One dose does not fit all Indians

The paper Reconstructing Indian population history, which appeared in the September 24 issue of Nature, has medical implications for the nation’s inhabitants. It will also have socio-political ramifications since it undermines the purported Aryan-Dravidian divide that continues to dominate popular consciousness, says Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad. The institute was part of the international research team which conducted the genetic study.

What are the medical implications of the findings?
We have found that India is genetically not a single large population, but a combination of smaller isolated populations. We understand that the incidence of genetic diseases among Indians is different from populations in the rest of the world.

Will the findings have an impact on the pharma sector?
Pharmaceutical companies are worried because the findings suggest that there cannot be a single medicine for all the people. Since India comprises smaller groups of people with different genetic structures, drug trials should take into account the ethnicity of a population under study.

The findings about the so-called Aryans or the North-South divide are politically sensitive. What does the paper say?
We have strong genetic evidence that today’s South Indians and North Indians have a common ancestry. The Ancestral South Indians and the Ancestral North Indians were migrants from Africa thousands of years ago (which predates the coming of the Aryans and the subsequent confinement of the Dravidians in the South). Our findings do not agree with racial theories such as those propounded by scholars like (German philologist and Orientalist) Max Müller.

Does that mean there were no Aryans?
Aryans could have been a group of noble people within the Indian community. But one thing we should remember is that our research focused on pre-historic ancestry, meaning the ancestry prior to the evolution of language or writing (the categorisations of Aryan or Indo-European and Dravidian are primarily linguistic). The historic (linguistic) ancestry will, again, be completely different. We conducted the research to find the ancestral Indian.

What will be the impact of the findings on facts like the wide variance in skin colour and language among Indians?
Skin colour is a different issue. We can find out the reasons behind the difference in skin colour and we will do that in our next project. But colour need not be constant and can change due to subsequent genetic mutations. Language, definitely, is an important thing and the issue here is about the Indo-European language theory. In 1786, Sir William Jones, an employee of the East India Company came up with this name (Indo-European) after noting similarities between European languages and Sanskrit. But both must have evolved from an ancestral, primitive language.