Tell me about Rakhigarhi…

The ancient Indus Valley Civilisation site near Hisar—dating back to the 2nd and 3rd millennium BCE—was first discovered in the 1960s. It was briefly excavated in the 90s—and then forgotten. Then the discovery of nine mounds in 2016—and more importantly, of 4,600 year old skeletons of four people brought it back into the spotlight. And scientists were able to extract ancient DNA from only a tiny bone from the inner ear region of a woman dubbed I6113. A paper based on a genetic analysis offered answers to some of the prickliest questions about the Indus Valley Civilisation:

“The IVC stands at the centre of a large and complex mystery about our origins. It is the missing piece in not just an archaeological but also a highly political jigsaw puzzle. Who were these people living in this large swathe of land along the Indus River and its vicinity? Were they indigenous or outsiders? Were these the same people who later composed the Vedas and started what is known as the Vedic Age? Or did another foreign race come and drive them out? And, most crucially, how do we, modern Indians, relate to this ancient group?”

And it sparked a huge and highly politicised debate over our ancestry—which involved Indian archaeologists later tailoring their answers to match the claims of Hindutva ideology.

Point to note: Rakhigarhi has since become a symbol of great pride for the BJP-led government. Last year, it announced plans to develop the site as a tourist hub and set up five on-site museums. The site now spans 350 hectares and includes 11 mounds.

What does it tell us about our ancestry?

The first Indians came out of Africa and can be traced back to the Andamans. They are known as either Andamanese Hunter Gatherers or Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI). They reached India around 65,000 years ago and then moved on to Southeast Asia and further on. The genetic ancestry of the woman found in Rakhigarhi offers highly significant clues to what happened next. Combined with another paper published at the same time—co-authored by 91 experts from around the world—it offers answers—some of which are unwelcome in certain political quarters.

One: A key part of the Rakhigarhi paper based on the woman’s DNA concludes:

“The Indus Valley people were indigenous, but in the sense that their DNA had contributions from near eastern Iranian farmers mixed with the Indian hunter-gatherer DNA, that is still reflected in the DNA of the people of the Andaman islands.”

So those who built the Harappan civilisation were a mix of Ancient Ancestral South Indians and settlers from Iran—who arrived 9000 years ago. And this mix is referred to as the Indus Periphery People. They likely spoke an early Dravidian language. 

Point to note: Genetic evidence of migrants from the Indus Valley Civilisation has been found in modern-day Iran and Turkmenistan.

Two: More important is what is missing from her DNA: the so-called ‘Aryan’ gene called R1a1—which originated in Central Asian settlers who arrived from an area between the Black and Caspian seas. Why this is important: “Most South Asians carry some ancestry derived from steppe pastoralists, ranging from less than 10% to a little over 20%, which is entirely absent in the Harappan genome.” 

So this tells us that the so-called Aryan invasion/migration did not occur until after the decline of Harappa. And the ‘Aryans’ were certainly not responsible for its fall.

Three: The evidence also suggests that the Harappans independently developed farming—perhaps with some outside influences. The ancient Iranian genetic material predates the rise of farming in the Middle East.

Four: Taken together with the second paper, Rakhigarhi gives us a sense of how our lineage evolved. After the Harappan civilisation declined after 2000 BCE, many of its descendants moved south-east to mix with those ‘first Indians’—and formed the Ancestral South Indian (ASI) population, most of whom live in South India today. Around the same time, we witnessed a huge influx of settlers from the Central Asian Steppes—either due to invasion or migration. The Harappans mixed with them to form the Ancestral North Indian (ANI) population.

A key related point to note:

“All of us, except for the people who remained secluded in the Andaman Islands, both from the highest to the lowest castes, including non-Hindu tribal populations living outside the caste system, are affected by the mixing of these two [ANI and ASI] groups. The percentages of the mixture however vary depending upon geography, caste and language groups. There is higher [ANI] ancestry among upper castes, Indo-European language speakers and those who originally hailed from north India.”

So why is any of this political?

It is important to understand that the Hindutva theory of the origins of Vedic culture were shaped by British colonialists—who claimed that the Indus Valley Civilisation was a pre-Vedic society that was destroyed by Aryan invaders (nicely mirroring and justifying their own imperialism). Hindu ideologues like MS Golwalkar fumed:

“It was the wily foreigner, the Britisher, who carried on the insidious propaganda that we were never one nation, that we were never the children of the soil but mere upstarts having no better claim than the foreign hordes of Muslims or the British over this country.”

So it is very important to establish Vedic culture as indigenous to India—not brought by outsiders—and therefore to establish the Indus Valley Civilisation itself was Vedic.

But here’s the catch: The same papers that established Harappans as indigenous also show a clear, inarguable evidence that the origins of Vedic culture—including, god forbid, Sanskrit—are linked to the entry of those Central Asian settlers:

“Our results also shed light on the question of the origins of the subset of Indo-European languages spoken in India and Europe. It is striking that the great majority of Indo-European speakers today living in both Europe and South Asia harbor large fractions of ancestry related to … Steppe pastoralists … suggesting that ‘Late Proto-Indo-European’—the language ancestral to all modern Indo- European languages—was the language [of the steppe pastoralist population].”

Or as Caravan puts it more bluntly:

“The implications could not be clearer: the Vedas were composed in a language that came to the subcontinent after the decline of the Harappan civilisation. Hence, Harappan culture cannot be the culture identified with the Vedas, unless [Indian archaeologists] can claim that the Vedas were not originally composed in Sanskrit, a language termed sacred for that very reason… The Hindutva Right would, in reality, be even more horrified at this outlandish possibility than by anything the current papers suggest.”

Cue the backtracking: Soon after news of the findings were released, the leading archaeologist—Vasant Shinde—began to make all sorts of claims:

• Shinde told reporters at a press conference: “Harappan people are the same as Vedic people.” 
• In another interview, he declared the ancient people of Rakhigarhi were “tall and sharp-featured like the modern Haryanvis.”
• Niraj Rai—who analysed the Rakhigarhi DNA—told Open magazine: “We are suggesting [through our findings] an out-of-India migration theory”—suggesting that the Harappans had taken Vedic culture to other parts of the world. 

None of which are supported by the genetic evidence unearthed in Rakhigarhi.

Also unsubstantiated: The flurry of distorted media reports on the Rakhigarhi findings—claiming that they debunked the idea of an Aryan invasion. All Rakhigarhi shows is that the ‘Aryans’ were not around during the Indus Valley Civilisation. And yes, the jury is still out on whether it was a migration or invasion. All we know is that the influx was significant enough to become a key part of our DNA.

The bottomline: Now that Rakhigarhi is slated to be a major tourist attraction, it will be interesting to see how those on-site museums will spin its more uncomfortable truths.

Reading list

The best writing on the subject is not recent. But the stories are well worth going down the rabbit hole. Cover stories by India Today and Open magazine are best on the Rakhigarhi findings. Tony Joseph’s essay in The Hindu is the clearest on how our genetic lineage evolved. Also in India Today: a good summary of the political stakes involved in the Indus Valley Civilisation debate. Hartosh Singh Bal in Caravan offers two insightful takes (here and here) but they are behind a paywall.