A Hindu friend clued me into the fact that this was Lord Rama’s birthday. Since I’m not Hindu or from a Hindu background I had no clue (to be fair, Google calendar is how I know when Ramadan starts). I don’t know much about Rama as I have not read the Ramayana (after all these years I’m only 2/3rd of the way through an English translation of the Mahabharata), but, I’m pretty sure I know which Y haplogroup he was, so much respect!
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Razib Khan
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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“I’m pretty sure I know which Y haplogroup he was”
out of shear curiosity, i got interested in the genealogy of rama, did some googling, and found the wikipedia page on Ikshwaku, the earliest known ancestor of rama. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikshvaku
just as i suspected, pesky western scholars have already suggested dravidian and munda origins for him.
Considering the politics of today, i doubt any scholar would remotely attach ‘Dravidian and munda origins’ for Ram.
They might attach ‘invading genocidal Aryan’ to him though.
The Ishhvakus may have been earlier Indo Aryan migrants – earlier than the Rigvedic Aryans – As the Vedas are mainly compositions patronized by the Rigvedic – Puru Bharata – later Kuru rulers, its assumed by many that the eastern Ishvakus were outside the Kuru-Pancala orthodoxy – though clearly Aryan.
I would speculate that MB giving a peek itihasa of the Kuru-Pancala and RM being the itihasa of eastern Ishvakus of the Kosala- (Magadh?) region. Also interesting to note that the Jainas seem to have some important links to Ishvakus – 22/23 of the 24 Tirthankars were Ishvakus including Mahavir (who do not get that much coverage in the Vedic Canon).
There is one hypothesis about this which is by Edgar Caycee or CW Leadbeater who are so called faith healers/ They said Ram entered India from Atlantian civilization which was dying and the references of flying chariot etc are all the technologies present in atlantic civilization.
@Nachiketa
Good hunch! This is also a major supposition by some scholars. At least in some parts of the Puranas, Ikshvakus are considered anarya who later accepted Vedic rites.
2/3rd is pretty good progress as its huge text. which translation you using ?
He was famously dark skinned.
Happy Ram Navami Razib and to all our friends on the blog !
I would be interested to know how has your experience been reading the great text (the Mahabharata).