Early Migrations to the Indian Subcontinent

Speaker: Tony Joseph, journalist, former Editor, BusinessWorld and author of the best-selling book Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestor and Where we Came From

Chair: Ganesh Devy, Literary critic, activist and Chairperson, People’s Linguistic Survey of India

In the last few years, our understanding of how the world got peopled in prehistory has changed significantly, thanks mostly to recent advances in the discipline of Population Genetics. All large population groups, we know now, are the result of multiple migrations that lasted centuries and, in some cases millennia, in the ancient past, each of them driven by historical forces. This context is crucial to understanding how four large, prehistoric migrations contributed to shaping Indian demography as it is today.

(Organised by IIC-International Research Division)