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Indian society. The
     one exception to the finding, that all Indian groups are mixed, is the indigenous
     people of the Andaman islands …’ 31
    In order to appreciate the messiness of
     the Jati system of castes, note the distribution of the R1a1 genetic haplogroup, the
     genes many Indians share with Eastern Europeans. 32 Their distribution in India across region and caste is telling. It is present
     in high concentration among high-caste Brahmins of Bengal and Konkan as well as in
     Punjabi Khatris, but it also shows up in tribes such as the Chenchus of Andhra
     Pradesh. In other words, a Chenchu tribesman is closely related to an
     upper-caste Bengali ‘bhadralok’ and a blond Lithuanian. You
     never know where you will bump into relatives. A paper published in the
Journal
     of Human Genetics
in January 2009,argues that the R1a1
     lineage probably originated in India. The study argues for ‘the
     autochthonous origin of R1a1 lineage in India and a tribal link to Indian
     Brahmins’. 33 Thus, we may well be dealing with a particularly successful Neolithic clan that
     branched out in different directions and whose descendants experienced very
     different fates.
    There is a difference between the
     genetic reality and the rigid and strictly hierarchical ‘Varna’
     system of castes described in the Manusmriti (Laws of Manu). The Manusmriti is often
     used by scholars as the framework to understand the phenomenon of castes. It now
     appears that the formal ‘Varna’ based caste system described in
     the text is a scholarly abstraction that may never have existed in reality. 34 Instead, what we have here is a very flexible and organic milieu consisting of
     Jatis that can adapt easily to changing times by allowing for evolving social
     equations. For instance, the system can spontaneously create new castes whenever new
     groups need to be accommodated. Similarly, groups can be promoted or demoted in
     status according to prevailing social conditions. This fits what we know from
     historical experience—including the formation of the warrior Rajput caste
     in the medieval period. In the past, these groups vied with each other to move up
     the pecking order. Today we have the opposite situation where they vie to be
     classified as ‘backward’ in order to benefit from affirmative
     action. The logic of collective action is the same.

2
People of the Lost River
    As we move from prehistory to history, we
     are immediately confronted by a problem of plenty. The early history of India has
     two parallel sources, but there is a great deal of disagreement about how they fit
     together. On one hand there is the archaeological evidence of the sophisticated
     cities of the Harappan Civilization (also called Indus Valley or
     Indus–Saraswati civilization). On the other hand, there is the literature
     of the Vedic tradition. Their geographies and timelines roughly overlap but
     archaeologists and historians have long had difficulty reconciling them. Indeed,
     this has remained a hot topic of discussion among scholars and often deteriorates
     into a political debate. I do not claim to have resolved the debate. Therefore, I
     will tell the two stories separately. I will then focus on the one thing that the
     two sources agree on: the drying of a great river that theRig
     Veda calls the Saraswati. No matter which way one looks at it, the drying of this
     river was an important geographical event that defined early India.
THE HARAPPAN CIVILIZATION
    Till the early twentieth century, as
     already discussed in the previous chapter, it was believed that Indian civilization
     began with the ‘Aryan Invasions’ that were supposed to have
     taken place around 1500 BC . These European-like Aryans
     were supposed to have come from Central Asia and to have conquered the subcontinent
     and then ‘civilized’ the native population. It should not be
     lost on the reader that this theory evolved in an intellectual milieu in which
     Rudyard