The Myth of Purity

A Genetic Mirror to Human Arrogance

For centuries, human beings have told themselves stories of origin. Stories of chosen bloodlines, sacred inheritance, and ancestral greatness have shaped civilizations and justified hierarchies. From these stories emerged ideas of belonging and exclusion — who is original, who is outsider, who is superior, and who is inferior. Though the language changes across cultures — divine will, racial pride, civilizational destiny — the underlying obsession remains the same: purity.

Yet modern DNA research has entered this ancient conversation with quiet authority. Without anger, without ideology, without rhetoric, science has examined our genetic past — and it has revealed something profoundly unsettling to every doctrine of purity. There was never purity to begin with.

A Civilization Woven from Many Threads

Genetic studies of the Indian subcontinent show that its people are not descendants of a single, unmixed lineage. Instead, they arise from deep and repeated mixtures of populations over thousands of years. The earliest inhabitants were ancient South Asian hunter-gatherers who lived on this land tens of thousands of years ago. Later came agricultural populations related to early Iranian farming communities. Much later still, pastoralist groups from the Central Asian steppes entered the subcontinent and mixed with existing populations.

Even the population associated with the Indus Valley Civilization — often invoked in debates about indigeneity — was itself already a blend of indigenous ancestry and Iranian-related agricultural ancestry. There was no singular origin point that remained untouched. There was no biological Eden from which one community can claim exclusive descent. India, from its earliest recoverable genetic memory, was a convergence — a weaving together of many human journeys.

The Collapse of False Binaries

For generations, political and cultural narratives have divided Indian history into dramatic oppositions: Aryan versus Dravidian, native versus invader, pure versus foreign. These binaries have been repeated so often that they began to sound like unquestionable truths.

Genetics complicates and ultimately dissolves these simplistic frames. What scientists once labeled as distinct ancestral components are themselves layered mixtures. The differences that exist among Indian communities today are differences of proportion, not of fundamental origin. Beneath linguistic, cultural, and regional distinctions lies shared ancestry.

Moreover, genetic evidence suggests that large-scale mixing among populations occurred extensively until roughly two thousand years ago. Only later did strict endogamy — marriage within caste lines — become deeply entrenched. In other words, India’s early biological history was more fluid than its later social order. Hierarchy was imposed upon diversity; it did not arise from immutable biological boundaries.

The Atheist Insight: No Divine Design

From an atheist standpoint, these findings carry a quiet but powerful implication. There is no cosmic architect assigning purity to one lineage and impurity to another. There is no sacred chromosome marking divine preference. What we observe instead is migration, adaptation, intermarriage, and survival — natural processes unfolding over time.

The universe is indifferent to our myths of blood. When science examines our DNA, it finds no heavenly endorsement of caste divisions, no metaphysical separation of north and south, no biological seal of superiority. It finds shared ancestry shaped by geography and history, not by divine decree.

The idea that hierarchy is written into the fabric of creation collapses under empirical scrutiny. What remains is humanity — diverse, complex, interconnected.

The Humanist Affirmation: Equality is Natural

Humanism does not deny difference; it denies the ranking of human worth. Modern genetics reinforces this ethical stance. Every human population on Earth is a mosaic of earlier populations. There is no pure race in Europe, no pure lineage in Asia, no untouched ancestry anywhere. India, in fact, stands among the most genetically diverse regions in the world — a testament to its long history as a crossroads of migration and exchange.

What some ideologies describe as contamination, history reveals as synthesis. What some fear as dilution, evolution demonstrates as adaptation. Diversity is not a deviation from nature; it is nature’s pattern.

When we understand this, claims of biological superiority lose their intellectual foundation. Xenophobia appears irrational. Caste arrogance reveals itself as historically shallow. Science does not command us to be compassionate, but it removes the illusion that cruelty has biological justification.

Identity Without Illusion

Religious traditions often root identity in sacred origin stories. Nationalist movements often root identity in territorial antiquity. A rational worldview, however, accepts that identity is historical — layered, evolving, shaped by interaction rather than isolation.

We are not monuments carved from a single stone; we are rivers fed by many tributaries. Our ancestors crossed mountains, deserts, and seas. Our languages moved across landscapes. Our genes crossed boundaries long before we drew them on maps.

To acknowledge mixture is not to abandon cultural pride. It is to ground that pride in truth rather than myth. Truth may humble us, but it also frees us from illusion. It allows us to see that belonging is not threatened by diversity; it is enriched by it.

Beyond Blood

If purity is a myth, then the hierarchies built upon purity are myths as well. The deeper we look into our biological past, the more artificial our divisions appear. Beneath religion, caste, race, and nationalism lies a shared human story — one of movement, exchange, and mutual dependence.

Before we were separated by ideology, we were connected by ancestry. Before we were categorized by social systems, we were shaped by the same evolutionary processes.

Science has quietly achieved what revolutions often struggle to accomplish: it has dissolved the intellectual foundation of purity without violence. It has shown us that we are not fortresses of unmixed blood but living testimonies to encounter and exchange.

And perhaps this is the most profound lesson of all. India’s strength — and humanity’s strength — does not lie in imagined purity. It lies in plurality.

“The more we learn about our genes, the less room remains for arrogance. We are not descendants of purity — we are descendants of mixture. And in that mixture lies our shared dignity.”

— Venugopal Bandlamudi