Pitroda’s jeans and genes: India isn’t America, Sam

I have been to Casablanca once. In and around Casablanca, there is plenty to see. It is a historic city. But like many others, such was the impact of the 1942 film, that I headed straight for Rick’s Café. This of course is not original. It is of recent vintage. Rick Blaine’s nightclub, made famous by the film, never existed. It was fictional. Lines from the film, like Humphrey Bogart’s “Here’s looking at you, kid”, have become immortal. Another such immortal line, though it was never spoken in the film, either by Humphrey Bogart or by Ingrid Bergman, was “Play it again, Sam”. But everyone thinks it figured in the film, so much so that Woody Allen had a film by that name.

Sam was of course the pianist. We have another pianist in the form of Sam Pitroda, who strums at the piano chords from abroad. In view of what has been happening, the expression “Play it again, Sam” must have passed through the minds of many people. He has to strum the chords from abroad. When he returns to India, he might have problems because of the “National Herald” case.

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In the 1980s, Sam Pitroda was described as the trigger behind India’s telecom revolution (STD booths), though Arvind Panagariya’s book (India, the Emerging Giant, p.374) suggests Sam Pitroda did his best to protect his turf and obstructed introduction of cellular technology. Otherwise, the mobile revolution would have occurred earlier.

I didn’t meet Sam Pitroda in the 1980s. I got to know him when he was Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission.

He is a wise man and I have always been educated by him. Many years ago, when ancestry testing was not that common, at least in India, I got mine done. Most people know that this is a mitochondrial DNA test, through the mother’s line. Most Indians who have done this ancestry mapping find a familiar pattern. Out of Africa circa 100,000 BCE, into India circa 35,000 BCE and so on. Mine was slightly different. It floated around in southern Europe till around 500 CE and then proceeded to the region around Uttar Pradesh, courtesy the female slave trade done by the Arabs. This kind of ancestry mapping through the mother is probabilistic, not deterministic.

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Earlier, villages kept records of ancestry. My father revisited his ancestral village (he left it after 1947) in Bangladesh and dug up those village records. These are deterministic. Karnasuvarna is in Murshidabad district, near Berhampore. At one point, it used to be the capital of the Gauda kingdom. Through those village records, my father traced the earliest known ancestor (Boron Dev) back to Karnasuvarna, circa 1500 CE. From there, Boron Dev migrated to the Sylhet region of what is now Bangladesh.

Before Karnasuvarna, Boron Dev had been in Kanyakubja (Kannauj) in Uttar Pradesh. On both the father’s side and the mother’s side, we converge on Uttar Pradesh. What am I, as per Sam Pitroda’s taxonomy? Part Arab, part White — I guess. By the way, there are general accounts of Brahmanas from Kanyakubja moving to Bengal and Odisha. (My wife’s line belongs to one of these.)

I have seen several genetic studies done of Bengalis and they reveal the obvious. Bengal, like all of Bharatavarsha, was a complete melting pot. You cannot have those stereotypes of Arab, White, Africa and China. For Bengal, you do have a small percentage of East Asian genetic makeup. But that’s not the same as Chinese and this percentage is more pronounced in Bangladesh than in West Bengal, depending on the part of that country.

Of course, Sam used China for all of India’s east, not just Bengal. Having been born in the North-East, I am upset when people from other parts refer to those from the North-East as “Chinky”. There is nothing “Chinky” about those Indians. But having been a frequent visitor to Delhi once upon a time, Sam must have been aware of that negative appellation. Or perhaps, despite moving to the US in the mid-1960s, he was aware of West Bengal’s famous slogan from the late-1960s and the 1970s: “China’s Chairman is Our Chairman.” More disturbing is the mindset revealed by the Pitroda worldview. There cannot be anything indigenous in Bharatavarsha, in the genes or otherwise. It must have been imported — by Arabs from the west, by Africans from the south, by Chinese from the east and by Whites from the north.

Perhaps this is a natural mindset for a person who has spent the formative years, and the rest of the career, in the United States. After all, in that country, the indigenous population was killed, subjected to ethnic cleansing, enslaved and packed off to reservations by White settlers and invaders. That’s a historical fact, regardless of what the US says today about native Americans and native Alaskans. Ditto for a country like Australia.

India is the only large country which continues to have indigenous populations (reflected in genetic studies too), though definition of “indigenous” depends on how far back you go. But the limited point is that the Pitroda worldview is incorrect. Many people, including Indians, wear blue jeans. I have seen Sam Pitroda wear them too. But that doesn’t make you an expert on genes.

The author is the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.