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The Racial Varieties of India Clickable terms are red on yellow background
(from P. Bělíček: The Differential Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties. Prague 2018, Tables 40, 41, pp. 131-132)
Racial Varieties on the Indian Subcontinent One of the first ethnographic researchers of India was Herbert Risley1, whose writings were based on the 1901 Census of Inhabitants. He invented a sort of binomial racial classification with groups of the tall and fair Turk-Iranians, the tall and long-headed Indo-Aryans with fair skin and dark eyes, the broad-headed Scytho-Dravidians, the long-headed Aryo-Dravidians and the black round-headed Mongol-Dravidians. His results were revised critically by A. C. Haddon and J. H. Hutton. In his treatise The Races of Man (1909) Haddon distinguished the broad-headed Indo-Alpines, the fair-skinned long-headed Indo-Aryans, the dark-haired dolichocephalous Dravidians and the Pre-Dravidian jungle people. J. H. Hutton turned attention to new results attested by the Census of India for 1933. He distinguished Indic Negrito tribes, Armenoid Alpines, Dardic brachycephals from the west, slender and narrow-faced Mediterranids, black Proto-Austroloids and flat-faced Mongoloids. The most detailed studies were provided by Indic scholars B. S. Guha and D. N. Majumdar. Guha based his considerations on Hutton’s classification relying on treating Hindus with terms for Europoid races. He discovered the Negrito element rightfully in the Kadars but erroneously in the martial race of Nagas. In his opinions the Proto-Austroloid or Pre-Dravidian element was preserved in the Santhals, the Mundas, the Juangas, the Soaras, the Kondhs. His system distinguished Tibeto-Mongoloids (tribes of Sikkim and Bhutan) and Palaeo-Mongoloids of two types: the long-headed type was represented by the Angami Nagas and the broad-headed type by a belt of Indo-Lappids spreading along the Himalayan foothills from Assam to Kashmir. Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt became a reputed connoisseur of Asiatic anthropology after his research expedition to India in 1927. After 1933 he discredited himself as one of the Nazibarons, who participated in the discriminative policies persecuting Jews. His early writings are, however, acknowledged as valuable in their descriptive depth. He paid special heed to Veddids and dark races of South India. He saw a special subcategory of Veddids in Gondids, who lived in matriarchal societies and used the mattock for hoe-cultivation. He recapitulated subgroups of Hindus as follows: (1) New Hindus or genuine Indids: culturally advanced peoples, finer physical phenotypes. (2) Gracile Indids (the Bengalis): brown skin colour, gracile appearance, patriarchal customs. (3) North Indids (the Rajputs, Todas): light brown skin colour, patriarchal societies. (4) Gondids (Gonds, Juangs, Bhils, Oraons): dark brown skin colour, curly hair, hoe-cultivation. (5) Malids (Kurumber, Weddah): dark brown skin, curly hair. (6) Melanids or Black Hindus: mixed hybrid groups with several subclades. (7) Southern Melanids (Yanadi): plant-gatherers, hoe-cultivators and peasants in the southern plains of India. They are remarkable for black skin colour and tendencies to matriarchal organisation. (8) Kolids (the Munda, Ho, Santhal in the North Deccan forests): totemistic tribes with black brown skin colour. They are probably Mongolic immigrants from the north. (9) Proto-Australoids (the Pulayan women and the Urali in Travancore, the Baiga in Rewa): ‘dolichocephalic head; markedly platyrrhine nose, depressed at the root, short stature, dark brown skin colour, wavy or even curly hair’. Their limbs are delicate, their forehead is less developed and slightly retreating, supraorbital ridges are often prominent. This group includes also the tribes of Chenchu, Kannikar, Kondh, Bhil, Santhal and Oraon. Mediterranids. Indic populations contain substantial admixtures of Altaic races with gracile appearance, slim figure, leptorhine noses and tall faces. Eickstedt discerned three types of Indic Mediterranids: (a) Dravidian Palaeo-Mediterraneans such as Tamil and Telugu tribes, (b) the people of the Indus valley civilisation and (c) types of Orientalids overlapping from western Eurasia. His subdivision has to be supplemented by comments emphasising that the Harappan elites in the Indus civilisation were composed from the middle classes of merchantry akin to Dravidian Tamils. Yet the real core of the Harappan society was formed by the lower classes of Elamitoid (Hititte-Farsian) peasantry with tell-site settlements and flat-roofed clay-brick labyrinth houses. The Harappan merchantry differed from Tamils by manufacturing pointed-base goblets typical of northern Turcoids and Maglemosian pottery with the Y-DNA haplotype R1a. The production of pointed-base pottery tempered with sand and organic materials was outreaching to India from the Afanasievo culture in the Baikal area and its cultural belt spanned in northern Eurasia as far as Poland and Germany. Its shape betrayed that it was designed as a kettle for hanging or storing in conic holes. In West European anthropology the term of Mediterranids covers several stocks of nomadic fishermen and small-game hunters without distinguishing Aurignacian Tungids (38,000 BC) from two factions of Turanids: the Magdalenian Iberoids (17,000 BC) in Spain and France and the Maglemosian Cimbroids (9,000 BC) in northern Germany. The former exhibited the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b and burnished pottery, the latter displayed the Y-haplogroup R1a and pointed-base pottery. The Harappan middle classes belonged to the zone of northern Turanids, while the Tamils endorsed the lineage of southern Turanids with artificial caves. There existed also the third type of Turanids represented by the Khmers bearing the Y-haplogroup R2a. The terminological disambiguation of European Mediterranids applies also to the Indian subcontinent: its Altaic races fell into camps of Turcoid varieties and Tungusoid Telugus. Turcoid r-languages were remarkable for r-plurals, rhotacism, shifts t, d > r, vocalic r-colouring and apical retroflex plosives. Tungusoid l-languages were noticeable for l-plurals, lambdacisms, vocalic l-colouring, shifts t, d > l and laminal retroflex stops. The group of oriental races generally reckons with three racial types known from European studies. (a) The tall brachycephalous Dinaric race is reported to range in the areas of Bengal, Orissa and Coorg. (b) The short-sized brachycephalous Alpenoid type is said to abound in Sourashtra, Gujarat and Bengal. (c) The Orientalids tend to appear among the Parsees settled around Bombay. By Armenoid types anthropologists mean populations with ‘opaque-white skin, brunet hair and eyes, abundant pilosity, medium stature (166 cm), sturdy body build, wide head with rounded occiput (cranial index 87), very long face, straight and narrow nose (nasal index 57) with high bridge, thin lips, narrow eye opening.’1 They represent a variety closely related to the Assyroid type, Jewish type and Dinaric types. Their occurrence indicates a great predominance of Ugroid and Scythoid phenotypes in the Near East, Levant, Syria, Armenia and Caucasus. Aryans. A special attention is paid to the fabulous Indic Nordids storied by many controversial myths of Aryan Indo-Europeistics. They are celebrated as victorious champions, who blessed India with the light of European civilisation although they were of Uralic origin and underwent several phases of Sarmatian, Sumerian and Iranian Europeisation. Their descendants settled down in Rajputana and established their rule as leading military and administrative nobility. They derived their origin from northwestern warrior classes led by the tribes of Rajputs and Yats. They seem to have had a hand also in Ashoka’s kingdom and the entire Maurya period. Nordids. Attempts to classify them as Europoid Nordids are doomed to failure, in fact, the Aryans were Sarmatised and Iranised Uralids affiliated principally with Siberian big-mammal hunters. The real bearers of European language traditions were the Campignian Littoralids importing the early Corded Ware via the Lower Volga basin. The ancients knew them as Getes (Scythised Massagetes and Turanised Euergetes) and their final Indo-Aryan destinations were represented by the Mehrgarh and Vindhya Range cordmarking culture (c. 10,000 BC). They were Scandinavian Gotho-Frisians transplanted via Prussia, Perm and Tocharia to India as the endogamous castes of Khattris and Brahmans. Carleton S. Coon discussed their Indic tribesmen as a high-headed, long-faced and narrow-nosed Indo-Afghan type. Coon’s follower J. Lawrence Angel gave them a prophetically far-sighted account by filing them among ‘earlier pre-Bronze Age Corded form’, Wilton M. Krogman’s Proto-Nordics and Danubian-Halstatt type.2 Indic Nordids and Europids with the Y-haplogroups I1, I2 produced Macrolithic axes that were derived from Elamitoid Macrolithic civilisations with the Y-haplogroups J1, J2. These cultures were responsible for the epoch-making rise of Neolithic agriculture but grew out of earlier Micoquian and Acheulean plant-gathering axe-tool makers. Their principal inventions were axes, adzes, mattocks and hoes for slash-and-burn farming. These stone instruments served for cutting woody species, unearthing edible roots and loosening soil before sowing. The Campignian colonists founded plantations in India as Mesolithic newcomers of late but established a firm position among its native autochthones. Their tribes manifested common origin by bearing similar ethnonyms: the northwestern Campignian Littoralids with the Corded Ware and the Y-haplogroup I1 were Gotho-Frisians, their Baltic brothers were Yotvingo-Prussians and the Neolithic Danubians with the Y-haplogroup I2 were Quado-Langobardians. In the Middle East their oriental tribesmen with flat-roof clay-brick architecture and Y-haplogroups J1 and J2 may be called Hittite-Farsians (or Guteo-Parthians). They shared their cults of naturistic deities, martyr gods, their wooden idols of bulls and bovine cattle as well as processional hymns in quantitative metres. They dominated in South Asia for millennia as a substratum of plant-gatherers until Mesolithic wanderings surprised them by the advent of western Nordids with cord-marked pottery. In Iran they were greeted as Geto-Persians and in India they became known as Khatri-Brahmans. All of these factions principally preserved the long-headed dolichocephaly and the tall robust ectomorph and macroskelic stature of the dark-skinned equatorial pre-agriculturalists. Yet they added a number of physiognomic innovations acquired by adopting some traits from Eurasian flake-tool makers: radical depigmentation, euryprosopic faces, leptorrhinia (narrow noses) and narrow lips. Classic anthropology distinguishes a few inveterate terms. ^†Caucasoids: the Caucasus is a mountainous region with many heterogeneous nationalities and cannot stand for any racial unity. More appropriate terms are Elamites, Hittite-Persians, Elamo-Susians, Gutio-Farsians or Guteo-Farsians. ^†Armenoids: a term for races with aquiline noses, which proves to be misleading, because Armenians are a hybrid mixture of Europoids, Turcoids and Abkhazians. More appropriate names may be found in Abkhazoids, Maikopians, Kurgan people or Ugro-Scythoids. Aralids: a term that improperly refers to the Turcoid Turanids subsumed as Homo sapiens. eur. turanicus (Montandon 1928). Lake Aral is a local centre of Trans-Caspian Turcoids that initiated a new tribal lineage with the Y-haplogroup R2. It pointed to the Kashmiri Turcoids and Khmer people. ^†Negrito: the Negrito people are of dark-coloured skin owing to secondary contact with dark Melanesian Negrids. They did not make their livelihood as insular fishermen but rainforest foragers, honey-eaters and insectivores. They must have descended from the short-sized Annamites in Annam, Vietnam, and the Canton region of China. Their ancestors probably formed the original core of Sinids speaking isolating tonal languages with reduplicative morphology. Table 32. Deletable terms of Hindu Anthropology	The Racial Composition of Indic and Dravidian Peoples Traditional comparative linguistics was founded in the mid-19^thcentury in honest efforts to reconstruct the evolutionary family-trees of living languages but got gruel by the 20^th century’s counterstroke of holistic dogmatism. Its main error consisted in regarding evolution as a uni-sexual monogenesis of mother-tongues to their daughters without assistance of heterozygous fathers. It has established a firm classification of nationalities based on amounts of mutual loanwords between neighbouring tribes compressed into a unified shape in ancient and medieval administrative domains. It mistook genetic consanguine kinship with the degree of mutual permeation of vicinal national tongues. Such preconceptions engendered also unilinear evolutionary models of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, Tai-Kadai, Austronesian, Austroasiatic and Hmong-Mien families. Ancient India was never united into one large monarchy and one reigning dynasty, so its sovereigns split the country into the Indo-Aryan north and the Dravidian south. Its Sanskrit name Dravidā remains questionable, since it cropped up occasionally in the treatise Tantravārttika by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa. It came into use as a convenient term for a large family only thanks to Robert Caldwell’s Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856). Its origin is explained by splitting rules of divergent monogenesis without considering invasions of heterogeneous tribes and racial groups. Their complex is treated as one central primordial whole with crumbling external peripheries tending to fall off and acquire independence. The extant family trees suffer from mistaking the hotch-potch terms for mixed heterogeneous domains for pure elements. Classic comparatistics maintained the following statements: Indo-European ® Slavic + Baltic Indo-European is an ancestor of the Slavic and the Baltic family Indo-European É Slavic + Baltic The Indo-European family includes the Slavic and Baltic family It presupposed that (i) c ® a + b is a descendancy relation, where (ii) a, b are disjointed elements without intersections, i.e. a Ç b = Æ, (iii) it implies that the element a Î c and b Î c. A new revised taxonomy must refute strict relations and replace them by a weaker relation c Þ a È b. It means that c contains the majority of a and b and a and b have intersection. Then Table 31 is rewritten as follows. North Dravidian Þ [Brahui È Kurukh (Þ Oraon È Kisan) È Malto (Þ Sauria Paharia)] Central Dravidian Þ (Koya È Kolami È Naiki È Ollari È Duruwa) South Dravidian Þ [(Malayalam È Tamil È Irula) È (Toda È Kota) È (Kodava, Kurumba)] South Central Dravidian Þ [(Telugu È Chenchu)] È [(Kuvi È Kui) È (Manda È Pengo)] There was a number of racial dominants in the official census of Dravidian India, and the decisive role was played by Turanids represented by several factions. The earliest faction were the Proto-Malayese cultures of club-, knife- and boomerang-throwers with microblades, the ABO blood group B and the Y-haplotype R*-M173. Their later progeny included the Harappan merchantry with the Y-haplotype R1a. The dominant position was however seized by the Tamil Turanids with R1b, rock-cut caves and grey burnished ware (11,000 BC). The lower Harappan caste of peasantry stemmed from Elamitoids agriculturalists with Y-haplogroups J and G. The last but not least was a class of urban craftsmen with cremations, whose Cemetery H culture crisscrossed India around 1800 BC. It proceeded from Annam, Burman and Bengal along the southern sub-Himalayan foothills to Punjab and Kazakhstan. * Vindhyan Indo-Nordids with cord-impressed pottery and s-plurals (Brahmans, Kshatryas). * Aryan Indo-Sarmatids with burials by exposition on scaffolds (Aryas, Saraiki, Marathi, Muria). * Harappan Elamitoids with the J-haplogroup and b-plurals (Quettans, Jadgali). * Macrolithic Dravidian Elamitoids with b-plurals, bull cults, Y-hg J (Kodagu, Kolami, Gadaba, Purji). * Ochre pit-grave cultures of Tungids with l-plurals and Y-hg C (Balti, Ladakhi, Tulu, Telugu). * Burmese Tungids with Mongolic epicanthic lids and Y-hg C (Palaung, Karen, Danu). * Turcoid Microlithic cultures with purification in water, burials in river streams, phallocentric lingam symbolism, Y-DNA haplogroups R1a and R1b, rock-cut caves, rock art and the Turkish sit posture: Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Orissa, Bengal, Assam. * Palaeo-Turcoid Veddids, the Palaeolithic predecessors of Tamils remarkable for tree-dwellings and the archaic Y-DNA haplogroup R*-M173; besides rough microblades they produced false boomerangs and bent throwing sticks (Urali, Kallar1, Maravar and Vatuka).2 * Western Indo-Scythoids, mummifiers, megalith-builders (Sindhs, Toda, Deccan Mountains). Eastern Indo-Scythoids, mummifiers (Munda, Mundari, Santhali, Bihari and Oriya tribes). * North-Indian Alpenoid Indids, hoe-cultivators with cremations and the Y-hg O (Indi, Hindu, Hindko). * Dravidian Indo-Negritos: hoe-cultivators with the Y-hg O (Kadars, Koyi, Kolami, Chenchu). * Oldowan Indo-Negrids with pebble-stone choppers (Sinhalese Veddahs, Loloish and Hmongic tribes). Table 32. An ethno-cultural classification of Dravidian tribes The most intricate knot of misunderstandings rules in the traditional Indo-Aryan ethnology and philology. The discovery of Sanskrit Vedic texts convinced their pioneering explorers that Old Indic bears only the unmistakable heritage of Germanic Aryans, although it exhibits also residual components of Dravidian, Elamitoid and Veddoid word stock. Its genuine Indo-European core was not imported to India by Aryan conquerors around 1600 BC but originated thanks to the earlier colonisation of Brahmanic tribes. These tribes announced their advent by the rise of the Mehrgahr culture in Pakistan and the Vindhyas Range culture (10,000 BC) in Central India. They both suggested numerous parallels to the Campignian shell-midden Littorids (10,000 BC) in western Europe. They exceeded in producing cord-marked pottery that looked like an evident anticipation of the Gotho-Frisian Corded Ware (3500 BC) and must have been a continuation of its Mesolithic Campignian predecessors. Aryan invaders were inimical to the hitherto reigning castes of Brahmano-Khattris and integrated them into the social hierarchy of their empire as a class of priestly clergymen. Their customs of eloping and buying brides, drinking intoxicating soma and burials by the exposition on the scaffolding classify them as Iranian Sarmatids of Uralic origin. Their cultural influence initiated speculations about a fictitious Indo-Uralic family1 without realising that its assumed word stock was based only on terms of pastoralist animal husbandry and iron-working metallurgy.2 They were transplanted by the hordes of horseback riding cavalry that undertook raids from the Sintashta-Petrovka centre (2100 BC). Besides Aryans and Brahmans India was populated by a wide variety of Dravidian tribes of Turcoid, Pelasgoid, Scythoid, Elamitoid and Sinoid descent. Their prehistoric typology may be retrieved according to the manner of burial inhumation, too. Indo-Scythoids were composed from the Sindhi megalith-builders (1000 BC) stemming from the Iranian Sogdian and Saka tribes. They lived in semi-barrel beehive shelters like the Todas, built circular stone-walled mounds and mummified the dead in a way common to Tocharians in the Tarim Basin. Another Scythoid stream proceeded south of the Himalayas and headed for the colonies of the Khasis of Assam and the Mundas of Chotanagpur. Both groups adored Ugroid divinities, Uranus in Greece, Ahriman in Iran and Varuna in India. Aryan conquerors stemming from Sarmatoid Iranians with t-plurals Þ Aryans, Marathi, Saraiki Europoid Hindus with corded-impressed ware and s-plurals Þ Brahmans, Kshatryas Macrolithic Dravidian Elamitoids, bull cults, b-plurals, J-haplotype Þ Kodagu, Kolami, Gadaba, Purji Microblade Turcoid tree-dwellers with Y-hg R*-M173 and r-plurals Þ Kallar, Maravar, Kurukh Leptolithic Dravidian Tungids with l-plurals Þ Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Kolami, Purji, Gadaba Pyrolithic Hindu Indids with cremations and i-plural Þ Kashmiri, Malayam, Telugu, Koyi, Kolami Megalithic Dravidian Scythoids with k-plurals Þ Kui, Kuvi, Naiki, Tamil, Gondi, Braui, Toda Table 33. A reclassification of Indic tribes by plural endings Their hosts were outnumbered by Turcoid Shivaists with the Y-haplogroup R1b and the Grey Burnished Ware (11,000 BC). Their lingam cults, rock-cut sanctuaries and the praying posture in the Turkish sit infallibly betrayed customs of European Iberids and Cimbroids. The first station on their move was founded by the Harappa civilisation (4,000 BC). In its area their cultic temples with sacred fountains dominated over the subdued Elamitoid peasantry professing the worship of the sacred cow zebu. Such caste hierarchy was established also in Dravidian kingdoms, where the leading Turcoid aristocracy was composed from the militant Tamils and their serfs recruited from the dolichocephalous Elamitoid farmers. Their files consisted from the Gadaba, Kota and Kodagu tribes with b-plurals. The Dravidian Tamils had respected partners in the Tulu and Telugu tribes, who developed from another race of nomadic fishers affiliated to the Palaungids and the Tagalog. Both groups abounded in dental and retroflex stops, used accusative constructions with the SOV word order and applied remains of vowel harmony similar to its prototype in Ural-Altaic languages. Extract from Pavel Bělíček: The Differential Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties. Prague 2018, pp. 115-138

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1 Herbert Risley: The Ethnology, Languages, Literature and Religions of India. Gurgaon: Academic Press, 1975.

1 Renato Biasutti: Le Razze e i popoli della terra, vol. II. Africa, Torino : UTET, 1941.

2 J. Lawrence Angel: The people of Lerna; analysis of a prehistoric Aegean population, Princeton, N. J., American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1971, pp. 36–38.

1 Louis Dumont – A. Stern – M. Moffatt: A South Indian subcaste: social organization and religion of the Pramalai Kallar. Oxford University Press. 1986, 2012.

2 Nicholas B. Dirks: The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 60–70, 174. 

1 Björn Collinder: Survey of the Uralic languages. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969; A. M. Uesson: On Linguistic Affinity. The Indo-Uralic Problem. Malmö, 1970.

2 A. J. Joki: Uralier und Indogermanen. Helsinki, 1974, p. 251.