Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Swastika


You are constantly surprised by how much you can learn by interacting with people from other cultures. A Bangladeshi friend recently introduced me to the Swastika, a symbol traditionally associated with well-being and good luck, and a symbol I had grown up associating only with the Nazis.

It turns out that the symbol has been in widespread use both in the East and West by innumerable number of religions and cultures. The symbol was adopted by the Nazis because of its association with the Aryan civilization from which the German nation has been conjectured to have descended. The wikipedia entry says that the Nazis claimed that the early Aryans of India, from whose Vedic tradition the Swastika sprang, were prototypical white invaders. It also says that the Indian caste system might have been created by those Aryan invaders to preserve their "racial purity". Quite interesting, if there actually is any truth to it.

Its fascinating to see how one symbol has come to stand for goodness as well as pure evil over the last century. Given that I never came across this symbol in its older historical context in Pakistan, it surprises me as to how far we have drifted away from our Indian origin.

7 comments:

  1. Couple of quick points: the Nazis inverted the traditional Vedic swastika, so the Nazi swastika was the mirror image of the swastika as the Aryans had known it. (Kind of creepy, no, that they basically inverted it -- as if inverting its meaning as well...)

    Secondly, the Aryan invasion model has been revised to be a migrationist rather than an invasionist model, and I think even there a debate is ongoing (see for instance the works of the scholar Edwin F. Bryant).

    As for the caste system being a means to preserve racial purity, I think first of all that the term "Aryan" is itself more of a cultural than a biological construct. The ancient texts of India use "Aryan" to refer simply to a "noble being" of high moral character and virtue. The caste system seems to have been something created to protect Aryan civilization from invading hordes -- and it was not always as degenerate as it is today in India. However, it is certainly a hierarchical and inegalitarian system that has been, by and large, a social disaster for India in the long term.

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  2. Thanks for the informative feedback. I don't know why it was created but the caste system sure seems to have done a lot of harm. For one thing, it should have provided a lot of incentive for the lower castes to convert to other religions, I think.

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  3. most mandirs have swastika painted on the walls, i have been to quite few mandirs in Sind which have Swastika.

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  4. "For one thing, it should have provided a lot of incentive for the lower castes to convert to other religions, I think."

    Definitely, and it also has to be acknowledged that Islam played a major role in challenging the caste system in South Asia.

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  5. @Tazeen

    Interesting to know that. I have had several Hindu friends in Pakistan but never had a chance to visit a mandir.

    @stumblingmystic

    True. It also partly explains the rise of Sikhism too.

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  6. 'It also says that the Indian caste system might have been created by those Aryan invaders to preserve their "racial purity".'

    There are some people who hold this, and it is an interesting but historically inaccurate account. If you want to read about someone who strongly believes this and who supported Nazism and the Holocaust, look up Savitri Devi.

    http://www.savitridevi.org/

    According to The Story of India, the Aryans migrated from the North to India when there was nobody there, that is, the Harappan civilization had already been destroyed by natural causes. So the caste system could not have been to maintain racial purity, since they were all of one race.

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  7. Thanks for the link.

    Reading about her gave me more insight into why Hitler was so against the Semitic race.

    I did watch The Story of India but I don't remember it saying that there was nobody there. I might have missed that.

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