4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST In 1938 in his We or Our Nationhood Defined Guru Golwalkar of the RSS, whose followers are in power in this country today, praised the Nazis fulsomely for their race theory. Such explicit invocation of "race" is now difficult to make, but the sub-conscious desire to be "Aryan" and to claim India as the homeland of the "Aryans" is patent enough. One sees it today in the writings of notable figures of the archaeological establishment and in semi-official journals like the Puratattva, home to some unbelievably fantastic pieces. It is time, therefore, to recapitulate what reliable researches tell us on this vexed question of race and the physical descent of the Indian people. Two very important books came out in 1994, analysing the results of massive research across the world. The UNESCO's History of Humanity, Vol.1, edited by S.J. De Laet summed up mainly the archaeological evidence, while the History and Geography of the Human Genes by L.L. Cavalli-Sforza et al., laid out an analysis of the genetic material. Though the works are independent, their results are strikingly similar. The species of Homo Sapiens, on current evidence, evolved in Africa, where the first great division in the human genealogical tree (between 'black African' and other peoples) occurred, between 130,000 and 50,000 years ago, i.e. between the earliest appearances of the species in Africa, and its first appearance in West Asia. As human diffusion into Eurasia proceeded, both the European and Mongoloid features became well established in their regions long before 10,000 years ago. No human fossils have been found in India, but it is fair to assume that humans in India too had assumed their present physical features around the same remote time as in Europe and China. This is far beyond the period when the families of Indo-European and Dravidian languages could possibly have originated. There is thus in India, at least, no established link between 'race' and language. As Cavalli-Sforza's 'Genetic Tree' shows the speakers of Aryan and Dravidian languages are practically indistinguishable by genetic markers; so are Iranians (speaking Aryan languages of the Iranic branch) and South West Asians, speaking Arabic, both of which latter groups are genetically distinct from Indians, though perhaps only two or three 'splits' removed. We must, then, think in terms of Indo-European languages coming to India not through mass migrations, but through the movement of small influential, dominant groups, a point well emphasized by Colin Renfrew in Archaeology and Language (1987). These points are to be borne in mind while considering claims that certain sections of the Indian population, comprising a number of Scheduled Tribes, are "indigenous", while the remaining Indian population is descended from later immigrants. This notion is obviously an import from the New World where the distinction between indigenous and immigrant is historically legitimate—a legitimacy not traceable for it in India. But the converse claim that the Indo-European languages are indigenous to India, along with their speakers, which historians and archaeologists linked to the Sangh Parivar are urging so loudly these days, is equally fallacious. The separation of the Aryan branch of the larger Indo-European family, by the canons of glotto-chronology, cannot go beyond the 4th millennium B.C.; and by this time, India must have been peopled for some thousands of years by our ancestors