Overview of Blog Contents

Outline of Posts

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The posts in this blog begin with a description of the initial populations of South Asia resulting from the 60,000 year-old migration out of Africa. It will progress to the description of the demographic distribution of three variant haplotypes ("Ancient North Indian", "Ancient South Indian", and "Ancient East Indian") in the northern plains. Then, we will provide the frame story of the Re-imagined Mahabharata, i.e., How the orally transmitted Mahabharata came to be written down and the political reason it was distributed all over India (like the Re-imagined Mahabharata these frame stories are speculative.

[I am leaving this collection of posts unchanged, even though many changes in the grand story have been made since March 2013. The first book The Last Kaurava was published by Leadstart Inc., of Mumbai India in November 2015, a revised version will be released this year as the first in a series of 5 books. The population distribution described here is used as a driver of conflict in these books.]

These frame stories will introduce the third Kindle book Bhishma Remembers (to be published), which will cover the story of Santanu's attempt to deal with a refugee crisis; then the story of his son Bhishma/Devavrat from childhood to  his  first handover of power to his half-brothers Chitrangada and Vichitravirya; then, a second handover of power to his nephews Dhritarashtra and Pandu; and then a third handover of power to his grand-nephew Suyodhana that results in the disastrous war.  The last episode will be the one that results in Bhishma's death and the end of the Kuru family.

Later Kindle books will cover other primary characters, from Pandu to Ashwatthama.

Outline of Posts

First, before we get to the frame story, we will cover:

   The demographic lay of the land in the Indo-Gangetic plain and how it came about.

Posts #1 and #2 have described the evidence that the population of South Asia derived from three haplotypes, all of which originated at least 10,000 years ago.

This Overview is Post #3.

The next post (#4) will describe how two of these ancient haplotypes ("Naga" and "Rakshasa") came to occupy different regions of the Gangetic Plain in the east, while one haplotype ("Western") occupied the Sindhu/Saraswati plain.

I will then digress (post #5) to a discussion of how matriarchy, the traditional band organization of all three branches, evolved as bands settled down into cities and towns.  In conditions of resource competition, the changes led to patriarchy. Otherwise, formal matriarchy continued and developed frameworks of mystery around the matriarch while the underlying polity became (or could become) gender-neutral and either democratic or led by a council of families.

Coming back to the main line, Post #6 will describe how the three haplotypes expanded from a small beginning and occupied the regions they did.

Post #7 will describe how the Western or Saraswati-Sindhu culture (SSC) culture developed into a system of cities and towns that were at peace with each other and formed the eastern end of a great trade route to Mesopotamia and Egypt; how, internally, they were ruled by a council under a matriarch in which the leading families of the city had representation; how men and women shared power equally in that council, and the pressures that were pushing them to become a male-dominated polity; some key technologies developed by the Western culture -- extensive use of "human archives" for memorizing contracts; extensive use of standardization; the use of "human chronometers" for time-telling; the domestication of the zebu (the humped cow common in India); and, finally, some key technologies that they did NOT develop (writing and coinage) which I will attribute to the use of "human archives" as guarantors of contracts. (This is also speculation though I would welcome discussion on why or whether this provides a reasonable explanation for the three historical mysteries of the undeciphered (and possibly undecipherable) Indus script, the apparent non-use of writing for monuments in India before 500 B.C.E., and the late development of coinage despite extensive trade ties with other coin-using cultures).

Post #8 will describe how the political structure of Naga bands evolved into one confederacy (Panchala) that claimed dominance over all other Naga bands.

Post #9 will describe how the Rakshasa bands evolved into two very loosely coupled confederations on either side of the Ganga.  Naga-Rakshasa rivalry was avoided by the two sides initially by maintaining a buffer between the two.

Post #10 will describe how one SSC family (the Kurus) attempted to extend the trade route further east into Naga territory by establishing the city of Hastinapur on the banks of the Ganga. The resulting conflict with the local Nagas and, later, the conflict with Panchala, and the consequences of Hastinapur victory, put increased pressure on the Nagas to conflict with Rakshasas further east over land.

Post #11 will describe the tectonic events leading to the crisis and how Hastinapur was overwhelmed by refugees.  This will also describe the Yadava migration through Saurashtra (in Western India) and their ultimate settlement on the banks of the new river Yamuna.  This increases pressures on the Nagas to go east and increases conflict with Rakshasas.

These posts will have established the cultural and political landscape that Bhishma and his successors had to deal with.


With these posts we are headed towards the following two frame stories for the Mahabharata:

1) Post #12: The Emperor Pushyamitra Sunga's (circa 150 B.C.E.) project to rewrite and distribute a master written text of the Mahabharata as a way of countering the influence of Buddhist monks;

2) Post #12 & #13: The Bharata project (circa 800 B.C.E.) of Hastinapur to transcribe its orally maintained history to a written form in order to preserve it.

Post #14 will be a digression -- it will be a summary of the ORIGINAL Mahabharata and an introduction to the rest of the Re-imagined Mahabharata.

A mix of three ancient haplogroups

Background to the Reimagined Mahabharata

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Genetics and Jaati

South Asia contains one of the most diverse populations in the world (possibly even more diverse than Africa).  Any discussion of the history of South Asia must address the reasons for this diversity and that makes it important to understand the genetics of the populations.  It is generally accepted that the diversity now is the similar to the diversity in 2000 B.C.E. -- the few anthropocentric measurements that have been made in the Indus valley show a range similar to what exists.  My contention is that this was true for the preceding 10,000 years and forms the background for the Reimagined Mahabharata.  This is a controversial position -- the controversy arises from claims about the origins of "Aryans" and "Dravidians", a racial/ethnic distinction that has driven expert opinion since the mid 1850s.  Aryans are supposed to have come in around 1500 B.C.E., destroying an existing urban Dravidian culture. The evidence for an Aryan invasion is scanty and requires that one discount local history and traditions as recorded in ancient Indian texts. Dravidians are supposed to have come in around 4000 B.C.E. -- this was based on physiological similarities between Dravidians and some pre-historic Mediterranean peoples (i.e., with even less cultural or local data than for the Aryan hypothesis).  Both these invasions supposedly occurred through the northwestern passes (the Khyber for one) through the Himalayas from Afghanistan..

Recent work by geneticists based on SNP correlation suggests something entirely different.  A better solution to the origins question is to push the most recent "invasion" back by another 10000 years or so.  The following excerpt builds to that.

Caste-based exclusivity in South Asia

I grew up as a child in Bombay (now Mumbai).  One of the things I remember vividly is my strong belief that I could determine the ethnicity of another Indian by their appearance.  I do not think that I came to this belief by myself – I think it was the general assumption, not only in my family, but in the surrounding community. I believed that I could identify the state that an individual was from and for some people in some states, the caste of the person. This was never tested with any rigor, and I no longer believe the strong version of this thesis, that I could do it for every state or ethnic group in India.  I certainly cannot do it now.  Coupled with a changing South Asian demographic, my own absence from India, and the creation of new states in India by carving up old states, it is simply no longer tenable. The weakest version is that I can recognize a South Asian; the next stronger belief is that I can identify broad “regions” (West, East, North, and South).

To a significant extent, the strong hypothesis confounds nature (i.e. genetic inheritance of traits) and culture (practices of dress, eating, behavior, and so on).  In Bombay (i.e., Mumbai of the 1960s), one could always identify a Sikh, for they were tall, wore a particular style of turban, had beards, were intimidating and scared most of the kids, but were considered extraordinarily honest, and drove taxis; I could recognize UP “bhayyas” for they wore white dhotis, a cap, had had round faces; a Sindhi home always smelled awful to my Tamizh nose (probably garlic, but I did not know that); and you could identify two Bengalis because as soon as they saw each other, they would start spouting Bengali rudely ignoring everybody else; the “Anglo-Indian” from Goa spoke “kasha-masha” English that was impossible to understand.  The list goes on. These cultural stereotypes probably overwhelmed any sharp distinctions that nature could have produced, but there were weaker distinctions to be made.

The reason of these distinctions in India can be credited to the millennia-old “caste” system. Jaati, as it is more correctly termed, divides the polity into endogamous units, supposedly based on the “purity” of their labor (inevitably, perhaps, the plush tasks score high on purity and the hard jobs that keep the system clean and healthy score low on purity).  People rarely married outside caste boundaries.  This is not to say that inter-caste sexual relationships, including marriage, did not occur – they were punished by a mix of religious and economic sanctions, which militated against expressions of interest  not leading to anything.  But the result is that  most Indian jaatis, (of which there are over four thousand) show, when analyzed with DNA-SNP analysis, a distinct founder effect dating from 100 to 200 generations ago. That is to say, Indian jaati endogamy began over 2000 years ago and maybe as late as 4000 years ago.

A hundred generations, and for that matter, two hundred generations are not enough for speciation – Indian jaatis are still fertile with each other (!) – but they are enough for some significant changes.  If the founder group was small enough and had some unusual genetic mutation, that would be more prevalent in that jaati than in the general population.  Some of these changes may be covert changes that are hard to detect in a deliberate manner, but recognizable unconsciously as a pattern.

The point is that by adopting the jaati system at some pre-historical point in the past, Indian civilization cast into stone the diversity of that era. The diversity of traits displayed by the various castes represent the diversity of traits that existed over two thousand years ago! Unlike Europe and China, where significant chunks of the population share a genetic heritage that can be traced to specific migratory events, the Indian population was already diverse at the beginning of recorded Indian history. If we are to find an explanation for the diversity of traits in South Asia, we have to begin with an explanation for these diverse traits being in place 2000-4000 years ago.

Sources of Diversity in South Asia

The analysis of correlation between SNPs between various ethnic and family groups has been used to build inheritance trees.  These attempt to explain how two groups split from a parent group and approximately when that might have happened (in terms of generations). When two populations meet and become one, it is possible to propose how these populations contributed to the pattern of SNPS in the current population – crudely, what proportion of traits were contributed by each of the parent populations.

Such analysis has been applied in a limited way to South Asian populations, across jaatis and within jaatis.  Much more work needs to be done and the work has to be extended to all jaatis if possible.  But based on current studies, the family tree for a subset of jaatis is best explained by positing an “Ancient North Indian” population and an “Ancient South Indian” population that merged.  Jaatis in the northwest tended to be as much as 90-95% ANI.  As one moves south and east towards the Deccan peninsula the percentage of ANI decreases and the percentage of ASI increases.  This continues south through the Deccan – unfortunately, this information is particularly scanty – and ends with the lowest ANI of 40% and ASI of about 60% in the deep south.

The source of the ASI and the ANI is not the proposed Dravidian invasion of 4000 B.C.E and the Aryan invasion of 1500 B.C.E.  If the Dravidian invasion was the source of the ASI, and it was followed by the Aryan source of the ANI, there would have been significant pockets of higher ASI percentage all over the north rather than in just one or two places. The ANI proportion being 95% in Afghanistan suggests that ALL north-western invasions of India came from groups that were ANI themselves (otherwise a 95% ANI would not happen). A recent invasion of ANI would have created a much more stepped transition from ANI to ASI, not the observed smooth transition from 95% ANI to 40% ANI.  Some of the oldest tribal populations in the south have substantial  ANI percentage.  

When the same comparisons are made with populations from East India (W. Bengal, Bangladesh, Assam, and the other Naga states), the split between ANI and ASI is harder to discern as one goes east – however, one finds a greater and greater admixture of variants similar to East Asian populations from Tiibet in the north and Burma in the east and other points further east.  I have not yet seen a report analyzing the east-west spread, though research has been in progress for some time.  This can be viewed as the source for an Ancient East Indian (AEI) which is not addressed by the  Dravidian-Aryan invasion theory.

I begin with the hypothesis that South Asian diversity derives from three ancient sources. (I've called them "haplotypes", though, technically they are not because we don't have a definite collection of SNPs to identify one, but have a derived factor in a multi-factor analysis of all SNPs -- but it makes the point that a certain pattern in the DNA continues to exist.) It is important to understand that the word “ancient” does not refer to 2000 BCE or even 4000 BCE.  All the genetic evidence indicates that the ANI is over 10,000 years old, the ASI is even older, probably as much as 50,000 years, and we do not have an estimate for an Ancient East Indian, if there is one.  The east-west change is sharper than the north-south change and therefore hints at a later time for the mingling of populations.  I hypothesize that migrations from Tibet started around 8000 B.C.E.

By 8000 BCE, the Indo-Gangetic plain and Deccan peninsula was already populated with descendants of these three lines – an ANI, an ASI, and an AEI.  The history of South Asia begins with the cultural evolution of these three populations.

Caveat emptor, for the thesis that three independent ancestral strands occupied the Indo-Gangetic plain is speculation. What follows is further speculation on how those three groups evolved, and their relations with each other before the crisis.

To be continued ... South Asia from 60,000 B.C.E, to 4000 B.C.E.

Setting the Stage

The Re-Imagined Mahabharata

[Since 2013 there have been many changes in my publishing plans, but the background material I describe in this collection of blogs is still valid.  A book The Last Kaurava was published in November 2015 by Leadstart Pvt Ltd (Mumbai). I produced a revised/shortened version, The Making of Bhishma, for the US market (Amazon) in November 2016. Beginning 2018, Leadstart will be publishing  The Making of Bhishma as the first book in a series titled The Fall of the Kurus. The Leadstart books are only for sale in India. I expect to set up to sell these books in the US via Amazon.]

In 2012, I released via Kindle an excerpt (The Making of Bhishma) from The Reimagined Mahabharata.  A large number of people downloaded that excerpt and a few responded to my requests to post reviews on Amazon (Thanks, all!).  Still, as it is not possible for the author to get details about the downloaders from Amazon.com, I do not know who my readers are. An email to kamesh@aiyers.net would be appreciated!

One observation I was able to make was that whenever it may have happened — the Mahabharata or something like it or something with a big war at the end — we have wildly differing pictures in our heads.  People I know, aware and historically conscious Indians, have told me that they hated Peter Brooks' movie/play because nobody was wearing gorgeous multi-colored clothing with high crowns or golden tiaras, the way B. R. Chopra or Amar Chitra Katha has it. I don't know what to do when I see that reaction— defend Brooks, or attack ACK!, empathize with the speaker, or sympathize with them (considering that they must have had too much to drink).

Now, I don't know what exactly happened either.  But, I do know one thing — none of us have any historically valid knowledge of those times.  Even the people publishing lists of ancient Indian kings going all the way back to Vaivaswata Manu, the founding father of our current strain of humanity (imagine! just one Y chromosone produced all this— talk about founder effects.) don't seem to know what things were like — what did people eat, how were they governed, what tools did they use, what kind of groups did they live in, what was the population, etc., etc. — all the things that a good history should tell us is missing.

So what I've done is write a "Pseudo History" leading up to the Reimagined Mahabharata.  I am going to put these up as a sequence of blogs.  Let me state up front what I intend to setup as the stage for the RM: Kurus from the Saraswati-Sindhu urbanization; Nagas bands occupying most of the Gangetic plain with Panchala as their one big confederation; and, Rakshasa bands east of Chhota Nagpur and south down the coast of the Bay of Bengal that are being consolidated slowly into the Magadha coalition.  The Nagas and the Rakshasas are matriarchies, the Kurus are in the process of developing a patriarchy, a process that will be speeded up by the war.

How did these groups come here?  I proposed a long pre-history beginning with the African expansion along the Makran coast to the Indian coasts in 70,000 to 60,000 B.C.E, and migrations from Afghanistan in 10,000 B.C.E and from Tibet around 12,000 B.C.E.  The first group splits in two and the western branch populates the Indus valley and merges with the 10,000 B.C.E. group to become the "Saraswati-Sindhu" culture.  The eastern branch becomes the Rakshasas and a big subset of these go north of Orissa to the area around the Bengal-Bihar border.  The group from Tibet come through Nepal and spreads across North India to become the Nagas.

By 2400 B.C.E., this political structure is in place. The Reimagined Mahabharata begins there.

Historical Background

The ethnic landscape of the Indo-Gangetic plain and South Asia

South Asia is a microcosm of the world when we consider human diversity.  To take the most obvious, skin color: the population of India ranges from a very light, almost pink in the north-west to a deep black in the south and a light yellow tinge in the east.  Other anthropometric measures of diversity show similar variation – noses go from aquiline in the northeast to broad and flat in east south; epicanthic fold is missing in the east and northeast; the average height is greater in the northeast; hair goes from tight curls to wavy to almost straight.  In no other part of the world is there an equivalent range of variation – Africa, the most likely source of Homo Sapiens, which shows greater diversity (genetically), fails to show it in easy-to-observe patterns like skin color or proboscis prominence.  The only prominent feature that appears to be missing is hair color – almost all South Asians have black hair, occasionally shading to a deep brown – in which the blond and the red-head are completely missing in the sub-continent. From the perspective of South Asia, Europe and China have strong “founder effects” that can be traced to the last 10,000 years.

Digression into Genetics and Population studies

Geneticists use two models for explaining diversity in expanding species. The first, and most popular, is that the source gene-bank of the species will display the greatest diversity as migrating “families” exhibit strong founder effects as well as random divergence. Second, and one not currently in favor for explaining human variation, is that two separated populations of a species evolved and then hybridized to create a mingled population with greater variation.

The first hypothesis, let me call it the “single source” model, explains variation by a mix of founder effects and random local variation.  Thus, as one samples the prevalence of variants of a gene in a geographically distributed species, one will find that particularly sharp difference between the population in geographically-separated regions A and B will show up as present in the “source” population as a minor variation. In addition, both source region and the others will show variants that do not occur anywhere else that survived because they improved “fitness” to the local environment.

The second hypothesis requires that the two sub-species maintained cross-fertility even as other variations emerged.  When the populations met, hybrid vigor results in fitter offspring that contain all the variations from the two sources.  As a result the original sub-species die off or are submerged in the much larger hybrid population.

The technical problem with the second solution is that the separate populations must not only stay fertile with each other, but their off-spring must not be sterile.  As an example, tigers and lions can cross-breed but the resulting ligers or tigrons are not fertile and cannot reproduce.  Similarly horses and donkeys cross-breed to produce sterile mules.  In the human context, in addition to the issues created by cross-breeding, is that the narrow female birth-canal compared to the size of the baby results in a very difficult labor that sometimes puts the life of the mother at risk.  Hybrid vigor, which often results in larger offspring, would have made this even more hazardous.  As a result, the first solution is the preferred explanation for geographical variation in a species.

Genetic data, gathered by DNA sequencing, enables us to chart sequences of variations (“haplotypes”) that would explain geographic variation. Analyzing such genetic variation tends to be confounded by selection pressures that may corrupt the data. However, DNA sequencing also allows for the use of variation in “snips” (SNPs, or “single nucleotide polymorphisms”) that often do not affect genes and are therefore not subject to selection pressure. Since the number of SNPs is large (500 thousand to a million or more), correlation can be used to create a measure of similarity between populations that is stable in the face of selection pressure as well as individual differences. Combining this with the single-source hypothesis, correlation across populations allows geneticists to construct population family trees with statistically derived “percentage of inherited SNPs”, without resolving the harder problem of discovering and modeling gene variation among populations.

... To be Continued  [What the Caste system did to the Indian genome]