A crowded street in Haridwar, Uttarakhand, in March 2020. Photo: Shashank Hudkar/Unsplash
- The New Indian Express recently reported that the Ministry of Culture was acquiring DNA profiling kits for a project to trace the ‘purity’ of India’s races.
- According to the newspaper, the decision was the outcome of a meeting between ministry secretary Govind Mohan and archaeologist Vasant S. Shinde.
- The ministry soon issued a strongly worded statement refuting the report and said that it has no intention of conducting studies of racial purity in the country.
- Tracing ‘purity’ is to trace something that doesn’t exist. More accurately, it is to track something that one is making up as one goes along, to suit their agenda.
The New Indian Express recently reported that the Union Ministry of Culture was in the process of acquiring an array of advanced DNA profiling kits for a project to trace the ‘purity’ of India’s races. According to the newspaper, the decision was the outcome of a meeting between ministry secretary Govind Mohan and archaeologist Vasant Shinde.
“We want to see how mutation and mixing of genes in the Indian population has happened in the last 10,000 years,” Shinde – an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, and director of a ‘Rakhigarhi Research Project’ – told The New Indian Express.
However, the Union culture ministry soon issued a strongly worded statement refuting the report and said that it has no intention of conducting studies of racial purity in the country.
The term ‘racial purity’ is heavily loaded worldwide and also has a long history of misuse and misappropriation. After a long interval in which the world abandoned the idea, it has seemingly reemerged as the narrative currency of supremacist ideologies in parts of the world where nationalism is on the rise – including some parts of Europe, North America and Australia.
In India, discussions on the topic of race have often been muddled by invocations of a distant and glorious past, in which a people of ‘superior’ ancestry inhabited what is today the country’s north. The imprints of a social hierarchy based on this flawed sense of superiority are to be found in the horrific caste system, which also privileges ‘purity’.
Good science and bad science
Genetic studies in modernity have provided us with a flood of data and established the fact that the human species evolves by a process of intermingling and interbreeding, not only between different population groups but also, at one point, with archaic hominin species like the now-extinct Neanderthals and the Denisovans. As a result, modern Europeans, Asians and other peoples all bear the genetic signatures of those extinct humans, as well as those of the environments to which they have adapted and the diseases to which they have been exposed.
In effect, we are all different, but we are all also the same. Many of our differences, but especially those founded on the notion of ‘purity’, are thus cultural constructs – crafted and deployed to produce or sustain oppressive social hierarchies that actors have used to justify everything from slavery in the US to the “racial hygiene” laws of the Nazis.
But science hasn’t stayed entirely out of the picture – especially bad and unethical science. The eugenics movement, which frequently misinterpreted Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, became popular in the US in the 1920s. It claimed to improve the quality of the human race by following the ‘scientific principles’ of genetics and heredity, and advocated “selective breeding” to achieve its goals.
The flag-bearers of the eugenics movement used racism as they understood it to justify racial discrimination. In particular, they implied that there was a need for some groups to be subjected to servitude and that they had to be marginalised from the rest of society.
The movement in America lost steam by the late 1930s – but its principles became part of the foundation of Nazism in Germany, whose weltanschauung was blinded by the purported superiority of the Germanic ‘race’ and the ultra-nationalist ideals of its pre-war leaders. With the stated goal of improving the nation’s health, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler implemented a campaign from 1935 to 1944 to ‘cleanse’ German society of individuals whom it considered to be genetically ‘inferior’. The Jews faced the brunt of this barbaric campaign.
Only seven decades or so after the Nazis were defeated in World War II, their ideals started to become popular again in some countries – to the extent of being put on open display. Such ‘neo-Nazis’ often marched in the streets under the presidency of Donald Trump in the US, championing xenophobia, misogyny and racism. Like their historical predecessors, they invoked genetics in all the wrong ways to justify their ideas.
Against this backdrop, the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) published a statement in 2018. It read that “the concept of racial purity is scientifically meaningless” and “any attempt to use genetics to rank populations demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of genetics”. The ASHG has a membership of more than 8,000 geneticists, and built on the conclusions of many studies, including a notable one published in 2017, to underscore the fact that the concept of ‘race’ is fundamentally wrong, and that humans cannot be categorised into biologically different races.
The 2017 paper in particular found that the genetic differentiation of human ancestries largely occurred subsequent to the “Out-of-Africa” migrations. Race, according to the authors of the paper, is a social construct that evolved within human societies that liked to self-identify with population groups based on physical or cultural attributes.
Indus Valley civilisation
In the last decade, scientists have used the theories and the tools of genetic study to examine the ancestries of different population groups. Their findings have helped us define the ancestries of many Indian groups as well as move beyond the myth of a ‘superior race’.
As many of these scientists have discussed, the Indian population carries a mix of genes borne by major migratory groups from parts of Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia and pastoralists from Central Asian steppes. The last group has been notable in public discourse of late for the cultural and political consequences of their migration on the Indus Valley civilisation.
When Harappan society in northwest India (and beyond the Indus Valley into parts of modern-day Afghanistan) declined due to soil infertility and increasing aridity, many of its constituents moved to northern and southern India, thus becoming our second-generation ancestors. Subsequently, immigrants from the Caspian steppe who called themselves ‘Aryans’ entered northwest India around 1500 BC (3,500 years ago), bearing with them an original form of an Indo-European language first spoken in the East European steppe. While this migration was active, India’s Northeast was beginning to host migrants from Southeast Asia.
Two scientific papers published in the journals Cell and European Journal of Human Genetics in 2019 described the results of archaeo-genomic studies of the early settlers of Central and South Asia. They provided dispositive proof of the narrative in the previous paragraph. Specifically, scientists charted the genetic trail of the hunter-gatherers, Iranian farmers and pastoralists from the Caspian steppe, and how they may have intermingled to become the makers of some of the world’s earliest civilisations.
One of the papers – which was, in a curious turn, co-authored by Vasant Shinde – presented a genomic study of a skeleton of a woman who resided in a 5,000-year-old Harappan settlement in Rakhigarhi, in Haryana. Her DNA showed no connection with the steppe pastoralists.
This conclusion went against an alternative origin theory beloved of the Hindutvawadis – that India was the original site of the ‘Aryans’, that they did not immigrate from the Caspian steppe, and that some of them migrated from India to parts of West Asia and Europe.
The other paper analysed the DNA of more than 500 individuals who lived in the last 8,000 years and concluded that, around the same time as the decline of the Harappan civilisation, its people interbred with the immigrants from the steppe to birth the ancestral North and South Indians. Likewise, the genetic template of later migrants is also distributed among India’s general population, including among some Adivasi groups in South India.
So tracking this will-o’-the-wisp called ‘purity’ is to track something that doesn’t exist. More accurately, it is to track something that one is making up as one goes along, to suit their agenda. So it is welcome news that the Union cultural ministry has no intentions of tracking ‘racial purity’ within the Indian population.
In fact, we must underscore the fact that genetic diversity is generally associated with increased fitness for survival, and is a positive characteristic from an evolutionary perspective. We must celebrate our genetic diversity instead of seeking out myths that will doom us all.
C.P. Rajendran is an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. The views expressed here are the author’s own.