South Asian endogamy predates the British

One of the things that happens if you read ethnographically thick books like Nicholas Dirks' Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India is that you start to wonder if most castes were simply created by the British and for the British. Granted, even Dirks would not deny the existence of Brahmins prior to the British period, but those who work within his general paradigm might argue that a group like Kayasthas were the product of very recent developments (e.g., the uplift of a non-Brahmin literate group willing to serve Muslim and British rulers). The emergence of genomics complicates this sort narrative, because you can examine relationships and see how plausible they would be given a particular social model. Zack Ajmal is now at 90 participants in the Harappa Ancestry Project. He's still undersampling people from the Indo-Gangetic plain between Punjab and Bengal, but that's not his fault. ...