"It has, at any rate, been an extremely consequential mistake. That white Aryan invaders defeated black aboriginal resisters has been taken over by numerous authors, including many who had no ideological agenda but naïvely lapped it up. It underpinned a second and similar mistranslation, viz. that the Sanskrit term for “caste”, varṇa, means “colour” in the sense of “skin colour” In fact, varṇa means “one in a spectrum”: a colour in the visual spectrum, a class in the social spectrum, but also a letter in the sound spectrum (hence varṇamāla for “alphabet”). The whole edifice of the “racial Aryan”, notorious through its Nazi application but equally popular in British colonial discourse and among its Indian copycats, was based on nothing better than a simple mistranslation."