It is a 2001 deja vu moment in 2017, as we saw the 1901 deja vu moment in 2001.

Michael Bamshad Does A Herbert Risley

In 2001, population geneticist Michael Bamshad of the Institute of Human Genetics, University of Utah, studied the genetic makeup of caste groups from Visakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh and compared them with various castes and regional groups of India as well as those in Africa, Asia and Europe. Then in his paper, he announced how the 'genetic distances' between castes correlated with social rank. The 'upper castes' were 'significantly more similar to Europeans' than the 'lower castes', he concluded.

Exactly a century before Bamshad, there was Sir Herbert Risley, commissioner for the 1901 census of India and honorary director of the Ethnological Survey of the Indian Empire, who had applied the nasal index to the castes. He had ‘proved’ how Indian castes belonged to several racial categories – from dark skinned, snubbed nose Dravidians to fair skinned Aryans with pronounced proboscis.

Doubts were raised from the Indian side, when Swami Vivekananda’s brother B N Dutta challenged Risley’s notion that ‘higher’ castes had European noses. He simply used more data than Risley.

Later, in a detailed work on the origins of untouchability, Dr B R Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Constitution of India, questioned the methodology and conclusions of Western ethnography. Considering the colonial thesis that the so-called ‘untouchables’ belonged to a different race from the ‘caste Hindus’, Dr Ambedkar made a profound statement. Even if one were to consider ‘anthropometry as a science’ by which the race of a person could be established, he said, the data obtained "disprove that scheduled communities belonged to a race different from the rest of Hindu communities. The measurements prove that the Brahmin and the Untouchables belong to the same race."

So, did Bamshad in 2001, with Single Nucleotide Polymorphism in the place of nasal index, prove Risley’s colonial ethnographic project of 1901 right and Dr Ambedkar wrong?

Interestingly, the story was immediately grabbed by popular science magazines as well as local media. Popular Tamil newspaper Dinamani wrote an article approvingly quoting Bamshad’s paper as ‘Aryan invasion/migration theory’ being finally proved by science.

UK-based popular science magazine New Scientist presented the Bamshad paper with the sensational heading 'Written in blood'. It then quoted a pro-missionary scholar Robert Hardgrave as saying that there are 'some historical and archeological evidence' that the "Aryans came in, they intermarried with indigenous people and also absorbed many of them into their social system of ranking".

The Times of India newspaper reported the study with the prominent heading in its international section: 'Upper caste Indian male more European, says study'.

Frontline, the magazine from the Left-leaning The Hindu family of publications, in reporting the Bamshad paper announced sensationally: "New genetic evidence for the origins of castes indicates that the upper castes are more European than Asian. It took a potshot at 'strident nationalism' in the form of 'Hindutva' ideology, which rejects the premise that Aryans were outsiders." While conceding that the archeological evidence of marauding or migrating Aryans was wanting, the article declared "modern population genetics, based on analyses of the variations in the DNA in population sets, has tools" that could provide "a more authoritative answer". And that answer was that the Y-chromosomes of the 'upper caste' men had markers closer to Eastern Europeans than to the Asians.

One lone media voice that questioned the study was India Today. Labelling the Bamshad study 'controversial', an article in the publication drew parallel with the pseudoscientific racial study of Risley a century ago. The magazine quoted the famous archeologist Dilip Chakravarti, questioning the terminology used by the papers. The article cautioned readers against taking the paper as the final say on the matter. Soon, the Bamshad study was followed by another study in 2004. A team of six scientists, including Richard Cordaux of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, studying the origin of the 'Hindu caste system' concluded that 'paternal lineages of Indian caste groups are primarily descended from Indo-European speakers who migrated from central Asia 3,500 years ago'.

Subsequent Studies Reject The ‘Authoritative Answer’

In 2003, Dr Toomas Kivisild and 17 other scientists published a paper, which studied both tribal and 'caste' populations. The paper reported that the "Haplogroup R1a, previously associated with the putative Indo-Aryan invasion, was found at its highest frequency in Punjab but also at a relatively high frequency (26 per cent) in the Chenchu tribe". This suggested ‘that southern and western Asia might be the source of this haplogroup’.

This study did not receive the media spotlight that Bamshad paper received. However, it did prove to be a turning point. Dr Gyaneshwer Chaubey, of Estonian Biocenter, who is an expert in the field of biological anthropology and evolutionary biology, says, "the paper is still true and that is the one which has enlightened me to move to population genetics from Drosophila genetics!" Dr Chaubey since then has been at the forefront of research work related to the peopling of South Asia and is co-author of almost all the important papers dealing with the subject.

Then in 2006, a major genetic study of the Indian population was taken up by a team of 12 scientists. The study produced results that contradicted the 2001 study of Bamshad et al. However, this too did not receive the media attention it deserved. The paper had concluded: