Aryan Supremacists

Melvin's thread reminded me of an idea I was toying with:

Create a TL where a Nazi-like regime, advocating the superiority of the Aryan race, arose in India and/or Iran, who've been the one's who historically been big on their "aryan heritage" (after all, the swastika is a Indian symbol, isn't it?).

This also brings up the question of how much the Arabs changed the makeup of Iranian society when they took over. Also, what did the real nazis think of the Iranians and Indians?

DominusNovus said:

Melvin's thread reminded me of an idea I was toying with:
Create a TL where a Nazi-like regime, advocating the superiority of the Aryan race, arose in India and/or Iran, who've been the one's who historically been big on their "aryan heritage" (after all, the swastika is a Indian symbol, isn't it?).
This also brings up the question of how much the Arabs changed the makeup of Iranian society when they took over. Also, what did the real nazis think of the Iranians and Indians?

Click to expand...

As it happens, there was a group of Indian sympathizers who worked with the Axis powers to "liberate" their home country - they were called the Frei Hind or Azad Hind Fauj. Their leader was a Bengali by the name of Subhas Chandra Bose (of the famous Bose family), who worked first with the Germans, and later with the Japanese - after thousands of Indian soldiers fell into their hands with the capture of Malaya and Burma.

The famous Iranist, Karl Hoffman, was deputized to command a "show troop" of Indian soldiers from the Azad Hind Fauj, and toured Europe in an attempt to prove that the brotherhood of Aryan nations transcended skin color. His students, including Michael Witzel and Helmut Humbach, claim that Hoffman was not a Nazi himself, despite his past.

In the unlikely event that Bose would have succeeded in defeating the British, India would joined the Axis Powers.

I'm reminded of one of the leaders of the Parsi community in Bombay, a mobed named Dastur-ji Kotwal. I once saw him speak, in his thickly Gujarati-accented English, about how the Parsis were inheiritors of the ancient Aryan mantle, and how the Iranians today are nothing more than Arabs (a statement which would provoke strenuous objections from any Iranian today). Kotwal is also a leading critic of intermarriage, and has convinced the other mobeds to excommunicate any Parsi who is guilty of marrying outside of the community - which, as you might imagine, is quite common.

The odd thing about this is that, physically, Kotwal is indistinguishable from the other inhabitants of Gujarat - Muslim, Hindu, or Parsi. Yet he will strenuously insist that the greatest threat facing the Zoroastrian community today is racial miscegenation.

WI the fair-skinned blue-eyed ppl of northern India and Kashmir, who live in such places as the Hunza Valley (and whom are speculated also to be the descendants of Alexander the Great's hoplites), suddenly got the idea of becoming white supremacists at a point in time before the advent of the Hindu and Mughal Empires ? I read 1 account in a book by a journalist who'd covered the Kashmir conflict of meeting a tall blond blue-eyed man in the Hunza Valley who was initially assumed to be English or German due to his appearance, but spoke only the local language, and later encountering an entire village of such Nordic-looking villagers who could've been mistaken as coming straight off the plane from a major European city like Hamburg. WI the Nazis in their quest for 'racial purity' had managed to co-opt and indoctrinate these ppl with the white supremacist mindset ?

What about OTL aspects of white supremacy in the Indian subcontinent ? IIRC, didn't the Aryans move from northern India and expand militarily so that the darker-skinned Dravidians, who were perceived as inferiors, were driven further south ? And could you argue that the modern-day Hindu caste system is somewhat inherently racist, given the preference for lighter-skinned northern Indian Brahmins over the darker-skinned Dravidian lower castes, esp the 'Untouchables'/DALITS mainly from the south ? I also recall reading somewhere that the 'black demons' described in Hindu mythology are based on this struggle between the light-skinned Aryans whose religion evolved into Hinduism, and the pre-existing dark-skinned Dravidians, with the latter being represented as the servants of the dark. The British in their colonisation of the subcontinent also held such racist preconceptions of the various Indian ppls, in terms of their 'martial races' policy with their Brit Indian Army which prioritised the recruitment of lighter-skinned Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Punjabis who were considered as the best soldiering material while darker-skinned ppl such as the Bengalis were considered inferiors.

Also, re Iran, I remember reading somewhere that 1 19th C racial theorist, I think it may've been Gobineau, was initially obsessed with the idea of Iranians/Persians being the direct descendants of the original Aryans, but then being totally disappointed when he travelled there and found the local ppls wanting in terms of displaying any so-called 'Aryan' physical and other traits.