EARLY I N D I A

among those who were not historians. It came to be used - and continues
to be used - in the political confrontations of various groups. This is
demonstrated by two examples at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Jyotiba
Phule, an authority for the Dalits, argued in the late nineteenth century that
the Sanskrit-speaking brahmans were descended from the Aryans who were
alien to India, and that the indigenous peoples of the lower castes were
therefore the rightful inheritors of the land. This argument assumes a conflict
between the dominant upper caste and the conquered, oppressed lower
castes. This was the foundation of caste confrontation and an explanation
for caste hierarchy. It was later to be used extensively in those political
movements that sought to justify their non-Brahmin and anti-Brahmin
thrust, especially in south India.
At the opposite end, some are now propagating an interpretation of
Indian history based on Hindu nationalism and what has come to be called
the Hindutva ideology. Since the early twentieth century, this view has
gradually shifted from supporting the theory of an invasion to denying such
an event, now arguing that the Aryans and their language, Sanskrit, were
indigenous to India. The amended theory became axiomatic to their belief
that those for whom the subcontinent was not the land of their ancestors
and the land where their religion originated were aliens. This changed the
focus in the definition of who were indigenous and who were alien. The
focus moved from caste to religion: the aliens were not the upper castes, but
Muslims and Christians whose religion had originated in west Asia. The
Communists were also added to this group for good measure! According to
this theory only the Hindus, as the lineal descendants of the Aryans, could
be defined as indigenous and therefore the inheritors of the land, and not
even those whose ancestry was of the subcontinent, but who had been
converted to Islam and Christianity.
Mainstream historians of an earlier period differed from both these
interpretations, particularly the second. They accepted the theory of an
invasion, with the introduction of Indo-Aryan and its speakers as the foundation of Indian history. This appealed to members of the upper castes who
identified themselves as the descendants of a superior race - the Aryans some insisting that membership of this race implied a kinship connection
with the British! The theory provided what was thought to be an unbroken,
linear history for caste Hindus. However, the discovery of the Indus civilization and its city culture in the 1920s contradicted this theory of linear
descent. The cities of the Indus civilization are of an earlier date than the
composition of the Vedic corpus - the literature of the Indo-Aryan speaking
people - and do not reflect an identity with this later culture. The insistence
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