Roughly 150 km from Delhi, the national capital, down the Delhi-Sirsa highway, a meandering road leads to the twin villages of Rakhi Shahpur and Rakhi Khas in Haryana’s Hissar district. The narrow, dusty road, typical of small-town India, belies the importance of the place to which it leads — the archaeological site of Rakhigarhi. A plaque here reads that it is the largest site of the Harappan culture. Ninety-nine years after it was discovered, the findings have raised questions about history and identity.
Mound 7 of the excavation site, that extends across 3.5 sq km or 350 hectares, has been identified as a burial plot from which 56 skeletons were recovered. Of these, a woman’s, roughly 4,600 years old, has created a buzz among those who work in history, anthropology, genomics, and linguistics. The DNA analysis of the skeleton says “the individual we sequenced fits as a mixture of people related to ancient Iranians (the largest component) and Southeast Asian hunter-gatherers”, as per Cell. It also says that there was no Steppe Pastoral gene (from people in Central Asia) in the Rakhigarhi woman.
The word Aryan has been interchangeably used for the Steppe Pastoralists (since we cannot say any time frame), though to avoid racial connotations many scholars now prefer to use the term Indo-Aryan for this group of people. This finding has fanned the debate on the so-called Aryan migration to India, part of the history books of many generations of Indians.
