In Nazi Germany between the years 1940 and 1944, proof of your Aryan or Semitic roots meant the difference between life and death. How this inhuman and intrinsically absurd theory of racial superiority originated and how it took hold of the German imagination makes for a fascinating, scholarly study. Tracing the origins of the Aryan Myth in the West, the author shows how in the heyday of nationalism, most European people developed legends glorifying their high born ancestry. He shows how these legends developed into pseudoscientific theories, which treated Europeans as the norm and other peoples as inferior--until in 19th-century Germany they culminated in the concept of a superior Germanic "race" in contrast to the inferior Jewish "race." This cultural study sheds horrifying new light on the philosophy that "justified" the mass extermination of millions of "subhumans" during World War II.--From publisher description.

In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

Critically examining the discourse of Indo-European scholarship over the past two hundred years, Aryan Idols demonstrates how the interconnected concepts of “Indo-European” and “Aryan” as ethnic categories have been shaped by, and used for, various ideologies. Stefan Arvidsson traces the evolution of the Aryan idea through the nineteenth century—from its roots in Bible-based classifications and William Jones’s discovery of commonalities among Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek to its use by scholars in fields such as archaeology, anthropology, folklore, comparative religion, and history. Along the way, Arvidsson maps out the changing ways in which Aryans were imagined and relates such shifts to social, historical, and political processes. Considering the developments of the twentieth century, Arvidsson focuses on the adoption of Indo-European scholarship (or pseudoscholarship) by the Nazis and by Fascist Catholics. A wide-ranging discussion of the intellectual history of the past two centuries, Aryan Idols links the pervasive idea of the Indo-European people to major scientific, philosophical, and political developments of the times, while raising important questions about the nature of scholarship as well.

"As one of the earliest of Holocaust deniers and the first to suggest that Adolf Hitler was an avatar -- a god come to earth in human form to restore the world to a golden age -- " ... [Devi's] appeal to neo-Nazi sects lies in the very eccentricity of her thought -- combining Aryan supremacism and anti-Semitism with Hinduism, social Darwinism, animal rights, and a fundamentally biocentric view of life."--Publisher informationt.

"Aryan," a word that today evokes images of racial hatred and atrocity, was first used by Europeans to suggest bonds of kinship, as Thomas Trautmann shows in his far-reaching history of British Orientalism and the ethnology of India. When the historical relationship uniting Sanskrit with the languages of Europe was discovered, it seemed clear that Indians and Britons belonged to the same family. Thus the Indo-European or Aryan idea, based on the principle of linguistic kinship, dominated British ethnological inquiry. In the nineteenth century, however, an emergent biological "race science" attacked the authority of the Orientalists. The spectacle of a dark-skinned people who were evidently civilized challenged Victorian ideas, and race science responded to the enigma of India by redefining the Aryan concept in narrowly "white" racial terms. By the end of the nineteenth century, race science and Orientalism reached a deep and lasting consensus in regard to India, which Trautmann calls "the racial theory of Indian civilization," and which he undermines with his powerful analysis of colonial ethnology in India. His work of reassessing British Orientalism and the Aryan idea will be of great interest to historians, anthropologists, and cultural critics.

Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf, is a perennial bestseller in India, with even street-side bookstalls prominently displaying stacks of it. The name 'Hitler' -- anathema almost everywhere else in the world -- is tossed about casually in the Indian subcontinent, not infrequently invoked in praise. Many Indians still harbour the notion that the Fuhrer was a friend of the Indian people and had extended wholehearted support to their freedom struggle. To journalist Vaibhav Purandare, this clearly suggested that Indians continued to be largely unaware of the German dictator's views on India, in spite of the fact that they are unambiguously expressed in his own writings. This lacuna spurred him on to delve into the archives -- in Germany, India and elsewhere. The result of Purandare's research is this comprehensive and painstaking portrait and analysis of Hitler's outlook on India and its people, his opinion of their struggle against the British Raj, and his take on Indian history, culture and civilisation. Also within these pages are surprising details of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose's entanglement with the Reich, the experience of other Indians living in Nazi Germany, the mission that Hitler sent to the Himalayas in search of 'pure-blood Aryans', and a number of other little-known historical nuggets. Accessible and rich in detail, Hitler and India is the very first examination of what India meant to a figure who, perplexingly, remains quite alive in the country.

The articles in this survey of the Indo-Aryan controversy address questions such as: are the Indo-Aryans insiders or outsiders?

Attempt to prove, by linguistic comparison, that the Māori people are of Aryan descent and, after 4,000 years of migration, speak the language of their Aryan forebears in India "in an almost inconceivable purity". Cf. Bagnall.