The new finding of a research that the caste system is not as old or integral to India as it has been widely believed, is certain to provoke several rounds of heated discussion. It has long been assumed that caste barriers, initially based on trade and then made inherent by birth into a subject of social status, have always served as the framework for Hindu society.
This, the conventional wisdom said, ensured that even groups located geographically close to one another did not mix for several thousand years. However, genetic studies conducted by Harvard Medical School and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad have now proven that strict endogamy is a fairly recent phenomenon and that 2000 years ago and before, people from across the country freely mixed with one another and struck relationships. While it is unlikely that the new research will have any impact on the caste-based politics of the country any time soon, it will nevertheless be interesting to see how outfits such as the Bahujan Samaj Party respond to the findings. At the root of the caste-based policies practised by parties such as the BSP is the assumption that certain communities like the Dalits, have been discriminated against for many thousands of years because of the ‘Manuvadi’ Hindu caste system. BSP chief Mayawati, for instance, has exploited this idea to ridicule caste superiority. The term is a derisive reference to the law-giver Manu who is believed to have codified the caste system and prohibited inter-caste marriages. However, as historians have already pointed out, the caste system (as a classification of people based on their occupation) first finds mention only in Book 10 of the Rig Veda. The caste system’s portrayal as a system of endogamous groups that are not allowed to mix happens centuries later in Manusmriti (whose exact dates are still contested).
While the last world on this issue is yet to be heard, the new evidence cannot be dismissed outright merely because it may be politically inconvenient for some or because it questions long-held beliefs. Based on the analysis of the genetic make-up of 571 persons from 73 well-defined ethno-linguistic groups of the Indian sub-continent, the researchers have found that between 4,200 and 1,900 years ago, there were no castes as we known them today by name. Even tribal communities that have been considered to be genetically isolated, such as the Bhils of Gujarat and the Kallars of Tamil Nadu, were not left out. The same genetic evidence also contains indicators for when different communities turned to endogamy. For instance, the researchers believe that the Vysyas in Andhra were one of the earliest to shun inter-caste marriages and have been isolated for almost 3,000 years; the Kshatriyas of Uttar Pradesh, however, took to endogamy at least 800 years afterwards while their Brahmin counterparts waited another 400 years before they stopped inter-caste breeding.