Make your own free website on  Races in India  The concept of
human races has often been misused, and the whole issue has
therefore come under intense criticism. Though it is unlikely
that there exist populations of humans that have been
reproductively isolated for long enough to have diversified to
the same extent as races of other biological organisms, many
genetic traits do show geographical (and demographical)
distributions demonstrating historical endogamical traits. When
the lines separating many of these characters roughly coincide,
it is useful to refer to the common borders as race divisions.
Social Stratification  The majority (about 80%) of Indian
society is broken up into about 2000 castes which can be further
broken down into endogamous units which are called subcastes,
the total number of these units in India is estimated to have
been 75000 at its peak, and still about 43000. Any genetic study
needs to take these into account, as well as the ‘gotra’s
(roughly speaking, exogamous lineages) withi