The origins of Indians

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

by Kiran Kumbhar  BIO

Kolkata, 2001. Photo by Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos

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.

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Jotirao 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........

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