Why do punjabis have big noses

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By Nina Bergheim Dahl

Supervisor: Associate Professor Kathinka FrøystadThis thesis concerns female beauty ideal among Sikh Jats in Punjab, India. Based on a five-month long anthropological fieldwork among Sikhs who belong to the farmer caste, I sought to unravel how notions of beauty influence women’s lives. Because culture is not static, beauty ideals are not static. In a Sikh Panjabi context I argue that changes of India’s recent political, economic and cultural developments are highly visible through how contemporary young Sikh Jat women beautify their bodies. First of all, I examine how a young woman looks when regarded as beautiful in a North-Indian, Sikh social context. In brief, her complexion is very light, her eyes big and dark, her nose thin and lips neither too broad nor too small. Her skin is free of spots, freckles and wrinkles, her overall body shape is symmetrical, and tall. Her black head hair is long and shiny, but visible body parts are hair free. Attitudes towards how she is beautified – if dark eyes are emphasized with make-up or arms are waxed – depend on who one asks. I suggest that there are two extreme ends of beauty ideals among Sikh Jats in Punjab, in particularly due to recent societal changes. India has undergone major shifts since the turn of the millennium. The Indian economy was liberalized during the 1990s, and was gradually opened up to the global market. A major middle class has emerged since then, which is characteristic of similar consumer lifestyles, access to education, and surplus money to spend on consumer goods by national and international companies. Scholars of India have noted how urban upper- and middle-class women have gained a larger sense of agency in their lives through this period of time.

Punjab is one of India’s richest states. Among other industries, the field of beauty’s entry is largely visible in the Panjabi urban landscape where commercialized beauty centers have settled in high numbers during the recent decade. In brief, I will argue that the commercialized beauty parlor as an institution is the most prominent site where notions of how to become a “modern” Panjabi woman are most thoroughly expressed through an “evolutionistic metaphor”. For the exclusive, high-class beauty salons with a vast range of beauty treatments to offer, the body is divided into parts and scrutinized for beautification potential. This discourse contradicts Sikh ideology’s view on the human body. That Sikh bodies are created by God is most articulated through notions of hair. By restraining from cutting or removing any hair on their body, Sikhs affirm that it is sacrosanct in its completeness. I therefore argue that a young generation of Sikh Jat women of this specific socio-historical context has to respond to contradictory notions regarding how to treat their own bodies.

Media Platforms Design Team

I've always thought I was pretty ... except for my nose. I hated it. It dominated my entire face. But every time I asked my mom about getting it fixed, she said, "You don't need it. You think it's bigger than it really is."

My nose was long and pointy and, I've been told, "very Indian." But unlike for some of my Jewish and Persian classmates, whose parents paid for nose jobs on their 16th birthdays, plastic surgery isn't common among the Indian families in my Los Angeles community. My parents were born in India and couldn't imagine spending thousands of dollars on a procedure if there wasn't anything medically wrong with you.

Eventually, I could afford to pay for my own nose job. But I was scared of getting a generic-looking nose that would be too refined and upturned. It would look obvious, too "Western." Even though my deepset dark eyes and the shape of my mouth make me look Indian, I worried that without my nose, I could be mistaken for another ethnicity. What would that say about me if I rejected the one feature that identified me as part of my community? This was the same nose that my dad's side of the family had. Based on my parents' feelings, I was nervous that other Indians in my community would judge me for being vain. I could just hear the old women saying, "That's not your nose. We know what Indian noses look like!" I worried that changing how I looked would say that where I came from wasn't good enough for me.

Many of my Indian friends felt the same about their noses. I once joked with a family friend, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Sejal Patel, M.D., that he should offer a Groupon for all my Indian girlfriends who also wanted nose jobs. When I shared my fears about losing my "look," he told me that he could make my nose smaller while maintaining my Indian-ness — "ethnic nose jobs" are his niche. When I went to his office, and Dr. Patel showed me a computer-generated image of what I would look like, I gasped. It actually looked cute ... and Indian.

Understandably, my parents were scared about my going under the knife. Fears aside, I went through with it.When the cast came off a week after, I couldn't believe it. My face finally looked like it fit together. My eyes look brighter, my lips looked fuller. I felt more feminine.

Since my nose job, I feel more confident, and I seem that way to others too. I have a different air about me, friends say. I'm positive this new attitude helped me meet my husband — we connected on an Indian dating site shortly after my nose job. When I told him about the surgery, he said he doesn't think of me as any less Indian. I don't either — I just feel like a prettier, more confident version of myself.

This article was originally published as "I'm Proud Of My Race, But Can I Have A New Nose?" in the July 2015 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to get the issue in the iTunes store!

Ancient people of Punjab (Punjabi: پنجابی (Shahmukhi), ਪੰਜਾਬੀ (Gurmukhi), पंजाबी (Devanagri), are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group of North Indian origin; which includes parts of Sindh, Punjab, Haryana, and Gujarat. Punjab region has been the location of some of the oldest civilizations in the world, the the Indus Valley Civilization. Excavation of pre-historic sites at Harrapa, Mohenjodaro, Ropar, Dholvira, Kalibangan, and Rakhigarhi reveal an advanced society that may be the cradle of Indian civilization.

Map of Indus Valley Civilization

During 19th Century European ethnographers and, of course, most famously, Adolf Hitler, also considered Aryans the master race who had conquered Europe, although the German leader considered them to be of Nordic lineage.

Hindu right-wingers believe the source of Indian civilization are the Arya - a nomadic tribe of horse-riding, cattle-rearing warriors and herders who spoke Sanskrit, and composed Hinduism's oldest religious texts, the Vedas.

Many Indian scholars have questioned the "Aryan Invasion from Europe" thesis, arguing that these Indo-European language speakers - or Aryans - were possibly just one of many streams of prehistoric migrants who arrived in India after the decline of an earlier civilization. The Aryans, they argue, originated from India and then spread across large parts of Asia and Europe, helping set up the family of Indo-European languages that Europeans and Indians still speak today.

Finding DNA of Indus Valley People

The climate of South Asia is not kind to ancient DNA. It is hot and during monsoon season, water seeps into ancient bones in the ground, degrading the old genetic material. So by the time archaeologists and geneticists finally got DNA out of a tiny ear bone from a 4,000-plus-year-old skeleton, they had already tried dozens of samples—all from cemeteries of the mysterious Indus Valley civilization, all without any success.

Skeletal from Rakhigarhi in Sirsa

How did First Punjabis Look Like?

In 2019, scientists were able to generate an accurate facial representation of 2 out of 37 individuals  found buried in 4,500 year old Indus Valley site at Rakhigarhi at Punjab-Haryana border. A multi-disciplinary team of 15 scientists and academics from six different institutes of South Korea, UK and India, applied craniofacial reconstruction (CFR) technique using computed tomography (CT) data of two of the Rakhigarhi skulls, to recreate their faces. Original skulls went through crano-facial reconstruction and the final facial appearance after reconstruction The case study, led by W J Lee and Vasant Shinde and supported in part by a grant of the National Geographic Society, has been published in a widely reputed journal, Anatomical Science International .

"The CFR technology generated faces of the two Rakhigarhi skulls, therefore, is a major breakthrough," Shinde, a professor at Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute, said. Shinde tried to spin the right wing theory by claiming that the faces of people resemble locals but he deliberately sidetracked the results that the 3-D video representation of the faces, the two individuals BR02 and BR36 clearly have Caucasian features with hawk-shaped and sharp noses.

Craniofacial Reconstruction of Indus Valley People

What Scientific Researches Reveal?

The most recent study on this subject, led by geneticist David Reich of Harvard University, was published in March 2018 and co-authored by 92 scholars from all over the world.  By comparing the results with modern South Asians’ genomes, the study showed that South Asians today descended from a mix of local hunter-gatherers, Iranian-related groups, and steppe pastoralists who came by way of Central Asia. It’s the largest number of ancient genomes reported in a single paper, all made possible by an ancient DNA “factory” the geneticist David Reich has built at Harvard. (Priya Moorjani completed her doctorate in Reich’s lab and is a co-author on this paper, currently at the Berkeley University).

The second study focuses on just a single genome from the Indus Valley civilization: I6113, a woman who died more than 4,000 years ago. Her skeleton was the only one—out of more than 100 samples the researchers tested from 10 different Indus Valley–civilization sites—that yielded ancient DNA, but even then it was contaminated and of poor quality. “We had to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze the sample really hard, more than we’ve done in any other sample we’ve ever tried,” says Reich, who is the senior author of the second paper. The team ultimately tried to sequence DNA from I6113’s ear bone more than 100 times, each time yielding a tiny dribble of genetic data.

What’s intriguing about I6113’s DNA is what she lacks: any of Eurasian steppe ancestry that is widespread in contemporary Punjabis and Sindhis. Instead, she appeared to have a mix of South Indian hunter-gatherer and Iranian-related ancestry.

First Wave of Migration to India

The study proves that there were two major migrations into India in the last 10,000 years. The first one originated from the Zagros region in south-western Iran (which has the world's first evidence for goat domestication) and brought agriculturists, most likely herders, to India. This would have been between 7,000 and 3,000 BCE. These Zagros herders mixed with the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent - the First Indians, descendants of the Out of Africa (OoA) migrants who had reached India around 65,000 years ago - and together, they went on to create the Harappan civilization.

The two studies piece together a history of how the people of the Indus Valley civilization are related to Punjabis and South Asians today.  This civilization grew from Indus valley region of Sindh and Punjab and then spread to Haryana, Gujarat, and adjacent regions. The Sindhi people, Aroras of Punjab, and Lohanas of Gujarat are the descendants of these early migrants.

Indus Valley Girl with Dravidian Features

These early migrants, people with a genetic makeup similar to I6113 mixed with people of Southeast Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry to form what has been called Ancestral South Indians. 

Second Wave of Migration to India

In the centuries after 2000 BCE came the second set of immigrants (the Aryans) from the Eurasian Steppe, probably from the region now known as Kazakhstan. They likely brought with them an early version of Sanskrit, mastery over horses and a range of new cultural practices such as sacrificial rituals, all of which formed the basis of early Vedic culture. (A thousand years before, people from the Steppe had also moved into Europe, replacing and mixing with agriculturists there, spawning new cultures and spreading Indo-European languages).

They merged with the Indus Valley civilization to form a group that has been called Ancestral North Indians. The Punjabi and Sindhi  Khatris and Brahmins are the direct descendants of these Sanskrit speaking warrior ancestors.

Making of the Indian Ancestry

These two ancestral groups then mixed as well, giving rise to the great diversity of ethnic groups in South Asia. Go back far enough, and both sides trace to the Indus Valley civilization, which appears to be the single largest source of ancestry for modern South Asians. To many in the Hindu right wing, these findings are unpalatable. They have been campaigning to change school curricula and remove any mention of Aryan immigration from textbooks. And on Twitter, several hugely popular right-wing "history" handles have long been attacking India's leading historians who have defended the theory of Aryan migrations and continue to do so.

The Punjabi Gene

The majority of Punjabi population share genes with northern Indian populations of Kashmir, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat, but also show a significant relationship with west Eurasian groups. In a 2004 Stanford University study conducted with a wide sampling from India, including 112 Punjabis displayed the following results:

• Indian tribal and caste populations derive largely from the same genetic heritage of Pleistocene southern and western Asians and have received limited gene flow from external regions since the Holocene.
• About 42% of genetic markers in the Punjab were of West Asian origin, the highest among the South Asians. 
• There was limited gene flow in and out of north India, but the highest amount of genetic inflow from the west showed up in the Punjab region

The Science Behind Research

A Haplotype is a group of alleles in an organism that are inherited together from a single parent, and a Haplogroup  is a group of similar haplotypes that share a common ancestor with a single-nucleotide polymorphism mutation. More specifically, a haplogroup is a combination of alleles at different chromosomes regions that are closely linked and that tend to be inherited together. As a haplogroup consists of similar haplotypes, it is usually possible to predict a haplogroup from haplotypes. Haplogroups pertain to a single line of descent.

Haplogroup J2 originated in Caucasus and southern Caspian region during the Mesolithic period. The first appearance of J2 during the Neolithic came in the form of a 10,000 year-old J2b sample from Tepe Abdul Hosein in north-western Iran towards the end of the last glaciation. I6113, a woman who died more than 4,000 years ago in Rakhigarhi belonged to this Haplogroup.

Broadly, the average proportion of mtDNAs from West Eurasia among Indian caste populations is widely distributed. In the northern States of India their share is greater, reaching over 30% in Kashmir and Gujarat, nearly 43% in Indian Punjab.

Haplogroup J2 Distribution in Punjab

Some preliminary conclusions from these varying tests support a largely north Indian genetic base for most Punjabis accompanied by some of the highest degrees of west Asian admixture found in north India.

Haplogroup R1a is distributed in a large region in Eurasia, extending from Scandinavia, Russia, and Central Europe to southern Siberia and South Asia.

Haplogroup R1a Distribution in Punjab

Here its worthwhile noting that Punjab witnessed a third migration from Central Asia/Iran region during the 4th-6th century. These migrants settled in Punjab and adopted the local culture. Rajputs, Jatts, and Gujjars form the bulk of this third migration wave. Also worth mentioning are the original natives of the region known as the "Adivasi" or the scheduled castes and tribes of Punjab.

Links

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-46616574
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/09/indus-valley-civilization-dna-has-long-eluded-researchers/597481/
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/scientists-reconstruct-faces-of-indus-valley-people/articleshow/71512919.cms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_and_archaeogenetics_of_South_Asia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1a