Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship has completely deconstructed and exposed the colonial investment in the propagation of certain theories, the field of Indology, at least in present-day Western academic circles, has been very suspicious of these voices being raised against the theory of the Aryan invasions.

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Edwin Bryant: “The Indo-Aryan invasion debate: the politics of a discourse”, WAVES conference, Los Angeles. August 1998, abstract., quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

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The Indo-Aryan problem is likely to remain unresolved for the foreseeable future, so we might as well attempt to address it in a cordial fashion.

Suspicion of the theory based on scriptural testimony—or lack thereof—remains an explicit or implicit factor in much Indigenous Aryan discourse.

Indeed, one might well wonder how much research would have been invested in the Indo-European problem in the first place, had it not been for its relevance to European imperialism and nationalism.

This all goes to show that ideological analysis, while indispensable in a historiographical study such as this, must refrain from straitjacketing individuals into convenient and easily identified stereotypes or groupings.

This raises another dimension that the Indigenous Aryan critique forces us to confront: What constitutes authority in areas of knowledge, particularly where the evidence is sometimes as malleable, scanty, and inconclusive as much of that concerning the Indo-Aryans?

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