Aryan

• 1. Introduction

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  Aryan is a word that carries two almost irreconcilable histories. In its oldest form, stretching back to the Vedic period and the ancient Iranian plateau, it was simply what people called themselves: a marker of shared language, shared ritual, and shared belonging. By the 20th century, that same word had been seized, distorted, and woven into one of the most destructive ideologies the world has ever seen. How a self-designation used by ancient Indo-Iranian peoples came to anchor Nazi racial theory, and how scholars are still reckoning with its legacy, is the story this documentary sets out to trace. Along the way, it will ask what the word actually meant in ancient India and Iran, who twisted it and why, what the evidence says about the people the Rig Veda actually described, and why today "Indo-Iranian" has largely replaced "Aryan" in academic usage while the old word survives in white supremacist circles and, oddly enough, in baby name registries.

• 2. The Original Meaning

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  The Sanskrit word arya designated, above all, those who spoke Vedic Sanskrit and observed Vedic cultural norms. In the words of Indologist Michael Witzel, the term did not mean a particular people or even a particular racial group, but "all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)". The Vedic community defined itself through worship of specific gods, Indra and Agni in particular, through participation in the yajna ritual, through the practice of poetry, and through the correct use of the arya speech. Those who could not speak the language correctly, the Mleccha or Mrdhravaac, were the outsiders.

  Scholar David W. Anthony put the shared Indo-Iranian identity sharply: the Rigveda and Avesta agreed that the essence of their shared parental Indo-Iranian identity "was linguistic and ritual, not racial. If a person sacrificed to the right gods in the right way using the correct forms of the traditional hymns and poems, that person was an Aryan." The Rig Veda explicitly affirms this: the barrier is ritualistic, not biological.

  In ancient Iran, the Avestan term airya functioned in exactly the same way. Scholar Gherardo Gnoli described the old Iranian airya as a collective term denoting the peoples who were aware of belonging to one ethnic stock, speaking a common language, and sharing a religious tradition centred on the cult of Ahura Mazda. The Avesta uses the term in geographic expressions as well, including the "expanse of the airyas" (airiianm vaejo) and the "dwelling place of the airyas". By the late 6th to early 5th century BCE, the Achaemenid king Darius the Great described himself as ariya, and in the Behistun inscription, he labelled the Old Persian language ariya as well.

  Some 35 names of Vedic tribes, chiefs, and poets mentioned in the Rig Veda were of non-Aryan origin, which suggests that cultural assimilation into the arya community was fully possible, and that the category was defined by belonging rather than birth.

• 3. Roots and Etymology

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  The term Arya first appeared in a modern European language in 1771, when French Indologist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron rendered it as Aryens and rightly compared the Greek arioi with the Avestan airya and the country name Iran. In Germany, Johann Friedrich Kleuker's translation of Anquetil-Duperron's work introduced the term Arier in 1776. William Jones' 1794 translation of the Indian Laws of Manu rendered the Sanskrit arya as "noble".

  The English form Aryan, originally spelled Arian, appeared first as an adjective in 1839 and then as a noun in 1849. By the time scholarly usage settled in, the word oscillated between two meanings: the broader one equivalent to Indo-European, and the narrower one equivalent to Indo-Iranian.

  The deeper roots of the word are debated. Several scholars, beginning with Adolphe Pictet who lived from 1799 to 1875, proposed deriving the stem arya- from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European term variously translated as "member of one's own group, peer, freeman" or "lord, ruler". The proposed Anatolian, Celtic, and Germanic cognates, however, are not universally accepted. According to linguists J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, the original Proto-Indo-European meaning placed clear emphasis on in-group status of the freemen as distinguished from outsiders, particularly those captured and incorporated into the group as slaves. In Anatolia the base word came to emphasize personal relationship; among Indo-Iranians it took a more ethnic meaning, presumably because most of the unfree who lived among them were captives from other ethnic groups.

  The word stem left traces across a wide geography. The name Iran itself derives from the Old Persian Aryanam, and the medieval kingdom of Alania takes its name from a dialectal variant of the Old Iranian stem Aryana. In the Pre-Sami language, the stem arya- was borrowed as the word for slave, suggesting conflictual relations between Indo-Iranian and Uralic peoples in prehistoric times.

• 4. Inventing a Race

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  In the 1850s, the French diplomat and writer Arthur de Gobineau published his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he viewed the white race, and particularly its Aryan branch, as the only truly civilized one. Gobineau divided humanity into three primary races, placing both Aryans and Semites within the white race, but argued that ancient Aryans had spread across the world and founded the great civilizations of antiquity before degenerating through intermixture with what he described as inferior indigenous populations. He believed the last pure Aryans were the Germanics.

  The British-German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain carried Gobineau's framework further in The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899, which Stefan Arvidsson identifies as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts". Chamberlain envisioned an existential struggle between a superior German-Aryan race and a destructive Jewish-Semitic race. The book was personally praised by German Emperor Wilhelm II, who recommended it as required reading for trainee teachers.

  Earlier in the 19th century, the intellectual groundwork had been laid more gradually. Christian Lassen, who lived from 1800 to 1876, glorified the ancient Aryans as "the most gifted" and "perfect in talent", setting them in contrast to the Semites. French orientalist Ernest Renan, born in 1823, portrayed the Semites as non-Aryans and the Aryans as a creative race destined to lead civilization. Swiss linguist Adolphe Pictet described them as the providential race and the direct ancestors of Europeans.

  The first recorded instance of the German Arier to mean "non-Jewish" dates to 1887, when a Viennese gymnastic society decided to admit only "Germans of Aryan descent" (Deutsche arischer Abkunft) as members. American author Madison Grant warned in The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, against miscegenation with supposedly inferior immigrant races. He counted even speakers of Indo-European languages, such as Slavs, Italians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews, among the threats to what he called the racially superior Germanic Aryans.

• 5. Nazi Legislation and Terror

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  In Mein Kampf, published in 1925, Adolf Hitler equated the ideal of the Aryan with the German Volk, presenting it as part of a non-Jewish master race. He framed a mythic history in which a Nordic Aryan people had conquered foreign lands, founded great civilizations, and later declined through racial dilution. Jews were racialized as morally and biologically inferior and targeted for elimination from German society.

  On the 7th of April 1933, the Nazi government enacted the Aryan Paragraph (Arierparagraph). Expressions such as "Proof of Aryan Ancestry" (Ariernachweis) and "Aryanisation" (Arisierung) entered official legal language. In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws required proof of Aryan descent as a prerequisite for Reich citizenship. Applicants demonstrated this with an Ahnenpass, or ancestor passport, providing documentary proof, typically baptismal or parish records, that all four grandparents were of Aryan descent. In December of the same year, the SS established Lebensborn, meaning "Fount of Life", to increase births among racially valuable Germans.

  In 1935, the Nazis also founded the Ahnenerbe to research Aryan prehistory through archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic studies. Its president, Walther Wust, maintained that Germans were directly descended from the Aryan Nordic race, which had spread into Asia until racial mixing caused what he called degeneration and de-Nordicization.

  Non-Aryans were legally discriminated against, including Jews, Roma, and Slavs, mostly Poles and Russians. Jews, regarded as the arch enemy of the Aryan race in what the Nazis framed as a racial struggle for existence, were especially targeted, culminating in the Holocaust. The Roma, who are of Indo-Aryan origin, were also targeted, culminating in the Porajmos. Alfred Rosenberg, the chief racial ideologue of the Nazi Party, expanded on these themes in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, published in 1930, citing Persian history as a cautionary example of racial miscegenation.

• 6. The Aryan Invasion Theory

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  Translating the sacred texts of the Rig Veda in the 1840s, German linguist Friedrich Max Muller believed he found evidence of an ancient invasion of India by a group he called "the Arya". In his later works, Muller was careful to note that he thought Aryan was a linguistic rather than a racial category. However, other scholars used his invasion theory to propose visions of racial conquest across South Asia and beyond.

  In 1885, New Zealand polymath Edward Tregear argued that an "Aryan tidal-wave" had washed over India and continued south through the islands of the East Indian archipelago, reaching the shores of New Zealand. Scholars including John Batchelor, Armand de Quatrefages, and Daniel Brinton extended the theory to the Philippines, Hawaii, and Japan, identifying indigenous peoples they believed were descendants of early Aryan conquerors.

  With the discovery of the Indus Valley civilization, mid-20th-century archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler argued that that large urban civilization had been destroyed by the Aryans. This position was later discredited; climate aridification is now viewed as the likely cause of the Indus Valley Civilization's collapse.

  In India, the British colonial government had followed de Gobineau's arguments and fostered the idea of a superior Aryan race that co-opted the caste system in favor of imperial interests. The fully developed British-mediated interpretation envisioned a segregation of Aryan and non-Aryan along caste lines, with the upper castes labeled Aryan and the lower ones non-Aryan. This allowed the British to identify themselves with the high-caste Brahmins, while Brahmins could see themselves as on par with the British.

  In recent decades, the idea of an Aryan migration into India has mainly been disputed by Indian scholars, who propose various alternate theories. Michael Witzel characterizes the indigenous Aryans position as not scholarship in the usual sense, but "an apologetic, ultimately religious undertaking". The term invasion, once common in this context, is now generally regarded as polemical and unscholarly.

• 7. After the Atrocities

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  The genocides and large-scale atrocities committed in the name of Aryanist racial ideology during the first half of the 20th century led academics to largely abandon the term Aryan as a stand-alone ethno-linguistic label. In contemporary scholarship, Indo-Iranian is the preferred alternative, although the term Indo-Aryan is still used to denote the Indic branch of that family. More than 900 million people are native speakers of an Indo-Aryan language, while an estimated 150 to 200 million speak an Iranian language.

  In Iran, the word's trajectory took a different path. During the Pahlavi period from 1925 to 1979, Iranian nationalism drew heavily on the Aryan myth to promote national identity. In 1935, Reza Shah mandated that the country be known internationally as Iran rather than Persia, linking the name directly to the Aryan heritage. His son Mohammad Reza later adopted the title "King of the Kings, Light of the Aryans" (Shahanshah Aryamehr), and in the 1970s he proposed an Aryan brotherhood among Iran, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan as a framework for regional cooperation.

  In religious contexts, the word arya remains in active use. Jawaharlal Nehru described the religions of India as arya dharma, a term that encompasses Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. In Jainism, the word appears in texts such as the Pannavanasutta, and a character named Arya Mangu is mentioned twice in the early Jaina text Avasyakaniryukti.

  As a personal name, Aryan continues to be given to children across South Asia and Iran. According to the U.S. Social Security Administration, in 2012 the name Arya was the fastest-rising girl's name in the United States, jumping from 711th to 413th in popularity. By 2017, the name had entered the top 200 most commonly used names for baby girls in England and Wales. Many American white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, including the Aryan Brotherhood, the Aryan Nations, the Aryan Republican Army, and the White Aryan Resistance, still use the term, ensuring that a word born from ancient Indo-Iranian self-identification continues to carry a heavy and contested charge well into the present century.