People of India - Part 1
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You can choose from several India tour packages but one of the most important parts of your travel must be getting to know the Indian people.
It would be almost impossible to pick out a single person as a typical Indian. The diversity among more than 1 billion citizens is mind-boggling: from the Adivasi societies of the Northeast to the Tamil-speakers of the South, this incredible array of humanity spices up the spectacle of crowd-watching. Any description of this huge variety of societies and cultures must, of necessity, be highly simplified, and for each assertion made there are bound to be many examples that contradict it.
India’s melting pot
At least six different sets of peoples converge in present-day India, after millennia of traders, conquerors, colonizers, mercenaries and missionaries that swept through South Asia from outside.
The first settlers are thought to be the forebears of the present-day Adivasis. These peoples still dwell in mountainous or jungle zones in a belt that stretches from Arunachal Pradesh’s high forests to India’s southern tip at Kanniyakumari.
The Dravidian-speaking peoples, who drove the Adivasis into the margins, away from plains lush with sugar cane and rice, now live mainly in the south Deccan. Apparently related to the pre-Hellenic Aegeans and Cretans, they brought the Harappan culture to its zenith at the cities of Harappa and Mohenjadaro. (The most impressive archaeological ruins are sited in what is now Pakistan.) The Dravidians were in turn pushed back by peoples who galloped into India from Central Asia and dominated the Indo-Gangetic plain from around 1,500 BC.
These new peoples were warriors and herdsmen who found the urban settlements of the Indus Valley peoples alien to their traditional way of life as nomadic herders. However, as they spread out across the plains of North India they began to settle in agricultural village communities. The language of their earliest writings, Sanskrit, and Latin share many root words and a basic grammar pattern, pointing to a common ancestry with peoples in southern Europe. From the Bharatas, a dominant Indo-European speaking people, comes Bharat, the official name for India - the “B” in BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which won political power in the late 1990s.
This wave of invaders was followed by Arab Semites from the area now comprising Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. They settled in large numbers. Jews escaping from Nebuchadnezzar arrived around 600 BC at the Malabar coast and became spice traders. Refugee Zoroastrians fled from Persia in the 10th century, and ended up in Mumbai. Persecuted Baha’is from modern Iran arrived more recently. In the Himalayas and on the northeastern frontier with Burma (Myanmar), most peoples have more in common, in terms of both culture and history, with neighboring societies to the north and east than with people of the Hindi-speaking belt of the central plains. Added to these are several million Tibetans in exile, who have taken sanctuary in India since 1959 and cluster in mostly mountain communities, although there are some monasteries as far south as Karnataka.
Early European court visitors and explorers included Portuguese, Danes, British and French, and long-term settlers soon followed. Eurasians, as the offspring of many mixed marriages were called during the British Raj (often now known as Anglo-Indians), are acutely aware of the slightest skin tone variance even today. Bleaching away a suntan with harsh chemicals is a standard practice in beauty parlors. There are few coy euphemisms about racial distinctions in polite society because they are one obvious key to prestige. Yet ancestry is only one component of India’s complex social hierarchy.
Vivid multi-striped foreheads in earth tones of white, yellow, or saffron are not decoration, but a marking that denotes affiliation to a particular deity or a sign of religious devotion. They range from a simple tilak, a religious mark smeared with a vermilion-dipped thumb, to elaborate patterns daubed across the forehead. Don’t confuse these marks with the bindi (bhindhya, kum-kum, tikkaj, worn by women over their “third eye”. The round red forehead dot traditionally signifies that a woman is married. But the glittery stick-on bindis sold in the bazaar are decorative and just for fun. Grandmothers, teenagers, movie stars, and even babies wear bindis.
