Our Hindu Connections

If you're wondering why I've gone on for a whole chapter about the ancient history of the Hindus, there are two important reasons.

The first is because most of the books you'll find on Hinduism written before about 1995 contain badly outdated material. Be advised that early Hindu history seriously reevaluated by Western academics at this very moment. A few still Cling to the old theories, and some are struggling to adapt them so that they'll somehow stretch to fit the newly uncovered facts. But most researches knowledgeable about the latest archaeological findings have acknowledged the crying need for an overhaul of Western ideas about ancient Hinduism.

The second reason may be even more important, at least for those of us born in the West. The new archaeological findings have archaeological information, it turns out, has immense implications not just for for Hindus, but for the whole history of Western Civilization.

" East is East and West is West/The twain shall never meet," wrote Rudyard Kipling, who spent a good chunk of his life in India. He wasn't right either. You've probably noticed the majority of Indian people are Caucasian , like the majority of people with ethnic European backgrounds. They have somewhat darker skin, but their skull shape and facial features are purely Caucasian. This is an important tip-off: Many Indians are actually quite closely racially related to most Europeans.

That's not the surprising connection Europeans have with Hindus. Most of the languages of North India, like Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and Punjabi, are related to the majority of European languages, such as English, French, German, Italian, Greek, and Spanish. In fact, when British scholars first started studying Sanskrit in the eighteenth century, they were dumbstruck at how closely it paralleled European languages.