Harvard Study Debunks Myth of Racial Purity
By Riaz Haq
CA
"To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races -- the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by." Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, leader of the Hindu Nationalist RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh)
Debunking the myth of "the purity of the Race" pushed by Hindu Nationalist leader Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, a Harvard study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics has found that vast majority of Indians today have descended from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations -- Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) who migrated from Central Asia, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Europe, and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent.
Geographically, Ancestral North Indians (ANIs) tend to be more concentrated in the northern and western parts of India closer to West Asia, while Ancestral South Indians are found mostly in southern and eastern parts of India.
The paper "Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India" confirms that North Indians ancestors started migrating to India from outside thousands of years before the advent of Islam. ANIs and ASIs routinely intermarried between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago until the imposition of strict segregation by the Hindu caste system , according to the study.
With segregation strictly in place, the Indian society moved toward endogamy — the practice of avoiding intermarriage or close relationships between ethnic groups — which reached its most extreme form in the creation of the caste system which remains in force to this day. A 2011 report found that in “40 percent of the schools across sample districts in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state, with 199 million people — teachers and students refuse to partake of government-sponsored free midday meals because they are cooked by dalits (untouchables).”
The paper is based on the work of researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the CSIR- Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. They conducted what they call the “most comprehensive sampling of Indian genetic variation to date,” using samples collected from 571 individuals belonging to 73 “well-defined ethno-linguistic groups.” The data allowed the authors to trace not just the genetic mixture between these groups but how long ago this mixture occurred.
Similar genetic studies of Pakistanis published in the American Journal of Human Genetics have found very diverse ancestral origins of the people in the country. These range from Balochis with origins in Aleppo (modern Syria) to Brahuis who are indigenous Dravidian, and Baltis of Sino-Tibetan ancestry to Pashtuns of Jewish or Central Asian origins.
These genetic studies offer strong rebuttal of Hindu Nationalists' claims of "racial purity" of Hindus. Genetics confirm that most Indians (and Pakistanis) are, in fact, people of mixed or foreign ancestry regardless of their faith.
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