India and the Question of Race

Since the publication of the literary critic Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism in 1978, scholars have tended to regard as neither neutral nor unambiguous the knowledge produced by colonial powers about their non-Western subjects. Instead, such knowledge is treated as having played a significant role in the creation of "colonial realities," or flawed representations of the facts erected to suit the needs of the governing powers. In his book Imagining India (1990), for example, the historian Ronald Inden lays out the ways in which 19th-century British colonial administrators sought to control and pacify the subcontinent's populace by "essentializing" it—that is, by identifying clear and simple characteristics or qualities that purportedly defined Indianness (or Indian nature). 

The famous caste system was one such feature that drew the attention of the colonialists and produced in them efforts to rationalize and manipulate it. So too was the archetypal "Indian mind," a more diffuse but allegedly identifiable object. In both cases a set of complex realities surrounding or making up these phenomena were reduced to basic precepts or systems designed to provide direct understanding and also give Western administrators the tools they needed to extend their authority over the population.

Early Race Theory

One key area in which politics mixed with science to create something of an artificial reality was that of race theory. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had developed the method of anthropometry, or the measurement of certain bodily features, to help them classify the various peoples of the world into an ordered evolutionary scheme. British researchers in India made extensive use of the method and established a range of supposed physical "types" corresponding, they argued, with population movements of the distant or the more recent past. Most influential of all their efforts was the division of the population into two principal groups, the lighter skinned Aryans of the north and the darker skinned Dravidians of the south. 

Based on scant historical evidence, and on dubious assumptions about the superiority of the Aryan type (because of its similarity to the European), British colonial-era scholars advanced a picture of dark-skinned indigenous "savages" being gradually infiltrated by light-skinned Aryan "nobles" to produce the current mix of racial types. Another element of their thinking was that certain peoples, among them Sikhs and Gurkhas (from Nepal), represented "martial races," groups particularly adapted to military life. These schemes, as faulty as they were, were widely accepted and persisted in one version or another well into the 20th century.

Later scholars, earnestly seeking to understand the racial composition of India's population, expanded and refined the earlier schema. Prior to the advent of DNA testing and other modern methods of population genetics in the 1970s, regional experts continued to posit the existence of such types as the proto-Australoid (the aboriginal peoples), the paleo-Mediterranean (a mix of Dravidian-speaking and other peoples), and the Caucasoid, or Indo-European (descendants of the Aryans). Also acknowledged as having contributed to the subcontinent's racial mix were Turks from the western region, Asians ("Mongoloids") from the Himalayas, Africans from across the Arabian Sea (most imported as slaves by Muslim traders), and pockets of Persians, Arabs, and Portuguese who settled along the coasts.

Contemporary Understandings

The issue confronting the modern population geneticist or physical anthropologist working in India is to make sense of the human diversity represented among the nation's peoples while striving to approach the data scientifically, free of preconceptions about past migrations or the relative social status of one group over another. Such misunderstandings only fuel further misunderstandings. Although contemporary researchers have successfully isolated a few identifying features of the South Asian population as a whole, such as a low occurrence of type-A blood (perhaps related to a high incidence of smallpox), the work is ongoing and it could be years before a detailed picture of the genetic makeup of India's population, and subpopulations, emerges.

Typically today, researchers from a variety of different disciplines either work together in a multidisciplinary project or consult each others' findings to arrive at a well-rounded picture. Thus physical anthropologists, archaeologists, Sanskritists, historians, and linguists may be found collaborating on work designed to comprehend the problem of population composition, movement, and intermixture. Because the population of South Asia at the end of the first millennium B.C. is estimated to have been as high as 100 million, and the current population is nearing 1 billion, the task facing these researchers is considerable. The earliest data indicate only that, except for a few isolated subpopulations such as the Negrito peoples of the Andaman Islands or the largely extinct Veddas of Sri Lanka (and formerly of South India), radical differentiation between racial groups is less prominent than apparent homogeneity among them. Still, much work remains to be done.

Racial Chauvinism

Despite the excellent work being done by serious scholars, there are groups inside India that have sought to rehabilitate earlier forms of racial "science" in order to further their own political goals. Primarily these groups are Hindu nationalists who proclaim themselves the descendants of the original Aryan nobles and thus the true inheritors of Indian civilization. At the same time, there are militant spokespersons for India's so-called Dravidians and underclass Dalits ("untouchables") who draw on the same or similar theories in opposing the claims of the "Aryan" supremacists. The field is a contentious one and serves to show how difficult it is to remove the "essentializing" urge from popular political discourse.