As Trautmann notes: "This tree paradigm remains very much the foundation of historical linguistics to this day, although a kind of willful collective… - Thomas Trautmann

James Mill's highly influential History of British India (1817), most particularly the long essay "Of the Hindus," comprising ten chapters, is the single most important source of British Indophobia and hostility to Orientalism.

The paradox of these developments is that in spite of the growing distrust between Sanskritists and race science, the two sides of an often noisy dispute nevertheless collaborated, without really meaning to, in the creation of an enduring synthesis, what I call the racial theory of Indian civilization. By this I mean the theory, which by century's end had become a settled fact, that the constitutive event for Indian civilization, the Big Bang through which it came into being, was the clash between invading, fair-skinned, civilized Sanskrit-speaking Aryans and dark-skinned, barbarous aborigines. It was a local application of the double binary that guided all nineteenth-century European ethnologies, the double binary of the fair and the dark, the civilized and the savage.

The [Dasyu/Dasa] image of the 'dark-skinned savage' is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing.