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1 ‘Religious restrictions vary significantly in the world’s most populous countries’ (Pew Research, 13 April 2017).
1 Nott and Gliddon 1854.
2 Hoeveler 2007, 57; Carmichael 2012.
3 Menand 2001, 110.
4 Stott 2013.
5 Darwin 1859.
6 Bergman 2011, 12.
7 Grehan and Schwartz 2009, 1823.
8 Wells 2007.
9 Culotta and Gibbons 2016.
10 Author’s interview with Ramasamy Pitchappan, 6 January 2016.
11 Author’s interview with Anu Acharya, CEO, Mapmygenome India Limited, 27 July 2017.
12 Ambassadors from Greece were sent to the Indian subcontinent with gifts for Emperor Chandragupta Maurya (321–298 BC), and in turn they also wrote accounts of what they saw. They described Stone Age tribes in the Himalayas, as well as the cities in the plains, and said that it was a land of 118 nations, rich and fertile, with rivers so wide that they could not see on the other side. One of the rivers, they said, was worshipped by all Indians. Another traveller, the Muslim polymath Al-Biruni, travelled through India nearly a thousand years ago, and wrote about the emphasis on the purity of fire and water, the avoidance of touching between communities, and that men wore earrings and a girdle passing from the left shoulder to the right side of the waist, that they spat out and blew their noses without any respect for the elders present. Al-Biruni could have been writing this same text about India now, and he would not be far from the truth (Mookerji 1966, 38; Wood 2008, 285).
13 French 2011, 18.
14 Butalia 2000, 45.
15 Dalrymple 2015.
16 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2012, 6.
17 Recent research by Analabha Basu, Neeta Sarkar-Roy and Partha P. Majumder at the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, West Bengal, says that Indians have five ancestral stocks, not two—one ancestral to all north Indians and the other to all south Indians—as was believed earlier. The three additional ancestries discovered were the Austro-Asiatic, the Tibeto-Burman, and an ancestral lineage dominant among the Jarawa and Onge tribals of Andaman and Nicobar Islands that was found to be similar to the present-day Pacific Islanders (Basu, Sarkar-Roy and Majumder 2016).
18 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2015a, 546.
19 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2015b, 493.
20 The ancient hymns of the Vedas, transmitted orally from the Bronze Age (1500–1200 BC), were not written down until thousands of years later. One of the hymns, Purusha Sukta, mentions that the entire cosmos as well as human society came into being out of primordial sacrifice.
1 Within that framework, there had been many perspectives. Auguste Comte in France explained that social change occurs primarily as the outcome of intellectual development, while Herbert Spencer in Britain was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution to show, with empirical data, that every society goes through a series of fixed stages of evolution as a consequence of some sort of cosmic design over which man has no control. Spencer had thus explained the superiority of the Western cultures over others, as the latter were at an earlier stage of evolution than the former (Spencer 1860, 9–27).
Even in the America of the nineteenth century, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had applied evolutionary principles to social phenomena, to explain that society moved inexorably through stages he termed as ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’, and ‘civilization’ (Bock 1955, 123).
2 See Chapter 8 titled ‘Nationalism’.
3 Pylee 2003, 64.
4 Das 2002, 28; Census of India 2011.
5 Tewari 2015; Socio-economic Caste Census 2011.
6 Water.org.
7 Census of India 2011.
8 Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015, 241; The Economist 2017.
9 World Health Organization.
10 World Bank 2017; Rana and Sugden 2013.
11 In the varna system, each of the jatis broadly fits into one of the varnas, giving Hindus membership to a varna and jati each at birth. People of one jati often share a traditional vocation, and usually do not marry or dine outside the jati.
12 Das 2002, 140.
13 Bhaduri 2009, 47.
14 Adiga 2008, 12.
15 Identity withheld.
16 Kaminsky and Long 2011, 168.
17 Dalrymple 2008.
18 Colundalur 2011.
19 Hindu Business Line 2016.
20 Kumar and Kumar 2017.
21 Guha 2007, 3305.
22 Ganguly 2012.
23 Hindustan Times 2017.
24 Al Jazeera 2017.
25 Hardiman 2008, 423–25.
26 Neill 1986.
27 Guha 2008.
28 Firstpost 2015.
29 Jaffrelot 2016.
30 Statistics of School Education 2010–11.
31 World Bank 2017.
32 Guha 2007, 3305.
33 Fernandes 2007, 1.
34 Dalrymple 2015.
35 According to the most recent census in 2011, 79.8 per cent of the Indian population
