Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part C (2024)

The Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), developed in the nineteenth century, remains one of the most contested constructs in South Asian historiography. While archaeology, linguistics, and genetics have steadily undermined its core assumptions, AIT’s persistence reflects ideological commitments more than empirical proof. This article argues that AIT took shape at the intersection of colonial governance, racial science, and biblical interpretation. British administrators—most notably Thomas Babington Macaulay—advanced English education to displace indigenous traditions and cultivate a loyal intermediary elite, while Friedrich Max Müller’s celebrated philological labors, supported by colonial institutions and patrons linked to the East India Company, reframed the Vedas within an Indo-European (and, at times, missionary) horizon. Enlightenment and nineteenth-century race theorists—Carl Linnaeus, Johann Blumenbach, Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and Joseph Arthur de Gobineau—furnished hierarchies that elevated “Aryan” whiteness and naturalized conquest. Biblical narratives such as the Curse of Ham and the Tower of Babel further sanctified AIT by embedding it in a providential history of dispersion and difference. By recasting caste as race and portraying Indian civilization as derivative, AIT legitimized colonial rule and fractured cultural self-understanding. Contemporary research favors migration and admixture over invasion, yet AIT’s political afterlives endure in both nationalist rejection and Dravidian assertion. Reading AIT through its motivating frames clarifies how colonial knowledge produced durable narratives of domination and division and underscores the need for a decolonized historiography.