G Steele

“More important than any ‘language problem’ is the need to protect the elite and keep it separate and more entitled than everyone else. English is the perfect tool for apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“In a grandiose sweep that demolished history itself, Sanskrit was put forward as the ancestor of not just this brand new ‘Shuddh’ Hindi, but the ‘Mother of all languages’. We still find otherwise thoughtful Indians asking: Well, if not Hindi, which other modern Indian language came directly from Sanskrit? It is hard to let go of a crutch we have grown up with—one every bit as powerful as the myth that all of us mixed people in the north are actually Ārya, or, more crudely put, The Master Race.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.”
― Peggy Mohan, Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages

“The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived.”
― David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past