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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Iam grateful to several organizations without whose funding this volume would not have been possible. I thank the American Institute for Indian Studies for a Senior Research grant to Poona in 1992–1993. I am also grateful to the Fulbright Foundation as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. I also thank the Center for Advanced Studies of the University of Illinois for their support. Material adapted from “Aryan Aristocrats and Übermenschen: Nietzsche’s Reading of the Laws of Manu,” which appeared in The Comparatist 23 (May 1999): 5-20, is reprinted by permission of John Burt Foster, editor. The Westerner who returns to India no longer recognizes his cradle. I am well aware that these Hindus are Aryans of our stock, our brothers; but we are brothers who refuse to reach out in one another’s direction. We are too different. Too many millennia divide us. We said farewell to one another too long ago. —G. Gozzano, Journey to the Cradle of Mankind Anything can be believed if one cites the authority of the Veda, if one takes some passage from the Veda, juggles it, gives it the most impossible meaning and murders everything reasonable in it. If one presents one’s own ideas as ideas meant in the Vedas, “all fools will follow me in a crowd.” —Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda ...