Where does one begin to tell a story that spans many thousands of years, a story whose origins are obscured by stubborn mists that will not lift and enduring myths that will not shift under the weight of ages of telling? Where does one begin unravelling the history of India and its peoples?
There have been many beginnings in the telling of the story depending on who told it, when and why. Different yardsticks have been used: myth, bias, selective readings and interpretations. Stripped of all this, there is and can be only one beginning. Today, a host of disciplines and technologies, many of them recent developments, are being applied to uncover and write the history of India and Indians. The story they tell begins in Africa. Indian history, or to be more precise, the history of Indians begins in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
Stone tools tell remarkable stories of the evolutionary history of our hominid and hominin1 ancestors and of the world they inhabited. Buried in the earth of India’s deep south, in Tamil Nadu, is one such story sculpted in hard stone many millennia ago.
What has climate change got to do with Indian history? A lot, if not everything.
We humans are all of African origin. Africa has the highest diversity of human genetic material. Genetic diversity is evidence of the place of origin of a species or group.
South Asia harbours a genetic diversity second only to Africa’s, strong evidence that it was settled soon after humans left Africa and became a secondary centre for early human dispersal. Archaeological evidence supports genetic findings that by 50 KA much of South Asia had been colonised.
About one-fifth of the world’s population, around 1.5 billion people, live in South Asia, a region comprising less than 3 per cent of the global land mass. It is a land of vast cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity. “The truth,” writes Reich, “is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.”
A five-stage process best fits South Asia’s colonisation history. The archaeological record takes us back to perhaps c130 ka; the genetic record begins only at c65 KA when Y-chromosome Hgs C and D appeared. The third stage, between 47-30 ka, records the arrival of Y-chromosome Hgs H, L, and R2. These three stages of colonisation were all made by hunter-gatherer populations. The fourth represents the movements of pastoral and farming cultures during the Neolithic from the east (Hgs O2 and O3) and west (Hgs J2, L, and R1a). It is associated with the arrival and spread of Austro-Asiatic, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages. The final stage brought small groups in recent times from different regions.
The oft-repeated phrase “unity in diversity” most aptly describes South Asia’s modern population, the unity coming from its maternal heritage, the diversity from its paternal. An estimated 88 per cent of South Asian mtDNA derives from the out-of-Africa dispersal.
In contrast to the maternal heritage, roughly two-thirds of South Asia’s Y-chromosome genotypes derive from male-dominated migrations of farming and pastoral cultures from east, west and Central Asia during the Neolithic. While South Asia’s women preserved and spread the initial gene pool in a hunter-gatherer economy, male immigrants brought new genetic material from farming and herding cultures originating beyond its borders. The admixture, therefore, involved a considerable degree of cultural, linguistic and lifestyle adoptions and adaptations. It has had a deep and lasting impact on many aspects of South Asian history.
Languages tell tales.
Languages have words and grammatical structures that provide information on their origins, speakers and their movements and interactions with others.
The earliest evidence for Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia appears only around 3.5 KA, after that of the other language families. Unlike the other families, however, they have a considerable body of texts dating to this early period. The texts, however, being mainly related to priestly functions, are preserved in the language of an elite section of society and provide only a limited view of the larger world…It is from this small window that we have to infer much of the rest.
Until about 10 KA, for over 95 per cent of their history, humans lived exclusively as foragers, a way of life inherited from their hominid ancestors. Some of the most important behavioural changes in social evolution occurred during this phase of human history.
The South Asian archaeological record identifies four macro-regions where primary domestication occurred: the greater Indus valley in the northwest; the Gangetic plains; east India; and south Deccan (Karnataka).
From c. 9500 BCE, forager numbers have declined from roughly 99 per cent of the world’s population to about 1 per cent by 1800 CE.
Agni, the god of fire, burned the forests, deprived foragers of sustenance, and forced them to migrate. Forests were replaced by farms and pastures. The Mahabharata tells one such story
Mesopotamian texts refer to the supply of a range of essential, luxury and exotic goods including timber, carnelian beads, agate, lapis lazuli, ivory, gold, figurines of monkeys, shell bangles made of marine species found only in Indus waters and animals from Meluhha
Pn 20 September 1924, was able to announce to the world the excavation of two sites on the Indus plains, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. It reported: “At both these places there is a vast expanse of artificial mounds evidently covering the remains of once flourishing cities, which . . . must have been in existence for many hundreds of years.”
The term “Harappan Civilisation” is generally used for the period of integration and urbanism… The coming together of multi-ethnic and multi-language groups that inhabited this geographically diverse region created a network of urban homogeneity supported by extensive agricultural hinterlands in a complex and unique material culture…It eventually covered an area roughly 1,210,000 sq. km in extent, 1,100 km north to south and east to west, nearly twenty times the area of Egypt, and over twelve times the settled area of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. The distance between the two major Indus cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, is greater than Mesopotamia’s north-south extent of about 440 km.
The Harappan gene pool came from its diverse hunter-gatherer populations mixed to a smaller extent with Iranian hunter-gatherers/farmers.
The Transition (2600-2500 BC) was a veritable revolution within the Harappan urbanisation process. By the time it ended, a complex and highly organised society, the Mature Harappan (2500–1900 bce), had emerged. It was significantly different in scale, organisational and social complexity, cultural uniformity and ideology and ethos from that of the Early Harappan.
The Transition took place with the abandonment of more than three-fifths of Early Harappan settlements.
The most notable feature of the Transition was the abruptness of the change.
The stimulus for the Transition may have come from a spurt in overseas trade with Mesopotamia.
Harappan cities were surrounded by massive walls, sometimes with bastions and towers, constructed of baked or mud bricks, rubble or stone. Imposing gateways monitored the flow of people and goods into and out of the city.
Five major regional centres were located on what appears to be a grid with calculated distances separating them: Mohenjodaro (250 ha, Sindh) on the Indus in the south; Harappa (150 ha, Punjab) on the Ravi in the north; Ganweriwala (80 ha, Cholistan) on the Ghaggar-Hakra; Rakhigarhi (+80 ha, Haryana) on the Chautang in the northeast; Dholavira (100 ha, Kutch/Gujarat) in the southwest.
The remarkable feature of the Mature Harappan is the overall acceptance for 700 years, despite regional differences, of a unifying culture by over a million people inhabiting a diverse geographical environment spread over a million sq. km.
Throughout history, four sources of power – economic, military, political, ideological – have been used in various combinations to enforce authority and retain control by elite groups (Butters 1996)... In Harappa, economic and ideological factors seem to have been the primary means of elite dominance.
Excerpted with permission from Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History, Alan Machado (Prabhu), Orient Black Swan.
