Friedrich Max Mu ̈ller (1823–1900) (van der Bosch 2002) created the notion
of the Aryan race. He assumed a link between Indo-European (or Indo-
Germanic, as he initially called it) and the Aryan race. He was a German-
born philologist, expert in Sanskrit, for whom, after failing to obtain the
Boden Professorship of Sanskrit in 1860, the University of Oxford would
create a chair of Comparative Philology in 1868. He had arrived in London in
1846 to expand his research for his translation of theRig Veda(a written
source composed around 1500bce, in which the group who had brought
Sanskrit into India was identiWed as the ‘Arya’). For Mu ̈ller the Arya were not
just a group who had spread from North India to other areas to the South: he
extended the meaning of Arya to include all those speaking Indo-European,
for whom he identiWed a homeland in Central Asia. The Aryan character of
both Indians and Europeans led Mu ̈ller to believe that when a Briton con-
fronted ‘a Greek, a German, or an Indian, we recognize him as one of
ourselves’ (1854 in Ballantyne 2002: 42). Later on in his life, when Darwinism
demonstrated that the timescale of racial and linguistic variation was diVer-
ent, Max Mu ̈ller broke with the equation he had made between the Aryan
races and the Indo-European linguistic groups (Trautmann 1997: 183).
Max Mu ̈ller’s retreat was not followed by others. By the mid nineteenth
century the development of physical anthropology—then called race science
(ibid. ch. 6) (Chapter 12)—made race a key element in the discussion of
Indian antiquities, as well as in other spheres of Indian scholarship and in
contemporary politics (Majeed 1999). Aryan ancestry was considered, for
example, in the selection of men for the army. Those of northern regions
(especially Nepal, Punjab, and Rajasthan) were favoured because of their
‘Aryan’ origin, strengthened by a century-long military—and very mascu-
line—heritage (Ballantyne 2002: 49). Several scholars—including some inter-
ested in coins and monumental art—argued that the Aryans had degenerated
in India. This was the case with James Tod, who in 1825 had published ‘An
Account of Greek, Parthian and Hindu Medals, Found in India’ in the
Transactions of the Asiatic Society(Cribbet al. 2004: 260). It was also the
case with James Fergusson (1808–86), one of the most inXuential scholars of
the time, an indigo-planter who had undertaken extensive architectural
studies between 1829 and 1847, and is regarded by many as the father of the
study of Indian architecture. In hisHistory of Indian and Eastern Architecture
(1876), Fergusson saw Indian monuments as reXecting miscegenation (not
his word), that is, racial intermarriage between Aryans and people belonging
to inferior races (Ballantyne 2002: 51). The heterogeneous racial history of
regions such as the Punjab—believed to be the Indian home of the Aryans—
was also put forward by Alexander Cunningham on the basis of the excav-
ations conducted by the archaeological surveyor for the government of India
224 Colonial Archaeology