They can be broadly divided into three religious groups, Gurukkals who follow Saivism, Iyers who follow the Srauta and Smartha tradition and Iyengars who follow Sri Vaishnavism. A compilation of a host of genetic studies done on the origins of the people of Bharath varsha can be read here:- From what I can tell the Velamas are not a marginal group, but somewhat elite. [...] Communities which claim to be Brahmins in the Tamil linguistic group have diverse origins. Second, I’m Bengali, with a lot of East Asian ancestry, so without inbreeding that’s going to break apart a lot of blocs which might otherwise exist in the genome because of population admixture. They’re skewing the distribution up. The Brahmins project themselves as the intellectual class. I took the HapMap populations and intersected SNPs so that I got 750,000. As it is today in a few hours you can really resolve what’s going on with questions about Indian genetics, or whether the Chinese are genetically differentiated, as long as you don’t have too strong of an agenda, can get data, and don’t go sniffing for particular results. “We were studying the history of diseases and realised we needed a proper genetic landscape map of India to do our work. 3. The author conducted an examination of 30 Alu polymorphisms in Sinhalese and compared with Alu frequency data from Tamils and other South Asians to evaluate genetic variation, affinities, and admixtures. N. Saha. Table 2 tells us all the haplogroups they found. Page 380 contains a section with the headline "The Mystery of Sinhalese Origins: An Alu I suspect what’s going on her is that the Chamars are representative of the pre-Indo-Aryan population, and the Indo-Aryans amalgamated with local elites as they pushed the Aryavarta beyond the Punjab. ", "[...] The majority of Sinhalese and Tamil subgroups form close genetic proximities among themselves on both PC [principal component] axes. That's why we have Dravidian languages in the south and Dravidian facial features are also present. Genetic Determinism, Pseudoscience Can't Hide the Casteism of Brahmin Chauvinists. Tamil Brahmins also live in Sri Lanka. I was struck that the South Indian Brahmins had 24, 25, and 26, runs respectively using default cut offs. ", "The Eurasian The Indian origin of paternal haplogroup R1a1* substantiates the autochthonous origin of Brahmins and the caste system by Swarkar Sharma et al., Journal of Human Genetics (2009) 54, 47-55. (If you understand Tamil, you can listen to the video at the end of this post) Why paarpaan, not Brahmin – because today’s ‘brahmins’ were doing astrology like others carpentry, or agriculture. ", "Population genetic study of three VNTR loci (D2S44, D7S22, and D12S11) in five ethnically defined populations of the Indian subcontinent. Genetically the population of Tamil nadu is diverse and so is the brahmin population. Tamil Brahmins were the earliest to frame merit as a caste claim, and it showed in IITs Tamil Brahmins were the earliest to frame merit as a caste claim, and it showed in IITs IIT Madras | Photo: Facebook M ass coaching and reservations brought new groups into the IITs and radically transformed the demographic makeup of these institutions. The position of the Tamil Brahmins is next to the Chamar here, but they are getting a lot of gene flow (nearly 50%) from the Uttar Pradesh Kshatriya, again indicates that the group is a composite. Its results showed the Tamils of Sri Lanka to be actually more closely related to the Sinhalese than to their fellow Tamils of India. These sub-haplogroups were rarely found in other populations. In the case of West Bengal Brahmins, marriages with the northeastern communities continued until the arrival of the 8th century Pala dynasty which cut off these regions. If your world-view needs to be supported by mtDNA haplogroup analyses published in Human Biology, more power to you! Often I’ll indulge this people, but usually I just ignore them. There are some genuine Brahmin converts for sure (usu retain surnames like Pandit, Reshi, Kaul etc) but not that many. - South Indian Brahmins are genetically distinct from North Indian Brahmins. This illustrates the sometimes surprising connections (or lack thereof) between genetics and culture. Take Huntington’s disease as an example. With the help of the genetic science, Indians also wanted to know as how Brahmins created the castes and how they divided the majority of Indians into 6000 different castes and how they ruled on them instead of being in minority? "Genetic affinities of Sri Lankan populations." Most of the scientists who work at IISc obtained their PhDs or postdoctoral training from leading American or British universities. The Tamil Vishwakarmas are locally known as Kammalar, although they prefer to be known as Vishwakarma.They are divided into the Kannar (brass-workers), Kollar (blacksmiths), Tattar (goldsmiths), Tatchar (carpenters) and Kartatchar (sculptor).. Karnataka. The Chamar make direct contributions to both Uttar Pradesh high castes. Excerpts from the Abstract: Gautam K. Kshatriya. Caste and jati are genetically real constructs and date to more than 1,000 years ago. '//cdn.viglink.com/api') + '/vglnk.js'; But a new study by geneticist David Reich and colleagues, published in the September 24 issue of Nature , takes a new approach to understanding the genetic history … The greatest influence. ", "Mitochondrial DNA history of Sri Lankan ethnic people: their relations within the island and with the Indian subcontinental populations. Contrary to Kshatriya's study, but coinciding with Mastana's study, Sinhalese people were found to be less descended from Tamils than from Bengalis. Sri Lankan Tamils have inherited about 55.20 percent of ancestry from the Sinhalese, plus or minus 9.47 percent. Experimental and Molecular Pathology 87:2 (October 2009): pages 159-162. Iyengars are known to be staunch Vaishnavites. Well, My family folklore suggests that my ancestors (Brahmins) moved from Bengal to Andhra to Tamil Nadu during the 14 th century AD. ", "Molecular Anthropology: Population and Forensic Genetic Applications. ", "Genetic profile of 11 autosomal STR loci among the four major ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. Whatever you may call invasion/migration, it is well known fact that Tamil Brahmins (in general south Indian Brahmins) are a distinct population from non Brahmin south indians. A lot of the public data is from obscure tribal groups who are somewhat inbred, and so often drift into long branches. First published online on November 7, 2013. Based on genetic analysis of Indians from different castes and communities, the scientists have been able to trace at what point in Indian history that … If the South Indian Brahmins went through a bottleneck of some sort, and have been endogamous, they’d have built up some of these. Excerpts from the Abstract: Ruwan J. Illeperuma, Samudi N. Mohotti, Thilini M. De Silva, Neil D. Fernandopulle, and W. D. Ratnasooriya. • The haplogroups possessed by Indian Tamils in this study are: M/N, M2, M2a1, M2a3a, M3c1, M5a1, M5a2a2, M5a4, M6a, M18'38, M18, M18a, M30c1, M33a1b/M35+ 199, M35b+16304, M53, M65b, M66, G3a1'2, N5, R/U, R5a2a, R5a2b, R7a'b, R8a1a3, R30b/R8a1a3, U1a'c, U2a, and P5. You can see them on the PCA plot above. I don’t have Zack’s data set, but I do have three Tamil Brahmin genotypes. 2. A genetic study in Andhra Pradesh discovered that both Brahmins and fishermen have the same ‘Dravidian’ genetic traits. The caste (varna) system has four ranked categories: priests (Brahmins), warriors (Kshatriyas), farmers and mer-chants (Vaisyas), and labourers and servants (Sudras). The Tamil contribution was as low as 11 percent or as high as 30 percent. perspective". Transfusion 45:12 (December 2005): pages 1934-1939. I really don’t care though, because I’m not Indian, and even if I was, I still wouldn’t care. Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site. The Tamils proper speak Tamil and their primary religion is Hinduism. s.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? var r = d.getElementsByTagName(t)[0]; r.parentNode.insertBefore(s, r); MtDNA haplogroup analysis [on HVS-1 and HVS-2] revealed that several West Eurasian haplogroups as well as Indian-specific mtDNA clades were found amongst the Sri Lankan populations. ", "Population Differentiation of Southern Indian Male Lineages Correlates with Agricultural Expansions Predating the Caste System.". These points are transcript prepared by Suthamalli Ganga. Specifically, out of the project's 15 Sri Lankan Tamil R1a1 carriers, 5 belong to the ", "A study of three candidate genes for pre-eclampsia in a Sinhalese population from Sri Lanka. ", "Population differences of two coding SNPs in pigmentation-related genes SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. true; The paper, titled “The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia,” which still has to go through peer review, uses genetics to examine the ancestry of ancient inhabitants of the subcontinent. Kashmiri Brahmins are said to be meat eaters. A few weeks ago a friend who is from a Tamil Brahmin background asked me if I knew anything about the genetics of this group. Up-country Sinhalese, Low-country Sinhalese and Sri Lankan Tamils exhibited similar frequencies of haplogroup M (41.67�43.59%) [...]". Using TreeMix I ran 20 plots each of two different data sets with Tamil Brahmins.