The Waiting Game: Past, Present and Future of Indian Genomics

Some 25% of humanity lives in the Indian subcontinent; neither quite of the Occident, nor of the Orient. This region has played critical roles in the development of human culture. It was from India that Buddhism, the world’s first missionary religion emerged, over two millennia ago. With the Near East and Europe on its left flank and the forbidding Himalayas bounding its northern border, it has remained a well trod byway for the streams of humanity trekking ever eastward toward the planet’s most populous realms, everywhere from East Asia down the Pacific Rim to Australia. In the Age of Augustus, it was in the teeming marketplaces of India’s port cities that merchants from Rome met those from southern China.

But more than just an accident of geography seals South Asia’s global centrality. The nearly two billion modern South Asians are heirs to prolific forebears. In 450 BC, Herodotus noted that the Indians were “by far the most numerous” of the world’s nations. Today, with India having surpassed China in population size, that is again true, though since 1947’s partition between a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan (which, would in turn further calve off Bangladesh), the core nation’s population is far less than if the subcontinent had remained unified (an India with its pre-partition borders today would ring in at 1.975 billion people, versus the PRC’s 1.41 billion). In human prehistory, India’s centrality was a matter of location, and the likelihood that it lies near the nexus of Eurasian humans’ momentous diversification in all directions, at an early step out of Africa.

But in more recent human history, India has played a different role. Its southern location likely made it a refugium for hominins during the cold, dry Pleistocene. And over the last three millennia India has been both a land of wealth coveted by conquerors and a font of cultural wisdom continually reshaping its neighboring civilizations. Indian philosophy influenced thinkers from Athens to Kyoto, everywhere from the abstract monistic philosophies that helped frame Neo-Platonism in third century Alexandria to the Buddhist metaphysics that took root in eighth-century Fujiwara Japan. Meanwhile, India’s wealth repeatedly lured those eager to plunder or tax, from Darius’ Persian armies in the 6th century BC and Alexander the Great in the 4th, down to the