As the cab began to wind out of the stifling city and escaped into the countryside, I wrestled with what I knew about the once great Indian civilization. Green rice fields sped by the window of my cab as I weighed what I had learned from books on ancient Indian history and from conversations I had with some New Delhi college professors I had met during the previous few days. The historical facts mingled in my mind with the impressions harvested by my own eyes.

Aryans, or Indo-Europeans (Caucasians) created the great Indian, or Hindu civilization. Aryans swept over the Himalayas to the Indian sub-continent and conquered the aboriginal people. The original term India was coined by the Aryan invaders from their Sanskrit word Sindu, for the river now called the Indus. Sanskrit is perhaps the oldest of the Indo-European languages, having a common origin to all the modern languages of Europe. The word Aryan has an etymological origin in the word Arya from Sanskrit, meaning noble. The word also has been associated with gold, the noble metal and denoted the golden skinned invaders (as compared to the brown skinned aboriginals) from the West.

Composed in about 1500 B.C., the Hindu religious texts of the Rig Veta tell the story of the long struggles between the Aryans and the aboriginal people of the Indian subcontinent. Sixteen Aryan states were partitioned by the sixth century A.D., and Brahmanism became the chief religion of India. The conquering race initiated a caste system to preserve their status and their racial identity. The Hindu word for caste is Varna, which directly translated into English, means color. Today the word is usually associated with occupation or trade; but that is because occupations evolved on the basis of skin color and ethnicity. The most pale skinned were called the Brahmin. These were the warrior-priest class, the top of the social ladder. The Untouchables (or Pariahs) were the racially mixed in the bottom caste.

Over the past few centuries the clear racial differences have faded, but one can still notice the lighter hues and taller statures of the higher castes. Many scholars consider Sanskrit the oldest and purest of the Indo-European languages. In modern India, the greatest insult one could pay a fellow Indian is to call him "black."

In spite of all the organized government and media efforts to root out racial feeling, there is still ample evidence that race does matter in modern India. Rodney Johnson showed me the personal ad columns that catered to the English-speaking Indians. The skin color of the advertiser is always described very precisely. I found that many of the ads emphasized the degree of lightness of the prospective husband or wife.

The average Christian conservative of the Western world would be aghast at the exuberant interest displayed by the ancient Indians in sex and in the ways they publicly displayed sexual experience through art. Hindu history, though, seems to indicate that it was not preoccupation with sex that brought down the high culture as much as it was the racial impact of that obsession. In spite of strict religious and civil taboos, the ancient Aryans crossed the color line. Slavery, or a similar system, had made servant women easily obtainable and proved a dangerous temptation for some of the basest of the slaveholders. Only a small percentage of each generation had sexual liaisons with the lower castes, but over dozens of generations a gradual change in the racial composition occurred. Such changes are almost imperceptible in a single generation. But they are dramatic after a millennium.

One of the problems of the Indian civilization is that the most creative, most intelligent, and most successful people have many avenues of fulfillment, while the lower classes consider sex a form of recreation. Sex is the one highly enjoyable pastime the poor can always afford. Every civilization has a lower average birthrate among its most talented elements, while its less intelligent and unproductive tend to proliferate. Ancient India was no exception.