It was Kismet.
III
“But we are Aryans, don’t you understand?… Aryans, the salt of the earth….”
“Aryans” … I know the word, I find myself on familiar ground.
My teachers at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Berlin had taught me that the Aryans were a Central-Asian race, a
“white” race, who conquered Europe and India, and who were of such superior intellectual and physical fibre that they made themselves masters wherever they went. And when I inquired about those Aryans who invaded India, I was told that right there they showed their wonderful metal: for brought face to face with teeming millions of dark aborigines, they established a caste-system of which the higher strata represent to this day the descendants of the white-skinned and therefore high-minded invaders, while the sweeper, the menial, the village laborer is the scion of the dark-skinned, conquered Dravidians.
To an Oriental this is of course a ridiculous and lying assumption. For even the purest of Aryan tribes in Hindustan, for instance the Rajpoots, have intermarried extensively with at least two other races. This superstition is not a new invention. It is as old as the beginning of things, and that much-praised work, the Veda, is only a chronicle of the ancient conceit of the Aryans, a conceit to which the lying and barbarous intolerance of modern Christianity has given a sharp and poisonous edge.
Yet even the Veda speaks of intermarriages between the Aryans and the original lords of the soil of India.
The caste system was not a bright invention to put a lasting stamp of inferiority on the conquered aborigines, but it is the outcome of a slow evolutionary process, due to the machinations of Brahmin priests who wished to preserve the profits arising from their sacerdotal profession within a restricted circle of families. These Brahmins had increased their ranks and influence by drawing recruits from the devil-worshipping priests of the aboriginal jungle tribes. Thus, how can there ever have been a question of preserving or establishing a permanency of racial superiority through the medium of caste, since at the very beginning of the system the race had lost its purity?
No. Your wonderful Aryan kinsmen in India were absorbed by the “inferior” races whom they conquered, just as the Normans were absorbed by the Saxon Englishmen, the Alexandrian Greeks by the Egyptians, the Mongols of the Golden Horde by the Chinese, just as the strong always absorb the weak, and just as, a few hundred years hence, we shall absorb you.