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.
To-day Christian England is ruling India, and the English Raj is just,
fair-minded, tolerant, and equitable. This is true, and it is also
true that the last Moghuls disgraced the throne of Delhi and shattered
Hindustan. But what can you prove by it?
Others have ruled India successfully before Asia had ever heard of
England.
Akbar, the Moghul Emperor, enforced tolerance and justice in those
barbaric days when the life of a Jew in Europe was at the kind mercy
of an ignorant and brutal Christian rabble. He, the Muslim, built and
endowed Hindu temples and charitable institutions while his European
contemporaries were periodically burning down the synagogues and were
trying to extend the sway of the gentle Christ with the effective help
of murder and torture. He, and before him his father’s successor on
the throne of Delhi, Shir Shah, the Afghan usurper, attempted to found
an Indian empire “broad-based upon the people’s will,” long before the
days of Voltaire, Robespierre, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais. He settled
land revenue on an equitable basis while the peasants of Europe were
groaning under the heavy and humiliating burden of serfdom.
You say that his successors did not live up to the high standard
established by this greatest of Moghul princes?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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