ABSTRACT
Excavations in the 1920s revealed a pre-Aryan civilization in the Indus Valley at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the north-west of India. The Aryans were a light-skinned race who were proud of their origins, their purity and their nobility – aryas means ‘the noble ones’. The term which was used to describe them was dasas – a word of contempt, later signifying slaves. Mahatma Gandhi worked very hard on behalf of the untouchables during his lifetime, and he refused to accept that any sort of contact with them incurred pollution. The philosophy of samsara , or reincarnation, is far-reaching and capable of an ever developing sophistication. The Hindu, the thinking Hindu, regards his present span of life as merely an episode in a long succession of lives, some already lived, some yet to come; some human and some possibly animal; some on earth, some elsewhere on other planets or in other dimensions.
