That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith. Is it not time we did away with it? The first effort to find direc… - Thomas Trautmann

Thus, even though it is only recently that the Aryan debate has become a large, noisy public debate, it has been with us for a long time at a lower level of intensity and public participation, and the issues remain unsettled. But times have changed, and today the civility with which these things used to be debated-the respect participants showed to the view of the opposing side, so noticeable in Majumdar's volume on the Vedic age-has gone out the window, unfortunately.

In this fantastic back-projection of systems of racial segregation in the American South and in South Africa onto early Indian history, the relations of the British "new invader from Europe" with the peoples of India is prefigured thousands of years before by the invading Aryans.

The supply of horses . . . has been a preoccupation of the rulers of India, from, nearly, one end of its recorded history to the other. . . . It has yet to be determined why exactly India has never been self-sufficient in horses. Climate? A relative scarcity of pasture?" ... whatever the reason, the stock has always had to be replenished by imports, and the imports came from westward in the ancient period. . . . It is a structure of its history, then, that India has always been dependent upon western and central Asia for horses.