Indo-Canadian DNA: Punjabi and South Asian Roots, Explained

In a lot of Surrey, Brampton and Abbotsford households, the DNA conversation goes the same way. Someone gets a 23andMe or AncestryDNA kit for Christmas. The result comes back, and the uncles start arguing over what it means. Is "Northern India & Pakistan" the same as Punjabi? Why does the cousin from Jalandhar show something slightly different from the cousin from Ludhiana? And can the test say whether the family is Jat, Khatri or Ramgarhia?

This guide is for Canadians of Indian origin who want straight answers. It covers who South Asian Canadians are according to the 2021 Census, how Punjabi families first reached British Columbia, what 23andMe and AncestryDNA actually show South Asians in 2026, what peer-reviewed genetics says about Punjabi ancestry, and how to get a community-level comparison from the raw file you already have. It is written mostly with Punjabi Sikh and Hindu families in mind, but most of it applies just as well to Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalee, Goan, Indo-Caribbean and East African Indian Canadians.

South Asian Canada in numbers: what the 2021 Census says

Statistics Canada's 2021 Census counted about 2.6 million South Asian people, 7.1% of the population, making South Asians the largest racialized group in the country, ahead of Chinese (4.7%) and Black (4.3%) Canadians. Of South Asians in Canada, 44.3% were born in India, which makes India the single most common birthplace in the group.

Language tells the Punjabi story most clearly. In 2021, about 520,000 people spoke Punjabi predominantly at home, up 49% from 2016. Statistics Canada noted that apart from English and French, Mandarin (531,000) and Punjabi were the country's most widely spoken languages at home, and that the number of Punjabi speakers grew much faster than the number of Mandarin speakers. Among South Asians, Punjabi was the second most common mother tongue after English, reported by 29.4%.

Faith and province

The same census found about 770,000 people reporting Sikhism (2.1% of Canadians, up from 0.9% in 2001) and close to 830,000 reporting Hinduism (2.3%, up from 1.0% in 2001). British Columbia had the highest share of people affiliated with Sikhism of any province, at 5.9%. Those two faiths, plus Muslim, Christian and Jain families, together make up the Punjabi and wider South Asian Canadian picture.

Not only Punjabi

Other South Asian languages are growing too. In 2021, about 92,000 people spoke Gujarati predominantly at home (up 43%), 92,000 spoke Hindi (up 66%), and 35,000 spoke Malayalam, more than double the 2016 figure. Add Tamil families from India and Sri Lanka, Goan and Mangalorean Catholics, Indo-Caribbean families from Guyana and Trinidad, and Indian families who came from East Africa, and "Indo-Canadian" turns out to cover a very wide range of ancestries.

2021 Census figure	Value
South Asian population of Canada	About 2.6 million (7.1%)
South Asians born in India	44.3%
Speak Punjabi predominantly at home	About 520,000 (up 49% since 2016)
Speak Gujarati / Hindi / Malayalam predominantly at home	About 92,000 / 92,000 / 35,000
Report Sikhism / Hinduism	About 770,000 (2.1%) / about 830,000 (2.3%)
Province with highest Sikh share	British Columbia (5.9%)

How Punjabi families came to Canada: 1900s to today

Most Indo-Canadian family stories start with immigration after the 1960s. But the Punjabi connection with British Columbia is more than a century old, and knowing it helps explain why so many Indo-Canadian families trace back to a few districts of Punjab.

The first settlers in British Columbia

Sikh officers passed through Vancouver in 1897 on their way to Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Settlement followed in the early 1900s: Sikh settlers were in Golden, BC, by 1902, where a gurdwara was built in 1905, and in the Abbotsford area by 1905. Between 1904 and 1908, 5,179 South Asians arrived in Canada. Most early Sikh workers found jobs in sawmills and lumber mills, on railway track crews, in mines and on farms. The Khalsa Diwan Society was founded in Vancouver in 1907 and opened its gurdwara in Kitsilano in 1908.

The welcome did not last. British Columbia removed South Asians' right to vote in 1907, and in January 1908 an order in council created the "continuous journey" regulation, which required immigrants to arrive by an uninterrupted voyage from their country of birth. Since no such route existed from India, it closed the door in practice. Canada's Punjabi population, which had passed 5,000 by 1911, fell to roughly 2,500 in the years that followed. The vote was restored to South Asian veterans in 1945 and to all South Asians by 1947.

The Komagata Maru, 1914

In 1914 the steamship Komagata Maru arrived in Burrard Inlet on 23 May with 376 passengers from Punjab: 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims and 12 Hindus. Only about two dozen were admitted. The rest stayed in the harbour for two months, and the ship was forced to leave on 23 July 1914. When it reached Budge Budge near Calcutta in late September, police and troops fired on the passengers and about 20 were killed. On 18 May 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologised for the incident in the House of Commons.

1967, Partition and new waves

The modern Indo-Canadian community grew after Canada changed its rules. Regulations in 1962 eliminated overt racial discrimination from Canadian immigration policy, and the 1967 regulations introduced a points system that scored independent applicants out of 100 on education, occupational demand, age, language, a relative in Canada and other factors, with 50 points needed for admission. Immigration from Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa increased significantly afterwards.

Many of the Punjabi families who came after 1967 had their own history of upheaval. The 1947 Partition divided both Punjab and Bengal and displaced between 12 and 20 million people along religious lines. And not every South Asian came from South Asia: after Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Uganda's Asian population in August 1972, more than 7,000 refugees were resettled in Canada by late 1973. Indo-Caribbean Canadians have a different journey again, covered in our guide to Indo-Caribbean DNA.

That history matters for DNA. Village, district and religion are often remembered well. Deeper ancestry, and how a family relates to the many communities of Punjab, is where genetics can add something.

What 23andMe and AncestryDNA show South Asians in 2026

For years, the honest answer to "what will my DNA test say?" was: something broad. That has changed at AncestryDNA, and only partly at 23andMe.

AncestryDNA's October 2026 update

Ancestry's 2026 white paper, dated October 8, 2026, describes a major expansion. The number of regions it can assign doubled, from 146 to 302, and its reference panel grew to over 295,000 samples, up from 185,000. South Asia gained a long list of named regions. The 2026 region list includes Northern Punjab, Northeastern Punjab, Central Punjab, Eastern Punjab, Western Punjab, Punjab & Sindh, Kashmir & Punjab Foothills, Jammu & Kashmir, Northwestern India, Rajasthan & Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh & Bihar, Gujarat, South Gujarat, Gulf of Khambhat, Goa, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Coastal Karnataka, Kerala, Central Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Telangana & Andhra Pradesh, Bengal and Sri Lanka, among others, plus regions for specific groups such as Parsis.

For a Punjabi Canadian, that is a real step forward. Instead of one wide northwestern label, AncestryDNA can now place your DNA among several named Punjab regions. The method compares windows of your DNA with its reference panels, first deciding the broad super-population and then the closest region within it, so results are still estimates and neighbouring regions can blur into each other. But "vague" is no longer a fair description of what it offers South Asians.

23andMe: still a handful of South Asian populations

23andMe's Ancestry Composition, the percentage breakdown most people screenshot, still splits South Asia into a small number of populations. Its own January 2025 announcement refers to "six Ancestry Composition populations in South Asia". A beta update it described in July 2024 would break Central and South Asia into seven populations, one of which, "North Indian & South Pakistani", includes Bihari, Punjabi and Sindhi people together. That is why many Punjabis see a broad northern label rather than "Punjab".

23andMe added detail in a different place. In January 2025 it introduced 44 South Asian genetic groups covering regions of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Afghanistan, including Punjab Plains, Doaba, Majha and Rachna Doab. These are shown as connections to places rather than as your percentages, so the headline breakdown stays broad. If you have only ever seen "Broadly South Asian", our post on why 23andMe says Broadly South Asian explains what is happening.

Service	How it reports South Asian ancestry	What a Punjabi Canadian is likely to see
AncestryDNA (2026 update)	302 regions worldwide, many named South Asian regions	One or more Punjab regions, possibly with neighbouring regions such as Kashmir & Punjab Foothills or Northwestern India
23andMe Ancestry Composition	A handful of broad South Asian populations	A wide northern South Asian population, plus genetic groups such as Doaba or Majha
Helixline upload	State-level breakdown and similarity to 140+ South Asian community reference groups	A state-level picture and a ranked list of the community reference groups your DNA is most similar to

The two approaches answer different questions. A region estimate says where in the subcontinent your DNA most resembles. A community comparison says which South Asian groups you are most similar to, which matters in Punjab, where communities with different histories have lived side by side in the same districts for centuries.

What genetics says about Punjabi ancestry

To read any of these results well, it helps to know the deep history. Punjab sits in the northwest of the subcontinent, close to the heartland of the Indus Valley Civilization, and that position shows up in the genome.

Two ancestral populations, mixed in different proportions

A 2009 study in Nature by Reich and colleagues showed that most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two ancient populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI), related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians and Europeans, and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent. They estimated ANI ancestry at 39% to 71% across Indian groups, higher in traditionally upper-caste groups and in speakers of Indo-European languages. Their analysis also included Pathan and Sindhi samples from Pakistan, which sat closer to West Eurasians on the same gradient.

Moorjani and colleagues, writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics in 2013, dated that ANI-ASI mixture to roughly 1,900 to 4,200 years ago, and found that India then shifted from a region where mixing was common to one where marriage within groups became the norm. A 2016 study in PNAS by Basu, Sarkar-Roy and Majumder, using a wider set of Indian populations, identified four major ancestries in mainland India and estimated that endogamy replaced widespread mixing about 70 generations ago, predominantly among upper castes and Indo-European speakers. Our explainer on steppe ancestry in India goes deeper into the components.

Steppe ancestry and the northwest

The biggest recent advance came from ancient DNA. In 2019, Narasimhan and colleagues published a large ancient DNA study of South and Central Asia in Science. They found that people related to those living around the Indus Valley Civilization, a mix of ancient Iranian-related and South Asian hunter-gatherer ancestry, form the majority of the ancestors of present-day South Asians. Steppe pastoralist ancestry arrived later, reaching the Swat Valley of northernmost South Asia and spreading further south in the first half of the second millennium BCE, and it contributes up to 30% of the ancestry of some modern groups. The group in northwest South Asia with the highest ANI proportion in their analysis was the Kalash of Pakistan.

A companion paper in Cell the same year, by Shinde and colleagues, reported a genome from Rakhigarhi in present-day Haryana, the largest known Indus Valley site. That individual had little if any steppe ancestry, which the authors said shows steppe ancestry "was not ubiquitous in northwest South Asia during the IVC as it is today". Put simply: the northwest, Punjab included, carries a larger share of the later steppe-related component today than it did 4,500 years ago, and, as part of its higher ANI ancestry, more than most of southern India.

What that means for a Punjabi family

Expect a Punjabi Canadian's DNA to sit toward the northern end of the Indian gradient, with a larger share of ANI-related ancestry than most South Indians and a smaller one than some groups further northwest. Expect the exact figure to vary between communities and between relatives, because every person inherits a different half of each parent's DNA. And expect a Y-DNA result, if you have one, to be one paternal line among thousands of ancestors. Our longer post on Punjabi DNA, steppe ancestry and R1a covers haplogroups in detail, and Jat DNA ancestry looks at one large Punjabi and Haryanvi community specifically.

What a Helixline upload adds for Indo-Canadian families

Helixline is an Indian DNA ancestry company, and its analysis is built around South Asian populations. You do not need a new kit: the raw file from 23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage or FamilyTreeDNA can be re-analysed against 7,600+ global reference samples and 140+ South Asian community reference groups. The Upload Ancestry report includes:

• A state-level ancestry breakdown, so you can see how your DNA relates to Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat and other states.
• Community similarity comparisons with a closest-match shortlist. Punjabi groups in our reference panel include Jat Sikh, Khatri Sikh, Ramgarhia Sikh, Mazhabi Sikh, Ramdasia Sikh, Punjabi Khatri, Punjabi Arora, Saini, Kalal/Ahluwalia, Mohyal Brahmin and Saraswat Brahmin, alongside neighbouring groups such as Haryanvi Jat, Dogra Rajput and Himachali Rajput.
• ANI and ASI composition, with steppe and AASI context, and chromosome painting, which helps tell a real segment of ancestry from statistical noise.
• Ancient DNA similarity to Indus Valley, steppe and AASI references, offered as probabilistic historical context only.
• Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups, if your raw file includes those markers.

For Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalee and Goan Canadians

The same report works for the rest of the Indo-Canadian community. Our reference panel also includes Patel/Patidar, Lohana, Koli, Dawoodi Bohra, Kutchi Memon and Sindhi (Hindu) groups for Gujarati and Sindhi families, many Tamil groups such as Vellalar, Nadar, Chettiar, Pillai and Tamil Brahmin (Iyer and Iyengar), Kerala groups including Nair, Ezhava/Thiyya and Syrian Christian, and Goan Catholic and Konkani Brahmin groups. Indian families who came via East Africa or the Caribbean can use it to look back past the family's last migration to its roots in India.

Using AncestryDNA's new regions and Helixline together

If you tested with AncestryDNA, your updated regions and a Helixline report are complementary rather than competing. Ancestry's regions place your DNA geographically. Helixline adds community-level similarity and the ANI, ASI and ancient DNA context that a region map does not show. If you tested with 23andMe, the gap is wider, because the percentage breakdown is still broad.

Plan	Price in Canada (one-time)	What you get
Upload Ancestry	CA$34	State-level breakdown, community similarity, ANI/ASI composition, chromosome painting, haplogroups
Upload Complete	CA$68	Everything above plus wellness traits, carrier screening, pharmacogenomics insights and downloadable PDF reports

Upload Complete's extra reports are informational and wellness insights, not a diagnosis. Prices are also shown in US dollars, pounds, euros and other currencies on the upload page. Your data is encrypted, stored in India under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, and never sold, and you can delete your uploaded raw file from your dashboard at any time.

How to download your raw data and upload it

Your raw data is a plain text file (often zipped) listing your genotype at hundreds of thousands of positions. Download it from the company that tested you. Menu names change from time to time, but the routes are usually these:

• 23andMe: sign in, open Settings from your profile name, find the 23andMe Data section and request your raw data download (not the report PDFs). You will get a .zip or .txt file.
• AncestryDNA: sign in, go to DNA, open the DNA Settings panel and choose Download DNA Data. Confirm through the email link to receive the file. Our AncestryDNA raw data walkthrough has screenshots of each step.
• MyHeritage and FamilyTreeDNA: both offer a raw DNA download in their DNA settings.

Then, on Helixline:

1. Choose Upload Ancestry or Upload Complete and pay on helixline.in/upload in Canadian dollars.
2. We email you a link to your dashboard.
3. Sign in with the same email and upload your unmodified .txt or .zip raw data file. It takes about 2 minutes.
4. Your results are typically ready within 1-2 days.

If your file cannot be processed, or you change your mind before analysis starts, you get a full refund (see the upload terms). Keep a copy of your raw file somewhere safe whichever company you used: it is the most useful thing a DNA test leaves you with.

Your parents in India: why a kit for them is worth it

Many Indo-Canadian families have one generation here and one in Punjab, Gujarat or Kerala. If your parents or grandparents are still in India, testing them adds real information. You inherit about half of your DNA from each parent, so their results hold ancestry that yours does not, and testing both sides of the family lets you separate a maternal pattern from a paternal one.

How gifting works from Canada

You can buy a kit for family in India from Canada: choose Someone in India at checkout on helixline.in/buy, or browse gift options at helixline.in/gift. Kits are shipped within India, and the saliva sample is collected from their door for free. Results are available within 2-3 weeks once the sample reaches the lab. Delivery to an address outside India can also be arranged on request, with a quote, through our international page.

• Origins, ₹6,999: ancestry with a state-level breakdown, community similarity, ANI/ASI/steppe/AASI composition and Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups.
• Decode, ₹12,999: everything in Origins, plus health, traits and pharmacogenomics reports and a Health Coach consultation.
• Infinite, ₹17,999: everything in Decode, plus a 137-marker Full Body Blood Test and a doctor consultation.

Helixline's lab partner in India is ISO 15189 certified, and samples and data stay in India. For more ideas on testing parents from abroad, see our guide to DNA tests as a gift for parents in India, and for the bigger diaspora picture, our NRI and diaspora DNA guide.

Reading results together as a family

Siblings share about half their DNA, so two siblings can show slightly different community similarities, and that is normal. Keep paper records next to the DNA: village names, gurdwara or temple records, passports and old letters answer questions about named ancestors that genetics never will. DNA tells you about populations. Family memory tells you about people.

Sources and further reading

• Statistics Canada, The Daily, 26 October 2022: The Canadian census: a rich portrait of the country's religious and ethnocultural diversity
• Statistics Canada, The Daily, 17 August 2022: While English and French are still the main languages spoken in Canada, the country's linguistic diversity continues to grow
• Sikhism in Canada (early settlement, the Khalsa Diwan Society and the franchise)
• Komagata Maru incident
• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21: Immigration Regulations, Order-in-Council PC 1967-1616
• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21: Canada's Oppressed Minority Policy and the Resettlement of Ugandan Asians, 1972-1973
• Immigration Act, 1976 (background on the 1962 and 1967 regulations)
• Partition of India
• AncestryDNA: Ancestral Regions 2026 White Paper (October 8, 2026)
• 23andMe: 44 new genetic groups in South Asia (January 2025) and Central and South Asia Ancestry Composition update (July 2024)
• Reich D et al. (2009), Nature: Reconstructing Indian population history
• Moorjani P et al. (2013), American Journal of Human Genetics: Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India
• Basu A, Sarkar-Roy N, Majumder PP (2016), PNAS: Genomic reconstruction of the history of extant populations of India
• Narasimhan VM et al. (2019), Science: The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia
• Shinde V et al. (2019), Cell: An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AncestryDNA or 23andMe better for Punjabi ancestry in 2026?

They now work quite differently. AncestryDNA's October 2026 update doubled its regions from 146 to 302 and added many named South Asian regions, including several Punjab regions (Northern, Northeastern, Central, Eastern and Western Punjab, Punjab and Sindh, and Kashmir and Punjab Foothills), so it can give a Punjabi family a far more specific map than before. 23andMe's Ancestry Composition still splits South Asia into a handful of broad populations, although it added 44 South Asian genetic groups, such as Doaba and Majha, in January 2025. Either file can be uploaded to Helixline for a community-level comparison.

Why does my 23andMe say North Indian and Pakistani instead of Punjabi?

Because 23andMe's percentage breakdown uses a small number of wide South Asian populations, and Punjab sits inside a broad northwestern one. That label is a limit of the reference populations, not a sign that something is wrong with your DNA. Its separate genetic groups feature and a re-analysis of your raw file against a reference panel built for South Asia can both say more.

Can a DNA test tell if my family is Jat, Khatri or Ramgarhia?

No. DNA cannot identify or prove a caste, and no honest test claims to. What an analysis can show is how similar your DNA is to reference groups such as Jat Sikh, Khatri Sikh, Ramgarhia Sikh or Punjabi Arora samples. Those groups overlap genetically, vary internally, and share most of their ancestry, so a closest match is a similarity score, not a membership card.

Do Punjabis have more steppe ancestry than other Indians?

Northwestern South Asia sits at the end of the gradient that carries more Ancestral North Indian ancestry, which includes the steppe-related component. Narasimhan and colleagues (Science, 2019) found steppe ancestry entered South Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE and contributes up to 30% of the ancestry of some modern groups, and that the Kalash of northwest Pakistan have the highest ANI proportion. Levels vary between communities and between individuals, so the only way to know your own figure is to measure it.

How much does a Helixline upload cost in Canada?

Upload Ancestry is CA$34 and Upload Complete is CA$68, one-time. You pay at helixline.in/upload, sign in with the same email and upload your unmodified 23andMe, AncestryDNA, MyHeritage or FamilyTreeDNA raw file. Results are typically ready within 1-2 days, and no new kit is needed.

Can I buy a DNA kit for my parents in India from Canada?

Yes. Choose Someone in India at checkout on helixline.in/buy, or see helixline.in/gift. Kits are shipped within India with free doorstep pickup of the saliva sample: Origins (ancestry) is ₹6,999, Decode adds health, traits and pharmacogenomics reports plus a Health Coach consultation for ₹12,999, and Infinite adds a 137-marker Full Body Blood Test and a doctor consultation for ₹17,999. Delivery outside India can be arranged on request with a quote.

Curious what your own file shows beyond a single regional label? Upload your raw data to Helixline for CA$34, or gift a kit to your parents in India.