As the dust of the petrous bones of a 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, Haryana, settles, we may have the answer to a few questions that have vexed some of the best minds in history and science -- and a lot of politicians along the way:
Q: Were the people of the Harappan civilisation the original source of the Sanskritic language and culture of Vedic Hinduism? A: No.
Q: Do their genes survive as a significant component in India's current population? A: Most definitely.
Q: Were they closer to popular perceptions of 'Aryans' or of 'Dravidians'? A: Dravidians.
Q: Were they more akin to the South Indians or North Indians of today? A: South Indians.
All loaded questions, of course. A paper suggesting these conclusions is likely to be online in September and later published in the journal Science.
These revelations are part of the long-awaited and much-postponed results of an excavation conducted in 2015 by a team led by Dr Vasant Shinde, an archaeologist and vice chancellor of Pune's Deccan College.
Why did it take so long? One answer was on offer exactly a year ago when this writer spoke to Shinde who was then holding out the promise of publishing the findings in September 2017. "It's a very politically sensitive issue," he said.
The archaeologist was referring to the fact that any research dealing with the Harappan civilisation would have to confront the Hindutva agenda of the government of India -- whose politics demands a genuflection to Vedic Hinduism as the origin of Indian civilisation...
On the face of it, the single most startling revelation of the Rakhigarhi research may be what it doesn't talk about
: the complete absence of any reference to the genetic marker R1a1 in the ancient DNA retrieved from the site.
This is significant because R1a1, often loosely called 'the 'Aryan gene', is now understood to have originated in a population of Bronze Age pastoralists who dispersed from a homeland in the Central Asian 'Pontic steppe' (the grasslands sprawling between the Black Sea and the Caspian) some 4,000 years ago. The genetic impact of their migrations has left a particularly strong and 'sex-biased', (i.e. male-driven) imprint on the populations of two geographically distant but linguistically related parts of the world: Northern India and Northern Europe.
"We are not discussing R1a," says Niraj Rai, the lead genetic researcher on the Rakhigarhi DNA project. "R1a is not there." The admission came wrapped in some prevarication but was all the more telling given that the Rakhigarhi data presented in this paper are derived primarily from the genetic material of 'I4411', a male individual -- R1a is a mutation seen only in samples of the male Y chromosome.
The absence of this genetic imprint in the first genome sample of an individual from the Indus Valley culture will bolster what is already a consensus among genetic scientists, historians and philologists: that the Indus Valley culture preceded and was distinct from this population of cattle-herding, horse-rearing, chariot-driving, battle-axe-wielding, proto-Sanskrit-speaking migrants whose ancestry is most evident in high-caste North Indian communities today...
In March this year, the Harvard population geneticist David Reich published an overview of the state of research in his field, the surprise bestseller Who We Are and How We Got Here, including an account of how the extreme sensitivity of leading Indian scientists about earlier evidence suggesting an ancient migration of Eurasian people from the Northwest into the subcontinent had nearly scuppered an important scientific collaboration in 2008.
The Indian scientists Lalji Singh and K. Thangaraj "implied that the suggestion of a migration would be politically explosive", Reich writes. The issue was ultimately resolved by means of a terminological sleight-of-hand -- using the nomenclature 'Ancestral South Indian' (ASI) and 'Ancestral North Indian' (ANI) to obscure the revelation that ANI represented a population with a significant genetic contribution from outside the subcontinent.
But the same dynamic appears to have emerged this year around a paper involving both Reich and his team at Harvard on the one hand and the scientists leading the Rakhigarhi project on the other. Entitled, rather flatly, The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia, this paper (usually referred to by the shorthand 'M Narasimhan et al') -- made public as a 'pre print' in April -- would make headlines in the Indian press and social media and reveal some more of the political pressures that colour research on ancient Indian history today.
Shinde said that he had complained to Reich about an earlier draft of that paper, and insisted that any reference to 'migrations' into South Asia be avoided. Or else. He suggested the more ambivalent term 'interaction' be used instead.
Given that Shinde controlled access to the Rakhigarhi samples which Reich was keen to work on, this would have been a potent threat, and indeed the paper manages to eschew the term 'migration' entirely while ultimately making more potent statements about the impact of post-Harappan 'Middle to Late Bronze Age' (MLBA) Steppe populations on the Indian gene pool.
However, the timing of the paper remains curious to say the least, given that it would have benefitted from the Rakhigarhi data which it seemed to pre-empt -- despite the fact that several of its co-authors, including Rai, Shinde, Thangaraj, Narasimhan and Reich now share credit for the mysteriously delayed paper.
The official word on this was that the Rakhigarhi research was behind schedule due to the 'contamination of one sample', but at the time the geneticist community was abuzz with rumours that the slowdown was because of the Indian team's discomfort with politically inconvenient results.