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Home > History Writing at Risk > How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India | Tony Joseph

How ancient DNA may rewrite prehistory in India | Tony Joseph

30 December 2018

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BBC News, 30 December 2018

by Tony Joseph

New research using ancient DNA is rewriting prehistory in India - and shows that its civilisation is the result of multiple ancient migrations, writes Tony Joseph.

Who are the Indians? And where did they come from?


Hindu right-wingers believe the source of Indian civilisation are people who called themselves Aryans - a nomadic tribe of horse-riding, cattle-rearing warriors and herders who composed Hinduism’s oldest religious texts, the Vedas.

The Aryans, they argue, originated from India and then spread across large parts of Asia and Europe, helping set up the family of Indo-European languages that Europeans and Indians still speak today.

As it happens, many 19th Century European ethnographers and, of course, most famously, Adolf Hitler, also considered Aryans the master race who had conquered Europe, although the German leader considered them to be of Nordic lineage.

When scholars use the term Aryan, it refers to a group of people who spoke Indo-European languages and called themselves Aryans. And that is how I have used it in this article. It does not refer to a race, as Hitler used it or as some in the Hindu right wing use it.

Many Indian scholars have questioned the "out of India" thesis, arguing that these Indo-European language speakers - or Aryans - were possibly just one of many streams of prehistoric migrants who arrived in India after the decline of an earlier civilisation. This was the Harappan (or Indus Valley) civilisation, which thrived in what is now north-western India and Pakistan around the same time as the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.

However, Hindu right-wingers believe the Harappan civilisation was also an Aryan or Vedic civilisation.

Tensions between the two groups backing these opposing theories have only increased in the last few years, especially since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in India in 2014.

Into this long-running dispute has now stepped the relatively new discipline of population genetics, which has started using ancient DNA to figure out when people moved where.




The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world’s first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India.


Prehistoric art hints at lost Indian civilisation





To many in the Hindu right wing, these findings are unpalatable. They have been campaigning to change school curricula and remove any mention of Aryan immigration from textbooks. And on Twitter, several hugely popular right-wing "history" handles have long been attacking India’s leading historians who have defended the theory of Aryan migrations and continue to do so.


India’s junior minister for human resource development, Satyapal Singh, was recently quoted in the media as saying: "Only Vedic education can nurture our children well and make them patriots who have mental discipline."

The idea of the mixing of different population groups is also unappealing to Hindu nationalists as they put a premium on racial purity. There is also the additional issue of the migration theory putting Aryans on the same footing as latter-day Muslim conquerors of India - such as the Mughals.

These are not just theoretical debates. The ruling BJP government in Haryana state, which neighbours the Indian capital Delhi, has demanded that the Harappan civilisation be renamed the Saraswati river civilisation. Since the Saraswati is an important river that is mentioned in the earliest of the four Vedic texts, such a renaming would serve to emphasise the link between the civilisation and the Aryans.

The new study puts an end to these debates and it has thus come as a shock to the Hindu right-wing. In a tweet attacking its co-author Prof Reich, ruling party MP and former Harvard University professor Subramanian Swamy said: "There are lies, damned lies and (Harvard’s ’Third’ Reich and Co’s) statistics."

However, the real message that the new research carries is an exciting and hopeful one: that Indians have created a long-lasting civilisation from a variety of heredities and histories.

The genius of the Indian civilisation during its best periods has been inclusion, not exclusion. Unity in diversity is, indeed, the central theme of India’s genetic make-up.



The above article from the BBC is reproduced here for educational and non commercial use