Racial Groups of India: Race of Indian

• India’s population is a conglomeration of peoples who entered the subcontinent at different times and from different directions, and then mixed for thousands of years. It is one strand of India’s wider racial, linguistic and ethnic diversity.
• India has long been a meeting ground of peoples and tribes. Nearly every major racial stock named by classical anthropology has a presence here, which is why the population is described as ethnically varied.
• Under British rule and after it, scholars tried to sort Indians into racial types from body measurements. These classical schemes (Herbert Hope Risley, Alfred Cort Haddon, John Henry Hutton, Egon von Eickstedt, Biraja Sankar Guha) are now historical classifications, not biological realities.
• Ancient and modern DNA has replaced them. Indians descend from a few ancestral populations that mixed, so the population forms continuous genetic gradients, not separate races.
• After Independence, in line with the policy of not dividing citizens by race, the Census dropped racial classification. Independent India’s census recognises no racial groups.

Race and Ethnicity: Concepts

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Race

• A race was traditionally defined as a large group of people sharing inherited physical traits that set it apart from other groups.
  • Three classic definitions:
    • Alfred Louis Kroeber: a valid biological idea, a breed or sub-species, but not a socio-cultural one.
    • Joseph Birdsell: an interbreeding group whose gene pool differs from that of other populations.
    • Alfred Cort Haddon: a biological breed marked by a combination of transmitted physical traits.
• Physical anthropology used several criteria:
  • Skin colour, hair form (straight, wavy, curly, woolly) and eye form, including the epicanthic fold of the eyelid.
  • Stature: short, medium or tall.
  • Cephalic index: head breadth ÷ head length × 100.
    • Dolichocephalic (long-headed): below 75.
    • Mesocephalic: 75–80.
    • Brachycephalic (broad-headed): above 80.
  • Nasal index: nose breadth ÷ nose height × 100.
    • Leptorrhine (narrow): below 70.
    • Mesorrhine: 70–85.
    • Platyrrhine (broad): above 85.
  • Later, blood groups and other genetic markers.
• World schemes of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries set the frame that Indian scholars later applied:
  • Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1795): five varieties: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay.
  • Thomas Henry Huxley (1870): added an Australoid group for Aboriginal Australians and similar peoples, in his essay On the Geographical Distribution of the Chief Modifications of Mankind. It split humanity into four groups: Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australoid.
  • Carleton Coon (1962): five races: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, Congoid and Capoid.
• These traits vary continuously and do not cluster into neat packages. Skin colour, for example, tracks sunlight and latitude, not ancestry alone.
• After the Second World War, scientists rejected the idea of fixed races. UNESCO’s statement “The Race Question” (1950) held that all humans belong to one species, and that “race” is better treated as a social myth than as a biological fact.
• Today genetics speaks of populations and ancestry components, which mix and grade into one another.

Ethnic Group

• Ethnic diversity is a feature of most societies. Historically it is often the legacy of conquests and migrations that brought different peoples under one rule.
• Ethnicity is the differentiation of groups that share cultural meanings, memories and descent, produced through social interaction.
• An ethnic group is a community that regards itself, and is regarded by others, as distinct because of shared:
  • ancestry or an origin myth, history and homeland;
  • language or dialect;
  • religion, mythology and ritual;
  • cuisine, dress, art and sometimes physical appearance.
• Ethnicity is usually inherited, but unlike race it is cultural and self-ascribed: people can stress, change or combine ethnic identities.

Related Terms

• Anthropometry: the systematic measurement of the human body (stature, head and nose dimensions, limb proportions). It was the main tool of early racial classification. It was also misused to link body form with mental or moral traits.
• Ethnocentrism: judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own. The term is associated with Ludwig Gumplowicz and was popularised by William Graham Sumner (1906).
• Amity–enmity complex: Arthur Keith‘s idea, in A New Theory of Human Evolution (1948), that groups evolved by combining loyalty within the group with hostility to outsiders.
• Pygmy peoples: groups whose adult men average under 150 cm. The term is used mainly for the forest hunter-gatherers of the Congo basin.
• Racial segregation: the enforced separation of groups in housing, schools and public places, as under apartheid in South Africa or the “Jim Crow” laws of the American South.
• Mongolian spot: a blue, blue-grey, blue-black or deep brown birthmark with wavy borders and an irregular shape, present at birth and usually gone within three to five years. It is common among East, South, South-east, North and Central Asian peoples, Micronesians and Polynesians, sub-Saharan Africans, Amerindians and Turkish people, so it marks no single race.

Race in the Indian Census

• Race entered Indian censuses through ethnographic surveys.
  • The 1901 Census, under Herbert Hope Risley, used measurements to rank castes and tribes into racial types.
  • The 1931 Census carried B. S. Guha’s anthropometric survey of racial affinities.
• Colonial ethnography often tied race to caste rank. It treated “Aryan” and “Dravidian” as races, a confusion of language with biology.
• From 1951, independent India stopped classifying citizens by race. From 1951 to 2011 the only caste and tribe groups counted were Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Census 2027 will enumerate all castes in its second phase (February 2027), the first full caste count since 1931. It still records no race.

Classical Racial Classifications of India

Herbert Risley’s Classification (1901)

• Herbert Hope Risley, Census Commissioner for 1901, published his results in The Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891), the 1901 Census report and The People of India (1908; second edition 1915).
• He relied mainly on the nasal index and the cephalic index, and recognised seven types:

• Physical traits given for each type:
  • Turko-Iranian (Afghanistan and Baluchistan, now outside India): very tall, fair, dark eyes, narrow nose.
  • Indo-Aryan: tall, fair, dark eyes, long head, prominent nose.
  • Scytho-Dravidian (also placed in Madhya Pradesh): broad head, fine nose, medium height, fair. Scythian traits were assigned to the upper strata and Dravidian traits to the lower.
  • Aryo-Dravidian: skin from light brown to black, long head.
  • Mongolo-Dravidian (with some Indo-Aryan elements; Brahmins and Kshatriyas of Bengal and Odisha): dark, round head, medium nose, average height.
  • Dravidian (also Madhya Pradesh): dark skin and eyes, long head, broad nose.
• In each mixed type he placed the “higher” castes closer to the incoming element and the “lower” castes closer to the older one. This tied his scheme to caste hierarchy.
• Criticism:
  • It mixed linguistic labels (Aryan, Dravidian) with racial ones. Dhirendra Nath Majumdar argued it was more a linguistic than a racial division.
  • It ignored any Negrito element.
  • Its claims of Scythian invasions behind western broad-headedness, and of a Mongolo-Dravidian origin of Bengalis, were not supported.
  • Measurement techniques were unstandardised.

A. C. Haddon’s Classification (1924)

• Alfred Cort Haddon disagreed with Risley and, in The Races of Man (1924), described India’s people as layers:
  • the pre-Dravidian jungle tribes, the oldest stratum;
  • the Dravidians, long-headed and dark;
  • the Indo-Aryans, long-headed and fair;
  • the Indo-Alpines, broad-headed;
  • the Mongolians of the Himalaya and the north-east.

J. H. Hutton’s Classification (1931)

• John Henry Hutton, Census Commissioner for 1931, held that all of India’s races came from outside. He listed them in the order of arrival:
  • Negrito: the oldest, now surviving mainly in the Andamans, with traces elsewhere.
  • Proto-Australoid: widespread among tribal peoples.
  • Early Mediterranean: in the south and the tribal belt; credited with early farming and megalithic practice. They spoke an agglutinative tongue, from which he derived the Austro-Asiatic languages.
  • Advanced Mediterranean: a later wave, from Eastern Europe in his view, with metal-working and the ability to build city-states; linked with the Indus cities.
  • Alpine (Armenoid): the source of broad-headedness in the west. He gave these people a Dravidian tongue, and held that in the third millennium BCE a broad-headed people from the Iranian plateau and the Pamirs, perhaps speaking a Dardic language, flooded the western end of this civilisation.
  • Nordic (Vedic Aryans): arriving in the second millennium BCE, about 1500 BCE in his reckoning.
  • Mongoloid: entering from the east.

Egon von Eickstedt’s Classification (1934)

• Egon von Eickstedt, in Rassenkunde und Rassengeschichte der Menschheit (1934), grouped Indians by skin colour, physique and region into three main races:
  • Weddid (Ancient Indians): the Gondid of central India and the Malid of the south.
  • Melanid (Black Indians): including the Kolid of the northern Deccan forests (Munda, Ho, Santal). He considered this the oldest element.
  • Indid (New Indians): gracile and coarser types of the north and the plains.
• Accounts of the scheme differ: some count three main races with 18 sub-types, others add a fourth division, the Palaeo-Mongolid.

Other Schemes

• Vincenzo Giuffrida-Ruggeri (1921) and Sasanka Sekhar Sarkar (1961) also proposed racial schemes for India. Sarkar’s stressed an old Australoid base on which later elements were laid.
• D. N. Majumdar and later Indian anthropologists added blood-group and other serological data. These showed more overlap between “races” than body measurements had suggested, and prepared the way for genetic studies.

B. S. Guha’s Classification (1935, 1944)

• Biraja Sankar Guha of the Zoological Survey of India carried out the 1931 Census survey. It was based on 38 characters (18 measurements and 20 observations) recorded on 2,511 persons from 39 groups (men of 34 groups, women of 5), using standardised techniques.
• Results appeared in the Census report (1935) and in Racial Elements in the Population (1944). He recognised six main races with nine subtypes.
• This became the standard scheme in Indian anthropology and geography.

1. Negrito

• The word is the Spanish diminutive of negro, “little black person”.
• Traits: very short stature, frizzy or woolly hair, bulbous forehead, broad flat nose, thick everted lips, slightly protruding jaws, long arms, dark skin.
• Guha himself called the Negrito presence in mainland India controversial.
  • He traced a strain among the Kadar, Irula and Pulayan of the southern hills.
  • Others saw traces among some Naga groups.
  • Suggested traces also include the Bagdi of the Rajmahal hills (now Jharkhand), the Paniyan and Kurumba of the southern hills, the Urali of the Nilgiris, and the Angami Nagas and Khasi of the north-east. The Kadar live in the hills of Keralam (Kerala) and the Anamalai.
  • Some scholars thought the evidence too thin to prove any Negrito strain on the mainland. At most it left little trace.
  • Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Sumitra Mangesh Katre held that a Negroid people came from Africa and brought their speech with them.
• The clearest representatives are the Andaman islanders: the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese.
  • Similar-looking peoples live in the Malay Peninsula (Semang), southern Thailand (Maniq) and the Philippines (Aeta of Luzon, Ati of Panay and Negros, Batak of Palawan).
• Older writers saw them as remnants of the first expansion out of Africa, some 70,000 years ago, which pushed along the coasts of the Indian Ocean.
• Genome studies show the Andamanese descend from very early migrants out of Africa and are distantly related to the AASI of the mainland. Look-alike “Negrito” peoples across South-east Asia are closest to their own regional neighbours, not to one another.
  • One study places the Onge of Little Andaman closer to South-east Asians than to present-day South Asians. It finds that the Great Andamanese took in some recent admixture from neighbouring populations and share much ancestry with Malaysian Negrito groups.

2. Proto-Australoid

• Huxley’s term “Australoid” was adapted as “Proto-Australoid” by Roland B. Dixon in The Racial History of Man (1923).
  • The word arose in mid-nineteenth-century ethnology for peoples “of the type of native Australians”. Daniel John Cunningham‘s Text-book of Anatomy (1902) used it for the body form of Aboriginal Australians.
  • Other names in the literature: Australo-Melanesian and Austric.
• Traits: dark brown skin, wavy to curly hair, long head, low forehead, prominent brow ridges, broad nose with a depressed root, thick jaws, large palate and teeth, small chin, thick everted lips, abundant body hair, short stature. They resemble the Negrito except for the woolly hair.
• Guha found this element dominant among the tribes of central and southern India:
  • the Santal, Munda, Ho, Oraon, Juang, Savara and Kondh of the Chotanagpur–Odisha belt;
  • the Bhil of the west, the Chenchu of the Nallamala hills, and the Baiga of central India;
  • hill groups of the south such as the Urali, Kanikkar, Kurumba and Irula.
  • the Gond, Kol, Korwa, Kharwar, Bhumij and Malpaharia of the central highlands, and the Kadar, Paniyan, Mithuvan, Malayan and Yerava of the south.
  • The Veddah, Malavedan, Irula and Sholaga were taken as its truest representatives.
• Often called the pre-Dravidian element, it is linked in the older literature with the Austro-Asiatic (Munda) languages.
• Hutton brought this stock from the East Mediterranean (Palestine), soon after the Negritos. It pushed the Negritos into remoter country and mixed with them, more in the south than in the north. Some writers also give it a part, beside the Mediterraneans, in building the Indus cities.

3. Mongoloid

• The term “Mongolian race” goes back to Christoph Meiners (1785).
  • Meiners divided humanity into just two races, “Tartar-Caucasians” and “Mongolians”.
  • The name comes from the Mongols, an East-Central Asian people of Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia, also found as minorities elsewhere in China and in Russia.
  • The wider label was stretched to peoples of Asia, the Americas and the Pacific islands. An often-repeated estimate gave them 29% of world population in 2019, against 27% Negroid and 20% Caucasian. No real count exists, because race is not a measured unit.
  • John Langdon Down used “mongolism” in the 1860s, after the people of Mongolia, for what is now called Down’s syndrome. The term is obsolete and offensive.
• Traits: straight hair, sparse body and facial hair, oblique eyes with an epicanthic fold, broad flat face, high cheekbones, yellowish to light-brown skin.
• Guha’s two types:
  • Palaeo-Mongoloid, the older type:
    • long-headed forms in the sub-Himalayan belt and Assam (Sema Nagas, Limbus);
    • broad-headed forms such as the Lepchas and the Chakma and Magh of the Chittagong hills.
    • Today they correspond to the hill peoples of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya and Tripura.
  • Tibeto-Mongoloid: taller, broad-headed, lighter-skinned. They live in Sikkim, Bhutan, Ladakh, Lahaul–Spiti and Kinnaur: the Bhutias, Ladakhis and Tibetans.
  • Older accounts name the Angami Nagas as long-headed Palaeo-Mongoloids and the people of the Himalayan foothills from Kashmir to Assam as broad-headed ones. They describe the Palaeo type as medium in stature and light brown, with a medium nose and little body hair, and the Tibeto type as tall and light yellow, with a hairy body, long nose and flat face.
• Their languages are mostly Tibeto-Burman, though the Khasi speak an Austro-Asiatic tongue.
• Groups often cited in this element: the Lepcha, Bhutia and Limbu of Sikkim; the Garo, Khasi, Rabha and Bodo of Meghalaya and Assam; the Naga, Kuki, Mizo and Chakma of the eastern hills; the Adi, Nyishi and Monpa of Arunachal; and the Tharu of the Terai.
  • Also the Jaintia, Murmi and Dafla.
  • The Toda of the Nilgiris are sometimes listed here, but they speak a Dravidian language and belong with the south.
• Their entry is placed in the first millennium BCE and later, along river valleys from the east and over the Himalayan passes. Tibetan refugees after 1959 added a recent layer in Dharamshala, Karnataka and the hill States.
• Homeland and routes:
  • Most anthropologists placed the homeland in China. Groups moved south into the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia, and into India through the northern and eastern passes.
  • Hutton thought Myanmar largely Mongoloid, so streams passing through it carried this ancestry with them.
  • Some also suspect a Mongoloid-Melanesian intrusion from Oceania, to explain occasional Mongoloid traits in Tamil Nadu and Keralam.
  • Mongolian students in Tibet fled to India with the Tibetans after 1950 and 1959. Many settled at Kalimpong, West Bengal.

4. Mediterranean

• In older anthropology the Mediterranean was a branch of the “Caucasoid” race: medium stature, slender build, long head, dark hair and eyes, and skin from olive to dark brown.
• It was counted among India’s dominant racial strains, coming from the eastern Mediterranean or South-west Asia in the third and second millennia BCE.
  • The stock is credited with earlier forms of Austro-Asiatic speech and with the earliest form of Hinduism.
  • Its oldest branch first settled in the north-west and took up farming, then was pushed into central and southern India by later comers.
  • Once widespread across India, it came to be concentrated in the Dravidian south, where it still forms the bulk of the people.
• Guha’s three types:
  • Palaeo-Mediterranean: dark, medium stature, long narrow head. He found them among the Dravidian-speaking peoples of the south, such as Tamil and Telugu Brahmins and the Nairs of Cochin. They were thought to have come in the Neolithic and been pushed south of the Vindhyas.
  • Mediterranean: lighter-skinned, with a narrow prominent nose. Found in the Ganga plain, Maharashtra and Malabar (for example the Nambudiri Brahmins). They were often credited with building the Indus cities.
  • Oriental Mediterranean: like the Mediterranean but with a long convex nose. Found in Punjab, Sindh, Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.
  • Older accounts extend the Mediterranean type to Haryana and Punjab, and the Oriental type to Haryana and southern Uttarakhand.
• The English word “Dravidian” was introduced by Robert Caldwell in A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856). It is a language family name.
  • Caldwell took it from the Sanskrit dravida, used in Kumarila Bhatta‘s Tantravarttika for the southern regions. The word is traced to tamiz (Tamil); Prakrit forms include Damela, Dameda, Dhamila and Damila.
  • Dravidian speakers make up about a fifth of India’s people (19.6% in 2011, about 23.8 crore), mainly Tamils, Malayalis, Telugus and Kannadigas. An older estimate gave about 245 million native speakers worldwide.
  • Isolated pockets survive outside the south: Gondi and Kurukh in central India, Malto in the Rajmahal hills, and Brahui in Pakistan’s Balochistan. These suggest a wider spread before Indo-Aryan expanded.
  • Outside India they live in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Maldives are sometimes named too, but their language, Dhivehi, is Indo-Aryan.
  • Their origins remain debated: indigenous to the subcontinent, or with roots or influence from West Asia.
  • Risley drew the Dravidian domain from the Vindhyas to Kanniyakumari, bounded by the Ghats and reaching north to the Aravalli and the Rajmahal hills.
  • Traits listed for them in older accounts: medium to tall, skin from black to fair, plentiful and slightly curly hair, high forehead.
  • Some scholars, notably Asko Parpola, link the Indus script with an early Dravidian language. Genomic evidence shows the Indus people carried both Iranian-related and AASI ancestry, the same mix that later formed the ASI.

5. Western Brachycephals

• Broad-headed peoples of the western and some eastern coastal regions. Guha’s three types:
  • Alpinoid: medium stature, round face, prominent nose, light skin. Found among the Banias of Gujarat, the Kathis of Kathiawar and the Kayasthas of Bengal.
  • Dinaric: tall, long face, very long and often convex nose, darker skin. Found among Bengali and Kannada Brahmins and in Odisha and Coorg.
  • Armenoid: like the Dinaric but with a more prominent, narrow nose and marked occiput. The Parsis of Mumbai were taken as typical.
• They were thought to have entered from the west, through Baluchistan, Sindh and Gujarat.
  • Three routes are given for the three types:
    • Alpinoid: Baluchistan, Sindh, Kathiawar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu;
    • Dinaric: along the Ganga valley and its delta;
    • Armenoid: Chitral, Gilgit, Kashmir and Nepal.
  • This explains why the broad-headed belt also reaches parts of Kashmir, the Ganga delta and the south. The Parsis and the Kodavas (Coorgis) are its standard examples.
  • Older accounts also place the Alpinoid in Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Odisha.

6. Nordic

• Joseph Deniker first described a “nordique” type in Europe: tall, long-headed, fair, often with light eyes.
  • His traits: somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a long skull. He treated four other European groups (Northwestern, Sub-Nordic, Vistula and Sub-Adriatic) as intermediate to it.
• Guha placed a Nordic element in the north-west: Punjab, Rajasthan and the frontier, mixed with the Mediterranean.
  • The Kalash and other Kafir groups of Chitral are often cited.
  • Older lists name the Kho of Chitral, the Red Kafirs and the Khatash. In India it is linked with the upper castes of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, always in mixed form.
• It was linked with speakers of Indo-Aryan languages entering in the second millennium BCE. Their contribution to Indian philosophy and literature was stressed by older writers.
  • This was the last wave of migration, between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, said to have come from South-West Siberia through Central Asia.
  • Traits given: tall, long head and face, fair skin, a well-developed nose, strong build, blue or dark eyes and blond hair.

Critique of the Racial Approach

• Typology without biology: the schemes assumed pure ancestral types that mixed. Human variation is continuous, and the traits used (head and nose shape, skin colour) respond to climate and nutrition.
• Mixed categories: “Aryan”, “Dravidian” and “Scythian” are language or historical labels. Naming races after them confused speech with ancestry.
• Disagreement: the schemes recognised anything from three to seven races for the same population. This shows that the categories were arbitrary.
• Small and selective samples: a few castes and tribes stood for whole regions.
• Social misuse: linking race with caste rank lent pseudo-scientific support to hierarchy. It also fed “Aryan invasion” narratives built on race rather than on evidence.
• Physical change over time: stature and head form change with diet and living conditions within a few generations.
• The “Aryan” question: the old schemes pictured a fair “Aryan race” invading and subduing a dark “Dravidian race”. Genomic data support instead a gradual migration of Steppe-related people after 2000 BCE, which mixed with the existing population and probably brought Indo-European speech. The Indus people themselves lacked Steppe ancestry. “Aryan” survives only as a cultural and linguistic term of the Vedic texts.
• For these reasons modern anthropology treats the old races as historical classifications. It studies population history through genetics, archaeology and linguistics together.

Genesis and the Genomic View

Genesis of Racial Diversity in India

• Archaeological phases show long human presence:
  • Palaeolithic tool-makers across the peninsula, and the painted rock shelters of Bhimbetka (Madhya Pradesh), used from the Palaeolithic onwards;
  • Neolithic farming at Mehrgarh (Baluchistan) from about 7000 BCE, with wheat, barley, cattle and goats;
  • the Indus cities, at their height c. 2600–1900 BCE;
  • the Vedic period, when Indo-Aryan speech spread across the north;
  • historical waves recorded in texts, coins and inscriptions.
• Position at a crossroads: India lay on the southern route out of Africa and between West, Central, East and South-east Asia. Almost every major population movement in Asia touched it.
• Gateways and corridors:
  • The north-western passes (Khyber, Bolan, Gomal) let in Iranian-related groups, Steppe pastoralists and later Persians, Greeks, Shakas, Kushanas, Hunas, Turks, Afghans and Mughals.
  • The north-eastern gateway and the Brahmaputra valley brought Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman speakers.
  • Sea routes brought Arabs, Jews, Syrian Christians, Parsis, Africans and Europeans to the coasts.
• Attraction of fertile land: the Indus–Ganga plain and the deltas offered food surplus, which drew settlers and conquerors and supported dense populations.
• Refuges and isolation: hills, plateaus, forests and islands sheltered older groups from later waves. The tribal belts and the Andamans therefore keep the oldest lineages.
• Mixing, then closure:
  • For thousands of years newcomers intermarried with earlier peoples, producing the ANI–ASI mixtures.
  • From about 2,000 years ago, caste endogamy sealed groups off. This multiplied genetic and cultural distinctiveness, and is why India has thousands of small, distinct communities rather than a few large ones.
• Environmental adaptation: skin colour, stature and other traits adjusted over generations to sunlight, climate and diet. This produced visible variation unrelated to deep ancestry.
• Social absorption: conquerors and migrants were absorbed as new jatis or clans (Rajput clans, many trading and artisan castes). Conversion added new religious communities without changing ancestry.

ANI and ASI

• David Reich, Kumarasamy Thangaraj, Lalji Singh and colleagues (Nature, 2009) analysed 25 Indian groups. They found that almost all are a mixture of two ancestral populations:
  • Ancestral North Indians (ANI): related to people of West Asia, Central Asia and Europe;
  • Ancestral South Indians (ASI): distinct from any population outside India, distantly related to the Andamanese.
  • ANI ancestry ranged from about two-fifths to seven-tenths. It was higher in the north-west, in Indo-European speakers and in traditionally upper castes.
• Priya Moorjani and colleagues (2013) dated the mixing to 4,200–1,900 years ago. After that, endogamy became strict and froze each group’s genetic profile.
  • This is why many Indian groups carry founder-event signatures: each group descends from a small number of ancestors and has married within itself since.
  • Nathan Nakatsuka and colleagues (2017) found many Indian groups with founder events as strong as or stronger than those of well-known isolated populations such as Finns. This raises the risk of recessive genetic diseases within particular communities, and makes community-level genetic screening useful.

Ancient DNA: Narasimhan and the Rakhigarhi Genome

• Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues (Science, 2019) used ancient DNA from South and Central Asia to explain how ANI and ASI formed:
  • AASI (Ancient Ancestral South Indians): hunter-gatherers descended from the first modern humans to reach India more than 50,000 years ago.
  • Iranian-related ancestry mixed with AASI to form the Indus Periphery Cline, the likely population of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
  • After the decline of the Indus cities, this population:
    • mixed with groups carrying Steppe pastoralist ancestry in the north-west to form the ANI. Steppe ancestry entered after 2000 BCE, probably with Indo-European languages.
    • mixed with more AASI-related groups to the south-east to form the ASI, whose closest living descendants are tribal groups of the south.
• Vasant Shinde and colleagues (Cell, 2019) sequenced an individual buried at Rakhigarhi (Haryana), c. 2800–2300 BCE:
  • the genome had no Steppe ancestry and no Anatolian-farmer ancestry;
  • its Iranian-related ancestry came from a lineage that split from Iranian-plateau groups before 12,000 years ago, before farming began there;
  • so farming in South Asia was not brought by a mass migration of western farmers. It grew from local hunter-gatherer populations in contact with the west.

Other Strands and Recent Studies

• Austro-Asiatic (Munda) and Tibeto-Burman speakers carry additional East and South-east Asian ancestry, matching the eastern origin of their languages.
• Small, isolated groups such as the Andamanese show very old lineages and strong genetic drift.
• Communities from outside are also visible:
  • the Parsis, with Iranian links;
  • the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews;
  • the Siddi of Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra, of East African descent. They came over centuries as traders, soldiers and enslaved people across the Arabian Sea. One of them, Malik Ambar, became the leading general of the Ahmadnagar sultanate in the early seventeenth century. Siddis are a Scheduled Tribe in Gujarat and Karnataka.
• The GenomeIndia project (Nature Genetics, 2025) sequenced 9,772 genomes from 83 populations (30 tribal, 53 non-tribal). It confirmed four major ancestry components (ANI, ASI, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman), strong structuring by language and geography, and high homozygosity from endogamy in many groups.

Ancestry and Race in India Today

Race in Indian Society

• Race has no legal standing in India. Article 15 of the Constitution bars discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, and Article 16 does the same in public employment.
• Yet prejudice based on appearance persists:
  • colourism, the preference for fair skin, in marriage markets and advertising;
  • discrimination against people from the north-east in metropolitan cities. After the death of Nido Taniam in Delhi in 2014, the Bezbaruah Committee recommended stronger legal protection and outreach.
  • prejudice against people of African descent, both Indian Siddis and foreign students.
• Caste and race are separate ideas. India has argued in international forums that caste discrimination is not racial discrimination, while others link the two. Genetics supports the separation: castes differ in ancestry proportions but are all mixtures.
• Teaching race today means teaching why the old categories failed, and what population history really shows.

Spatial Pattern of Ancestry

• North-west to south-east gradient: ANI and Steppe-related ancestry are highest in the north-west (Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Kashmir) and decline towards the south and east. ASI-related ancestry rises in the same direction.
• Caste gradient within regions: in most regions, traditionally higher castes carry somewhat more ANI ancestry than others. Every group is still mixed.
• Central and southern tribal belt: the highest ASI and AASI-related shares are among the Dravidian- and Munda-speaking tribes of Chotanagpur, Bastar, the Eastern Ghats and the Nilgiri–Western Ghats hills. The areas long called “Proto-Australoid” were refuges of the oldest ancestry.
• North-east and Himalaya: East Asian-related ancestry dominates among Tibeto-Burman speakers, and mixes with South Asian ancestry in the valleys of Assam.
• Austro-Asiatic pockets (Santal, Munda, Ho, Khasi): South Asian ancestry with a clear South-east Asian component.
• Andaman Islands: distinct, very ancient lineages in tiny populations. The Great Andamanese numbered only a few dozen by the late twentieth century, and the Sentinelese remain uncontacted.
• Deccan and the south: a blend of ASI-rich and ANI-related ancestry. Castes differ in proportions, and many endogamous groups show founder effects.
• Ganga plain: the most thoroughly mixed region, where every wave from the north-west met older populations.
• Indo-Aryan-speaking tribes such as the Bhil of the Aravalli–Vindhya–Satpura hills carry tribal ancestry profiles despite speaking an Indo-Aryan language. Language shift is common in Indian history.
• Western coast and cities: small communities of Iranian, Jewish, Arab and African descent, products of sea trade.
• The map of ancestry follows the corridors and refuges of Indian geography: open plains mixed newcomers, while hills, forests and islands preserved older layers. Even so, no region holds a “pure” race.