India Today 10th September 2018 | Page 3

FROM THE www.indiatoday.in EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Aroon Purie GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR: Raj Chengappa EDITOR: Ajit Kumar Jha (Research) GROUP CREATIVE EDITOR: Nilanjan Das; GROUP PHOTO EDITOR: Bandeep Singh MANAGING EDITORS: Kai Jabir Friese, Rajesh Jha EXECUTIVE EDITORS: Damayanti Datta, S. Sahaya Ranjit, Sandeep Unnithan DEPUTY EDITORS: Prachi Bhuchar, Uday Mahurkar, Manisha Saroop M umbai : M.G. Arun H yderabad : Amarnath K. Menon C handigarh : Asit Jolly SENIOR EDITORS: Shweta Punj, Sasi Nair, Alokparna Das J aipur : Rohit Parihar SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Kaushik Deka, Ashish Mukherjee M umbai : Suhani Singh, Kiran Dinkar Tare; p atna : Amitabh Srivastava ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Shougat Dasgupta, Chinki Sinha K olkata : Romita Sengupta; B hopal : Rahul Noronha; T hiruvananthapuram : Jeemon Jacob; B eiJing : Ananth Krishnan ASSISTANT EDITOR: p une : Aditi S. Pai PHOTO DEPARTMENT: Vikram Sharma (Deputy Photo Editor), Rajwant Singh Rawat, Yasir Iqbal (Principal Photographers), Chandra Deep Kumar (Senior Photographer); M umbai : Mandar Suresh Deodhar (Chief Photographer), Danesh Adil Jassawala (Photographer); K olkata : Subir Halder (Principal Photographer); C hennai : N.G. Jaison (Senior Photographer) PHOTO RESEARCHERS: Prabhakar Tiwari (Chief Photo Researcher), Saloni Vaid (Principal Photo Researcher), Shubhrojit Brahma (Senior Photo Researcher) CHIEF OF GRAPHICS: Tanmoy Chakraborty ART DEPARTMENT: Sanjay Piplani (Senior Art Director); Devajit Bora (Deputy Art Director); Vikas Verma (Associate Art Director); Bhoomesh Dutt Sharma (Senior Designer) Siddhant Jumde (Senior Illustrator) PRODUCTION DEPARTMENT: Harish Agarwal (Chief of Production), Naveen Gupta (Chief Coordinator), Vijay Kumar Sharma (Senior Coordinator) PUBLISHING DIRECTOR: Manoj Sharma ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Anil Fernandes (Impact) IMPACT TEAM Senior General Manager: Jitender Lad (West) General Manager: Mayur Rastogi (North), Upendra Singh (Bangalore), Kaushiky Gangulie (East) GROUP CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER: Vivek Malhotra Assistant General Manager: Garima Prashar (Marketing) SALES AND OPERATIONS: D.V.S. 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Reproduction in any manner is prohibited. l l Sub scriptions: Printed and published by Manoj Sharma on behalf of Living Media India Limited. Printed at Thomson Press India Limited, 18-35 Milestone, Delhi Mathura Road, Faridabad-121007, (Haryana) and at A-9, In dustrial Complex, Maraimalai Nagar, District Kancheepuram-603209, (Tamil Nadu). Published at K-9, Connaught Circus, New Delhi-110001. Editor: Raj Chengappa. l in dia today does not take the re sponsibility for returning unsolicited publication material. All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi/New Delhi only EDITOR-IN-CHIEF I don’t normally give much mindspace to ancient Indian history. However, my interest was piqued when Manag- ing Editor Kai Friese informed me about a new scientific discovery on the In- dus Valley Civilisation (IVC), specially in relation to Vedic culture. This, obviously, had some relevance, considering the cur- rent dispensation in the country. There is an effort to project the IVC as Vedic and backdate the accepted chronology of the Vedas—India’s most ancient texts. However, now, thanks to advances in genetics, the IVC has started revealing some of its secrets. DNA samples extract- ed from Citizen I4411, a male who lived in the Indus valley city of Rakhigarhi, in modern-day Haryana, approximately 4,500 years ago, has geneticists in a tizzy. The most startling aspect is the complete absence of the genetic marker R1a1 in I4411’s DNA. This is significant, because R1a1, often loosely and some- what misleadingly called the ‘A ryan gene’, is widely dispersed in the modern popu- lation of India. The indications are that the people of IVC are a closer match with South Indian tribes. The ‘A ryan gene’ has been traced to people who migrated to India from the Steppes of Europe, and earlier studies have established that they are found more among the upper castes of North India. Our origins are a deeply emotive subject because political movements have sprung out of identity politics—the Dravidian parties in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s and, more recently, the uproar over the National Register of Citizens in As- sam that aims to identify ‘outsiders’. One of the biggest, longest-lasting mysteries on the subcontinent is the origin of the people of the Indus valley, an early Bronze Age civilisation that flour- ished in northwest India between 3500 and 1800 BCE. In his 2014 bestseller Sapiens, scholar and historian Yuval Noah Harari devotes several pages to the Sumerian and Meso- potamian civilisations of the Middle East, but makes only a passing reference to the contemporary IVC which, in fact, covered an area twice their size. That’s because while the cuneiform script of Sumer and Mesopotamia has been decoded, we are Our February 11, 2002 cover yet to find the Rosetta Stone that could unlock the language of the people of the IVC. So while ancient Sumeria speaks to us and tells us stories about the daily lives of its people and their fairly humdrum existence, IVC remains deafeningly mute. Until its writing is deciphered, we will never know how its inhabitants passed their time, who they worshipped, how they developed their fascinating urban culture of flush toilets, water supply and sewage systems and baked brick homes which parts of India are still deprived of four millennia later. We don’t even know, for instance, what they called themselves or their magnificent walled cities —Mohenjo- daro and Harappa are modern names. Our cover story this week, The Explo- sive Truth, by Kai Friese, who has been tracking this subject for over a year and is passionate about it, explores these new revelations that emphasise the fact that there were once several distinct popula- tions in the subcontinent, some of whom clearly reached these shores earlier than the others. It fits in with one of the theo- ries that geneticist David Reich had listed on where the people of the IVC came from—that they were Ancestral South In- dians, a pre-existing mix of South Asian hunter gatherers and Iranian farmers. These are conclusions that further re- search needs to build upon. While the newest findings could upturn some of our most recently held theories about the Indus people, they in fact reinforce earlier wisdom that India was essentially a melting pot of cul- tures rather than a single civilisational conti nuum. At the very least, it will only serve to underline one of our greatest strengths—unity in diversity. (Aroon Purie) SE P T E M BE R 10, 2 018 INDIA TODAY 1