The Aryan idea stood as a sign of kinship and the political rhetoric o — Thomas Trautmann

"The supply of horses . . . has been a preoccupation of the rulers of India, from, nearly, one end of its recorded history to the other. . . . It has yet to be determined why exactly India has never been self-sufficient in horses. Climate? A relative scarcity of pasture?" ... whatever the reason, the stock has always had to be replenished by imports, and the imports came from westward in the ancient period. . . . It is a structure of its history, then, that India has always been dependent upon western and central Asia for horses."

"The [Dasyu/Dasa] image of the dark-skinned savage is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount of text-torturing."