Connecting with my ancestors: the living, not the dead

I am not my ancestors. I am goth punk. Growing up brown-skinned in white-majority towns in the US and UK, my ancestry was something to distance myself from. I wanted to be seen for who I was, for the things I liked, and the music I listened to, not pigeonholed by my skin colour and Indian name. I was focussed on my future – not my family’s past.

But a few years ago, as a thirty-something researcher in an evolutionary biology department in Scotland, I started learning about the science of ancestry.

I learned that if your recent ancestry is confined to Europe and you trace this 30 generations, or about a thousand years, back to the Middle Ages, you’ll find that you share the exact same set of ancestors as everyone else with European ancestry (including any royals who were about at the time). Go back another thousand years, around the time Mount Vesuvius erupted, and you’ll encounter the Most Recent Common Ancestor – an individual who is an ancestor of everyone alive today. Another two thousand years earlier – just after the Pyramids of Giza were built – brings you to all the shared ancestors of every living human on earth.

Your ancestors, ultimately, are my ancestors. How, then, can they define who we are as individuals? And yet, explaining this to students and friends, I found myself faced with how much meaning some people found in connecting with their ancestors, and how far removed I felt from this myself.

Why had I never been curious enough to ask my parents about their family histories? Maybe I was missing something. So for the first time in my life, I sat down with them and asked.

My parents are Sikh. Sikhism is a young, radical religion born in response to the hypocrisy laced throughout much of India’s religious practices. The founders weren’t against Islam or Hinduism – in fact they taught that any religion can be a route to God. What they took issue with was the focus on ostentatious ritual over everyday moral actions, on hierarchy over oneness, and the worshipping of people, objects, and images as if they were gods.

The worship of dead ancestors, too, is roundly excoriated in Sikh scripture. A passage therein by the Sufi poet Kabir reads: “People do not honour their ancestors when they are alive, yet make ritual offerings to them after they have died!” Sikhs are encouraged to focus their energy on the living, not the dead.

My dad explained that in much of India, a person’s ancestry follows them everywhere by virtue of their family name, which usually indicates the caste they belong to. To escape this hierarchical system, one Sikh guru advocated dispensing with family names altogether, instructing men to take the surname “Singh” and women the surname “Kaur” – thereby also dismantling the patriarchal practice of women taking their husbands’ names.

And yet, my ancestors, like most Sikhs, held on to their surnames. Whether for the sake of practicality (like identifying people outside their own villages) or pride, they felt the pull of the old more strongly than the push to rebel against it.

But my ambitious paternal grandfather wanted nothing to do with the poorly-regarded jeweller caste associated with his family name. He wasn’t pious, but he wrote poetry. So he changed his surname not to Singh but to his pen name, Kanwal, meaning “lotus”.

This desire not to be defined by his family history, but rather by his passions, his art – to me, that resonated.

But there was also much that didn’t. For example, he was a misogynist who abused his wife and children.

In contrast, I discovered that my maternal grandfather, a convert to Sikhism, believed strongly in gender equality, and broke tradition to educate his daughters. But beyond that, I struggled to find anything else I could identify with.

We sat together, my mum and dad and me, around the kitchen table with cups of tea. They talked about the feminist great-grandmother who secretly gifted my mum a bikini, the mafioso uncle who sparked my dad’s love of astronomy, the great-aunt who narrowly escaped Partition alive. The gulf between my parents and me felt much smaller now than it did sitting at that same table years ago, as a teenager dressed in black.

My long-dead ancestors remain distant, patchwork people made of stories, unknowable except through the mark they’ve left on my parents. My parents, though, are still here, and there is so much more to know about them, so many more conversations to be had. And now I hear the religion of my ancestors speaking to me: focus on the living, not the dead.