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Human genetics

Tracing India's invisible threads

Nature volume 461, pages 487–488 (2009)Cite this article

One measure of the extraordinary level of human diversity found in India is the use of 15 languages on its banknotes. The genetic underpinnings of that population diversity are yielding to whole-genome analysis.

The idea and shape of modern India was an invention of its twentieth-century political leaders, who crafted citizenship defined by civic and universalist, rather than ethnic or religious, criteria precisely because that citizenship is so diverse1. As Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation's first prime minister, wrote2: “[India] is four hundred million separate individual men and women, each differing from the other ... a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads.” Who are these diverse peoples separated by caste, customs and language? Where did they come from, and when? What are the “invisible threads”, beyond claims on the state, that bind them? Studies of biological kinship, which search for the stories of ancestry marked indelibly in a person's genome, help to provide answers to these questions because they illuminate that unwritten past3. The latest addition to our attempts to understand India through genes comes from Reich, Singh and their colleagues (page 489 of this issue)4, who arrive at some bold conclusions about its past population history from genome-variation studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Aravinda Chakravarti is at the Center for Complex Disease Genomics, McKusick–Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21205, USA. aravinda@jhmi.edu ,

    Aravinda Chakravarti

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  1. Aravinda Chakravarti
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Chakravarti, A. Tracing India's invisible threads. Nature 461, 487–488 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/461487a

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