Aryans, Jews, Brahminsunmasks fictions about race, caste and origins and tells us how our fractured present consists of competing pasts. Comparatist scholar Dorothy Figueiraexaminesthe works of European (Voltaire, Schlegel, Max Mu?ller, Nietzsche)and Indian (Rammohan Roy, ayanandaSaraswati, Tilak, Vivekananda) thinkers who built an ideology of the Aryan out of mis-readings of "Aryan" texts, starting with the Veda. In both the East and the West, the search for "original" India became bound up with a search for a superiorrace living in an unchanging utopian past.Figueira then looks with hope to Phuleand Ambedkarwho subverted this'nationalist' script in their portrait of theanti-Aryan. As the Aryan myth is resuscitated today in the service of Hindu revival, this work of impeccable scholarship assumes urgency.