SOCIAL SCIENTIST
being of foreign origin must be marginalized and submit to the homogenized mainstream culture. Such politically motivated constructions need not deter us from taking cognizance of the well-established theory that a people who called themselves Arya and spoke Sanskrit entered India from the north-west around 1500 B.C. They had been in occupation of eastern Iran long enough to have given Iran its name as the 'land of the Aryans'. According to Gnoli3 'Airya' (=Arya) always has an ethnic connotation in Avesta in which Airyas are distinguished from other ethnic groups such as the Tuiryas, the Sairimas, the Sairus and the Dahas.
However, this should not be construed to mean that Aryans constituted a unitary racial group. The basic criteria for identifying ethnicity are a common cultural tradition and a sense of identity. It is held4 that ethnic identities particularly emerge and get accentuated in circumstances when there is regular social interaction between groups characterized by cultural differences. The principal markers of Aryans identity were religion and language on which grounds they differentiated themselves from the Dasa tribes mentioned in the Rgveda.
In a recent work5 Thomas R. Trautmann reevaluates the presumptions of colonial ethnology and 'new orientalism' regarding the concept of 'Arya' and writes that "the political consequences of the Aryan or Indo-European do not reside within the idea itself... but... are the creatures of historical conjuncture and human purpose."6 It is important to make this distinction lest we suppose "that political problems can be resolved by suppressing ideas we deem to be bad." His meticulous research leads him to conclude that although the racial interpretation of Indian civilization is a social construct—the notion of race itself being a socially constructed category of thought— nevertheless, it is undeniable that "Sanskrit was brought to India from without and was spoken by people calling themselves Arya", and Dasas were an ethnic group marked different from the Aryans by language and religion and perhaps also complexion.7 Their enslavement gave Sanskrit its word for slave. We may add that the fact of enslavement of an ethnic group has given the word for slave not only to Sanskrit and English - in the latter case the term 'slave' comes from the enslavement of Slavs by other Europeans—it has also given 'Orja', which is the Finnish variant of Arya, the signification of 'slave' in the Finnish language. As Parpola points8 out, a branch of the people who called themselves Aryans was defeated and enslaved by the ancient people of Finland, hence the fate of the term Arya = Orja in Finland was similar to that of Dasa in India.