The People That Never Were - Linguistic Scholarship and the Invention of the Aryans

In The People That Never Were, Christopher M. Hutton takes a fresh look at the term Aryan, making the case that the concept was brought into being by western philology and Indology. Hutton then takes the reader through the history of the concept, beginning with colonial scholarship in India around 1800, and ending in the first decades of the twentieth century. By exploring the complex history of the Aryan paradigm, Hutton raises a challenging set of questions for the modern discipline of linguistics and illuminates the role of linguistic scholarship in political understandings of human diversity.