“But the fascination did not last long. As soon as easier
relations allowed Western travelers to visit India, to journey through fabled
Hindustan with its renowned Benares and Chandernagor, cities whose evocatively
poetic names awakened in the soul ineffable yearnings, Europeans realized,
alas, that the Brahmanic race they had thought of as White was not White at
all. Their disappointment was total, for they could no longer delude
themselves. Nevertheless, they continued
to classify those Indian populations as White, just as they persisted in
labeling ancient Egyptians even Ethiopians as White. The scholar D’Omalius D’Halloy
seems to have been the first to have had the courage to openly challenge this
ethnographic heresy. While he accepts Cuvier’s classification, D’Halloy makes
the following remark: ‘The illustrious
author of Regne animal identifies
three branches within the White race, which he lists in this order: the Aramaic branch; the Indian, German, and Pelasgian branch; and the Scythian and Tartar branch.
Although this classification is based upon linguistic and historical
considerations rather than on natural rapprochements, I decided to use it in my
work, because it is the most generally accepted. But when all these people
speaking languages considered related to Sanskrit are grouped within the same
branch, the result is that an almost Black people, such as the Hindus, ends up belonging in the same branch as the whitest
among the White peoples.’
“Notwithstanding D’Halloy’s judicious observation, the
authors of every ethnographic work persisted in identifying the Hindus as a White
people. But to mask the quite apparent inconsistency of this classification,
they adroitly replaced the term White
race with the phrase Aryan race,
which is a meaningless expression, for it refers neither to some set of natural
characteristics nor to some geographical reality.”
THE EQUALITY OF THE HUMAN RACES, by Antenor Firmin, p. 260
(University of Illinois Press, Champaign: 1885, 2002)
