Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Shared Myths 1 The Aryan Canon 1 Methodology and Plan 2 Part I. The Authority of an Absent Text 7 Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and Orientalist Discourse on the Aryan 8 The Enlightenment Background 8 Voltaire and the Search for Authority 10 Locus of Poetic Inspiration or Site of Cultural Decay? 18 Conclusion 25 Chapter 2 The Romantic Aryans 27 Romantic Myth Theory 27 Friedrich Schlegel and the Foundations of Romantic Linguistics 28 Romantic Mythographers and the Upnekhata 31 Romantic Indology: The Case of Max Müller 34 Conclusion 47 Chapter 3 Nietzsche’s Aryan Übermensch 50 Introduction 50 Reading Nietzsche Reading India 52 Manu as a “Semitized” Aryan Sourcebook 54 The Aryan as Übermensch 55 Christianity, an Anti-Aryan Outcaste Religion 57 The Jew and the Aryan 58 Conclusion 61 Chapter 4 Loose Can[n]ons 64 Racial Theory: An Overview 64 vii Gobineau and the Aryan Aristocrat 67 Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Aryan Publicist 73 Alfred Rosenberg and the Nordic Aryan 80 Conclusion 86 Part II. Who Speaks for the Subaltern? 89 Chapter 5 Rammohan Roy 90 Reading Reform 90 The Complexity of the Colonial Subject 92 Scriptural Authority and the Hermeneutics of Satı̄ 94 Misreading Monotheism: Idolatry and Brahmin Perfidy 96 Rammohan Roy’s Syncretism and Its Challenge to Postcolonial Theory 100 Chapter 6 Text-based Identity: Dayānand Saraswatı̄’s Reconstruction of the Aryan Self 105 Introduction 105 Dayānand’s Canon and Hermeneutical Strategies for Reading the Aryan World 107 Aryan Masculinity and the Teleology of Decay 112 Conclusion 117 Chapter 7 Aryan Identity and National Self-Esteem 120 Introduction 120 Justice Ranade and Lokamānya Tilak 121 Swami Vivekananda 133 Conclusion 139 Chapter 8 The Anti-Myth 144 Introduction 144 The Aryan and Its Other 145 Mahatma Phule 147 Dr. Ambedkar 150 Conclusion 157 Afterword 160 Notes 165 Bibliography 189 Index 203 viii Contents ...