Author: Earnest Sevier Cox Year: 1923 Source: Excerpts from a chapter titled "Civilizations that have Perished through Contact with Colored Races: India" from his book "White America"

Aryans of India - Earnest Sevier Cox

"In population the Caucasian race leads the world, with about 800,000,000 souls. Nearly 300,000,000 of these, however, are of the darker branches of the race and live in Asia, 220,000,000 of them being Aryans of India." (Senate Document No. 662, 61st Congress, 3rd Session, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 1911, under title of Dictionary of Races or Peoples.)

We have seen that mankind is divided into three great primary groups or races: black (Negro), yellow (Mongolian), and white (Caucasian). We have also seen that the Caucasian or white race is essentially migratory, and that its restless energy, combined with its superior cultural ability had, at an early period, led it from its primeval home into every continent. These age-long movements of the Caucasian had in pre-historic times given rise to extensive blood admixture with both black and yellow races, so much so that at the dawn of history there were numerous mixbreed Caucasic peoples fully constituted as "races," some by admixture with the Negro, others by admixture with the Mongolian.

Our immigration officials, in the main, classify the peoples coming to our shores according to the languages they speak. For instance, the Hebrew from Russia is classified as Slavic. On the basis of language, the American Negro, immigrating into another country, would be classified as Caucasian because he speaks a Caucasic language. Language, then, is not a satisfactory test of race. Aryan language, in Asia, has outlived the purity of the Aryan race. It is by the language test only that it may be said 300,0000,000 of our race live in Asia, 220,000,000 being Aryans of India.

The objection to language as a test of race lies in the fact that races mix, but that languages do not. When two peoples speaking different tongues come into contact the final outcome is the blood admixture of the groups and the survival of one of the languages. We see this principle in progress in Ireland and Wales, where Mediterraneans and Nordics are amalgamating, but where English is supplanting the Keltic speech acquired by the Mediterraneans from earlier Nordic conquerors. In central and northern Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese languages have survived, though the pure whites are, with each generation, becoming submerged in the racial mixtures.

We are, then, prepared to see why it is that a classification of Aryan peoples on the basis of language does not of necessity agree with their classification on the basis of race stock.

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Our relatedness to the Aryan conquerors of India is certain. Such kinship is honorable and in it we gain in added confidence that Aryan breeds will develop great cultures wherever it is possible for them to express their inherent qualities. But surely those who assert that the present peoples of India are our blood relatives, and should be received as such, ought to be able to explain why the overwhelming mass of Indians are colored, why their complexion exhibits all shades of color, from the jet black to the blue-eyed blond! Is it that climate has selected the mass for racial slaughter and an infinitesimal few for racial preservation? We know that this is not true. Not climate, but the blood of colored races, is responsible for our "sun-burnt cousins." Not climate, but caste is responsible for the little purity that exists.

The briefest survey of the Aryan conquest of India will suffice to show that the white Aryan came into contact with a decayed civilization which was in its last stages as a result of the previous Caucasian conquerors of India having interbred with the aborigines. The breed which produced the earlier culture had become submerged in the black mass about them, and the new-coming Aryan found that the "melting pot" had prepared India for an easy conquest. The Aryans, by reason of race and culture, came as aristocrats. Their numbers were but small when compared with the colored multitudes about them. They came slowly from their homeland in the northwest where, in spite of later mixtures with blacks and yellows, we yet find Afghans and Persians who are fundamentally Aryan.

While all the darker strains of India may not be traced to the influence of the blood of the Asiatic branch of the Negro race, which at an early time was widely distributed on the Asiatic mainland, and which now has many representatives in the islands south of the continent, yet blood of the Negro is evident in certain of the races of India.

Speaking of the race types of India, Madison Grant says,

"The Aryanized Afghan and Hindu of northern India speak languages derived from Old Sanskrit and are closely related to the Mediterranean race. Aside from common dolichocephaly, these peoples are entirely distinct from the Dravidians of south India, whose speech is agglutinative and who show strong evidence of profound mixture with the ancient Negrito substratum of southern Asia. Everywhere throughout the Asiatic portion of its range the Mediterranean race overlies an even more ancient Negroid race. These Negroids still have representatives among the pre-Dravidians of India, the Veddah of Ceylon, the Sakai of the Malay Peninsula and the natives of the Andaman Islands." (The Passing of the Great Race, p. 148.)

The all but complete disappearance of the blood of the white civilizers of India is well expressed by the same authority, who says:

"The Hindu today speaks a very ancient form of the Aryan language, but there remains not one recognizable trace of the white conquerors who poured in through the passage of the Northwest. The boast of the modern Indian that he is of the same race as his English ruler is entirely without basis in fact, and the little swarthy native lives among the monuments of a departed grandeur, professing the religion and speaking the tongue of his long-forgotten Nordic conquerors, without the slightest claim to blood kinship. The dim and uncertain traces of Nordic blood in northern India only serve to emphasize the utter swamping of the white man in the burning South." (Ibid., p. 70)

Not only were the eastern Aryans, before their amalgamation with other races, true representatives of the race type that has dominated civilization, but also it is from this branch of the race that we have received important arts and sciences, and to their ancient literature we are indebted for much that we know concerning the religious beliefs of our kindred, their social organization, their laws and race ideals.

The ancient literature of the Aryan is embodied in the Rig-Veda and the Epics. The Vedic times cover approximately the six hundred years intervening between 2000 B.C. and 1400 B.C. These writings afford us a fair conception of Aryan society and reveal a vigorous, white, conquering people, well organized, respecting their women, already in possession of ancient laws, glorying in agriculture, passionately religious, imposing their faith and culture upon the surrounding colored populations to whom they refer in terms of contempt. Themselves they designate as a people of "fair complexion" and term those whom they have subdued "colored," and ridicule them, calling them monkeys; just as the Aryans four thousand years later have gone into Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, have boasted of their white complexion and vigorous mentality, and have accredited the dark races of these lands with close relatedness to chimpanzee and gorilla.

Let us look backward over a span of forty centuries and get a glimpse of these white invaders of northern India. Their records tell us that they were of fair complexion, with straight, well-bridged noses. The latter feature, as well as the complexion, marked them as a separate people and so impressed social ideals that, even to the present day, a man's social position varies in inverse ratio to the width of his nose:

"that is to say, the nasal index, as it is called, is a safe guide to the amount of Aryan, as distinguished from the aboriginal blood in his veins." (India Through the Ages, F. A. Steele, p. 6)

The tall, fair, high-nosed invader came as a conqueror, looked upon the mongrel and black multitudes as inferiors, and treated them as such. Of this treatment, however, we shall learn later.

Emerging from the hill country of Afghanistan and the slopes of the Hindu Kush, the Aryans (Nordics) took possession of that extremely desirable portion of India known as the Punjab. A glance at the map will show that the Punjab is a well-watered northern province and that it comprises but a small proportion of the present Indian Empire. From the Punjab, these blond Caucasians extended their sway, imposing themselves by force and the influence of superior culture upon the mixbreeds, who infested the country in countless numbers then, as they do now. We may better understand the ease with which this was done by the first Aryan invaders of India, by reflecting upon the ease with which foreign control has been imposed by the last Aryan invaders of India, the English. The task of the first Aryan invaders should have been even less difficult; for their invasion was by land from an adjoining territory, while the English have dominated India from afar, their line of communications consisting of a long and tortuous sea route. Both the first and last invasions were wrought by the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, military caste of Aryans; and both invasions maintained by prestige of race and culture rather than by constant appeal to arms.

When occupying the Punjab, the Aryans did not expel the mixbreed white-yellow-black populations whom they conquered (as yet the Aryans were not in contact with the blacks in the south of India). Throughout the history of their conquests, the Aryans have not expelled a subjugated people whom they could profitably enslave. Modern Aryans in North America did expel the red man, but they imported the black. The former would not work, the latter could be made to work. If we, from the vantage point of centuries, pass critical judgment upon the color policies of the Indian Aryans, we may ask ourselves in what did they fail and to what mistake is their final undoing attributable? We know that their failure must be attributed to their reliance upon caste, rather than expulsion, in dealing with their colored subjects. They sought to keep themselves white by imposing laws against race admixture and supporting such laws by the ideal of race purity and by religion. But long continued race contact, throughout human history, is written large in one word—amalgamation.

The story of civilization is, in the main, the story of the Aryan race and its culture. The history of the Aryan peoples show that where they have seemingly been most cruel in their dealing with other races, their civilization has been most permanent. Of the Nordic tribes who, between the fourth and sixth centuries of our era, overran South Europe, those that became isolated and finally lost by amalgamation with their subjects, rapidly declined as cultural factors; while those who replaced conquered peoples have led in civilization. Franks, Lombards and Saxons retained race and cultural capacity. The Aryan conquerors of South America, to a great extent, have amalgamated with colored subjects. The settlers of North America segregated the colored race they found in possession of the land and have established a form of caste to prevent blood admixture with the colored race which they inducted into their midst.

Caste will not perpetuate the civilization of the whites who dwell with colored races, but it will prolong it. The Aryans of India relied upon caste. They knew that they owed their capacity in the civilized arts to their breed, and to their breed they owed their prestige among colored races. How to preserve breed and, at the same time, utilize inferior peoples to do their labor was the problem confronting the Aryan. The answer to the problem was, "caste, enforced by law and religion."

The priests were the scientists and philosophers, and they devised a system of social control designed to meet the requirements of the native problem. This extraordinary scheme has been classed among the greatest expressions of human ingenuity. Caste, as originally instituted, divided the population into four divisions; warriors, priests, agriculturalists and merchants, and laborers. The first was composed of those of the purest Aryan descent, while the last was made up mainly of the subjugated mixbreeds with whom the Aryan was in immediate contact. The heart of caste was not vocation, as at present, but endogamy (marriage within the caste). There were large groups of the subjugated population whom the Aryan did not honor with caste. These were referred to collectively as outcasts, recognized as barely human.

We see, then, a white people dwelling among a colored, who greatly outnumber them, and attempting to remain white by the institution of laws forbidding interracial marriage.

"Our first glimpse of India discloses two races struggling for the soil, the Dravidians, a dark skinned race of aborigines, and the Aryans, a fair-skinned people. Descending from the northwest passages. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., article "India.")

Keane, in his Ethnology, says:

"As a rule, the Anglo-Saxon and British Aryan, who are by far the most numerous and widespread out of Europe, do not amalgamate with the aborigines." (Ethnology, p. 410)

This author is comparing the Saxon Aryan with Spanish, French and Portuguese "Aryans," who readily mix with colored races. But Saxon resistance to intermixture is relative only. The Saxon mixes with other races in every land where there is race contact. This mixing is slow, but the end will be the same. The same authority, on another page, himself affirms that the end of all race contact is amalgamation of races.

The Anglo-Saxon of the United States, like his early kinsmen in India, will retain comparative purity for many generations. Like his ancient relatives, he invokes law to prevent interbreeding of white and black. But the present day white man is not as well fortified against miscegenation as the ancient white man of India, who supplemented legal prohibition of marriage with non-whites by his religious teaching, and by caste, which was perfect in ideal and enforceable by law. In the United States, legal prohibition of interracial marriages has not been written in the statutes of all the states; and, too, we have a religion, which, instead of opposing interbreeding with the colored races within our midst, is interpreted by a large number of whites in such a manner as to minimize or abolish the color line.

But the peril to the color line in India, as in the United States, was not legal interbreeding of races. There, as here it was the illegitimate mixbreed who threatened the purity of the white race.

There has ever been a deplorable freedom between the white and non-white races which has resulted in an increasing number of mixbreeds. In India, caste prevented interracial marriage, but was incapable of preventing illegitimate unions. The Aryans, intent upon retaining race purity, yet unable to restrain men of their race from unions with colored women, and, in most instances unable to discover the guilty white, turned with a terrible wrath upon the helpless mixbreed. The half-castes were not permitted to reside within the limits of the city: were reviled by all, both black and white; and finally, the Aryan laws provided that, under certain conditions, the soldiers might slay them without mercy. It is evident that such extreme measures would not be permanently enforced, most of all by men of the Aryan race, whose history is general marked by tolerance to races and creeds. In spite of legal restrictions, the mixbreeds increased. Caste prolonged race purity but did not preserve it. The modern "Aryan" in India is just such a mixture as the ancient Aryan was authorized to kill.

Of the "220,000,000" so-called Aryans of India it is not likely that one-tenth of one per cent are whites of the Aryan race.

"Even the haughty Rajputs, formerly of the Kshatria (military) caste, have long lost their racial purity, and are now largely intermingled with Bhils and other primitive non-Aryans" (Keane).

"Men who call themselves Hindoos still exist, Sanskrit derivatives are still spoken, but the Hindoo spirit, however, is dead; the noble blood has been lost in the Indian quagmire, in the yellow-black-white swamp." (A.P. Schultz, Race or Mongrel, p. 61)

Races dwelling in common territory will eventually amalgamate; and by observing the present, we are conscious that a slow amalgamation of white with non-white is occurring even in Saxon circles, and we know that amalgamation has already proved the end of hope in many Latin possessions. With the present in mind, we are able to understand the problems confronting ancient India and realize the Aryan's hopeless task in seeking to institute laws and customs that would perpetuate his breed and the civilization which proceeded from his breed, and which perished with it. The history of race contact will establish that the Aryans undertook an impossible task. They brought religion, law and caste to their aid, the most carefully devised agencies the world has known. But the human intellect has never proved equal to the task of regulating sex relations.

In Indian history, as in Egyptian, we find that the further back we go the greater the culture. This is explainable on the basis of breed. These civilizations were founded by Caucasian peoples, who eventually were replaced by, or became mixed with, their colored subjects. That their cultures had a Caucasian origin is a matter beyond doubt. To make clear the causation of their decay, we may bring to bear numerous analogous instances from both ancient and modern history. We have the Greek and Roman cultures and those of Central and Northern Latin-America, which were implanted by a breed and declined with the breed which implanted them. There was gradual submergence of the creative breeds into the non-creative which, in all instances, were more numerous.

Let us look to the high state from which the Aryans of India fell and we may appreciate the loss to civilization. It was only about a century ago that the Western World began to realize the riches of the Sanskrit literature and the ancient glory of the Hindus. When the ancient treasures of the whites of India were translated, Europeans were struck with amazement to learn that their own language was that of the civilizers of India, and that the civilizers of India were a white people with a culture so deep and varied, and of such ancient origin, as to suggest that India was the home of the Aryan peoples, and that Western arts and creeds had been derived from Asia. We know now that the Aryans of India, like those of modern America and Australia, were conquering invaders, and that, like those of America and Australia, they carried their culture with them and imposed it upon colored races.

Hindu history reveals that it was the early invaders, not their mongrel offspring, who displayed affinity in ideals, race, and culture to the Europeans of the days preceding steam and electricity. However alien the Saxon student may feel when pouring over Egyptian and Assyrian records, he has consciousness of kinship with these tall, high-nosed, aggressive warriors, priests, and people, who emerge from obscurity upon the banks of the Indus, spread gradually to domination of the great Indian peninsula, carry their culture at a later date to Ceylon and Cambodia, and, after centuries of effort to retain race purity, gradually subside into the mongrel mass.

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Let us quote well-recognized authority which shall serve to heighten our estimate of the culture of the conquerors of the Punjab.

"The Aryan tribes of the Veda are acquainted with most of the metals. They have blacksmiths, coppersmiths and goldsmiths among them, besides carpenters, barbers and other artisans. They fight from chariots and freely use the horse, though not yet the elephant, in war. They have settled down as husbandmen, till the fields with the plough, and live in villages and towns. They have learned to build 'ships' (river boats) … unlike the modern Hindu, the Aryans of the Veda ate beef … thus the stout Aryans spread eastward through Northern India, pushed on from behind by late arrivals of their own stock, and driving before them, or reducing to bondage, the earlier 'black-skinned' races." (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed., article "India.")

The "black-skinned" peoples with whom the whites came into contact were so numerous that miscegenation between the Aryan warriors and colored women soon produced a mixbreed element which threatened the purity of the white race. Knowing that race characteristics have not changed during the past forty centuries, and possibly not materially in a hundred centuries, can we not see that in early India there would be among the whites an element who wished to expel the colored from the destruction successively taken, in order to create an environment whereby the Aryan race and culture would be assured permanency? And is it not likely that this element was overruled by others who opposed "harsh measures" in dealing with the colored, and by another and more powerful element of property owners who profited by labor of the colored and were ready always to resort to force to keep them in serfdom? (Caste, as at first constituted, was based on color; and its preservation in its original form would have answered every purpose of slavery. Those opposed to expulsion of the blacks relied upon caste to preserve the white breed and at the same time enslave the colored.)

Sympathy for the oppressed can be shown to have played an important role in the highly sensitive Aryans' dealing with the hapless elements of his own race, though perhaps not so much as in his dealing with other races. At the time of the removal of the American Indians from east of the Mississippi to their present locations, there were many Americans who opposed the measure as extremely cruel, although the retention of the Indians in their original homes would have resulted in their absorption by the Saxon settlers and a consequent lowering of Saxon capacity. The opponents of removal would have made mixbreeds of the Caucasian to avoid offense to the Indian.

A critical study of race contact will prove that, however reprehensible are the few sub-normal whites who are content that their offspring by colored paramours be consigned to an inferior evolutionary status, it is not they, but the sympathizing abnormal whites who have given the greatest impetus to race amalgamation. This is especially true of the Anglo-Saxon Aryans, the sub-normal of whom do interbreed with colored people, but the abnormal of whom, in theory at least, assert that there should be no color line. For every slave owner of the Teutonic colonies of England, Holland and Germany, and for every slave owner of Teutonic America who has interbred with colored women, there have been a thousand non-slave owners of Teutonic race living apart from the colored races who have asserted that there is not, and should not be, a color line. These, then, constitute real problems when dealing with colored races, the sub-normal whites who transgress the color line in practice and the super-normal whites who oppose the color line in theory.

Religion, that mighty agency in mongrelizing the Caucasian, with its caste-eliminating, race-equalizing tenets, has been seized upon in all lands by the super-normal whites in their efforts to abolish the color line. The "melting pot" in India was not full until there arose a religion attempting to offset the Hindu religion which gave its sanction to caste to preserve the Caucasian. Hinduism taught the colored that caste was founded upon the will of God. Its purpose was to keep the races apart. When the illegitimate mixbreeds in India twenty-five centuries ago had increased until they were more numerous than the whites, there arose Gautama Buddha, an aristocratic mixbreed with yellow blood predominating, who stripped Hinduism (Brahmanism) of caste and sought a religious reformation that would level the races of India. India was ripe, the colored world was ripe and anxious for such a theory. The success of Buddhism knew no bounds. It was popular! Why not? The teachings of its founder gave to the mongrel a position in human society that evolution had denied him in nature. It bridged an impassable chasm with an assumption.

We leave India, having seen that every social agency of the Aryan devised to preserve race and civilization had failed; and that every social agency observable in the modern Aryan's color problems was used in India to promote amalgamation, and succeeded. The Aryan conquerors of India utilized every remedial measure but one; they did not attempt geographical separation of races.