For those of us living in the West, there is this identity that’s thrust upon us on arrival. To rephrase one of my favorite quotes, I was only Indian after I left India. Each day brings a new identity to us. Sometimes they make us think critically. Sometimes they make us cringe seeing the obsession surrounding a label.
I looked back in time to see where we started and where we ended up. First, take a look at the picture below. We are Homo Sapiens, the most advanced Hominid species. All Non-African Homo sapiens carry approximately 2% of Neanderthal genes in their DNA.
With advanced DNA studies, scientists have conclusively established that modern humans outside of Africa are all descendants of a single population of Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who first moved to Asia and then to the rest of the world starting around 70,000 years ago. So basically, all our earliest forefathers had a relationship with Africa. Considering that Earth is estimated to be 4.5 Billion Years old, we share more affinity with Africa than frankly Mother Nature.
These OoA migrants settled in India and mixed with the locally existing archaic humans. Their descendants are called First Indians. Today, every person of South Asian ancestry has 50 to 65% genome ancestry of First Indians. Later starting around 4700 BCE, agriculturists from Zagros in Iran moved to India and mixed with the First Indians. This resulted in the first Harappan civilization.
Around 2000 BCE, a new wave of migration from Central Asia brought what we today call Aryan ancestry into India. This ushered in a new Vedic civilization. Although there have been many migrations later on, in India and in Europe, the Aryan migration was the last to significantly change the demography. Since then on, India had a Vedic, Buddhist, Islamic, and Christian rule at different times before finally ending up with a form of Constitutionally Secular Government today. In the middle, many groups sought refuge in this place. Some came from East Asia and some from West Asia. All of them brought their own culture and identity. But the great melting pot finally reigned supreme.
So, what is our identity as Indians? There is a simple pizza analogy. To quote John Pucadyil rephrasing Tony Joseph - “The base of the Indian ‘pizza’ was laid about 65,000 years ago when the OoA migrants reached India. The sauce started with the Zagrosian herders reaching Balochistan after 7000 BCE. They mixed with the First Indians and together went on to build the Harappan Civilization. When the civilization collapsed, the sauce spread all over the subcontinent. With the ‘Aryans’ after 2000 BCE, cheese was sprinkled all over the pizza, with a lot more in the north than in the south. Around the same time arrived the major toppings that we see today in different regions in different amounts — the Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman-language speakers. And then, much later, of course, came the Greeks, the Jews, the Huns, the Sakas, the Parsis, the Syrians, the Mughals, the Portuguese, the British, and the Siddis — all of whom have left small marks all over the Indian pizza.”
Reducing all this to one conformist identity is like eating a piece of bland bread and calling it a pizza.
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Notes:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43305406
https://john-pucadyil.medium.com/tony-josephs-early-indians-an-appreciation-7a345de4bd18
https://www.scienceme.com/