Aryanism and Empire

Javed Majeed
History Workshop Journal, Issue 58, Autumn 2004, pp. 312-316 (Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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clarity shows mastery not only of the scientic theories but also of the practice of
writing for a specic audience, whether young children or a scientic elite. An
emphasis on connexion in all these texts between the sciences, between science
and society, between reader and writer leads the way condently to future research
on womens integrated and integral position within the history of science.
Aryanism and Empire
by Javed Majeed
Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire, Palgrave,
Basingstoke and New York, 2002; 266 pp., 55. ISBN 0333963601.
Race in British India has been explored by scholars for several decades, beginning
with Kenneth Ballhatchets wry and well-observed Race, Sex and Class under the
Raj: Imperial Attitudes and their Critics 17931905 (1980). This was the rst full-
length scholarly study of the inuence of the category of race on British attitudes in
India, showing how crucial that category was for the maintenance of social distance
between British ofcials and Indians. Ballhatchet also considered, amongst other
themes, the changing attitudes of British ofcials to Eurasians, or those of mixed
European and Indian parentage, as a barometer of the increasingly rigid notions of
race that characterized British thinking in India as the nineteenth century wore on.
Ballhatchets work was followed by an important essay by David Washbrook,
Ethnicity and racism in colonial Indian history, which appeared in a collection of
essays edited by Robert Ross entitled Racism and Colonialism (1982). Whereas
Ballhatchet tended to focus on attitudes to Eurasians, Washbrook made the key
point that British interpretations of Indian society bore the mark of a sociology of
multiple ethnicity, in which Indian society as a whole was seen in terms of a loose
collection of different racial groups. Washbrook noted how this outlook under-
pinned strategies to legitimize British rule in India, but more importantly he raised
the question of the impact of the concept of race on Indian self-perceptions. He
considered why Indians proved to be so receptive to the language of race, and how
they began to redene their own identities in increasingly racial terms.
Following these studies, there have been a number of works on race in British
India developing further these lines of enquiry. Some studies continue to concen-
trate on Eurasians, or Anglo-Indians as they are also called,
1
while one recent work
focuses on the category of the Aryan, showing how it emerged from British Orien-
talist scholarship in nineteenth-century India. Thomas R. Trautmanns Aryans and
British India (1997) is an elegant and detailed exposition of the connections between
the philology of British Orientalist scholarship and British ethnography, in which
the concept of race held a central, if contested, position. His starting point is the
formulation by Sir William Jones in 1786, published in the Asiatick Researches of
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1788, of what was to be later called the Indo-European family of languages. Perceiv-
ing a close afnity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, Jones articulated a theory of
the monogenesis of humankind, on the basis of which he outlined the diffusion of
different nations of peoples across the globe. Trautmann traces the connections
between this linguistic formulation and the concept of race by analysing how British
Orientalists interpreted and developed the category of Arya which they found in
Sanskrit texts in ethnographic terms. He shows how this inuenced British notions
of the history of civilizations and of the relationships between British and Indians
as Aryan groups who might have been related to each other in the distant past. In
this sense, the racial language of Aryanism became a source of tension in British
ideologies of the Raj, between the search for grounds of similarity between the
British and Indians, and an emphasis on differences between these two societies and
groups.
2
At the same time, Trautmann shows how the relationship between
philology and ethnology came under increasing strain as the nineteenth century
wore on.
Alongside these studies which tend to focus on the colonial deployment of race
as a heuristic device and organizing category in British India, there have been a
number of examinations of how the category of race was internalized and appro-
priated by Indians to understand and redene their own group identities. This
process was the subject of the collection edited by Peter Robb, The Concept of Race
in South Asia (Delhi, 1995), which examines how specic Indian groups constructed
their own group identities using the language of race. Some of these reformulated
identities deployed the Aryan-Dravidian distinction which was developed by
British scholars and ethnographers as a framework within which to understand the
category of caste, and to explain the decline of ancient India caused by the inter-
marriage of these two racial groups. From this perspective, the decline of India from
its ancient position was seen by some British commentators as a powerful reminder
of the dangers of miscegenation. The impact of race on the formation of Indian
identities has also been usefully discussed in terms of the category of the so-called
martial races. Here scholars have considered how some Indian groups began to
perceive themselves in terms of this British concept, in part because of the consider-
able benets which accrued with their access to the British Indian army as potential
recruits.
3
In a sense, this inuence was part of a general process, whereby the terms
of community which were enshrined in the British Census of India inevitably
became part and parcel of Indian self-perceptions.
4
In addition to these areas of
study, another important eld of enquiry has addressed interactions between race
and gender, in which constructions of femininity and masculinity have been
shown to interlock with hierarchies of race.
5
Tony Ballantynes important work emerges partly from these strands of enquiry.
It expands this eld of study by combining these different emphases to consider both
British constructions of an Aryan race and specic Indian appropriations of it. It
outlines the emergence of Aryanism in British Orientalist scholarship and shows
how this was appropriated by some forms of Hindu nationalism in the latter part of
the nineteenth century. While some of this is familiar territory, Ballantyne is careful
to note how different groups of Indians used the concept in different ways. He
stresses how some Indian Christians used the idea of an Aryan race to construct a
vision of an egalitarian society characterized by loyalty to the crown and racial
fraternity, and throughout he is careful to note how the notion of an Aryan racial
community was contested and exible in imperial and post-colonial India. He is also
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sensitive to the different levels on which the theory of Aryanism worked among
colonial ofcials and writers, showing that while the theory had considerable
authority at the macro level, it had a limited cachet at the regional level, so that the
scholar-administrators of the Punjab tended to diverge from the Aryan model in
their formulations on the nature of Punjabi society.
Where Ballantyne breaks new ground is in the comparative framework he elab-
orates to deal with the question of Aryanism. He convincingly argues that previous
intellectual histories have been limited by their concentration on particular
geographical and cultural territories, especially nation-states, which has precluded
them from examining ideas circulating throughout the British empire as a whole. He
also argues that previous studies tended to work with a rigid model of the relation-
ships between metropolis and empire, in which lines of communication, nance and
personnel radiated out from London to colonial peripheries. Ballantynes focus is
different. He utilizes the metaphor of a web to draw attention to the horizontal
linkages between colonies and to different kinds of inter-colonial exchanges. From
this perspective, a particular colony or city can be seen to have occupied multiple
positions, so that Calcutta might be subaltern in relation to London while at the
same time being an important sub-imperial centre from which lines of patronage,
accumulation, and communication owed out into the South Asian hinterland and
beyond to other parts of Asia.
This comparative framework underpins Ballantynes central project, to show how
the intellectual products of British Orientalist scholarship in nineteenth-century
India circulated to other parts of the empire. In particular, he provides us with a
fascinating account of how the category of an Aryan race, produced by British
scholars in India, was used by a variety of British writers to interpret the society,
culture and origins of the Maoris in New Zealand. He is able to point to the specic
ways in which nineteenth-century ethnographers, linguists, missionaries and ofcials
drew links between Polynesian languages and Sanskrit, or cultural parallels between
Hindu India and Maori society, in order to argue for the Aryan origins of Maoris.
Following in the wake of Sir William Joness diffusionist theory of humankind, these
Orientalists made the case for the Indian origins of the Maori, a position exempli-
ed by the work of Edward Treagar, who in his The Aryan Maori (1885) argued that
linguistic comparison showed that the Maori left India four-thousand years ago,
migrating almost directly to New Zealand. Similarly, a number of inuential scholars
from Max Muller to E. B. Tylor drew comparisons between Maori and Hindu
mythology in order to argue that Maori religion was a transplanted form of
Hinduism, while others pointed to parallels between the caste system in India and
the structure of Polynesian society. From this perspective then, while India may have
been in a subaltern position in relation to London, it operated as a sub-imperial
centre with regard to Australasia by providing the materials and methodologies for
the interpretation of Maori society, language and religion in New Zealand. In these
methodologies the notion of the Aryan, developed on the basis of the afnity
between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, had a powerful valency.
However, Ballantyne is concerned to show how Aryanism in New Zealand, as in
India itself, could be used both to legitimize and to subvert colonial authority and
racial hierarchies. He is careful to show how these theories were challenged by
others, not least by Maoris themselves, who imagined their communities in ways
which reread their own traditions while incorporating new European ideas. This
included incorporating their own interpretations of the Bible, especially the Old
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Testament after its translation into Maori in 1858. Here Ballantyne shows how
Maori writers and thinkers increasingly identied themselves with the Israelites of
the Old Testament and so rejected the idea of Aryanism. With this contrast between
the Maori rejection of Aryanism and its internalization by some strands of Indian
and / or Hindu nationalism, Ballantyne rounds the comparative circle.
Ballantyne is careful to account for shifts in intellectual paradigms in relation to
their broader historical and social contexts. This sensitivity to context is apparent in
his interpretation of the subtext in C. J. Abrahams article On the Celtic origin of
the English vowel sounds in the rst volume of the New Zealand Institutes Trans-
actions and Proceedings (1858), which he reads in terms of the need to use linguis-
tic analysis to minimize ethnic and religious difference among the settler population.
Similarly, he cites J. T. Thomsons arguments, developed in a series of articles for
the Transactions from 1871 to 1878, as to the descent of the Maori from an archaic
negro race occupying the peninsula of Hindostan (p. 71). Here he shows how
Thomson drew upon contemporary Indological studies of south Indian and tribal
languages to recongure his own sense of the relationships between the apparently
dynamic and progressive European settlers and the supposedly doomed Maori.
Ballantyne is also scrupulous in showing how political events in India had an impact
on the study of Maori society, arguing that it was the 18578 Indian rebellion which
led commentators in New Zealand to search for an indigenous Maori religious
system, whereas before they had denied the very existence of a systematic body of
beliefs. This broader concern for context also underpins his explanations for the
eventual demise of the Indocentric paradigm in Maori studies from the 1890s
onwards.
There is no doubt that Ballantynes comparative framework captures an
important dimension of the production of knowledge in the British empire. In the
second half of the nineteenth century the questions in the Indian Civil Service
examinations were cast in a comparative mode, inviting candidates to draw parallels
and contrasts between key aspects of ancient Greek and Roman societies and
contemporary Indian. The style of these questions is testimony to the way compara-
tive approaches were taken for granted as an important feature of the production
of ethnographically-oriented legal, historical and linguistic knowledge.
6
In this way, Ballantynes framework reects the comparative approaches which
characterized the production of knowledge within the British empire. However, at
the same time, these approaches were sometimes unstable, in so far as they occasion-
ally produced bodies of knowledge or insights which either exceeded or undermined
the terms of comparison.
7
Ballantynes own work sometimes also reects these dif-
culties. It is not clear (to this reviewer at least) how his argument about the reinter-
pretation of Sikh identities ts in with his argument as a whole, in so far as there is
no apparent applicability of this process in ethnographic reconstructions of the ethos
or traditions of Maori society and culture in martial terms. Furthermore, while
Ballantyne is careful to show specic links between British Orientalism and rein-
terpretations of Maori society, at times this specicity is lost when he seems to
suggest that the mere use of comparative methodologies signals the existence of an
Indocentric paradigm. But after Sir William Jones, not to use such a comparative
framework in these elds of study would have been difcult, if not impossible.
Comparativism was inscribed into the very discipline of linguistics, and as such it
could not be avoided, irrespective of the origins of that paradigm. Ballantyne also
tends to take the language of race for granted, in so far as Aryanism is seen to
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exemplify and to emerge from that language. Here Trautmann is more careful,
because he points to the historical development and changes in the concept of race
which had an impact on the changing fortunes of Aryanism.
However, these are issues raised by Ballantynes innovative and lucid book, more
than they are criticisms. Combining a wide-ranging comparative framework with
rigorous analysis of textual links and intellectual inuences, the work has broken the
mould of intellectual histories of the British empire. Ballantyne has done imperial
history a major service by opening up new avenues of comparative enquiry into how
intellectual capital circulated within the British empire, and continues to circulate
today within and between its successor societies.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 For example, see Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian
community in British India, 17731883, Richmond, 1996.
2 Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge, 1994, sees this as the dening
tension in British imperial ideologies as they related to India.
3 See in particular David Omissy, Martial races: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial
India 18581939, War and Society 9: 1, May 1991. See also Richard G. Fox, Lions of the Punjab:
Culture in the Making, Berkeley, 1985.
4 For example, see The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. N. Gerald Barrier,
Delhi, 1981.
5 For example, see Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the Manly Englishman and the
Effeminate Bengali in the late nineteenth century, Manchester, 1995.
6 See my Comparativism and References to Rome in British Imperial Attitudes to India,
in Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture 17891945, ed. Catharine
Edwards, Cambridge, 1999.
7 Majeed, Comparativism and references to Rome, as previous note.
Pulpit Politics
by Anthony Page
Stuart Andrews, Unitarian Radicalism: Political Rhetoric, 17701814, Palgrave,
Basingstoke and New York, 2003; xii + 232 pages, 47.50. ISBN 0333969251.
Religious toleration was a central value of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Religious toleration in England, though praised by Voltaire, was a restricted toler-
ation combined with discrimination. Toleration was conned to orthodox protestant
dissent and failure to conform to the Church of England carried with it a range of
civil disabilities. Unitarians, those who rejected the orthodox doctrine of the holy
trinity, technically stood outside the bounds of toleration. Thus, early in the century
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