Mapping Mahabharata to Lactose Intolerance

Lactose tolerance, the ability to digest milk sugar into adulthood, is a genetic mutation that arose among pastoralists in Eurasia, who tamed the horse for its milk, around 5000 BC.

- Devdutt Pattanaik

By 3000 BC, they spread to Europe and by 1000 BC to South Asia. These were the same people who spread their language, patriarchy, and technologies—horse-drawn spoked-wheel chariots and composite bows—across continents. The Rig Veda and the Mahabharata echo this Steppe inheritance. Rig Veda and Mahabharata tell stories of North India, where 80 per cent of adults can digest lactose. In the south, only 20 per cent can.

Yet a recent map on the internet claimed that the Mahabharata war involved the entire subcontinent, from the Himalayas to the southern seas. This is a political fantasy. The epic itself never mentions the rivers Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna, or Kaveri. Its geography is much narrower: Hastinapur in western Uttar Pradesh, Kurukshetra in Haryana, Matsya near Jaipur, Trigarta in Punjab, Panchala between the Ganga and Yamuna. Horses came from Sindh, Madra, and Gandhara; elephants from Magadha. The events took place long before the Brahmin migration to South India after 300 AD, an event captured in the myth of Agastya and proven by the presence of Brahmin land-grants (brahmadeya).