The People That Never Were: Linguistic Scholarship and the Invention of the Aryans takes the reader through the history of the concept Aryan,
beginning with colonial scholarship in India around 1800, and ending in
the first decades of the twentieth century. The book shows how Aryan
emerged as a free-standing explanatory device, and a key to historical
narratives of superiority and inferiority. History came to be understood
as consisting of peoples or races with assigned characteristics and
world views. The book takes apart the arguments for the existence of an
Aryan race or people in ancient times, focussing in particular on the
role of philologists in offering distorted readings of ancient Sanscrit
texts. It shows that Aryan came into English around 1840, promoted
primarily by F. Max Müller, whose own conceptual confusions subsequently
were projected back onto ancient India and at the same time read into
contemporary Europe. The conclusion looks at the academic debate today,
notably in relation to scholarly authority and to the insider/outsider
dichotomy that seemingly pits Western Indology against Hindu
nationalism. It suggests that historical linguistics no less than race
theory is based on a series of profound conceptual errors. Myths about Aryan
perpetuated by scholars over two centuries have distorted our
understanding of British colonialism in India as well as of Nazi
ideology.
Online ISBN:
9780190213015
Print ISBN:
9780190212988
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
1
Philology and Physical Anthropology
2
Sir William Jones
3
The Emergence of the Aryan Paradigm
4
Philologies Collide
5
Invasion Theory and the Aryan/Dravidian Dichotomy
6
Language and Race
7
Anti-Aryanism and Revivalist Aryanism in India
8
Concluding Discussion
End Matter
