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The Racial Varieties of India |
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(from P. Bělíček: The Differential Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties. Prague 2018, Tables 40, 41, pp. 131-132) |
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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 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, 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 Table 32.
Deletable terms of Hindu
Anthropology |
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The Racial Composition of Indic and Dravidian
Peoples
Traditional comparative linguistics was founded in the mid-19th century
in honest efforts to reconstruct the evolutionary family-trees of living
languages but got gruel by the 20th 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 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).
* Macrolithic Dravidian Elamitoids with b-plurals, bull cults, Y-hg J (Kodagu,
Kolami, Gadaba, Purji).
* Burmese Tungids with Mongolic
epicanthic lids and Y-hg C
(Palaung, Karen, Danu).
symbolism, Y-DNA haplogroups R1a and R1b,
rock-cut caves, rock art and the Turkish sit posture: Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Orissa, *
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
Eastern Indo-Scythoids, mummifiers
(Munda, Mundari, Santhali, Bihari and Oriya tribes).
*
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, Extract from Pavel Bělíček: The Differential Analysis of the Wordwide Human Varieties. Prague 2018, pp. 115-138 |
