Where did they come from?

A first-of-its-kind study has found that the Roman Catholics of Goa, Kumta and Mangalore share genetic affinity with the Gaud Saraswat Brahmin community

In De Souza Prabhu, Goan poet Eunice de Souza tells the story of a Brahmin Catholic woman.

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No, I’m not going to delve deep down and discover I’m really de Souza Prabhu even if Prabhu was no fool and got the best of both worlds. (Catholic Brahmin! I can hear his fat chuckle still.)

Interestingly, a new study too connects Konkan Roman Catholics to the Brahmin heritage. 

Titled, Dissecting the genetic history of the Roman Catholic populations of West Coast India, the study was conducted by scientists from the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences (BSIP) in Lucknow, Mangalore University, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research and Institute of Advanced Materials, Sweden. According to authors of the paper, which was published in Human Genetics on August 23, till date, no genetic study has been done on the Roman Catholics from three different locations of the West Coast of India—Goa, Kumta and Mangalore.

Roman Catholic fete, Cathedral, Bassein, Bombay, India, 19th Century. Pic/Getty Images

Chief scientist of CSIR-CCMB Kumaraswamy Thangaraj shares, “Historically, a lot of information on Roman Catholics in the Konkan region was not proven with the help of genetics. So, we decided to begin our investigation almost seven years ago. We have analysed the DNA of 110 individuals from the Roman Catholic community of Goa, Kumta and Mangalore.”

The results are intriguing. In this first throughput story, the team found that the Roman Catholics of Goa, Kumta and Mangalore regions are close to very early lineages of the Brahmin community of India. “Our aim to study this population group was not just due to lack of their [Konkan Roman Catholics] genetic history but because of the different hypotheses given by historians over time. According to some historians, Roman Catholics were Konkani speakers of the Gaud Saraswat community.

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After the arrival of the Portuguese, most of them forcefully converted to Christianity and a few groups escaped towards the South, especially Kumta and Mangalore and mixed with the local community,” explains Niraj Rai, senior scientist at BSIP.

Niraj Rai and Kumaraswamy Thangaraj

Although most of the written records of the origin and culture of the groups converted to Roman Catholicism were destroyed during Portuguese rule, especially in the 16th century, oral tradition along with cultural and linguistic affinity of this community relates its origin from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, whose origin in turn, according to some schools of thought, is near the mythical Saraswathi river region, the study states. 

They compared the genetic information of the Roman Catholic group with previously published DNA data from India and West Eurasia. They put this information alongside archaeological, linguistic and historical records. Rai continues, “We matched Roman Catholic genetic data with the published database from India and found that Roman Catholics have a maximum match with the Brahmin groups of North and North West of India. The present extensive genetic analysis with uniparental markers and genome-wide autosomal SNP markers, suggest that the Roman Catholic group has male-biased admixture with the arrival of North West population carrying genetic composition typical of Indo-European populations on the Indian cline, which holds true with all of the populations with more affinity with priestly groups on ANI-ASI cline in India.”

Interestingly, they also found that Roman Catholics have Indo-European genetic affinity along with cryptic Jewish admixture. “One school of thought says that Gaud Saraswat Brahmins are the descendents of a very early tribe of Jews and they came to India about 2,700 years ago as refugees. Few historians believe that Gaud Saraswat Brahmins are descendents of those Jews who came to Kerala during King Solomon’s time about 2,900 years ago, and from Kerala they arrived in Mangalore and Goa. So, we wanted to check all possible hypotheses using cutting-edge DNA markers,” Rai adds.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis suggests that most of the Roman Catholics have aboriginal Indian maternal genetic ancestry; while the Y chromosomal DNA analysis indicates high frequency of Rs 1a lineage, which is predominant in groups with higher ancestral North Indian (ANI) component. “In the end, everybody’s roots are traced to Africa. But we don’t know how many years later the populations divurged into different religions, languages and caste,” Thangaraj explains.

The study further said the west coast of India has a rich diversity of various ethno-linguistic human population groups. The Roman Catholic is one such distinct group, whose origin is much debated. When asked, Dr Analabha Basu, who has a PhD degree in Population and Statistical genetics from the Indian Statistical Institute and is currently associated with the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, says, “This result [published in Human Genetics] has been shown multiple times before as well. So, indeed to a larger extent, this conclusion was expected; there maybe some affinity towards Brahmin lineage. It is also true that Roman Catholics have similarities with the Jews. Therefore, this study has come at a relevant time.”

He, however, feels that the Roman Catholic population has been largely neglected and little research is done on their genetic history. “This population is neglected in the mainstream discussion. But it is also true that histories of many populations are not entirely known yet. So I welcome the CSIR-CCMB study. However, I don’t believe that this is the only truth possible. We must explore other possibilities to conclude their [Roman Catholic] exact genetic history,” Basu informs.

“The origins of many population groups in India like the Jews and Parsis are not well-understood. These are gradually unfolding with advances in modern and ancient population genetics. Roman Catholics are one of them with much debated history of origin based on inferences of anthropologists and historians,” Lomous Kumar, first author of the paper, said in a statement.

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