page_title: Miscegenation
section_title: India
hierarchical_section_title: Miscegenation / History of ethnoracial admixture and attitudes towards miscegenation / Asia / India
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Affiche du Théâtre national de l'Opéra-Comique pour Lakmé de Léo Delibes
context_page_description: Miscegenation is the interbreeding of people who are considered to be of different racial types. This racial mixing requires sexual activity between members of different races, thus producing mixed-race offspring. Opposition to miscegenation, thereby preserving their race's purity and nature, is a typical theme of racial supremacist movements.
  Though the notion that racial mixing is undesirable has arisen at different points in history, it gained particular prominence in Europe during the era of colonialism. Anonymous authors invented the word in an 1863 fraudulent political pamphlet, indicating that miscegenation meant interracial marriage and interracial sexual relations, particularly between "... the American White Man and Negro". The term came to be associated with laws which banned interracial marriage and sex, these laws were known as anti-miscegenation laws.
  Although the term "miscegenation" was formed from the Latin miscere "to mix" plus genus "race" or "kind", and it could therefore be perceived as value-neutral, it is almost always a pejorative term used by people who believe in white racial superiority and purity.
context_section_description: The Indian subcontinent has a long history of inter-ethnic marriage dating back to ancient history. Various groups of people have been intermarrying for millennia in the Indian subcontinent, including speakers of the Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages.
  The origins and affinities of the approximately 1 billion people living on the subcontinent of India have long been contested. This is owing, in part, to the many different waves of immigrants that have influenced the genetic structure of India. In the most recent of these waves, Indo-European-speaking nomadic groups from the Near East, Anatolia and the Caucasus migrated to India. According to 19th-century British historians, it was these "Aryans" who 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 population 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 concept of a historical "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 renowned 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 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 and the 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. The study establishes, based on the impossibility of identifying any genetic indicators across caste lines, that castes in South Asia grew out of traditional tribal organizations during the formation of Indian society, and were not the product of any Aryan invasion and subjugation of Dravidian people.
  In Goa, a Portuguese colony in India, during the late 16th century and 17th centu
caption: "Lakmé", the Opera deals with the romantic relationship between a British Officer and an Indian Brahmin woman.
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