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| An oil painting of Khair-un-Nissa by George Chinnery. c. 1805. She was an Indian Hyderabadi noblewoman who married the British Lieutenant Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick. |
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| Rahul Gandhi, a member of the Indian Parliament, is the son of an Indian father (Rajiv Gandhi) and Italian mother (Sonia Gandhi). |
According to the controversial Indo-Aryan migration theory, Indo-Iranian nomadic groups ("Aryans") from Central Asia migrated to India more than 3,000 years ago. In turn, the Indo-Iranian languages are descended from the Indo-European languages speakers from who may have origins around the Black Sea. According to 19th century British historians, it was these "Aryans" who and established the caste system, an elitist form of social organization that separated the "light-skinned" Indo-Aryan conquerors from the "conquered dark-skinned" indigenous Dravidian tribes through enforcement of "racial endogamy". Much of this was simply conjecture, fueled by British imperialism. British policies of divide and rule as well as enumeration of the population into rigid categories during the tenure of British rule in India contributed towards the hardening of these segregated caste identities. Since the independence of India from British rule, the British fantasy of an "Aryan Invasion and subjugation of the dark skinned Dravidians in India" has become a staple polemic in South Asian geopolitics, including the propaganda of Indophobia in Pakistan. There is no decisive theory as to the origins of the caste system in India, and globally renown historians and archaeologists like Jim Shaffer, J.P. Mallory, Edwin Bryant, and others, have disputed the claim of "Aryan Invasion".
Some researchers claim that genetic similarities to Europeans were more common in members of the higher ranks. Their findings, published in Genome Research, supported the idea that members of higher castes are more closely related to Europeans than are the lower castes. According to the research invading European populations were predominantly male who intermarried with local females and formed the upper castes i.e. the local females had upward mobility in caste which was denied to local males. However, other researchers have criticized and contradicted this claim. A study by Joanna L. Mountain et al. of Stanford University had concluded that there was "no clear separation into three genetically distinct groups along caste lines", although "an inferred tree revealed some clustering according to caste affiliation".
A 2006 study by Ismail Thanseem et al. of Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (India) concluded that the "lower caste groups might have originated with the hierarchical divisions that arose within the tribal groups with the spread of Neolithic agriculturalists, much earlier than the arrival of Aryan speakers", and "the Indo-Europeans established themselves as upper castes among this already developed caste-like class structure within the tribes." A 2006 genetic study by the National Institute of Biologicals in India, testing a sample of men from 32 tribal and 45 caste groups, concluded that the Indians have acquired very few genes from Indo-European speakers. More recent studies have also debunked the claims that so-called "Aryans" and "Dravidians" have a "racial divide". A study conducted by the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2009 (in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT) analyzed half a million genetic markers across the genomes of 132 individuals from 25 ethnic groups from 13 states in India across multiple caste groups.
Many Indian traders, merchants and missionaries travelled to Southeast Asia (where Indianized kingdoms were established) and often took local wives from the region. The Romani people ("Gypsies") who have origins in the Indian subcontinent travelled westwards and also took local wives in Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Genetic studies show that the majority of Romani males carry large frequencies of particular Y chromosomes (inherited paternally) that otherwise exist only in populations from South Asia, in addition to nearly a third of Romani females carrying particularmitochondrial DNA (inherited maternally) that is rare outside South Asia. Around circa 800, a ship carrying Persian Jews crashed in India. They settled down in different parts of India and befriended and traded with the local Indian population. Intermarriage occurred, and to this day the Indian Jews physically resemble their surrounding Indian populations due to intermarriage.
There are even cases of Indian princesses marrying kings abroad. For example, the Korean text Samguk Yusa about the Gaya kingdom (it was absorbed by the kingdom of Silla later), indicate that in 48 AD, King Kim Suro of Gaya (the progenitor of the Gimhae Kim clan) took a princess (Princess Heo) from the "Ayuta nation" (which is the Korean name for the city of Ayodhya in North India) as his bride and queen. Princess Heo belonged to the Mishra royal family of Ayodhya. According to the Samguk Yusa, the princess had a dream about a heavenly fair handsome king from a far away land who was awaiting heaven's anointed ride. After Princess Heo had the dream, she asked her parents, the king and queen of Ayodhya, for permission to set out and seek the foreign prince, which the king and queen urged with the belief that god orchestrated the whole fate. That king was no other than King Kim Suro of the Korean Gaya kingdom.
In Goa during the late 16th century and 17th century, there was a community of Japanese slaves and traders, who were either Japanese Christians fleeing anti-Christian sentiments in Japan, orJapanese slaves brought or captured by Portuguese traders and their South Asian lascarcrewmembers from Japan. In both cases, they often intermarried with the local population in Goa. One offspring of such an intermarriage was Maria Guyomar de Pinha, born in Thailand to a Portuguese-speaking Japanese-Bengali father from Goa and a Japanese mother. In turn, she married the Greek adventurer Constantine Phaulkon.
Inter-ethnic marriages between European men and Indian women were very common during colonial times. According to the historian William Dalrymple, about one in three European men (mostly British, as well as Portuguese, French, Dutch, and to a lesser extent Swedes and Danes) had Indian wives in colonial India. This was primarily because the European men came to India when they were young and there were very few white women available in India. One of the most famous intermarriages was between the Scottish resident James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Hyderabadi noblewoman and descendant of prophet Mohammed, Khair-un-Nissa. During the British East India Company's rule in India in the late 18th century and early 19th century, it was initially fairly common for British officers and soldiers to take local Indian wives. The 600,000 strong Anglo-Indian community has descended from such unions. There is also a story of an attractive Gujjar princess falling in love with a handsome English nobleman and the nobleman converted to Islam so as to marry the princess. The 65,000 strong Burgher community of Sri Lanka was formed by the intermarriages of Dutch and Portuguesemen with local Sinhalese and Tamil women. Intermarriage also took place in Britain during the 17th to 19th centuries, when the British East India Company brought over many thousands of Indian scholars, lascars and workers (mostly Bengali) who settled down in Britain and took local British wives, some of whom went to India with their husbands. In the mid-19th century, there were around 40,000 British soldiers but less than 2,000 British officials present in India.
Source: www.wikipedia.org
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