https://twitter.com/journonitten/status/1071778759919919104?s=21
I have seen this countless times on Twitter and facebook; Brahmins almost always need to “humble brag” their caste. It really is in poor taste..
https://twitter.com/iyervval/status/1071301552680255489?s=21
Related: Oh to be a Gaud Saraswat Brahmin
Let the “Cosmopolitan/Liberal” brahmins have their last days in the sun.The “Benaras Brahmins” (as Atish Taseer named them) will soon find out that they no longer can shape hindu-dom as the gravity(economic/political power) has shifted towards the middle castes. Its good that these decedent communities are cast aside.
It is a source of shame to me that, despite having lived most of my life in India, the world of tradition in a city like Varanasi is closed to me. And the reason is plain: I am colonised. I am part of that class which the British administrator Lord Macaulay set out to create in the 1830s: men who would act as intermediaries ‘between us and the millions whom we govern’. Indian in blood, English (and now increasingly American) in tastes and intellect. Macaulay was roughly my age – thirty-four – when he was appointed president of the Committee of Public Instruction, and he knew that he could never educate the whole body of the people. His plan was to create a class that would gradually extend modern knowledge to the great mass of the population. But that is not what happened. What happened instead was that this class grew more isolated with every generation, more deracinated – Gandhi described them as ‘foreigners in their own land’ at the opening of the Banaras Hindu University in 1916.
https://granta.com/the-interpreters/
Also https://www.ecosophia.net/the-twilight-of-the-intelligentsia/ .
On the one hand everything in India – generally ills – are blamed on brahminism ie on Brahmins, remember Smash B Patriarchy or something like that. OTOH, it is irrational if some Brahmins stick their neck out and give some opinions as Brahmins . You can’t have it both ways.
At a general level, caste is promoted for political purposes by many parties; it would be rare for an Indian political party to have no truck with caste especially at local level. If someone is open about his/her caste background so what.
Read ” it is irrational if some Brahmins stick their ..” as ” it is irrational to criticise if some Brahmins stick their…”
This is the exact shit I was referring to the commenter bharat about. Pseudo secular Macaulayite folks with Brahmin lineage but have for >5 generations not been Brahmins are peddling the agenda proudly eating beef in the streets using their surname card. Everyone from Aurangzeb to Macaulay were caste-struck and thought if Brahmins can be targeted for deracination then Hindudom collapses for good…
Except it does not. All that happens is that the ownership “transfers” (i doubt Brahmins ever had ownership like that anyway, all this shit about ownership ideas is externally imposed). Indic resurgence is going to be led by the communities/jaatis that avoided deracination and are upwardly economically mobile in the timeframe of sovereign India.
Last year during my travels in India I stayed a few nights in an ashram located in a Muslim village in Bengal. The villagers are all regular namaazi Muslims, only the ashram is Sufi. Anyway, the villagers come and go and word travels quick when outsiders especially Americans come. So I was interacting with regular folks and many were curious about life in the US etc. Then the subject came to food, and I revealed that I don’t have a taboo on eating beef. Strict adherent visibly Muslim people were INCENSED and extremely uncomfortable when I dropped it not thinking it was a big deal. They were like how the fuck do you as a son of Brahmins eat the meat of the Nandi bull that sits at the feet of Lord Shiva? If it wasn’t for the peaceful Sufi medicants in whose ashram I was staying, my beef eating Brahmin ass could have been LYNCHED by Muslims. Also I quote that Nandi bull stuff verbatim and it took me a few “repeat that again” because the Bengali spoken in the village is very different from Kolkata Bengali. The horror of what could happen to me if I didn’t watch my tongue about sensitive shit like this dawned on me after each time the villager repeated over the statement…
Us Lutyens folks need to get off whatever caste high horse crap and learn our place in resurgent Indian society quick. The future belongs to the non deracinated, and this pure class remains really among the OBC SC ST and most Muslims, basically what is called the “Bahujan” in Indian politics. Rahul Gandhi dropping his gotra etc is going to get his ass handed to him again…
Pith: Macaulay was mostly correct, and is the father of modern India.
In two vast realms, Thomas Macaulay was the progenitor of modern India,namely, education, and justice.
In 1835, he called for secondary education to deliver what is basically, western culture”. There was nothing in sanskrit or Persian (or Tamil, or Telugu) to deliver a basic education to India. His conclusion ” argued that Sanskrit and Persian were no more accessible than English to the speakers of the Indian vernacular languages and existing Sanskrit and Persian texts were of little use for ‘useful learning” or any learning. Note that at this time, the great works in tamil, telugu or Marathi had not yet been codified. It needed a Charles Philip Brown to codify the Telugu classics, and Meenakshisundaram and U.Ve.Saa to do the same for Tamil, but that took another 50 years.
He recommended that “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”. But there was no such action done; leaving alone the somewhat outdated concepts of “English in taste and opinions” which I interpret being liberal. It was Kamaraj, and a lesser extent, MGR and the Dravidan parties who implemented some of these ideas, rather haphazardly via midday meals and Tamils schools. We, the rural tamils owe big to this sequence of actors.
The second set of advancements pertain to justice; between the creation of a Penal Code in 1860, followed by the Criminal Procedure Code in 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code in 1909. Almost all law proceeds as per Macaulay.
Macaulay is the reason that india exists as a country, and he has contributed more than any Indian we know. Almost everyone of us who write here is a child of Macaulay. At the minimum, for us, the people of South India, and particularly, the people at the wrong end of the caste spectrum, he got us out of the mess that would have been India without a liberal education.
Whenever we are asked to believe that the English are to be thanked for bringing us the wonders of modern technology, civilization, law and government one cannot help but wonder how other non-colonized societies (Japan, non-English speaking countries of Europe) acquired these institutions without the high costs that South Asia incurred.
It is possible that in an alternate non-colonial version of history South Asia today may have consisted of more (or fewer) countries. Who cares ?
what you are essentially acknowledging is that no one in this country, especially those at the bottom even had the recognition or brains or capability not just for then, but for all time to come to alleviate themselves without this sequence of events. I dont think thats true. World was moving towards infantry based army, greater productivity with use of labor. The nationalist and also marxist utopianism of last century further proves this.
It didnt matter who macaulay was ,even without him, the turn of history would have been somewhat the same. Its more a matter of propaganda that people speak of him. Honestly, no one should even bother to talk about these things as it looks away from the greater forces at play. Even Japan,china,africa,latina america , rest of the entire world had to move in this same direction.
I only have one question, if we were to assume one person were removed, how much would history change, not much. Ibn khaldun points out that how the defeated group copies from the victors. Long before british imperialism in India.
All of Macaulay’s ideas and exertions were made towards strengthening the colonial rule whose purposes were to suck India dry economically for the benefit of Britain. Without Macaulay or British colonialism, India would have been much better off.
+1
Boss
I should have used Lutyens to refer to the parasitic colonial class instead of Macaulayite. Didn’t realize it would evoke fierce defense of some random dead character. Almost similar sentiment to Holy Prophet (pbuh) reactions lol
“Except it does not. All that happens is that the ownership “transfers” (i doubt Brahmins ever had ownership like that anyway, all this shit about ownership ideas is externally imposed).”
This is perfectly true from my own experience and reading of history. The importance of Brahmins to the Hindu religion is massively over-estimated by external agents. The leftist view that Hinduism is somehow imposed upon the rest by the Brahmins could not be more untrue.
Traditionally Brahmins were responsible for the maintaining the repository of cultural and religious knowledge much of which wasn’t created by the Brahmins themselves. A good portion of it was however created by the Brahmins but a lot of very important stuff going back to the earliest times wasn’t.
e.g. The core of the Mahabharata epic, ‘jaya’ was first created by group of bards in the Kuru courts called the ‘Suta’. The ‘Suta’ traditionally were a group close to the Indo-Aryan ruling class and did jobs like chariot driving etc. The Mahabharata records a ‘suta’ Ugrashravas, narrating ‘Jaya’ to certain sages of the Bhrigu clan in Naimisharanya forest in central Uttar Pradesh. This Bhrigu clan then maintained the text for many centuries, adding more and more stuff to it every generation.
Since the traditional Hindu life is pretty much dead due to urbanization, industrialization etc I don’t see Brahmins continuing to exist as a group for more than 2-3 generations. Intermarriage rates among Hindus are increasing and even in arranged marriages, finding a family of a similar socio-economic background is becoming more important than finding a family of the correct caste. I think pretty soon the Hindu upper castes along with dominant OBCs will coalesce into a single group. Inter-marriage of upper-caste Hindus and Hindu dalits is also increasing but more slowly and also their is still some gap socio-economically among upper castes and dalits. I am hopeful though. 2 generations more of positive discrimination will bring them closer to other Hindu groups.
I don’t see it as caste-dropping. He’s probably happy to get out of jail to (I suppose) familiar comfort foods, and these comfort foods are pretty unique to the Tam Bram community! You’re reading way too much between his lines.
The only Brahmins I see dropping caste are the left-lib ones in the secular media who use to it to demonstrate their authority when they oppose the Hindutva agenda.
I do not remember seeing a Brahmin bring up the caste card in a defense of Hindu tradition or right wing politics ever in recent times. Its simply cannot be done. Brahmins are too few and thus too unimportant politically and also not very powerful or rich either.
One can say that ‘Brahminism’ (by which I mean an aversion towards trade/business and inclination towards education for its own sake along with a tendency for ‘safe’ jobs in the govt.) is the biggest hindrance for Brahmins themselves. Brahmins lack the skills which Baniya and Punjabi Khatri community display towards conserving wealth and investing capital strategically.
The 2 caste groups who transform everything to caste are Brahmins & SC’s. I have not seen other castes do this sometime back but with time i am noticing a surge in caste pride which is directly linked to the caste identity politics which followed in India since independence.
The best book about this phenomenon is –
The Culturalization of Caste in India: Identity and Inequality in a Multicultural Age
https://www.india-seminar.com/2012/633/633_balmurli_natrajan.htm