Thomas R. Trautmann > Quotes

“By century’s end a deep and lasting consensus was reached respecting India, which I call the racial theory of Indian civilization: that India’s civilization was produced by the clash and subsequent mixture of light-skinned civilizing invaders (the Aryans) and dark-skinned barbarian aborigines (often identified as Dravidians). The racial theory of Indian civilization has proved remarkably durable and resistant to new information, and it persists to this day. It is the crabgrass of Indian history, and I should like to uproot it.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“If anything, the public image of Orientalism before Said was that of Proust, for whom (in his great novel) the Professor of Sanskrit alternates with the Professor of Tamil as the very type of the dry old stick, the ineffectual academic, the purveyor of arcane knowledge who has few students. Scholars are used to such cruel jibes from the great writers, but the changed image of Orientalism in Said—from dreamy obscurantism to the intellectual Foreign Legion of Europe— was a shocking reversal.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“[...] the classic statement of Warren Hastings, architect of the Orientalist policy, in the preface to the first English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. by Charles Wilkins, published in 1785:

Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state: it is the gain of humanity: in the specific instance which I have stated, it attracts and conciliates distant affections; it lessens the weight of the chain by which the natives are held in subjection; and it imprints on the hearts of our own countrymen the sense and obligation of benevolence. (Bhagavad Gita 1785:13)”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“In the end, for Said, Orientalism is any European pronouncement about the Orient that is made with a show of authority. The Saidian expansionary redefinition of Orientalism unites the productions of Orientalists and non-Orientalists, both of the colonial past and of the postcolonial present.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“The broader usage of the term Arya is largely due to Friedrich Max Müller, who took the word from Sanskrit and applied it to the family of languages now called Indo-European and the peoples speaking them. As we shall see in the next chapter, the concept of the Indo-European language family had been clearly articulated by Sir William Jones in 1786 as a group of related languages consisting of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian, codescended from a lost ancestral language, although he did not give this language family a name. The "original stock" that spoke the ancestral language he simply called Indian or Hindu. In the early nineteenth century the name for the language family and its peoples varied among four main choices. From the Bible narrative of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, came the name Japhetic for this family; unlike the coordinate names Semitic and Hamitic, which are still in use for language families, the name Japhetic did not last long. German philologists preferred "Indo-Germanic," devised by Heinrich Klaproth in 1823 (see Schwab 1984:184), but non-Germans resisted. The English linguist Arthur Young proposed "Indo-European" as early as 1813, and it eventually displaced the other terms (Young 1813). But "Aryan" had a long innings.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“In British eyes India presented the spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized, and as such it constituted the central problem for Victorian anthropology, whose project it was to achieve classifications of human variety consistent with the master idea of the opposition of the dark-skinned savage and the fair-skinned civilized European.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“To claim historical continuity in allotting indigenous or alien status to particular groups in the creation of contemporary identities is unacceptable, for identities are neither permanent, nor unchanging, nor transparent. — Romila Thapar”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India

“The long shadow of the death camps casts itself backward, darkening the aspect of nineteenth-century linguistic and ethnological thought. The Aryan concept is the central idea of twentieth-century fascisms, and the fact that it was developed by scholars raises the question of the role scholars have played in preparing the way for these appropriations. Ethnological ideas belong inescapably to the realm of moral reasoning, and their misuses are properly subject to moral evaluation. The need to combat the appropriations of science by Nazis, segregationists, and hate groups has led to the writing of a number of books exploring ways in which linguists and ethnologists have provided the materials for such appropriations and in some cases participated willingly in them.”
― Thomas R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India