Authors: Patrick French
One of the more extraordinary things about the Tamil Brahmin community was the way in which it had managed, despite numbering only 2 million or so, to extend itself in India and around the world to remarkable effect. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar had more in common than the similarity of their names: they were the only Indians to have won a Nobel prize in science, and they were all Tamil Brahmins, and all Iyers.
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Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel for his work on the theoretical structure of stars and was the originator of the Chandrasekhar limit, was also the nephew of Raman, who gave science the Raman effect. “Venki” Ramakrishnan, the winner of the Chemistry prize in 2009 for his work on the function of the ribosome, left India after graduation. Returning after the Nobel award, he professed to be baffled by the “Indian phenomenon” of mass applause and the elevation of heroes. “We are all human beings, and our nationality is simply an accident of birth … The fact that I am of Indian origin is even less important.”
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Many of his listeners would have disagreed, believing still in the concept of inheritance—that birth was not accidental.
While many aspects of Indian caste prejudice have declined, an emphasis on group identity has strengthened, with caste being a way of uniting people socially and politically. An article published in 2009 mentioned that childless couples were asking sperm banks to label the donations by caste. One doctor said that although potential parents knew sperm donors had
to remain anonymous, they were often “insistent, almost fanatical, about caste.” The couples apparently wanted to maintain “healthy blood grouping” by making sure the biological father came from the same community as the mother. Clinics would usually pass on this information verbally. One would-be mother, Anuradha Rai, an Internet marketing manager and a Bhumihar, said she was not greatly concerned by the height, features or even the IQ of the father. “My husband felt if the sperm donor was from a different caste, the baby would not get the right genes.”
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The right genes: it was an interesting concept. Could caste be genetic? In India you can sometimes guess someone’s community from their physical appearance, so the idea was not completely outlandish. A few years ago I was in Lucknow airport with a Muslim man who had lived in the city his whole life. He said that by looking at a face—leave aside more obvious markers like clothing and headgear—he could tell which caste and place in Uttar Pradesh someone came from. I put him to the test; he got three out of three right. It occurs to me now that these encounters, the pair of us accosting people at random to ask about their family background, would be less straightforward in other countries (in England you would risk assault or arrest). Only in India are you asked by passengers within moments of boarding a train: “You are from? What is your good name? You are married? Do you have issue? What is your salary?”
Might it be possible to determine caste through genetic testing, in the same way that aspects of ethnic heritage can be established through mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA analysis? The U.S. company 23andMe was pioneering retail genomics, identifying more than half a million genetic markers which suggested what diseases and conditions a person might have inherited. Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin of Google, founded 23andMe: its “personal genome service” enabled you to explore your genome online. You could “get to know your DNA” by spitting in a tube and sending it to a laboratory for analysis. But could caste be “proved”? If so, the consequences would be endless, and ranged from angry family scenes (“Your parents said you were a Punjabi Khatri girl!”) to students who wished to come from a lower caste in order to qualify for admissions quotas (Kaun Banega OBC?).
I found some bizarre and boastful websites dedicated to Indian genetic genealogy; a few sold “caste testing kits” for a lot of money and seemed to rely on crank science. They did not have the scientific rigour of companies like 23andMe, but rather played with a strand of thinking that was still influential in India. A blogger on
Sanghparivar.org
summed it up: “A man
gets birth in a particular genetic lineage (family) on the basis of his previous karmas (thoughts and actions). Birth is not accidental.” The husband and wife must be of the same caste to “maintain the original biological-genetic strain of the family.” Back in Ashoka’s time, it seemed, too many men became celibate under Buddhist influence. “Thus, their seeds were lost. Those bio-qualities were lost forever! The girls had no choice but to marry inferior men. Then, the generations which followed were genetically inferior. They did not have the valour, strength and ability to carry the mighty Vedic sciences on their shoulders. They were weak. Soon, India collapsed. India became a hunting ground for invaders.”
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The campus of the IGIB, India’s secretive Institute of Genomics & Integrative Biology, is set in a leafy part of north Delhi, where the wide roads and clean pavements are a relic of “Civil Lines”—a colonial-era term used to distinguish military streets from the civilian. I arrived on the Delhi metro, coming up a shiny new metal escalator into blinding sunlight, but the last five minutes of the journey were done most easily by cycle rickshaw, which offered the uneasy sight of malnourished calves pedalling along the nourished.
Dr. Arijit Mukhopadhyay was a specialist in eye genetics, a small, quick man in his mid-thirties with fitted trousers, a short-sleeved shirt and closed-toed sandals. “My interest is in RGC death,” he said. “RGC [retinal ganglion cell] death is the final cause of glaucoma, a disease of the visual nerves culminating in blindness.”
Mukhopadhyay was one of only two people authorized to speak about an extraordinary project that was under way here. A consortium of mainly young scientists was attempting to unravel the complete genetic map of the Indian peoples. It was an ambitious concept in a country with over one billion inhabitants, several thousand endogamous groups (who married only within their community) and more than 300 distinct functioning languages. The project had been conceived by Professor Samir Brahmachari, a bio-physicist, and from the start he had realized he was stepping on dangerous ground. The information they were liable to discover about the origins of communities might have political, religious or caste consequences, and if mishandled could lead to conflict and even violence. The media had already run several stories which, in the view of the IGIB, distorted their research.
“We are trying to draw a genetic landscape of India and use it as a canvas to identify disease genes and genetic markers,” said Dr. Mukhopadhyay cautiously from behind his desk. “We will learn which groups are prone to particular diseases or do not react to certain drugs. We are in the early days
of an idea that has huge implications. We have looked at fifty-five populations so far, across the length and breadth of the country. This is the discovery stage. For example, we found that susceptibility to HIV is lower in a certain group in the north-west of India. A particular protective form of the gene has stayed within that population, because they are endogamous. The more outbred their community becomes, the more it will spread.”
He showed me a bar chart and a map of India covered in circles of different colours, some like pie charts.
“You can see here the Indian peoples fall into four major language families: Indo-European, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman and Dravidian.” The first group spread across the upper and middle reaches of the map, the Austro-Asiatics (the tribals or Adivasis) were clustered in the centre and east, the Dravidians covered the south as far up as Andhra Pradesh and the Tibeto-Burmans were confined to small border areas to the north.
“Now look at these. This stuff was very unexpected.” He pointed at the coloured circles on the map. “You will see that Indians are more similar than you would think across the country. There are membership exchanges within these four groups. It’s all mixing up, even with the Dravidians.”
Now I understood the circles: they showed genetic groups where you would least expect to find them. In Kashmir, there were people who were genetically similar to Dravidians. In Gujarat and eastern Orissa the same was true, though the markers were weaker. In parts of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in the south of the country, the situation was reversed: here were Indo-Europeans. In Madhya Pradesh in central India, you could find groups whose ancestors had come from the Himalayas. So people who thought they were a product of a place where their family had lived for infinite generations were genetically closer to Indians who lived a thousand miles away, and spoke a different language.
When I pointed to a spot on the map and asked Dr. Mukhopadhyay exactly where it was, he hesitated.
“We don’t say the place names. We agreed, because of the political risks, not to release the ID of the blood-sampled groups—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. This is uncomfortable territory.” He touched two red circles near Pakistan. “They probably would not eat in one another’s home. How deep are our genetic relationships, and yet how different are our social relationships. The cultural structures we are following are new: it takes time for practices like not marrying into another community to come out genetically. It takes a few thousand years.”
Tens of thousands of years?
“No, thousands of years.”
So with all this mixing and complexity, could you test for caste?
“There is no scientific basis to say you could have a caste gene. For a start, in our research we use samples of fifty or a hundred people, not individuals. If you test a population group in India and look at twelve genetic markers—DNA sequence variations—you have nearly a 100 percent chance of knowing if they are tribals or not, and an 85 percent chance of establishing their language group. The data would not tell you the caste, because there is no basis. You can’t say who is ‘superior’ or ‘inferior.’ I travelled to Pune to take some blood samples and one person—I should tell you that he was a political type—said to me: ‘You can take my sample, and prove that I am the supreme quality of human in India.’ There’s a strange dynamic in our society.”
Dr. Mukhopadhyay had to leave for a meeting and introduced me to his colleague Dr. Mitali Mukerji. She was the only other person authorized to speak about the project.
“It seems like a lot of Bengalis work here,” I said.
Dr. Mukhopadhyay smiled. “I am a native of Calcutta. If a job is advertised, seven out of ten applicants are Bengali. Some say, ‘Ah, Bengalis are more clever because they eat a lot of fish and get omega-3 acids.’ I tell them: it’s not like that, clever Bengalis go to academia and clever north Indians go to commerce.”
Dr. Mukerji specialized in molecular genetics and coordinated the project across six institutes in the country. “I considered working abroad, but there was a lot to do on genomics here,” she told me. “We were studying the history of diseases and realized we needed a proper genetic landscape map of India to do our work. Take Huntington’s disease as an example. It is caused by DNA mutation and can get worse with each generation. It’s very rare in Asia. It came to India by two routes, one from the north and the other probably through Mysore at around the time of Tipu Sultan. There is evidence that the form of Huntington’s disease which we see in south India originated in Ireland, and that it probably came from soldiers who were made captives by Tipu Sultan.”
It was extraordinary to think of scientists being able to deduce this; my own ancestors included Irish soldiers, and I shuddered at the thought of them being captured by Tipu. I was still digesting what I had heard about genetics in India and asked Dr. Mukerji what had surprised her most during the ongoing research project.
“We soon realized there was not a prototype Indian. People appear to
have come in from places that are now Iran, Burma, central Asia, Afghanistan. This supports the idea of waves of settlers from various directions. There are many admixtures, whereas by comparison Caucasians are homogenous. India is like a melting pot compared to other Asian countries. If you trace mitochondrial DNA, it shows that women moved around and probably reproduced with other communities. Marriage within your group is more recent in India.”
What she said was not good news for racial theorists or for Indians who saw their position in the hierarchy of caste as being ordained by scripture and tradition. Had Kshatriyas not married Kshatriyas and Brahmins married Brahmins forever? Hinduism does not depend on a linear concept of time and has no single sacred book—it is not a “revealed” religion like Christianity, Islam or Judaism—but it has an overwhelming sense of its own antiquity. If you leave aside for a moment the influential reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which sought to strip out distractions such as caste from religion, most variants of Hindu practice stress that rituals have been done by Brahmin priests in a particular way for aeons. If the ancient social order was not divinely ordained and has not existed since the dawn of civilization, it was invented by humans for a social purpose. This has been a progressive point of view for many years, but the IGIB project threatened to give it a proof and validity.
In the months after my visit to the IGIB, rival scientific reports were published in different parts of the world, including a study which claimed, on the basis of a much smaller sample survey, that India’s caste groups had been endogamous for millennia. This was widely reported, and any future research which appears to show that caste is genetically identifiable will certainly receive publicity. The notion of such a root distinction appeals both to upper-caste traditionalists and to lower-caste political leaders who claim they represent the descendants of India’s original inhabitants (whom they imagine were beaten down and exploited by fair-skinned Aryan invaders).
Dr. Mukerji stressed the project was by no means complete. “There’s so much we are still discovering. Skin pigmentation is only the property of a few genes, so you just need to flip some genes to get from dark to light skin. It will be some years before we understand this fully. I was surprised that people we tested from Ladakh, Sikkim and the north-east were so similar, and that some Kashmiris may originally have been Dravidians who were pushed up to the north. Upper-caste Hindus seem to be much closer to Muslims than to the high castes from other places. We need to study in more detail in the south, where the communities have remained
more distinct. Adivasis are noticeably different. They may be connected to Australian aborigines.”