It is not my purpose here to tackle this issue in depth but merely to show it as one of the masks of colonialism. I examined the topic elsewhere and many other new accounts of the matter can be examined for more information, notably S.P. Gupta (The  Indus-Sarasvati Culture), B.B. Lal (The Earliest Civilization in South Asia), S.R. Rao (Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization), my own and coauthored works  (Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civilization, Gods, Sages, and Kings, The Myth of the Aryan Invasion, and In Search of the  Cradle of Civilization).

Nor do I mean to say that academics cannot change and have no valuable insights. Currents of scholarship exist within academic groups that can see beyond such colonial motivations and have been questioning them in various contexts, including the history of America, where the genocide of the native population was long excused as a civilizing influence. If they make the effort, these individuals can discern the same distortions relative to India, which as a very different cultural and religious sphere than the Western could hardly be understood by nineteenth century European scholarship from which these ideas arose. A new non-colonial, non-Eurocentric scholarship, and one sensitive to  the spiritual traditions of the planet, is required to really take humanity forward into an age of consciousness beyond all materialist and political machinations.

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