Vasant Shinde

Last updated

Vasant Shinde is an Indian archaeologist and supporter of Indigenous Aryanism, [1] who has done excavations at Rakhigarhi from 2011 to 2016. [web 1] He gained fame as first author on the long-awaited 2019 paper "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," [2] on DNA-research on a single skeleton from Rakhigarhi which shows that the people of the Indus Valley Civilisation had no steppe (Indo-Aryan) genetic ancestry, in line with the Indo-Aryan migration theory. [3] [web 2] [web 3] [4] The day after the publication Shinde publicly endorsed the Out of India theory, thereby rejecting the conclusions of his own paper. [web 4] [web 2] [web 3]

Contents

Occupations

Excavations

In the 1980s-1990s Shinde conducted excavations at the Tapti basin in Maharashtra. [5] [note 1]

From 2011 to 2016 Shinde conducted excavations at the Indus Valley Civilisation site of Rakhigarhi. [web 1] According to Shinde, Rakhigarhi was larger than Mohenjo-daro, [web 7] [web 8] and the IVC started in the Ghaggar basin, identified by him with the Sarasvati river, [6] and from there extended to the Indus river. [web 7]

Rakhigarhi DNA

According to Avikunthak, Shinde was the first archaeologist who noticed the value of genetic research in the debate on the origins of Indo-Aryan culture in India. [7] Initially working together with Seoul National University College of Medicine, [8] Shinde gained fame as main author on the long-awaited [web 8] 2019 paper "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers," [2] [7] co-authored by David Reich, and wearing his "unmistakable stamp." [7] The paper concluded that the IVC-people lacked ancestry from Anatolia and the steppes, [9] in line with the Indo-Aryan migration theory, which argues that the Indo-Aryan Vedic people migrated into South Asia after the height of the Indus Valley Civilisation, in the period of ca. 1900-1500 BCE. [10] [4] [11] [web 3]

Shinde et al. (2019) concluded that the genome of researched individual "fits as a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians (the largest component) and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers." The Iranian component was unrelated to early Iranian farmers, "contradicting the hypothesis that the shared ancestry between early Iranians and South Asians reflects a large-scale spread of western Iranian farmers east," concluding that farming in India began "without being connected by movement of people." [12]

Shinde et al. (2019) states that the presence of Anatolian farmer-related ancestry in South Asians today "is consistent with [it] being entirely derived from Steppe pastoralists who carried it in mixed form and who spread into South Asia from 2000–1500 BCE (Narasimhan et al. 2019)." [3] The paper further states that "a natural route for Indo-European languages to have spread into South Asia is from Eastern Europe via Central Asia in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, a chain of transmission that did occur as has been documented in detail with ancient DNA." [2]

A press note was released by Shinde in september 2019, preceding a press conference at 6 september 2019 on the findings. [web 9] The press note stated that the research

completely sets aside the Aryan Migration/Invasion Theory [...] as hypothesized by Sir Mortimer Wheeler.

It also stated that the research

establishes the fact that the Vedic culture was developed by the indigenous people of South Asia. Our premise that the Harappans were the Vedic people thus has received strong corroborative scientific evidence based on ancient DNA studies.

Several media outlets followed Shinde's primer, and presented the study as a rebuttal of the established Indo-Aryan migration theory, confusing it with Mortimer Wheeler's outdated proposal, and ignoring the actual contents and conclusions of the study. [web 10]

At the press conference held at September 6, 2019 to explain the findings, Vasant Shinde and Niraj Rai publicly endorsed the Out of India theory, rejecting the idea that the Vedic people had migrated into South Asia at the time of the decline of the Harappan civilisation. [1] [web 4] [web 2] [web 3] As Shinde stated, "the Vedic era that followed [the IVC] was a fully indigenous period with some external contact." [web 3]

According to journalist Hartosh Singh Bal, "the claim that the Harappans were the Vedic people "betrays the very research that underlies the two papers. To believe this, the authors would have to discredit their own papers." [web 3]

During 2020 Shinde further propagated his interpretation of the archaeogenetic data, craniofacial reconstruction of skeletal remains, and material archaeological remains that "the Harappans moved westward - propagating the "Out of India theory"- a return to the Hindutva claim of the Vedic Aryan, now invoking aDNA data as arsenal." [1]

Project advise

In 2022 Shinde advised Ministry of Culture Secretary Govind Mohan on a project to study the genetic history of India's population. [web 6] [web 11] Reported by The New Indian Times as a project "“trace the purity of races in India,” [web 6] the project drew criticism and condemnation. [web 12] In response, the Minsitry of culture issued a statement "refuting the report and said that it has no intention of conducting studies of racial purity in the country." [web 12] According to Shinde, his statement was "twisted and fabricated." [web 11] In an open letter, "[over] a 100 leading biologists, historians, anthropologists and intellectuals" protested against the plan, warning that the term "race" is a social construct with unwarranted implications. [web 11] [web 13] [web 14]

Works

See also

Notes

  1. Blanton 2006, p. 22: "Special note must be made of the work of Vasant Shinde (1991, 1998)"

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cemetery H culture</span> Bronze Age culture in the Punjab

The Cemetery H culture was a Bronze Age culture in the Punjab region in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, from about 1900 BCE until about 1300 BCE. It is regarded as a regional form of the late phase of the Harappan civilisation, but also as the manifestation of a pre wave phase of Indo-Aryan migrations, predating the migrations of the proto-Rig Vedic people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarasvati River</span> River mentioned in the Vedas and ancient Indian epics

The Sarasvati River is a mythologized and deified ancient river first mentioned in the Rigveda and later in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. It played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rigveda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indus Valley Civilisation</span> Bronze Age civilisation in South Asia

The Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), also known as the Indus Civilisation, was a Bronze Age civilisation in the northwestern regions of South Asia, lasting from 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE, and in its mature form from 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE. Together with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, it was one of three early civilisations of the Near East and South Asia, and of the three, the most widespread, its sites spanning an area including much of modern day Pakistan, northwestern India and northeast Afghanistan. The civilisation flourished both in the alluvial plain of the Indus River, which flows through the length of Pakistan, and along a system of perennial monsoon-fed rivers that once coursed in the vicinity of the Ghaggar-Hakra, a seasonal river in northwest India and eastern Pakistan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rakhigarhi</span> Archaeological site in Haryana, India

Rakhigarhi or Rakhi Garhi is a village and an archaeological site in the Hisar District of the northern Indian state of Haryana, situated about 150 km northwest of Delhi. It is located in the Ghaggar River plain, some 27 km from the seasonal Ghaggar river, and belonged to the Indus Valley civilisation, being part of the pre-Harappan, early Harappan, and the mature phase of the Indus Valley Civilisation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elamo-Dravidian languages</span> Proposed language family

The Elamo-Dravidian language family is a hypothesised language family that links the Elamite language of ancient Elam to the Dravidian languages of South Asia. The latest version (2015) of the hypothesis entails a reclassification of Brahui as being more closely related to Elamite than to the remaining Dravidian languages. Linguist David McAlpin has been a chief proponent of the Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis, followed by Franklin Southworth as the other major supporter. The hypothesis has gained attention in academic circles, but has been subject to serious criticism by linguists, and remains only one of several possible scenarios for the origins of the Dravidian languages. Elamite is generally accepted by scholars to be a language isolate, unrelated to any other known language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Indo-Aryan peoples</span> Indo-European ethnolinguistic groups primarily concentrated in South Asia

Indo-Aryan peoples are a diverse collection of peoples speaking Indo-Aryan languages in the Indian subcontinent. Historically, Aryans were the Indo-Iranian speaking pastoralists who migrated from Central Asia into South Asia and introduced the Proto-Indo-Aryan language. The early Indo-Aryan peoples were known to be closely related and belonging to the same Indo-Iranian group that have resided north of the Indus River; an evident connection in cultural, linguistic, and historical ties. Today, Indo-Aryan speakers are found south of the Indus, across the modern-day regions of Bangladesh, Nepal, eastern-Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and northern-India.

The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages. These are the predominant languages of today's Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, North India, Eastern Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gandhara grave culture</span> Aspect of Pakistani history

The Gandhara grave culture of present-day Pakistan is known by its "protohistoric graves", which were spread mainly in the middle Swat River valley and named the Swat Protohistoric Graveyards Complex, dated in that region to c. 1200–800 BCE. The Italian Archaeological Mission to Pakistan (MAIP) holds that there are no burials with these features after 800 BCE. More recent studies by Pakistani scholars, such as Muhammad Zahir, consider that these protohistoric graves extended over a much wider geography and continued in existence from the 8th century BCE until the historic period. The core region was in the middle of the Swat River course and expanded to the valleys of Dir, Kunar, Chitral, and Peshawar. Protohistoric graves were present in north, central, and southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province as well as in north-western tribal areas, including Gilgit-Baltistan province, Taxila, and Salt Range in Punjab, Pakistan, along with their presence in Indian Kashmir, Ladakh, and Uttarakhand.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the horse in the Indian subcontinent</span>

The horse has been present in the Indian subcontinent from at least the middle of the second millennium BC, more than two millennia after its domestication in Central Asia. The earliest uncontroversial evidence of horse remains on the Indian Subcontinent date to the early Swat culture. While horse remains and related artifacts have been found in Late Harappan sites, indicating that horses may have been present at Late Harappan times, horses did not play an essential role in the Harappan civilisation, in contrast to the Vedic period. The importance of the horse for the Indo-Aryans is indicated by the Sanskrit word Ashva, "horse," which is often mentioned in the Vedas and Hindu scriptures.

Banawali is an archaeological site belonging to the Indus Valley civilization period in Fatehabad district, Haryana, India and is located about 120 km northeast of Kalibangan and 16 km from Fatehabad. Banawali, which is earlier called Vanavali, is on the left banks of dried up Sarasvati River. Comparing to Kalibangan, which was a town established in lower middle valley of dried up Sarasvathi River, Banawali was built over upper middle valley of Sarasvati River.

Indigenous Aryanism, also known as the Indigenous Aryans theory (IAT) and the Out of India theory (OIT), is the conviction that the Aryans are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Indo-European languages radiated out from a homeland in India into their present locations. It is a "religio-nationalistic" view on Indian history, and propagated as an alternative to the established migration model, which considers the Pontic–Caspian steppe to be the area of origin of the Indo-European languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bhirrana</span> Archaeological site and village in Haryana, India

Bhirrana, also Bhirdana and Birhana, is an archaeological site, located in a small village in the Fatehabad district of the north Indian state of Haryana. Bhirrana's earliest archaeological layers predates the Indus Valley civilisation times, dating to the 8th-7th millennium BCE. The site is one of the many sites seen along the channels of the seasonal Ghaggar river, identified by ASI archeologists to be the Rigvedic Saraswati river.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dravidian peoples</span> South Asian ethnolinguistic group

The Dravidian peoples are an ethnolinguistic supraethnicity composed of many distinct ethnolinguistic groups native to South Asia. They speak the Dravidian languages, which have a combined total of about 250 million native speakers. Dravidians form the majority of the population of South India and Northern Sri Lanka.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peopling of India</span> Immigration patterns of different races of people of India

The peopling of India refers to the migration of Homo sapiens into the Indian subcontinent. Anatomically modern humans settled India in multiple waves of early migrations, over tens of millennia. The first migrants came with the Coastal Migration/Southern Dispersal 65,000 years ago, whereafter complex migrations within South and Southeast Asia took place. West-Asian (Iranian) hunter-gatherers migrated to South Asia after the Last Glacial Period but before the onset of farming. Together with ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers they formed the population of the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC).

Mitathal is a village and Indus Valley civilization (IVC) Archaeological sites in the Bhiwani tehsil of the Bhiwani district in the Indian state of Haryana. Part of Hisar division, it lies 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) north of the district headquarters Bhiwani and 249 kilometres (155 mi) from the state capital Chandigarh. As of the 2011 Census of India, the village had 1,448 households with a total population of 7,434 of which 4,002 were male and 3,432 female.

Kunal is a pre-Harappan Indus Valley civilisation settlement located, just 30 km from Fatehabad City in Fatehabad district of Haryana state in India. Compared to other IVC sites, such as cities like Rakhigarhi and towns like Kalibangan, Kunal site was a village. Excavation at Kunal show 3 successive phases of Pre-Harappan indigenous culture on the Saraswati river who also traded with Kalibanga and Lothal. Kunal, along with its other contemporary sites Bhirrana and Rakhigarhi on Sarasvati-Ghaggar river system, is recognised as the oldest Pre-Harappan settlement, with Kunal being an older cultural ancestor to Rehman Dheri in Pakistan< which is on the Tentative List for future World Heritage Sites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Archaeology of India</span>

Archaeology in India is mainly done under the supervision of the Archaeological Survey of India.

Sothi is an early archaeological site of the Indus Valley civilization dating to around 4600 BCE, located in the Hanumangarh District of Rajasthan, India, at a distance of about 10 km southwest of Nohar railway station.

<i>Early Indians</i> 2018 book by Tony Joseph

Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From is a 2018 nonfiction book written by Indian journalist Tony Joseph, that focuses on the ancestors of people living in South Asia today. Joseph goes 65,000 years into the past—when anatomically modern humans first made their way from Africa into the Indian subcontinent. The book relies on research findings from six major disciplines: history, archaeology, linguistics, population genetics, philology, and epigraphy, and includes path-breaking ancient DNA research of recent years. It also relies on the extensive study titled "The Genomic Formation of Central and South Asia", co-authored by 92 scientists from around the world and co-directed by geneticist David Reich of Harvard Medical School, in which ancient DNA was used. The book has been translated into Bengali, Tamil, Hindi, Odia, Telugu, Marathi, Malayalam, Gujarati, and other languages.

References

Sources

Printed sources
Web-sources
  1. 1 2 Dhiman, Kuldip (3 July 2016). "Engulfed in the labyrinths of time". The Tribune .
  2. 1 2 3 C.P. Rajendran (2019), Scientists Part of Studies Supporting Aryan Migration Endorse Party Line Instead, The Wire, 13 september 2019
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Bal, Hartosh Singh. "What media reporting on ancient DNA results says about our times". The Caravan. Retrieved 2019-12-07.
  4. 1 2 Siddhartha Mishra (2019), The Press Conference On Rakhigarhi Findings Throws Up More Questions Than Answers, Outlook India
  5. 1 2 3 Bhishma School of Indian Knowledge System, Prof. Dr. Vasant Shinde
  6. 1 2 3 Chandan Nandy (2011), Culture ministry to study ‘racial purity’ of Indians, The New Indian Express
  7. 1 2 T.S. Subramanian (march 27, 2014), Rakhigarhi, the biggest Harappan site. Bigger than Mohenjo-daro, claims expert
  8. 1 2 Jason Burke (30 Dec 2015), Rakhigarhi: Indian town could unlock mystery of Indus civilisation
  9. [ http://chapter.intach.org/pdf/press-note-prof-vasant-shinde.pdf Press note]
  10. Girish Shahane (Sept 14, 2019), Why Hindutva supporters love to hate the discredited Aryan Invasion Theory, Scroll India
  11. 1 2 3 Jacob Koshy (june 10, 2022), Scientists condemn project to study ‘racial purity’ of Indian population, The Hindu]
  12. 1 2 C.P. Rajendran (2 june 20062022), It’s About Celebrating Our Genetic Diversity, Not ‘Racial Purity’
  13. 122 scientists, academicians criticise project to reportedly study ‘racial purity’ of Indians, scroll.in
  14. Letter to Ministry: Publicly Disavow Plans To Revive Racial Stereotyping in India, The Wire