--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "david_russell_watson" <liberty@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > Yes, because if AIT is true, the present Indian ruling class is
> > related more to the former British colonials that to the people
> > of large parts of India
>
> What Aryan-invasion theory not over a century old claims that?
>
> India is presently a democracy, so in what sense does it have
> a ruling class, much less a class consistently related to any
> other group, including the ancient Aryans?
>
With "ruling class", he seems to mean the upper castes. Till today,
attempts are made to interpret the genetic studies as showing that
the upper castes are more European than the lower castes; This was
announced with much fanfare after the publication of a study by a
Prof. Bamshad from Utah on the population of the SE-Indian state of
Andhra Pradesh. In fact, his results were perfectly explainable with
known data from Indian CE history regardless of any Aryan invasion:
it is known that in India's south and east, the Brahmin caste was
imported from the northwest, where *all* people on average are more
European-looking (taller, lighter-skinned, straighter-nosed) than in
Andhra, by a natural gradient. Just as people in North-Africa are
more European-looking than in Central Africa, without therefore
having immigrated from Europe.
In colonial days, the IE kinship of Britons and Indians was
explicitly used to justify colonization, e.g. in Viceroy Lord
Curzon's speech ca. 1905. Race was part of this reasoning: in spite
of their anti-miscegenation rules, the Indo-Aryans had mixed a bit
too much with "native" Draupadis, so they lost some of their Aryan
racial qualities and now stood in need of some help from their purer
British cousins.
> Moreover the British aren't Aryan, certainly not genetically,
> but not even culturally or linguistically. English isn't an
> Indo-Iranian language.
>
Again, "Aryan" is clearly meant in its 19th-century sense of "Indo-
European".
> Can you really look at two Indians side by side, from any two
> castes, and find them less closely related to one another than
> either to a typical Briton, Torsten?
>
I'd say an average Panjabi looks more like an Englishman than like an
Andaman islander. In the far northwest of the subcontinent, in some
members of the Pakistani ruling class, you do find specimens that, if
dressed in Western suit, could perfectly pass for Europeans.
> > and therefore has no more right to rule them than the British
> > did.
>
> Such a conclusion is a necessary one for a nationalist only.
>
The original version is the reverse: because they are cousins, the
British have as much right to rule India as the Indo-Aryans had. This
was said explicitly by Churchill: "we have as much right to be in
india as the Indians, except perhaps for the depressed classes who
are the native stock."
There is no denying at all that the AIT has been used to the hilt as
a political tool. But that doesn't make it true or false.
KE