Steed Vs Seed

Among the cloud of myths surrounding your columnist, there is one of a migration of his ancestors, ostensibly from the land of snows and saffron in Kashmir, towards the Kanyakumari coast. Their first halt was Goa. But when the state fell to Portuguese, they supposedly moved again, to Karnataka.

Without ‘hard’ evidence, however, the story of this diaspora is admittedly difficult to prove. But it’s not improbable as some sceptics believe it to be. A curious case in point is the origin of Gypsies, also called Romani in Europe. Over the years, the migration of Gypsies has become confused with that of Israelites.

Some ‘experts’ thought Gypsies of England, for instance, originally came from Egypt, and not India. But now a study using genome-wide sequencing has pinpointed the origin of the 11-millionstrong Romani to a single group’s departure from north-western India some 1,500 years ago! The study has also revealed various subsequent population changes as the Roma spread throughout Europe. Equally intriguing, modern Indo-European languages, including Queen’s English and Hindi, seem to have originated some 9,000 years ago in Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey!

The older Kurgan Hypothesis tried to set the linguistic cradle onto the Russian steppes at a much later period.

The new tale of origins still has a formidable foe in the well-entrenched myth – brave Aryan riders thundering down the steppes seem more colourful than nerdy farmers!