There were many followers of Lord Macaulay in addition to Sir Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones. Lt. Colonel Coke, Commandant of Morodabad, in the year 1860, wrote to the then Governor General as follows:-

Our endeavor should be to uphold in full force, the separation (for us fortunate) which exists between different religions and races, not to endeavor to amalgamate them. Divide et Impera should be the principle of the Indian government.

The method adopted by St. Francis Xavier for the Hindu soul can be understood clearly – a sword in one hand and a cross in the other. The Arab and the Turk methods too, were easy to understand. The method adopted by the British, however, was unique. It was according to the suggestions made by Lord Macaulay, to demean the Hindu culture and demoralize Hindus by impressing upon them the superiority of the culture and the language of the West.

This is where the British were at their best. They adopted the Divide et Impera policy in full. Politicians, historians, linguists and missionaries, with the full backing of the government finance and authority, went to work.

After the formation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, it became a race to come up with the most feasible story of the invasion by the Aryans and locate the rightful owners of the Sanskrit language. Many countries joined in this race by the formation of organizations and also creating Sanskrit studies at the universities.

The following organizations were formed: Societie Asiatique of Paris in 1822; Royal Asiatic Society of G.B. and Ireland in 1823 and branches were opened in Boombay, Ceylon, China and Malaysia; American Oriental Society in 1842 and German Oriental Society in 1844.
Universities in many countries became deeply involved in the most interesting subject, Comparative Philology. Some of them include The Institute of Indology in Berlin and Bonn University of Germany; Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities in Great Britain; Yale, John Hopkins and Columbia Universities in the U.S.A. and College de France. There is no previous record of such effort being made by world nations to study the origin of the culture and language of one occupied nation.

The Europeans were impressed with neither the Hindu culture nor religion. However, they could not hide their surprise at the uniqueness of the Sanskrit language. They observed that many Sanskrit words had uncanny resemblance to words in many European languages. This became the basis of a new branch of linguistics, comparative philology.

This was a period of great excitement for the linguists and historians. Each one was after justifying that the origin could be his country. That it is their nation that is the home of the Aryan Race. Their ideas about the Aryan race, supposedly their ancestors, were very different from the views about Hindus and their culture expressed by Lord Macaulay in his address to the Parliament.

For the Europeans, their ancestors, the Aryans, were the Conquistadores, the destroyers of the towns, cities and the culture. In fact, the history of Europe is not very different. The British Isles rose to their greatest just as the British Empire with India being the Jewel in the Crown. Within 200 years, the British saw the rise and fall of the Empire.

“It was only an island where uncivilized tribes lived. The island was called Britain (Rand McNally Social Studies Series).”

The Celtics, people of the tribe called Celt, were attacked by tribes from Northern Germany and Holland. The attackers were Angles, Jutes and Saxons. The country came to be known as Anglaise or Angle-land, and eventually England. The people are called Anglo-Saxons even today.

The Anglo-Saxons hardly had time to settle when they were attacked by the Vikings, the sea-faring Danish people. The Vikings are also known as the Northmen or Normans, since they had reached the north of France. Hence, this area was called Normandy.

William the Conqueror, a Norman, won the English crown and introduced French as official language. After the death of William the Conqueror, the Anglo-Saxons rose again and claimed the right over the French throne. It entailed into a long war, came to be known as The 100 Years War.

A French girl, Jeannette d’Arc from a little village, Domremy in eastern France, came to the rescue of her nation. Jeannette came to be known as Joan of Arc, as well as Maid of Orleans. She saved the French crown, however, no French ruler came to save her when she was being burned to death at the stake by the English.

The English too, reached North America and participated in land grabbing, destruction of culture, slavery trade and high-sea robberies of the Spanish ships loaded with gold and silver.

The British tried to squeeze the people of the 13 Colonies with taxation, when they were asked to leave the land. They then turned their sights to India.

Bhikhu Patel is a contributor to India Tribune’s opinions column and India West’s letters to the editor. Here at ICC, Bhikhu is an active participant in the Rangmach Senior program. Born in Tanzania and educated in the UK, Mr. Patel is an accountant by profession, but is an amateur historian by passion.

Every historian has a different tale to tell about the home of the Aryans, and with good reason; the Aryans were always on the move, “in search of grazing lands (Pageant of India).”

One historian happened to see them in Europe (Rapid Reference World History), where as another saw them in the Western Steppe lands of Eurasia. A third described the area of sighting as “north of the Black Sea and the Caspian.” The historians of People & Our World were more specific in saying they were spotted “east of the Caspian Sea.” Even though the historians differed in their views about the home of the Aryans, they agreed about the route taken “in search of pasture land” as well as the places where long stoppages were made.

In The Story of Mankind, Hendrick Van Loon starts with the Aryans’ transit stop, saying that they were ‘living along the shores of Caspian Sea for many centuries’.
An observation was made by Major Yeats-Brown that “the budding was in the unknown motherland, somewhere in the Uplands of Central Asia.”
The Aryans’ possible route from Europe to the East was through Middle Asia, now called the Middle East. After living along the shores of Caspian Sea for many centuries, the Aryans moved again in search of fresh pasture lands. They moved to the peaks surrounding the Iranian Plateau.

For centuries, they lived among the peaks surrounding the Plateau of Iran, and that is why, Van Loon says, we call them Aryans. Would it matter to Van Loon what they called before being given the name Aryans?

It became time to move again. They moved in waves of immigration through the passes of the Hindu Kush, finally arriving in the fertile plains of the Indus (A Rapid-Reference World History). These tall blue-eyed people sallied forth in search of grazing lands (Pageant of India). The first wave of Nordics is believed to have passed into India around 1700 BC, followed by a succession of others. Wouldn’t you wonder why the Nordics with their cattle and families would pass through difficult areas and terrain to such long distances such as India?

A C Bouquet had the answer in his book Comparative Religion. He said that “these people were very much of the type of our Scandinavian fore-fathers, hard fighting, heavy drinking folk, kept their race pure and became the progenitors of the highest Hindu castes.”

The Nordics or Germanic people came to be regarded as the purest Aryans. The Aryan Nation organization claims the qualification of Aryan Race for their members, in fact, Adam, Noah and the clan, and their progeny are claimed to be of Aryan race.

According to Bishop Usher, the formulator of Biblical (Christian) Chronology, God made his creation in the year 4004 BC. The humans misbehaved, hence the flooding of the rivers known as The Great Flood. All the miscreants were destroyed. That happened in 2350 BC.

Of course, Noah and the clan were saved by God during the period of the Great Flood in Noah’s Ark. They stayed for some time on Mt. Ararat, which is situated in the popular region near the Caspian Sea. When the flood subsided, they came down to the fertile plains of Tigris and Euphrates.

Noah and the clan had help from God-people and soon there was great increase in their clan. There was unity among people, and there was one language. It was decided the Tower of Babel would be built and that it would reach the clouds. God feared losing his place in heaven. He struck terror in the hearts of men by creating different languages. Now no one understood his neighbor. They quarreled among each other. This was the beginning of dispersal. The Tower was never completed. This occurred around 2000 BC.

Some tribes, after spending centuries among the peaks surrounding the Plateau of Iran, now acquired the name Aryan, entered India. The popular period is around 1500 BC. The European historians followed the Biblical Chronology, to justify the Aryan Invasion Theory.

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