A stroll down a street in any Indian city makes it clear how diverse Indians are…” (p. There are also Sino-Tibetan languages spoken by groups living in the mountains fringing the north of India, and small pockets of tribal groups in the east and center that speak Austroasiatic languages related to Cambodian and Vietnamese, and that are thought to descend from the languages spoken by the peoples who first brought rice farming to South Asia and other parts of Southeast Asia…The people of India are also diverse in appearance, providing a visual testimony to mixture. The Dravidian languages, spoken mostly by southern Indians, are not closely related to languages outside South Asia. The Indo-European languages of the north of India are related to the languages of Iran and Europe. India may have been the first place where the Near Eastern and the Chinese crop systems collided. The Chinese monsoon summer rainfall crops of rice and millet also reached peninsular India around five thousand years ago. The Near Eastern winter rainfall crops, wheat and barley, reached the Indus Valley sometime after nine thousand years ago according to archaeological evidence…Around five thousand years ago, local farmers succeeded in breeding these crops to adapt to monsoon summer rainfall patterns, and the crops spread into peninsular India. India today is also the product of collisions of cultures and people.Ĭonsider farming…Indian farming today is born of the collision of the two great agricultural systems of Eurasia. The great Himalayas were formed around ten million years ago by the collision of the Indian continental plate, moving northward through the Indian Ocean, with Eurasia. In both cases an indigenous population which consisted of a mixture of farmers and hunter-gatherers was impacted genetically and culturally by warlike migrants from the steppe who established highly stratified and unequal societies sometime between four and five thousand years ago (c.

In many ways, the history of the Indian subcontinent parallels that of Europe, which is also a subcontinent of Asia.

Who we are and how we got here