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.

Quotes

 * 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


 * 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


 * 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.
 * SCHETELICH, MARIA. "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