The origins of Indians: Genetic studies support what historians have argued for decades: ancient India was a place of migration and mixture

[Razi Raziuddin]

https://aeon.co/essays/ancient-india-was-shaped-by-waves-of-migration-and-mixing

Kolkata, 2001. Photo by Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos

The origins of Indians

Genetic studies support what historians have argued for decades: ancient India was a place of migration and mixture

Kiran Kumbhar

is a historian, writer, and public health expert. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, US.

South Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, or ‘India’ in its pre-nation-state meaning, boasts a remarkable diversity in ethnicities, cultures and languages. For more than two centuries, scholars and amateurs from around the world have attempted to explore it and make sense of it – though, unsurprisingly, these attempts have had a raucous ride. The more recent genetic studies (including with ancient DNA) on early population movements into and across South Asia – which have captured the attention of scholars and the public for more than a decade now – are only the latest to witness the impassioned contests that are a familiar rite of passage for any new idea in the South Asian history discourse. Constant scholarly activity as well as relentless public commentary have meant that, apart from the genuinely fascinating history of the peopling of India itself, the history of how that history has been imagined, framed and written at different times by different people over the past 200 years is almost equally enthralling.

In Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), the American geneticist David Reich wrote that: ‘We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians.’ Indeed, when genetic studies knocked open the doors of ancient Indian history, the vast scholarly room inside was already bustling with numerous methodologies, hypotheses, interpretations, assertions and controversies.

Therefore, to better understand the novel ideas that the pipette-wielding ‘barbarians’ brought to the history of India’s peopling – as well as how novel they are in the first place – we first need to acquaint ourselves with the scholars and concepts there before them.

otirao Phule, a social reformer from the city of Pune in western India, published a book in 1873 in the Marathi language titled Gulamgiri (‘Slavery’). In it he wrote, among other things, about the history of the caste system and of the lives of the Shudras and the Ati-Shudras, ie, the so-called low-caste and the Dalit (formerly ‘untouchable’) people respectively. Phule himself was from a low-caste community. In a sociopolitical context characterised by the oppressive dominance of Brahmans (also spelled ‘Brahmins’) and of the caste system enforced by them, Phule believed that Shudras and Ati-Shudras – forming the majority of people in India – would experience no improvements in their living conditions unless they were emancipated from the ‘trammels of bondage which the Brahmins have woven round them like the coils of a serpent.’

Women grinding paint, Kolkata, India; daguerreotype (c1845) by an unknown photographer. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

Like all successful leaders, Phule’s organising efforts included an ingenious invocation of history. He argued that the ancestors of Brahmans had arrived in India long ago from foreign lands, and had fought and conquered its indigenous peoples, these latter being the ancestors of contemporary low-caste groups. He wrote:

Recent researches have demonstrated [that] probably more than 3,000 years ago, the Aryan progenitors of the present Brahmin Race descended upon the plains of Hindoostan … The cruelties which the European settler practised on the American Indians on their first settlement in the new world, had certainly their parallel in India on the advent of the Aryans and their subjugation of the aborigines.

In the Indian context, the ‘Arya’ or the ‘Aryans’ were the people of the Vedic society: ie, the communities that composed the religious scriptures known as the Vedas. The oldest Veda is the Rgveda (also spelled ‘Rig Veda’), which was written in an early form of Sanskrit called Vedic Sanskrit, and in its hymns the term arya is used by the poets to refer to themselves as community members. A similar word was also the self-designation used by the people who wrote the Zoroastrian religious books in the Avestan language, and who lived in what is now Iran (the name ‘Iran’ derives from a derivative of the term arya).

He claimed that ‘the same blood was running’ in the veins of an English soldier ‘as in the veins of the dark Bengalese’

So when Phule wrote about the ‘Aryan progenitors’ of Brahmans, he was referring to these early, Vedic people. His activist genius lay in juxtaposing the lived experiences of casteism and Brahman domination with the then-recently published historical writings on the origins of India’s people and caste groups. Ever since the late-1700s, when some East India Company officers realised that Indian languages, especially Sanskrit, were similar in significant ways to many European languages, British (and other European) intellectuals couldn’t stop talking and writing about their explorations and explanations of these linguistic affinities. This late-1700s and early 1800s Indomania (to use the historian Thomas Trautmann’s 1997 description) facilitated the flourishing of such disciplines as comparative philology and historical linguistics, gave us some of the most vociferously debated concepts of modern times – ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Aryan’ – and ended up making the German-British philologist Friedrich Max Müller a common fixture in bookshops across India.

Friedrich Max-Müller (1883) by Alexander Bassano. Courtesy the National Portrait Gallery, London

Max Müller gave a series of influential public lectures in 1861-63 on the ‘science of language’. Today, these lectures serve as a helpful guide to the methodologies and argumentation styles of 19th-century philologists. For example, after providing an exhaustive list of similarities – in grammatical forms, sound changes, words and their meanings – between Sanskrit and Avestan (which he called ‘Zend’), Max Müller told his audience that the ancestors of the Indian and Persian people ‘lived together for some time after they had left the original home of the whole Aryan race’ (he later regretted his conflation of language with race). More significantly:

before the ancestors of the Indians and Persians started for the south, and the leaders of the Greek, Roman, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic colonies marched towards the shores of Europe, there was a small clan of Aryans, settled probably on the highest elevation of Central Asia, speaking a language, not yet Sanskrit or Greek or German, but containing the dialectic germs of all …

Trautmann says that Max Müller became the ‘most ardent and consistent advocate of the idea of the brotherhood of the Aryan peoples, more especially of the kinship between Indians and Europeans.’ One of his most provocative claims, the likes of which made him notorious among Europeans desiring no such kinship between themselves and supposedly inferior Indians, was that ‘the same blood was running’ in the veins of an English soldier ‘as in the veins of the dark Bengalese’.

About the same time that Max Müller – living in England and having never visited India – was choosing to emphasise such claims of common Aryan ancestry for Europeans and Indians, his contemporary Phule – living in India and daily experiencing the effects of its caste system – chose to focus on the ‘foreign’ ancestry of the Brahmans. In Phule’s interpretation, the same blood might have run, if at all, in the veins only of Europeans and upper-caste Indians. Both were relying on prevalent scholarly arguments of the time, and cited the research of mostly European scholars who had painstakingly analysed (and overanalysed) linguistic minutiae. While the claim of a common descent of Indians and Europeans relied primarily on the larger affinities between the languages of those peoples, the claim of the subjugation of India’s indigenous communities by incoming Aryans was based mostly on a single literary source: the Rgveda.

The Rgvedic hymns, apart from describing the beliefs and lives of the aryas or Aryans, also have much to say about other people in the region (northwest South Asia). These people, which the hymns call ‘Dasyu’ or ‘Dasa’, were the Aryans’ ‘cultural other’ and ‘rivals for land, crops, and cattle’. There are descriptions of conflict and battles between the two groups: for example, an address to the god Indra that says: ‘It was you who tamed the Dasyus, and who alone vanquished their communities for the Arya.’ However, despite the fact that elsewhere in the Rgveda there are hymns in which the poets describe fellow Aryan tribes also as rivals and enemies, writers of the 19th century gave the ‘Aryans vs Dasas’ conflict an oversized significance. For instance, the Indian historian R C Dutt wrote in an 1888 book that the Vedic period ‘was one of wars and conquests against the aborigines; and the Aryan victors triumphantly boast of their conquests in their hymns.’ A few decades later, in a public lecture in 1928, the Indian historian Jadunath Sarkar discussed a similar argument about what he termed the ‘Aryan penetration’ into India, but with a reduced emphasis on militaristic interpretations: ‘It did not lead to an utter extermination of the original inhabitants of the country … A grand compromise with the non-Aryan religions and customs was forced on the conquerors by the circumstances.’

The Vedic communities left behind few physical items and permanent structures for us to study

At the start of the 20th century, there was thus in place a broad outline of the early history of the peopling of India. It was a history mainly from the vantage point of northern India, and was considered to begin with the Aryan people and the Vedic period dated to the 2nd millennium BCE. There was an awareness that different groups and tribes (who many writers termed ‘pre-historic peoples’) existed across the subcontinent even before the arrival of the Aryans, but they were generally neglected in historical accounts. There was also an understanding that, despite cultural similarities between the north Indian and south Indian people (broadly speaking), there were some major differences, particularly in language. People in the southern regions primarily spoke languages of the so-called Dravidian family (eg, Tamil and Telugu), which was entirely different from the large Indo-European family of languages that dominated northern, western and eastern India. In some accounts, it was claimed that the indigenous Indians whom the incoming Aryans first encountered in the northwest gradually moved south and became the ancestors of the latter-day Dravidian-speaking Indians.

What is striking about the 19th-century accounts of the population history of South Asia is that they were largely based on just one category of evidence, namely linguistic and philological, with an overwhelming reliance on the Vedas, especially the Rgveda, as a primary source. However, from a historical methodological perspective, the language of the Rgveda is, in Trautmann’s words, ‘archaic and its meanings are often hard to make out because of its poetic character and religious purpose’, not to mention that the Vedic communities left behind few physical items and permanent structures for us to study. To quote the concise clarity of Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton, co-authors of the 2014 translation of the Rgveda, ‘all Vedic texts leave out an enormous amount.’ Looking back, it is clear that the greatest drawback of the historical narratives of this time – almost all of which were later found to be incorrect or only partly correct – was that substantially grand claims were made despite the presence of such major methodological and interpretative challenges.

As it turned out, in the early part of the 20th century, the dependence on linguistic evidence was to be replaced by a dependence on a new category of evidence: that from archaeology.

In January 1931, in a letter from a British colonial prison in India, the anticolonial leader and intellectual Jawaharlal Nehru informed his daughter about an exciting prospect in the study of Indian history:

I have not written much [in earlier letters] about the days before the Aryans, because I do not know much about them. But it will interest you to know that within the last few years the remains of a very ancient civilisation have been discovered in India. These are in the north-west of India round about a place called Mohen-jo Daro … Imagine! all this was thousands of years ago, long before the Aryans came.

From Excavations at Harappa (1941) by Madho Sarup Vats. Courtesy Harappa

Nehru was referring to the Indus Valley Civilisation, or the Harappan Civilisation, named after the city of Harappa in present-day Pakistan where the first digs were made by archaeologists. Though scholars were aware of the Harappan ruins since at least the early 19th century, they were properly excavated and studied only in the 1920s. Based primarily on the work and insights of three Indian archaeologists, the British head of the Archaeological Survey of India made the momentous announcement in its 1923-24 report. While prior to that year in India:

no monuments of note were known to exist of an earlier date than the 3rd century BCE … we have [now] taken back our knowledge of Indian civilisation some 3,000 years earlier and have established the fact that in the 3rd millennium before Christ and even before that the peoples of the Punjab and Sind were living in well-built cities and were in possession of a relatively mature culture …

Over time, archaeologists discovered hundreds of Indus Valley sites across the northwestern, northern and western regions of the subcontinent, helping people in South Asia become aware of a significant new branch of their ancestral tree. There was excitement, but also significant challenges. If just a few ancient Sanskrit texts had elicited a dizzying array of multiple interpretations in the past, one could only imagine the potential response to thousands of material remains – bricks and weight measures and seals and necklaces and children’s toys, etc – from numerous archaeological sites. Unsurprisingly, there was a flurry of commentaries and interpretations, frequently at odds with one another. As it often happens, new knowledge, instead of facilitating easy resolutions, simply gave rise to new debates and questions. The most prominent of those questions was: how were the Indus Valley people and the Vedic people related, if at all? In fact, this question, though it might have begun its life as a routine academic exploration, would go on to become the most vociferously analysed and hotly debated enquiry about the history of the South Asian people, and continues to animate debates even today.

The discovery of the Indus Valley civilisation upended an earlier sense of certainty and complacency

In 1944 Nehru, once again in prison, was working on what would become his most famous book, The Discovery of India (1946). He wrote that the early findings and interpretations about the Indus Valley Civilisation had ‘revolutionised the conception of ancient history’, with some scholars pointing to similarities between the Harappan people and the ‘Dravidian races and culture of South India’. In his cosmopolitan imagination of the history of his people and his country – which he likened to ‘some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously’ – not only did indigenous Harappans and incoming Aryans interact with each other, ‘[w]e might say that the first great cultural synthesis and fusion took place’ between them, and from it grew ‘the basic Indian culture, which had distinctive elements of both.’

For an anticolonial political leader interested in the past primarily with an eye on the present and another on the future, Nehru’s historical interpretations were admirable, showcasing his desire to lay the foundations for a common, basal Indian identity to straddle the multiple identities favoured by most Indians. But for scholarly historians, whose primary job was to understand the past on its own terms, there were several unresolved uncertainties involved in the potential Indus Valley-Aryan encounters. While the militaristic interpretations by some influential scholars – in which ‘Aryan invaders’ were accused of wholesale destruction of Indus Valley cities and massacring the people – were quickly refuted, there was much that remained unknown, including their language. (The ‘Indus script’ remains undeciphered to this day.) Some commentators speculated that the Indus Valley people were simply Vedic people. In the 1953 edition of a popular history textbook by R C Majumdar and colleagues, we are told that, although ‘There is also a theory that the “Indus” people were Aryans … It is impossible to come to any definite conclusion on this point …’ However, the textbook acknowledged, ‘we can no longer accept the view … that Vedic civilisation is the sole foundation of all subsequent civilisations in India.’

Stamp seal and modern impression featuring a unicorn and incense burner, Indus Valley, c2600-1900 BCE. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

In other words, when after nearly 200 years of colonial domination India was nearing freedom and marching ahead with nation-building plans and activities, the discovery of the Indus Valley civilisation upended an earlier sense of certainty and complacency about the history of its people and cultures. Some, like Nehru, were excited about the new insights that the Indus Valley research was going to offer. Others, mostly ‘Hindutva’ (or Hindu supremacist, or Hindu nationalist) ideologues from upper-caste communities, were exasperatedly mulling over how to retrofit the Harappans in their already fully formed conclusions about the subcontinent’s history. The historian Romila Thapar writes that, in the inflexible, rigid imagination of Hindutva groups, the region’s millions of Muslims and Christians – who’d been in the subcontinent for centuries (with most hailing originally from low-caste communities) – were outsiders and not properly Indian; while Hindus, broadly defined, were the rightful descendants of the Vedic people who were in turn considered not migrants from outside but the subcontinent’s original inhabitants.

The content of the century-old Hindutva imagination of history indicates that it was fuelled less by a rational curiosity about the subcontinent’s past, and more by an intense hatred for Muslims and other non-Hindus. So, although it was clear to many scholars of the time, like Majumdar, that the Vedic culture was not the ‘sole foundation’ of India’s past and present, even this tentative consensus came to be mocked and attacked in the postcolonial period, with leaders like Nehru and scholars like Thapar becoming a consistent target of such attacks. Over the recent three decades, the ever-rising political power of Hindutva groups in India – largely via undemocratic means – has led to an amplification of this anti-intellectual project. It is in such a rife sociopolitical context, at the dawn of the 21st century, that scholars conducting genetic studies stepped in to offer their interpretations and arguments regarding the history of India’s peopling.

Many of the early genetic studies to deal with the South Asian past attempted to better understand the histories and movements of the subcontinent’s various tribal populations. This was in alignment with the long-standing genetic research studies of tribal communities (also known as Adivasis, roughly translated as ‘earliest residents’), even though the Adivasi people have otherwise been starkly marginalised, both in historical accounts and in the public discourse. For example, speaking during a session of the Constituent Assembly of India in December 1946, the political leader Jaipal Singh Munda, an Adivasi, did not mince his words as he described the disproportionate dominance of leaders from upper-caste groups in the Assembly and in Indian politics. To the members of the Assembly, which included Nehru, he said:

my people … have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6,000 years … It is the new-comers – most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned – it is the new-comers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastnesses.

First appearing in the 1970s, genetic studies of South Asia’s population history became common in science journals by the turn of the 21st century, with many focusing on tribal genomes. The edited collection The Indian Human Heritage (1998) was an early work to make substantial historical claims using genetic evidence, in a chapter called ‘Peopling of India’ by Madhav Gadgil and colleagues. A collaborative effort between the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and Stanford University in California, it was based on mitochondrial DNA (‘mtDNA’) analysis of 101 individuals. It dated the arrival of Homo sapiens in South Asia to about 65,000-50,000 years ago, and argued that certain tribal groups ‘may be amongst the first group of Homo sapiens to have reached India’. Another study concluded that contemporary Indian tribal people were ‘descendants of the initial [Homo sapiens] settlers’, and a 2008 study said that the ‘tribes of [the] southern and eastern region along with Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic speakers of central India are the modern representatives of earliest settlers of subcontinent.’

Today, almost all people in South Asia carry this ‘First South Asians’ ancestry in their genomes

Indeed, the past three decades have witnessed the rise of DNA – of both contemporary individuals and people from the remote past (‘ancient DNA’) – as an important category of primary sources that scholars use to explore the histories of the people of the world. However, not all genetic studies on India have come to the same or similar conclusions on even the basic aspects of population movements, alerting us to the frequently forgotten fact that, just like other historical sources – eg, hymns and archaeological finds and archival documents – DNA is prone to differing interpretations by different researchers. Nonetheless, many genetic studies, accompanied by historically, archeologically and linguistically grounded analyses, are being increasingly considered important interventions by historians of South Asia.

From these early studies and extant archaeological knowledge, we know that when anatomically modern Homo sapiens arrived first in the subcontinent about 65,000-50,000 years ago, they would have found the region already inhabited by other human species, whom we now term hominins. Over time, the hominin population declined and that of modern humans increased, so much so that ‘between approximately 45 and 20 kya[thousand years ago] most of humanity lived in Southern Asia’. (In this study, ‘Southern Asia’ included parts of Southeast Asia.) As the centuries and millennia went by, these early humans of South Asia developed art forms like ornamental ostrich eggshell beads dating 40,000 to 25,000 years ago, and exquisite rock art dating to 12,000 years ago. These hunter-gatherer people – the descendants of the earliest modern humans in the subcontinent – were labelled as ‘First Indians’ by the Indian journalist Tony Joseph in his celebrated book Early Indians (2018). In this essay I will use that label with a minor change, and call these early residents the ‘First South Asians’. Genetic scientists say that, today, almost all people in South Asia carry this ‘First South Asians’ ancestry in their genomes to varying degrees, with tribal groups possessing more of it than others.

The genetic studies that first generated significant public interest and received wide coverage in the media were those that attempted to explore the history of the caste system and of the Aryan migrations. A 2001 study by Michael Bamshad and colleagues argued that ‘the upper castes have a higher affinity to Europeans than to Asians, and the upper castes are significantly more similar to Europeans than are the lower castes.’ Soon after, Frontline – a major English-language biweekly in India – published the essay ‘The Genetics of Caste’ by R Ramachandran, which summarised the arguments of this and other related genetic studies, as well as pointing to their limitations. Other studies came to different conclusions, arguing that ‘the genetic diversity of the South Asian population predates the possible Aryan migration and does not map easily, if at all, on caste groups. In fact, the differing historical claims of these various genetic studies were quickly picked up by activists and groups of different political inclinations to influence opinion not just in India but at the United Nations in 2001 (in advocacy against caste-based discrimination) and in the United States in 2006 (to press for changes in how early Indian history was represented in California state textbooks).

A 2009 study by David Reich and colleagues – a collaborative effort between the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad and Harvard University in Massachusetts – explored similar questions as previous studies, but utilised new methods of analysis, employed greater diversity in the caste and tribal groups studied, and examined vastly greater numbers of genetic markers. A later literature review termed it a ‘seminal study’ that had conducted ‘the first genome-wide survey in South Asia … in parallel with creating a new toolkit for population genetics analyses’. Like earlier studies, it showed that upper-caste groups shared greater genetic affinity with ‘West Eurasians’ (that is, ‘Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus’, as Reich put it in his 2018 book) than did low-caste and tribal groups. The researchers coined new terms for early South Asian people who, in the abstract modelling involved in the study, were classified into two groups considered ancestral to all contemporary South Asians: Ancestral South Indians (ASI) and Ancestral North Indians (ANI).

Subsequent studies further elaborated how the ASI and ANI populations came to be formed, and how they were related to the Harappans and the Aryans. Research from 2019 led by Vagheesh M Narasimhan at Harvard found that, around 7500 BCE, people from the Zagros mountain region of present-day Iran began moving to northwest South Asia. These people practised agriculture (perhaps in addition to hunting and gathering), and they either introduced farming to the First South Asians (who by now had spread across the subcontinent), or blended their agricultural practices with the farming that the latter perhaps had already been doing. Agriculture then thrived in northern South Asia for centuries, ultimately leading to the early stages of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which was kickstarted around 3500 BCE by the descendants of this mixture of Zagros-Iranian migrants and First South Asians.

The migrants from the northwest were descendants of pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe region

When the Harappan cities went into decline after around 1900 BCE, their residents migrated eastward and southward, into regions where the First South Asians were still around. This resulted in another mixture: migrating Harappan people (who carried some Zagros-Iranian ancestry) mixing with First South Asians, giving rise to the Ancestral South Indian population. Narasimhan and colleagues have found a ‘strong correlation between ASI ancestry and present-day Dravidian languages’, while Reich and colleagues argued that the ASI people ‘may have spoken a Dravidian language before mixing with the ANI’.

From the vantage point of today, the 2000-1000 BCE time period looks extremely dynamic with regard to demographic and cultural changes in the subcontinent. The Harappans were leaving their cities and moving around, the First South Asians were mixing with the Harappans and learning new languages and agriculture-related practices and, in the middle of all this, new migrants were moving in from the east as well as the northwest. Those in the east were the bearers of the Austroasiatic language family, and mixed with the First South Asians and the Ancestral South Indians depending on local demographics. The descendants of this mixture – which include people of the Munda tribal groups like Jaipal Singh Munda – now reside primarily in eastern and central India.

The migrants coming in from the northwest were the bearers of the Indo-European language family. They were descendants of pastoralists from the Eurasian Steppe region, an ancestry that ‘matches that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe … [and hence] elegantly explains the shared distinctive features of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages.’ On their arrival in the northwest of the subcontinent, these Steppe-origin people – ie, the Aryan people of 19th-century historical narratives – encountered the Harappans, and the mixture of those two groups resulted in the formation of what is called the Ancestral North Indian population. This mixture was characterised by a ‘male bias’: as Narasimhan and colleagues put it, ‘Steppe ancestry in modern South Asians is primarily from males and disproportionately high in [upper-caste groups like] Brahmin and Bhumihar groups.’ Over time, with people continuing to move across the subcontinent for a variety of reasons, there occurred tremendous mixing between the ASI and ANI populations, a mixing that geneticists claim dwindled by about 1,900 years ago, or the turn of the 1st millennium CE(aligning well with the time window that historians attribute to when the caste system, especially caste-based endogamy, started to become codified and more sociopolitically entrenched).

It needs to be remembered that the labels of ASI and ANI were devised by geneticists in the context of abstract modelling, and that other studies have added some more categories to the ancestral population groups of modern South Asians. A less technical description of these early population movements and mixing, and of the extraordinary demographic dynamism of the 2000-1000 BCE period, would read something like this: numerous small and big instances of migrations and mixing-together of different groups, along with conflicts and battles, were taking place all over the subcontinent, and would over time, aided by several further mixtures, culminate in the current population profile of South Asia. Perhaps the most succinct description of this millennia-long process of constant internal and external migrations, invasions and mixing is found in the book The Sceptical Patriot (2014) by the Indian journalist Sidin Vadukut, who writes:

We are all, every single one of us, the outcomes of centuries of civilisational upheaval. We are part-Greek, part-Mongol, part-Persian, part-British, part-Mughal, part-French, Part-Portuguese, part-Arab, part-Turk, part-everything.

Clearly, genetic studies have important insights to offer to our understanding of history, especially in terms of providing more granular evidence for already existing scholarly arguments (eg, on the migrations of Steppe people in the 2nd millennium BCE, and on the history of caste-based endogamy). Still, let’s not forget that the methodology of these studies involves reducing whole humans into whole genomes and then into tiny bits of DNA. As a primary source for human history, genes are unlike monuments or rock inscriptions or poems, in that on their own they tell us little about culture, politics and power – the central elements of human history. There is only so much one can learn about human society and the human experience by feeding invisible bits of people’s tissues to machines in a sterile laboratory, thousands of miles and often thousands of years away from the fleshiness of their social, cultural and political contexts. There is also the potential risk of unlearning important stuff we’ve already learned, like the dangers of the pseudoscientific tendency to biologise social and cultural identity categories such as caste groups or even nationalities.

That reality will continue to be vehemently opposed by powerful Hindutva groups and political parties

In fact, without the copious extant knowledge about the human past and present from centuries of research in the humanities and the social sciences, genetic analyses would be directionless and unable to meaningfully contribute to knowledge-making, a fact broadly acknowledged by many geneticists but often not apparent to the general public. The way I see it, in the context of historical research, geneticists are not exactly ‘barbarians coming late to the study of the human past’, but simply yet another group of scholars – certainly still novices – standing on the shoulders of earlier scholars of history, and standing shoulder to shoulder with contemporary ones.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the history of the historical narratives of the peopling of India is that, even after more than two centuries of linguistic, archaeological and now genetic evidence pointing to very similar conclusions, especially regarding the reality of the 2nd-millennium BCE Aryan migrations into the subcontinent, the expression of that reality will continue to be vehemently opposed by powerful Hindutva groups and political parties. For a country with soul-crushing disparities and widespread misery, one is sometimes baffled by the disproportionate amount of time, energy and resources that many elite Indians spend on matters of antiquity. Indeed, it is important to ask what this history means, if anything, to the majority of Indians and South Asians who do not have the luxury to spend time mulling over the remote past. There’s probably no easy answer to this, but here’s a thought to get us started:

Hundreds of millions of Indians, almost all of them from low-caste and tribal communities, are so impoverished that, without government support in the form of free foodgrains, they would be at risk of starvation. At the same time, the wealth of the materially richest Indian is about $100 billion, which means that if he spent even the stately sum of $1,000 per day on food, and we start counting the days backward, he would still have an insanely vast amount of money left by the time we encounter the Harappans. In fact, he will have an insanely enormous amount left even when we reach the hunter-gatherers who were making ostrich eggshell beads, and even further back, at the time of the arrival of the very first Homo sapiens in the subcontinent some 65,000 years ago. As it turns out, India’s richest person will have completely spent all his wealth only after we reach the Middle Stone Age lives of the hominins of South Asia who left behind a huge cache of stone tools in Attirampakkam – some 275,000 years ago.

Demography and migration

Anthropology

Genetics

7 May 2026