Description

Until the mid-19th century, no Indian had ever heard of the notion that his ancestors
could be ¯Aryan invaders from Central Asia who had destroyed the native civilization and
enslaved the native population. Neither had South-Indians ever dreamt that they were the
rightful owners of the whole subcontinent, dispossessed by the ¯Aryan invaders who had
chased them from North India, turning it into A¯ryavarta, the land of the A¯ryans. Nor had
the low-caste people heard that they were the original inhabitants of India, subdued by
the ¯Aryans and forced into the prisonhouse of caste which the conquerors imposed upon
them as an early form of Apartheid. All these ideas had to be imported by European
scholars and missionaries, who thought through the implications of the ¯Aryan Invasion
Theory (AIT), the theory that the Indo-European (IE) language family had spread out
from a given homeland, probably in Eastern Europe, and found a place in Western and
Southern Europe and in India as cultural luggage of horse-borne invaders who subjugated
the natives.
One of the first natives to interiorize these ideas was Jotirao Phule, India’s first modern
Mahatma, a convent-educated low-caste leader from Maharashtra. In 1873, he set the
tone for the political appropriation of the AIT: “Recent researches have shown beyond
a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins were not the Aborigines of India ( . . . ) Aryans
came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as
conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self,
extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted.”

Dr. Koenraad Elst, Belgium, makes it clear that the theory was a propaganda of British to divide & rule Indians.