Why India must become the Hindu Israel!

https://twitter.com/dvatw/status/1077870550163300353?s=21

Happy Boxing Day; just had a lovely walk around Chetpet EcoPark. I was shocked to find out that allegedly it cost 25 Crores (allegedly).

There is a trend in the West that the Parties of the Left can only unite their diverse coalitions of minorities (gays, blacks & feminists) with straight middle class male WASPs (Justin Trudeau, Jeremy Corbyn, Beto O’Rouke). Continue reading Why India must become the Hindu Israel!

Structural Conflicts between Bharat and India

The Indian Republic has a problem. It is deep and structural and vexing. The wheels of industrialization have brought half the country in conflict with the other.

The country is seemingly convulsed with agrarian distress and farmer unrest. Some have located these issues in climate change, others in the prominence of neo-liberal reform. But the issue is far more structural. Half of India knows only to make a living from farming, and they are seemingly getting better at it every year.

India’s farmers have been outperforming the world in terms of growth quite comfortably.

So if we are having year after year of record agrarian yields and remain a next agro-exporter, whats the problem ? The problem is that the other half wants food at the cheapest prices possible. This other half lacks the decisive political numbers that the rural group does, but lives in the more vocal and wealthier urban areas. Farmers obviously  want better prices for their work, but urbanites are understandably wary of overpaying for food when they know they can spend their hard earned monies on modern goods and services.

But the conflicts dont end there. They extend into the realm of international trade relationships. India’s urbanites want to interact with the industrial world for personal growth and opportunity. India’s IT, pharmaceutical exports and remittances provide valuable foreign exchange for its fuel imports, and investment needed for modernizing its economy. But the industrial world is also super efficient at growing food and sees food as an important export. One American farmer can still produce what 50 Indian farmers can.

The Indian farmer thus requires protection from foreign competition, which is far more advanced technologically and is not constrained to small land holdings like he is. But such protection is not in congruence with the freer trade that its urbanites want and need for industrial growth.

Food inflation and international trade are thus two critical parameters on which rural and urban India face a structural conundrum. It is not that other cultures have not faced this crossroads before. Every country that has industrialized (Germany, Russia and China) has dealt with the question of its unproductive agrarian class. Authoritarian political structures meant that the ‘solution’ pursued by these countries brutalized the rural populace.

India’s democracy is deep and will prevent the urban elites from executing such brutality, despite their cultural and historical obsessions. Gaon tatva might seriously blunt Hindutva.

 

Brown Pundits – Episode 6, Chinese history, pop culture and strategy, with Tanner Greer

The latest BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed the podcast! Please leave more 5-star reviews. If this podcasts interests enough people I’ll be getting us on other platforms.

This week a very special episode of Brown Pundits’ BrownCast with Tanner Greer of The Scholar’s Stage, one of my favorite weblogs. If I’m a philosopher in the armchair, Tanner is a practitioner in the field. He lived for several years in China, and his observations have a contemporary salience that our discussion last week probably lacked.

This is what won Brexit!

An extraordinarily shameful video of BritPaks acting like savages in an English airport.

They really go out of their way to make a fool of themselves.

It’s videos like this that set off the native populations and make them believe that the Islands are being overwhelmed by strange folk.

It’s why I honestly believe that any right-thinking and aspirational coloured (or Person of Colour) would do well to vote for the Tory Party; Labour has compromised with these retrograde elements for far too long.

At the very least if they want to do these Sufi Chants in a public sphere ; they should have half-naked bellydancers (of both sexes) writing suggestively around to assure everyone it’s sexy fierce.

Though it’s a two way relationship as well; after the jump I’ve shared a shockingly offensive tweet by a Remainers suggesting Asian companies don’t honour their commitments. From the way the tweets are written the chap just doesn’t seem on the ball on how to do international business, sorry to say! One shouldn’t take a colonial attitude to the Rising Powers of the East.

Continue reading This is what won Brexit!

Pathans between Hind and Iran

There was a comment below on the positions of Pathans genetically in relation to South Asians and Iranians. The “Pathan” samples are from Pakistan, while “Pashtun” are from Afghanistan. What you can see is that the “Pathan” samples are more like Punjabis, while Pashtuns are like Tajiks. The Iranian samples are from western Iran. You can see that the Pakistani Pathans are definitely a little closer to UP Brahmins than to Iranians. The Afghans are a bit closer to Iranians than UP Brahmins.

Here’s Treemix:

Continue reading Pathans between Hind and Iran

The power of the nameless

From the Wikipedia entry for Angkor Wat

The initial design and construction of the temple took place in the first half of the 12th century, during the reign of Suryavarman II (ruled 1113 – c. 1150). Dedicated to Vishnu, it was built as the king’s state temple and capital city. As neither the foundation stela nor any contemporary inscriptions referring to the temple have been found, its original name is unknown, but it may have been known as “Varah Vishnu-lok” after the presiding deity.

And more:

Cambodia was first influenced by Hinduism during the beginning of the Kingdom of Funan. Hinduism was one of the Khmer Empire‘s official religions. Cambodia is the home of the holy temple of Angkor Wat, the largest Hindu temple in the world. The main religion adhered in Khmer kingdom was Hinduism, followed by Buddhism in popularity. Initially the kingdom revered Hinduism as the main state religion. Vishnu and Shiva were the most revered deities, worshipped in Khmer Hindu temples….

Cham Hindus, an ethnic group in Vietnam influenced by Indic culture 1,000 years ago, are still Hindu to this day. Similarly, the people of the Indonesian island of Bali maintain continuity with the Hindu traditions of Java.

Now, consider this comment from the usual suspect:

Professor Truschke is also correct in stating that “Hinduism” is in many ways a constructed category. It was the British who used it as an umbrella term in the census for anyone who didn’t declare their religion to be something that the colonial power recognized (like Islam). Previously, people may have described themselves as worshipping a particular god.

It is curious that this person who protests for the honor of the Islamic religion casually asserts that the Hindu religion was created as a category by the British! While his religion taps at deep truths and must be respected, he can dismiss the faith of 800 million as a British fiction. The glamor of fashionable nonsense never ceases to attract this one like a moth to the flame.*

In any case, where have I heard this before? From the Wikipedia entry on caste:

There are at least two perspectives for the origins of the caste system in ancient and medieval India, which focus on either ideological factors or on socio-economic factors….

This school has focused on the historical evidence from ancient and medieval society in India, during the Muslim rule between the 12th and 18th centuries, and the policies of colonial British rule from 18th century to the mid-20th century….

This view, which emphasizes the colonial experience, is encapsulated by Nicholas Dirks’ Castes of Mind. A debased form of this is that “well acktchually…did you know the British invented caste?”

The genetic reality has falsified this. Evidence from places such as Andhra Pradesh indicates that the endogamy which is the hallmark of caste/jati dates back to 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. This is not to deny that the category and its organization was not influenced by the British, and likely earlier the Muslims, but its ultimate basis seems to be one which is deeply rooted in South Asia.

Now consider this map:

1941 British religious census, 75% of India is non-Muslim

After many centuries of rule by a religiously Muslim elite, the majority of Indians still retained a non-Muslim identity. The legacy and prestige of Islamicate conquest-elites were such that the 1857 rebellion against the British co-opted a Mughal as a figurehead, so persistent was their glamor. And yet the majority of Indians still cohered around an identity that was called “Hindu,” originally a term for Indian.

Without any knowledge of the puranas, or the elaboration of the Vedanta centuries before Islam became a permanent feature of the South Asian landscape, the fact that most Indians remained non-Muslim after centuries of Islamic rule indicates that there was a systematic social-religious system to which they adhered. The fact that they exported this social-religious system in fragments and essentials to Southeast Asia over 1,000 years ago indicates that Hinduism as we understand it was not simply a British reification!

It is sometimes common among people who follow the Abrahamic religions to classify Hinduism as “pagan.” Though theologically there is some justification for this, to be frank, this is more an aspersion than a description, bracketing Indian traditions with small-scale primal religions which were prevalent outside of Eurasian oikoumene.

Ethnographic evidence indicates that much of “Islamic Africa” was minimally Islamicized until the 20th century. Rather, local elites patronized ulema, whose remit was sharply delimited. It was modern transportation and public health that allowed for greater central integration across regions such as the Senegal. Sufi orders, in fact, benefited from European colonization in many regions of Africa because the only “high religion” tradition that was available locally was Islam, and so many heretofore pagan or nominally Muslim tribes were assimilated into the high culture matrix that was nearest to them.

The contrast with Dharmic and Chinese paganism is instructive. Only in areas where the local “high religion” tradition was moribund (e.g., Korea) or nascent (what became the Philippines) did Christianity gain widespread purchase. In the “pagan” hinterlands of the Indonesian archipelago Muslims and Christians, and later a modified form of Hinduism, gained mass conversions from peoples previously untouched by central governance.

Persistence of native Dharmic religious traditions despite Muslim cultural prominence is strong indirect evidence of a resilient high religious tradition despite debates as to its name.

Related post: Hinduism before India.

* The same person dismisses revisionism about 7th century Islam, which he takes to be authoritatively historical, while accepting at face value the idea that Hindus had no self-conception as a coherent identity before 1800.

India never existed

I deleted my post since I’m just going to put these tweets out there; it will make for a good podcast though.

I suspect in a 100 years we will still have Coloniser Experts opining on South Asian Nationhood and then being feted like white deities in the Desh..

Indian to ban commercial surrogacy

I find the Indian government’s ability to own-goal itself and its own citizens to be simply astounding.

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