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Contested domains of biological similarities and sociocultural diversity

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Abstract

Scientists and social scientists often read the same text differently. They also construct categories having the same nomenclature independently. Many of us also work in isolated domains, rarely reading texts researched and documented by others. We conduct our research within the defined format of our disciplines. We engage with others only when contestations emerge and challenge some of the rooted paradigms of each other’s disciplines. This paper reflects the reactions of a social scientist to texts on population genetics and attempts to arrive at the genetic theory of the origin of ethnological history of human populations in India. Inadvertently, most of these intensely researched and passionately documented DNA evidence present a serious challenge to the discourse of cultural pluralism and social diversity that the humanist perspective of science and social science takes pride in documenting. This paper is based on secondary resource materials and the methodology adopted is that of narrative research.

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Notes

  1. To add to this equation, Mukherjee cites scientific evidence to suggest that while the human chromosome has 20,687 genes in total, it is only 1796 more than worms, 12,000 fewer than corn, and 25,000 genes fewer than that of rice or wheat (ibid: 322).

  2. I embark on this reconstruction as a reflexive recourse: to place before you that in the formative years of my training and in my nascent thoughts, I noticed plurality and diversity of populations and cultures.

  3. Thinking loud: if I tell the same respondents that they are genetically similar, would they give up their cultural prejudices?

  4. Barth (1969: 14) wrote: ‘when defined as an ascriptive and exclusive group the nature, of continuity of ethnic units is clear, it dependence on the maintenance of a boundary. the cultural features that signal the boundary may change, and the cultural characteristics of the members may likewise be transformed..’.

  5. This is the title of the India Chapter in David Reich’s (2018) recent book titled Who we are and How we got here.

  6. This question is best answered by a population geneticist but my query is, will this be able to avert cultural and social mayhem and, as Vir Sanghavi asked, ‘political bombshell’?

  7. This is the crux of this debate! The theme of the volume is to explore dialogical possibilities that break communication barriers of structured methodologies and validation strategies.

  8. According to the website mhrd.gov.in, there are 574 languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan family, 153 languages in the Dravidian category, 226 to Sino-Tibetan and 65 belonging to the Austro-Asiatic family. When we equate these with genetic identity and endogamy, how do we account for these language variations?

  9. Kawoosa (30.08.2018, Hindustan Times), in the disaggregated analysis of the linguistic diversity in 640 districts of India, reports that there are only 21 districts in the country, where the effective number of languages spoken is greater than or equal to four. In 428 districts, effective number of languages spoken is less than or equal to 1.5. The report also acknowledges that when dialects are taken into consideration than for some states, the number goes up to even 7.7.

  10. Article 366(25) of the constitution of India refers to Scheduled Tribes as those communities, who are scheduled in accordance with Article 342 of the constitution.

  11. It is these vulnerable groups in the Andaman Nicobar Islands that are particularly targeted for the genome studies projects. It is of concern as the population of the groups inhabiting these islands has declined significantly (Only 380 Jarwa, 101 Onge, 44 Great Andamanese, 229 Shom Pen and 15 Sentineles were recorded in the 2011 Census).

  12. This view finds prominence in the works of anthropologists GS Ghurye in Caste and race in India (1931) and DN Majumdar Races and cultures of India.

  13. In 1931, when the colonial administration tried to collect it, the Congress protested and the exercise was abandoned (for details refer: The politics of data: 1931 and 2015 by Dipankar De Sarkar) livemint.com accessed on 4th January 2019.

  14. Releasing economic data of the survey in 2015, the finance minister said ‘ the name of the report indicates (caste) but caste is not reflected in our data’ (cf. Hindustan Times, 3rd July 2015 hindustantimes.com accessed on 4th January 2018).

  15. But these reported figures were loaded with anomalies and when states were asked to cross-verify it, there were more than 8 lakh errors found in the data as reported in the Deccan Herald, 17 July 2015.

  16. Munshi and Rosenzweig (2005) believe that one reason for the formation of new castes was geographical mobility (https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Workshops-Seminars/Labor-Public/rosenzweig-050916.pdf).

  17. This is not the place to comment about the quality or objectivity of the data or interpretations made by Risley that was called by the critics as ‘the apotheosis of pseudo-scientific racism’ (Bates 1995: 237; Schwartz 2010: 68).

  18. The fieldwork for the project was started in October 1985 and lasted until 1994. In all 43 volumes are published (11 are national series and 32 are state series data).

  19. KS Singh Festschrift volume People of India: Bio-cultural dimensions (1993).

  20. In the same volume Biman Kumar Das Gupta (1993) in his article titled People of India and Anthropological Survey of India informs us: ‘project data on 4635 communities have been collected from as many as 3581 villages, and 1011 towns and cities of 421 districts of India. A complete draft list of the communities was made by various regional offices on the basis of lists of Scheduled castes and Scheduled Tribes and other communities obtained from the Ministry of Home and also names collected from Census reports and gazetteers ’ (ibid: 358–359).

  21. I do recollect having expressed similar apprehensions on this account to KS Singh (architect of this massive People of India project), on several occasions.

  22. Dumont (1980: 205) writes ‘great separations of the caste system survived conversion’.

  23. One of the criticisms of the People of India project (1992) was that it was a part of the nationalistic agenda. Commenting on both the projects (1908, 1992) Laura Jenkins (2003: 1144) writes ‘The people of India projects colonial and postcolonial, and the varied identity claims made about them, in them and through them demonstrate the intertwined nature of social identities and state identification’.

  24. Anderson (1991) calls nation–state: ‘imagined community’.

  25. ‘The dominant feature of India’s social history is the incursion from age to age into a single enormous land of different races possessing different standards of culture’ (Mukherjee 1937).

  26. David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India have probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genome of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic groups across India. Reich’s (2018) book referred to earlier has further added to this controversy.

  27. Nonetheless, many academicians in India do concur that the British were in a substantive way responsible not only for the colonization of Adivasi but also for pushing them into the vagaries of caste hierarchies.

  28. The caveat of distinct possibility implies prevalence of alliances outside the institution of marriage and these were not necessarily endogamous. Material evidence to trace prehistoric practices of marriage as an institution to my knowledge is rather scant.

  29. Chamar is not a scheduled tribe but scheduled caste and mostly live in northern India. They are socially isolated in small hamlets occupying the same geographical zone. Authors also do not specify which genealogical mapping was used to trace 500 generations. Bhil adivasis living in different parts of the country have historically mixed with other populations in their respective regions.

  30. Migration systems theory propounded by Mabogunje (1970) argues that it comprises a ‘set of places linked by flows and counterflows of people, goods, services, and information which tend to facilitate further exchange’ (cf. De Haas (2007) Migration and development: A theoretical perspective (Bielefeld: COMCAD-Working papers-Centre on Migration, Citizenship and Development): 29).

  31. It is for historians to establish if freezing of communities in closed endogamous groups started during the Gupta period but how researchers arrived at the destination of 70 generations remains ambiguous to me. In a reply to this article Vadeivelu, Murali K (PNS 19 April 2016 113 (16) accessed on 8.01-19) says that endogamy in India was actually a result of foreign invasion and did not freeze in the Gupta period.

    This study was based on 367 individuals out of which 331 are drawn from 18 mainland populations and 2 island populations of Jarwa and Onge from Andaman and Nicobar and has taken into cognizance linguistic, ethnic and geographic diversity. It concluded that Islanders and Mainlanders have distinct ancestry.

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Acknowledgements

Dinesh Kumar, research fellow, Department of Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, deserves special mention for helping with the literature and references for this article.

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  1. Formerly Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Panjab University, Chandigarh, 160011, India

    Shalina Mehta

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Mehta, S. Contested domains of biological similarities and sociocultural diversity. J Biosci 44, 66 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12038-019-9877-3

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