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Abstract
The author analyses the features of the genesis and history of Aryan myth in Iranian, Indian and Tajik nationalist ideologies as frontier cases of the development of nationalism.
The author analyzes the development of the Aryan myth in frontier nationalistic imaginations. Indian nationalists had experience of use of the Aryan myth, but the Aryan idea was never central in the ideology of nationalism. Iranian political elites tried to modernize and westernize Iran and used the Aryan myth because in their efforts to replace the Muslim religious foundations of the Iranian identity with Aryan ones, which they imagined as more secular. Tajik nationalists were able to use the Aryan myth only after the de-Sovietization of the country and the collapse of the USSR as one of the instruments of political mobilization in their attempts to combat the radical Islamic project.
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