The Indo-European, Vedic and post-Vedic meanings of rya

Dr. Koenraad Elst

In debates on the politically controversial term Arya, we keep hearing from Hindus and Buddhists
that it only means "noble", as in the Buddha's "four noble (Arya) truths". Following the Arya Samaj
reinterpretation of the Vedas, many even insist that in the Vedic context, Arya meant good while
its opposite Anarya meant bad, immoral. These moralistic and self-flattering readings bespeak a
deficient sense of historicity, i.c. the realization that over time, terminology is susceptible to
change. Attempts to derive Arya from a basic root *ar-, to which various meanings have been
assigned, make good sense in principle, but bypass the Vedic age when from this ancient root, a far
more precise meaning had crystallized.
While it is now a matter of consensus that the term had no racial or linguistic meaning ("Nordic"
c.q. "Indo-European"), it did have an ethnic meaning. Starting from different considerations,
invasionist linguist JP Mallory and anti-invasionist historian Shrikant Talageri agree on this, and we
will argue further in favour of this finding. In the earliest historical age, attested in the oldest
literature in Indo-European languages, we find Arya or cognate terms used in the sense of
"compatriot", "one of us", viz. by the Anatolians, Iranians and Paurava Indians. In the Iranian world,
it retained its purely ethnic meaning, as evidenced at the World Aryan Fair in Tajikistan 2006. In
India, it evolved to "one who shares the civilizational norms of the Vedic Paurava tribes", and since
it was in the Paurava milieu that the Vedas were composed, it came to mean "Veda-abiding",
"civilized", and thence "noble".
In the Vedic-Avestan age, a group that designated itself as Arya could be deemed Anarya by
another group that considered itself Arya. In particular, the Iranians called themselves Arya but in
the Vedas they were designated by various tribal names including Dasa (which has nothing to do
with Dravidian aboriginals) but never as Arya, a term which the Vedic people reserved for
themselves. So, this was a relative ethnic term, not having a fixed reference to a particular nation,
but used in self-reference by different nations. But when a community strongly identified with the
Vedic tradition settled in new lands, viz. the Brahmins who settled in South India, the name Arya (>
Aiyar, Aiyangar) did acquire an absolute ethnic meaning accepted by both insiders and outsiders.
This division between Northern Aryans and their Dravidian surroundings presented an instance of
the contrast between Indo-European and non-Indo-European, and in the 19 th century, scholars
prematurely generalized this into the assumption that Arya was an early synonym for IndoEuropean. This was a projection of a recent situation onto the proto-historic past, a childhood
disease of the discipline of Indo-European philology.

In debates on the politically controversial term rya, we keep hearing from

Hindus and Buddhists that it only means "noble", as in the Buddha's "four noble
(rya) truths" and his noble (rya) eightfold path. Following the post-Vedic
reinterpretations of the Vedas by Hindus from the Purna authors down to the
rya Samj and todays travelling gurus, many even insist that in the Vedic
context, rya meant good, moral while its opposite Anrya meant bad,
immoral. These moralistic and self-flattering readings bespeak a deficient sense
of historicity, i.c. the realization that over time, terminology is susceptible to
change. They project, or so we will argue, a meaning common in later times on to
the term rya in Vedic context. Others go to the opposite extreme: they first
suggest a deep etymology of the term, situated in the proto-languages register
of extremely simple and fundamental concepts, and next pretend that this is the
sense in which the Vedic people used it.

1. Deep etymology of rya

Let us consider the deep etymology approach first. It is still in dispute, but one
hypothesis has an edge over the others. Kbler [2000 48 ff.] gives a range of
explanations that have been proposed in the past two centuries.
rya has been analysed as stemming from the root *ar-, plough, cultivate (cf.
Latin arare, aratrum), which would make them the sedentary people as opposed
to the nomads and hunter-gatherers; and lends itself to a figurative meaning of
cultivated, civilized. Others, however, have connected it with the root of Latin
ire, to go, so as to make it an apt name for a nomadic populations: the
proverbial roaming warrior-bands that must have ransacked the Harappan cities.
A more surprising hypothesis derives rya as a lengthened form of Arya from a
root *al-, other (cfr. Greek allos and Latin alius, other), hence inclined
towards the other/stranger, hence hospitable. This could be similar in meaning
to the name of the god Aryaman, other-minded, whose attribute is hospitality.
From this sense, an ethnic meaning is tentatively derived: we, the hospitable
ones, we, your hosts, hence we, the lords of this country. This too,
admittedly, sounds rather contrived.
Also surprising is a meaning suggested in attempts to establish a deep historic
connection (which the present author too considers very likely) between IndoEuropean and Semitic. Summarizing such attempts, Srya Knta str [n.d.:3]
links Proto-Indo-European *h2er- (> ar, rya) with Arabic, Hebrew hrr, to be
free. This is the root of words like hurriyat, freedom, and tahrr, liberation.
Alternatively, rya could be from a root *ar, possess, acquire, share (cf. Greek
aresthai, acquire), an interpretation beloved of Marxist scholars who interpret
the rya class as the owner class.
Another explanation, the most likely and most popular one, is from a root *ar-, to
fit; orderly, correct, cf. Greek artios, fitting, perfect; and hence skilled, able,
cf. Latin ars, art, dexterity; Greek aret, virtue, aristos, best. This may in
turn be the same root as in the central Vedic concept rta, Avestan arta, order,
regularity, whence rtu, season, cf. Greek ham-art, at the same time.
Attempts to derive rya from a basic root *ar-, to which various meanings have
been assigned, make good sense in principle, but they bypass the Vedic age
when from this ancient root, a far more precise meaning had crystallized.

2. Ancient Indo-European meaning of rya

While it is now a matter of consensus that the term rya had no racial meaning,
whether Nordic or other [Ghurye 1932, Hock 1999], nor even a linguistic

meaning ("Indo-European"), it did have a subjective ethnic meaning in the oldest

attested Indo-European languages, viz. Hittite, Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit.
Starting from different considerations, invasionist linguists like J.P. Mallory and
anti-invasionist historian Shrikant Talageri agree on this, and we will argue further
in favour of this finding.

2.1.

Anatolian

In the earliest historical age, attested in the oldest literature in Indo-European

languages, we find rya or cognate terms used in the sense of "compatriot", "one
of us", viz. by the Anatolians, Iranians and Paurava (Vedic) Indians.
The use of rya cognates in the Anatolian languages Hittite and Lycian in the
sense of compatriot, fellow citizen is given in some recent textbooks of IndoEuropean linguistics, e.g.:
The most loaded term in the reconstructed lexicon is *h4ers or *h4erys,
member of ones own group, which in Indo-Iranian is generally represented as
Aryan. From *h4ers we have Anatolian, e.g. Hittite ar, member of ones own
group, peer, friend, Lycian arus-, citizens, while *h4erys yields (perhaps) Old
Irish aire, freeman, more certainly Avestan airya, Aryan, Sanskrit ary, kind,
rya-, Aryan (cf. ar-, faithful). The evidence suggests that the word was, at
least initially, one that denoted one who belongs to the community in contrast to
an outsider; a derivative of the word is found in Hittite ra, (what is) fitting, and
natta ra, not right, cf. the use of kosher which originally meant (in Hebrew)
what is fitting. [Mallory & Adams:266]
While the connection with older and deeper meanings is transparent, the
operative meaning of these rya-related words in Anatolian society was
compatriot. It didnt exactly mean Hittite or Lycian, at least it wasnt a
synonym of those ethnonyms, for their neighbours didnt use those words to refer
to these nations. They themselves used it in self-reference, as us in distinction
from them.

2.2.

Iranian

The same situation prevailed in ancient Iranian: aryo-: self-designation of the

Indo-Iranians. Perhaps a derivative of ar-. [Watkins 2000:5] This root ar-, in turn,
is explained as To fit together [Watkins 2000:5] Further to aryo-: 1. Aryan,
from Sanskrit rya, compatriot. 2. Iran, [] from Old Persian riya, compatriot.
[Watkins 2000:5]
Likewise in to the Online Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com/,
consulted June 2011), lemma Aryan, we read: Ancient Persians used the name in
reference to themselves (Old Persian ariya-), hence Iran. Ultimately from Skt. rya- compatriot; in
later language noble, of good family. Also the name Sanskrit-speaking invaders of India gave
themselves in the ancient texts, from which early 19c. European philologists (Friedrich Schlegel, 1819,

who linked the word with Germanic Ehre, honor) applied it to the ancient people we now call IndoEuropeans (suspecting that this is what they called themselves); this use is attested in English from
1851. [] German philologist Max Mller (1823-1900) popularized the term in his writings on
comparative linguistics, recommending it as the name (replacing Indo-European, Indo-Germanic,
Caucasian, Japhetic) for the group of related, inflected languages connected with these peoples,
mostly found in Europe but also including Sanskrit and Persian. [] Gradually replaced in comparative
linguistics c.1900 by Indo-European, except when used to distinguish IE languages of India from nonIE ones. [] As an ethnic designation, however, it is properly limited to Indo-Iranians (most justly to the
latter) [].

In his Behistun inscription, ca. 500 BC, Darius proudly called himself and his
family since at least nine generations Airya, apparently in the caste sense of
noble, high-born. The name Iran itself is from Airynm Xathra, dominion of
the Airya-s. As a term in international usage, it soon became more than selfreferential, it became a pure ethnonym also used by outsiders.
Yet, until modern linguists launched the notion of an Iranian language family, the
term was not coterminous with the set of all speakers of Iranian languages. Some
wayward Iranian-speaking peoples were not considered Airya by the citizens of
the Persian and Afghan heartland of Iranian culture. From the Avesta down to
Firdausis hnmeh (ca. 1000 CE), Trya or Tuirya was the name of Iranianspeaking people living beyond the Oxus, roughly contrasted with the Airya as
nomadic with sedentary, illiterate with literate, barbarian with civilized. They
were generally deemed hostile though some of them also accepted
Zarathushtras religion, which promoted agriculture and the domestication of the
environment. As soon as Turkic tribes started replacing the Iranian Scythians as
masters of the Central-Asian steppes, the term got increasingly identified with
the Turks, but originally it marked an intra-Iranian distinction between barbarian
and civilized speakers of the various Iranian dialects.
The name rn/Iran was restored by Reza Shah Pahlevi in 1935 as a more
accurate replacement of Persia, which was a pars pro toto ever since the Persian
Achaemenids united the Iranians under one sceptre.
At the World Aryan Fair held in 2006 in Tajikistan, declared guardian of Aryan
civilization, the Aryan peoples represented were all Iranian-speaking: Kurds,
Ossetes (Scythians), Pathans, Persians, Tajiks, Baluch, and Indian Parsis. After the
World Avesta Conference in Dushanbe in 1992, this was another instance of open
support by the newly independent Tajik state to the pan-Iranian movement.
Though not officially anti-Islamic, the movements conspicuous Zoroastrian
revivalism makes the Islamic governments in Iran and Pakistan distrust it. A
striking feature of the Aryan Fair was the widespread use of swastika flags
featuring two intertwined blue swastikas, termed wheel of Mithra, the sun-god.

2.3.

Vedic

The Sanskrit word rya- () was the self-designation of the Vedic Indic people,
according to a standard textbook of Indo-European linguistics. [Fortson 2004:187]

This is approximately true, but Shrikant Talageri fine-tunes this definition: it

applies to the Vedic people, but only to some Indic people, viz. those of the tribe
that created the Veda.
When listing and discussing all 36 instances of the use of rya in the Rg-Veda,
Talageri concludes: The word is used in the sense of We, the Noble. When an
Iranian, for example, used the word Airya, he undoubtedly meant an Iranian, or
even perhaps an Iranian belonging to his own particular tribe or community. He
would never have dreamt of referring to a Vedic Aryan or an Irishman by the
same term. The use of the word rya in the Rigveda must be understood in this
sense: the Vedic Aryans used the word rya in reference to Vedic Aryans as
distinct from other people, and not in reference to Indo-European language
speaking people as distinct from non-Indo-European language speaking people.
All other people, Indo-European or otherwise, other than themselves, were nonryas to the Vedic Aryans. [Talageri 2000:154-155]
In the Rg-Veda, the ethnic horizon mainly consists of the five peoples, paca
janh, conceived as descent groups of five patriarchs: Anu, Druhyu, Turvau,
Yadu and Puru. These five were the five sons of Yayti, himself a king belonging
to the Aila lineage (from Il, daughter of Ur-patriarch Manu Vaivasvata) or Lunar
dynasty. The term rya is used in the Rg-Veda for three individuals belonging to
the Paurava tribe: king Divodsa, his father Vadhryava, and his descendant
Suds, winner of the crucial battle of the Ten Kings. In a tribal sense, it always
refers to the Paurava tribe or segments of it, the putative descendents of Puru,
youngest and favoured among the five sons of king Yayti. In nine cases,
reference is to rya enemies. This means that politically, they were temporarily in
the enemy camp, but ethnically they were of the same stock as the Vedic seers.
They and the Dsa-s are distinguished as sanbhi (kinsmen) c.q. nistya (nonkindred) enemies. Contrary to the moralistic interpretations by the rya Samj
and other moderns, rya did not mean good nor Anrya bad. Even a hostile
reference to a traitorous fellow-Paurava will still call him rya, while non-Paurava
friends whose virtues are praised do not get promoted to the rya category.
The Paurava-s considered all others, including Iranians (Dsa, Dasyu, Pani) and
non-Paurava Indians (Ydava, Aiksvaku, et al.), as non-rya. It is possible that the
latter, like the Iranians, also considered themselves as rya and the Vedic
Paurava-s as non-rya, but we simply dont have their testimony for that period.
Only when the Paurava-originated Vedic tradition became normative for the
neighbouring tribes did rya gradually lose its Paurava exclusiveness and acquire
the non-ethnic meaning of Vedic, partaking of Vedic tradition, civilized,
noble; while Anrya became barbarian.

The one exception in the Rg-Veda where rya seems to have a non-ethnic, generally moral
meaning, is RV 9:63:5: krnvanto vivam ryam, making everything rya or doing every
rya (deed), usually translated as ennobling the world.

2.4.

The non-Aryans in the Rg-Veda

The Iranians were divided in tribes, some of which are mentioned in the Rg-Veda.
Of these, some are also known through Greco-Roman sources: Dahae
corresponds to Vedic Dsa, Parnoi to Pani. Through Avestan and more recent
Iranian sources, we know of the Dahyu, nation, the Vedic Dasyu; and of at least
four of the tribes mentioned as opponents of Vedic king Suds in the Battle of the
Ten Kings: Pashtu or Pathan, in the Veda Paktha; Persian or Paru; Parthian or
Prthu; and Baluch (living near the Bolan pass) or Bhalna. Likewise, the Medes
(now Kurds) are probably the Madra-s. That Persians and Medes are known
historically as living in Western Iran while their confrontation with the Vedic
people took place in what is now Pakistan, is not really problematic. From
Mesopotamian sources we know of them as intruders from the East. The
intervening centuries were sufficient to allow a migration or expansion from the
Indo-Iranian border zone to Mesopotamia.
It is a matter for wonder that so many authors have seen in the Dsas and other
opponents of the Vedic people the Dravidian or Munda aboriginals confronting
the Aryan invaders. To the careful reader, the Iranian identity of most of them is
simply obvious.
For those who are inclined to dismiss Talageris views as discredited by his Hindu
nationalism, note that in a number of respects, his position goes against the
majority opinion among Hindu nationalists, e.g. his denying an implication of
moral superiority to the Vedic rya-s. While many Hindu writers assume that the
battles between the Vedic Aryans and their enemies were somehow battles
between Good and Evil () our analysis of the Rigveda and Vedic history is not
based on this rosy viewpoint . [Talageri 2008:368] In fact, there is nothing to
indicate that the ryas were more civilized and cultured than the Dsas, () nor
that the struggles between the ryas and Dsas involved any noble social, moral
and ethical issues. [Talageri 2000:405]
In the context of Talageris identification of the Iranian tribes, we note that Hindu
nationalist author N.R. Waradpande [2000:116-117] denies an ethnic meaning to
Prthu and Paru, preferring their literal meaning of broad c.q. axe (the latter
actually translates the similar-sounding parau). Against this, Talageri [2008:]
shakes the Hindutva pride further by arguing that the name Paraurma, Rama with
the axe, is a misreading by Puranic authors of the Vedic name Parurma, Persian Rama, a
nickname of Rma Jmadagnya, author of RV X.110, for whom he manages to demonstrate an Iranian
ancestry. This means that the authors of the Purna-s, treated as revelation by many Hindus,
misunderstood the name of Vishnus sixth incarnation. More generally, it illustrates a point made
repeatedly in Talageris work, explicitly and implicitly, that the Sanskrit literary tradition was as
human and prone to changes and retroprojective reinterpretations as the religious text corpus of other
civilizations.
2.5.

Relative and absolute use of rya

It is possible and indeed likely that other Indian tribes contemporaneous with the
Vedic Pauravas also called themselves rya (and the Paurava Anrya), but they
have left us no texts to prove it. After the spreading of the Vedic tradition outside
the Paurava tribe among these other tribes, such usage may have facilitated the
adoption of the already familiar term rya in the (to them) new meaning of
Vedic.
But sometimes a community strongly identified with the Vedic tradition settled in
new lands, where no one was familiar with the term rya. In Northwest India, the
neighbouring peoples, the Iranians and the non-Paurava Indo-Aryans, already
knew the term and probably used it to designate themselves. But in South India,
the term rya came to designate the Northern immigrants who described
themselves as such: Buddhist and Jaina preachers and Brahmin settlers. The
latter's caste names Aiyar and Aiyangar are evolutes of rya. The local
population took the name rya to be an objective designation, identified with
Northerner and speaker of Indo-Aryan.
This division between Northern-originated Aryans and their Dravidian
surroundings presented an instance of the distinction between Indo-European
and non-Indo-European, with the former designated as rya. A similar situation
had existed in the lands conquered by the Iranians, where the Semitic, Turkic,
Uralic and other communities were non-Aryan in contrast with the Indo-Europeanspeaking Iranian or Aryan conquerors. In the 19 th century, scholars prematurely
generalized this into the assumption that rya was an early synonym for IndoEuropean. This projection of more recent situations onto the proto-historic past
is now considered as a childhood disease of the discipline of Indo-European
philology.

2.6. A synonym for Indo-European?

If some Indo-European peoples used rya or a cognate form as an ethnic selfdesignation, could this not be a remnant of a pan-Indo-European usage? Could it
be that Slavic or Italic had the same usage originally but lost it over time?
In the 19th century, many scholars explored this scenario, including claims of the
use of an rya cognate as ethnic self-designation in Celtic (Eire) and Germanic,
but these have been abandoned. So has the relation with German Ehre,
honour, which is in fact from *aiz-, cognate with Latin aes-timare, whence
English esteem. The etymon of Eire seems to be *iweriu, < piHwerion, fat land,
opulent country. The Irish word aire, freeman, may be related to rya, but it is
a different word and is not known to have served as an ethnic self-designation.
Thus far, only Anatolian, Iranian and Vedic Sanskrit are certified to have used it
as a self-referential ethnonym.
So, there is no firm indication that rya, or *Heryo, ever was a pan-Indo-European
or Proto-Indo-European self-designation and thus a valid synonym for IndoEuropean: Although in Indo-Iranian the word takes on an ethnic meaning, there
are no grounds for ascribing this semantic use to Proto-Indo-European, i.e. there

is no evidence that the speakers of the proto-language referred to themselves

explicitly as Aryans. [Mallory & Adams:266] But in theory, it remains a
possibility.

3. Post-Vedic meanings
3.1.

Vedic standards

From meaning belonging to the Paurava tradition, Vedic, rya evolves in a

trans-ethnic cultural sense. The Dharmastra-s of Manu and Baudhyana relate
it to wider territory of North India, ryavarta, but distinguish the Kuru-Pacla
region, i.e. from the Saraswati eastward to the Ganga-Yamuna dob, as the best:
there, the people naturally observe the Vedic norms, so all others should seek to
emulate their customs. To Manu, their defining ingredients are the Vedic
sacrificial ritual and the observance of varnramadharma, the differentiation of
society according to social function and age group, each with its own duties and
privileges. The absence of order, i.e. of ritual (as, to a large extent, in modern
society) and of functional differentiation (as in tribal societies with their supposed
Ur-communism), counts as Anrya, uncivilized or barbaric.
Thus, the Manu Smrti [10.45] says that those outside the caste system, whether
they speak barbarian languages or rya languages, are regarded as aliens,
indicating that some people spoke the same language as the rya-s but didnt
have their status of rya because they disregarded the varnramadharma.
Note that we need not agree with the strakra-s that the varnramadharma is
truly Vedic, for we do not find it in the first nine books of the Rg-Veda. Even in
the tenth book, the last and youngest one, we find it mentioned only once, and
there only in the vaguest use, viz. the Purusa Sktas recognition of the existence
of four functions in society, without any details of how their personnel is recruited
nor of how they should conduct themselves vis--vis one another, the very stuff
that is the main focus of the stra-s. Like medieval and contemporary Hindus,
the stra composers may have considered as Vedic everything they held
sacred, regardless of whether a particular norm or custom is indeed traceable to
the Veda-s.

3.2.

Varna meaning

One resultant semantic development is "upper-caste", meaning those people who

received the Vedic initiation. Since Ksatriya-s and Brahmins had their own more
specific titles, the general honorific rya often designated the Vaiya. It is also
used as a form of address to any honoured person, which is probably the origin of
the present-day honorific suffix -j, evolved through the Prakrit forms ayya, ajja,
'jje.

The term distinguished those who had received the Vedic initiation symbolized by
the sacred thread. In particular, it became a form of address for members of the
Dvija (twice-born) castes, i.e. those whose members (or later, whose male
members) wore the sacred thread. And among these, it was particularly in use
among the lowest of the three, the Vaiya-s. Whereas the Ksatriya-s and
Brahmins further distinguish their own specific varna also setting themselves
apart from the other Dvija-s, Vaiya-s seem happy enough to set themselves
apart from the non-Dvija-s.
We find a parallel situation in Western society too, mutatis mutandis. An
employee or servant (dra) has no title, he may even be addressed with his first
name by his boss. The employer (Vaiya), by contrast, is addressed as Mister X
(from magister, greater one, master), or Sir (from senior, elder). These
general forms of respectful address could in principle also be applied to Ksatriya
professions, but in those cases you will normally specify as Captain, General,
Minister, Excellency, Your Majesty. Likewise, people in Brahmin professions will be
addressed as Doctor, Professor, Reverend, all the way up to Your Holiness. In their
cases, just calling them Mister would be a slight on their specific state of merit,
whereas it is perfectly fine to address a businessman as Mister regardless of
the extent of his business achievement.
Applied to communities and cultural patterns, rya came to mean of Vedic
tradition, conforming to Vedic norms. For insiders to the Vedic tradition, it
would consequently mean up to standard, proper, "civilized". To outsiders, it
would still mean Vedic, and refer to those people or communities distinguished
as adhering to Vedic norms. Those outsiders, who used the term not to designate
themselves but to designate outsiders whom they saw observing or bringing the
Vedic tradition, included the natives of South India, where the term acquired the
ethnic connotation of North-Indian.

Soon enough, people started objecting that nobility or ryatva is not a matter of birth but of
character, e.g.: O my Lord, a person who is chanting Your holy name, although born of a low
family like that of a Candla, is situated on the highest platform of self-realization. Such a
person must have performed all kinds of penances and sacrifices according to Vedic scriptures
many, many times after bathing in all the holy places of pilgrimage. Such a person is
considered to be the best of the rya family." (rmad Bhgavatam 3.33.7)
The meaning of the term became vaguer, from conformity with a specific (viz.
Vedic) code or with criteria of high birth to a general quality of character, noble.
That is exactly parallel to the evolution of the European term "noble", which
originally meant someone belonging by birth to the nobility class, the princes and
dukes and earls. The same evolution also affected the Chinese word junzi. People
can see for themselves that qualities of character appear in all classes and all
religions, so the concept noble or rya got delinked from its religious or
sociological basis.

3.3.

Ethical meaning

From the Hindu Epics on down, rya and Anrya are frequently used in the moral sense.
People are sometimes classified as rya or Anrya based on their behavior, but the ethnic or
caste meaning still tends to shine through.
In the Rmyana, the Vnara-s and Rksasa-s call themselves rya. The monkey king
Sugrva is called an rya and speaks of his brother Vali as an rya. Rvana regards himself
and his ministers as rya, which is only natural as he is a Brahmin and descendent of the
Vedic sage Pulastya. Likewise, Rmas being an rya may have as much to do with his
Ksatriya status as with his exemplary moral conduct.
In the Mahbhrata, the term is generally applied to people according to their behaviour.
Duhsana, who tried to disrobe Draupad in the Kaurava court, is therefore called Anrya.
Vidura, the son of sage Vysa by a maidservant, was the only person in the assembly whose
behaviour is called rya because he alone openly protested against Draupadis disrobing. The
Pndava-s reproached themselves for their Anrya conduct when they killed Drona through
deception.
However, this should not be taken to prove, as Hindu reformists are wont to
claim, that this ethical meaning supersedes and nullifies the social stratification
meaning. Just as the metaphorical meaning of crusade or jihd as moral
struggle against the evil in oneself and society presupposes the meaning of
holy war and doesnt nullify the underlying doctrine of religious war, so likewise
the extended usage of rya in Sanskrit or noble in European languages
presupposes and doesnt discard its literal sociological meaning, viz.
characteristic of the hereditary upper class.

3.4.

Noble in Buddhism

Against the association of the anglicised form Aryan with colonial and Nazi
racism, modern Hindus always insist that the term rya only means Vedic or
noble and has no racial or ethnic connotation. This purely moral, non-ethnic
meaning is in evidence in the Buddhist notions of the four noble truths (catvrirya-satyni) and the noble eightfold path (rya-astngika-mrga). So, the
meaning noble applies for recent centuries and as far back as the Buddhas age
(ca. 500 BC), and contrasts with the Vedic age (beyond 1000 BC), when the
ethnic sense prevailed, and post-Vedic Hindu society, when either Vedic
sectarianism or caste pride animated the use of the term rya.
At least, this is what the Buddhists claim: that when the Buddha lived and taught,
the term rya had a general psychological-ethical meaning, noble, larger than
and not dependent on any specific cultural or religious tradition or social class.
However, we must look at the historical data, even and especially when
pertaining to a venerated person like the Buddha, without assuming modern and
sectarian predilections.

Firstly, we must take into account the possibility that he too used the term in the
implied sense of Vedic, broadly conceived. That after Vedic tradition got carried
away into what he deemed non-essentials, he intended to restore what he
conceived as the original Vedic spirit. After all, the anti-Vedicism and antiBrahmanism now routinely attributed to him, are largely in the eye of the modern
beholder. Though later Brahmin-born Buddhist thinkers polemicized against
Brahmin institutions and the idolizing of the Veda, the Buddha himself didnt mind
attributing to the Vedic gods Indra and Brahma his recognition as the Buddha and
his mission to teach. At the end of his life, he unwittingly got involved in a
political intrigue when Varsakra, a minister of the Magadha kingdom, asked him
for the secret of the strength of the republican states. Among the seven unfailing
factors of strength of a society, he included sticking to ancient laws and
traditions and maintaining sacred sites and honouring ancient rituals. [Dgha
Nikya 2:73, discussed in Elst 2010:197-199] So, contrary to his modern image as
a revolutionary, the Buddhas view of the good society was close to Confucian
and indeed Brahminical conservatism. Far from denouncing empty ritual, he
praised it as a factor of social harmony and strength. In this light, his
understanding of rya may have been closer to the Brahminical interpretation of
the term as Vedic than nowadays usually assumed.
This even applies to the Buddhas view of caste. When predicting the future
Buddha Maitreya, he had him born in a Brahmin family; and he had over 40%
Veda-trained Brahmins among his ordained disciples. His impact on his disciples
was such that after his death, the messages by cities claiming a part of his ashes
for veneration in stupas took the form of: He was a ksatriya, we are ksatriya-s,
therefore we are entitled to a share in his ashes. Clearly, lay followers of the
Buddha did not shed their caste pride, nor feel a need to even pretend to when
speaking in a Buddha-related setting par excellence.
So, secondly, the Buddha may not have renounced the caste-related meaning of
rya altogether. After all, determination by birth was not alien to the worldview of
the Buddha, whose ascent to Awakening was predetermined by physical marks
he was born with, according to common Buddhist belief. Buddhist scripture makes
much of the Buddhas noble birth in the Solar lineage, as a relative (and
reincarnation) of Rma. So, as Gmez [1999:132] points out, the Buddhist usage
of rya is subject to ambiguities, e.g. in the Mahvibhs: The Buddha said,
What the noble ones say is the truth, what the other say is not true. And why is
this? The noble ones [] understand things as they are, the common folk do not
understand. [] Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are
possessed by those who own the wealth and assets of the noble ones.
Furthermore, they are called noble truths because they are possessed by those
who are conceived in the womb of a noble person. [cit. Gmez 1999:133]
To play devils advocate, we could even extend our skepticism of the Buddhas
progressive image to an involvement in the racist understanding of rya. Some
pre-WW2 racists waxed enthusiastic about descriptions by contemporaries of the
Buddha as tall and light-skinned. [Schuman 1989:194] That would seem to
make him Aryan in the then-common sense of Nordic. Nowadays, some

scholars including Michael Witzel [on his own Indo-Eurasian Research yahoo list]
suggest that the Buddhas kya tribe may have been of Iranian origin (related to
aka, Scythian), which would explain his taller stature and lighter skin in
comparison with his Gangetic fellow-men. It would also explain their fierce
endogamy, i.e. their systematic practice of cousin marriage. Indeed, the Buddha
himself had only four great-grandparents because his paternal grandfather was
the brother of his maternal grandmother while his maternal grandfather was the
brother of his paternal grandmother. The Brahminical lawbooks prohibited this
close endogamy (gotra-s are exogamous) and like the Catholic Church, imposed
respect for "prohibited degrees of consanguinity"; but consanguineous marriages
were common among Iranians. (It was also common among Dravidians, a lead
not yet fully exploited by neo-Buddhists claiming the Buddha as pre-Aryan.) The
kya tribe justified the practice through pride in their direct pure descent from
the rya patriarch Manu Vaivasvata, but this could be a made-up explanation
adapted to the Indian milieu and hiding their Iranian origin (which they
themselves too could have forgotten), still visible in their physical profile. So, that
would make the Buddha an Aryan in the historically most justified ethnic use of
the term, viz. as Iranian.

3.5.

rya = Hindu?

The relative authoritative Hindu law-book Manu Smrti [10.43 ff.] claims that
the Greeks and the Chinese had originally been rya-s too but that they had
lapsed from rya standards and therefore lost the status of rya. So, non-Indians
could be rya, on condition of observing certain cultural and ethical standards,
viz. those laid down in the Manu Smrti itself. The term rya was culturally
defined: conforming to Vedic tradition.
Nonetheless, Manu had a strong pro-Indian bias, and at least in the two millennia
since the Manu Smrti, the only ones fulfilling the requirement of living by Vedic
norms were Indians. In 1875, a socially progressive but religiously fundamentalist
movement (back to the Vedas, i.e. before the degeneracy of the casteist
stra-s and the superstitious Purna-s) had been founded under the name
rya Samj, in effect the Vedicist society. They used the term in an exclusive
sense: it excluded many Hindus not by caste but by their degree of strict
observance of the (putative) Vedic norms. It rejected all non-Vedic elements in
Hinduism as Anrya, a distinction that has a certain historical justification in the
Vedic identification of rya with the Vedic tribe.
But the modern age has also seen a rise in the inclusive use of the term, as
referring to all Hindus, or indeed all Dharmic Indians. During Indias freedom
struggle, philosopher and freedom fighter Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950) wrote
in English about the Aryan race, by which he meant the Hindu nation, nothing
more nor less. In 1914-21, together with a French-Jewish admirer, Mirra RichardAlfassa, he also published a monthly devoted to the cause of Indias selfrediscovery and emancipation, the rya. If the word rya had not become tainted
by the colonial and racist use of its Europeanized form Aryan, chances are that by

now it would have replaced the word Hindu (which many Hindus resent as a
Persian exonym unknown to Hindu scripture) as the standard term of Hindu selfreference.

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[Ratnagar 2006:166] if, as in the case of the early Vedic society, land was
neither privately owned nor inherited by successive generations, then land rights
would have been irrelevant to the formation of kin groups, and there would be
nothing preventing younger generations from leaving the parental fold. In such
societies the constituent patrilineages or tribal sections were not strongly
corporate. So together with geographic expansion there would be social
flexibility. Grma is not village but nomadic group.
[Ratnagar 2006:172] On grounds of linguistic paleontology (key words for
certain trees and animals) and the purportedly mutual influence on/from
Kartvelian and Finno-Ugric, she locates the Homeland in the steppe region of
Eurasia.