The Oriental Deception P2
The Aryan myth defined both the true Hindu community and the origin of the West as I described in my earlier study about this subject. (1)
The Indian myth of Aryanhood was utilized to bring about the mobilization of powerfull sentiments of affinity and solidarity. Through a transformation of consciousness, segments of the Indian population could consider themselves on a par with their conquerors rather than their subjects. With this myth, privileged segments of Indian society were able to frame an embattled Aryan 'We," which purportedly existed before the arrival of the British and could be rallied in the rearticulated tradition. This construct allowed specific groups of Indians to assert a cohesive social identity and declare their cultural superiority in response to colonial domination. The social identity activated by the Aryan myth fostered estrangement from British colonial authorities and thus functioned as an effective instrument of resistance. It was instrumental in the eventual expulsion of the colonial authorities.
Outside the brahmin elite, groups on the periphery subverted the Aryan myth for social reform. Thus, the myth was employed both to reassert the social and religious stability of the elite and undermine its hegemony. After independence, reconfigured versions of the Aryan myth became instrumental in destabilizing caste authority and, most recently, fomenting communalism.
As in India, so too in Europe: speculation regarding the Aryan provided essential information concerning the past; it promised to reveal the state of civilization that was closest to the supposed common ancestors of all Indo European peoples. For those seeking to distance themselves from a Hebrew heritage, Aryan India provided an attractive alternative. Germans, in particular, believed that the study of Vedic mythology could elucidate the history and fate of the Indo-German Volk, a national collectivity inspired by a common creative energy, that was promulgated as the unique essence of the German people. German Indology's valorization of the Aryan past and an idealized vision of India further contributed to the identification of this Volk with the mythic Aryan. Subsequent racial hygienists would invert this Aryan myth: India became a projection of the German racial situation. Once the metaphorical cradle of German civilization, India now became its symbolic grave. Through the Aryan myth, India functioned both as an example and a warning to the Nazis. Just as the Aryans in India fell, so would those in Europe if racial purity were not recreated. In both the East and the West, the search for the "original" India became bound up with a search for a superior race living in an unchanging utopian past.
But we should question how versions of the Aryan past articulated an ethical process whereby the European subject defined itself through cultural confrontation. Michel de Certeau termed the impossibility of portraying the Other as anything but a translation into a European familiarity of the Self.
The truth regarding the Aryans was less to be found in their literature than in what it was no longer able to express. Truth was not to be discovered in words, but rather in the lacunae, the message that had been lost through decay, inaccessibility, and the loss of ability to read correctly.
European theories of the Aryan race developed out of scholarly inquiry into the origin of languages, the study of myth, and the historical study of religion. The quest for an original language from which other languages derived involved a search for unity in diversity. The quest for linguistic unity reflected the need for an ultimate textual authority. However, once that authority was identified, something curious occurred. The horizon of the text was virtually swept away-, its integrity ignored.
The text was treated by interpreters as almost nonexistent; they made it up to suit their needs. In a similar fashion, the horizon of the reader became pure ideology, expressing itself in emotional appeals to return to some golden age or true spirituality of the text.
Western Orientalist scholars focused on the superiority of the Indian Aryans and their legacy of excellence as manifest in their modern European descendants. In the Enlightenment, the Aryans provided an alternative to the Hebrew model. For the Romantics, the Aryan past confirmed those aesthetic and spiritual values that were cherished and promoted in the European present. Among certain nineteenth-century cultural critics, however, an Aryan theory of race inspired counter-hegemonic reveries of degeneration. Gobineau's Arierdaemmerung heralded the twilight of the gods. It was Nietzsche's task to transform these gods into idols. In the writings of Chamberlain and Rosenberg, notions of who comprised the Aryan race exhibited an endemic feeling that Christianity had empowered a sickly underclass and corrupted German religion. The fall of the Aryan resonated in the infectous post-World War I story of betrayal by Jewish materialists and the vindictive Allies.
In India, theories of Aryan unity ingeniously ignored discrepancies in racial and cultural development. Rammohan Roy and Daydnanda focused on the Aryan religious tradition as a basis for Hindu spiritual revival. For Tilak and Ranade, the Aryan's racial superiority could be witnessed in their survival in modern times as caste Hindus.
Ranade took a cosmopolitan perspective; he contrasted the Aryan to the Semite and the Dravidian. For Vivekananda, the Aryan was superior both to the Dravidian and the West. Tilak valorized the Aryan past to promote the nationalist cause. Vivekananda held expansionist designs: he saw itinerant Indian preachers setting forth to perfect (Aryanize) the world. Phule and Ambedkar challenged the myth of the Aryan, bringing back into discussion what nationalist discourse had excluded.
Discussions of Aryanhood were thus either system-maintaining or counter-systemic. The system in question was the caste system, and specificly the role of brahmins as disseminators of the Veda, itâs legitemate readers, and (ab)users of secular and religious power. There was some suggestion that the Veda had been corrupted by barbarian influences and the intolerance of ruthless conquerors. It was also believed that the process of textual degradation could be reversed. In those cases where the discourse was systems-maintaining, brahmins jealously guarded their access to the text and their right to interpret it. In those instances where Aryan discourse was counter-systemic, reformers desperately sought to wrest the texts away from their brahmin custodians.
These nineteenth-century quests for the Aryan past can be viewed as forms of popular culture, susceptible to the political and institutional forces that inform cultural criticism. They collaborate in the political structure that they inhabit and in their position and complicity within the power structure.
Popular culture, even when Marxist in inspiration and populist in spirit, is defined by the mechanisms of exclusion. Like all quests for origin, it expresses moments in time when elites feel themselves threatened. When a culture has lost its means of self-defense, it turns to the ethnologist and the archaeologist.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Indian history bear out this maxim. The myths of the Aryan articulate this fear of impotence and present, a geography of the eliminated, or "a negative silhouette" formed from the political and symbolic distributions of power.
But who should read or interpret texts of authority? Who is the legitimate reader?
Are those "legitimate" readers of the Veda in the nineteenth century so unlike the modern critics? Both claim positional knowledge. Both, laboring notions of voicelessness and absence, can license the neglect of texts that contradict their master narratives. Both claim privilege to speak for the Other. The brahmin custodian of the Veda received his hermeneutical mandate from God. Critics are self-anointed and legitimized by their peers. The nationalist reformer defined the Aryan in order to reassert sociopolitical power and retain traditional lines of control. The critic, impotent through alienation from real political action, compensates by a posture of powerlessness vis a vis representation. Political parallels may well be drawn between extravagant claims in the mythology of the Aryan race and the more sober evocations of colonial discourse analysis. We have seen how the problem of identity finds no dear resolution. Identity, both individual and national, continues to be problematic into the new millennium.
French Aryan Rewrites History.
For Voltaire, Asia was the ideal. In fact, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was a principle panegyrist and official defender of Asia's moral rectitude. It held the key to understanding the European present as wen as its future. At first, Voltaire directed his enthusiasm toward China. But its radical foreignness and the indecipherability of its literature stymied his efforts. He then turned his attention toward India, consoling himself with the belief that Indian religion was "very possibly' the same as that of the Chinese government, that is, a pure cult of a Supreme Being disengaged from all superstition and fanaticism . He maintained that the brahmin religion was even more ancient than that of China (Voltaire Oevres Complette, 1885).
The Indians were, perhaps, the most ancient assembled body of people. It appeared that other nations, such as China and Egypt, went to India for instruction. The brahmins were the first theologians in the world , and Indian religion formed the basis of all other religions . Voltaire believed that Indian philosophers had discovered a new universe "en morale et en physique."
With time and with a more complete documentation, Voltaire became better informed and refined his characterization of ancient India. As inventors of art, the Aryans were chaste, temperate, and law-abiding . They lived in a state of paradise-naked and without luxury. They subsisted on fruit rather than cadavers. Paragons of morality and specimens of physical perfection, the Aryans embodied prelapsarian innocence and sobriety. Their gentleness, respect for animal life, and deep religiosity incarnated the virtues of "Christianity' far more than anything found in the civilized West. Unlike the Saracens, Tartars, Arabs, and the Jews, who lived by piracy, the Aryans found nourishment in a religion that was based upon universal reason.
While Voltaire had initially based his information on the travel accounts of Chardin, Tavernier, and Bernier, he later came to rely heavily on the Lettres idifiantes et curieuses ... par quelques missions de la compagnie de jesus (Paris: 1706-76), especially the letters from Pere Boucher to Huet. As elsewhere in his oeuvre, even in his most virulent critiques of the Church, Voltaire was never truly distant from his Jesuit teachers. Jesuitical documentation on India supplied him with a theme he was to exploit with verve. Although the reverend fathers expressed horror for idolatrous superstition, they were not totally negative in their assessment of Indian religious potential. Jesuit missionaries judged the Indians eminently capable and worthy of conversion. After all, one could find in their "ridiculous" religion belief in a single God , suggesting a kind of proto-Christianity. Bouchet's mention of parallels between Aryan religious thought and Christianity prompted Voltaire to develop the idea that the West had derived its theology from India.
In short, Voltaire appropriated from the Jesuits data to suit a specific polemic-that Vedism comprised the oldest religion known to man and represented a pure form of worship whose loftly metaphysics formed the basis of Christianity. Voltaire found no difficulty in reconciling the sublimity of Indian religion with its modern superstitions: the Vedic Indian had simply been made soft by the climate . The climate's effect was so pernicious that India's conquerors even became weak under its influence . Thus, human frailty and nature conspired to render man idolatrous.
By disengaging a fictive Urform of Hinduism from all superstition and fanaticism, Voltaire effectively set up an ideal against which all other religions could be measured to their disadvantage. What religion could compete with that of the initial brahmins, who had established a government and religion based upon universal reason?
When you have peaceful prelates, ruling an innately spiritual people, religion is simple and reasonable. More importantly, India was to supply Voltaire with information to combat the Church and its role in society. As a culture ignored by the Bible, India allowed Voltaire to question the accepted biblical chronology. Most significantly. however, Voltaire's discussion of India enabled him to vent his spleen against the Jews. In other words, Voltaire's emplotment of India concentrated on four problems: it allowed him to call into question the chronology of the sacred book, the chosen status of the Jews, the origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the diffusion of our mythology, all of which challenged the historical importance of the Jewish people.
One can almost forgive Voltaire his subjective portrayal of India, given the quality of the information culled from travel accounts, missionary letters, "scholarly' works, and "translations." Although he sought out European accounts that he felt were exempt from sectarian prejudice, he was inexorably drawn to texts glaringly slanted by Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric, as in the case of La Croze and Niecamp. He studied those Europeans who purported to know Sanskrit, yet knew none. He studied authors who, although they had spent sufficient time in India, were nevertheless woefully ignorant of the culture. Having literally read everything available concerning India, edited and unedited, Voltaire realized only too well the necessity of basing any future discussion of India upon an authentic Sanskrit text. He, therefore, set out to discover one. After having depended so long on secondary sources, he tended to ascribe authenticity to any Sanskrit text that fell into his hands. Time and again, he was deceived by his sources.
As the oldest theologians, Indians were the first people to possess books . One such book was the Shaster Bedang, a supposedly four-thousand-year-old exposition of the doctrine of the "Bedas" written by the philosopher Beass Muni. It was found in Alexander Dow's History of Hindostan translated from the Persian to which are prefixed two dissertations concerning the Hindoos.Voltaire believed that the Bedang taught Vedic monotheism. Voltaire was also familiar with another purportedly ancient and sacred book, the Shasta or Shastabad of Brahma. Voltaire maintained that the Shasta was five thousand years old, probably the oldest book in the world and the source for subsequent law books. It possessed real wisdom and the pure original expression of Indian religion. The Shasta was actually a small "theological" treatise of recent date that had been transmitted to John Zephaniah Holwell, who included it in his Interesting historical events relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan (1765-71). However, Voltaire read its existence to prove that the brahmins had preceeded by several centuries the Chinese, whom Voltaire initially thought had preceeded the whole world in wisdom. The Shasta's importance for Voltaire, therefore, was not so much that it was the oldest book but that its style prefigured, in his estimation, all wisdom, including that of Greece.' The Shasta proved to Voltaire that the Indians were monotheists. More importantly, however, it showed that the Chinese and the West borrowed from India both their vision of God and their myth of the Fall of Man.
Voltaire also discovered a manuscript, entitled the Cormo Vedam, yet did not believe the Cormo Vedam to be a text worthy of the modern brahmins. He judged it a ludicrous ritual "pile" of superstitions . Voltaire cited the Cormo Vedam primarily to show how the Veda and brahmins had degenerated.
Traces of such decay were particularly prevalent in Voltaire's primary document of Aryan religion, the Ezour Vedam. In Voltaire's estimation, the Ezour Vedam was the most important Sanskrit [sic] text that he possessed. He claimed that its composition predated Alexander's expedition to India. Voltaire received the manuscript of the Ezour Vedam from the Comte de Maudave (1725-77) who had brought it to France.
The count was purportedly a close friend of a francophone brahmin who had tried to translate the manuscript from Sanskrit into French . Voltaire alternately defined the Ezour Vedam as the beginning of the Veda or "a copy of the four vedams" . In La Refense de mon oncle, he characterized it as "the true vedam, the vedam explained, the pure vedam." By 1761, however, he described it as merely a commentary of the Veda.
In reality, it did not matter to Voltaire that this text was not really the Veda; what mattered was that it satisfied the idea of a Veda which, for Voltaire, represented an exemplum of sublimity and the scripture of the world's oldest religion. The Ezour Vedam became such a text: it was the authentic text par excellance, the real Urtext, anterior to Pythagorus and anterior to the Shasta. Not only did Voltaire value it but, at the Bibliotheque du Roi where he had deposited a copy, he claimed that it was regarded as the most precious acquisition of the collection.
This "Veda" announced a pure cult, disengaged from all superstition and all fanaticism. Written by the first brahmins, who also served as kings and pontiffs, it established a religion based upon universal reason.
More importantly, the Ezour Vedam provided Voltaire with the ideal text with which to challenge the historical perspective of Judeo-Christianity. Voltaire read the Ezour Vedam to show how the vaunted aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition existed in India centuries before the Old Testament. The general thrust of this argument was to displace the Jews from a favored position in the Christian tradition. Vedic India represented a more distant antiquity than that of the Jews.
For his part, Voltaire hoped to prove how all the principles of Christian theology that had been lost with the Veda could still be found in the Ezour Vedam, thanks to its retrieval and circulation by a French philosophe.
[url="http://www.raphaelvishanu-world.at/orientald3.html"]http://www.raphaelvishanu-world.at/orientald3.html[/url]
The Aryan myth defined both the true Hindu community and the origin of the West as I described in my earlier study about this subject. (1)
The Indian myth of Aryanhood was utilized to bring about the mobilization of powerfull sentiments of affinity and solidarity. Through a transformation of consciousness, segments of the Indian population could consider themselves on a par with their conquerors rather than their subjects. With this myth, privileged segments of Indian society were able to frame an embattled Aryan 'We," which purportedly existed before the arrival of the British and could be rallied in the rearticulated tradition. This construct allowed specific groups of Indians to assert a cohesive social identity and declare their cultural superiority in response to colonial domination. The social identity activated by the Aryan myth fostered estrangement from British colonial authorities and thus functioned as an effective instrument of resistance. It was instrumental in the eventual expulsion of the colonial authorities.
Outside the brahmin elite, groups on the periphery subverted the Aryan myth for social reform. Thus, the myth was employed both to reassert the social and religious stability of the elite and undermine its hegemony. After independence, reconfigured versions of the Aryan myth became instrumental in destabilizing caste authority and, most recently, fomenting communalism.
As in India, so too in Europe: speculation regarding the Aryan provided essential information concerning the past; it promised to reveal the state of civilization that was closest to the supposed common ancestors of all Indo European peoples. For those seeking to distance themselves from a Hebrew heritage, Aryan India provided an attractive alternative. Germans, in particular, believed that the study of Vedic mythology could elucidate the history and fate of the Indo-German Volk, a national collectivity inspired by a common creative energy, that was promulgated as the unique essence of the German people. German Indology's valorization of the Aryan past and an idealized vision of India further contributed to the identification of this Volk with the mythic Aryan. Subsequent racial hygienists would invert this Aryan myth: India became a projection of the German racial situation. Once the metaphorical cradle of German civilization, India now became its symbolic grave. Through the Aryan myth, India functioned both as an example and a warning to the Nazis. Just as the Aryans in India fell, so would those in Europe if racial purity were not recreated. In both the East and the West, the search for the "original" India became bound up with a search for a superior race living in an unchanging utopian past.
But we should question how versions of the Aryan past articulated an ethical process whereby the European subject defined itself through cultural confrontation. Michel de Certeau termed the impossibility of portraying the Other as anything but a translation into a European familiarity of the Self.
The truth regarding the Aryans was less to be found in their literature than in what it was no longer able to express. Truth was not to be discovered in words, but rather in the lacunae, the message that had been lost through decay, inaccessibility, and the loss of ability to read correctly.
European theories of the Aryan race developed out of scholarly inquiry into the origin of languages, the study of myth, and the historical study of religion. The quest for an original language from which other languages derived involved a search for unity in diversity. The quest for linguistic unity reflected the need for an ultimate textual authority. However, once that authority was identified, something curious occurred. The horizon of the text was virtually swept away-, its integrity ignored.
The text was treated by interpreters as almost nonexistent; they made it up to suit their needs. In a similar fashion, the horizon of the reader became pure ideology, expressing itself in emotional appeals to return to some golden age or true spirituality of the text.
Western Orientalist scholars focused on the superiority of the Indian Aryans and their legacy of excellence as manifest in their modern European descendants. In the Enlightenment, the Aryans provided an alternative to the Hebrew model. For the Romantics, the Aryan past confirmed those aesthetic and spiritual values that were cherished and promoted in the European present. Among certain nineteenth-century cultural critics, however, an Aryan theory of race inspired counter-hegemonic reveries of degeneration. Gobineau's Arierdaemmerung heralded the twilight of the gods. It was Nietzsche's task to transform these gods into idols. In the writings of Chamberlain and Rosenberg, notions of who comprised the Aryan race exhibited an endemic feeling that Christianity had empowered a sickly underclass and corrupted German religion. The fall of the Aryan resonated in the infectous post-World War I story of betrayal by Jewish materialists and the vindictive Allies.
In India, theories of Aryan unity ingeniously ignored discrepancies in racial and cultural development. Rammohan Roy and Daydnanda focused on the Aryan religious tradition as a basis for Hindu spiritual revival. For Tilak and Ranade, the Aryan's racial superiority could be witnessed in their survival in modern times as caste Hindus.
Ranade took a cosmopolitan perspective; he contrasted the Aryan to the Semite and the Dravidian. For Vivekananda, the Aryan was superior both to the Dravidian and the West. Tilak valorized the Aryan past to promote the nationalist cause. Vivekananda held expansionist designs: he saw itinerant Indian preachers setting forth to perfect (Aryanize) the world. Phule and Ambedkar challenged the myth of the Aryan, bringing back into discussion what nationalist discourse had excluded.
Discussions of Aryanhood were thus either system-maintaining or counter-systemic. The system in question was the caste system, and specificly the role of brahmins as disseminators of the Veda, itâs legitemate readers, and (ab)users of secular and religious power. There was some suggestion that the Veda had been corrupted by barbarian influences and the intolerance of ruthless conquerors. It was also believed that the process of textual degradation could be reversed. In those cases where the discourse was systems-maintaining, brahmins jealously guarded their access to the text and their right to interpret it. In those instances where Aryan discourse was counter-systemic, reformers desperately sought to wrest the texts away from their brahmin custodians.
These nineteenth-century quests for the Aryan past can be viewed as forms of popular culture, susceptible to the political and institutional forces that inform cultural criticism. They collaborate in the political structure that they inhabit and in their position and complicity within the power structure.
Popular culture, even when Marxist in inspiration and populist in spirit, is defined by the mechanisms of exclusion. Like all quests for origin, it expresses moments in time when elites feel themselves threatened. When a culture has lost its means of self-defense, it turns to the ethnologist and the archaeologist.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Indian history bear out this maxim. The myths of the Aryan articulate this fear of impotence and present, a geography of the eliminated, or "a negative silhouette" formed from the political and symbolic distributions of power.
But who should read or interpret texts of authority? Who is the legitimate reader?
Are those "legitimate" readers of the Veda in the nineteenth century so unlike the modern critics? Both claim positional knowledge. Both, laboring notions of voicelessness and absence, can license the neglect of texts that contradict their master narratives. Both claim privilege to speak for the Other. The brahmin custodian of the Veda received his hermeneutical mandate from God. Critics are self-anointed and legitimized by their peers. The nationalist reformer defined the Aryan in order to reassert sociopolitical power and retain traditional lines of control. The critic, impotent through alienation from real political action, compensates by a posture of powerlessness vis a vis representation. Political parallels may well be drawn between extravagant claims in the mythology of the Aryan race and the more sober evocations of colonial discourse analysis. We have seen how the problem of identity finds no dear resolution. Identity, both individual and national, continues to be problematic into the new millennium.
French Aryan Rewrites History.
For Voltaire, Asia was the ideal. In fact, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire was a principle panegyrist and official defender of Asia's moral rectitude. It held the key to understanding the European present as wen as its future. At first, Voltaire directed his enthusiasm toward China. But its radical foreignness and the indecipherability of its literature stymied his efforts. He then turned his attention toward India, consoling himself with the belief that Indian religion was "very possibly' the same as that of the Chinese government, that is, a pure cult of a Supreme Being disengaged from all superstition and fanaticism . He maintained that the brahmin religion was even more ancient than that of China (Voltaire Oevres Complette, 1885).
The Indians were, perhaps, the most ancient assembled body of people. It appeared that other nations, such as China and Egypt, went to India for instruction. The brahmins were the first theologians in the world , and Indian religion formed the basis of all other religions . Voltaire believed that Indian philosophers had discovered a new universe "en morale et en physique."
With time and with a more complete documentation, Voltaire became better informed and refined his characterization of ancient India. As inventors of art, the Aryans were chaste, temperate, and law-abiding . They lived in a state of paradise-naked and without luxury. They subsisted on fruit rather than cadavers. Paragons of morality and specimens of physical perfection, the Aryans embodied prelapsarian innocence and sobriety. Their gentleness, respect for animal life, and deep religiosity incarnated the virtues of "Christianity' far more than anything found in the civilized West. Unlike the Saracens, Tartars, Arabs, and the Jews, who lived by piracy, the Aryans found nourishment in a religion that was based upon universal reason.
While Voltaire had initially based his information on the travel accounts of Chardin, Tavernier, and Bernier, he later came to rely heavily on the Lettres idifiantes et curieuses ... par quelques missions de la compagnie de jesus (Paris: 1706-76), especially the letters from Pere Boucher to Huet. As elsewhere in his oeuvre, even in his most virulent critiques of the Church, Voltaire was never truly distant from his Jesuit teachers. Jesuitical documentation on India supplied him with a theme he was to exploit with verve. Although the reverend fathers expressed horror for idolatrous superstition, they were not totally negative in their assessment of Indian religious potential. Jesuit missionaries judged the Indians eminently capable and worthy of conversion. After all, one could find in their "ridiculous" religion belief in a single God , suggesting a kind of proto-Christianity. Bouchet's mention of parallels between Aryan religious thought and Christianity prompted Voltaire to develop the idea that the West had derived its theology from India.
In short, Voltaire appropriated from the Jesuits data to suit a specific polemic-that Vedism comprised the oldest religion known to man and represented a pure form of worship whose loftly metaphysics formed the basis of Christianity. Voltaire found no difficulty in reconciling the sublimity of Indian religion with its modern superstitions: the Vedic Indian had simply been made soft by the climate . The climate's effect was so pernicious that India's conquerors even became weak under its influence . Thus, human frailty and nature conspired to render man idolatrous.
By disengaging a fictive Urform of Hinduism from all superstition and fanaticism, Voltaire effectively set up an ideal against which all other religions could be measured to their disadvantage. What religion could compete with that of the initial brahmins, who had established a government and religion based upon universal reason?
When you have peaceful prelates, ruling an innately spiritual people, religion is simple and reasonable. More importantly, India was to supply Voltaire with information to combat the Church and its role in society. As a culture ignored by the Bible, India allowed Voltaire to question the accepted biblical chronology. Most significantly. however, Voltaire's discussion of India enabled him to vent his spleen against the Jews. In other words, Voltaire's emplotment of India concentrated on four problems: it allowed him to call into question the chronology of the sacred book, the chosen status of the Jews, the origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the diffusion of our mythology, all of which challenged the historical importance of the Jewish people.
One can almost forgive Voltaire his subjective portrayal of India, given the quality of the information culled from travel accounts, missionary letters, "scholarly' works, and "translations." Although he sought out European accounts that he felt were exempt from sectarian prejudice, he was inexorably drawn to texts glaringly slanted by Protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric, as in the case of La Croze and Niecamp. He studied those Europeans who purported to know Sanskrit, yet knew none. He studied authors who, although they had spent sufficient time in India, were nevertheless woefully ignorant of the culture. Having literally read everything available concerning India, edited and unedited, Voltaire realized only too well the necessity of basing any future discussion of India upon an authentic Sanskrit text. He, therefore, set out to discover one. After having depended so long on secondary sources, he tended to ascribe authenticity to any Sanskrit text that fell into his hands. Time and again, he was deceived by his sources.
As the oldest theologians, Indians were the first people to possess books . One such book was the Shaster Bedang, a supposedly four-thousand-year-old exposition of the doctrine of the "Bedas" written by the philosopher Beass Muni. It was found in Alexander Dow's History of Hindostan translated from the Persian to which are prefixed two dissertations concerning the Hindoos.Voltaire believed that the Bedang taught Vedic monotheism. Voltaire was also familiar with another purportedly ancient and sacred book, the Shasta or Shastabad of Brahma. Voltaire maintained that the Shasta was five thousand years old, probably the oldest book in the world and the source for subsequent law books. It possessed real wisdom and the pure original expression of Indian religion. The Shasta was actually a small "theological" treatise of recent date that had been transmitted to John Zephaniah Holwell, who included it in his Interesting historical events relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan (1765-71). However, Voltaire read its existence to prove that the brahmins had preceeded by several centuries the Chinese, whom Voltaire initially thought had preceeded the whole world in wisdom. The Shasta's importance for Voltaire, therefore, was not so much that it was the oldest book but that its style prefigured, in his estimation, all wisdom, including that of Greece.' The Shasta proved to Voltaire that the Indians were monotheists. More importantly, however, it showed that the Chinese and the West borrowed from India both their vision of God and their myth of the Fall of Man.
Voltaire also discovered a manuscript, entitled the Cormo Vedam, yet did not believe the Cormo Vedam to be a text worthy of the modern brahmins. He judged it a ludicrous ritual "pile" of superstitions . Voltaire cited the Cormo Vedam primarily to show how the Veda and brahmins had degenerated.
Traces of such decay were particularly prevalent in Voltaire's primary document of Aryan religion, the Ezour Vedam. In Voltaire's estimation, the Ezour Vedam was the most important Sanskrit [sic] text that he possessed. He claimed that its composition predated Alexander's expedition to India. Voltaire received the manuscript of the Ezour Vedam from the Comte de Maudave (1725-77) who had brought it to France.
The count was purportedly a close friend of a francophone brahmin who had tried to translate the manuscript from Sanskrit into French . Voltaire alternately defined the Ezour Vedam as the beginning of the Veda or "a copy of the four vedams" . In La Refense de mon oncle, he characterized it as "the true vedam, the vedam explained, the pure vedam." By 1761, however, he described it as merely a commentary of the Veda.
In reality, it did not matter to Voltaire that this text was not really the Veda; what mattered was that it satisfied the idea of a Veda which, for Voltaire, represented an exemplum of sublimity and the scripture of the world's oldest religion. The Ezour Vedam became such a text: it was the authentic text par excellance, the real Urtext, anterior to Pythagorus and anterior to the Shasta. Not only did Voltaire value it but, at the Bibliotheque du Roi where he had deposited a copy, he claimed that it was regarded as the most precious acquisition of the collection.
This "Veda" announced a pure cult, disengaged from all superstition and all fanaticism. Written by the first brahmins, who also served as kings and pontiffs, it established a religion based upon universal reason.
More importantly, the Ezour Vedam provided Voltaire with the ideal text with which to challenge the historical perspective of Judeo-Christianity. Voltaire read the Ezour Vedam to show how the vaunted aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition existed in India centuries before the Old Testament. The general thrust of this argument was to displace the Jews from a favored position in the Christian tradition. Vedic India represented a more distant antiquity than that of the Jews.
For his part, Voltaire hoped to prove how all the principles of Christian theology that had been lost with the Veda could still be found in the Ezour Vedam, thanks to its retrieval and circulation by a French philosophe.
[url="http://www.raphaelvishanu-world.at/orientald3.html"]http://www.raphaelvishanu-world.at/orientald3.html[/url]