Mfa summary

[Music] [Music] thank you very much vikram and good morning to everyone it's a pleasure to be
here and uh and i thank mountain for organizing this and giving me this opportunity i've been
looking forward to coming to hyderabad for a very long time partly because that's where i started
my career in journalism more than three and a half decades ago but the pandemic has ensured
that we this engagement happens in virtual space and not in physical space probably that will
happen some other time in the future we have about an hour ahead of us and i would be using
this time to talk about the new insights we have about some old questions that all of us probably
have wondered about from time to time can you sit a little closer yeah yeah that should do sorry
why do we speak so many languages about 780 of them including the 22 languages listed in the
constitution as o cial languages of india and and more than the absolute number it is that 280
languages belong to at least four very di erent families the indo-european which is spoken by
nearly uh three-fourths of the population of india the reading languages which are spoken by
nearly one- fth of the population then there is austroasiatic spoken by tribals in central and
eastern india there is jupiter burman which is spoken by groups in the himalayan region so what
accounts for this this diversity of language families and why are they spread the way that that they
are and who exactly were the heroines who built the largest civilization of its time and how are we
related to them if at all what accounts for the striking similarities that we see today in the culture
of of of the indian subcontinent whether it is in the way that we build houses around courtyards in
many of the cooking utensils that we use or in the way that we treat the people tree are sacred
where do these similarities come from and also what accounts for the equally striking di erences
that we have whether it is in as we discuss languages or in you know in our eating habits in what
we prefer to eat and not to eat and that is a very striking di erence as we will see between north
and western india or south and eastern india so so the the answers to all of these questions lie in
our prehistory and uh and they and the answers reveal themselves when you grapple with a single
larger question a mega question which goes like how did we come to be who who are we where
did our ancestors come from and how did we form into the population that we are today over
what period how long have we been here until recently we did not really have a good way of
answering or settling these questions we could make various guesses using evidences from
archaeology linguistics epigraphy and so on but that was about it and this is what has changed in
the last few years and that is thanks mostly uh to a relatively new discipline called population
genetics in the last few years population genetics has been around for decades but until very
recently it used to look at the genomes of currently living people and and it could therefore using
that the genomes of currently living people it could make uh conclusions about which population
groups are related to which other population groups how closely and how weakly etc this was
good because these studies could tell us for example that the north indians were more related to
west asians and central asians than south indians etc but these studies could not solve the
problem of how did these relationships between multiple between di erent population groups
come about who moved where there could be no answer to that and that is what has changed
when population geneticists acquired the ability to extract and analyze dna from people who lived
thousands or tens of thousands of years ago and and this changes things because to for example
let us say we have uh uh we have an article we have an archaeological site in hyderabad and we
have collected you know recovered skeletons and collected ancient dna from from a level that is
let's say 3000 years ago and let's say from the dna that is collected from this level we can nd no
trace of an east asian ancestry but let's say from a level that is only two thousand years ago we
can all we did we we also collected engine skeletons and dna and in this uh dna we did nd uh
signi cant traces of east asian ancestry then it is a clear conclusion that between these two
periods between 4 000 years ago and 3 000 years ago there is a new ancestry that came into
hyderabad from east asia now so this is what has happened in actually in the last few years
across the world hundreds and hundreds of ancient dna samples have been recovered and
analyzed across the world and that has given us a far sharper uh insight into how di erent
population groups formed not just in south asia in europe in the americas in east asia in australia
all over the world for example uh i i would like to show a picture the picture that you see there uh
is a picture of uh of one of the early hunter gatherers of europe if you google for someone called
the cheddar man c-h-e-d-a-r cheddar man and he lived around nine thousand one hundred years
ago in somerset england and his face was reconstructed using skeleton and dna this was before
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 later migrations changed the demography of europe right so this is the earliest you know
inhabitant of europe one minute so what we know about europe is that uh from the from from the
ndings that have happened because of ancient dna is that europe went through two major
periods of churn just in the last 10 000 years rst around 9 000 years ago a population of one of
the early the early farmers of uh west asia from regions today known as turkey and early known as
anatolia moved into europe uh displaced uh or mixed with the with the undergraduates who
speak the the people of the the picture that we saw just now mixed or replaced the hundred
gatherers of europe uh to a large extent so that was the rst that that was about uh nine thousand
years ago then again around ve thousand years ago another population from central a from the
central asian steppe region people known as yamnaya who were who had mastered the art of
riding horses and metallurgy moved into europe displaced or mixed with the then existing farmers
and whatever remained of the original undergraduates so if you want to know what the european
population is it is the mixture of these three population groups and europe has seen therefore
major signi cant demographic change twice over in the last 10 000 years and similarly we can
understand demographic changes that have happened in uh in in the americas in in deep history
in southeast asia by because of multiple migrations so the point is that the greater understanding
of prehistory that we have today is about all of the world not just not just south asia south korea is
only one part of it what's happening today is that because of the new ndings the it's like a big
jigsaw puzzle being lled in because of the because we can see how population movements
happened in in deep history large in in massive ways that change demographic but you could ask
you know there are migrations that happen all the time across time across space so how can we
understand the impact of migrations on di erent population groups if they are so arbitrary they
happen all the time and how can we put a structure to understand it the answer is that there is a
way to put a structure to it and understand migrations and the impact they have on shaping
human populations that is to realize that even though migrations happen across all time and
space there are four classes of migrations that were driven by global forces uh that are
responsible for the way most population groups look today around the world and which are these
for for classes of migration why do we say historic forces because when we look back we can see
they are not arbitrary there's a reason why they happened then and there is a reason why they
were massive and there is a reason why they shaped human populations of these four classes of
migrations that shaped human demography around the world the rst one you probably have
heard of or read about it is called the out of africa migrations this happened around 70 000 years
ago when a small group of africans moved out of africa into the arabian peninsula around 70 000
years ago and then over the next thousand few thousands of years their descendants spread
throughout the rest of the world and this is one migration probably counting no more than a few
hundred people to begin with that's the population that gave rise to all of the non-african
population in the world today that we can see from the genetic regard if you if you if you study the
genetics of people all over the world you will see that all of the people outside of africa are
descendants of a small subset of the african population that that existed around 70 000 years ago
it's as simple as that in other words we are the diversity of the african population is far larger than
the diversity of all the people put outside of outside of africa because they all come from a subset
of the african population so this is uh this is this has changed earlier there were you would have
found some scientists somewhere or the other saying actually humans arose in di erent parts in
di erent regions of the world di erently and etc but today it is today no scientist would say that
today is an accepted fact that uh modern humans arose in the in in africa and around 70 000
years ago they migrated around the world peopling the rest of the world so that's the rst uh
migration and as they were spreading around the world a major event happened that's a glacial
age a glacial age that intervened between around 29 000 years ago and about fourteen thousand
years ago when glacial ages happen these are periods of great identity because the world's
oceans and water gets locked up in ice which means there's very little evaporation and very very
little rain which means large parts of the world becoming uninhabitable and added so during the
glacial period these modern humans who were expanding around well they got separated from
each other for thousands of years thousands of years which meant uh they developed along
slightly di erent parts accumulating minor genetic di erences uh but it one should bear in mind
that even today modern humans all around the world share 99.9 of their of their genes they have
the same genes so the di erences that we talk about are minor in the larger scale of things uh so
as they were we know that they the migration started around 70 000 years ago and the last
continent that they uh migrated to people is probably the americas which according to latest
researches just a few weeks old they probably reached around 30 000 years ago somewhat earlier
than 16 000 years ago that has been understood until now so during that period is the period that
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 it took for modern humans to populate the world and the driving force as we discussed the global
force uh that was driving it was climate uh because climate is what uh what made new passages
uh happen open and climate is what made people move in search of new ways of living to to
newer areas and climate is what drove migrations of not just modern humans but all other animals
and birds as well so the rst out of african migrations is one of the major classes of migrations
that shaped the world demography and that was given by climatic forces and the thing to take
away from this is that whenever you hear the question who are the rst indians who are the rst
african i mean we're the rst uh japanese who were the rst australians where the rst europeans
the answer to all of those questions are just the same they were out of africa migrants uh now
after the glacial age ended we see something else happening which is that we see modern human
populations around the world uh experimenting with agriculture and you know agriculture the
thing to remember is that not all agriculture is the same you have to be lucky because people who
are experimenting with the arms uh bananas etc tubers in southeast asia in fact southeast asians
may have been one of the rst people to experiment with agriculture they were not very lucky
because they these do not yield that the yield or the productivity is not large enough for them to
change their lifestyle but those people who were in geographic locations where they had the
opportunity to domesticate cereals and cultivate them such as rice wheat mali they were lucky
because it over a period of time the productivity was very high and they could actually change
their lifestyle from being undergraduates and initially gathered us undergraduates as in gathering
um cereal so to becoming cultivators and farmers and these were people in egypt in india in
mesopotamia in china to begin with and wherever people took to agriculture the the result was a
huge population explosion because farmers or settled farmers their population grows at a much
higher level than that of hunter-gatherers so from all these regions that took to agriculture what we
see are major population explosions that result obviously in huge migrations that change the
demographic farmers overrun or outrun in terms of population growth hunter-gatherers
everywhere so this is the second class of migrations we could call it the neolithic or the farmer-
related migrations farming related migrations and the driving force is man's mastery in a
substantive way our nature by to the extent of inventing agriculture so these are farming related
migrations that shaped a lot of the world's demography third class of migrations happened when
one modern human population group in central asia gured out how to ride the horse and
combine that ability with the with the mastery of a metallurgy and these were a population group
called yamnaya and uh they could then you could then imagine when you when you gain mastery
of a host the kind of mobility that you acquire is nothing comparable to the kind of mobility
modern humans had until then so they were able to move signi cantly into uh from central asia
into europe to begin with that's about 5000 years ago they signi cantly moved into europe
displacing or mixing with the existing populations as we discussed earlier and they changed these
migrations changed the demography of a large part of eurasia from the west and most part of
europe to uh to india they spread their language too which is indo-european languages spread
re ect the spread of the of the yamnaya of the central central uh pastoralists who who expanded
between 5000 years ago and about 3500 years ago roughly so this is the third class of migrations
and the driving force is man's mastery our force and metallurgy that allowed certain modern
human population groups to expand into areas that were already populated and dominate them
so that's the third class of migrations that shaped world demography the fourth class of
migrations that shaped world demography happened to not in every history but in historic times
where there are records and our immediate forefathers will will have bond the brunt of it in some
ways and these are colonial migrations as you can imagine which the global force that is driving it
minds mastery over the seas which allowed populations in europe to travel all over the world
move into areas that are already well populated and dominate them and change the demography
demography of the americas completely changed so did that of australia and some other parts of
the world so these are the four classes of migrations the out of africa migrations the farming
related migrations the the bronze age horse and metallurgy related to migrations and the colonial
migrations that shaped a large part of the world's demography so now that comes the question
so if that's what uh what you need to understand to understand a good part of the world's
demographic how does that apply to our population indian population how can we understand it
the rst thing to understand is that the indian population indian democracy was left mostly
una ected by the colonial migration unlike in the europe or in australia because the number of
people who came to india uh us colonialists was too small compared to the existing population of
india and said that they left with a little mark on our demography they may have left a cultural
mark but they left but their mark on indian demography is not much so to understand india's
demography we need to understand the other three classes of migrations the out of africa
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 migrations the farming related migrations and the central asian bronze age migrations uh that that
changed the demographic across a large part of eurasia so that's what we will turn to of this the
rst which is the um the out of africa migrations as we said it had happened the the out of africa
migration itself happened around 70 000 years ago so by when would they have reached india the
best guess that we can have is that they would have probably reached india around 65 000 years
ago why is that uh because we have been we have um uh archaeological evidence of fossils and
tools left behind by modern humans uh in australia and southeast asia in australia by around 59
000 years ago in southeast asia by at least 63 000 years ago and they would have and these
people who these those regions would have passed through the pass through india uh in all
likelihood so the the so so it is reasonable to assume that they were in india by around 65 000
years ago what my book calls the rst indians so that's when the story of the modern humans in
india roughly begin 65 000 years ago we have a date now did what did they come into did they
come into a land which was uh empty as far as they are concerned there's no immediate
competition no they came into a land which was already pretty well occupied by other homo
species how do we know this we know this from the tremendous extent of stone tools that have
been left behind by other homo species the oldest stone tools that we have uh in india is dated
back to 1.5 million years ago one point that's from a place called in tamil nadu near chennai 1.5
million years ago modern humans arose only three hundred roughly around three hundred
thousand years ago that's the earliest that we can nd the the fossil of a modern human so what
you're saying is that india was already populated by other homo species almost ve times as long
as uh modern humans have been in existence so the when the rst modern humans arrived they
came into a place that is already obviously occupied by by other homo species so most
archaeologists believe that they may not have immediately occupied the whole of india because
the common assumption that modern humans are somehow very superior to other homo species
it's not correct let's just concede most my archaeologists cannot nd signi cant distinctions
between the kind of tools that were made by the homo species by members of other other homo
species and modern humans and many of them had either as large a brain as us or even larger
than us so it is it is considered to think that the modern humans had a huge advantage to begin
with over other homo speeches so it is likely that the modern humans who arrived in india stayed
out of the regions that the other homo species were in strongly in strong presence which is
essentially peninsular india that's what we what we can guess from the uh from the profusion of
stone tools that are available from the uh deccan region as well as the the peninsula region so it is
likely that the modern humans moved across the sub-himalayan range and some of their
descendants moved across to southeast asia australia and all of those regions it's also likely that
another group took a coastal route and came down all the way down the south staying out of the
central part of the peninsula india and then going up the eastern coast and all the way across to
the east asia and all other regions so this is the story of the rst indians how long would it have
taken them to have uh mastery over the subcontinent uh we did not have a clear idea exactly
when but we do know that the other homo species died out they go up went extinct as they went
extinct in other parts of the world as well uh whenever uh modern humans uh in some cases even
before modern humans arrived so but with the best best uh understanding that we can have is
that around 35 000 years ago we could guess from the profusion of of a new kind of tools that
had been invented by the modern humans which the others had which is microlithic tools which
are which are stone tools which are a few centimeters long which can be hafted onto bone or
stone and be used as spears arrows etc we can see a profusion of that we can see from the
genetic track record the population of modern humans expanding around 35 000 years ago from
a multiplicity of evidences we can guess that around 35 000 years ago modern humans were in
control or in dominance of the entire subcontinent so that's the the rst indian story and we often
ask ourselves where can we nd the the the descendants of the rst indians where do we need to
go do we need to go to the andamans do we need to go somewhere else where can we nd them
how many are they the answer is actually quite simple you have to look into the mirror or stand up
and look around because 50 this is something we did not know 50 to 65 percent of the ancestry
of most most population groups in india today come from the rst indians uh so that's that's not
something that we knew earlier that's what something that we know now and so it is right in the
sense that if you go to the demands and some a few population groups there you might nd who
have not mixed with later migrations that happened but uh but but the point is that the signi cant
portion of the ancestry of the rst indians are still is the foundational ancestry is or what i call in
my book the base of the indian demographic pizza is made of the rst indians who came here 65
000 years ago so that's the rst uh portion of the demography that makes us what we are this and
that's also what makes us distinct you will not nd the rst indian ancestry anywhere else outside
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 of south asia you will nd it commonly across south asia not just in india but india in my book i
use india in the old sense of the term which covers all of south asia not just the republic of india
so when you say the the rst indian ancestry that is that's that's unique to all of south asia and
you will not see it outside of the region that's what makes us south asia unique and di erent the
the base of the south asian demographic pizza the second migration as we discussed second
class of migrations the agriculture-related migrations there are two of them that impacted india
right one uh from northwestern india and one from east asia and we will discuss there were two
agricultural related migrations that changed that had a major impact on indian demography the
rst let's talk about northwestern india we know the earliest evidence of agriculture in india comes
from a place called mahakar in the balochistan province of today is pakistan and in the 80s it was
excavated and we have found the earliest evidence of uh of of farming that goes back to uh up to
7000 bce that's about almost 9 000 years ago so and we are what we can say and that over the
thousands of years you can see in the archaeological regard the beginnings of agriculture in
maharaga expanding and expanding over into the whole region of northwestern india in dossin
then the gujarats into in into the whole regions and and that's the agricultural revolution that was
parked that happened in the northwestern region starting from 7000 6000 bce and that over a
period of time leads on to the higher up in civilization it's the agricultural revolution which happens
and over thousands of years it leads on to the harappan civilization which in this mature form
lasted for 700 years between uh 2600 bce and 1900 bce so the question so who were these
people genetics now has the answer and the answer is the people who drove the agricultural
revolution in northwestern india and built the hierophant civilization are a mixture are a mixture of
the rst indians and the population related to the rst farmers of iran from the zagros region
zagros region uh is on the eastern border sagros mountain region is on the eastern borders of the
mesopotamian or the civilization so it's a population related to the early uh farmers who could
have been in india from around uh uh 12 000 bce or 10 000 bce so it is the mixture between these
two populations that created technical revolution in northwestern india and as we have seen when
agricultural revolution happens there is you know it expands it's expanded all over uh
northwestern india a very large area and as we we often don't realize that when it grew into the
harappan civilization it was the largest civilization in the world both by area and by population it's
as big as both the muslim predominantly egyptian civilizations put together the civilization uh
ended around 1900 bc ended meaning started declining because of a long drought that a ected
other civilizations as well and then uh which will come to later also then the people the
hierophants moved out from uh they you know not everybody but signi cant they were signi cant
outward movement of the hierarchans who moved into both into eastwards into north india and
southwards into south india so but we will come to that again

as we study as we go into the other migrations so i said there were two agriculture related
migrations one is from the west and one is from the east the eastern migration from east asia
happened as a result of china and there were two streams of migration that resulted from the
chinese transition into agriculture and one of those migrations took the island route and a ected
many of the islands in that part of the world and one took the land route and the lion fruit one is
what what what a ected us it came through uh southeast asia and they spread both agriculture
uh and a language called austroasiatic languages and and the last uh tale of that migration east
india and it would have reached here around uh 2000 bce or late or a little later according to the
latest genetic evidence uh from southeast asia so that's the uh australasiatic that's the story of
australia we just had the migration from east asia that had a signi cant role in the formation of the
indian population uh so that's the third migration uh the fourth and the last major migration i say
the last major migration because from genetic evidence we know today that after the fourth one
which we are going to discuss even though there were many migrations or invasions that
happened later the huns the sagas the arabs the persians you can go on none of them really left
had a very major impact on indian demography because the by then the population of india was
also the last major uh migration to have a major impact and shape indian demography was the
fourth one which was from the central asian step region uh who moved in uh into south asia
sometime between 2000 bce and 1500 bce that's a that's a period of about 500 years and these
are people who call themselves idea and and spoke indo-european languages and this is also the
arrival of indo-european rank wages into india between around 2000 bce and 1500 bce until now
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 uh the the the the the period of the migration is was earlier during earlier genetic research had
suggested that the period was between 2000 bc and 1000 bce now we know that that be that the
period of that migration was shorter and was between 2000 bc and 1500 bc why is that because
we now now know that the source regions from where the migration came that region today
known as kazakhstan and they were signi cantly impacted from later migrations after 1500 bce
from east asia and if there were migrations from the kazakhstan region to south asia after 1500 we
should see those east asian genetic signatures in signi cant manner in india as well which we do
not see we see so the migrations that happened we now based on the latest understanding is
between 2000 bce and 1 500 bce now when they came in so this so by around uh 1500 bce we
can say that all the four major components of indian demography are in right the rst indians are
in the west asians are in the east asians are in and so are these central asians and then what
happens over the next uh is if the period between 2000 bce uh to 1000 uh bce or even 1 500 bc
you could say that the 2000 year period between that would have been the most tumultuous most
eventful period in the history of india is the period that made us what we are and why is that think
of all that happened around 100 1900 bc the higher up and civilization largest in the world most
impressive uh which had survived for 700 years starts falling apart and people start moving in
search of new lives around the same time comes new migration from eastern india bringing new
languages and perhaps new practices or new forms of agriculture and plants as well and then
comes another migration around the same time from from central asia uh very powerful migrants
who have mastered the art of uh host writing and metallurgy and who are dominant in the
northern part of india who changed a language shift in northern india from pre-indian languages to
indo-ireland languages and the pre-iron languages of the harappa continued to survive in
southern india developing into later day the reading languages of tamil telugu canada there were a
whole lot of them which are spread not only in south india but in pockets in central india and in
northern and western india as well so this is the this is a period of major churn a major formulation
and this is this is the period when all the components are in and genetic says this is important
genetic says during this period india saw the kind of uh genetic mixing that we can see today from
the genetic record of of indians kind of mixing that had never been seen before or later the period
between 2000 bce and the beginning of the common era a period of about 2000 years because
the di erent population groups came together they mix and it has left a mark on almost every
population group so normal today no matter whether which population group you take you would
nd no matter how remote a region you would nd it is mixed because this is the mixing that
happened so then why do we keep saying 2000 years what happened after that that's also
surprising it says the new genetic evidence says around 100 100 ce that's almost that's about 1
900 years ago or almost 2 000 years ago the mixing came to a stop why is that because the
genetic evidence suggests that around that time the practice of endogamisation or the practice of
people marrying within their own communities which we know is the distinguishing mark of the
caste system this is counterintuitive right because it's easy for anybody to imagine a situation
where people were not mixing with each other for a very long time and nally deciding hey this
doesn't make sense let's start mixing it's more counterintuitive imagine a situation where di erent
di erent population groups had come together had mixed to a large extent and much later you
decide hey let's let's let's let's start in rogami how did this happen and it also goes against the
general understanding that the caste system was co-terminus with the arrival of the idea now we
know that that's not about terminus it happened much later so so we do not have we only we can
only say based on the evidence that we have we can only say today when did the caste system
fall into place with some degree of certainty uh when you say 100 ce you should not take that as
absolute 100 ce it's it it has to be a range because it's a system that that takes place across the
across a large region so what explains so we did not we can say with some degree of certainty
when it happened but to clearly say why exactly it happened how did it happen we will need more
research but my book does go into some pointers on how to start thinking about it the way to
start thinking about it uh is that now we know that the beginning of of it you have to see it as a
political development around 100 ce rather than as a scriptural development it's not uh it's not
something that is given in the scriptures even though people used to often quote a verse from the
veda from the 10th mandala which talked about di erent varnas coming from di erent parts you
know from the white shares from the thighs etc but we now know today that that's not a correct
interpretation because it's most most experts or would agree that that that part of the that
singular uh verse was probably inserted much later to give justi cation to a caste system that was
erasing much later because we also know that many of the rishis the old rishis they were born of
what would of of mothers who would later be considered lower caste according to the hierarchy
so it is it's it it we have multiple evidence to suggest that the early array in the early periods the
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 full- edged caste system was not in existence but that it's a much later development how did that
happen uh my book goes into some detail but it would be too uh time consuming to go into this
but i think the answers the clues lie in the fact that we have to ask what happened to empires
then who was falling who was rising and and what were the di erent systems that were in place
clues lie in the fact that the common assumption that all incoming indo-european language
speakers or people who call themselves a idea where of similar mind and similar mindset is
probably uh wrong because we ourselves know from the from the old from the from the vedas
that there were signi cant ghts between di erent groups of people who called themselves idea
so the idea that they were they are all of similar approaches or ideologies as regards mixing or as
regards language use is probably wrong and it's quite likely that there are signi cant di erences
between di erent communities of indo-european indo ideal language speakers who came to india
within this period because we are talking about a large period it's almost 500 years and that we
can see evidence of that di erences in opinion and in terms of social structures in the uh in the
literature of the of the period because we can we know that the uh you know there is a there is a
question that patanjali asks which is the land of the idea and he answers it himself and he says it
is below the himalayas above india in the west it's where the saraswati disappears and in the east
it's at the cut where the kalaka forest states which is generally regarded as the con uence of the
ganga and the yemen so the areas to the east of the con uence of ganga and germany are not
ideo bharta they are male 2 so which is which gives an idea but you should remember that at this
period the eastern parts are also uh it's it's it's it's indo-aryan uh areas in the sense of people who
who live there uh who they they speak in dividing languages they call themselves idea but in the
mind of the ayurveda those period those regions are not ideal why is that it has to be because of
very di ering social practices so these regions to the east which are called magadha is also the
regions which saw the emergence of of new idea uh new religions new uh of jainism of buddhism
of the rise of the rst uh rst real empire of the maurya empire who were also patrons of jainism
buddhism aji vegasm so you are talking about two two powerful two regions that have very
di erent approaches to social life how how society should be organized and how uh how
conservative or not conservative you ought to be and you have to when you say a political
development happened around 100 around 100 ce or around that period you have to see as one
of those approaches to life and how to order society came to dominate over the other one so
that's one way to start thinking about it but we do need more uh ideas on uh we do need more
research to come at to arrive at more de nite conclusions on how uh it happened rather than
when it happened when it happened we have a much clearer idea now the so what does all of this
mean for us uh how does it change how should it change the way we see ourselves and and
others around us i think all these or most of these ndings are very signi cant uh impact over time
on on on all of those or all those questions the way we sell see ourselves one of those things for
example is that you know the rest of the population until now used to think of the tribals as people
who are very di erent from them what we now know is that that that's not correct if the rest of the
population has any close relatives in the world right survivors they have no closer relatives in the
world because we share the ancestry of the rst indians so no matter where in the caste hierarchy
you stand no matter what language you speak no matter which region you inhabit no matter
where you are if a south asian you cut you you we carry we share the ancestry of the rst indians
it was signi cant that's the base on pizza so this changes out the way that we understand
ourselves and people around us uh but at the same there are also other things that that come one
of the striking things that come up from the genetic research is the consequence of the cost
system uh that has now been on for to almost 2000 years two things are interesting one is that the
cast system fell into place much after much after the mixing had already taken place because the
the the mixing had already taken place to a very large extent by uh when the car system falls in
place so uh so that's uh that's an important part but since then the the the the serious practice of
endogamy has also made signi cant impact for example a genetic study found that the genetic
di erence between people in a single indian village in a single same indian village is to two is two
to three times higher uh than the di erence between north europeans and south europeans see
distance makes a di erence right because there is less intermingling between them so when there
is less distance when you're talking about a village the di erences should be much much lower
but in india it's not like that in the same village there's it's the di erence of genetic di erences are
much larger than the di erence between north indians and south indians so that's the kind of
impact that the caste system has had in terms of creating di erences between people which
would have had its impact and its cost in in many ways because society's progress when people
in a local area can act together to to to build things to create things uh you know to build value all
of those things the caste system from the evidence that we have seems to have cut at the root of
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 those ability for communities to act together so summing up what we have heard so far this is one
way to look at and understand the indian population structure four prehistoric migrations that
provided the moving parts or basic components a two thousand year period of mixing that
ensured that that almost all population groups in the country are a combination of these four
components in di erent proportions uh i'm sure the east eastern indians would have more of the
institutional industry the northern and western indians would have more of the west asia and
central asian ancestry the rst indians will have the south indians will have all the rst indian
ancestry but all population troops are mixtures in di ering proportions so and then the 2000 year
period of genetic segregation or indo-coming that has created a large number of small
populations so this is this is uh this is one way of understanding it as i've said there's also another
gurative method to understand this the metaphor of the indian demographic pizza where the
base is the ancestry of the rst indians the descendants of the original out of africa migrants who
reached here 65 000 years ago uh then the source on top of this comes the source which are the
harappans why this why is this so because when their civilization declined because of a long
drought the higher weapons moved as we said from the northwest to north india as well as in
south india thus becoming the ancestors of today's north indians as well as south indians this is
new right so the question of how are we related to the hierarchans is the same for all indians they
are our ancestors whether you are a northington or a south indian the hierophants are our
ancestors and what they created are you know so that's uh in so in many ways the harappans can
be seen as the cultural blue that holds indians together because when they moved all over india
the hierophants took with them many of the cultural practices and belief systems that they had
perfected in the crucible of the arab and civilization and these have now become integrated into
the lives and belief systems of indians everywhere so the questions that we are started with the
way indians build their houses around courtyards it comes from the harappan civilization the fact
that most indians consider the people tree sacred it comes from the higher open civilization the
similarities between some of our kitchen utensils it comes on the way they build their kitchen
utensils in the harappan civilization it goes on there are many seals in the hierarchy civilization that
show people going before a people or the sacred g tree with the deity inside in the north the
language of the hierophants shifted from proto-dravidian to indo-european or individual languages
after the arrival of the central asian pastoralists but in the south their language continued to
ourish and went on to develop as we said into various uh languages of the davidian family on top
of the sauce so there's the base there's the sauce on top of the source is the cheese the idea who
arrived in the subcontinent after the decline after the decline of the higher principle station they
are present more in the north than in the south but they are spread across the country and have
made a major impact on indian civilization and culture are shown by the fact that two-thirds of
indians today speak a language brought by the area the way the european language is spread
across the world is is very revealing as i said the towards the the easternmost extent you can see
where indo-european languages are spoken in eurasia would be uh would be iceland and where is
the limit in the east it's the indian subcontinent it is to the to the east of bangladesh you will not
nd any large community speaking into european languages so this is the spread of the central
asian migration that spread into european languages across the world on top of the sauce and the
cheese come other toppings which may not have made a major impact on our demography but
have certainly contributed to our culture also these are not spread uniformly across the continent
and more visible in some regions than others so that's about as much as we can say about the
way indian population is structured and distributed based on current ndings but there are also
apart from this understanding we also know that though science is giving us a much clearer
understanding of uh human prehistory around the world not just in south asia as we discussed
around the world these ndings are often not palatable to political ideologies that derive their
strength from some form of ethnic or religious identity because i'd like to believe that their nations
are pure and not mixed so but why is this so why does history become politics the best answer to
that question is actually a quote from the well-known historian british historian ej hopes bomb
who said historians at nationalism what poppy growers in pakistan are to heroin addicts we
supply the essential raw material for the market in other words history is often a raw material out
of which contenting versions of nationalism are spawned and the and that's why there is there is
there is a certain reluctance to accept the facts that as science has brought out but the fact is the
new understanding of indian prehistory is essential to understanding india as it is multiple
migrations are what explain india's language landscape for example with its four major language
families the adam and eve and the oncon which belong to the rst indians the dravidian
languages which are descendants of the language were spoken by the hierophants who mixed
with devastation migrants the hierarchies were a mix of the rst indians and the west asian
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 migrants austroasia they can debit a burman language is brought by migrants from east asia and
indo-european language brought by step pastors who arrived here over 3500 years ago if you
look at eating habits another thing that we mentioned when we began which are the source of
much political con ict today they are di erent across the subcontinent and these di erences can
only be explained by the help of genetics northern and western indians for example many of them
carry a genetic mutation that allows them to consume milk as adults you should know that not
every the majority of the populations of the world cannot cannot consume milk as adults it's it's a
genetic mutation that allows humans uh to consume milk as adults because uh most most
animals do not have that ability because they do not keep cattle so in contrast sudan and eastern
indians who do not have the chewing mutation and therefore lacto what what's what's medically
called lactose resistant tend to eat more more more meat and sh and consume far less milk and
milk products in other words because of the di erence in the distribution of the gene uh that that
that has to do with the lactose resistance.

there is a di erence in the way that people consume animal protein people who can consume
milk consume more of the milk and milk products and others consume less of the milk and milk
products but more of meat and sh these cultural patterns are also re ected in many other ways
so where do these ndings take us next and what implications do you do they hold for us the
good thing is that the the new ndings provide a sound and robust space for indian society get
get rid of the divisions and antagonisms that have held it back for example it's not clear that the
single largest ancestry of all population groups in india is that of the rst indians no matter where
as we said no matter when the caste hierarchy they stand no no matter what language they speak
all indian population groups share this unique ancestry of rst indians we also now know that the
caste system is neither divinely nor genetically ordained and that it has but the result of political
development that took place around 2 000 years ago and we know that the people who created
the hierarchy and civilization are the ancestors of all indians in the north as well as in the south in
many ways therefore the new ndings provide the foundation for indians to build a more cohesive
society that is less divided by caste and more respectful of di erences but at the same time the
ndings also sound a cautionary message which is that india has created a common and durable
civilization out of the di erent population groups that streamed into it over the distant past and
that holding it together requires a certain sensitivity towards the acceptance of di erences and
preferences any other way of managing india would be very unindian prone to mishaps and
doomed failure and unity in diversity you could say is not a cliche it's merely an accurate
description of our reality we are all indians and we are all migraines and we are all mixed thank
you that was fabulous uh tony in one hour i have learned much more than i have learned in
several days thank you thank you so very much and i'm sure um the audience large audience
which is listening to you uh is equally enjoying and enlightened there are a bunch of questions
that have come in i'll start with uh three questions which are interlinked but yeah you want to
address them together and then we'll carry on with other questions yeah my rst question which
i'm reading from those who have posted it is this we were told that the muslims are the heirs of
abdul ghasni and all those who came from um the arab world and they are not a part of our indian
uh milieu uh how do you respond to that yeah this is as i said it repeated genetic studies these are
the four main components of indian population we have heard when we study history we do read
about many other migrations and invasions that have happened in the historic period uh the huns
i mean it goes on from from from the early uh [Music] two thousand years ago to the honest the
sarcas all of them but the fact is that when you look at their impact on a large scale on the indian
demography you nd they're not they're not large most of the indian population is the result you
are these are the four migrations that explain it and i think to understand this you have to realize
what you have to realize is the size of the indian population it's not easy to change it yeah we are
pretty large by by when you compare it to any in ows that happen uh when you look at small
communities you may see that yeah this small community there has a large ancestry from this or
or that but when you look at it as as the south asian region you do not nd it and i think to
remember this because this is quite stunning which i forgot to mention in the talk earlier is that
genetics tells us that by around 20 000 years ago 20 000 years ago india was the center of the
modern human population this is where the most of the modern human population was so
imagine that so when we today say india has a very large population is one of the or will soon
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 become the largest power place in the country in the world uh you should realize that we have
this is a long track record we are merely carrying a tracker car that has been as low as 20 000
years ago why is that because this region has been very hospitable not just to modern humans
like us but also to um you know other homo species as we as we uh as we heard so so that's one
of the reasons why we do not we can con dently say that these other migrations that happen they
do not leave a large enough mark on the indian demography and some of those migrations did
leave a mark on our culture more than they did on our demography so you are saying muslims are
no di erent from us is it absolutely yes yes same truth i mean even when there have been genetic
studies done on particular communities uh such as the you know which we know in historic times
have come from uh from iran or from elsewhere or from the middle east there has been it hasn't
found that they are all mixed very hard with the existing uh population so so that's the story the
story is that there would have been uh additional migrations that was as bad as the the word that i
use is toppings that i'm sure there are 100 other topics that have added to the pizza but when you
look at the pizza in its totality this is what it is and other migrations or invasions of people who
came in did not change our demography in its totality uh anywhere near as much as the four large
migration states the pedro analogy is fabulous thank you uh but on the same lines uh there is one
more question here but uh if you are saying that all of us are from the same micro or migratory
products yes are we now dispelling the controversy in the theory of aryan migration and aryan
migration means migration of all the religious migration and you think it's a common feature and
what's your stand on that uh see the one of the four migrations that we talked about the iron
migration is is is one of them right is the last one is the step migration uh is is the uh are the
migrations that brought into irene languages to india indo-european languages to india uh that is
the idea migration that we now know happened between 2000 bce and uh 1500 bce the the so
the migration that it happened is a is it is is it's that is uh supported again and again by the latest
genetic research the fact that we have to also understand is that signi cant mixing has happened
so people often do not uh take this into account as i said today it is di cult to nd it's di cult to
nd [Music] any population group that is not mixed all population groups are mixed you might nd
one or two populate minor population groups which may have only you know not all of the uh
which may not have the step migration ancestry but otherwise or it's widespread in the uh in the
country so so i have answered the question migration is there but i think we have to understand
along with it that there has also been signi cant mixing not only of step migrations but also of all
the other migrations that happened these are not these are not separate genetically speaking
these are not separate communities so the popular understanding of north indians being aryans
and south indians being dravidians how far that gets validated uh as i said we have to distinguish
between um are essentially linguistic terms the fact is that we do have four di erent language
families that are spoken by people right so very di erent languages that are spoken by people
there are indo-european or individual languages that are spoken by people and these are di erent
groups of people now if you look there genetic composition is a di erent thing altogether and
these are so that is one thing to to understand the as i said all population groups are mixtures
there could be di erences in composition as in some regions would have more of uh this
particular ancestry and some regions would have less of this particular ancestry and more of or
something else but all all uh parts of uh of our populations all population groups are mixtures it
did uh yeah does that answer the question yeah thank you very much very much there's a
question which speaks on the literary traditions uh then do you then you say based on your work
and research did ramayana and mahabharata did actually happen and who wrote the vedas and
is it written by people if you're part of the arya migratory groups or is it much later is it an
indigenous work uh see the okay i will start there let's start with the earliest the vedas vedas
would have been uh composed orally much much much much much before they were ever
written down in paper so they were in oral composition and orally transmitted the earliest versions
of sanskrit we have that is the vedic sanskrit already have within them the the impact of pre-iron
languages what do you mean by that these are uh let's it's a retro ex i mean just to give one
example is there's something called retro ex consonants these are sounds like etc which no other
indo-european language in the world has to the extent that sanskrit has so how did sanskrit
acquire the the retro ex consonants because retro ex consonants are a very major feature of all
other languages in india including the dravidian so in if when you say in the earliest version of
sanskrit we can already see that there are retro ex consonants unlike other indo-european
languages the the the conclusion is that it already re ects the mixing or the uh integration with the
people who were already there so the vedas are the creation of uh of of the idea who brought
indo-european languages to india but we ought to also have to understand that the earliest
society itself would happen during the period that we talk about in terms of the 2000 year period
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 and including the earliest periods would have been periods of signi cant cultural uh mixing and
this is something that that's often lost out in the cultural wars or in the arguments and in the
heated debates that whenever migrations happen what results is it is a new culture it is not some
but something something new comes in and displaces everything what what what happens in
reality in which my book goes into in much detail uh especially by talking about the experience in
in what happened in europe when the yamana moved into europe there's a new culture that is
formed coded by a culture which is not which is not the air you will not nd it in central europe but
you will not nd it in uh in europe before the amnio arrived either so the impact of the amnio
migration into europe was a new culture that brings both together so this is the way that we have
to understand uh and the the the languages that came in with the idea with the migration from the
step and the culture that followed would have elements of both what we have brought uh came
along with the migration that's also elements from the uh from the culture that existed already so
and that's that this is supported by the genetic nding that there was signi cant mixing in the
early 2000 years so and the so i think that's the way to understand it so the vedas are sanskrit
and it's an indo-european language or individual language creation as for the historical uh that is
di cult i think that is di cult to i i think that's a di cult question to answer because all of those
many of these things would have some element we would have begun us oral composition we
should have been put together at a much later stage and when they began it would have had it is
likely that they would have had some [Music] incidents that were at the root of it so what what all
forms it went through in successive iterations and in successive transmissions is di cult to say uh
yeah so yeah i don't know whether i answered the question but you were talking of genetic
di erences you said within a village when genetic analysis is done you will nd much greater
variation between in within a village than with between regions in europe yes why is that so a what
does it actually mean to its uh in terms of its real impact on society and if the genetic di erences
are so much how would one [Music] population of one area for example india as you de ne it and
another uh region in the world how would their they behave di erently or live di erently what does
what how does the genetic composition dictate human existence um i mean one of the things that
i will start for example what are called regressive diseases or because you are there's in with
signi cant you know mixing within the communities over time leads to recessive uh genes that
causes genet and this is a fact for example this is a problem with the jewish community which
they deal with in fact they have systems to see whether when people marry each other whether
they actually their systems just make sure that they check their genes to see that they are you
know not related to problems but we can there are genetic studies that have been done that in
many communities in india today you have similar issues because there has been endogamy that
has been practiced for a very long time so it's one of the one of the facts but the fact that i was
talking to in the in the book is that the reason why genetic di erences are over a period of when
people mix freely with each other and the genetic di erences between groups reduce because
everything is more shared right when people do not mix with each other and they then and they
practice endogamy very strictly and many people many of some of the studies that went into this
issue were pretty surprised at the extent to which some communities have maintained uh so
strongly over such a long period of time and so so that's what creates the di erences you're not
allowing mixing to happen and the in the talk i was talking about was that that is actually suggests
less collaboration between di erent communities living in the same geographical space right it's
because it because you want to keep di erent from this and that and that and i must as i said
some of this requires in the book i say that there should actually be a study on what is the cost of
this lack of of dividing a geographically together community into di erent communities that look
after their own interests that's not normal in a in a in a society when which wouldn't have been
normal before it fell into place either because in a normal society a lot of what happens is people
in their locality acting together on common interest so that's what builds wealth that's what builds
things for the future but as i said some of these things will need more more research we only have
found a new understanding of when this fell in place and how long it has been going on and that it
has it has no genetic sanction because people are already mixed and it has no uh scriptural
sanction because that's a later interpolation i i had probably not explained what i was about to
ask you let's take indians and chinese we have di erent genetic compositions we have di erent
ways in which we have evolved over uh centuries are we therefore very di erent people who live
di erently think di erently behave di erently or is there a unifying underlying denominator uh so
genetically i think it would i mean genetic di erences as we are talking about is i don't think that
um the fact is 99. more than 99.9 of the genomes of modern humans across the world today are
the same so the di erences that even look large to us in the law in the larger scheme of things
they are not uh they're not clear the the the what i was talking about was the cultural
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 consequences not not the genetic genetic record of these di erences suggest a cultural practice
which is a programming and i was suggesting that cultural practice interferes i think with the
possibility of common action and interferes with progress is my understanding i could be wrong
so i was more talking about the cultural consequences of uh uh of of of a practice as far as the
genetic consequences are concerned the one thing that we can speci cally say i is is recessive
genes and their impact on on community on on health that which we know from studies that are
done in other communities which which which which have the same approach it has been it has
been common and that i i do think there are currently some uh e orts being done to address this
issue by taking lessons by by looking at the way that the users are doing dealing with this i'm not
sure whether you want to answer this question in your short time available but i still have to tell
you that there's a question here which says that uh sir raj vedham of swarajya group says the data
which the most peer review papers that you have cited on population genetics are fabricated and
you have chosen data selectively and there are fundamental aws in the methods that are
adopted and how do you counter the argument the the standard way for all science all disciplines
of science uh is to is is that if anybody has a problem with the methodology is to is to raise a
methodological issue in a peer-reviewed paper have it discussed and and take it forward right
also that that's the way that you discuss a scienti c problem for someone who is not in the
discipline to come out and say hey i think this was all done in that that way what is the process for
that uh the process i think i think you have to follow the scienti c process of uh of discussion of
debate that's and these are studies that are done uh i've done this one of the studies that that
mentioned there's 178 scientists from around the world 170 scientists and not only just
geneticists this includes some of the most in in multiple disciplines multiple disciplines from
anthropology from archaeology and as i said it's 162 117 scientists well-known scientists uh who
are doing in their own elds and if there's one person who comes and says no no these guys
don't know anything i know and this is i mean what's the i nd that odd and if you really think so
he should write a paper get it published in a peer-reviewed paper and uh and create a string
about it how close are we to crack the harappan indus languages which have not yet been
deciphered do you have any insight on that uh i think it is highly i mean the amount of e ort that
has gone into trying to decipher it is uh not funny that they've thrown everything at it over over the
last you know nearly 100 years and i think the chances of it being deciphered is is poor unless we
strike lucky and come across some seal somewhere that you know that has a translation or that
has two languages written in it and one language which we know and one is the higher e cient
script and therefore we can gure out what it is and which is how you know what you call the um
the raw set of stone this is how many some of the scripts were disappeared actually because you
could nd uh links between two di erent uh seals or or or scripts and then try and decipher it so
we might strike lucky because the harappans were very trade oriented people they had strong
trade links with uh and mesopotamia in fact they used to even interfere in the international warfare
of of the of the mesopotamians so it is quite it's quite i mean we may not have come across it yet
but uh but it is possible that we might come across uh such uh the erosion like uh discovery in
which case um then pretty soon we will have we will know what the script is we'll be able to read
otherwise i think it is it's probably di cult which means that they did not speak sanskrit because
uh that language is pictorial this is verbal in another sense so sanskrit came much later after the
arab civilization can you say that yeah yeah that's correct and the thing is that after the harappan
civilization declined you do not see your writing no for such a long time so writing itself
disappeared uh so you do not see in the earliest transcript literature there is no mention of writing
there nothing the writing was not part of the culture the culture that is re ected in the earliest
vedic literature and the culture that is re ected in the hierarchy archaeology are completely
di erent the harappan is a trade order it's a trade-oriented very urban civilization while the uh the
early vedic literature is a very pastoral society it's not a it's not a it's it's not an urban civilization in
fact we have to wait after i mean this was one of the things that started me on this project entirely
uh you know apart from there were three questions that started me on this who were the
harappans how are they related to us where did they disappear and most importantly why did it
take more than a thousand years more than a thousand years after the harappan civilization
declined for us to see cities rising up in india again what i mean it's unbelievable right if you have
been to the you know the most stunning hyderabad site in india which is dholavira it's quite
stunning it was a really moving experience for me it's right in my book also and uh to see the
scale of the ambition and you know many of the harappan sites where they did not arbitrarily rise
they were planned they were planned sites they planned cities and the scale of the ambition and
the way that these were built and that these were built um you know in thousand six hundred four
thousand six hundred years ago it's unbelievable and then you realize that to see something of
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 similar scale and ambition to something see something of similar scale and ambition how long do
you have to wait you had to wait for the mauryans to arrive for the maori to arrive right it's almost
you know nearly somewhere between one thousand one thousand ve hundred years later so the
second urbanization of uh of india after the hierarchies declined happen you know happens more
than a thousand years later what explains this so you have to have an answer the only the answer
that we have to some extent we nd it from europe also as the yamnaya moved into europe as the
pastoralists moved into europe they were moving into areas that were already you know farmers
settled farmers and settlements they may not have they may not have had you know a very large
civilization like the the the the higher representation but they were they had settlements which are
very very impressive and very what you see when the when the people when the central asian
steppe pastor is moving there are the settlements slowly disappearing because you see it isn't
you you do not we often think when you say pastoralists we think of them as herders or somehow
um you know some of beneath the uh the culture of cities and things like that but it is not like that
this is a very powerful moving mobile uh it's it's a new lifestyle it's a new mobile lifestyle it's far
more appealing and there in fact the compared to the mobility and the power of the pastoralist the
the settled farmers would be sitting ducks in the sitting ducks because they have they're tied they
can't go anywhere and in fact the pastoralists would be making use of them to er they would take
what they want and would be and they might even have relationships which are which show the
power di erence between the two so you have to see that there is a there is a new movement
there is a new way of life that moved in and that changes uh lifestyle itself across a large
spectrum so the only way to understand why did it take so long for civilization to rise up again for
cities to rise up again and as i said cities rise up again in the east in the region called great
neighbor magatha not in ayurveda the biggest cities the empire rises in magadha so to so to
understand why it took such a long time for cities to come up again and the new empire strikes is
to understand that there was a lifestyle change and that lifestyle change you can see when you
you can feel for yourself when you go to a higher up inside and then you when you read the
earliest sanskrit literature there's there's no connection between the two these are two di erent
words this is um tony someone is pestering me that we should get back to the issue of caste what
is it triggered you have said that it was a political development what exactly does it mean by that
and what made it so entrenched in this country uh it was a politic it was the politic what do you
mean when you say political development i mean that was the other sense you would say that all
of religion itself is di cult to distinguish religion from politics in a way increasingly so but uh but
what i mean when i say it's a political development is is is it they write the the the caste system
arose it's likely that the roses apart us as the result of a power play between di erent factions who
are di erent ideas of how society ought to be organized and what you need to realize which we
often do not is that the uh the vision of a caste structure of the vision of society it's a pretty
cohesive and uh highly attractive one in many ways you're saying this is you should organize
society somebody has to apply mind to how a society ought to be organized this is where power
is this is where your material power is this is where spiritual power is this is where you know and if
you look at the epics which re ect this ideology in its entirety it's a highly uplifting experience see
the way the king the idea of a king or an emperor is portrayed it's an ethical gure so you have to
you have to see that in the in the framework and in the time and the period that we are looking at
it was it was a convincing structure which which a lot of people in power across the across across
the country right uh every king every king who whether he is in ireland over time or or in in the
dravidian land everybody bought into it so it was a so you have to see it as a as a powerful new
vision of how a society ought to be organized i think which was not there before that around in the
beginning centuries of the common era that arose the precise political play that led to this
denominator i don't think it's yet that's that's a story that is it to be told but the only thing i have
done is that i have done to point it out uh the way to start thinking about it one of the things
minutes when you discuss this cast thing that people say is that what was in buddha already
talking you know against caste uh that was many centuries before common era so what do you
say people do not often realize that you do not see a full edge it in the regions that go to s there
is us yet a full- edged uh attack on a caste system what you see are they are is questioning of the
idea uh that the brahmin is special because of the birth where buddha questions it and he
questions it directly and says and so that's so the idea of a priestly class that has uh hereditary
and is to be regarded that that that is that is very much alive that is very much in the air that is
that is and that is being fought against in the area of magatha but that is a long way o from a full-
edged caste system that requires full- edged vision of who what who is the king and what does
he do what is it supposed to do so and the other parts of the society so by the time of buddha the
the caste system in its entirety would have been at least in the area that he was in that is the most
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 of the areas that we are in which is eastern india would not have been developed yet but as i keep
saying i usually i refuse to go into too much into this area because these are this all all of these
things should be considered as uh preliminary comments because we need we really need to
have much more research on what exactly happened uh taking into account the new genetic
understanding the uh the question that was also learned rst time is clari ed to you tony normally
we nish by 11 30 11 45 but there are 100 more questions and we are talking for of a period of
ve thousand years and i think we can go we can go on like this the question i have now is that uh
what would have triggered the need for endogamy around 100 ce uh if endogamy ended around
that time has it has the system of caste been rmed up around that time is the regulator written
after that i mean there are some conjectures we can do like that now no you should by the time of
what we are talking about common era and all have written have been composed long long
before long before okay even though the missions have been composed we are talking even after
the buddha has come and gone buddhism is still alive uh so we are we are really into the the this
period that we're talking about is uh after the maui empire has gone uh it's around or a couple of
centuries here or there before the gupta empire you know is that it's this is also the period that we
see land grants being given to to praise or to brahmins around the country on a large scale so so
that i think is a is also an indication of the fact that there is a new way and a new relationship and
a new vision that is that is that is being accepted by society so the way that i have put is that you
have to see it as a new vision a new way of ordinary ordering society which has fully worked out
unlike unlike during the previous periods when there would have elements of it that were around
but what do you mean by elements elements would mean it is possible that the priestly function
or the people who are performing the priestly function were already using very strongly using
endogamy why is that because please always need a special reasons for to tell others that you
are special right that's why priests of all really why do they wear special clothes because to say
that you're special that your special powers why do they wear when they make di erently try to
make themselves di erent in many ways whether you're a christian whoever you are priest
because it is a matter of people having to trust that they are they have some special powers
always have to have some reason for the others to consider them so so it won't be surprising if uh
if endogamy as a practice to say that this is a special and particular power that we have because
unlike you guys we have we have had uh practiced in rogami for a very long period of time it
might have been so it would be it would have been as practice limited to certain communities not
others but what you see is that after the period of time all of this begins to fall into place as a well
worked out system of how society should be governed and then it gets accepted across the
board over a period of time so this development is what has to be understood and it has to be
seen as a gradual level over a period of time rather than our normal understanding of of caste
being always fully worked out no it's something that evolved uh in a contingent manner
depending upon the political process that worked out so all of this requires more understanding i
think yeah i've always speculated tony that vegetarianism was also a form of elitism that we are
di erent we don't eat all that rubbish we are superior therefore to the rest of them who eat would
you subscribe to that yes we already know this right because you know the buddhists and the
jainists were one of the rst probably to say that uh yeah you know i mean rst to de nitely say
that they should wait for the sacri cing animals you shouldn't sacri ce animals then it slowly
expands but for example says you shouldn't cause animals to be killed for you to eat but it
doesn't say don't eat uh no meat as long as it was not caused to be killed by you meaning it was
already killed or then it's okay but we also know that when there was a schism but there was a
there was a division between the ranks and somebody was trying to where did the opposition
come from the opposition david came from by suggesting that buddha was not being was being
too lenient he was being too luxury loving and you should be stopping all of it so you would know
that the mechanics of this is always like this somebody say something reasonable and if and the
politics says that if you want to upstage him the one who is challenging will him say that he is
being actually very relaxed you need to be 10 times more you know hard on this point to be really
pure and to be really insanely so what you call in in evolution there's a concept of uh arms race
you know it's the arms i don't know whether so this is the kind of arms race but arms race over
what should i say righteousness or sickness you must know bring your attention speci cally
writes in many play into at least three or four places against uh killing animals yes one place in an
earlier edit he says that you can eat a peacock yes obviously ashoka but there was a strong
moment against uh killing animals at around that time that's correct yeah yeah then there's just
one more question which is a much larger question uh is that going back to the genetic thing uh
yeah someone is asking the question if really the if 99.99 it takes so little to make that make that
di erence because we do not see how much of see i've thought about this i think we also do not
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 see i think we get what should i say too fascinated by visible di erences and we do not realize
how much of similarity goes underneath there must be a better way to answer that question but i
cannot think of one point zero one percent makes all the di erence that's right yeah yeah i i once
went to the village of malana yes in the himalayas yeah and it has a it's a village of only one kind
of people who do not uh marry outside that village and yes they claim to be the descendants of
uh alexander the great okay uh where is it where is if you knew about it i would have wanted to
learn a little more from you but i'll send you i've heard of this but i do not i haven't looked at it
closely yeah the only question that uh [Music] i've been sent second time to ask is the gentleman
says to consider the analogy that you made of pizza parsees are the pineapple uh in the topping
of the pizza of indian ethnicity highly opinionated but likely nevertheless though the parsi
introduction to the indian society is fairly recent compared to various other ethnicities like muslims
armenians etc yet there is much more acceptance given to them before mentioned why is that so
pineapples had a better our favorite vegetables come on our fruit sorry no no i i did not get this
he's saying he's talking about he's talking about parsley and he's saying more acceptance for
others than for pastors more acceptance of parties than others oh more acceptance of pastors
than others yeah of course um since they have come so recently would they have a di erent uh
genetic composition than what indians would have from this i have read once a long time ago i
did read one study one or two studies have been done on on passes in india i think and all of
them all of them do show that there is a ancestry um that's clearly visible from that shows that
they are they came from there but all of that also shows a signi cant mixing so [Music] then see a
lot of the [Music] early historical migrations that happened even when there were religious
di erences where in in in in gujarat for example the early traders muslim traders who came their
track record in gujarat and the and the relationships that they had with the powers they're not that
di erent from that of the passes both yet and this would have been the same for the trade related
uh muslims who came in kerala for example or the syrians who came as christians or all the jews
who were there so most of the trade related migrations and uh you know or things that happened
seems to have been of of the kind that were not uh antagonistic and you can see that in even in
southeast asia i think so that might be one way of looking at it and the other way of looking at it is
that you know today today we are in a period when there is uh uh where there is signi cant what
should i say a battle happening of uh or the idea of nation and nationhood which is not something
that we had you know 100 years 100 years earlier and so this this exacerbates di erences
because then it becomes in the same way as we were talking about caste system arising as a
result of politics here those di erences because you're having a political ght over uh de nitions
of what is what what's the nation i mean to just to put it clearly we have grown up with uh most of
us uh brought up with an idea of nation that was stewed but that that that came out of the
freedom struggle that brought all communities all all religions everybody on a community ight
against the colonialist colonists and that was the idea that it was an all-inclusive nationalism that
was forced out of the freedom struggle and that was what was dominant all across and in this
version of nationalism you would see the taj mahal would have been a common heritage without a
doubt gandhi would be a national hero who would who would even think that he is not a national
hero because he got all engines together to ght the british but there was also an alternative
version of nationalism which was also common also has been around with us for nearly the same
long but was never dominant but has now become dominant and this version of nationalism
which is not inclusive which has to by de nition is exclusive and says only one part of the citizens
from really the citizens the rest are really either appendages or not really necessary and in this
version of nationalism the taj mahal is not a common heritage it's uh it's it's a humiliating reminder
of the fact that there were others who came here at some point of time etc etc gandhi is not a he's
not a hero he's a villain in fact the guy who killed him he's the hero so these are two completely
opposed uh versions of what a nature our nation is and what our nationhood is and the fact that
we also don't forget is that this is not a novel de nition this alternative thing which de nition of
natural which has come become dominant it's not a normal de nition it is purely a borrower from
europe in the last century because in europe in the last century where is the idea took root for a
nation to be a nation you had to have one religion one race one language everything one and
that's what makes nation because then that is what makes one nation di erent from the other
nation and if you don't have that you are really not a nation this was an idea that took root which
led to horror upon horror of di erent kinds of nations the expelling people of others from their
countries it went to two world wars of the kind that we had never seen it led to the rise of his
muslim hitler so much so the carnage was so big of this false idea of what a nation should be that
the world the rest of the world turned away from it nationalism became a became a dirty word
nobody would say he's a nationalist uh and people and that was how liberal ideas took hold that a
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 nation is not you you don't have to be one one race one language one religion one culture to be a
nation that's how liberal democracies took over that's that's what we have happened because it
was uh you really through but what we have is that we have borrowed those ideas which were
thrown away by the rest of the world and which has which has been seeding seeding and seeding
now has become dominant so it is when you have that kind of con ict of uh di erences or but
de ning what our nation or nationhood should be then di erences then you look back and say
you look back and see antagonisms where there would have been none earlier did you look back
and see antagonisms where there were there was just normal life going on as you should uh
because you need that antagonism in the past to to create that antagonism in the present so
[Music] you
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