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SCIENCE : GENE AND CASTE
The Confusion Deepens
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UNBOTTLING
THE GENE |
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THE GENETIC piece that makes a man, the Y chromosome, is
transferred from father to son. So it reveals paternal lineage.
OUR ANCESTRAL mothers' secrets are revealed by a mother's
genetic gift to her child-mitochondrial DNA (or MTDNA).
GENETIC SIGNATURES which identify racial groups were studied
in Y chromosome and MTDNA of Indians, Europeans and Asians.
UPPER CASTES were found to be paternally closer to Europeans.
Lower castes were closer to Asians.
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Every answer leads
to more questions. The Manu Smriti talks of caste as based on profession.
Those who followed a particular vocation were classified as belonging
to the corresponding caste. Bamshad holds that "caste may have been
based on profession, but a particular profession was predominantly one
race". Of course, race itself is not so easily defined when one is
speaking of entire continents. Asian, African and European are geographical
terms that do not indicate homogeneous populations, points out Dilip Chakravarti,
a Cambridge University archaeologist. India alone now has people of all
racial types, from the mongoloids of North-east India to the tall, fair,
sharp-featured people who are at the centre of the current controversy.
"There's no question of the genetic diversity of the Indian population",
says sociologist Andre Beteille, "but it is quite another thing to
be divided into races."
Geneticists contest that. "There are discernible
genomic signatures that are much more prevalent in groups such as caucasoids
and mongoloids. These ancient signatures characterise these groups in
the genomic sense and continue to be retained in spite of thousands of
years of evolution," says Majumdar. So if someone has a caucasoid
ancestor, the gene experts can find out.
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"The
observed trend among castes matches expectations."
Partha Majumdar, Anthropologist
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That's for individuals. But a few Brahmins having
caucasoid ancestors would hardly mean all of them do. Which is one more
argument against the study. All the blood samples for the different castes
were from a specific geographic area in Andhra Pradesh, and the sample
size in some castes was as small as 10. "If more samples are studied,
the results could be different," points out Shrivastava. Caste itself
is also highly elastic. B.N. Chattopadhyaya, professor of ancient history
at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, cites the example of the Boya tribe
of Andhra Pradesh. They became warriors and claimed the status of Kshatriyas.
Those among them who performed religious rituals even became Brahmins.
In the 1960s anthropologists Karve and Malhotra compared four Brahmin
sub-castes with four peasant sub-castes. They found that the variation
within the Brahmin sub-castes was greater than the variations between
Brahmin and peasant castes. Caste mobility happens even today, though
post-Mandal the traffic is bidirectional.
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"The
Rig Veda was of an oral genre-how can it be dated?"
Nayanjot Lahiri, Historian
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So what's the bottom line? "Unlike other
detective stories, with genetic evidence we can't say 'the butler did
it'," points out anthropologist Shiv Vishwanathan, "but we shouldn't
be afraid of truth or data. Evidence shrinks to shape with time."
Perhaps it will. Right now time itself is a bone of contention. The study
doesn't mention when the Europeans came to India. "Where does the
genetic data show it was during the Vedic Age?" asks Gupte.
A hundred years ago, Risley's nose-based theory
of the European origin of caste had met its match in B.N. Dutta's nose-based
theory of caste. Dutta, Swami Vivekananda's brother, had then disproved
the theory that higher castes have "European" noses merely by
making more measurements. Times have changed, and tools too. Now it's
genetic tests, and it may take many more of these to set to rest the controversy
that has returned after a hundred years of quietitude.
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