We're going over three books that approach the questions of the history of South Asia from multiple disciplines. Tony Joseph's 'Early Indians' uses population genetics and research to reveal that modern Indians are the layered product of multiple prehistoric migrations. Peggy Mohan's 'Wanderers, Kings, Merchants' follows a parallel trail through language, showing how Sanskrit, Tamil, and other South Asian tongues carry the memory of every community that ever passed through the subcontinent. And journalist Sowmiya Ashok's 'The Dig' brings both of these threads to earth, literally, by documenting the painstaking archaeological excavations at Keeladi and beyond, where potsherds and coins are slowly rewriting the timeline of Indian urban civilisation.
Who are we, and where did we come from? Now, these are old questions, but over the years, we have developed a better answer by analysing historical texts and epigraphs, DNA research, along with comparative linguistics, and deep archaeological excavation. All these have better developed our understanding of the South Asian subcontinent's past.
Whenever I go through anything historical, I get fascinating by how layered a discussion can be and how badly our intuitions handle it. For instance, we are as far from Cleopatra as she was from the builders of the Great Pyramid. Or The Ea‑Nasir complaint tablet and the statue it gets memed alongside are separated by the same historical distance. We also have the tendency to push values of today into the past while removing them from historical context.
The following three books, each approaching the question from a different discipline, bring this understanding within the reach of a general reader.
In 'Early Indians', Tony Joseph brings together a decade's worth of DNA studies, population genetics, and archaeological findings to trace the deep ancestry of modern Indians.
He uses the analogy of a pizza to describe the diverse ancestry of Indians today. No group in the subcontinent is "pure" or has existed in isolation since the beginning of time. Instead, we are a product of specific, layered migrations. The foundational 'base' of this pizza consists of the "First Indians" or the Ancient Ancestral South Indians (AASI). These were the descendants of the modern humans who arrived from Africa approximately 65,000 years ago. This AASI base forms the bedrock of nearly every Indian's DNA today.
The pizza's 'sauce' is the mix of the First Indians and West Asian agriculturalists who arrived around 7000 BCE, forming the basis of the Indus Valley Civilization. When this civilization declined, it spread across the subcontinent. The 'toppings' are subsequent migrations, including Austroasiatic language speakers from East Asia (around 2000 BCE) and Indo-European language speakers, termed Indo-Aryans, from the Central Asian steppe (after 2000 BCE).
Joseph walks through how geneticists extract and analyse genetic data both from skeletal remains and DNA from living populations. They spot signs of past migrations by seeing which bits of people’s DNA match different source groups, and then working out which mixes of people could have produced the genetic patterns we see today.
He acknowledges ongoing scientific debates and is honest about what the evidence cannot yet tell us. Readers encounter a subcontinent built not from a single founding population but from a long series of mixings and cultural exchanges, each leaving a mark on the people who came after.
Where Joseph follows the movement of people through their DNA, Peggy Mohan follows the movement of language. ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’ is a book about how languages travel, change, and get rooted, and how the languages of the subcontinent carry within them the memory of every group that ever passed through.
She opens the book with an extended comparison to creole languages, showing how new tongues are born when populations with different native languages meet and must communicate. This is her model for understanding Sanskrit, Tamil and the other major languages of India. They are records of contact alongside negotiation and gradual fusion. Grammar is more conservative than vocabulary and carries deeper traces of a language's origins and migrations. For instance, while a Dravidian language like Malayalam has borrowed thousands of Sanskrit words, its underlying grammatical structure still bears the framework common to Dravidian languages.
Sanskrit also had close contact with Dravidian languages, which can be seen in its use of distinctive “retroflex” sounds (such as the dh in बड़ा (big) in Hindi or the hard N sound in மண் (soil) in Tamil). Retroflex consonants are rare outside of the South Asian subcontinent and many linguists see their prominence in Sanskrit and later Indo‑Aryan languages as a sign of long contact with Dravidian speech communities.
The book traces the arc from the earliest reconstructable languages of the subcontinent through the arrival of Indo-European speakers, the development of Sanskrit as a prestige language, Sanskrit’s relationship with the various Prakrit languages and the long evolution of the modern tongues we speak today. We get interesting conversations, such as the one with historian Irfan Habib about the early origins of Urdu. Mohan's explanations are grounded in concrete examples drawn from Hindi, Tamil, Sanskrit, and several other languages, making the book accessible to readers with no formal training in linguistics.
Journalist Sowmiya Ashok explores history rooted in archaeology in her book 'The Dig', beginning with discoveries at a humble coconut grove near Madurai. The location discovered in 2014 turned out to be a massive 110-acre mound concealing an urban settlement on the banks of the Vaigai river, with archaeologists uncovering evidence of a vibrant, advanced society that thrived approximately 2,300–2,600 years ago during the Sangam period.
The book takes readers on a comprehensive journey across the archaeological landscape of India. Ashok also visits the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi in Haryana, and the lost port of Muziris in Kerala, vividly recreating the painstaking, sweaty reality of fieldwork along the way, and also going over current archaeological debates. Readers meet a diverse cast of characters involved in the excavation process, including superintending archaeologist K. Amarnath Ramakrishna, local history teachers, and the women labourers who expertly sift through the mud.
Ashok balances academic rigour in cataloguing coins and potsherds with engaging personal anecdotes, such as enjoying mutton feasts in Madurai and observing ancient pottery. Her interviews with local villagers whose lands are temporarily acquired for digging reveal their dual feelings of intense pride and anxiety over their livelihoods, grounding abstract debates in archaeology in the physical world of real people.
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