ABSTRACT
Sir William Jones’s discovery of linguistic affinities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek was the basis for a fundamental reconceptualization of Indian history and culture. Thus history and ethnology were invested with particular cultural significance as they were central in the definition of both national and imperial identities. In suggesting that the encounter with India had important consequences for identities in the metropole, this study reaffirms recent works that suggest that metropolitan society was not insulated from the effects of empire, rather the imperial venture played a pivotal role in the constitution of material culture. The discourses of Aryanism were an important product of these new ‘connections’. Born out of the colonial encounter in South Asia, the Aryan idea became a crucial element of the culture of empire, whether in British India, Southeast Asia, the Pacific or in Britain itself, as it seemed to offer a powerful framework for explaining both the past and present of the empire.
