Roughly 4,000 years ago, a sprawling civilisation of agriculturalists flourished across a wide arc subsuming modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Communicating in a still little-language comprising symbols, scribblings and awkward shapes, tens of thousands of people lived in cities with surprisingly modern systems of drainage, towering granaries, and baked brick houses, and used intricate jewellery, impressive seals and standardised weights, competing with the other great civilisations of the era in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

That civilisation – known variously as the Indus Valley Civilisation or the Harappan civilisation – has today emerged as a lightning rod for clashing political ideologies in modern India, especially after a pair of landmark studies in 2019 on DNA examination of remnants found from digs in the region. The latest bend on this road came this week after the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) introduced revised and updated content in social sciences for sociology and history meant for Class 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12.

The cause of conflict – the decades-old polarising debate over the so-called Aryan migration theory

“In order to study the genetic history of the Harappans, DNA was extracted from the skeletal remains excavated at Rakhigarhi…the analysis of the data indicates that the Harappans are the indigenous people of this region,” the new textbooks read.

“The genetic roots of the Harappans go back to 10,000 BCE. The DNA of the Harappans has continued till today and a majority of the South Asian population appears to be their descendents…The continuity without any break in genetic history as well as cultural history rules out large scale immigration of the so-called Aryans,” the books add, in language far more strident than previous versions.

“At no stage, the genetic history of the Indians was either discontinued or broken…Thus, this study has indicated unbroken continuity for 5,000 years in this region.”

As is evident, this interpretation of the study appears to side with a group of historians and ideologues who argue that India is an ancient civilisation with perennial traditions,a civilisational state that was shackled by foreign invaders who were alien to the land and its culture. But is it correct?

In the study published in Cell, for the first time, scientists sequenced the genome from an ancient skeleton found in a 4,600-year-old burial site in Rakhigarhi. A related study published in Science by a group that included some of the authors of the first study put together the genetic sequences from 523 ancient people in central and south Asia.

The findings were essentially three, according to an interview by author Tony Joseph to this newspaper in 2019.

One, the agricultural transition or revolution in northwestern India that began around 7, 000 BCE, and the Harappan civilisation that followed a few thousand years later, were spearheaded or built by a mixed population of First Indians (or the out-of Africa migrants who were the first modern humans to reach India around 65,000 years ago) and another group related to west Asians from the Zagros region of Iran.

Two, there was a migration of central Asian Steppe pastoralists into India in the first half of the second millennium — that is, between 2,000 BCE and 1,500 BCE — who brought Indo-European languages to India.

And three, there was no indication of a Steppe ancestry in the ancient DNA of Harappan citizens, which confirmed the conclusion that the Aryans were not present during the Harappan civilisation, and that they arrived after the Harappan civilisation declined.

“The Science study also argues the case for why the language of the Harappan Civilization was likely to have been Dravidian. So to put in a nutshell, with much stronger and robust ancient DNA evidence, the newly published studies reconfirm earlier genetic findings about who the Harappans were and when the Aryan migration happened,” said Joseph, the author of Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

The third conclusion is both critical and controversial. In report after report in the international press, some authors of the study said they believed that modern South Asians were descended from the Harappan people who later mixed with Steppe herders who migrated from the north.

They cautioned that more research was required because the conclusions were too heavy to rest on a single genome, but also added that 11 of the 523 genomes in the larger study showed strong similarities to the Rakhigarhi sample. “Now we believe that these 12 samples, taken together, broadly represent the ancestry that was present in [South Asia] at that time,” Vagheesh Narasimhan, a Harvard University genomicist and co-author of the study, told Smithsonian Magazine at the time.

But in India, a different debate was raging.

Professor Vasant Shinde, one of the co-authors of both the studies, told the press in India that the new research completely debunked the Aryan Migration Theory. He told HT at the time that the study, which spanned over seven years, including three years of genetic examination, showed it was the indigenous people of South Asia who developed the Harappan civilisation and were “the Vedic people”.

The claims sparked a controversy with a section of historians and archaeologists, including some of the other authors of the study, refusing to back the statement. But the bold assertion buttressed a powerful new narrative about the history of the Indian people, and its civilisation that neatly dovetailed with what Hindu nationalists have been arguing for close to a century.

Who are we and where did we come from? Since the days of the first East India Company traders landing on the shores of this strange but extraordinarily diverse land that they’d go on to subjugate, this question has roiled the politics of successive eras in India. And it has often got to do more with politics and ideology than history, science and research.

“Max Mueller maintained that there was an original Aryan homeland in central Asia. He postulated a small Aryan clan on a high elevation in central Asia, speaking a language which was not yet Sanskrit or Greek, a kind of proto-language ancestral to later Indo-European languages… The northern Aryans who are said to have migrated to Europe are described by Max Mueller as active and combative and they developed the idea of a nation, while the southern Aryans who migrated to Iran and to India were passive and meditative, concerned with religion and philosophy,” the eminent historian Romila Thapar wrote in a 1996 article, The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics.

In 1883, he described the Bengali reformer Rammohan Roy as an “Aryan belonging to the south-eastern branch of the Aryan race and he spoke an Aryan language, the Bengali”.

There were other theories about the Aryan too. The anti-caste icon from Maharashtra, Jyotiba Phule, saw Aryans as the invaders and the indigenous people, who were the lower-caste people and adivasi folk, as the original inheritors of the land. Bal Gangadhar Tilak wrote that Aryans migrated from the Arctic North Pole regions in the post-glacial age.

But there were opponents too, especially among Hindu nationalists who said there was no migration and that Aryans were indigenous to India. In Bunch of Thoughts, RSS ideologue MS Golwankar blamed it on British distortion of history. “We were told we had no motherland, that most of us had come from somewhere outside and therefore were equally strangers and foreigners to this country,” he wrote, calling the Aryan-Dravidian divide as “recent” and “superficial”

One interpretation of the Rakhigarhi study that supported this theory of indigeneity and unbroken Indian civilisation without outside influences, therefore, was welcomed by the right-wing. Balmukund Pandey, organising secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihaas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY), an RSS-affiliated group of historians, told HT in 2019 that the study had only affirmed what they had been saying for the past several decades. “The theory that there was no Aryan migration should be included in the curriculum,” he said at the time. His words were prophetic.

But Rakhigarhi is not the only dig site enmeshed in contemporary politics. Down south, another set of protracted excavations are providing new clues to understanding how ancient civilisations worked and interacted, and animating local politics and society.

In 2015, excavations began in the town of Keeladi, around 500 kilometres away from Chennai, after carbon dating samples from the area were traced back to 580 BCE, suggesting that similar to the “second urbanisation” in the Gangetic plains, there was a civilisation that existed in Keeladi, and Sivakalai (172 km away) between 2,600 and 3,200 years ago. It narrowed the gap between the imaginations of the Tamil and the Indus Valley Civilisations (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE), the earliest known in the Indian subcontinent.

The reconstruction of this ancient society evoked both linguistic and cultural pride, pushing chief minister MK Stalin to claim that the Tamil civilisation was rich, modern and developed, and juxtapose Tamil pride against the Hindi heartland. More importantly, it prompted some scholars and politicians to say that Tamils descended from the Indus Valley civilisation, and that the civilisation at Keeladi had little interaction with Vedic culture.

In this fractious debate, what is the truth? As Joseph said in his book, India might be a multisource civilisation and not a unisource one. And as Thapar wrote in her 2019 book, Which of Us Are Aryans, knowledge requires the teasing out of complexities and this cannot be done by insisting on the answer to a question being either this or that…”Often, it is the nuances that lie in between the options that push ideas forward and encourage explanations.”