Why the Rakhigarhi site is the source of heated debate about our origins

Genetic material from the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi has given rise to conflicting theories about our origins. Ritwik Sharma examines the debate

“What are these stars on the ground?” our guide in Rakhigarhi village in Haryana quizzes us. The tiny “stars” are shining bright as the midday sun beats down on the barren mounds under which lie remnants of India's first urban civilisation. Before we can guess, he tells us they are shards of human skeletons.
 

When unbroken skeletons are exhumed from the necropolis of the ancient Harappan city and studied, as that of one woman buried over four millennia ago recently testified, they can reveal a great deal. And lend further fuel to the debate centering around which of us can claim to be “Aryans” or “original Indians”.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the theory of an “Aryan invasion” (alternatively, “migration”) gained wide currency. The hypothesis is that people from Central Asia or Europe succeeded the Harappans after the mysterious decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in the second millennium BCE. They brought Indo-European languages into South Asia from the Pontic Steppes (which stretches from the Black Sea eastwards to the Caspian Sea). These people, loosely referred to as “Aryans”, are believed to have developed the Sanskrit language and set the foundation of Hinduism.

This view is challenged by an alternative indigenist position that is crucial to Hindutva politics. This view asserts that the Aryans are indigenous Indians, that the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation does not predate but segues into the Vedic Civilisation and that Indo-European languages originated from India and in fact radiated outward.

The Rakhigarhi researchers, who sequenced the genome of one sample, published a paper titled “An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists and Iranian Farmers”, in the scientific journal Cell earlier this month. It concluded that the people of the mature Indus Valley Civilisation, spread over northwestern South Asia from 2600 to 1900 BCE, lacked ancestry from the Steppe pastoralists. “A genome from the Indus Valley Civilisation is from a population that is the largest source for South Asians. The population has no detectable ancestry from Steppe pastoralists or from Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting farming in South Asia arose from local foragers rather than from large-scale migration from the West,” it read.

Confusingly, reports in the media have differed on the question of whether the study supports or debunks the theory of Aryan migration. While some reported that the study countered the Hindutva theory of Aryans as indigenous Indians, others took it to suggest there was no Aryan migration after the Indus Valley Civilisation. At a recent press conference, the paper's lead scientist, Vasant S Shinde, senior archaeologist and vice chancellor of Deccan College in Pune, and Niraj Rai, one of the main authors and head of the ancient DNA lab at Lucknow's Birbal Sahni Institute for Palaeosciences, advanced the contentious out-of-India migration theory.

Photo: Sanjay K Sharma

Shinde says there are limitations of data sourced from only one skeleton, but that it informs us about ancestry “before and after Harappans”. According to him, early farmers interacted with farmers from Central Asia. “There was some small movement of people from Central Asia and mixing of their gene with the population here. But it doesn't change the ancestry of the people here. There was no attack that replaced the entire population,” he tells Business Standard. He claims there is strong archaeological evidence of continuity, where Harappans moved to other parts of South Asian cities after the decline of the civilisation. “We find a part of the Steppe gene (the r1a1, also called the "Aryan" gene) in North India. That is because it is close to the Central Asian region,” he says.

Rai claims that "culturally as well as archaeologically we are not finding much impact from Central Asia in the Indus Valley". The material culture of sites of the civilisation such as Rakhigarhi, Dholavira and Lothal (the latter two are in Gujarat) is indigenous, is in continuity from mature Harappan times and is reflected even today, he says. “There was no Steppe gene flow in mature Harappan times. Now people are arguing that Steppe people came to India later, around 1500 BCE. But in modern-day data we find that there is no mass replacement of the genetic pool,” he says, adding that genetically one can't explain the advent of Vedic culture yet.

Surbhi Gupta, an expert in architectural history, heritage conservation and redevelopment, who is curating a museum at Rakhigarhi, cautions against being wedded to one hypothesis. “History is a weave between story and fact... You can never have 100 per cent research, but always find new things. So I think it's important to be agile in our viewpoints.”

Former director of the Archaeological Survey of India Amarendra Nath disapproves of any jingoistic talk that the Rakhigarhi study has sparked, even as he emphasises that there has been a continuity of practices. Nath led excavations in Rakhigarhi over three seasons starting in 1997. A report authored by him in Man and Environment journal in 2015 on Harappan interments in Rakhigarhi noted that “evidence collected from funerary pits of cemetery area (RGR-7, one of the mounds) helps in the reconstruction of beliefs pertaining to life after death and assists in understanding a pattern of mortuary rites followed by the Harappans at Rakhigarhi and elsewhere...”

Photo: Sanjay K Sharma

Among its conclusions are the cemetery site revealing special mortuary practices accorded to adult females as noted by a high percentage of earthenware as compared to adult male burials, and that the verses from the Rigveda (dated to roughly between 1500 and 1200 BCE) supplement the evidence of religious beliefs of an elite class. The skeletons exhumed were also comparable to the modern population of undivided Punjab, it observed. Nath contends that the new Rakhigarhi DNA study only substantiates earlier publications that found skeletal remains matching with the local population.

The latest Rakhigarhi paper published in Cell shows that ancient South Asian farmers represented in the Indus Valley Civilisation Cline (a measurable gradient in a single character, or biological trait, of a species across its geographical range) had negligible ancestry related to ancient Anatolian farmers. They also had an Iranian-related ancestry component distinct from sampled ancient farmers and herders in Iran. The paper adds that while the study is sufficient “to demonstrate that this ancestry profile was a common feature of the Indus Valley Civilisation, a single sample — or even the gradient of 12 likely samples we have identified — cannot fully characterise a cosmopolitan ancient civilisation”.

However, it also makes a point that is at odds with Shinde and Rai's spoken arguments on the question of migration. It reads: “A natural route for Indo-European languages to have spread into South Asia is from Eastern Europe via Central Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, a chain of transmission that did occur as has been documented in detail with ancient DNA. The fact that the Steppe pastoralist ancestry in South Asia matches that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe (but not Western Europe) provides additional evidence for this theory, as it elegantly explains the shared distinctive features of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages.”

The Rakhigarhi report, together with a paper (“The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia”) published virtually simultaneously in the journal Science, unambiguously talk about migrations from the Central Asian Steppe that brought Indo-European languages to India between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE, points out Tony Joseph, journalist and author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From (2018). “If the spread of people from the Steppe in this period (first half of the second millennium BCE) was a conduit for the spread of South Asian Indo-European languages, then it is striking that there are so few material culture similarities between the Central Steppe and South Asia in the Middle to Late Bronze Age (i.e., after the middle of the second millennium BCE). Indeed, the material culture differences are so substantial that some archaeologists report no evidence of a connection. However, lack of material culture connections does not provide evidence against spread of genes...,” it reads.

"The Science paper is saying there is no surprise that there is no material culture change that is reflected in archaeology because such change need not always happen; that it did not happen in Europe when the migration of Steppe pastoralists changed European demography; and that lack of evidence for material culture change is not evidence against migrations," explains Joseph.

The contents of the two reports betray equivocation in the scientists' claim of there being no migration into India post-Harappa. For instance, the Science paper says: “Groups that view themselves as being of traditionally priestly status, including Brahmins...tend (with exceptions) to have more Steppe ancestry than expected on the basis of ANI (Ancient North Indians)-ASI mixture, providing an independent line of evidence for a Steppe origin for South Asia’s Indo-European languages.”

Harvard University geneticist David Reich, who is involved in both studies, notes that they show that Steppe pastoralists entered South Asia from the north 4,000-3,500 years ago, and are responsible for 0-30 per cent of the genetic makeup of South Asians (varying widely between groups). “It also shows that such ancestry was absent in the 12 individuals we analysed who were likely from the Harappan Civilisation (one from Rakhigarhi, and 11 individuals excavated from Gonur in Turkmenistan and Shahr-i-Sokhta in Iran who we show were likely recent migrants from the Harappan Civilisation). Thus, the ancestry became thoroughly mixed into the northwestern part of South Asia (where it is ubiquitous today although nowhere more than 30 per cent) only after the period of these samples (4,000-5,500 years ago),” he adds. The suggestion of Harappan migrants in Iran also underlines the multi-directional history of human migration.

Back in Rakhigarhi, our guide who requests anonymity is dismissive of claims that the study shows “Aryans” were native to India. “It is a lie that suits the Hindutva agenda of the government.” His concerns relate to his immediate environment — such as getting Unesco world heritage site status for Rakhigarhi to boost the village's economy.