The races of India

'What are the major races in India?', my visitor asked.

I was stumped. I knew about India's many religions, languages, castes and sub-castes, but races? I wasn't sure. I mumbled something about the Aryans in North India, Dravidians in the South and the Mongloid people of Eastern India, but I felt like a fool for not being more specific.

So I looked it up, and here is what I found.

First, there is a difference between 'race' and 'ethnic group'. Race is used to denote people that share common physical and genetic traits. Whereas ethnic group denotes people who have common cultural, behavioural, linguistic, ritualistic, or religious traits.

There are 2000 or more ethnic groups in India. These are, however, divided into very few racial types. I'm going to use the classification suggested by Founder-Director of the Anthropological Survey of India, Dr. B. S. Guha (this is itself open to a lot of debate, but hey, at least it's a start):
Negritos: These broadheaded people from Africa were the earliest to inhabit India. They can still be found in the Andamans, and among hill tribes in South India like the Irulas, Kodars, Paniyans and Kurumbas.
Pro-Australoids or Austrics: This group was the next to come to India after the Negritos. They are a brown race of people with wavy hair, spread over the whole of India, Burma and the islands of South East Asia. They are said to "form the bedrock of the people". They cultivated rice and vegetables and made sugar from sugarcane. Their language has survived in the Kol or Munda (Mundari) in Eastern and Central India.

Mongoloids: Found in North Eastern India, these people have features that are common to those of the people of Mongolia, China and Tibet. These tribal groups are located in Assam, Nagaland and Meghalya and also in Ladakh and Sikkim. Generally, they are people of yellowish complexion, oblique eyes, high cheekbones, sparse hair and medium height.

The next group is Mediterranean or Dravidian: This group came to India from the Southwest Asia and appear to be people of the same stock as the peoples of Asia Minor and Crete and the pre-Hellenic Aegeans of Greece. They are said to have built the city civilization of the Indus Valley, whose remains have been found at Mohenjodaro and Harappa and other Indus cities. The Dravidians spread to the whole of India, supplanting Austrics and Negritos alike. Dravidians comprise three sub-types, Paleo-Mediterranean, the true Mediterranean and Oriental Mediterranean.

Nordics: Nordics or Indo-Aryans are the last immigrants into India. Nordic Aryans were a branch of Indo-Iranians, who had originally left their homes in Central Asia, some 5000 years ago, and had settled in Mesopotamia for some centuries. The Aryans must have come into India between 2000 and 1500 B.C. Their first home in India was western and northern Punjab, from where they spread to the Valley of the Ganga and beyond. These tribes are now mainly found in the Northwest and the Northwest Frontier Province.

And then there's one last small group - the Western Brachycephals. These include the Alpinoids, Dinaries and Armenois. The Coorgis and Parsis fall into this category.

So there it is. An entire smorgasboard of skin colour, height, hair and facial features. That's what India is made up of. And it is further complicated by a lot of intermingling and intermarriage.

There is a lot of debate around racial classification in India, especially around the Aryan-Dravidian classification. Studies have proved that there is no genetic basis for differentiating between fair-skinned Aryans and dark-skinned Dravidians. Very sensibly, the Census of India has dropped the concept of race, preferring instead to focus on ethnic groups, which are identifiable by language and culture. Racial classification, which was essentially a colonial construct, has thankfully disappeared from official publications.

But I'm glad I looked up this stuff. The next time someone asks me about the races of India, at least I'll know what to say.

Acknowledgement: The information for this post came from here and here.

Updated in 2015: There is a gene study in 2013, which has found that all populations in India are a genetic mixture of two ancestral groups: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI). The ANI are outsiders (they are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans) and the ASI are primarily from within the subcontinent. The Study was published by scientists from Harvard Medical School and the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India. This study effectively debunks all previously held concepts of racial differences among Indians. According to this study around 4200 years ago, there may have been groups in India which were purely ANI and those which were purely ASI. But they began mixing, and by 1900 years ago, there were no groups which were purely ANI or ASI. For the past 1900 years, we have been a mixed genetic stock of people. 

You can read the study here:  http://genetics.med.harvard.edu/reich/Reich_Lab/Press_files/Fountain%20Ink%20-%20December%202013%20-%20Cover.pdf