Historical definitions of races in India

Various attempts have been made, under the British Raj and since, to classify the population of India according to a racial typology.

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The theory of the Aryan race set up by Western writers falls to the ground at every point… the theory is based on nothing but pleasing assumptions and inferences based on such assumptions… Not one of these assumptions is borne out by facts… The assertion that the Aryans came from outside and invaded India is not proved and the premise that the Dasas and Dasyus are aboriginal tribes of India is demonstrably false… The originators of the Aryan race theory are so eager to establish their case that they have no patience to see what absurdities they land themselves in… The Aryan race theory is so absurd that it ought to have been dead long ago.
- Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, Volume 7 edited by Vasant Moon, Education Department, Govt. of Maharashtra Publications, Mumbai, 1990. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

The distinction between Aryan and un-Aryan on which so much has been built seems on the mass of evidence to indicate a cultural rather than a racial difference.
- Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda (1971), quoted in E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 2

These premises developed in response to the colonial need to manipulate the Indians’ perception of their past. The need was felt most strongly from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, and an elaborate racist framework, in which the interrelationship between race, language and culture was a key element, slowly emerged as an explanation of the ancient Indian historical universe. The measure of its success is obvious from the fact that the Indian nationalist historians left this framework unchallenged, preferring to dispute it only in some comparatively minor matters of detail.
- Chakrabarti, D. K. (1997). Colonial indology : sociopolitics of the ancient indian past. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt.

The systematic mistranslation of “dark people” etc. as “the dark-skinned aboriginals subdued by the white Aryan invaders and their caste Apartheid” for almost two centuries is one of the grossest mistakes in scholarship, and extremely rich in consequences.
- Koenraad Elst, On Modi Time : Merits And Flaws of Hindu Activism In Its Day Of Incumbency – 2015. Chapter 20

When it is said that Agni, the fire, “puts the dark demons to flight”, one should keep in mind that the darkness was thought to be filled with ghosts or ghouls, so that making light frees the atmosphere of their presence. And when Usha, the dawn, is said to chase the “dark skin” or “the black monster” away, it obviously refers to the cover of nightly darkness over the surface of the earth.
- Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

[R]ace theories conquered the intellectual scene, fitting neatly with the Europe-to-India scenario for the spread of Indo-European. It all fell into place: the Aryans had been white Nordic people who, with their inborn superiority, had developed a culture and technology which allowed them to subdue less advanced races: dark-haired Mediterraneans and West-Asians, and dark-skinned Indians. The linguistic "aryanization" of India by white Aryan invaders from Europe formed a complete case study of all that the upcoming racist worldview stood for.
- Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". Vol. I., p. 244

The fact that racial interpretations arose in the 19th century is not surprising , given the prevalence at the time of quasi-scientific attempts to provide a justification for racially based European imperialism , and the well known scramble of the European powers to divide up the non-European world. Moreover, the British take-over of India seemed to provide a perfect parallel to the assumed take-over of prehistoric India by the invading ‘Aryans’.
- Hans Hock, Through a glass darkly: Modern racial interpretations vs. textual and general prehistoric evidence on arya and dasa/dasyu in Vedic society. 145-174. Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, interpretation, and ideology, Proceedings of the International Seminar on Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 25-27 October, 1996, ed. by Johannes Bronkhorst and Madhav M. Deshpande. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora, 3. 1999. page 168

In general, the assumption of racial self- and external identification, as well as the alleged parallel with the English conquest of India for the time of the alleged Indo-Aryan immigration to India, is extremely questionable.
- Hock, H. H. (2002). Wem gehört die Vergangenheit?: Früh-und Vorgeschichte und indische Selbstwahrnehmung. p. 236-7

There are a whole series of standard opinions in the Indological literature, which are regarded as expressions of proven research results and are adopted in this capacity from one book to another to this day, without anyone believing that they need to be checked again against the source material and/or in the context of newer research and hypotheses. One of these standard opinions is the view that the population that the Arya encountered when they immigrated to India was radically different from them, especially in terms of their external appearance.
- Maria Schetelich. "Die „schwarzen“ Feinde der Arya im Ṛgveda" Altorientalische Forschungen, vol. 18, no. 1, 1991, pp. 151-162. https://doi.org/10.1524/aofo.1991.18.1.151 page 151

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.
- Thomas Trautmann, 1997. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press. quoted in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. ch 3

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