Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (4 page)

This theory, however, had to be
drastically revised when
remains of the sophisticated Harappan
civilization were discovered. They proved that Indian civilization clearly predated
1500
BC
. Oddly, the ‘Aryan invasion
theory’ was not thrown away. It was now argued that a people called the
Dravidians (supposed ancestors of modern-day Tamils) created the Indus cities and
that these cities were destroyed by the invading Aryans. This theory too ran into
trouble. There is virtually no archaeological or literary evidence of such a
large-scale invasion. As we shall see, the Harappan cities did not suddenly collapse
but suffered a slow decline as a key river dried up and environmental conditions
deteriorated.

Just by looking around, it will be
obvious to anyone that India is home to a bewildering array of castes, tribes and
language groups. Some of these groups came to India in historical
times—Jews, Parsis, Ahoms, Turks to name a few. However, there are also
many populations that have lived in the country for a very long time. Further
complicating the picture is the fact that there has been a great deal of internal
migration over thousands of years. So, where a group is found today may be very
different from where it originated. Over the centuries most groups have mingled and
yet a few have retained their unique identity to this day. In isolated pockets such
as in the Andaman and Nicobar islands and in the North-Eastern states there are
still tribes that have remained separate from the mainstream since prehistoric
times.

Given this multiplicity, it is very
difficult to generalize about the ethnic origins of all Indians. Nonetheless,
twenty-first-century genetic studies provide some clues about how the Indian
population came to resemble today’s complex milieu. This too is an
evolving area of study, but we are getting some sense of the broad contours.

The first thing that should be clear
from the outset is that there are no ‘pure’ races. With the
possible exception of some tiny isolated groups, the vast majority of Indian tribes,
castes and communities are a mixture of many genetic streams. This merely confirms
what we can all see—that Indians come in all shapes, sizes and
shades—and these can vary quite a lot even within the same family.
Nevertheless, some patterns of genetic distribution are discernible.

The first clue came with a 2006 study
that India’s population mix has been broadly stable for a very long time
and that there has been no major injection of Central Asian genes for over 10,000
years
²⁴
. This means that even if there had been a large-scale influx of so-called
Indo-Europeans, it would have taken place more than 10,000 years ago, long before
iron weapons and the domestication of the horse. Similarly, the study suggests that
the population of Dravidian speakers has lived for a long time in southern India and
the so-called Dravidian genetic pool may even have originated there.

More recent studies have added colour to
these discoveries. A study led by David Reich of Harvard Medical School, published
in
Nature
in 2009, suggests that the bulk of the Indian population can be
explained by the mixture of two ancestral groups—the Ancestral South
Indian (ASI) and the Ancestral North Indian (ANI).
²⁵
The ASIs are the older group and are not related to Europeans, East Asians or
any group outside the subcontinent. The ANIs are a somewhat more recent group and
are related to Europeans.

Not surprisingly, Ancestral North Indian
genes have a larger share in North India and account for over 70 per cent of the
genes of Kashmiri Pandits and Sindhis. However, it is
interesting that ANI genes have a large 40–50 per cent share even in
South India and among tribal groups of central India. Indeed, there is no
‘pure’ population of Ancestral South Indian. The only
populations without a large ANI input live in remote places like the Andaman
Islands. Incidentally, there are also no pure ANIs.

There may be a temptation to equate the
ANI–ASI data to the old Aryan–Dravidian racial theory. One
should be careful doing this for a number of reasons. First, the ANI and the ASI are
not ‘pure’ races in the nineteenth-century sense. Rather, they
are merely different genetic cocktails that each contain many strands. Second, the
terms Aryan and Dravidian are not just about genetic ancestry but carry strong
cultural connotations. While the ANI genes are more widespread amongst speakers of
Indo–European languages and the ASI genes in Dravidian-language speakers,
there is a tendency to extrapolate this to cultural innovations of much later times.
For instance, the people called Aryans are usually linked to the Vedic tradition
while the Dravidians to the Sangam literary tradition. This is not meaningful to the
ANI–ASI framework because we are dealing with genetic mingling that
started well over 10,000 years ago, a lot earlier than the Vedic tradition, Sangam
literature or the Harappan civilization.
²⁶
We are dealing with small bands of hunter–gatherers and early farming
communities rather than the thundering war-chariots, iron weapons and fortified
cities that are said to have been part of an Aryan–Dravidian rivalry.

In other words, after thousands of years
of mixing, Indians are most closely related to each other and it is pointless
splitting hair over who is more Aryan and who is more Dravidian. The
story of Manu, the Indian Noah, sums up the genetic findings
surprisingly well. He was said to have been the king of the Dravidians prior to the
flood but is repeatedly mentioned in the Vedic tradition as an ancestor!

A word of caution: India is a large and
diverse country and there are many communities that will not fit a simple
ANI–ASI framework. In the country’s north-east and along the
Himalayas, for instance, we find large genetic inputs from Tibeto–Burmans.
In historical times alone we know of genetic inflows of Arab, Ahom, Turk, Jewish,
Iranian and European extract. The deliberate North–South axis of the
ANI–ASI approach should not be expected to explain all genetic variation
across the country. It is merely the starting point of a very interesting line of
study that could not only explain our pre-history but also provide key tools for
next-generation medicine. One point, however, is clear—that Indians are a
mongrel lot who come in all shapes, sizes and complexions. Genetics has merely
confirmed what we can all see.

Of course, the genetic links of North
Indians to some Europeans and Iranians corroborates linguistic linkages that were
discerned in the nineteenth century. Most of the evidence is centred around a gene
mutation called R1a1 (and more specifically a sub-group R1a1a).
²⁷
This gene is common in North India and among East Europeans such as the Czechs,
Poles and Lithuanians. There are smaller concentrations in South Siberia,
Tajikistan, north-eastern Iran and in Kurdistan (that is, the mountainous areas of
northern Iraq and adjoining areas). Interestingly, however, the gene is rare among
Western Europeans, western Iranians and through many parts of Central Asia. In other
words, we are dealing with R1a1a
population concentrations that
are separated by vast distances from each other. How did they get there?

A study by Peter Underhill et al
published in 2010 in the
European Journal of Human Genetics
found that the
oldest strain of the R1a1a branch was concentrated in the Gujarat-Sindh-Western
Rajasthan area, suggesting that this was close to the origin of this genetic group.
European carriers of R1a1a also carried a further mutation, M458, that is not found
at all in their Asian cousins.
²⁸
Since the M458 mutation is estimated to be at least 8000 years old, the two
populations appear to have separated before or during the Great Flood. Thus, the
genetic linkages between North Indians and East Europeans are best explained by the
sharing of a distant common ancestor, perhaps from before the end of the last Ice
Age. We do not really know why the Asian and European branches separated, although
it is tempting to assume that it had something to do with climatic changes.

Note that the most common lineage in
Western Europe is R1b. This is related to R1a1 and possibly also originated in the
Persian Gulf area but the two lineages separated a long time ago—probably
during or before the last Ice Age. Compared to R1a1, India has relatively low
concentrations of R1b. My interpretation is that we are dealing with two major
genetic dispersals occurring from the Persian Gulf-Makran-Gujarat region at
different points in the climatic cycle—one occurred at the onset or during
the last Ice Age with R1b carriers heading mostly west, and another occurred around
the time of the Flood involving R1a1 carriers.

The genetic and cultural links between
North Indians and eastern Iranians are due to the second dispersal but possibly
with additional inputs from a later migration of some lineages
north-westward from India.
²⁸
As we shall see in the next chapter, there is reason to believe that some
Indian tribes moved westward to Iran and beyond during the Bronze Age. In addition,
cultural linkages could have been kept alive by trade. The spread of Indian culture
to South East Asia in ancient times and, more recently, the accelerated popularity
of the English language in the post-colonial period show that one does not need
either conquest or large-scale migration to drive linguistic and cultural exchange.
The reality of complex back-and-forth linkages make it very difficult to decode
history using the linguistic layers. This may explain why traditional timelines
based on linguistics were far shorter than those being suggested now by genetics and
archaeology.

There is one further insight that
genetics hints at—the dynamics of India’s caste system. India is
not unique in having developed a caste system. Through history we have seen
different versions of the caste system in Japan, Iran, and even in Classical Europe.
What is remarkable about Indian castes is their persistence over thousands of years
despite changes in technology, political conditions, and even religion. The system
has even survived centuries of strong criticism and opposition from within the Hindu
tradition.

It was once thought that the caste
system had something to do with the Aryan influx and the imposition of a rigid
racial hierarchy. However, as geneticist Sanghamitra Sahoo and her team have shown:
‘The Y-chromosomal data consistently
suggest a largely
South Asian origin for Indian caste communities’.
³⁰
Genetic studies suggest that Indian castes are profoundly influenced by
‘founder events’. Roughly speaking, this means that castes are
created by an ‘event’ when a group separates out and turns
itself into an endogamous ‘tribe’. Over time this process leads
to a heterogeneous milieu of groups and sub-groups, sometimes combining and
sometimes splitting off. The result is that, despite centuries of mixing, we do not
have a unified population but a complex network of clans. This is a good description
of the messy ‘Jati’-based social system that exists to this
day

Genetics also tells us that there is no
real difference between groups that we differentiate today as
‘castes’ and ‘tribes’. As India’s
leading geneticist, Dr. Lalji Singh puts it, ‘It is impossible to
distinguish castes and tribes from the data. This supports the view that castes grew
directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society. The
one exception to the finding, that all Indian groups are mixed, is the indigenous
people of the Andaman islands …’
³¹

In order to appreciate the messiness of
the Jati system of castes, note the distribution of the R1a1 genetic haplogroup, the
genes many Indians share with Eastern Europeans.
³²
Their distribution in India across region and caste is telling. It is present
in high concentration among high-caste Brahmins of Bengal and Konkan as well as in
Punjabi Khatris, but it also shows up in tribes such as the Chenchus of Andhra
Pradesh. In other words, a Chenchu tribesman is closely related to an
upper-caste Bengali ‘bhadralok’ and a blond Lithuanian. You
never know where you will bump into relatives. A paper published in the
Journal
of Human Genetics
in January 2009,
argues that the R1a1
lineage probably originated in India. The study argues for ‘the
autochthonous origin of R1a1 lineage in India and a tribal link to Indian
Brahmins’.
³³
Thus, we may well be dealing with a particularly successful Neolithic clan that
branched out in different directions and whose descendants experienced very
different fates.

There is a difference between the
genetic reality and the rigid and strictly hierarchical ‘Varna’
system of castes described in the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu). The Manusmriti is often
used by scholars as the framework to understand the phenomenon of castes. It now
appears that the formal ‘Varna’ based caste system described in
the text is a scholarly abstraction that may never have existed in reality.
³⁴
Instead, what we have here is a very flexible and organic milieu consisting of
Jatis that can adapt easily to changing times by allowing for evolving social
equations. For instance, the system can spontaneously create new castes whenever new
groups need to be accommodated. Similarly, groups can be promoted or demoted in
status according to prevailing social conditions. This fits what we know from
historical experience—including the formation of the warrior Rajput caste
in the medieval period. In the past, these groups vied with each other to move up
the pecking order. Today we have the opposite situation where they vie to be
classified as ‘backward’ in order to benefit from affirmative
action. The logic of collective action is the same.