Aryan Invasion Theory and Politics: the Case of David Duke

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Aryan Invasion Theory and Politics: the Case of David Duke

Koenraad Elst

David Duke

There are, broadly speaking, three political movements which have taken an interest in the Aryan invasion debate. The first consists of European colonialists and racists, very active before 1945, as in the Nazi schoolbooks where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was used as the perfect illustration of white dynamism and military superiority (whites entered the dark-skinned people's country, not the reverse), white racism (Aryan invaders devised and imposed the caste system to prevent miscegenation), the perennial threat of racial mixing (the upper castes are visibly non-white, proving that their ancestors succumbed to the seduction of dark-skinned beauties), and the destructive results of such racial mixing (Indians have not contributed to scientific progress for centuries, unlike their whiter ancestors, and they were no match for a small number of white British invaders). Likewise, in 1935 Winston Churchill declared that the British had as much right to be in India as anyone else there, except perhaps "the Depressed Classes, who are the native stock", meaning that most Indians were the progeny of invaders equally foreign in origin as the British.

The second group is the anti-Hindu front in India, including Christian missionaries, so-called Ambedkarites, Dravidian separatists, Marxists and, just now joining the AIT bandwagon, militant Muslims. All of these proclaim to be concerned with -- or just to be -- the natives of India, dispossessed by the Aryan invaders who brought Hinduism from outside. While the political animus of this group entirely stems from Indian conditions, viz. the anti-Hindu struggle, their intellectual source of inspiration, mainly through Christianity and Marxism, is largely Western.

The third group is lined up against the first two, in that it opposes the AIT: the Hindu nationalists. Seeing the disruptive and separatist uses to which the AIT has been and is being put, they feel they need to support the refutation of the AIT.

In Western academic accounts of the political aspects of the AIT, attention is mostly directed at the third group, and this in a uniformly negative and demonizing sense. The second group is practically ignored (though the academics concerned function willy-nilly as its intellectual support base), and the first group is relegated to the past. Contemporary AIT theorists are convinced that they themselves are entirely free from Aryanist fantasies and from colonial or missionary ulterior motives; and that no such pressure is exerted upon them by politicians or public opinion in the West, which after 1945 has completely lost interest in the "Aryan" question. They are indignated that Indian critics dare to even mention racism among the ideological motives behind the defence of the AIT.

This perception and self-perception among Western AIT scholars is worth a closer analysis, but in the present article I want to focus in particular on the assumption that for Western public opinion, the Aryan question is a dead issue. I will draw the readers' attention to a revival of the racist use of the AIT as the prime illustration of the racist worldview.

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