THE GREAT INDIAN MELTING POT

G.N. Devy's latest collaboration, The Indians, is an ambitious work of scholarship that reaffirms India's infinite capacity to absorb and assimilate

- Bhavya Dore

Who were the first Indians to inhabit the subcontinent? Scholar, linguist and cultural activist G.N. Devy has no time for this question. "There is no merit in it," he says. "Because genetics tells us all of us are a mixed population. It's very difficult to decide who's the original, who is the purest. It's a completely futile exercise in the 21st century."

Devy, a retired professor, best known for leading the People's Linguistic Survey of India, has most recently coedited The Indians: Histories of a Civilization. The ambitious volume, spanning 12,000 years up until 2000, includes essays from over 100 scholars and touches on varied aspects of the country's past. The other editors are journalist and writer Tony Joseph and archaeologist Ravi Korisettar.

"The genesis of this book lies in the contestation unfolding before us in recent years between the scientific view of history and the ideologically charged attempts to distort the history of South Asia," Devy writes in the introduction. He refers to recent committees set up by the government that proposed to study the origin and evolution of Indian culture.