Edmund Leach

"The history of European colonialism covers many centuries and takes diverse forms, but whereas the European explorers and conquerors of the Americas, Africa, and Oceania usually took it for granted that the local inhabitants could be enslaved or butchered or driven into the hinterland at the whim of the invaders, the literate nations of Asia were initially treated as peoples toward whom the courtesies of European diplomacy should be applied. At the end of the day these Asian civilizations were likewise mostly subdued by force of arms, but such conquest needed some kind of moral justification, a mythical charter. The Rig Veda as interpreted by Max Müller and his contemporaries provided just such a myth."

"In a 1967 article, “Virgin Birth,” Leach astutely foreshadowed the reflexivity of the late 1970’s and 1980’s, calling attention to the fact that anthropologists call their own practice religion but assert that other peoples practice magic. In the present volume he presents the dramatic case of the fabrication of the Aryan invasion, which shows how profoundly the seemingly objective academic endeavors are af­ fected by the mentalité of the culture to which they belong. Leach de­ scribes how cherished but erroneous assumptions in linguistics and anthropology were accepted without question. If the mentalité of the academic culture was in part responsible for the fabrication, geo­ politics was even more responsible for upholding the Aryan invasion as history. The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization needed a mythical charter to serve as the moral justification for colonial ex­ pansion. Convenient, if not consciously acknowledged, was the Aryan invasion by a fair-skinned people, speaking the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, militarily conquering the dark- skinned, peasant Dasa (Dasyu), who spoke a non-European language and with whom the conquerors lived, as Leach puts it, in a “system of sexual apartheid.” The first civilization in India, thus, was built by the Aryan invaders. A remarkable case of Orientalism indeed."

"It had the following form: Away back, long before the dawn of true history, Aryan invaders (who spoke a proto-European language and were therefore close kin to the Greeks, Romans, and Persians, who were the acknowledged founders of European civilization) had brought the first civilization to India, establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy among a population of barbarian serfs. They followed the precepts of a morally pure religious system, “The Vedic Religion,” which was very different from “the modem Brahmanic religion, as founded in the Puranas and Tantras, [which] consists in a belief in Vishnu, Siva and Brahma, and manifests itself in the worship of the most hideous idols”. After many centuries, during which the high culture of these original Aryans gradually decayed into gross immorality and superstition, a new wave of Indo-Europeans was now repeating the process. Once again the conquerors were establishing themselves as an elitist military aristocracy under the banner of a morally pure religion (Christianity)."