Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (review)

Ballantyne argues that the concept of Aryanism played a central role in British imperial rule and tied together the disparate parts of the empire from the Pacific to South and Southeast Asia and to the metropole itself in a single imperial ideology.

The first of the six chapters deals with the heart of the subject, the discovery of ancient Indian texts and the Sanskrit language by (mostly) British officials working in India. Ballantyne includes useful short pen portraits of the ideas of William Jones and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (as well as of the German Max Müller), among others. Interestingly, he also discusses how Aryanism stimulated the writing of global history during the Scottish Enlightenment, and how it forged a link between ancient Irish culture and ancient Indian culture during the Irish Enlightenment.

Chapters 2, 4, and 5 concern New Zealand and the Pacific; chapters 3 and 6 return to India. From the time of Ferdinand Magellan, the Pacific was seen as an extension of Asia, the greatest reach of "Further India." This conceptualization was consolidated in the first half of the nineteenth century with the development of the "Semitic Maori" thesis in New Zealand. By the 1840s, an Indocentrist thesis had become dominant partly because of observed similarities between Hindu and Maori customs. By 1885, the term "Aryan Maori" had become the hallmark of Aryan theory in Britain and New Zealand. By the 1920s, however, Aryanism had lost its attractiveness, and racial exclusiveness became the norm. In the 1830s, the Maoris reacted by recasting their own identity and disputing any Aryan origins. They preserved the idea that they were an Israelite chosen people; indigenous agency was asserting itself.

The notion of Aryanism popular during the late nineteenth-century Hindu revival, especially as developed by Dayananda Saraswati's Arya Samaj (founded in 1875), helped Indians to reassess their history and to provide them with an ethnic and religious bulwark against British hegemony in all its forms. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the term Arya and the slogan "Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan" had become basic to Hindutva (Hinduness) nationalism.

The book advances the argument of Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Cambridge, 1997). The concept of Aryanism provides a rubric to comprehend the worldview of British imperial rulers. It illuminates the extent to which orientalism—which became a pejorative term after Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978)—was motivated by intellectual curiosity rather than imperial control. The book is particularly informative about the Maoris and is a useful addition to imperial studies and the theory of ideas.