i am studying indian history and have learned that there is a race in india called the aryans. my question is, are these at all related to the aryans that the nazis were all about?
It’s the same word, but used to desribe two very different groups of people. See this article on Dictionary.com.
The Aryans who arose in (what is now) India and Iran (and, I presume, Afghanistan), were among the earliest known speakers of the family of languages known as Indo-European. (I’m not enough of a linguistics scholar to coherently put together a picture of Indo-European and Indo-Aryan languages in a few short sentences.)
In the 19th century, as the early philologists began to reconstruct that Indo-European family, some crackpot theories arose that there was an earlier “race” of people who spoke the pure form of the language and who were superior in virtue and intelligence to all other peoples. Early proponents included the French scholar Joseph-Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816 - 1882) who wrote extensively on the “danger” of “mongrelization” if the “white” (principally Germanic) peoples lowered themselves to mix with their inferiors. Houston Chamberlain was a Brit (1855 - 1927), born the year that de Gobineau first published his ideas. He picked up de Gobineau’s theories, honed them down to the even narrower “Nordic race” and specifically attacked Jews as people who had caused problems with the development of Europe. (Chamberlain’s fascination with the Germans led to his moving to Germany (where he married Wagner’s daughter) and becoming a naturalized German citizen during WWI.)
Obviously, their notions, particularly as made specific by Chamberlain, struck a responsive chord with Hitler, but there was never any science to back up their wild conjectures.
The short answer to the question is that there is not and has never been an “Aryan” race in Europe. There were some odd ideas about racial purity that were triggered by studies of language, having nothing to do with actual human migrations.
The only Aryans are the ones who lived in South Central Asia.
Cecil Adams on Who were the Aryans?
Just to add slightly to comments above, these days Indo-Aryan is commonly separated out linguistically as the Indic subgroup ( sometimes sister group ) of the larger Indo-Iranian complex. As with ethnologue here: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=630
The full Indo-European tree ( as per ethnologue, not necessarily a universally recognized organization scheme ): http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=629
More generally, as Q.E.D.'s cite notes, they budded off the same west Central Asian complex as the Persians, Medes, Scythians et al.
- Tamerlane
One crackpot theory put forward by Austrian Hans Horbiger in the 1920s is even more preposterous than the one De Gobineau and Chamberlain et al believed. This was that the Aryans were created by a gravitational interaction between the Earth and the Moon. Not the Moon you see in the sky today though (that would be too simple), but the third Moon, which was destroyed in a collision with the Earth 120,000 years ago – there have been four moons so far according to his theory. In addition to the Aryans, other inferior races were created by various mutations at that time. Apparently some Nazis believed this nonsense and used it to justify their racist persecutions. It’s sad that an ancient group of Central Asian people should become confused with such imaginary creations.
There is, of course, yet another crackpot theory that the Nazis themselves built settlements on the Moon (Nazis seems to attract crackpot theories like flies to manure).