Further evidence of the Hindutva attitude to the pursuit of truth and scientific rigour is available in the history textbooks foisted on students in the four erstwhile BJP-ruled States. Take the case of the compulsory textbook for first-year graduate students titled ``Bharat ki Sanskritik Virasat'' introduced in Madhya Pradesh. Essentially a primer of the Hindutva brand of culture, it determinedly pushes the pseudo-thesis that the Aryans did not migrate to the Indian sub-continent from outside but were `indigenous.' This is very much in line with the absolutist assertions made by `Guru' M. S. Golwalkar, the RSS's second supremo and its most important ideologue, in his 1939 work, ``We: or Our Nationhood defined,'' which the Hindutva camp is doing its best to cover up today. Rejecting theories that held that the `Aryans' migrated to India, Golwalkar asserts: `` Hypothesis is not truth. Out of the heap of hypotheses we reject all and positively maintain that we Hindus came into this land from nowhere, but are indigenous children of the soil always, from times immemorial and are natural masters of the country. Here we compiled our inimitable Vedas, reasoned out our Philosophy of the Absolute--the last word on the subject, built our sciences and arts and crafts...''(Golwalkar, 1939, page 8-9). The equation of `Hindu' and `Aryan'--`` the Hindu i.e. Aryan race'' (Golwalkar, 1939, page 6) is central to the thesis about national identity as expounded in this chillingly-explicit work.
The anti-scientific character of this thesis has been exposed by India's leading historians, among them Dr. Romila Thapar (an excellent article is available in Seminar; see Thapar, 1992). Historians point out that term Aryan should be applied, scientifically speaking, only to a language. The language of the Rig Veda for instance is Old Indo-Aryan. The links between this language and Old Avestan indicates a movement from West Asia to India by Aryan speakers. The evidence ``does not support the notion that India was the homeland of the Aryan-speaking people'' (Thapar, 1992, p. 22). Further, Vedic Sanskrit and its dialect variations provide evidence of further geographical movement from the north-west into the Ganga valley. The Aryan speakers did not maintain any racial purity, so what really spread was not a body of racially ``pure'' Aryans, but rather the use of the language Old Indo-Aryan. Dr. Romila Thapar goes on to discuss the implications of such pseudo-theses for developing a justification of upper caste domination. There are other dimensions to the pushing of this pseudo-thesis, especially the linking up with the fascistic vision of Golwalkar on national identity and the place of minorities, above all Muslims. Revealingly, Golwalkar was attracted to Nazi Germany's handling of the `minorities' problem: ``To keep up the purity of the Race and it culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the semitic Races-the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how wellnigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by.'' (Golwalkar, 1939, p.35).