WHY THE FINDINGS ARE CONTROVERSIAL

Since coming to power, the Hindutva lobby has accelerated its project of rewriting Indian history to backdate the accepted chronology of the most ancient Hindu texts (the Vedas) and project the Indus Valley Civilisation as ‘Vedic’

DNA samples from the 4,500-year-old Rakhigarhi skeletons belonging to the Indus Valley Civilisation undermine such projections

The skeleton’s DNA showed that the people of ancient Rakhigarhi were a mix of ‘Ancient Ancestral South Indian’ and ‘Iranian Agriculturalist’ populations

What the Rakhigarhi DNA lacked was the steppeland genes that are strongly associated with high-caste North Indian populations today

This comes as further evidence that a postIndus population of migrants from the steppe were associated with the beginnings of Vedic Hinduism and suggesting a rupture rather than a cultural continuum

The Rakhigarhi findings reinforce the conclusions of experts that date the earliest Vedas to c. 1500 BC—a period after the collapse of Indus Valley cities and associated with a significant migration into India of a population from the steppelands to the northwest

In other words, the people and culture of the Indus Valley Civilisation were distinct from the population apparently associated with the beginnings of Vedic (Hindu) civilisation

The close match of Rakhigarhi DNA with South Indian tribal populations also suggests that the Indus valley culture spoke an early Dravidian language. While this may be fodder for South Indian political parties, it would be much harder to digest for the popular North Indian Hindutva narrative of ancient national harmony

more telling given that the Rakhigarhi data presented in this paper are derived primarily from the genetic material of ‘I4411’, a male individual—R1a is a mutation seen only in samples of the male Y chromosome.

The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axewielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today. Rai points out that the fact that haplogroup R1a did not show up in the Rakhigarhi sample could be attributed to the limited amount of genetic data retrieved. Or it could be because it’s just not there. “We do not have much coverage of the Y chromosome regions [of the genome],” Rai says, revealing that they had retrieved more data from the mitochondrial and autosomal DNA in their sample (mitochondrial DNA reflects maternal descent and autosomal tests reveal genetic information inherited from both parents). However, he was emphatic in acknowledging that while “a mass movement of Central Asians happened and significantly changed the South Asian genetic make-up”, the inhabitants of ancient Rakhigarhi “do not have any affinity with the Central Asians”. In other words, while the citizens of the Indus Valley Civilisation had none of this ancestry, you, dear average Indian reader, owe 17.5 per cent of your male lineage to people from the Steppe. It’s worth noting that this genetic footprint is of an entirely more impressive order than the relatively inconsequential biological legacy of Islamic or European colonial invasions that often preoccupy the political imagination in India.

So much for what we have now learned about who our 4,500-year-old ancestor ‘I4411’ was not. What about who he was? The short answer, says Rai, is that I4411 “has more affinity with South Indian tribal populations”. Notably, the Irula in the Nilgiri highlands. A draft of the paper argues that this individual could be modelled as part of a clade [a group sharing descent from a common ancestor] with the Irula but not with groups with higher proportions of West Eurasian related ancestry such as Punjabis, and goes on to suggest that the inhabitants of Rakhigarhi probably spoke an early Dravidian language. However, the results also show clear evidence of mixing with another population from outside the subcontinent, labelled ‘Iranian agriculturalist’. This is a population that had been identified in earlier studies of ancient DNA and is consistent with the hypothesis that some agricultural technologies were introduced to the subcontinent through contact with the ‘fertile crescent’ in West Asia, widely regarded as one of the birthplaces of Eurasian agriculture in the 5th-8th millennium BC.

For an older generation of Indians, the Rakhigarhi results may sound like a reboot of half-remembered schoolbooks: ‘Dravidian’ Harappans followed by Vedic horsemen from the Steppe. And for anyone who has been following more recent developments in population genetics too, the latest findings will sound familiar. Meanwhile, in the popular press, coverage of recent discoveries in the archaeology or genetics of Harappan India has been obsessively and distractingly focused on the ‘Aryan invasion theory’. What gives? And why does it matter? The answer has to do with the fact that recent years have been a very busy time in ancient Indian history. And modern Indian politics. Skulduggery

In the months preceding the news of the Rakhigarhi findings, anticipation was high, and fuelled by a series of related research papers and their journalistic glosses, an amusing if acrimonious debate erupted in the social media and the blogosphere. Shinde for his part was given to dropping broad hints that the Rakhigarhi results would point to a ‘continuity’ between the population of the ancient town and its present-day inhabitants (predominantly Jats, a population marked by pronounced R1a Steppe ancestry).

Perhaps it should be no surprise, in these fractious times, that fake news would be deployed as a weapon in the civil war that has consumed ancient Indian history. In January this year, a Hindi newspaper carried an article purportedly based on an interview with Rai, asserting that the Rakhigarhi DNA was, in fact, a close match for North Indian Brahmins and that the findings would establish that India was the ‘native place’ of the Indo-European language family.

“Utter crud!” was the reaction of David Wesolowski,