South Asia Studies402 Cohen Hall, 249 S. 36th Street
‘The Negro Our Aryan Brother’ : Race, Caste, and Hindu Cosmopo-nationalism in the Transcolonial 1920s
This talk explores the entangled genealogies of modern concepts of race, caste, and religion by exploring a very particular—and unexpected—microhistory. In 1925, the Arya Samaj missionary Pandit Chamupati went on a mission tour of British East Africa to avoid a scandal brewing in Lahore around an anti-Muslim tract he had anonymously authored. Based in Nairobi, Chamupati stayed in East Africa for around one year and published several essays about his trip, including the Vedic Magazine article “The Negro Our Aryan Brother.” By arguing that East Africans were long-lost Vedic Aryans, Chamupati extended the scope of the “Aryan” body in an unusual way. He also linked Aryanism, as transcolonial formation of race, caste, and religion, to an emergent notion of a neo-Vedic empire that was itself unstable, founded on constitutive contradictions.