Why do people think there is something called Aryan Race?

Question

Despite enormous evidence that in the original sources it was never intended to use it in terms of race.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryavarta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arya
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_Invasion_Theory

Answer 1

Ignorance.

Aryans as a race finds no support in Indian literature or tradition. (And genetics demolishes it.) The word 'Arya' in Sanskrit means noble and never a race. In fact, the authoritative Sanskrit lexicon (c. 450 AD), the famous Amarakosha gives the following definition:

mahakula kulinarya sabhya sajjana sadhavah

An Arya is one who hails from a noble family, of gentle behavior and demeanor, good-natured and of righteous conduct. And the great epic Ramayana has a singularly eloquent expression describing Rama as:

arya sarva samascaiva sadaiva priyadarsanah -

Arya, who worked for the equality of all and was dear to everyone .

The Rig Veda also uses the word Arya something like thirty six times, but never to mean a race. The nearest to a definition that one can find in the Rigveda is probably:

praja arya jyotiragrah ...

Children of Arya are led by light - Rig Veda, VII. 33.17.

The term 'aryan' has never been used in a racial sense anywhere in the vast compendium of Hindu literature archaeological .

Max Muller was responsible for giving the word "Aryan" a racial meaning. Yet nothing resembling a racial definition is in the original Sanskrit.

India is called Aryavart. Manu Smriti (2/21,22) describes the exact location of Aryavart which lies from the south of the Himalayas and all the way up to the Indian Ocean. Its inhabitants are called the Arya. But it is not a locally spoken name. Commonly, we write Bharatvarsh for India in general and scriptural writings. The territory of India (or Bharatvarsh for Aryavart) during the Mahabharat war (3139 BC) was up to Iran. So the ancient Iranian people also used to call themselves the Aryans.

Aryan Race Theory is in fact the brainchild of Christian evangelist-scholars, fashioned and tempered in the nineteenth century as a weapon for European expansionism in India. Promulgated to generations of Indian children in British-created schools, it created, like so many other Western creeds and dogmas, social divisions where none had hitherto existed, resulting in jealousy, mistrust, and suspicion among communities where peaceful coexistence had been the norm. This theory, which posits the invasion of ancient India by a white-skinned race (the "Aryans") who conquer an indigenous, dark-skinned population, therefore worked ingeniously with the British divide-and-conquer strategy for rule in India. The theory and its variants continue to be used today by the Vatican and other Christian enterprises in their campaign to "harvest" tribals and other vulnerable communities of Hindus. For these spiritual imperialists, spurious racial theories still hold their divide-and-conquer appeal.

The Aryan invasion theory, as Schaffer notes, arose from a Euro centric view that was hostile to an Indic basis for Western civilization or peoples. The discovery of close affinities between the Indo-European languages in the eighteenth century required an explanation. By placing the original Aryans in Europe, who later migrated to India where they got absorbed by the indigenous population, it took away any need to connect the ancient Europeans with India, which was not pleasing to the colonial mindset. The theory eventually developed an anti-Semitic tone.

It was used to trace Western culture not to the Jews and their Biblical accounts but to a proposed European homeland dominated by Nordic peoples. Thus the invasion theory became one of the pillars for Nazi historians, yet strangely the Communists in India have become strong supporters of the theory and accuse those who question it of being fascists!.

This theory is being challenged by two new discoveries, one archaeological and the other linguistic. Firstly, in the Rig Veda, the Ganges, India's sacred river, is only mentioned once, but the mythic Saraswati is praised fifty times.

For a long time, the Saraswati river was indeed considered a myth, until the American satellite Landstat was able to photograph and map the bed of this magnificent river, which was nearly 14 km wide and took its source in the Himalayas. Archaeologist Paul-Henri Francfort, who studied the Saraswati region at the beginning of the Nineties, found out that the Saraswati had "disappeared", because around 2200 B.C., an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and famine. "Thus", he writes, "most inhabitants moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and Sutlej rivers".

The lies of Aryan Race Theory are as useful for white supremacists today as they were for the Christian missionaries a century ago in their campaign not only to convert the infidels but also to justify the colonization of "heathen Hindoostan."

To add injury to insult, Hitler highjacked the term Aryan to indicate racial supremacy. A word which belonged to people who never supported racism of any kind and never tried to impose their beliefs on others.

Answer 2

Hitler called Nordic peoples of Caucasic origin Aryan for the very reason your links suggest. Ever since then, segregation groups, particularly white supremacists use the term Aryan to describe themselves. You will never find any legitamate paper work to say Aryan is a racial group however.

Answer 3

Ar·y·an Audio pronunciation of "aryan" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (âr-n, r-)
n.

1. Indo-Iranian. No longer in technical use.
2. A member of the people who spoke the parent language of the Indo-European languages. No longer in technical use.
3. A member of any people speaking an Indo-European language. No longer in technical use.
******* 4. In Nazism and neo-Nazism, a non-Jewish Caucasian, especially one of Nordic type, supposed to be part of a master race.*************************

Answer 4

It was a term invented by Adolph Hitler to justified the murder of millions of people. The ideology of that has never faded, hence the term continues. How sad.

Answer 5

There was a group of people that were from a place known as Aryavarta.

Answer 6

It's not a race. To me, it's the blong hair, blue eyes, fair skinned look.

Answer 7

ignorant emotive thinking is the most powerful form of thinking we use, and denial is a common defense mechanism that is very easy to use

Answer 8

the point?....
no one cares dude, hitler doesn't have yahoo.

Answer 9

thanks to that loser evil dude called Hitler, lest we forget