Theos-Talk Archives (December 2002 Message tt00655)

FROM BHAKTI ANANDA GOSWAMI / BA G

Dear Mr. Johnson, 

Thankyou for your thoughtful and informative replies. My responses 
are below at /////


Message 9857 

From: "kpauljohnson <kpauljohnson@y...>" <kpauljohnson@y...> 
Date: Thu Dec 19, 2002 7:31 am
Subject: Composites and counterparts

KPJ 
Dear Bhakti Ananda Goswami,

Thanks for sharing your further thoughts, which inspire a few 
reflections and/or clarifications:

BA G
> thought leaders of an era. Their pseudo-scientific presentation 
> of 'root races' and glorification of an imagined superior 'Aryan' 
> race supplied an important rationale for Euro-centric imperialism. 


KPJ
Perhaps the attitude of superiority of Kashmiri and Punjabi light 
skinned Indians towards darker South Indians might figure into HPB's 
Aryanism.

//// No doubt it did. Despite the claim of modern Muslims that 
theirs' is a religion devoid of racism, history reveals something 
else. While evidence for any ancient racial 'white' "Aryan Invasion" 
is lacking, North West Old India was invaded numerous times in the 
later historical period by people of a different lighter-skinned 
ethnicity like the Persians, Arabs and even the Greeks (the Bactrian 
Era). At least some (if not all) of the assumed 'Aryan' racial 
features of the Punjabis, for instance, are surely due to these later 
influences, and not the very ancient imagined 'Aryan' invasion. Were 
these Persians, Greeks and Arabs racist? Did 'Aryanism' arise from a 
somewhat mythical sense of a singular separate racial identity and 
history possessed by these lighter-skinned inhabitants of the North 
West Indo-Iranian Region? Whatever the case, there was clearly a 
modern confluence of European 'white racism' and Indo-Iranian and 
Arab 'white racism', which produced the Aryan mega myth. 

//// What of the racism of these North West Indian peoples ? 


/////THE ARAB-MUSLIM COMPONENT

//// As for the Arabs, studying their global history from age to age 
often reveals a stratification of societies with racial 
characteristics as the determining factor. Muslim chattel slavery was 
very often a lighter-skinned on darker-skinned form of oppression. 
This has persisted to the present. For example, in the last 50 years, 
dark skinned Tamil Shaivite women have disappeared by the tens of 
thousands into Saudi Arabia and other Muslim states where they are 
virtually chattel slaves. When I was in Sri Lanka in 1982 I learned 
of the International Police Organization's (Interpol's) efforts to 
investigate the whereabouts of tens of thousands of Tamil women who 
had been flown to the Arab countries for 'employment' and then 
disappeared there. The presumption regarding these missing women was 
that they were now concubines and chattel slaves. In rich Arab 
households, the concubines often do the jobs that legal wives don't 
want to do. They also sexually service the men, who virtually own 
them. They have no rights at all and their children are born as 
chattel slaves, not legitimate sons and daughters. This arrangement 
suits the Arab Muslim women, who are the supervisors /masters of 
these women as domestic slaves in their households. These slaves 
relieve legitimate wives of some of their mens' oppression. 
Comparatively privileged (but still oppressed) the wives' legal 
status is not endangered by the slave-like concubines. Legal wives do 
not generally have to worry about the offspring of a concubine 
competing with their own children for an inheritance. 

/// Another modern example of the persistence of racist chattel 
slavery among Arab Muslims is in the Sudan. The Arab Muslims of the 
Northern Sudan are presently enslaving the dark-skinned tribals of 
the South (both Animists and Coptic Rite-related Catholics). Look on 
the internet for the story of the heroic "Lost Boys of the Sudan", 
for some insight into this campaign of the Arab Muslims against the 
Black Tribals (Animists and Christians)of the Sudan.

/// Besides examples of actual chattel slavery, the more subtle forms 
of racial stratification in Muslim societies are often quite 
obvious. To understand the time-depth and global expression of this 
Arab Racism, there are a number of ways to approach the problem. 

/// THE RACIAL STRATIFICATION OF MOGUL AND HISPANIC CULTURE AND THE 
LEGACY OF 16th CENTURY MOORISH IBERIA

/// The Iberian Moors were primarily a mix of Arabs and Africans. 
The question is, did they have a general racial stratification in 
their culture with the lighter skinned and more Arab or European 
features conferring social privilege? If this was the case, was 
this also common throughout the rest of the Muslim World ? It would 
be nice to be able to see if this were so, and in fact we can 
actually SEE that in some areas of Muslim rule it WAS so, because of 
the evidence from art history. Remember that From South East Asia and 
India to Iberia, there was a contiguous Arab Muslim culture. A way to 
observe this is to note that the so-called 'Arabic' numeral system, 
introduced from the Muslims into Europe, was adopted by the Muslims 
in India from the Vedic Sanskrit-related numeral system. Muslim 
monist Sufi mysticism also had elements of Indian Advaita Vedanta in 
it. Many things from the India and Asian civilizations were 
introduced into Africa and Europe by the Arab Muslims. So there was 
a complete integration of Eastern and Western Muslim culture, with 
the Muslims introducing Western traditions and innovations into the 
East, and Eastern traditions and innovations into the West. 
Diffusion studies of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian, Seleucid 
and other great empires show an amazing consistency of the dominating 
culture over vast distances. Of course, in modern times, this same 
thing was evident in the colonial culture of the British Empire etc. 
So, keeping this commonality of a ruling culture in mind, let us 
consider some of the evidence of racial stratification in Muslim 
culture from both Eastern and Western sources. 

/// In the 1500s the Muslim Mogul Ruler of India, Akbar the Great, 
commissioned the translation and color illustration of numerous 
Indian scriptures and other literary works. In these scores of 
surviving full-color miniatures, we get to see what the court of the 
Mogul King looked like, as revealed through the illustrators' 
projections into their literary world of Vedic kings and sages, God, 
gods and demons. The pictures tell the stories. One is the story of 
the text being translated, and the other is about the perspective and 
world of the artists. What the pictures reveal is that the Mogul 
court was definitely not prominently peopled by dark-skinned 
Indians. If we look at the illustrations of these Indian texts 
commissioned by Akbar the Great in the 1500s, we can get some insight 
into the racial stratification of Mogul Culture. The Freer Gallery of 
Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. has a collection of 
these full-color miniatures. 

/// For the Vaishnava Shastra the Ramayana alone, over one hundred of 
these miniature full-color illustrations have been preserved. It is 
said that Akbar had about 24,000 volumes in his prized Agra library. 
In the Ramayana illustrations, the demons and vanaras (forest 
dwellers) are clearly NOT dark-skinned Southern Indians (Tamil 
or 'Dravidians'), as the Victorian Aryanists claimed. However, the 
illustrations do depict the human upper classes as fair-skinned, with 
the exception of God / Rama and those like Him, who are gray, blueish 
or even greenish skinned. One illustration I have seen, out of over 
a hundred, depicts some of the Rakshasis guards of Sita with negroid 
skin and hair, but one the Rakshasis also has light blue skin, 
another pinkish skin and they have non-human two-toed clawed feet. 
The point is that if one examines these illustrations for what they 
can reveal about the 1500s Mogul Muslim world in which the artists 
lived, one can actually see the racial stratification of that 
society. In the question of racism in the Ramayana itself, one can 
also clearly see that the vanaras were according to the Vaishnava 
Tradition, real monkey-like beings with tails, and that the demons 
were giant shape-shifting non-human monsters with bizarre colors, 
horns, fangs, claws, and strange hides. This is important, because 
the modern Aryan versus Dravidian conflict, as framed by the Euro-
Aryanist racists, has depicted Rama as a 'white' Aryan race-hero 
against Ravana as a black or Tamil 'Dravidian' race hero. In 
contradiction to this view, in the Akbar illustrations of the 1500s, 
Rama is usually dark blue-gray and Ravana (who also has ten heads and 
twenty arms) is depicted as racially 'white' ! Never the less, the 
Victorians reinterpreted the Ramayana to support their Racist view, 
and adopting this view, the Tamil Dravidianists now imagine Hanuman 
and the Vanaras to have been the Tamil slaves or servants of the 
Aryan Lord Rama ! What a divisive tragedy. 

/// While the many surviving Akbar color miniature illustrations 
prove that the modern Aryanist racist reading of the Ramayana is 
nonsense, they also prove that the Muslim Mogul-ruled Indian society 
of Akbar's time did have a racial stratification. Another point with 
regard to India is that the Muslim Black African rulers there were 
originally brought to India by the Arabs as chattel slaves. This 
fact is not contested. Nor is the fact that Muslims in Africa ran 
the international slave trade which exported countless non-Arabs 
(blacks) both East to India etc. and West to the New World. Another 
indicator of the racial stratification of global Muslim society in 
the same era, is in the conquistador's society, which conquered the 
Western Hemisphere. Today if one analyzes the racism of the machismo 
Spanish culture in Central and South America, one can find numerous 
elements which are remnants of the Moorish Civilization of the 
Iberian Peninsula at, and just after the time of the New World 
Conquest. Although the Moors were mixed Arab and African, the 
Iberian Society that they dominated seems to have prized its lighter-
skinned and more Arab featured individuals. In fact, preserving their 
lighter more 'Aryan' features (as some modern Spanish would identify 
them !) seemed to be an important priority, which in the New World 
continued to differentiate the high-class racial Spaniards from the 
low-class Amerindians. When studying the stratification of race and 
social privilege in Central and South America, I was struck by how 
similar it was to that expressed in the castes in some regions of 
India. Since the modern rise of global Racist Aryanism, Aryanism 
also seemed to thrive there among the 'high class' lighter Spanish. 
This 'Aryan' affinity is why so many Nazis found a sympathetic haven 
in Latin America. 

/// So investigating a little further into the history of Hispanic 
racism, this is the conclusion that I came to. Of course 'white' 
people did not invent racism. There were tribal / race wars and 
chattel slavery in the Western Hemisphere before the 'Spanish' 
arrived. However, when the Iberians came, some tended to guard 
their 'racial' heritage more than others. These were also those 
whose forbearers were more involved in owning chattel slaves and in 
slave trading. When we think of the European conquest of the 'New 
World', we usually think of the Spanish as a Catholic people. Of 
course they were in fact Catholic by name, but their culture was 
still actually Arab-Moor-Muslim. Grenada itself had not fallen to 
the Christians until the fall of 1492 ! A vast number of 
Moors 'converted' in name only (being called 'Moriscos') but were 
still actually Muslim. After over 7 centuries of Moorish 
civilization, in 1519 Cortez and his conquistadores, who invaded the 
Aztec land in the New World, were Christian in name and 'dress', but 
still Muslim in culture. What they brought with them was the older 
culture of Moorish Spain with a thin historical veneer of 
Christianity on top of it. This is what accounts for the remnants 
of Moorish Civilization in the Hispanic Americas. For example, a 
kind of 'honor killing' of women is still permitted in the culture, 
which has obvious connections to Arab Muslim 'honor killing'. 
Oppressive Hispanic 'machismo' in general is reminiscent of the Arab 
Muslim oppression of women. The Jihadi spirit of the Conquistadores 
and their laws and systems of punishment (see the Spanish Inquisition 
as well) have connections to the particularly brutal Arab and Moorish 
Muslim cultures. 

//// The idea that Muslim culture was an inclusive, tolerant and 
benevolent force in history is nonsense. It is a modern myth being 
perpetrated by Muslims and politically correct non-Muslims. The true 
historical character of Muslim civilization can be seen in the fact 
that SHARIA stills allows, even mandates jihad, amputations, 
stonings, beheadings, the keeping of concubines and multiples wives 
and owning of chattel slaves ! As far as race is concerned, the 
mixed race masses at Mecca each year belie the reality of Arab Muslim 
genocide and enslavement of non-Arab 'infidels' around the world. 
When I was in the famous Collpetty Mosque in Sri Lanka, I did not see 
one single Muslim with Tamil features there. The persons I 
interviewed who had lost relatives into the international Arab Black 
Hole of promised 'domestic service employment' were all 'low class' 
Tamil Blacks, NOT 'high class' ARYAN Sinhalese. Since there were 
plenty of financially desperate Sinhalese, and it is allowed under 
SHARIA to make chattel slaves of ANY infidels, why were the black 
Tamil Shaivites being targeted instead of the 'Aryan' Sinhalese 
Buddhists? Were they not equally infidels? Of course my 
perception may be biased by my sampling, in that I was not there long 
enough to thoroughly research the situation. Were in fact the 
majority of the missing women Tamil? Was there a difference between 
the relationship of the iconoclastic Muslims to the lighter-skinned 
iconoclastic Sinhalese and their relationship to the dark-
skinned 'idolatrous' Hindu Tamil ? So the question still remains... 
did/ do the Muslim Arabs prefer to enslave darker-skinned peoples and 
make allies of the lighter-skinned ones ? Is this what they did for 
centuries in India ? Did the Muslim rule there elevate lighter-
skinned peoples to their privileged status ? What was the 
relationship between the Persians and the descendents of the Greeks, 
and the Muslim invaders? Were these lighter-skinned non-Arab peoples 
protected and elevated in preference over the darker-skinned natives 
of the region ? 

/// In relationship to our current discussion, what was the 
contribution of all this to the 'ARYAN' racial component of the 
Punjabi and Kashmiri Mix? What part of Aryanism was IRANIANISM / 
Persian, what part ISHMAILI or Arab-Muslim, and what part was Hindu-
Brahminic ? The European Anglo-Germanic, French etc. and Russian 
Aryans brought their own stream of 'white' racist consciousness to 
this historical confluence of 'white' racism, and provided the world 
with its definitive Aryan pseudo-history, tying together all of 
the 'white' racists into a single global mega myth. In the mega 
myth 'White' Aryans gave high civilization to Egypt, Persia, India 
and Sri Lanka. The global class dominance of lighter-skinned peoples 
was not due to more recent centuries of Muslim and European military 
Imperialism. It was mythologized to be the result of a much more 
ancient natural superiority of the white aryan race, which was 
imagined to have conquered the world in some remote time, seeding it 
with civilization. 


KPJ 
Maybe the readiness of 20th century Indians to accept the 
Kashmiri Nehru-Gandhi dynasty had something to do with this same 
Aryanism. 

/// I am sure that it did. 


KPJ 
Yet the dynasty that has been leading the Theosophical 
movement through most of the 20th century has been South Indian, as 
was Krishnamurti. 
snip

/// There are South Indians as well as Sri Lankans who identify as 
Aryans. The question is not whether Theosophy has been led by South 
Indians, but whether these were still ARYAN identified. Here is a 
portrait of Krishnamurti, one of a 'Dravidian' Tamil child of the 
straight haired type, and of a 'Dravidian' man of the wooly haired 
type. For a modern Dravidianist understanding of racial 'Dravidians', 
of both the straight haired and wooly haired types, see 
http://www.cwo.com/~lucumi/india2.html [these photo links did no go 
through, so please compare photos of Krishnamurti with the both the 
straight haired and wooly haired so-called 'Dravidian' racial types.] 

/// When I was in Sri Lanka I met with numerous 'Dravidians' from 
Tamil Nadu India, and the more straight-haired and European-type 
featured persons tended to identify themselves as Aryans regardless 
of their skin tone. 


BA G
> >I have become somewhat disappointed at the lack of honest self-
> reflective interest shown by native Indologists in the subject of 
the 
> genesis of Indo-Aryanism as related to Euro-centrism in general and 
> HPB / Theosophy in particular. That your important work on 
Theosophy 
> has received no critical review from Indian scholars (if I 
understand 
> you correctly) 


KPJ
That is hopefully not the case, but I have been unable to determine 
otherwise. The Indian publisher did tell me, shortly after its 
release, that it had attracted some positive notice, but failed to 
reply to my inquiry about specifics. Indian periodicals are not 
indexed in USA sources, and the print Indian indexes lag far behind. 
Last time I checked at the Duke University library there were no 
indexes for Indian scholarly journals for the late 90s, (cut off date 
was 1997, this being in 2000), but surely by now there are. So it 
behooves me to go back and check.
snip

/// I will be quite interested to see how pro-Theosophy Indian 
scholars receive your honest appraisal of their icon. 

BA G
> agenda in the Theosophy of HPB and friends. She never reveals any 
> real living masters, and such masters never publicly owned her. 

KPJ
That ignores the crucial, and hidden-in-plain-sight case of Swami 
Dayananda Sarasvati. (And her mythologizing his disciple Shyamaji 
Krishnavarma in letters to her aunt in Russia.) But after being 
publicly *disowned* by the Master she came to India to publicly 
serve, she was not likely to make the same mistake again. 

//// This public disowning is why I did not include Swami Dayananda 
or the Sankarcarya who rejected her among HPB's unrevealed Mahatmas.

KPJ
Mythologizing her other and later mentors protected her from any such 
embarrassments down the road. (Which would have been problematic had 
she been obliged to explain the deaths of Ranbir Singh, Thakar Singh, 
and Mikhail Katkov, and the upheaval this entailed in her network of 
sponsors.)

/// This is exactly my understanding of the situation. In her own 
estimation, HPB was creating something great, and could not risk any 
mere mortal's sabotage of it. She had to protect her project from 
the possible exposure of herself and her sources as neophyte in many 
things, and from the possible scandals involving her real teachers, 
and their potential rejection of her. 

BA G
> HPB pieced her Mahatmas together out of some real Sikhs, Advaita 
> Vedantist Hindus and others, and their writings. In this 
composite 
> the dominant element is the personality of some real charismatic 
> characters, who I believe are well identified as the Kashmiri 
> Rajas. 


KPJ
This is the case with the more fully-developed characters, especially 
Koot Hoomi and Morya. But some of the ones more briefly sketched, 
e.g. "The Chohan Lama of Shigatse" are probably not composites but 
fictionalizations of single individuals.

//// I agree.

BA G 
>Since she never identified them, and they never publicly 
> owned any relationship to her, I doubt if there was actually a 
master-
> disciple relationship between them. Instead she imagined these 
> charismatic leaders as her Gurus. There was some kind of 
> involvement between them, more likely political, because she was 
> trying to get close to them by offering politics-related 
services. 


KPJ
True, but the diary entries from Swami Dayananda indicate that he was 
actually helping her learn Sanskrit and monitoring her progress, etc. 
so in that case there is at least an *element* of a guru relationship.
Surely intertwined with a political one though.

//// At one time Dayananda was clearly her shiksha (instructing) 
guru, but because he ultimately rejected her, he could not have been 
her diksha guru, due to the serious vowed nature of the diksha 
relationship. HPB implied that she had such a vowed diksha 
('disciple' is related to the Sanskrit word diksha) relationship with 
her Mahatmas. 


BA G
> She and her associates had the spy-network and diplomat cards to 
play in the 
> colonial fight for dominance in the region of Kashmir. This no-
> doubt would have given them access to the Rajas, as it is 
apparently 
> did. 


KPJ
Not just there but in central and northeast India as well, with the 
maharajas of Indore and Varanasi among the most prominent sponsors.

/// The entire genesis of Aryanism and Theosophy is a most uniquely 
intriguing phenomenon in history. I am surprised that much more 
effort has not been focused by historians on unraveling the mysteries 
of the interactions between the players like Jacolliot, Notovitch, 
Eliphas Levi, HPB, and persons like the Rajas of Kashmir and the 
Ahmadiyya Messiah (of the 'Tomb of Jesus' group) who was a great 
supporter of the British Raj, and whose group ended up with British 
royal patronage, to the extent that their global headquarters is in 
Great Britain today ! 


BA G 
> orbit. HPB used them, and they used her. 

KPJ
She used Olcott, Olcott used her. A similar case in that their 
spiritual partnership was one of mutual advantage more than mutual 
admiration, when examined closely. Perhaps these origins in 
manipulative and secretive associations have something to do with an 
ongoing atmosphere of suspicion and conspiracy theories in the 
movement they led?

///// Certainly the secret conspiratorial nature of the western and 
eastern occult societies is an important factor in HPB's Theosophy. 
The Mahatmas and their brotherhood are presented as destroying and 
hiding books and keeping secrets from humanity as well as revealing 
secrets to humanity through their carefully chosen initiates. In 
fact, HPB is depicted as the only revelatory human instrument of her 
kind at the time ! She is then depicted as both withholding and 
hiding or covering over the Mahatma's revelations in her books. The 
idea of hidden teachings and secret conspiracies is all-pervasive in 
her work. Even within her Theosophical Society she had a more occult 
ESOTERIC section !


BA G
> secrecy ? Were her Rajas Masons? Were they Sufi occultists? 

KPJ
No, but some of her Middle Eastern mentors were, and her descriptions 
of Mahatmas build upon those of her "Oriental Rosicrucian" mentors in 
the Ottoman Empire.
snip

//// Yes her Egyptian Esoteric and Turkish Sufi Mentors were surely 
contributive to her eventual literary development of the Mahatmas. 
Secret international political intrigue was also very central to the 
Egyptian and regional esotericism of the time. The Egyptian Ahmad 
messiah was a military leader, and in Kashmir, India and the Punjab, 
another (pro-British) Ahmadiyya self-appointed Muslim Messiah there 
also sought eventual conquest of the region. The Ahmadiyya 
worshipers of this Muslim Messiah there today are still trying to 
determine the political outcome of the region. One focus of their 
regional strategy is to gain control of Kashmir, where their 
bogus 'Tomb of Jesus' is. What I would like to know, is what was the 
relationship between the Rajas of Kashmir, the Ahmad Messiah and HPB 
and her network of occultist friends. On page 277 of His 1999 
University of Chicago Book "Rethinking India's Oral and Classical 
Epics: Draupadi Among Rajputs, Muslims, and Dalits", Prof. Alf 
Hiltebetel, in a discussion of the modern insertions into the Maha 
Bhavishya Purana, mentions the Ahmadiyya traditions of Jesus' sojourn 
in Kashmir. This fiction was incorporated into the Theosophical 
view, and some relationship between HPB's thinking on this and that 
of Notovitch, Eliphas Levi, and other occultists of the time is 
evident. Was the corrupted version of the Bhavishya Purana actually 
created during the library project of the Kashmiri Singh Dynasty 
Rajas ?

/// Here is a polemical Muslim site that gives the anti-Ahmadiyya 
view of the relationship between Western esoteric teachings about 
Jesus and those of the Ahmadiyya's Messiah Mirza. Mentioned is the 
corrupted Bhavishya Purana, and it is stated that "Bhavishya Purana 
was printed for the first time in Bombay in 1910 under the order of 
Maharaja Partap Singh of Kashmir. " 
http://alhafeez.org/rashid/british-jewish/bjc_2.htm


BA G
> publication of my work and receive my degree. Now my health has 
> improved a little, and I have a computer installed on my bed, so I 
> need to focus my attention on trying to get at least one 
introductory 
> volume to my work summarized, out of my immense and ever-growing 
> graduate work data base. This is going to take all of my efforts, 
> and so I have to restrict my writing on other subjects. 


KPJ
Best wishes on your progress in that endeavor.

/// Thankyou, I need all the best wishes I can get !


BA G
> Thus it deserves to be studied at very close-range, by specialists 
in 
> the various fields involved. 

KPJ
Within the coming month I will get down to Duke and see what Indian 
periodical indexes reveal about recently scholarship on Theosophical 
history there.

//// Although I cannot write at length on the subject, I will 
continue to be intensely interested in your own studies into it, and 
the response of other scholars to your work. Please let us have an 
update if you find out about any significant recent scholarship on 
Theosophical history. 

/// My best wishes to you also, 

//// Bhakti Ananda Goswami


Cheers,

KPJ





Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date Size 
9859 Re: Composites and counterparts Steve Stubbs 
<stevestubbs@y...> stevestubbs Thu 12/19/2002 3 KB 

9870 The Kalmuck factor kpauljohnson <kpauljohnson@y...> 
kpauljohnson Thu 12/19/2002 3 KB 

9886 Re: The Kalmuck factor Steve Stubbs <stevestubbs@y...> 
stevestubbs Fri 12/20/2002 2 KB 

9864 Re: Composites and counterparts Morten Nymann Olesen kidhr7 
Thu 12/19/2002 13 KB 

9874 Re: Composites and counterparts