Thursday, October 19, 2006

Racial interpretation of the caste system

by: S. Aravindan Neelakandan on Nov 30 2004 12:00AM in Religion
Aryan supremacist ideology is a specific racist ideology. It is completely consistent with the Aryan invasion model. As Dr. Elst points out elsewhere David Duke with his KKK roots, is a passionate advocate of the Aryan invasion model. Indian nationalists have consistently rejected this model and often have criticized the very idea of an Aryan 'race'. Sri Aurobindo as early as 1914, while criticizing the Aryan race theory as an imaginary creation of philologists[23], made the following remark,
“I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more obscure and difficult to determine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it the trenchant distinctions current in the popular mind are wholly out of place.”[24]
Calling the Aryan invasion theory 'a philological myth', Sri Aurobindo considered that the so-called racial distinction between the Aryans and Dasyus, then advocated by British Indologists was based on 'flimsier character'[25]. He also warned with a keen insight of the dangers that could arise from treating a speculative race theory as a scientific fact. According to Sri Aurobindo:
“We are ready to accept all European theories, the theory of an 'Aryan' colonization of a Dravidian India, the theory of Nature worship…as if these hazardous speculations were on par in authority and certainty with the law of gravitation and the theory of evolution.”
“So great is the force of attractive generalizations and widely popularized errors that all the world goes on perpetuating the blunder talking of the Indo-European races, claiming or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building on that basis of falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-scientific conclusions."[26] ...
Dr. Ambedkar stands along with Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda in rejecting the racial interpretation of the caste system. But Indian 'secularists', Marxists as well as British colonialists accept the racial interpretation of the caste system. It is an irony that the followers of E.V. Ramasamy who call themselves rationalists often share the dais with anti-evolutionist Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.
In fact, there is another crucial area where Dr. Ambedkar is nearer to the Hindu nationalist rather than to the pseudo-secularist. It is the case of Sanskrit. The attempts of Hindu nationalists to revive Sanskrit have often drawn heavy criticism from Marxists, pseudo-secularists and 'Dravidian' racist parties. In fact, 'Dravidian' racist parties like DMK, are followers of E.V. Ramasamy's doctrine that North Indians and Brahmins are racially different from Dravidians and that Hinduism is a Brahminical conspiracy to enslave the Dravidian race*. Thus, in these circles Sanskrit is often abused with all sorts of epithets – most of which are unprintable and obscene. But it so happens Dr. Ambedkar went even one step forward than the Hindu nationalists who accept Hindi as the national language and want only to revive Sanskrit. Comments (19)

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