India was a conquered land

by philg

Some more news to the uneducated (me!) from Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani… India was not always populated by today’s Indians.

From the profile of Birsa Munda:

Who owns India? Who owns the forests and rivers, the farmlands eyed by industry, the slums coveted by real estate developers and airport authorities, the hills and plateaus desired by mining barons?

The nationalists of the twentieth century had a simple answer to who owned the land: Indians did. The British did not. Yet when the nationalists assembled the jigsaw puzzle of diversities to define the Indian nation, some pieces got left out of consideration. Among those were the original tribal inhabitants of the country, who are now called Adivasis. The Adivasis, taken together, match in size the population of Germany or Vietnam, but they are so various and widely dispersed across the subcontinent that it is nonsensical to speak of them as a single group. One experience many Adivasis do share, however, is the overriding of their rights in the name of development and in the interests of other Indians, especially those with more money. “It’s as if middle and upper classes and castes have seceded into outer space,” the writer and political activist Arundhati Roy says. “They look down and say, ‘What’s our bauxite doing in their mountains, what’s our water doing in their rivers?’”

Matters did not improve when the European missionaries came:

“They say in Africa, when the colonizers—the white colonizers—came, ‘We had the land and they had the Bibles. Now we have the Bibles and they have the land.’”

Wikipedia says “Adivasi make up 8.6% of India’s population, or 104 million people, according to the 2011 census.” Where does everyone else in India come from? William Jones, also profiled in the book, figured out that the dominant languages came from the same place as had European languages:

This insight—that Sanskrit and the European classical languages were all branches of a single, lost linguistic river—helped to challenge prejudice and reconnect the world. Jones was arguing that Sanskrit was a “beautiful sister” of Greek and Latin.

Genomics has enabled 21st century folks to look at traces of the physical migrations, e.g., in “The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia” (March 31, 2018, Narasimham, et al.). The genetic data seem to be consistent with what the language scholars have been saying for centuries (see Wikipedia for the standard migration theory of Indo-European). So this isn’t exactly news, but it is a different way of thinking about India for me. I think about North America as having been conquered by European migrants, thus depriving the natives of what had been their birthright. But I hadn’t reflected that there were likely surviving tribes in India who had originally been in possession of the entire subcontinent.

9 thoughts on “India was a conquered land”

  1. There is a book you would likely enjoy (https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-How-Got-Here/dp/110187032X) that gives similar detail for most of the globe. For example, in African the pygmies and the San appear to be remnants of much larger populations over-run by Bantu herders in relatively recent times. Similary, Europe has seen waves of colonisation on a scale not previously understood (the same folk that swept down into India swept west into Europe, contributing 50% of the DNA of most Western Europeans, but 90% in the British Isles) – and quite recently, just after Newgrange was built (5k years ago?).

  3. Does it matter? China was a conquered land. France was a conquered land. America was a conquered land. Wars have consequences. If you want to go make and litigate the historic records, should France be part of Italy since it was part of the Roman Empire? Should Egypt be Grecian since it was part of Alexander’s conquest. Should Japan be part of the USA since we beat them in WWII? Should Mexico belong to Spain? Afterall they were conquistador turf and they still speak the language!
    —
    What matter is that countries exist TODAY. Borders exists today. And, these countries and borders exist to protect and advance the interest of the majority of the tribe that currently occupies it. The world made up of over a hundred such tribes which have their own borders, interests and priorities. And, they will continue to exist as long as the tribes have the weapons and economic ability to protect them. Period.

  4. This has been a constant feature of human history until the end of WW II when we finally said, more or less, the music stops, everyone takes a seat, and borders become something that will be defended by the entire world to finally end wars of conquest. In theory, at least. 🙂

  5. I am a big India fan and tried to read the khilnani book but decided it was witless after reading some early chapter about some guy who tortured people, which the author likened to Guantanamo. Thought that was a vacuous analogy.

  6. Jack: I think that I found the passage you’re referring to…

    Beatings, exposure to extreme temperatures, suspension torture—not so different from what’s in the 2014 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Indeed, Kautilya’s conception of the state is disturbingly familiar today: like an iceberg, one part towers above us, a beacon of majestic power, while another part hides in the deep—a state of secrecy, duplicity, manipulation, and constant surveillance.

    I’m not sure that he is saying that things in Gitmo are exactly the same as they were 2000 years ago in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurya_Empire when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra was written.

    Maybe he wants to remind readers that we’re not as distant from those folks as we would like to believe? I’m not sure that this is a bad thing. My Facebook friends are on a constant campaign to show how much more virtuous they are than Americans of just a generation or two ago, e.g., by pointing to hate-filled days in which women could not work, same-sex sexual relationships were impossible, etc.

  7. I always like to offend the French by pointing out that they are just Germans who sold out and adopted a Latin based language. They get really upset, start making odd noises, and then I point out that ‘France’ is just the land of the Franks, a Germanic tribe… nothing Gallic in France for the last 1400 years at least.

  8. The very southern tip of India is quite primitive and has not changed much in the last few thousand years.

    Michener’s novel of South Africa, “The Covenant”, is a slog but wrangles some of these migrations and conquests. A good backgrounder on the Boers and the religious (!) justification for the apartheid outrage.

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