GENE STUDY UNDERMINES HINDU NATIONALISTS’ ARYAN RACE THEORY
▶ International collaboration finds India’s population was not indigenous but formed by migration
A study of South Asian genetics casts deep doubt on the Hindu nationalist theory that an ancient Aryan population, indigenous to India, gave birth to Hinduism and its Sanskrit language.
The paper, The Genomic Formation of South and Central
Asia, posted on the online archive bioRxiv, suggests that India was home to several mixed populations.
It says that pastoralists who moved to India from Central Asia were likely to have brought with them an Indo-European language closely related to Sanskrit.
The world’s Indo-European languages, thought to spring from a common ancestral tongue, include Sanskrit, Hindi, English, French, Greek, Russian and dozens of other modern languages.
The paper, posted on Saturday, summarises a decade of research and collaboration by 92 international scientists and scholars, including geneticists, archaeologists, linguists, molecular biologists and anthropologists.
The research included work on DNA samples from 612 human remains, from 6200BC to AD1, as well as samples from 1,789 people across 246 ethnographic groups in Central and South Asia.
The collaboration was essential, said Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist at Deccan College in Pune and one of the study’s authors.
“We’ve been excavating a number of sites, but by ourselves we weren’t able to learn about the movement of people. So we started collaborating with genetic scientists,” Mr Shinde told The National.
He works on digs in northwest India, where the Indus Valley civilisation flourished from about 3000BC to 1400BC.
While the digs yielded many artefacts, they gave up few details about where the people who built the civilisation had come from, what language they spoke and what happened to them.
Leading Hindu nationalists, who have claimed that the subcontinent has always been inhabited by Hindus, insisted that the Indus Valley civilisation gave birth to Sanskrit and to the Vedas, the principal Hindu texts.
MS Golwalkar, a nationalist ideologue who died in 1973, wrote that Hindus had been “in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for 8,000 or even 10,000 years” before Muslim and Christian invaders arrived.
Golwalkar also argued that an indigenous Aryan race left India and spread to Europe, taking Sanskrit along.
His hypothesis, championed by others in the Hindu right, “was always an oddball theory”, said Tony Joseph, who is working on a book about South Asian genetic research.
“They couldn’t explain how all these languages were linked so they said that they all came out of India,” Joseph said.
As long as discussions were restricted to linguistics, he said, this was at least an arguable theory. But the advance of genetics over the past five years, particularly in testing ancient samples, contradicted Golwalkar’s hypothesis.
The new study is the most definitive yet, Joseph said.
By following the spread of DNA markers, the paper notes that the Indus Valley civilisation was probably a mixture of two populations – the descendants of agriculturalists who arrived around or before 4700BC from what is now Iran, and descendants of hunter-gatherers thought to be the original human beings in South Asia.
One theory speculates that the hunter-gatherers came from a line of people who migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago. But nothing has been proven, Mr Shinde said.
“Where did these first people come from? We just don’t know yet,” he said.
There is still no conclusive proof as to what language the Indus Valley civilisation spoke. But with the pastoralists moving out of the Central Asian steppes, towards Europe but also into South Asia, we have more knowledge, Joseph said.
“There is a striking correlation between where the steppe pastoralists went and where Indo-European languages spread.”
The new study finds that the pastoralists began streaming into South Asia about 2000BC. They mixed with the Indus Valley populations, resulting in the genetic pool from which hundreds of millions of Indians draw their lineage.
Groups from the Indus Valley populations also moved farther south in India, mixing not with the pastoralists but with indigenous South Asian hunter-gatherer communities.
“We show that Indus Periphery-related people [of the Indus Valley civilisation] are the single most important source of ancestry in South Asia,” the study’s authors wrote.
“There was trade, there was movement – a lot of mixing of populations happened,” Mr Shinde said.
Some westward movement did occur as well, the study says, having found small but significant signs of hunter-gatherer DNA west of the Indus Valley.
Joseph, a journalist who has written extensively on genetic research into ancient Indian populations, said he often been criticised by Hindu nationalists.
“That is to be expected,” he said. “These are hot-button topics. I am curious now to see how they respond to this study.”
There was trade, there was movement – a lot of mixing of populations happened VASANT SHINDE Deccan College, Pune