Anyone even remotely interested in this sort of subject, please keep reading. Anyone who isn’t, please consider this to be an open thread!
Interesting genetic research on the population of India,
The population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation’s highly stratified social structure.
“All Indians are pretty similar,” says Chris Tyler-Smith, a genome researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. “The population subdivision has not had a dominating effect.”
[snip]
The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.
The researchers also found that Indian populations were much more highly subdivided than European populations. But whereas European ancestry is mostly carved up by geography, Indian segregation was driven largely by caste. “There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes,” says Reich.
These findings are very interesting, and in some circles will prove to be pretty controversial. I’m interested in this because I think this genetic data pretty decisively decided the on-going Indian origins debate between the “One India” (OI) theory and the “Indo-Aryan Invasion” (IAI) theory in favour of the latter (please note: the term “Aryan” as it is used here does not have anything to do with Nazis or Nazism).
The “One India” theory (which, of course, has many minor variants encompassed by that term) basically posits that India has always been more or less one, single compact cultural and population unit for as long as people have inhabited the Subcontinent. Despite the obvious political fragmentation down through the millennia, “India” – everything from the Indus river valley to Sri Lanka – is one civilisational unit which has not seen any outside injections into its culture up until modern times. By making these assertions, it explicitly rejects many of the implications inherent in the IAI theory.
The IAI theory, on the other hand, posits that around the first half of the 2nd millennium BC, Indo-European (or Indo-Aryan, more specifically) invaders came pouring down from the north across the Hindi Kush and other channels into India, subjugating the indigenous population and establishing themselves as a ruling class over the natives.
The OI supporters generally advance their position for political purposes, and tend to be divided into two groups: Western-educated, socialistic anti-colonialists and Hindu fundamentalists. The first of these interprets Indian history through the Marxist lens, and argues that India was the usual peaceful, carefree, harmonious place free from racism, sexism, and whatever other –isms are out there that former colonies are always said to have been prior to the entry of interloping European colonials. For instance, this type of OI supporter would argue that the caste system did not exist until the British came and misrepresented statements made in the Vedas and other Hindu texts, and that the British used it as a means of dividing Indians against each other to make them easier to control. The Hindu fundamentalist wing of the OI position, on the other hand, says that the British cooked up the IAI theory as a means of destroying India’s “unique and unified history” and that this notion of Indo-European invaders was merely invented to justify British (who are also Indo-Europeans) intrusion into India. Some also argue that the IAI theory was created to serve as a way of defaming India’s Hindu heritage by making it appear both non-indigenous and violently imperial, and that instead, Hinduism has always been both peaceful and aboriginal.
To one with even a passing familiarity with Indian history and culture, the arguments from both of these camps are highly questionable, to put it lightly. But politics trumps facts: the secular OI-supporters want to use it to wring further guilt and concessions from the West (particularly Britain), while the Hindutva OI-supporters use it as an excuse to push for the sometimes-violent “Hinduisation” of non-Hindu and minority populations in India, as well as a justification for the on-going suppression of India’s Dalits, or Untouchables.
This genetic evidence seems to confirm the IAI theory. That theory has much to commend it, from what we know of history and archaeology.
First, we know that in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC (roughly 2000-1500 BC), there indeed was a great irruption of Indo-European populations from someplace to the north of the Near East and to the east of Europe. Where exactly this Ursprung was, we don’t still know for sure, though the region encompassing what is now modern Ukraine and on over to the Volgograd area north of the Caucasus seems to be the most plausible candidate. At any rate, this five hundred year period saw a lot of population movement. It was at this time that the people who eventually became the Latins and other Italics first entered the Po valley and the people who eventually became the Mycenaeans entered Greece. In the Near East, this period saw the invasion of Indo-European peoples into what would become Persia. Indo-Europeans also invaded the Fertile Crescent. It is in this period that the Mitanni (whose name I would connect linguistically with the Medes/Medan in Persia) rose to prominence in northern Mesopotamia, and they basically appear to have been an Indo-European ruling caste that established itself over the local Hurrian population. The same thing happened with the Hittites, with an Indo-European ruling stock taking control and ruling the indigenous people.
And it is right around this time that the IAI theory suggests the Indo-Aryans came pouring into the Indus valley, overwhelming the indigenous river valley civilization, before pushing on further into the Subcontinent. So the timing certainly makes sense.
Likewise, the Rig Veda itself suggests this invasion. There are parts of this text that seem to chronicle the invasion as the obviously light-skinned and light-haired invaders overwhelm the “black, no-nosed” indigenous population. These invaders make extensive use of both the horse and the chariot and even seemed to attach a sacral aspect to these, which is characteristic of other invading IE groups at this time and later. The Mitanni in the Near East also employed both horses and chariots extensively. Much later, the Celts held the same attitude towards the chariot, and anyone who’s read the Iliad should note the prominence that chariots played in the battles described, truly an archaism from an earlier stage in the development of Greek culture.
As for the “black, no-nose” (or “snub-nosed”) people whom the invaders overwhelmed, this seems like a potentially plausible description of the Indus Valley people. Asko Parpola, the world-renowned Finnish Indologist, suggests that the Sumerian place-name Meluhha refers to the Indus Valley civilization. While later references to Meluhha dating from the first millennium (such as those made by the Assyrian king Ashurbannipal, 668-627 BC) seem to place it in Africa, much earlier references dating as far back as 2200 BC place Meluhha to the east of Mesopotamia. It has been suggested that the Indus valley civilization was perhaps even a colony of the Sumerians. This would make a common-sense connexion with the “black” inhabitants of the Indus valley then. Sumerian texts have been noted in which the Sumerians refer to themselves as “the black-headed people.” Given that pretty much everybody in the Near East, past and present, has been dark-haired, this reference is more readily understood to be a reference to skin colour, rather than hair-colour. The Sumerians were darker than the other peoples around them. If the Indus Valley people were colonists or breakaways from Sumer, then it would make sense that they’d fit this same phenotypic characteristic – recorded about them later when the light-skinned Indo-Aryans began invading.
Linguistically there is a connexion between the Indo-Aryans and other Indo-European invaders at this time, even with the scant documentation available. For instance, the Suppiluliuma-Shattiwaza treaty between a Hittite and Mitannian king, dating to sometime around or close after 1300 BC, invokes a number of god-names that are closely related to the names of Vedic gods. Further evidence is found in the Kikkuli horse training manual, a neo-Hittite document dating to around 1400 BC, which contains a number of Mitannian loan-words that are clearly and closely related to Sanskrit terms. The Mitanni and the Indo-Aryans of India who spoke a language that would become Sanskrit seem to have shared a common origin, as well as a number of gods in common.
Parpola believes that the Indus Valley language (which has been amazingly hard to decipher, by the way) is most closely related to modern Dravidian languages such as Tamil. This suggests a picture in which that civilization was overwhelmed, and the people migrated (or fled) further on down into the southern portion of the Subcontinent. It is noteworthy, in light of this scenario, to note the existence of the Brahui, a Dravidian remnant existing primarily in Pakistan, right in the neighbourhood of where the ancient Indus Valley civilization flourished.
The genetic findings reported in the article correlate quite well with what we know from this history. One part of India’s genetic componency – the part found in higher proportions in higher-caste and Indo-European speaking portions of India’s population – is genetically similar to European and Central Asian populations. The other component – found, presumably, in higher proportions in lower-cast and Dravidian-speaking groups – is related to a dark population found on the Andaman Islands. This suggests that the picture of conquest by Indo-Aryans has merit (though “invasion” may actually be too strong of a term, many Indologists believe it may have been more of a “robust migratory event” such as what was seen with the Germanic tribes who wore down the western Roman Empire, bringing about its eventual downfall). Indo-Aryans, after some genetic admixture through intermarriage with the conquered locals, established a caste system that was religiously enforced and which resulted in a “shut-off” of further intermarriage, eventually evolving into the system reported today. The darker, genetically more-indigenous populations eventually were pushed aside or subjugated, which may explain why we see the population of the Subcontinent grow progressively darker and more Dravidian as you move south and east from the Indo-European core centred about Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan.
Now, I will grant that I am no Indologist. I’m nothing more than an interested amateur in this field, so I am certainly open to being told I am factually wrong, that my conclusions are off base, and that I’m even a dirty, rotten Christianist trying to defame the history of holy India. I just present this for discussion. So please, talk amongst yourselves!
