The cruel myth of an Aryan village: tourists went there to get pregnant (6 photos)

On the upper reaches of the Indus River, in western Ladakh, lies the village of Darchik, dubbed one of the world's last "Aryan villages." Yes, these are the villages where, according to Western magazines, true representatives of the Aryan race live.





A rather dubious reputation in the middle of the last century, when the West was obsessed with the idea of ​​"Aryanness." Then stories emerged of tourists coming here to have purebred children with local men.

What are these Aryan villages?

These are very simple, beautiful, but not wealthy villages. People live here in stone houses with wooden roofs, and apricot trees grow everywhere.

The locals call themselves Brokpa, which means "people of the high hills." They speak a language called Brokskat, which few outside the region understand. Unlike most Ladakhis, who have a Tibeto-Mongolian appearance, the Brokpa have Indo-Aryan features.



Local elders near a stone house and a very beautiful window with a broken pane.

Their distinctive features: brown eyes, sharp noses, and fair skin. This only fueled the legend that they are descendants of the ancient Aryans.

Like many people near the Himalayas, they wear long woolen robes decorated with flowers, silver, and turquoise.

An offensive or beneficial legend

After tourism in the country somewhat developed, photographs of local residents appeared in magazines. And immediately, the magazines began publishing articles about women coming here to get pregnant. And it keeps getting worse.

By the late 1990s, tourist companies began calling the local villages the "Aryan Valley." Then rumors took a strange turn, suggesting that foreign women were visiting these villages in an attempt to have Aryan children.





Welcome to the Red Aryans is written on the arch.

Of course, few people want a child from a resident of a godforsaken, poor village, so the myth of "pregnancy tourism" in Ladakh is truly false. But he saves the village, even if the locals feel a little humiliated. However, they use him to attract tourists to this remote corner of the world.



Stone houses dug right into the cliffs: this is how they live on the Tibetan plateau.

The residents of the small villages themselves didn't know they were anything special, of course. They never used the word "Aryan" to describe themselves. It was the tourists who brought the word here, so they could look at the locals themselves, not just at the culture, but at the locals themselves, like museum exhibits. No one was particularly interested in their language, holidays, or prayers; only their appearance mattered.

The myth gained momentum after the release of a foreign documentary in 2007, which implied that a European woman had chosen a man from the Brokpa tribe as the father of her child. Blogs and tabloids spread this claim, portraying Aryan villages as places where women came to conceive.



Supposedly, these are the heirs of Alexander the Great.

Is it a shame? Yes, but at least it's some kind of tourism. Historians and ethnographers have concluded that the myth arose because people lacked a striking and memorable idea. Previously, the world was steeped in colonial ideas about "pure blood," that somewhere, somewhere, there remained a corner of pure, unadulterated Aryans. And the fair-skinned people of Ladakh fit perfectly into this racial theory. But the village endured, and now half of its income depends on tourism—there are guesthouses and workshops showcasing local crafts. Even with this strange approach, it's a chance for the locals to show the world at least a little of their culture.



Tourism brought the internet and tin roofs here.