The Aryan Hinge
Caste, race science, and the two Hindutva names on the Cofnas letter
The letter is addressed to the rector of Ghent University. Among its five hundred and sixty-nine signatories are two scholars who have built careers on the proposition that caste is a fiction manufactured by Europeans, and the school of thought they draw from is named after Ghent. That coincidence is worth holding still for a moment, because it is not really a coincidence at all.
The letter itself concerns Nathan Cofnas, a self-described race realist suspended by Ghent in August after his public statements about Jason Arday, and I have written elsewhere about the arithmetic of its signatures and the grammar of its four sentences. What interests me here is a smaller finding inside the larger one. The eighth name on the list is Prakash Shah, Reader in Culture and Law at Queen Mary University of London. Some way further down sits Ramesh N. Rao, Professor of Communication at Columbus State University in Georgia. Two names out of five hundred and sixty-nine is nothing, statistically speaking. Diagnostically it is a great deal, because these two men arrive at a defence of hereditarian race science from a direction that ought, on the surface, to have nothing to do with it, and the route they travel is the oldest route in the modern history of racial thought.
Before anything else, a distinction that I hold to firmly and that Hindutva works ceaselessly to erase. Hinduism is a vast, internally quarrelsome, philosophically extraordinary set of traditions practised by more than a billion people, including members of my own family, and it is not the subject of this essay. Hindutva is a twentieth-century political ideology of ethnic nationhood that captured the Indian state and now operates a transnational advocacy apparatus. The distinction matters because the collapse of the two is Hindutva's most valuable rhetorical asset, converting every criticism of a political project into an attack on a faith and every Dalit testimony into an act of bigotry against Hindus.
Caste entered European scholarship as race. That is the hinge on which everything after it turns. When William Jones announced in Calcutta in 1786 that Sanskrit bore a relation to Greek and Latin stronger than accident could produce, he opened a philological question that nineteenth-century Europe promptly converted into a biological one. The Aryan was born in a lecture on grammar and grew up in an anthropometric laboratory. By the time Herbert Hope Risley was superintending the Census of India in 1901, caste had been rendered as a gradient of racial admixture measurable with callipers, the nasal index standing as the instrument by which a fair Aryan aristocracy could be distinguished from a dark Dravidian substratum, and the census itself hardening a fluid and locally variable system of jati into a national ladder with the colonial state as its registrar. Colonial race science did not discover caste. It rewrote caste in its own image, and then governed through the rewriting.
The traffic ran in both directions, and this is the part usually left out. Savarkar's Essentials of Hindutva, published in 1923, defines the Hindu as one who holds India as both fatherland and holy land, a formula lifted in its structure from the blood-and-soil nationalisms then remaking Europe. Golwalkar's We, Or Our Nationhood Defined of 1939 admires, in terms that require no interpretation, Germany's purging of what he called the Semitic races, and offers it to Hindusthan as a lesson in how minorities might be handled. The men who built Hindutva were not naive recipients of European racial thought. They were students of it, and they understood exactly what they were borrowing, which was a technique for converting a hierarchy into a nature and a nation into a body.
What has changed since is the direction of the claim, and the sophistication of the change is easy to underestimate. Asserting Aryan racial supremacy carries costs in a world that has seen where the assertion leads. So the contemporary move runs the other way. Caste, it is now said, was invented by Christian missionaries and colonial administrators who could not comprehend Indian society and imposed a Portuguese word and a European theology of hierarchy upon it. Brahminism, on this account, is a fabrication of Western Indology. Anti-caste politics becomes a colonial residue, Dalit organising becomes evidence of missionary manipulation, and legislation against caste discrimination becomes an act of anti-Hindu prejudice dressed as equality law.
This is the research programme associated with S. N. Balagangadhara, professor emeritus at Ghent University and formerly director of its India Platform and its Research Centre for the Comparative Science of Cultures. Deborah Sutton's 2018 study of the Ghent school, published under the title "So called Caste," maps the genealogy with care and reaches a conclusion I would put no more gently myself, which is that the denial of caste as a meaningful category of South Asian life performs the precise function of insulating Hindutva politics from criticism inside India and outside it.
Prakash Shah works within that programme and says so. His own published abstracts describe drawing on the resources of the Ghent School for the comparative study of India and Europe. He co-edited Western Foundations of the Caste System for Palgrave in 2017. He held a British Academy grant under the title "Designed to fail? Foundations of the laws on caste in India, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Nations." He has taken that argument onto the platforms of the Coalition of Hindus of North America, onto the podcast of the Hindu American Foundation in conversation with its executive director, and onto the stage of the Hindudvesha conference series, where the framing session held that India was infiltrated by European race theories which restructured its varna and jati order into a caste system that the British then entrenched by census. He has written for IndiaFacts. In each venue the destination is the same, which is that Britain's caste discrimination provisions rest on an Orientalist error and should be undone.
Ramesh Rao edits IndiaFacts. He served as Human Rights Coordinator and sat on the executive council of the Hindu American Foundation between 2004 and 2013, an organisation with roots in the Sangh Parivar whose programme includes opposition to laws prohibiting caste discrimination. He is the author of Secular 'Gods' Blame Hindu 'Demons': The Sangh Parivar through the Mirror of Distortion. In 2003 he co-edited a volume titled Gujarat after Godhra: Real Violence, Selective Outrage, concerning the killings of 2002, in which somewhere between one and two thousand people died, most of them Muslim, in a state whose chief minister then was Narendra Modi.
His co-editor on that volume was Koenraad Elst.
Elst is a Flemish author who advocates the Out of India theory, which holds that the Indo-European languages originated in the subcontinent and radiated outward to Europe, and which mainstream scholarship regards as pseudohistory, contradicted directly by the ancient DNA work on steppe pastoralist movement into South Asia. Between 1992 and 1995 he sat on the editorial board of Teksten, Kommentaren en Studies, the journal of the Flemish New Right. Among his fellow editors there was Koenraad Logghe, who had endorsed keeping one's own race pure and called for respect for the ideals of the Dutch volunteers who fought for the SS on the Eastern Front. In June 1992 Elst addressed an event affiliated with the Vlaams Blok, a party a Belgian court would later find to be in breach of anti-racism law. Anders Breivik cited him in 2011. Meera Nanda has written at length on what his career demonstrates about the alignment of Hindutva with the European far right, and his career demonstrates it well, since it is one continuous piece of work rather than two.
So the circle closes on itself. A letter to the rector of Ghent, defending a race realist, signed by a scholar whose intellectual home is the Ghent school of caste denial, and by another who co-edited a book on Gujarat with a former editor of a Flemish New Right journal. None of these people needed to coordinate. They arrived at the same page because the page was built for them.
The theoretical claim I want to make is sharper than convergence, which is a weak word that suggests two things drifting toward each other by chance. Brahminical supremacy and white supremacy are distinct historical formations with distinct victims and distinct architectures, and flattening them serves nobody. What they share is a method, and the method is what travels. Both take a structure of domination that human beings made and can therefore unmake, and relocate it into the order of nature, where politics cannot reach it. Hereditarianism performs the relocation by asserting that the gap between groups is written in the genome. Hindutva performs it by asserting that the hierarchy was never there at all, that jati was a benign division of function until Europeans arrived with their theology of rank, and that what remains is an insult invented abroad. The two claims are formally opposite and functionally identical. One says the ladder is natural. The other says the ladder is imaginary. Neither permits the ladder to be climbed down.
Ambedkar saw the structure with a clarity nobody has improved on. Caste, he wrote, is a system of graded inequality, an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt, and its genius lies in giving almost every group somebody beneath it to guard. He also refused the racial reading, insisting that caste is a social division of a people already homogeneous and that endogamy was superimposed upon it, which is precisely the analysis that Hindutva now appropriates in mangled form when it says caste is not race and therefore not discrimination. Ambedkar denied that caste was biology in order to insist that caste was politics and could be destroyed by political means. The Ghent school denies that caste is biology in order to insist that caste is a European hallucination and that nothing exists to destroy. The same premise, turned inside out, arrives at the opposite of annihilation.
The material stakes are not academic. Caste discrimination in the diaspora is documented in the courts and in the surveys, in the Cisco litigation in California, in the ordinance passed in Seattle in February 2023, in the bill that reached the California governor's desk in October of that year and was vetoed after an intense campaign. Every one of those fights has been met with the argument that caste categories are a colonial import, that naming caste in law singles out Hindus and South Asians for suspicion, and that scholarship supports this. The scholarship is supplied. That is the function the Ghent school performs in the political economy of the diaspora, and it is why a legal academic in London and a communication professor in Georgia turn up on the same document as the co-authors of a paper defending racial hereditarian research.
Consider what sits at the top of that document. The first signatory is Michael Biggs, Professor of Sociology at Oxford, whose own university page records that he has published on the massacre of Muslims in India in 2002 and describes that violence as orchestrated by the ruling political party. Forty-odd rows below him is the man who co-edited a volume presenting the same events under the heading of selective outrage. Neither would recognise the other's politics as his own, and neither had to. The academic freedom frame is a solvent, and what it dissolves is the requirement to agree about anything except the proposition that the institution has no standing to judge. That is the whole appeal of the frame, and it is why formations with nothing else in common keep meeting inside it.
I should be exact about what I am not saying. I am not claiming that Shah or Rao signed this letter because of Hindutva, or that they hold any view whatever about race and intelligence, or that they coordinated with anybody. I have not seen evidence for any of that and I would not assert it. What I am claiming is that a document assembled to protect a hereditarian from institutional consequence proved to be a comfortable place for two scholars whose work removes caste from the domain of things a state may legislate about, and that the comfort is structural rather than accidental. The letter offers a proposition that both projects require, which is that scrutiny of a scholar's claims must give way to protection of the scholar's standing, and that the institution which employs him is the least qualified body to weigh the difference.
None of this is remote from here. Hindutva organisations operate in Aotearoa, they have received Crown funding, and they carry the same repertoire into our multicultural settlements, where a state eager for community partners rarely asks which community and on whose authority. Our anti-racism apparatus is built almost entirely for the axis of Pākehā and everyone else, which leaves caste illegible to it, so that a Dalit worker in Auckland who is being ground down by people who look like her has no vocabulary in the Human Rights Act to describe what is happening. Settler multiculturalism is comfortable funding culture and profoundly uncomfortable adjudicating hierarchy inside a minority community, and Hindutva has learned to live in exactly that gap. The Free Speech Union, which now has a council member on the Cofnas letter, will be there with the argument that naming any of this is an attack on religious freedom.
Te Tiriti is what makes a different answer possible here, and the reason is structural rather than sentimental. A framework built on the relationship between peoples, on tino rangatiratanga and on obligations that run outward into communities, has the conceptual equipment to ask who holds authority inside a group and on what warrant. It can distinguish a community from the loudest organisation claiming to represent it. That question is the one Hindutva cannot survive being asked in public, which is why the apparatus will work so hard to make the asking sound like bigotry.
Caste was translated into race by an empire that needed a ruler's map. Race is now translated back into caste denial by a movement that needs the map erased. Both operations answer to the same discipline, which is the refusal to let a hierarchy be seen as a thing that people built. Five hundred and sixty-nine scholars have signed a letter that protects the men doing the translating. Somewhere in that number are two who have been doing it for twenty years.