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My work presents an international conceptual history of Aryanism, considering its trajectories in the time of British imperialism in the Indian subcontinent (1757-1947). My thesis argues that Aryanism is, contrary to popular understandings of it as an endogamous European notion of white supremacy, an inter-elite political and epistemological idea produced through sustained and heterogeneous interactions between European and Hindu Indian elites. Drawing on Subaltern School postcolonial critique, South Asian Marxism and interventions made by anti-caste scholarship, I argue that Aryanism came alive through logics of imperialism that incorporated both European and subcontinental notions of hierarchy and difference, demonstrating the global entanglements of the categories of race, caste, and class. In this way, the thesis points to complex networks of political and affective alliances that worked to challenge and reify dominant colonial hierarchies, in turn becoming productive of new ones.
Across four empirical chapters, I enquire into the sites in which these interactions of Aryan connection played out. Centring the ‘global occult’ as the under-studied and under-theorised site for Aryanism’s connected politics, the chapters investigate early encounters between British East India Company orientalists and upper-caste pandits, the occult Theosophical Society’s envoy into fin-de-siècle Indian upper-class society, Hindu revivalists’ proselytisation of the spiritual and political teachings of yoga in early 20th century Britain and America, and the entanglements between European paganism, Hindu nationalism and Nazism in the life and writings of Greek-French Aryan supremacist Savitri Devi (1905-1982).
These empirical investigations lead me to argue that the ontology of correspondences and astral connection provided by esotericism, and more specifically the intellectual and material infrastructure of the ‘global occult’, provided a central arena in which ideas of Aryan inter-elite connection between India and Europe could be explored. By this, my work makes significant interventions into current debates within the postcolonial theory and global intellectual history, ultimately understanding Aryanism as a history of our collective present.