December 1946, the Adivasi political leader Jaipal Singh Munda said:
'my people … have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6,000 years … It is the new-comers – most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned – it is the new-comers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastnesses.'
Against this fraught background, intensified by the Hindutva grip this century, the palaeogeneticists are addressing the evidence on India's population history.
