Book Review by Ruchira Paul
“The warrior like Aryan invaders from Central Asia swept over India and supplanted its older religious and linguistic traditions with their own due mostly to the absence of any meaningful resistance from the inhabitants of India’s western borders and central plains. The Aryans brought with them a proto Indo European language which later developed into Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scriptures and liturgy. They introduced the tradition of fire worship, a pantheon of gods very similar to that of the Greeks, the practice of burning their dead and Sati (burning the living widows of powerful men on the funeral pyre of their husband), the caste system and horses. The caste system most likely took root quickly in India because the light skinned invaders saw the darker skinned natives as an inferior class of humans. The original Aryan Vedic religion evolved to adopt and incorporate older indigenous gods such as Shiva and some powerful female gods who went on to become leading deities in the Hindu tradition. Despite the fundamentalist Hindu right’s claim that the Aryans and their language Sanskrit were entirely of local Indian origin, modern day linguistics and genetic studies convincingly point to an Aryan migration trail radiating east and west towards Persia, South Asia and Europe from a region in Central Asia.”
Hindu-Muslim relations India have been studied and there is much to examine and contemplate especially in light of the rise in Hindu nationalism in present day India which describes the Muslim rule in India as an unmitigated disaster. In that context it is fair to ask why India did not go the way of Iran, another ancient Aryan civilization with an old established religion and a magnificent history of scholarship, art, architecture and warfare that converted almost entirely to Islam after the Arab invasion while India remained a majority Hindu entity throughout the almost 700 years of Muslim rule. (At the time of the Indian Independence in 1947, undivided India was about 25% Muslim)