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Who are we Indians? Genetics is bringing bad news for

the politics of identity: We are all migrants
February 23, 2019, 2:00 AM IST Gurcharan Das in Men & Ideas | Edit Page, India, World | TOI

Many pundits predict that the approaching 2019 election is likely to focus on
identity politics primarily because of economic discontent, making BJP turn to
identity and other non-economic issues. Before we are engulfed in election
rhetoric this may be a good time to pause, sit back and ask – who after all, are we
Indians? What are our origins? What should be a straightforward matter of factual
evidence has grown into a contentious debate in recent years.
So far, theories about how Indians were formed were based on linguistic analysis
and archaeology. Based on the similarity of European and Indian languages,

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colonial Indologists (and Nazis) propagated the Aryan invasion theory in which
blue-eyed fair people swept into the Indian subcontinent on horses, conquering
everyone along the way. The Hindu Right has retorted, claiming that Indo-
European languages originated in India and spread westwards. There are also
theories about the Indus Valley people: were they connected to the Dravidians
who were pushed south by the Aryans or were they Aryans who moved
southwards?

Startling answers have come in the last decade, the latest from last year’s study
co-authored by 92 scientists from around the world, coordinated by David Reich,
who runs a lab at Harvard that analyses ancient DNA. It has changed the way
historians think about our early history. There is tremendous excitement, not
unlike the exhilaration in the 1920s and 1930s when archaeologists discovered
Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Valley Civilisation. Tony Joseph, a
journalist, has just written a remarkable book, Early Indians, narrating this story.
Its conclusion is that we are all migrants and we are all mixed.

Many of us believe that we have always lived on the subcontinent from the
beginning of time. This is not true. The new science of population genetics, which
uses ancient DNA from skeletons thousands of years old, has made dramatic
breakthroughs and we Indians can now trace our ancestry back to around 65,000
years ago when a band of modern humans, or homo sapiens, first made their way
from Africa into the subcontinent.

They crossed from Africa to Asia and walked along the coast of southern Asia and
all the way to Australia, while another group went towards central Asia and
Europe. The genetic ancestry of these First Indians constitutes 50-65% of our
DNA today. Thus, ‘pure Indians’ never really existed. All human beings are
descended from Africa.

After this first migration, apparently there were three more waves of major
migrations into India and the new migrants mixed with the local population.
Interestingly, as early as 20,000 years ago, the subcontinent had the world’s
largest human population. The second major migration occurred 9,000 to 5,000
years ago, when agriculturists from Iran’s Zagros region moved into India’s
northwest and mixed with the First Indians to create probably the Harappan
people and later the urban Indus Valley civilisation.

The Harappan people moved south and mixed with the local people to produce
what geneticists call Ancestral South Indians with a culture based on Dravidian
languages. A third farming related migration occurred around 2000 BC when
migrants from the Chinese heartland swamped south-east Asia and reached
India, bringing the Austroasiatic family of languages (such as Mundari and Khasi

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spoken in eastern and central India.) The fourth migration took place between
2000 and 1000 BC soon after the Indus Valley civilisation collapsed. It brought
central Asian pastoralists from the Kazakh Steppe, who spoke an Indo-European
language.

The study of ancient DNA is a new, evolving science and more findings are
expected. But so far, the genetic evidence confirms the old colonial hypothesis
that Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, did
migrate to India when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with
them an early version of Sanskrit and they mixed with the Harappans to create
the ancestral north Indian population. It was not the other way around as the
Hindu Right has argued. What is surprising is that the Harappans may also have
a foreign connection, although much before their urban civilisation came about.

For some reason the vigorous mixing of people came to an end around 100 AD in
India (but not in the rest of the world.) Thus, differences between people have
increased in the last 2000 years in India. The only explanation seems to be that
after 100 AD the caste system became rigid. Because marriage was confined
within a jati group, genetic differences increased even though people lived side by
side in the same village. In contrast, the Chinese continued mixing freely and they
are a homogeneous Han people today while Indians are diverse and ‘composed
of a large number of small populations’, writes Reich.

Enterprising readers of this article can order a DNA kit from various online sites
such as Mapmygenome or 23andMe and confirm their identity. They will find half
their DNA comes from First Indians who came out of Africa with various
proportions of Harappan, Aryan, and other DNA. We are all mixed and we are all
descended from a single woman in Africa, having left behind ancestors in
Ethiopia, Middle East, central Asia and other places.

It is futile to obsess over purity and pollution because we are a product of what
Rushdie called ‘chutnification’ through waves of migrations and minglings in
prehistory. It is splendid how science has confirmed the statement of the Maha
Upanishad: Vasudhaiva kutumbakam, ‘the whole world is a family’, which is also
engraved at the entrance hall of our Parliament. But the unity of the human race is
bad news for the politics of identity and difference.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

AUTHOR

Gurcharan Das

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Bestselling author Gurcharan Das is a former CEO of Procter & Gamble India. He
was VP & MD, P&G Worldwide, when he took early retirement in 1995. . .

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TOP COMMENT
(4)
Aryan Invasion to Aryan migration. when first lie could not stand they constructed second lie.
There is a yourtube video where one scientists find human skeleton in Mexico, which nullify
human origin theory of African origin. There are so many unanswered question in so called
imaginative theorists. Sopt looking India with Western lenses. Human rights violator
Westerners can never digest a superior civilization India, which gave them reasoning,
science, mathematics and food when they were poor and idiots in 16th century.
LUCKY B
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