Page:The history of caste in India.pdf/98

 the Vedic vocabulary or with the semideveloped vocabulary of the modern ethnology, in our minds, but we should try to translate the words in the sense current at the time of our writer.

Our writer never defined the term "ārya." The people for whom he wrote understood perfectly what "ārya" meant. What meaning he had in mind—the meaning which was accepted by the people of India for centuries before and after the period of our writer—must be gathered from the uses of the word "ārya" in the text.