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 l… - Thomas Trautmann

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.

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 direct evidence of the physical features of the Indian aborigines in the Sanskrit texts dating from the time of the Big Bang that brought Indian civilization into existence . . . boiled down to a matter of noses.

The argument from silence was once regarded as a weak argument, to be used sparingly and with care, but for some time now authors have become responsible for the infinity of what they do not say, and they are liable to be charged with erasures, elisions, suppressions, guilty silences, and significant omissions. The argument from silence is made more easily today, but even by the higher standard of the past, the complete silence of Grant and Mill on the core argument of Jones is surely significant of a tendency to stress the difference "every way" of the Indians and the British.