Banishing the North-South divide

Are you descended from an Ancestral North Indian or an Ancestral South Indian? Do you think you will know this from the colour of your skin, the size of your nose, the texture of your hair or the language you speak?

Maybe. It is likely that you will have to do some kind of genetic mapping which will tell you that no matter which part of India you are from, chances are you are not that different from someone from another part of India.

Anthropology, evolutionary science and genetics have worked over the last 50 years or so to destroy many previously held beliefs about race. Physical characteristics — skin colour, noses, hair — are the least of it, apparently. These change according to climatic conditions and don’t take millions of years. The new research is genome-based, examining “singlenucleotide polymorphisms” or SNPs.

So Indians are descended either from Ancestral South Indians (ASIs) — who arrived about 60,000 years ago and Ancestral North Indians (ANIs), who came later. Most Indians today are a mix of these two groups. Interestingly, the genetic mix apparently predates all our historic social separations — caste and endogamy. The “purity” maintained by the caste system is only about 3,000 years old. We were all mixed up into Indians long before that.

While science will tackle issues of race according to the evidence, society takes a longer time to interpret and accept scientific findings. The Christian world still has problems with Charles Darwin. In America, many southern states had ruled that miscegenation — relations between the races — was illegal. It took a long civil rights struggle to change that.

In India we are lucky that our Constitution ensured equality in 1950 itself. However, as we all know, caste discrimination remains to this day. That is, while everyone knows that caste-based oppression and bigotry, are illegal, we still maintain our sense of “purity” from the other in social contexts. This is particularly true when it comes to marriage. Even today, an inter-caste marriage can lead to death. To small communities, breaking this law is tantamount to breaking faith in the most heinous way.

Underlying all this is a feeling of superiority. Obviously, the higher the caste the more the superiority but each caste and sub-caste mimics that in its own way and lays down strict rules to discourage “pollution”. We understand how caste dynamics work in our social interactions and maybe even subconsciously, we give voice to those prejudices.

Now there is a chance to turn all those fondly-held beliefs on their heads. If we are one people who are a mixture of two ancestral groups, then all our ideas of ourselves are made up: artificial systems to control society and distribute privileges. The acceptance of this idea will not have a smooth path. The “white” part of the world is still uneasy with the idea that they are substantially not a different race from the “black” part of the world, and they’ve been staring at the evidence for a while now. Or that race itself is a misnomer for an animal species called Homo sapiens.

We all came out of Africa, that much is now accepted. The question is of when and later, how. This is the story of all of us and the story of our journey out of Africa is fascinating. Many streams of academic discipline will work together — archaeology, anthropology, evolutionary sciences, linguistics, history, historiography, philosophy, sociology and more. All will try and protect their own territories, their own belief patterns, whether based on shibboleths or evidence and their own internal prejudices. But that is how the world works.

Yet, as we have seen, with every new scientific discovery, our lives change, in both obvious and subtle ways. Whatever the outcome, the unravelling of the human genome tells us a story that is very close to home.