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SCIENCE : GENE AND CASTE
White India
Controversy erupts over a study that says upper
caste Indians are of European descent
By Supriya Bezbaruah with Samrat Choudhury
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SON OF THE SOIL: Lower castes
are more Asian, says the study |
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100000 BC: The First Immigrants
India has long been a home for a stream of migrants. Among the first
were Stone Age hunters from Africa. 10000 BC
10000 BC: Builders of the Indus
Civilisation The next lot, possibly from the Mediterranean, spoke
Dravidian dialects and built the rich Indus Civilisation.
3000 BC Fair Invaders: The Indo-Aryan
Migrants
They arrived with horses and chariots from Europe. They spoke
Sanskrit. Their culture shaped India.
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VASUDEVA KUTMBAKAM: Brahmins
and Kshatriyas may be of the caucasoid family |
India, 1901. The
greatest ever exercise in human nose-counting had just been undertaken.
Her Majesty's Indian subjects were being counted, sifted and sorted. The
Census of India was on. Census commissioner Sir Herbert Risley noticed
that upper caste Hindus were fair and had sharp noses. Since these are
among the distinguishing features of the "white man"-caucasoids-he
figured there may be a relationship between the two. To make this scientific,
he took a few measurements. The methodology: measure nose length, divide
by nose breadth, and call the number arrived at the "nasal index".
The conclusion, of course, was that upper caste Hindus are distant relatives
of Englishmen who have been out in the sun a few centuries.
Much water has flowed down the Thames and Ganga
since. Adolf Hitler has made infamous the theory of Aryan supremacy. Computers
and genetic engineering have been invented. Accepted wisdom on the question
of an Aryan invasion of India has veered from history book standard to
disbelief after archaeologists found evidence that the Aryans did not
ride into India, subjugate the native population and set themselves up
at the top of the caste heirarchy.
And now, this happens.
Eighteen scientists from India and the US led
by human geneticist Michael Bamshad of the University of Utah compared
genetic signatures of modern-day Indians of various castes with those
of today's Europeans and east Asians. Using genetic markers, they traced
back the paternal lineage of the Indians through the Y-chromosome. Maternal
lineage was traced through mitochondrial DNA (see box). The results of
the study, published in an American journal called Genome Research, conclude
that the upper castes are genetically closer to Europeans and the lower
castes to Asians. Also, that we have a common maternal ancestry but different
paternal stock.
"This paper is clearly a landmark,"
says Partha Pratim Majumdar, head of anthropology and human genetics at
the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata. "It uses a large battery
of genomic markers to show that the observed trend among different castes
matches expectations (about caste differences)." Dr Peter Forster
of The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge,
says that "the conclusion that higher castes have greater genetic
relatedness to west Eurasians is well founded on the basis of their data".
So then: are Brahmins and Kshatriyas really Europeans
inside? They may be, but the final verdict on that is far from out yet.
The paper has unleashed the academic equivalent of fistfights among historians
and anthropologists across the country. Controversies once buried have
returned from the grave and theories are being tossed about on all sides.
How the European genes got here at all is among the most interesting points
of the debate. The paper infers that caste Hindus are descendants of Aryans
to explain the genetic data. The counter is quick. "Dravidian and
Aryan are linguistic, not racial terms. There is no specific Aryan race,"
says social anthropologist V.N. Shrivastava. But the Aryan invasion theory
was based, among other things, on linguistic grounds: the similarity between
Sanskrit and European languages was taken as evidence of people from Europe
having migrated to India. The Rig Veda is the oldest known Sanskrit text.
It was dated to around 2000 b.c. which is about when the Indus Valley
Civilisation is supposed to have ended. "But it was an oral genre-how
can it be dated?" asks Nayanjot Lahiri, reader in history at Delhi
University. Moreover there was no mention in the Rig Veda of migration
or any other homeland, which would have been natural if a great journey
had been undertaken or a war won. The people of Israel still talk with
familiarity of their journey to the "Promised Land" 2,500 years
ago.
The Aryan invasion theory takes its hardest
blow from the skeletons found at Indus sites. They show the same racial
mix as any population of South Asia. There was no evidence of the carnage
that would have accompanied an invasion. "Of the skeletons found,
only three showed any signs of injury," says S.P. Gupte of the Archaeological
Society of India. "And even those had wounds that had healed-the
people did not die of those wounds."
Yet there is the evidence. "Their conclusions
are based on large sample sizes and on three independently inherited types
of genetic loci-paternally inherited Y-chromosomes, maternally inherited
MTDNA, and biparentally inherited Alu insertions," says Forster.
Translation: the research team did their homework. Which means they are
probably right about the European genes being there. "Our results
clearly show that there are differences between upper and lower castes,
and the upper castes are closer to Europeans," says B. Bhaskara Rao,
an Andhra University anthropologist and one of the authors of the paper.
And the fact that Sanskrit is close to European languages holds.
So, the plot thickens. If there was no Aryan
invasion like the archaeologists say, and our upper castes are genetically
closer to Europeans like the anthropologists say, what could possibly
have happened?
In their paper, Bamshad and colleagues conclude
that it was a migration, mainly of males, that brought the west Eurasians
here, not invasion. The white men didn't come in plundering and pillaging.
They just drifted in and, it must follow, became sufficiently popular
to begin cohabiting with the local women here. That there was migration
to India is not disputed. "India was never an ethnic vacuum,"
says Shrivastava. "Palaeolithic hunters arrived in the Old Stone
Age, there was a stream of migrants-builders of the Indus Valley-around
10,000 b.c., and the Indo-Aryans arrived around 3,000 b.c. ." And
caste began? "There are more than 100 theories on how caste originated,
but one can be sure it didn't emerge because Aryans subjugated the native
population." So how did they then end up at the top of the caste
hierarchy? And what, in any case, is caste?
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