Great Expectations

Meanwhile, the reality of who the IVC people were has remained a mystery. Dr Shinde knows all too well the incongruous burden of expectations that have now settled on a 4,500 year old resident (classified as ‘I4411’) of Rakhigarhi, a ramshackle village in the dusty khadar or floodplain of an almost extinguished river. Over the last decade and a half Rakhigarhi has become a staple of school textbooks, tourism pamphlets and journalism—invoked as the largest Harappan/Indus Valley site in India. In fact, since 2014 it has been regularly cited as ‘even larger than Mohenjodaro’— the legendary archaeological site in Sindh, Pakistan, first excavated in the 1920s.

Despite the element of hyperbole, excavations here which have been conducted intermittently since the late 1960s have established its significance as an extensive and enduring urban settlement with its beginnings arguably as early as the seventh millennium bce. Most importantly, the village with its seven teelas or mounds has produced enough evidence to identify it as the site of a ‘mature’ Harappan settlement of the second and third millennium bce. In other words, a town that witnessed the rise and—more than four thousand years ago—the mysterious fall, of India’s first urban civilization.

On the face of it, the single most startling revelation of the Rakhigarhi research may be what it doesn’t talk about: the complete absence of any reference to the genetic marker1 R1a1 in the ancient DNA retrieved from the site. This is significant because R1a1, often loosely called ‘the ‘Aryan gene’, is now understood to have originated in a population of bronze age pastoralists who dispersed from a homeland in the ‘Pontic steppe’ (the grasslands sprawling between the Black Sea and the Caspian, abutting Central Asia) some four thousand years ago. The genetic impact of their migrations has left a particularly strong and ‘sex-biased’, (i.e. maledriven) imprint on the populations of two geographically distant but linguistically related parts of the world: Northern India and Northern Europe. ‘We are not discussing R1a,’ said Niraj Rai, the lead genetic researcher on the Rakhigarhi DNA project. ‘R1a is not there.’ The admission came wrapped in some prevarication but was all the 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 DNA 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 cattleherding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today. Rai did point out that the fact that 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 said 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 makeup’, the inhabitants of ancient Rakhigarhi ‘do not have any affinity with the Central Asians’. In other words, while the citizens of the Indus Valley Civilization had none of this ancestry, you, dear average Indian reader, owe some 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 more recent Islamic or European colonial invasions that often preoccupy the political imagination in India.

Excerpted with permission from Which Of Us Are Aryans? Rethinking the concept of our origins, by Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese, Razib Khan, Aleph

The ‘petrous bone’ is an inelegant but useful chunk of the human skull—basically it protects your inner ear. But that’s not all it protects. In recent years, genetic scientists working to extract DNA from ancient skeletons have discovered that thanks to the extreme density of a particular region of the petrous bone (the bit shielding the cochlea), they could sometimes harvest a hundred times more DNA from it than from any other tissue in human remains.

Now this somewhat macabre innovation may well resolve one of the most heated debates about the history of India. When the dust of the petrous bones of a 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Haryana, settles, we should have the answer to a few questions that have vexed some of the best minds in history and science—and a lot of mediocre politicians along the way:

Q: Were the people of the Harappan civilization the original source of the Sanskritic language and culture of Vedic Hinduism?

A: No.

Q: Do their genes survive as a significant component in India’s current population?

A: Most definitely.

Q: Were they closer to popular perceptions of ‘Aryans’ or of ‘Dravidians’?

A: Dravidians.

Q: Were they more akin to the South Indians or North Indians of today?

A: South Indians.

All loaded questions. But a much-anticipated research paper suggesting these conclusions is likely to be accessible online within months. Drafts of the paper have already been circulated to researchers and interested journalists including this writer.

These revelations are part of the long awaited and much postponed results of an excavation conducted in 2015 by a team led by Dr Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice chancellor of Pune’s Deccan College. Why did it take so long? One answer was on offer a year ago when this writer spoke to Shinde who was then holding out the promise of publishing the findings in September 2017: ‘It’s a very politically sensitive issue,’ he said. The archaeologist may have been referring to the fact that any research dealing with the Harappan civilization would have to confront the Hindutva agenda of the BJP government at the Centre—whose politics demands a genuflection to Vedic Hinduism as the origin of Indian civilization. For historians or anyone working on the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) this is a complication. Indeed, when the IVC was first ‘discovered’ in the 1920s colonial archaeologists quickly identified it as evidence of a pre-Vedic culture, which, they theorized, had been utterly destroyed by the advent of ‘Aryan’ invaders from the Northwest who represented the dawn of Hindu India.

In later years most mainstream historians have discarded the ‘Aryan Invasion theory’ or ‘AIT’ as an oversimplification— while retaining a chronology that places the Vedic civilization as a successor to the IVC. And the AIT continues to rankle Hindutva nationalists even as it has taken root in South India as the core narrative of a popular politics which sees the IVC as a Dravidian culture that has survived ‘Brahminical’ invaders only south of the Vindhyas.