For many colonial and postcolonial actors, the Aryan was that ghostly figure from the past that needed to be recast as a useful historical certainty. But there was no consensus about his role, no collective narrative. In two centuries of identity formation, the Aryan has retroactively played the roles of a migratory hero, the civilisational forbearer, a superstar supremacist or the villainous choreographer of social inequity. For early Europeans in India, only the Aryan past unlocked India’s present; for nationalists the past triggered their impulse for freedom; for subalterns it was a bequeathal of bondage. Who is the real Aryan and how is he different from his memory? In what way does he continue to shape our present?