De-link Caste and Colonial system

Today’s Deepak Lal’s article throws many lights on “Caste, gene and history wars”. Of course, the political and left fanatic will ignore, then that is not our problem. A friend of mine recently mentioned that the “left people are not interested in fundamental issues”. Unfortunately, it also true in non left! Actually the kind of education system we have is too not enough to allow the student to question the ‘fundamental issue’.

Some excerpts:

• In the late 1960s, whilst visiting the Padmanabhaswamy temple in Trivandrum, the usual pandas accosted me. One came up to me and enquired about my origins: my jati and gotra. He then rattled off the names of about ten generations of my ancestors. He then asked for the names of the spouses and children of myself and my cousins. He did not ask for any money and was only interested in updating his records. Unless he had imagined my ancestors (and I could check the veracity of at least the last four), this would put my caste-based ancestry into the 15th century!

• A recent novel study (Reich et al: “Reconstructing Indian population history”, Nature, 24 September 2009) by American and Indian geneticists does just that. Though their sample is small — but diversified by language, region and caste — their conclusion on caste seems secure. They conclude: “Six Indo-European and Dravidian-speaking groups have evidence of founder events dating to more than 50 generations ago, including the Vysya at more than 100 generations ago. Strong endogamy (average gene flow less than 1 in 30 per generation) must have applied since then to prevent the genetic signatures of founder events from being erased by gene flow. Some Indian historians have argued that ‘caste’ in modern India is an ‘invention’ of colonialism …However, our results indicate that many current distinctions among groups are ancient and that strong endogamy must have shaped marriage patterns in India for thousands of years (ps.489=90)”. So much for the post-modern turn in Indian history!

Prof Lal’s 2002 articles are here 1 and 2