Need comments on book Cradle of civilization

[Vanbakkam Vijayaraghavan]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2001 05:40:44 -0000, Vidyasankar Sundaresan
<vsundaresan at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>From -
>
>>3. D.N.Jha's review of Trautman's Aryans and British India at
>>http://www.indolink.com/Book/archive.html
>
>"...some scholars in contemporary India have tried to whip up the Aryanness
>of the Hindus as against the followers of Islam. The degree of their
success
>is difficult to assess but one thing is quite clear: the champions of the
>idea of the Aryan as a race in the biological sense today have much in
>common with our erstwhile imperial masters."
>
>The question is whether these said people think of Aryan as a "race
>in the biological sense", when they talk of the Aryanness of Hindus.
>For one, I doubt if many have the sophistication to distinguish a
>false idea of "biological race" from other equally (or more) false
>ideas of race.

The American Anthropological association has decided that the idea of race
itself is unscientific with no basis in biology and has asked the US Govt.
to drop race as a category in census.