the Kṣatriya houses on his side against the domination of the Ārya-Brahmin.
In his numerous publications, Phule presents a picture of history, which is not different in substance from the one seen in the works of the Brahmin authors like Bhandarkar, Kunte, and Ranade. However, his interpretation is very different. Agreeing with the idea that Āryas came into India from outside and subjugated the indigenous groups, Phule identifies these invading Āryas exclusively with Brahmins. In doing so, he is using the very ideas propagated by Brahmins that the old Kṣatriyas and Vaiśyas have no longer survived, and that there are only Brahmins and Śūdras. However, in the context of the theory of Āryan invasion, the Brahmins become the outsiders, foreigners, and the subjugated Śūdras become the true sons of the soil, the aggrieved people who lost their independence. In Phule's interpretation, those Śūdras who tilled the land (kṣetra), became Kṣetriyas “land-owners/land-tillers,” and these were the true Kṣatriyas. The invading foreign Ārya-Brahmins came in hordes from Iran and subjugated the pre-Āryan people of the land. In describing the process of subjugation, Phule cleverly uses Brahmanical myths, but turns them upside down. The myth of the axe-wielding Brahmin Paraśurāma killing all Kṣatriyas in the world twenty-one times shows the cruelty of the invading Brahmins. Phule says that the indigenous Kṣatriyas fought Paraśurāma so bravely that they came to be named Mahā-ari “great enemies,” but after their subjugation, these brave Mahā-aris were reduced to the status of untouchables (Mahār, cf. Phule 1991: 41). The Vāmana incarnation of Viṣṇu, in the form of a Brahmin boy subjugating the demon Bali through deceit, shows how the Brahmins subjugated the non-Brahmins through deceit. Most of these ideas are frequently repeated in Phule's writings, but are seen in a concentrated form in his Gulāmgiri “Slavery” (Phule 1991: 111ff.).
While Bhandarkar, Kunte, and Ranade looked forward to the “civilizing” mission of the British Āryas, at the same time noticing its similarity with the civilizing mission of the ancient Indian Āryas, Phule was urging the British authorities to save the non-Ārya Śūdras from the domination of the Ārya-Brahmin. The clearest expression of this is seen in his “Memorial addressed to the Education Commission” in 1882 (Phule 1991: 233). Phule says:
I sincerely hope that Government will ere long. . . take the glory into their own hands of emancipating my Shudra brethren from the trammels of bondage which the Brahmins have woven around them like the coils of a serpent. . . . Away with all Brahmin school-masters.
(1991: 236)
Phule never refers to the British by the term, Ārya, which is reserved only for the despised Brahmins. Phule's construction of the ancient history is thus a mirror image of the history constructed by the Brahmin authors, similar in substance, but opposite in its orientation. Brahmin authors reacted vigorously to Phule, and this reaction is seen particularly in the writings of Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1926: 441ff., 1020ff.).
Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1850–82) had the shortest span of life among his contemporaries, and yet his prolific and fiery writings have left a significant legacy of a brilliant mind. Vishnushastri represents a segment of Pune Brahmins very different from the one represented by the moderate Bhandarkar and Ranade. Vishnushastri and B. G. Tilak were students of Bhandarkar, and yet temperamentally differed from him. They despised the moderateness of Bhandarkar and Ranade and accused them of being British sympathizers. The hoped camaraderie between the Western Āryas and the Indian Āryas seen in the works of Bhandarkar and Ranade was infuriating to Chiplunkar and Tilak, whose political views were more conservative and militant. Their works laid the foundation of the conservative militant Hindu nationalist movement. Vishnushastri does not seem to be opposed to the theoretical construction of the Indo-European language family and the place of Sanskrit within such a family: “It is clear from a good deal of evidence that these (Parsee/Iranian) people belong to the Aryan family. From the similarity of languages and ritual practices, it is established that the ancient Hindus were related to the ancient people of Persia” (Chiplunkar 1926: 606–7). Turning to the origin of the Hindus, Chiplunkar says:
The origin of this (Hindu) nation is from the Aryan branch, which is considered to be the principal branch of the human race. . . . The original home of these Aryans was probably somewhere in-between Europe and Asia. Such is the conjecture of modern philologists. From that region, different groups of these people went very far in both directions. This is what everyone believes these days. One of these groups came to the east and settled in Iran and another group came and inhabited the land of Punjab. This is the original home of the ancient Hindus. From there, they spread throughout the country.
(1926: 615)
Thus there is not much difference between the historical notions expressed by Bhandarkar, Ranade, and Chiplunkar.
However, here the similarity ends. While from a purely historical point of view, Chiplunkar may not be opposed to expressions like “Western Āryas” or “British Āryas,” however, for Chiplunkar, there was no love lost between these two Āryas. In fact, Chiplunkar discusses in great detail how the British hated the Brahmin. He discusses a letter signed by a British person as Elifas in the Bombay Gazette (September 29, 1876) which had the heading “The Native Press and Brahmin Intriguers.” The letter says: “When will the Government be awake to the fact that a Brahman is a born-intriguer.” Referring to Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, the letter says:
It is unnecessary to say that he is one of the herd of demi-semi-educated Brahmans, annually let loose on the country from the Government schools and colleges. It is as needless to say that he is a Government servant, a master in an English High School. . . . (He has) a special talent as a caterer to the intellectual and moral wants of the native public.
(Ibid.: 643)
The author of the letter says that it is the Brahmin who stays aloof from the European, and not the European from the Brahmin. The Brahmins believe that “the lowest Brahmin would be defiled by eating with the highest European.” Vishnushastri takes the author of this letter to task. So much for the love between the Indian and the British Aryans.
What one notices in the writings of Vishnushastri Chiplunkar is the segment of Brahmins which is caught between the British on one hand and the Śūdras on the other; these Brahmins are waging a fight on both the fronts. In criticizing Jotirao Phule's charges that the Chitpavan Brahmins were born from a funeral fire or that they were invaders from Iran, Vishnushastri angrily asserts that, whatever the origin of the Chitpavan Brahmins, their natural qualities have always manifested themselves before and no mean attacks like the writings of Jotirao are going to diminish those qualities (1926: 1023). Referring to the high intelligence of the Hindu Āryas, Chiplunkar says:
Another quality (of the Indian Āryas) is their intelligence. Our country is famous for this quality from the very beginning. When the most ancient nations of Europe had not even been born, the people of this land of Āryas had developed high intelligence, and one cannot say that that intelligence has diminished even under the current conditions of [political] down-turn. The power of intelligence, which the Āryas had when they first settled in the land of five rivers, is still the same after the passage of thousands of years.
(Ibid.: 1069)
The notion that the Indian Āryas may themselves be of foreign origin needed to be dealt with more specifically, because it has uneasy implications in that the Indian Āryas become foreigners like the Muslims, the French, and the English. Chiplunkar elaborates an interesting argument in favor of the Indian Āryas:
Recently, western scholars have determined a theory, based on linguistic and other theories, that this land of India was not originally ours. Of the many Aryan nations which lived near the Caucasus mountains, many went to the east and others to the west. Among them, we and the Iranians are the eastern Aryan nations. The Iranians went to Iran, while we entered this Hindusthan through the region of Punjab. If this explanation is accepted, then like the Muslims, the French, and the English, we are ourselves foreigners. The only thing we can consider is how we behaved among ourselves as well as with the people we subjugated. Recently, it has been determined that there was no caste system in the Vedic times. So, clearly there could not have been the (alleged) domination of the Brahmins. Therefore, we do not need to worry about this period. Eventually, in the evil age of the Purāṇas, the fourfold system of Brahmins, Kṣatriyas, Vaiśyas, and Śūdras entered the land of the Āryas. Even in this period, it is difficult to figure out how these four Varṇas came to be determined. It is obvious that each person was assigned to a Varṇa fitting his qualities and abilities. . . . How did the Āryas treat the people they subjugated? There is no evidence that the Āryas eliminated the subjugated Śūdras and tribals or fed them to hunting dogs. There is no evidence that any Āryas committed atrocities alleged by Mr. Jotirao Phule.
(Ibid.: 1178–9)
Thus, Vishnushastri counters Phule's charges strongly, and in doing so establishes the superiority of Indian Āryas over the Western Āryas. It was they who tried to eliminate the Red Indians in the American colonies. In fact, Vishnushastri uses the expression “our Western Aryan brothers” (āmace pāścātya āryabandhu) sarcastically (1926: 1239). If “our Western Aryan brothers” care for us so much, why don't they just offer us sage advice and retire to their own country, rather than stay here and exploit us (Chiplunkar 1926: 1223). Referring to the mutiny of 1857, Chiplunkar laments? “In this century, there was a chance of getting rid of all foreigners and establishing sovereignty of our Aryan land. However, our Western Aryan brothers found our weakness and set us fighting among ourselves, and that chance was lost” (1926: 1225). Vishnushastri marks a turning point in the use of the expression “our Western Āryan brothers.”
Among the personalities considered so far, Bhandarkar was the only trained philologist of modern Maharashtra to deal with the question of Aryan origins. Others based their opinions on derived information and built their arguments to fit the social and political needs as they saw them. B. G. Tilak (1856–1920), on the other hand, had an original approach, an approach based not so much on philology, but on astronomy and geology, and on an ingenious interpretation of Vedic textual materials. Three of his publications bear witness to his scholarly treatment of the subject of Aryan origins. Importantly, unlike many of the other authors, his treatment of the subject rests on purely scholarly grounds, and does not make any reference to the contemporary social or political conditions. This is particularly remarkable considering how deeply he was involved in the nationalist politics of the day. His first publication on the subject was the book Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, published in 1893. His second publication was The Arctic Home in the Vedas, published in 1903. His third and the last publication on the subject was the book Vedic Chronology and Vedāṅga Jyotisha [Containing also Chaldean and Indian Vedas and other miscellaneous essays], written in 1913 in the Mandaly jail in Burma and published posthumously in 1925.
Tilak's contribution to this subject is so voluminous and the astronomical, geological, and textual arguments so complex, that it would not be possible to do justice to them in a few paragraphs. What distinguishes Tilak from all others is that he is not just arguing for the Arctic home of the Aryans, in the sense of Indo-Europeans; he is specifically arguing that the descriptions in the Vedic texts themselves are of such high antiquity, and hence the Vedas themselves may be located in the Arctic home. Here is a summary of Tilak's conclusions in his own words:
10000 or 8000 B.C. – The destruction of the original Arctic home by the last Ice Age and the commencement of the post-Glacial period.
8000–5000 B.C. – The age of migration from the original home. The survivors of the Aryan race roamed over the northern parts of Europe and Asia in search of lands suitable for new settlements. The vernal equinox was then in the constellation of Punarvasu, and as Aditi is the presiding deity of Punarvasu,. . . this may, therefore, be called the Aditi or the Pre-Orion Period.
5000–3000 B.C. – The Orion Period, when the vernal equinox was in Orion. Many Vedic hymns can be traced to the early part of this period and the bards of the race seem to have not yet forgotten the real import or significance of the traditions of the Arctic home inherited by them. . . .
3000–1400 B.C. – The Kṛttikā Period, when the vernal equinox was in the Pleiades. The Taittirīya Saṃhitā and the Brāhmaṇas, which begin the series of nakṣatras with the Kṛttikās, are evidently the productions of this period. . . . The traditions about the original Arctic home had grown dim by this time and very often misunderstood, making the Vedic hymns more and more unintelligible.
(1903: 453–4)
Summing up his “historical view” of the Vedas, as opposed to the “theological view” of the tradition, Tilak makes three significant points:
1 The Vedic or the Aryan religion can be proved to be inter-glacial; but its ultimate origin is still lost in geological antiquity.
2 Aryan religion and culture were destroyed during the last Glacial period that invaded the Arctic Aryan home.
3 The Vedic hymns were sung in post-Glacial times by poets, who had inherited the knowledge or contents thereof in an unbroken tradition from their ante-diluvian fore-fathers.
(Ibid.: 457)
A succinct critique of Tilak's ideas is offered by Dandekar:
It is, for instance, difficult to imagine that the Vedic seers had preserved in their oral traditions, for over five thousand years which could have by no means been a period of peace and stability, the memories of the experiences of their ancestors in the arctic region. And why, it may be asked, should these memories have been preserved specifically by the Vedic and the Iranian Aryans? . . . The fourth and last Ice-age is now believed to have occurred about 50,000 B.C. . . .The primarily naturalistic and astronomical interpretation of the Vedic mantras, which Tilak adopts, is also not much favoured by the modern Vedists. But the major defect of Tilak's theory is that it has completely ignored the linguistic and archaeological aspects of the question.
(1981: 8–9)
While it is true that Tilak does not bring up any of the contemporary social or political issues while discussing his theory, and argues purely on the basis of evidence as he sees it, his theory can be seen to have some interesting implications. The earlier theories of Aryan migrations as seen in the works of Bhandarkar, Kunte, and Chiplunkar accept the notion of the Aryans coming to India from outside, and yet they seem to connect the composition of the Vedas with the region of Punjab. That makes the Vedas a product of a branch of Indo-European. However, Tilak's theory of the Arctic home in the Vedas takes the descriptions given in the Vedas, if not the Vedas themselves, to a period of 8000–10000 BC. That would almost certainly place the Vedas earlier than the Greeks, the Romans, and the Mitannis. Such a hoary ancestry to the Vedas makes their inheritors, the Indian Aryans, senior brothers to the Western Aryans, in spite of their current condition of subservience to them. At best, it suggests the possibility that the linguistic and the cultural traditions of the Western Aryans may be derived from the more ancient Vedic tradition, and at minimum, their traditions turn out to be younger than the Vedic traditions. Such implications would certainly have an energizing impact on the nationalist movement rooted in the Brahmanical tradition. The possibility that the traditions of the Greeks and Romans could be derived from the Vedic tradition has not been seriously entertained in Tilak's own writings, and yet it is clear that this is the direction that would appear in the works of nationalist Indian authors during Tilak's lifetime. Stanley Wolpert has discussed the significance of Tilak's theories for his nationalistic goals. He shows that Tilak spoke differently on different occasions, more cautious on some than on others. In his Arctic Home in the Vedas and similar publications, Wolpert claims, Tilak was “anxious to maintain the guise of scientific impartiality” (Wolpert 1961: 125). The cautious Tilak says:
It is impossible to demonstrate historically or scientifically that Vedic religion and worship is absolutely without a beginning. All that we can say is that its beginning is lost in geological antiquity. . . . If theologians are not satisfied with the support which this scientific view accords to their theory about the eternity of the Vedas, the scientific and the theological views must stand, as they are, distinct from each other, for the two methods of investigation are essentially different.
(1894: 37–8)
However, on another occasion, the less cautious Tilak says: “We may, however, still assert that for all practical purposes the Vedic religion can be shown to be beginningless even on strict scientific grounds” (reported in Wolpert 1961: 126). The political significance of Tilak's theories was not lost on his followers. In his Sanskrit biography of Tilak, Chitale (1956: 203) claims that, in the conflict between the Eastern and the Western civilizations, Tilak accomplished the victory of the Eastern civilization over the Western civilization in his publications (paurvātya-pāścatya-saṃskṛtyoḥ saṅgharṣe paurvātya-saṃskṛter vijayo ‘nena grantha-dvaya-nirmāṇena lokamānyaiḥ sampāditaḥ).
As a representative of this direction in constructing a nationalist version of ancient history, we may consider the prolific writings of Narayan Bhavanrao Pavgee who is the author of a multivolume work The Bhāratīya Sāmrājya or Hindu Empire. This was projected to be completed in twenty-two volumes, and eleven volumes had already appeared by 1912. Besides these volumes, he also published in 1912 another work: The Vedic Fathers of Geology. Pavgee's work is distinctly inspired, though not constrained by the work of B. G. Tilak, who disagreed with Pavgee's notion of the Āryāvartic home of the Aryans. However, Pavgee's nationalist Hindu ideology is visible throughout his writings, something that cannot be said for the careful work of Tilak. Pavgee's multivolume work is dedicated with love and respect to all Ārya brothers (ārya-bāndhava) and sisters (ārya-bhaginī) and is intended to express his very strong affection for his dear Ārya mother-land (dayita-ārya-bhūmi).
The second volume of his Bhāratīya Sāmrājya (1893) is titled: Āryalok va tyāñce Buddhi-vaibhav “The Āryan People and the Wealth of their Intelligence.” The book begins with a section dealing with the original home of the Āryas (āryāñce mūla-nivāsa-sthāna). Pavgee asserts at the very beginning that the Vedas are the oldest literature of mankind, and that the Vedas support the notion that northern India is the original home of not just the Aryans, but of the entire mankind (Pavgee 1893: 2). In his support, he cites Elphinstone's History of India:
It is opposed to their foreign origin, that neither in the code, nor, I believe, in the Vedas nor in any book that is certainly older than the code is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further than the Himalaya chain in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.
(Pavgee 1893: 3–4)
The Aryan family of languages originated in India, Pavgee (1893: 5) asserts, and it expanded westward from India through the regions of Iran, Greece, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, and Russia. Pavgee mentions the view of western philologists that the Aryans came into India from outside, but he does not support this view. In the ninth volume of his Bhāratīya Sāmrājya (1900), titled Bharatakhaṇḍātīl Nānāvidha Bhāṣā “Various Languages in India,” Pavgee has a section on the original land of the Ārya language, that is, Sanskrit. Pavgee asserts unequivocally that Sanskrit originated in the region of Āryāvarta within India and is the mother of all Aryan languages. All languages such as Marāṭhī, Hindī, Bengalī, Gujaratī, Iranian, Greek, Latin, German, English, and Polish were born from Sanskrit. They are daughters of Sanskrit (Pavgee 1900: 14). Various originally Ārya groups left their religion and castes and left the original Ārya homeland, and these eventually became the various branches of the Aryan language family. In support of this conclusion, Pavgee offers a large number of passages from Smṛtis and Purāṇas (Pavgee 1900: 16ff).
In his 1912 book in English, The Vedic Fathers of Geology, Pavgee refers to another of his publications that I have not been able to get hold of. However, in this publication, Pavgee tries to outdo the theories of B. G. Tilak. Here are Pavgee's theories in his own words:
In my work entitled “The Āryāvartic Home and the Aryan cradle in the Sapta Sindhus,” or “From Āryāvarta to the Arctic and from the Cradle to the Colony,” and in my larger work in Marathi with still greater details, I have endeavoured to prove, by all sorts of evidences, Vedic and non-Vedic, scriptural and profane, scientific and demonstrative, historical and traditional, that we are autochthonous in India; that we were born in Āryāvarta on the banks or in the region of the reputed and the most sacred river the Sarasvatī, which was deemed by our very ancient Vedic ancestors of the Tertiary Period to be the scene where life had first commenced; that our Colony of young adventurers, having emigrated from and left Āryāvarta, had colonised distant lands of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, and settled in the Arctic and Circum-Polar regions, during the Tertiary Epoch, at a time when the climate of the Arctic regions having been genial, these were fit for human habitation; that at the sight of the new phenomenon of everlasting Dawns, as also of the unusual long days and nights of the Arctic Regions, – to which our colonists from India were not accustomed while living in their Mother-Country-Āryāvarta, – their astonishment and fear knew no bounds; and that at the advent of the great Ice-Age; the once genial climate of the Arctic Regions having been replaced by extreme, not to say unbearable cold, and the higher latitudes having been covered with Ice-caps of enormous thickness, such our colonists as had made settlements there, were compelled to retrace their steps back to their Mother-land Āryāvarta, by the direction of the Snow-clad Himalaya, which was ever in their minds, and which they always remembered and cherished with fondness, as the northern boundary of their Beloved Bhārata-varsha.
(1912: 34–5)
Pavgee attempted to solve all the riddles which Tilak was not able to solve. His theory combined Tilak's Arctic home with an even more ancient Āryāvartic home.4 While Tilak did not explicitly say that the languages and the cultures of the Greeks and the Romans were derived from the Vedas of the Arctic home, Pavgee went ahead and made these assertions. In arguing against the theories proposed by Western philologists, Pavgee found “convincing” evidence in the Smrtis and Purāṇas for the “Out of India” model. In some sense, Pavgee may be credited to be one of the first exponents of this theory, which has gradually become popular among the Hindu nationalists of the twentieth century. In his work, the nationalist ideology and historical reconstruction occupy the same space and they reinforce each other. Beginning with the work of Tilak, and in the work of Pavgee, Bhandarkar's philology takes a back seat, and sciences like astronomy and geology appear as the primary tools for historical reconstruction. Rejecting the primacy of Comparative Philology, Tilak asserts:
Dr. Schrader, in his Pre-historic Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, gives us an exhaustive summary of facts and arguments regarding primitive Aryan culture and civilisation which can be deduced from Linguistic Palæology, or Comparative Philology, and as a repertory of such facts the book stands unrivalled. But we must remember that the results of Comparative Philology, howsoever interesting and instructive they may be from the linguistic or the historical point of view, are apt to mislead us if we know not the site of the original home, or the time when it was inhabited or abandoned by the ancestors of our race.
(1903: 431–2)
This insistence on the use of physical and mathematical sciences is an important development and is again reminiscent of the induction of these sciences in the search for the “Sindhu-Sarasvat” civilization in modern times. In this new “scientific” adventure into historical reconstruction, Tilak's ideas wielded great influence, particularly in the region of Maharashtra. In the Vedavidyā volume of the Marathi Encyclopedia published by S. V. Ketkar (1921: 186ff.), Western views are presented as prima facie views, while Tilak's theory is presented as the siddhānta “final conclusion.”
Before I conclude this discussion of the nineteenth-century theories about Aryans and their migrations as they developed in Maharashtra, I would like to point out a major factor, besides the emerging nationalism. The participants in this discussion are not neutral personalities. Their own identities are directly involved in the production of their theories. Referring to Prakrit languages used in Aśokan inscriptions, Bhandarkar (1914: 296) says: “They are, however, not recognized as independent languages by our grammarians who treated them as we treat the Marathi of the lower classes.” Who is this “we?” This is not just a distant observer/scholar “we.” This refers to “we, as Brahmins.” Thus, the academic scholarship of Bhandarkar and others was inevitably tied to their self-definition as Brahmins. Referring to Bhandarkar, Rosane Rocher (1974: 269) says that his work shows his “upper-class bias,” but we may not be able to extricate any scholar from his or her self-definition, and recognizing these self-definitions allows us to see the forces of history at work. The identity of Bhandarkar, Ranade, Kunte, Chiplunkar, and Tilak as Brahmins has as much to contribute to the shape of their theories, as the non-Brahmin Śūdra identity of Phule has to contribute to the shape of his theories. While a careful scholarly writer like Bhandarkar rarely uses expressions like “we, the Brahmins” or “we, the Āryas,” expressions like “we, the Āryas,” “our Aryan history,” “our Aryan land,” “our Aryan brothers and sisters,” and “what we did in ancient times” abound in the works of Chiplunkar and Pavgee. This collapse of the distance between the object of study and the scholar, especially in the heat of the rising nationalist sentiment, has had serious consequences in the shape of historical scholarship in succeeding decades. This is seen in the works of Vishvanath K. Rajwade, the famous Marathi historian, and, more significantly, in the historical writings of the Hindu Mahāsabhā leader, V. D. Savarkar. The collapse of the gap between the object of historical study and the historian often turns the historian away from his role as a neutral observer and analyst to that of an advocate. This advocacy of a certain point of view, in the cause of self-identity and self-interest, is manifest in the writings of many of the personalities discussed earlier. The stronger this self-advocacy appears in the historical writings of the nineteenth century, a greater shift in the direction of what one may call “Out of India” theory is discerned. As we have noticed, this shift occurred rather slowly, but it was speeded up with the explicit formulations of Pavgee. It is easy to underestimate the impact of Pavgee's publications. However, among the authors discussed here, Chiplunkar and Pavgee were read most widely. Divekar, in his 1981 survey of materials in Marathi on the economic and social history of India (p. 35) says that Pavgee's “multi-volumed Bhāratīya Sāmrājya (Pune, 1893) covers such varied subjects as history, geography, education, science, and crafts in ancient India.” Though less objective than other works, Pavgee's work in Marathi was easily accessible to wider audiences and that this was one of the few such extensive works in Marathi at this time. The Marathi publications of Chiplunkar, Tilak, and Pavgee, stoking the fire of a resurgent nationalistic Brahmanical spirit, were instrumental in the emergence of the later developments in Hindu nationalism under the leadership of Savarkar and others. The India-centered projection of Ārya-Hindu history was an essential part of this nationalistic Hindu project. Its beginning was already made in the nineteenth century.
1 During his visit to Vienna to attend the Congress of Orientalists in 1886, Bhandarkar read out his own Sanskrit verses describing the gathering of scholars. In his own words:
The idea I endeavoured to bring out in these verses. . . was that this body of holy and learned Ṛṣis, adored by gods and men, that had assembled at Mithilā,. . .had risen up again at Vienna. . . . Aśvala, the priest of Janaka, had assumed the form of Bühler, Yājñavalkya appeared as Weber and Roth, and Śākala as Kielhorn. Kahoḍa manifested himself as Jolly; and the remaining Ṛṣis as Ludwig, Rost, Jacobi, and the rest.
(Bhandarkar 1933: Vol. I, 347)
2 Vishnushastri Chiplunkar (1926: 1039) criticizes Kunte for this dedication, suggesting that this dedication allowed Kunte to escape stringent rules of the Department of Education which prohibited a school teacher from engaging in any other work.
3 For details, see: Trautmann 1997: 4–5.
4 In his recollections of his meetings with Tilak, Pavgee says that beginning in 1894 he had many opportunities to discuss his theories with Tilak. Pavgee says that Tilak never agreed with him on his theory of the Āryāvartic home of the Aryans, and insisted on his idea of the Arctic home of the Aryans (see: S. V. Bapat 1925: 523ff). It is perhaps this interaction between the two that inspired Pavgee in his later work to incorporate the notion of the Arctic home as a colony of the Aryans from their Āryāvartic home.
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