RACE

By Chidanand Rajghatta

WASHINGTON: The upper caste Indian male population is genetically closer to Europeans than the lower castes, which are more "Asian," according to a potentially controversial new study being published in the forthcoming issue of the journal Human Genome.

Interesting, but actually a confirmation of what has been long suspected.

My old "Americana" mentions that the language and literature of the Aryan invaders of India falls into two periods, the Vedic and the Sanskrit.

Vedic is the English adjective formed from the noun "veda," the native name of the literature. This word means "knowledge", and can be compared to Latin "videre," Gothic "witum" ("we know"), English "wit," etc., and is a good indication that the original culture-bearers were Aryans from the West.

I believe the theory that the caste system was originally set-up as a form of segregation is still widely accepted. Here is another warning of what happens when the Aryan gets careless--after the gradual mixture with the Dravidians, India sharply declined.

As an aside, it might be mentioned that F. Max Mueller, who made a translation of Kant's "Critique" into English, was also an outstanding Sanskrit scholar, and his translation of the "Rig Veda with Sayana's Commentary" among many others, is still one of the outstanding efforts of its kind.