[Fwd: Ideology and race in India's early history]

may 6th

sensible, even-handed analysis by a history teacher.

of course, she will be called a 'race-traitor' by m karunanidhi and
other 'dravidians'. and what if she is a non-brahmin from tamil nadu? m
karunanidhi et al will have a fit.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Ideology and race in India's early history
Date: Fri, 5 May 2006 18:23:19 -0400
From: S. Kalyanaraman

Ideology and Race in India's Early History1

Padma Manian
San Jose City College

Probably without realizing it, World History textbooks often take
sides in an ideologically charged controversy over the role of race in
India's early history. Their account of the so-called Aryan invasions
may reflect nineteenth-century Eurocentric scholarship that privileged
lighter skinned peoples over darker skinned ones. Alternatively, it
may show a na¥ve endorsement of recent books by Indians and Westerners
that owe as much to ideology as to evidence. Certainly the facts don't
speak as clearly as most textbooks confidently represent them.
1
I have taught World History at colleges in the United States for
many years. When it came to the early history of India, I once taught
that "Aryans" invaded India in 1500 B.C.E., conquered the "Dravidians"
and then became predominant. This is what I had learned in elementary
school, high school and college courses in India. This is still what
is taught in most textbooks. About ten years ago, I became aware of
challenges to the idea of the Aryan invasion and decided to look more
critically at what World History textbooks were saying about this
topic. My study was published in the History Teacher.2 More than half
of the textbooks I examined stated that the ancient Harappan
civilization was "burned, destroyed and left in rubble by invading
Aryan-speaking tribes." These Aryans were "virile people, fond of war,
drinking, chariot racing and gambling" and were also "tall, blue-eyed
and fair-skinned." The defeated natives were "short, black,
nose-less." The victorious Aryans had a "strong sense of racial
superiority" and "strove to prevent mixture with their despised
subjects". Accordingly they evolved the caste system with the lighter
skinned Aryans at the top.
2
In fact, archaeologists have been aware for several decades that
Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the demise of the Harappan
civilization.3 In contrast, most of the textbooks relied on out-dated
sources and presented erroneous material.
3
Although there is consensus among well-informed students of Indian
history that Aryan invasions had nothing to do with the demise of the
Harappan civilization, there is a contentious debate underway both in
India as well as in the rest of the world regarding whether there was
an invasion of Aryans into India around 1500 B.C.E (that is, after the
end of the Harappan civilization). The Indians who favor the invasion
theory are largely of a progressive or leftist political persuasion.
They believe that the iniquities of the caste system are a result of
the Aryan invasion. For such Indians, questioning the invasion theory
would undermine the work of redressing the injustices of the caste
system. It would be akin to Holocaust denial. On the other hand, many
Indians who doubt the invasion theory view it as a matter of national
pride that their civilization is rooted in the ancient past on Indian
soil and is not a result of barbarian invaders a mere 3500 years ago.
Each side believes that ideological commitment blinds the other side
from seeing the true facts. Western supporters of the invasion theory
are accused of intellectual inertia. They are also diagnosed as
suffering from "the Liberal White Man's Burden" — the guilt that some
Western scholars and journalists feel for the sins of their fathers in
perpetrating racism and imperialism in modern times. This predisposes
them to believe in the idea that their Aryan ancestors committed
similar crimes 3500 years ago. It is argued that the desire of Western
liberals to atone for these sins inclines them to support uncritically
Indian leftist views on the Aryan invasion. As for Western scholars
who question the Aryan invasion theory, they are accused of being
sympathetic to the Indian right wing and, if they have no affiliation
with academic institutions, of lacking the credentials to justify
commenting on history. This debate can be followed on the Internet and
is interesting in its own right. 4
Recent advances in molecular genetics have opened a promising
approach to settle these questions, although the evidence at this
stage remains inconclusive. Bamshad et al. studied the DNA of people
from the Andhra region of Southern India and compared them to
Africans, Europeans and East Asians.4 The mitochondrial DNA
(transmitted matrilineally) of all castes was more similar to that of
East Asians than of Africans or Europeans. The DNA of the Y-chromosome
(transmitted patrilineally) of all castes was however more similar to
that of Europeans than of East Asians or Africans. Moreover the higher
castes were more similar to Europeans than were the lower castes. The
authors conclude that "Indians are of proto-Asian origin with West
Eurasian admixture" due to the Aryan invasion. The majority of the
Aryan invaders were men who transmitted their European Y-chromosome to
their sons born from the native women and placed themselves at the top
of the caste hierarchy. But the maternal lineage remains largely
"proto-Asian." The analogy, not explicitly stated in the paper,
corresponds to Latin American countries where the conquistadors mated
with native women to produce a largely mestizo population, with those
at the high end of the social scale having the highest proportion of
European ancestry. However, there are inconsistencies in the data. In
Table 3,5 the lower castes are closer to Asians than to Europeans and
the higher castes are closer to the Europeans than to Asians but not
very much so. But in Table 46 all castes are much closer to Europeans
than to Asians. Then in Table 5,7 the lower castes are again closer to
Asians. In Table 4, the upper castes have a "genetic distance" of
0.265 from West Europeans and 0.073 from East Europeans. This would
imply that East Europeans are closer to upper caste Indians than they
are to West Europeans! The one set of data that does not use a
calculation of "genetic distance" and which is therefore more reliable
is Table 2.8 This table shows that the upper castes have 61% Asian
maternal lineages, 23.7% West Eurasian lineages and 15.3% other.
However, the 23.7% West Eurasian number includes 16.9% from the U2i
lineage that the paper itself says is India-specific, and moreover is
50,000 years old.9 Therefore in calculating the fraction of West
Eurasian lineages that Aryan women brought into India with the 1500
B.C.E. invasion, the U2i component should be subtracted. Only 6.8% of
maternal lineages of the upper castes could have come with the
invasion. The invasion looks very conquistador-like indeed! 5
Another recent paper has looked at the genetics of the Indian
population: Kivisild et al.10 The authors state that "Indian tribal
and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of
Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene
flow from external regions since the Holocene."11 They looked at some
markers on the Y-chromosome that are widespread among Greeks and other
Europeans and found that of the 325 Indian chromosomes of diverse
caste and geographical background, none had these markers. From
statistical considerations, this implied that the European
contribution to male lineages in India is less than 3%. Kivisild et
al. also suggest "early southern Asian Pleistocene coastal settlers
from Africa would have provided the inocula for the subsequent
differentiation of the distinctive eastern and western Eurasian gene
pools." Other researchers, such as Macaulay et al., take this
suggestion further.12 They claim to have found evidence that there was
only a single dispersal of modern humans from Africa and that this
dispersal was through India. According to this account, several
generations of the ancestors of all non-African people would have
lived in India. The ancestors of Western Eurasians (including
Europeans) would have spent several thousand years in India until the
climate improved to allow them to migrate North and West out of India
about 45000 years ago.
6
Let us go back now to how the commonly accepted date of 1500
B.C.E. for the Aryan Invasion of India was proposed. It is not based
on any archaeological evidence, but instead was based on Friedrich Max
Mueller's linguistic work in the nineteenth century explaining the
similarity of the Indo-European languages. In his view, the speakers
of the Indo-European languages are descended from Japheth, one of the
sons of Noah, the speakers of Hebrew from Shem and Africans and Indian
Dravidians from Ham, the least favored of Noah's sons (Ham and his
line were accursed because of Ham's disrespect of Noah). Since the
Flood can be dated from the genealogies of the Bible to be around 2500
B.C.E. and the Vedas were ancient scripture at the time of the Buddha
(around 500 B.C.E.), the Aryans (said Max Mueller) likely invaded
India and defeated the Dravidian descendants of Ham around 1500 B.C.E.
Around the same time, the Israeli descendants of Shem were defeating
another of Ham's descendants, the Canaanites. Max Mueller dated the
composition of the earliest of the Vedas to around 1200 B.C.E.,
allowing the Aryans a few centuries to get settled in India.
7
Those who challenge the Aryan invasion theory, however, believe
the Vedas to be much older than 1200 B.C.E. A key piece of evidence is
that the Sarasvati is the most important river in the Rig Veda but is
at present a small stream that gets lost in the desert. Proponents for
an ancient date for the composition of the Vedas argue that since the
river dried up in about 1900 B.C.E., the Vedas must have been composed
before then.
8
I expect that the question of whether there was an Aryan invasion
and whether it occurred around 1500 B.C. E. will be resolved soon by a
combination of genetic studies and by geologists dating the ancient
courses of dried-up rivers in the Indian desert. In the meantime,
teachers of history and textbooks would do well to present both sides
of the debate instead of ignoring the existence of the debate.
Biographical Note: Padma Manian received her B.A. from Madras
University, India and her Ph.D. in History from Miami University,
Oxford, Ohio. She taught World History for five years at the
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse. She now teaches U.S. History and
Women's History at San Jose City College, California.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Notes
1 The author would like to thank Professor David Fahey of Miami
University, Ohio for his valuable suggestions in improving this
manuscript.

2 Padma Manian, "Harappans and Aryans: Old and New Perspectives of
Ancient Indian History," The History Teacher 32:1 (November 1998),
17-32.

3 See, for example, Mark Kenoyer's essay at:
www.harappa.com/indus/indus3.html (1996).

4 Bamshad et al., "Genetic Evidence on the Origins of Indian Caste
Populations," Genome Research 11 (2001), 994-1004. Also available at:
www.genome.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gr.173301.

5 Bamshad, 998.

6 Bamshad, 999.

7 Bamshad, 1000.

8 Bamshad, 996.

9 Bamshad, 1000.

10 Kivisild et al., "The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers
Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations," Amerian Journal
of Human Genetics 72 (2003), 313-332. Also available at
http://hpgl.stanford.edu/publications/AJHG_2003_v72_p313-332.pdf.

11 The Holocene refers to a period beginning approximately 11,000 years ago.

12 Macaulay et al., "Single Rapid Costal Settlement of Asia Revealed
by Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial Genomes," Science 308 (2005),
1034-1036. Also available at:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/308/5724/1034?ijkey=QWTbNGl4UEtZk&keytype=ref&siteid=sci.

http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/3.2/manian.html