Dinesh Jayaraman

“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

“Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real. This was the paradox of the whispered stories: they were no more than make-believe but they created the truth, and brought into being a city and an army with all the rich diversity of nonfictional people with deep roots in the actually existing world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Victory City

“Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Word for World Is Forest

“I don’t know what ‘human nature’ is. Maybe leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest