Historical definitions of races in India

[1] Some scholars of the colonial epoch attempted to find a method to classify the various groups of India according to the predominant racial theories popular at that time in Europe.

Scientific racism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries divided humans into three races based on "common physical characteristics": Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid.

[2] American anthropologist Carleton S. Coon wrote that "India is the easternmost outpost of the Caucasian racial region" and defined the Indid race that occupies the Indian subcontinent as beginning in the Khyber Pass.

[2]The theory propounded by German comparative philologists in the 1840s and 1850s "maintained that the speakers of Indo-European languages in India, Persia, and Europe were of the same culture and race.

"[12]Edgar Thurston[year needed] named what he called Homo Dravida and described it close to Australoids, with Caucasoid (Indo-Aryan) admixture.

[14] Also, Deniker mentions that the "Indian race has its typical representatives among the Afghans, the Rajputs, the Brahmins and most of North India but it has undergone numerous alterations as a consequence with crosses with Assyriod, Dravidian, Mongol, Turkish, Arab and other elements.

The Races of Mankind Before European Expansion , published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1891 depicting world races, in the era in which scientific racism was prevalent.
Mother and child in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh , of northern India (2004)