Parishti Project

Between 1845 and 1880, Indian resistance to the British presence in India was growing. Continued corporate occupation through treaties and trade agreements was becoming untenable.

The British East India Company ("Company"), which had been incorporated in 1600, would be dissolved in 1873 marking the transfer of the reigns from corporate colonization to national colonization. The Company was scrambling to justify its continued occupation of India. It chose to capitalize on the linguistic similarity between language families to create a western origin story to appropriate almost 6K years of social and scientific progress on the Indian subcontinent.

Under contract to the Company, F. (Friedrich) Max Müller mistranslated the Sanskrit word arya (meaning “good”)[1] in the Rig-Veda[2] to manufacture a mythical race called Aryans (a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, race of invaders[3]) who Müller argued brought Sanskrit (together with its pre-existing literature) to India when they invaded.

The plot sequence of Müller’s mythology would have been as follows:

1. Mature Harappan Civilization (2600-1700 BCE)
   
   At this stage, the Harappan Civilization an established agrarian and sea-trading culture, with an estimated 2,500 cities.
   
   Though Müller did not have the benefit of genetic testing, we now know that the inter-generational female burials at Harappa were related to each other, while the male burials were not. This suggests that men who sailed away to trade married and settled elsewhere, while men who sailed to Harappa to trade married and settled in the families of their wives.
    
2. Late Harappan Civilization (1700-1300 BCE)
   
   During the Late Harappan Civilization, the Indus River had dried up and ceased to be navigable. Sea-trade became more difficult and the inhabitants moved away from the Indus Valley to more hospitable regions.
    
3. Vedic Period (1700-1000 BCE)
   
   The texts that Müller cites as the authority for his Aryan Invasion Mythology are set in the Vedic Period.

The British cultural continuity justification for occupation of India fell apart when Müller recanted his interpretation of the word arya under pressure from fellow linguists, claiming that he always meant Aryan to refer to a language group rather than a newly discovered race of people. When Müller failed to defend his new mythology, the British abandoned but did not debunk Aryan identity, leaving a vacant weapon abandoned by the side of the road with a full tank of gas, the keys in the ignition and the engine running.[4] It was reasonably foreseeable that someone (like Germany) might see the vacant Aryan identity as useful and drive it away. That is exactly what happened.

Having cast themselves in the self-story of Übermensch, German officers were unable to accept that they lost WWI. They falsely blamed internal sabotage by Jewish businessmen, who they argued cared more for than their own profits than for aiding the war effort. Übermensch scapegoated Jews for both the loss of WWI and the punitive reparations that were crippling the German economy. Then in 1939, the German Übermensch drove Britain’s weaponized mythology right into Poland, started WWII, built concentration camps, and committed genocide against 12 million people[5]. (Übermensch also invented BMWs, while Coco Chanel made everything smell nice, and IBM counted it all.)

If you are still a believer in the existence of an Aryan race of Germanic invaders, ask yourself how Sanskrit (or any written script) and its vast literature disappeared from Germany in the 1200 years between 800 BCE, when the Vedic translated by Müller were written, and the 4th century CE when Gothic script was created using Latin and Greek letters[6]. Remember, it was the linguistic similarities between India and its trading partners[7] from which Müller manufactured his Aryan Invasion Mythology. Until he recanted, Müller argued that the similarities of language could only have come from a military invasion, and not from more than a millennium of trade and cultural exchange preceding the Vedic Period.

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[1] Dr NS Rajaram, “Aryan Invasion — History or Politics?” (29 April 2014), Archaeology Online.

[2] F Max Müller, Rig-Veda-Sanhita: the sacred hymns of the Brahmans (London: Trübner, 1869).

[3] Müller sets his mythical invasion at the time of the Rigveda, which is itself set in approximately 1500 BEC – 1200 BCE, but the text he was translating dated from 800 BCE, no older versions of the Rigveda having survived. For comparison, the oldest archaeological site in India at that time (now Pakistan) was the matrilocal sea trading port of Harappa.  “Harappa” in Wikipedia.

[4] Consider also that at any time between the invasion of Poland, and the genocide of 12 million people, Britain could have stepped forward and admitted, “Nope, we made it all up”. Consider what a crushing defeat that admission would have been to the German PR machine. Did Britain hold that weapon in reserve because it still needed the Aryan myth to justify its continuing colonial projects, or was Churchill a true believer?

[5]  Übermensch committed genocide against six million Jews and six million others including Blacks, Muslims, Roma, communists, 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, resistance fighters in every country he occupied, persons with disabilities, and his own injured veterans returning from the front.

[6] “The first written Germanic language was created in the 4th Century, by Bishop Ulfilas, who used Latin and Greek orthography to create a version of the Bible in Gothic.”, Babbelcom & Lesson Nine GmbH, “The History of the German Language”, Babbel Magazine.

[7] Bengalis were trading Dhaka muslin with Egyptians to shroud mummies more than 2 millennia ago. Smithsonian Magazine & Livia Gershon, “How Modern Researchers Are Trying to Recreate a Long-Lost Fabric”, online: Smithsonian Magazine. The reason that no one knows how to make Dhaka muslin anymore is that the East India Company cut the thumbs off Bengali weavers when it could not move the production of Dhaka muslin to Britain, thus creating a market for western textiles to be sold into India. "The ancient fabric that no one knows how to make",