Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu nationalist reconstructions of Indian prehistory*

before the Asiatick Society in 1786, the thesis that the Sanskrit language was related to the classical European languages, Greek and Latin, and indeed to Gothic, Celtic and Persian, this was later received not only as a milestone in the history of linguistics. This newly found linguistic relationship represented at the same time the most important theoretical foundation on which European Orientalists reconstructed a pre-history of South Asia, the main elements of which achieved general recognition in the second half of the 19th century. According to this reconstruction, around the middle of the second millenium BCE, Indo-European tribes who called themselves ārya (Aryans)migrated from the north into India where they progressively usurped the indigenous popula-tion and became the new ruling class. In colonial India this so-called “Aryan migration theory ” met with an astonishing and diverse reception within the identity-forming discourses of different people groups. The reconstruction of an epoch lying almost three to four thousand years in the past metamorphosed, in the words of Jan Assman, into an ‘internalized past’, that is, through an act of semioticization the Aryan migration was transformed into a ‘hot memory ’ in Levi-Strauss’s sense, and thereby into a ‘founding history, i.e. a myth ’ (Assman 1992:75–77). This was *An earlier version of this article, in German, was published in “Arier ” und “Draviden”: Konstruktionen der Vergangenheit als Grundlage für Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmungen Südasiens ed. by Michael Bergunder & Rahul Peter Das (Halle: Verlag der Franckesche