The above are faces of India above that’s rarely “shown off” because they don’t conform to Desi ideas of beauty (if a few of them had had light eyes well that’s another story they would have probably made book cover). A quick comparison of the pictures of contributors of the Ideas for India Blog that the Economist refers to below shows that none look like the Dalits/OBCs pictured above?
Desis are not one race and this idea that we are one people is simply wrong (despite our ANI/ASI proportions being similar). Let’s be clear Desis hate the ASI in us; we detest it and are laden with an inferiority complex about not being wholly ANI. As a society we worship light skin and sharp features and foreign ancestry; it is a very deep-rooted revolt against our historic miscegenation at the time of Harappa or whenever and that’s why we have been failing as a region. (similar to Latin Americans and their relation to their non-white identity why else do Brazilian women want to resculpt themselves into Europeans?)
We need to have a black liberation struggle because the myth of racial unity has squarely placed fairer-skinned desis on the top of the pyramid. Black Power for Dalits & OBCs throughout South Asia. How would we feel if a bunch of Wasps got together to talk about how to help African-Americans with only one part-black member? I’m considering the Nadar caste to be OBC OUT of 45 CONTRIBUTORS; a few are unknown btw Forward castes are 10-15% of the population of India. It is a reasonable assumption to assume the unknowns are forward-caste.
Just to be fair Pakistan has the same issue so this isn’t a gripe at India but at Desis; Qureshis and Punjabi Kashmiris are particularly well-represented as I can see from personal experience.
Despite even the rapid expansion of the past 20 years, India still endures high rates of poverty that Asia, by and large, has long left behind. Surprisingly few Indian politicians, officials, or press folk show much interest in getting to grips with economic questions. Even now, with growth sliding to a worrying 5% or so, public debate on economic matters is limited to a narrow field.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/07/economics-blogging
My father pointed this article to me this morning and asked me “Zack what is the one reason why India is so poor?” We both answered that the short answer was caste. Caste and Biraderi are two different (yet interrelated) institutions and the fact of the matter is that the Indians who look like the above are not the Indians in the New Diaspora (I’m talking about those in the West as opposed to the older settler Desi societies in Fiji, Suriname & Maldives).
Razib mentioned something in “British Class system persisting down Centuries” that:
This might sound crazy, but the India caste system seems to b stratified in terms of ancestry. The Genographic Project even asserts that caste predates the Indo-Aryans, which I suspect is true. HAP has illustrated quite clearly that there are differences between South Indian non-Brahmin high/middle castes and low castes.
I apologise in advance if I’ve got this wrong (or misinterpreted the paragraph) but from what I understand its not crazy at all. Brahmins look different, I have met enough Indians to realise that its almost immediate that one can tell from physical features alone about caste ancestry (and as a foreigner to Hinduism I can now even distinguish the surnames of certain regional castes with ease).
Tam-Brams are much fairer than the ordinary Tamils (even if they are dark their features are more north Indian) and we have to talk about the Elephant in the Room. Gujarati Brahmins at a glance are just much more sharper features and Euro-looking (remember meeting with the light eyes) than other Gujaratis; I’m saying this as an outsider. I remember once I brought this up with a group of Indians and they said Zack you aren’t supposed to mention these things. These aren’t minor differences whereby all brown people are alike; these are very noticeable perceptual shifts that even other races would be able to pick on.
So the launch of a new Indian economics blog, called Ideas for India, looks welcome. Unveiled last week in Delhi by Abhijit Banerjee, a famous economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (who called himself a “cheerleader” for the project), along with Jairam Ramesh, an Indian cabinet minister, the blog gives economists (and other academics) in India and beyond a chance to write for non-expert readers.
Its first articles give a sense of what is on offer: an analysis of corruption within India’s rural job-creation scheme; an economic explanation for why caste identity persists; an essay on the allocation of land within India. For the general reader on India this could become a treasure trove: each day a clutch of experts tell you, in around 1,000 words, the essence of their current research, without footnotes or squiggly equations but with suggestions for further reading at the end.
Caste identity is not itself a bad thing but there has to be an honest discussion about it. Indians I meet in Diaspora will immediately tell me “caste isn’t important” but then strangely enough everyone knows exactly their caste and more often than not will marry someone conveniently from their background. The upper castes are disproportionately (and absolutely) reflected in the affluent sectors of Indian society & diaspora simply because it is so easy to identify (North Indians) by their caste through their surnames.
I have taken the contributors names of the Ideas for the admirable Ideas for India Blog to give an example:
Contributors
Abhijit Banerjee – easy Bengali Brahmin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abhiroop Mukhopadhyay – easy Bengali Brahmin (Mukherjee)
Indian Statistical Institute
Abhirup Sarkar – easy Marathi Brahmin (the Kar gives it away Tendulkar); sorry I’m wrong Bengali Kshatriya
Indian Statistical Institute
Ajay Shah – Gujarati Jain?
National Institute of Public Finance and Fiscal Policy
Alessandro Tarozzi – European
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Anand Swamy – unidentifiable by surname (Swamy can be Rajput, Jat or Bania apparently) but does not “look” lower caste
Professor of Economics at Williams College
Anandi Mani – Nadar Caste OBC
University of Warwick
Anil Deolalikar – Brahmin
University of California, Riverside
Anjini Kochar– Punjabi Khatri
Stanford University
Arvind Subramanian – Tam Bram
Peterson Institute for International Economics and CGDev
Bharat Ramaswami – difficult to tell probably Tam Bram?
Indian Statistical Institute
Bhaskar Dutta – Kayastha
University of Warwick
Debraj Ray – Roy? Bengali Brahmin
New York University
Devesh Kapur – Punjabi Khatri
University of Pennsylvania
Ejaz Ghani – Punjabi Muslim?
World Bank
Farzana Afridi – Pathan Muslim
Indian Statistical Institute
Himanshu – no surname but fair so guessing??
Jawaharlal Nehru University
Ila Patnaik – apparently forward caste Kshatriyas from Orissa
National Institute of Public Finance and Fiscal Policy
James Berry – foreigner
Cornell University
Jishnu Das – Kayastha caste
World Bank
Kaivan Munshi – Nagar Brahmin whatever that is
Brown University
Karthik Muralidharan – are Vellars Kshatriya?
University of California, San Diego
Lakshmi Iyer – easy Tam Bram
Harvard Business School
Martin Ravallion – foreigner
World Bank
Meghnad Desai – Gujarati Brahmin
London School of Economics
Michael Greenstone – Foreigner
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mushfiq Mobarak – Muslim?
Yale University
Nicholas Bloom – Foreigner
Stanford University
Nishith Prakash – unknown from Bihar
University of Connecticut
Poonam Gupta – Bania
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy
Pranab Bardhan – Oriya Kshatriya
University of California, Berkeley
Pravin Krishna – unknown
Johns Hopkins University
Ranjan Ray – Roy? Brahmin
Monash University
Reetika Khera – Punjabi Khatri
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Rema Hanna – Muslim?
Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Robin Burgess – foreigner
London School of Economics
Rohini Somanathan – unknown
Delhi School of Economics
Rukmini Banerji – Bengali Brahmin
Pratham
Sandip Sukhtankar – Gaud Saraswat Brahmin (Marathi the Kar gives it away)
Dartmouth University
Sanjoy Chakravorty – Bengali Brahmin
Temple University
Seema Jayachandran – Malayalam unknown
Northwestern University
Shawn Cole – foreigner
Harvard Business School
Siwan Anderson – foreigner
University of British Columbia
Steven Wilkinson – foreigner
Yale University
Tavneet Suri – Punjabi Sikh? Khukrain (Khatri)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4 out of 45 are Muslims so almost good representation there (not going to quibble) but of course the Muslims themselves are most likely from the Ashraf classes.