Eternal India Encyclopedia

Eternal India encyclopedia

LURE - THRU THE AGES

Aryans : A nation or a code that defined a civilization?

the noble class (Arya Kshatriyas) have gradually sunk to the state of servants — the Paundrakas, Chodas, Dravidas, Kambojas, Yavanas, Shakhas, Paradhas, Pahlavas, Chinas, Kiratas and Daradas. ” Two points about this list are worth noting: 1. Their fall from the Aryan fold had nothing to do with race, birth or nationality; it was due entirely to their failure to follow certain sacred rites. 2. The list includes people from all parts of India as well as a few neighbouring countries like China and Persia (Pahlavas). Kambojas are from West Punjab, Yavanas from Afghanistan and beyond (not necessarily the Greeks) while Dravidas refers probably to people from the southwest of India and the south. Thus the modem idea of Aryan-Dravidian racial divide is fully dis- credited by ancient records. We have it on the authority of Manu that the Dravidians were also part of the Aryan fold. Interestingly, so were the Chinese. Race never had anything to do with it until the Europeans adopted the ancient word to give expression to their nationalistic and other aspirations. The Rig Veda uses the word mainly as an adjective, invariably as a term implying finer qualities. The closest to a definition of Arya that one can find in the Rig Veda is probably the following : ....praja arya jyotiragarh Children of Arya seek and are led by jyoti (light) (C.R.V. VII 33.7) The word “light” here, is to be taken in the spiritual sense of enlight- enment. Once again the idea of Aryan as a race is fully refuted by ancient records going back thousands of years. It refers to a code of conduct that defined a civilization. The following description of Rama given in the great epic Ramayana of Valmiki is a singularly eloquent expression of the Aryan ideal. aryah sarva-samashcaiva sadaiva priyadarshanah Arya — who cared for the equality of all and was dear to everyone. In summary, it can safely be asserted that the word Arya denoted certain spiritual and human values that defined and sustained an ancient civilization. The entire Aryan civilization — the civilization of Vedic India — was driven and sustained by this ideal. The whole of ancient Indian literature from the Vedas, the Brahmanas to the Puranas to the epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana can be seen as records of the struggles of an ancient people to live up to the ideal. Anyone regardless of birth, race or national origin could become Aryan by following this code of conduct. It was not something to be imposed on others by the sword or by proselytization. Viewed in this light, the whole notion of any “Aryan invasion” is a contradiction of terms. (N.S.R.)

The words Arya and Aryan are among the most widely used terms while speaking of ancient history, and yet they are seldom if ever clearly defined. The most familiar usage is as a race or a tribe that invaded India in the second millennium BC which gave rise to the famous Aryan invasion theory. To add to the confusion, Max Muller himself used Arya to mean both race and a family of languages — a family that included Indian, Iranian and European languages. To further confuse the issue, Arya became a racial term among Europeans, especially Germans in their efforts to free themselves from the Judaic heritage of Christianity. The notion of the “Aryan nation” was a very potent force in the political movement that led to German unification'. This, as Max Muller noted, added confusion to both linguistics and anthropology. Recognizing this, he denounced the idea of Aryans as a race or nation in no uncertain terms, in the following famous statement made in 1888 : “I have declared again and again that if I say ‘Aryan’ I mean neither blood nor bone, nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak the Aryan language. To me an ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood and Aryan eyes and hair is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of dolicocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic gram- mar. ” It is clear that when he gave vent to this expression of frustration, Max Muller had firmly decided that Aryan was a linguistic concept. But the issue is not so simple for he himself had contributed to the confusion by using the term in the racial sense before 1871. Recent research has established that German unification following the Franco- Prussian War (1870-71) was a major factor in this shift from race to language. Modem science, especially the emergence of Molecular Genetics in this century has fully exploded the notion of Aryan as a race. Nonetheless the discredited notion of the Aryan race continued to be invoked in Europe at least until the defeat of Hitler in 1945. Thus the European uses of the terms Arya and Aryan represent no more than popular political and academic fashions and provide no help whatso- ever in trying to understand the meaning of the word as used in ancient India where the term originated. In order to understand the real meaning of the word we must look to the original Indian sources. The term Arya in India is extremely ancient going back to the Rig Veda itself. The Amarakosha (c. 500 AD), the authoritative lexicon of classical Sanskrit defines Arya as mahakula kulinarya sabhya sajjana sadhavah which may be translated as : “An Arya is one who hails from a noble family, of good conduct and of gentle behaviour and demeanour.” There is no reference to any race, nation or language. Aryans according to the originators of the term referred to those who observed a code of conduct; people were Aryans or non-Aryans depending on whether or not they followed this code. This is made entirely explicit in the Manudharma Shastra or the Manusmriti which states : “But in consequence of the omission of sacred rites, and of their not heeding the sages, the following people of