## Highlights - holding back the truth cannot heal divisions. It can only cause them to fester underground with even more vigour. Also, no scientist or writer can accurately predict the consequences of a particular truth being withheld: history is made up almost entirely of unintended consequences. So the only reasonable position for any scientist, or any writer for that matter, to take is to let the facts speak, - Singh mentions that archaeologists found ‘lotas’ at the bottom of the internal latrines that the homes were provided with, suggesting that the way South Asians wash themselves hasn’t changed all that much – even if many South Asians today do not have the indoor facilities that the Harappans enjoyed. - But in the Indus Valley, we find hundreds of thousands of bangles. They were distinctive ornaments and they were for both females and males.’ - South Asia being the centre of modern human population is not a new phenomenon – it is just an ancient track record that we continue to maintain. - Imagine what it would have taken to knit together such a large civilization through common standards of weights, seals, script, city design and even burnt bricks which had a uniform height to width to length ratio of 1:2:4. And all this without modern methods of communication and travel. Despite the geographical range of the civilization, it seems to have been less conflict-prone than its western counterparts. - The moment of the enormous increase in the size of temples and their absolute predominance, when compared to domestic dwellings, corresponds clearly to the transition from the chiefdom to the early state. It is thus in the temple that we must look for the institutional organism that gave rise to the transformation. Its growth is the critical factor, the true structural change that transformed the settlements of Lower Mesopotamia from egalitarian communities to complex organisms . . . The extraction of resources from the producers, and from consumption within the families, and their diversion towards social services, required a strong dose of coercion. Such coercion could be physical, but the use of force is expensive and becomes counterproductive after a while. Therefore, preferably the coercion is ideological. The temple was the only institution that could convince producers to give up substantial parts of their work for the advantage of the community. - It is clear that seals depict scenes that are evocative of religious beliefs or myths or stories that were well known to the Harappans. What these were is, of course, beyond our ken today, though we can clearly see that some concepts did pass on to later periods – from the sacredness of the peepul tree to the yoga-like pose. - When a script is used for writing different languages, the order in which the signs/letters appear usually changes in a noticeable manner. For example, in the Harappan seals that were found in Mesopotamia or the Gulf region, experts have found that the pattern or order in which the signs appear is different from the way they appear on seals found in the Harappan Civilization itself, suggesting that in the seals found abroad the Harappan script may have been used to write a different language, perhaps Akkadian or Sumerian or other languages spoken in the Gulf region. There are no such differences in sign patterns among seals found in the Harappan Civilization region itself. Therefore, it is likely that at least during the Mature Harappan period, when there was a high degree of standardization in general, there was one language that was predominantly used, perhaps for administrative, trade and legal purposes. So the best guess we can make based on archaeological and genetic evidence is that a population of herders from the southern or central Zagros region, speakers of Proto-Elamite or a related language, migrated to south Asia sometime after 7000 BCE, mixed with the First Indians and this new, mixed population sparked an agricultural revolution in the north-western region of India and then went on to create the Harappan Civilization over the next few millennia. - The evidence includes pictorial depictions on seals and sealings that suggest the worship of a buffalo-horned male god, mother goddesses, the peepul tree, the serpent and, possibly, the phallic symbol, all of which have been derived not from the earliest Vedas, but from the pre-Aryan population. Many of these went on to become part of the Indian cultural tradition as we know it today, and this is a crucial point Mahadevan makes. ‘The Indus heritage is shared by Dravidian as well as Indo-Aryan speakers. The Dravidian heritage is linguistic. The Indo-Aryan heritage is cultural, preserved through loanwords words taken from another language, loan translations phrases taken from another language, and myths . . . As I read it, the message of the Indus Script is: unity in diversity.’ - Mahadevan suggests the name Agastya comes from ‘akatti’ and that the legend of Agastya in Old Tamil literature – where he is thought to have led eighteen kings and eighteen families of the Velir clan from north India to south India – could refer to the rulers of the Harappan Civilization who migrated to the south after the civilization declined. - First of all, Indian culture is not synonymous with, or identical to, ‘Aryan’ or ‘Sanskrit’ or ‘Vedic’ culture. ‘Aryan’ culture was an important stream that contributed to creating the unique Indian civilization as we know it today, but by no means was it the only one. There were other streams that have contributed equally to making Indian civilization what it is. Second, to say that Indo-European languages reached India at a particular historical juncture is not the same as suggesting that the ‘Vedas’ or ‘Sanskrit’ or the ‘Aryan’ culture was imported flat-packed and then reassembled here. ‘Aryan’ culture was most likely the result of interaction, adoption and adaptation among those who brought Indo-European languages to India and those who were already well-settled inhabitants of the region. - Many studies have repeatedly shown that there is much higher prevalence of R1a among the upper castes than the lower castes and that it is about twice as high among the Brahmins as among the scheduled castes and the scheduled tribes. So what we see is a genetic signature that is prevalent among Indo-European-language-speaking countries and that also has a strikingly elevated presence among the traditional custodians of the oldest layer of Indo-European languages in India: Sanskrit. - The Swat valley samples were genetically very similar to the three outliers from Shahr-i-Sokhta and the BMAC and, like them, had ancestry from the First Indians and Zagros agriculturists. But there was one crucial and telling difference: they also had Steppe ancestry of about 22 per cent. The study says: ‘This provides direct evidence for Steppe ancestry being integrated into South Asian groups in the second millennium BCE, and is also consistent with the evidence of southward expansions of the Steppe groups through Turan at this time.’ - ‘Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist Indo-European society.’ The paper also said 70 to 90 per cent of mtDNA lineages of present-day Indian population groups derive from First Indians, while only 10 to 40 per cent of Y-chromosome lineages have similar ancestry. This difference is attributable to the sex bias in the later migrations. - Book 7, 21.5 of the Rigveda says ‘may not the “shishna-deva” approach our holy worship’, and Book 10, 99.3 describes how Indra slew them. Some authors have used ‘lustful demons’ as the appropriate translation for ‘shishna-deva’ in this context, but the literal meaning of the original text – and, of course, the animosity – is quite clear. - a long-standing civilization, the largest of its kind at the time, fell apart due to the ravages of a long drought, and its most visible symbols of power and prestige slowly disappeared even as urbanism itself did; people migrated to the east and the south in search of a new life; a new set of migrants came in from the north-west, bringing new languages and a different culture that put emphasis on sacrificial rituals and prioritized pastoralism and cattle breeding over urban settlements; another set of migrants came in from the north-east, bringing new languages, new domesticated plants and perhaps wetland farming techniques and a new variety of rice . . . and thus the pot of Indian culture was put on the boil. Four thousand years later, it is still simmering, with new ingredients getting added once in a while, from the Jews to the Syrians to the Parsis. - People tend to think India with its more than 1.3 billion people as having a tremendously large population, and indeed many Indians as well as foreigners see it this way. But genetically, this is an incorrect way to view the situation. The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two or three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans. The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations.