Thomas Trautmann
- Published in print:
- 1997
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520205468
- eISBN:
- 9780520917927
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520205468.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism ...
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“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.Less
“Aryan,” a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as this book shows in its far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological “race science” attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly “white” racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India that the book calls “the racial theory of Indian civilization,” and which it undermines with its analysis of colonial ethnology in India.
