Aryan and Non-Aryan in India,

Year

1979

Publisher

University of Michigan Press

Language

English

Pages

ISBN

978-0-89148-045-7

Link

Last Update

20-Jul-2026

Keywords

Sociology ; History

Description

The term Aryan is not often heard nowadays except in the ancient Indian context, and after its misuse by Germanic demagogues in the 1930s this is not surprising. It may have philological relationships with words in non-Indian Indo-European languages, but I understand that modern comparative philologists have recently cast some doubt on several of these (e.g., Irish Eire, German Ehre, Latin arare). The only relative of this Indian word whose kinship is practically certain is the Old Persian Airiya (Modern Persian Īrān). We may thus safely assert that a powerful group of Indo-Iranians in the early second millennium B.C. called...