The Peopling of India
An Online Weekend Course
Faculty
Course Dates
Price
INR 2,000
Timings
Course Faculty
Tony Joseph
Tony Joseph is the author of the book, ‘Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From’. The Second Edition of the widely acclaimed best-seller came out in September 2021. Tony has always been fascinated by the ancient history of India and he gave up all other work to exclusively focus on it over a decade ago. Many of his articles on the subject have been highly impactful, such as the 2017 piece in The Hindu titled “How Genetics is Settling the Aryan Migration Debate’. He has been in the media industry for over three decades, and has been the Editor of BusinessWorld, Associate Editor of Business Standard and Features Editor of The Economic Times at various times. He is currently working on his second book, which will be a sequel to the first.
About The Course
Until quite recently, we did not have a good enough understanding of how the populations of different world regions were formed in prehistory. This is no longer the case because population genetics studies based on ancient DNA, or DNA recovered from the skeletons of people who lived thousands of years ago, has removed much of the uncertainty. We now have ancient DNA evidence for multiple mass migrations that happened at different periods of prehistory which shaped the world’s populations, including in the Indian subcontinent. This helps us answer many fundamental questions about India that had remained unanswered thus far. Questions such as: who were the people that built the Harappan Civilization and where did they disappear? Why do we have so many different languages grouped into at least four very different language families? Why are these language families spread the way they are? How old is the caste system? What accounts for the significant cultural similarities that we observe across the subcontinent? And what accounts for the equally noticeable cultural differences, starting from eating habits? In the light of the new answers we have, how should we now see ourselves?
And, of course, why is any of these a matter of political debate?
