Advances in science and technology have always inflicted a death knell on prevalent myths and fallacious narratives, especially surrounding sociology and anthropology. The concept of racial purity and its derivative caste supremacies have long entrenched, enchained, marginalised and oppressed vast populations across the world over several millennia.
India is no exception, where, under the pretext of Sanathana Dharma and Varnashrama Dharma, a vast majority of the population was ostracised as untouchables and treated as sub-humans for millennia. The recent resurgence of population genetics—a sub-branch of genetics that essentially deals with genetic variations in human populations—assisted by advanced technology to extricate ancient DNA from skeletal remains of bygone civilisations, has shed new light on evolutionary biology and genetic composition of current human populations across the world.
There is an overwhelming consensus among scientists on the origins of Africa and the out-of-Africa migrations of human beings classified under the nomenclature Advanced Homosapiens. It is no mere coincidence that the ancient name for Africa was Alkebu-lan, meaning ‘Mother of Mankind.’
Mitochondrial DNA evidence traces the human trajectory of its origins to a ‘Mitochondrial Eve,‘ the primordial mother of all modern-day humans, who lived 200,000 years ago. This is based on Coalescent Theory and its empirical observation of all alleles of a gene from a sample population to a common ancestor. Such groupings pertinent to the common ancestry of populations are termed haplogroups, which indicate similar, shared inherited genetic markers and mutations within populations.
While maternal ancestry is traced by Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), the patrilineal lineage is tracked by testing the Y chromosome. Though there are many haplogroups in Africa—the crucible of human origin, such as L1, L2. L3, L4…etc—the L3 haplogroup is the root of all out-of-Africa migrations that eventually merged into different racial stock, universally referred to as ‘five races,‘ namely the Negroid, Caucasian, Mongoloid, Australoid and Amerindian.
The first humans, the primitive hunter-gatherers under the haplogroup L3, migrated out of Africa at around 150,000 BCE, and probably a few hundred of them crossed the Saudi Peninsula into the Asian subcontinent. At the end of the Ice Age, at about 12,000 BCE, the advent of the Holocene Age saw an explosion of flora and the beginnings of agriculture and cultivation of crops.
The first epoch is an admixture of the pre-historic hunter-gatherer population in India, and the migrating Anatoli farmers in the area comprising Iran, Turkey, and Syria formed the bedrock of the genetic stock of the ancient Indus Valley and Harappan Civilisations that dates back to at least 7000 BCE.
The second epoch happened during the declining years of the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), around 4000-3000 years ago, when there was further admixing of IVC with Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer societies. During the second half of the second millennium BCE, the horse-riding, chariot-making Steppe Pastoralists from Central Asia migrated to India, which paved the way for the Aryan Civilization and brought the Indo-European languages to the sub-continent.
The Steppe migrants amalgamated vigorously into the Indus Valley societies, constituting the third epoch. The final era of commixture was between the protagonists of the second and third epochs, transforming the Indian subcontinent into a melting pot of genes.
This mixture between people belonging to Indus Valley Cline (IVC), original hunter-gatherer tribes from Africa and later from Southeast Asia and Steppe Pastoralists continued unabated for many millennia before a closed social stratification, commensurate with castes and purity in the form of endogamy, defiled the cosmopolitan ideals of the ancient Indian social fabric. Its repercussions and the grotesque sociopolitical manifestations reverberate ruefully even in twenty-first-century India.
Caste enclosures became the dominant norm during the Gupta Empire, commencing in the fourth century AD. The spurious texts of Manusmrithi and other Dharmashasthras condoning caste systems were written and codified during this period.
David Reich, the Harvard University geneticist, and his team did extensive genome studies on the Indian population—ancient, medieval and present—in collaboration with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), led by K.Thangaraj. The studies concluded that the Indian gene pool comprised two major variants, the Ancient North Indians (ANI) and Ancient South Indians (ASI), and all sample populations from all across India contained both ASI and ANI genotypes.
These pathbreaking discoveries dispelled notions of racial purity and exclusivity of castes, which were customarily associated with an elite race. For the proponents of the Aryanism supremacy theory and its nativistic claims by Hindu right-wing radicals, these new findings were unpalatable. Ergo, they quickly denounced it for want of extensive data!
The prevalent myths of racial purity were categorically debunked. When the definition of nationalism is not settled, history is naturally and deftly invoked for nationalist myth-making.
Kerala society makes for an enlightening case study on demystifying the centuries-old caste system and caste consciousness in light of the new studies unravelled by population genetics. Historically, the population of the southern state was believed to be constituted by a wave of migrations in history and the dominant forward castes of Nambudiri Brahmins, Nairs and backward caste Ezhavas/Thiyyas were classified and equated as distinct races.
The Nambudiri Brahmins, according to a popular myth, were descendants of Aryan society in Aryavartha, who were installed in 64 villages by Parashurama, the sixth avatar of Vishnu, by reclaiming land in the sea by throwing an axe!
Nairs migrated from the Newar region of Nepal, and the Ezhavas came from Sri Lanka. The original inhabitants of Kerala, the tribals known as Adivasis, belonged to the ancient stock of Negrito and the Ancestral Austro-Asiatic (AAA) race. The society was highly stratified and was once notorious for one of the most heinous human rights violations in history based on caste supremacies, untouchability and apartheid rules, customs and traditions created around it.
The research on population genetics by an eminent scholar, K Sethuraman, debunked centuries-old, entrenched myths of the Kerala caste system and its noxious hierarchies. In his well-researched and brilliant book, Malayali Oru Janithaka Vayana: Keraleeyarude Janithaka Charithram, loosely translated as A Genetic Reading of Malayalees: The Genetic History of Keralites’ he analyses the genetic research on Kerala population sub-groups and found that all castes have the dominant genetic material of tribal original inhabitants, the Adivasis and castes classified as scheduled castes like ‘Pulayar.‘
No genetic exclusivity was discovered, which should entail a paradigm shift in conventional notions of caste dominance and caste formations in the state. No historical records are available of Nambudiri, Nair and Ezhava migrations; none of the customs and practices of North Indian Aryan communities or medieval Sri Lankan societies were ever known to have been transmitted and imbibed into Kerala social norms and cultural practices.
Furthermore, no ancient texts or stone inscriptions mention caste names Nambudiri, Nair, Ambalavasi or Ezhava, denoting these to be modern constructions to wrest political control by caste broadening and social reorganisation of communities. In Sangam literature, scripted more than 2000 years ago, the social organisation of the land that includes modern-day Kerala were divided into eight occupational groups, namely Arivar, Pulayar, Valayar, Padayadichavar, Uzhavar, Kammalar, Voddavar and Ayyar.
Democratic decentralisation of occupational castes was the prevalent social order. Modern caste terminologies are conspicuous by their absence.
The term ‘Nair’ denoted a profession rather than caste and was a motley crew of more than 120 castes before consolidation. Similar caste broadening was witnessed among Kerala’s Ezhava/Thiyya, Vishvakarma, Dheevara and Dalit communities.
Noted historian M.G.S. Narayanan – widely acclaimed as the doyen of structured, methodical and unbiased historical research—surmised that Nairs may have originated from Adivasi tribes of Paniya and Kurichi and raises this argument in his book, Kerala Charithrathinu Chila Thiruthukal, could be translated as Some Corrections To The History of Kerala.
These stellar discoveries are corroborated by careful examination and astute analysis of cultural artefacts of Kerala society, and the consequent interconnections are explicit. For example, the Kula Daivam (Family Deity) of the Namboothiri community are Marutha in central Kerala and Aiyanar in Northern Palghat state; both are family deities of untouchable castes.
The traditional offerings for Aiyanar are meat and liquor, though Brahmin communities have iterated the custom to include vegetarian options only. Again, Vettakkorumakan, the family deity of Samoothiri Kings (Zamorin) and Azhvanchery Thambrakkal – the latter possibly by self-proclamation adorns the highest echelons of Brahmin caste—is a dark, tribal forest dweller, has no kindred to any North Indian deities and never found or mentioned anywhere else other than Malabar region of Kerala.
Until the latter part of the Middle Ages, the nomenclature of Brahmin castes exhibited a common inheritance to lower caste names. According to an ancient inscription, the ‘Thiruvattoor Testament’ mentions the first Namboothiri chieftain’s name as Vaikath Pandyan, followed by Chathan, Chadayan and Koran in the 12th century AD. These names resemble names adopted by lower castes and erstwhile untouchables.
The transition of upper caste to prerogative names like Narayanan, Neelakandan, etc., and its attendant exclusivity to use, by law or by reformulated social rules, marks the inflexion point of endogamous clustering of castes as power centres, by excommunicating others in a strategically conceived hierarchy.
Researchers from the National Institute Of Biomedical Genomics (NIBMG) in West Bengal have done extensive studies on genes of different communities to disentangle the genesis of the intricate endogamous caste system in India. Studies have ascertained with great precision the era when the intermixture of West Bengal Brahmins ended.
Their matrimonial alliances with northeastern communities ended in the 8th century with the ascension of the Pala Empire. The Marathi people, with the advent of the Rashtrakuta and Chalukya empires between the 6th and 12th century AD, started recruiting warriors (Kshatriya) from the peasantry, which effectively ended the mixing with indigenous tribes and Dravidians.
Ideas have consequences, as are narratives borne out of realpolitik motives. Sociocultural discourses in the past revolving around racial purity and adjacent caste hierarchies were more of a political project without corroborating scientific evidence and empirical data.
Six million Jews probably wouldn’t have ended up in concentration camps and gas chambers if Hitler had access to the latest discoveries in Archeo-Genetics and Anthropology-Genetics. The ‘Final Solution Of The Jewish Question‘ crystallised from an infallible belief in Aryan Supremacy Theory, which necessitated the purging of ‘inferior races’ along the lines of the Ubermensch eugenics (Overman) of Nietzsche.
India would have been an equitable and egalitarian society, eschewing oppression and segregation of communities with similar genetic characteristics. The opportunity costs of ignorance are staggering and often irredeemable. But even without the sophisticated science of genetics, India had an illustrious record of casteless society as enshrined in ancient Tamil texts of Silappathikaram and Patirruppattu. It is a glorious testament of truth that humans don’t always require scientific tools to comprehend the essence of humanity.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
