March 29, 2020 – Brown Pundits

Are the (TV) Mahabharata and Ramayan “Right Wing”?

In 1987 and 1988, India’s official (and at that time, only) TV channel (Doordarshan) broadcast serialized version of the famous Indian epics, the Ramayan and the Mahabharata. The series were hugely popular and with no competing TV choices, there was the kind of nationwide common viewing experience that is less and less common in the internet and cable TV age. I dont know if Left-liberal Indians (mostly Hindus themselves) were agitated at that time (i dont remember it being an issue, but I was not really reading Indian media at that time) but over time a narrative has developed that the broadcast of these serials led to a rise in Right wing Hindu nationalism, which culminated in the demolition of the Babri masjid by a Right wing mob in 1992. THe subsequent rise of the BJP to power is then the next step in a sequence that began with the broadcast of these “Hindu” serials.

As India has gone into lockdown due to Covid19, Doordarshan has announced that it is going to rebroadcast these serials. This step has revived the complaints about these serials being the first step in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, exemplified by tweets like this one from “engaged historian” Audrey Truschke:

To me, as an outsider, this is quite fascinating. It seems that there is a significant segment of the Indian intelligentsia (which hapens to be the dominant faction in terms of foreign coverage of India; Western news organizations almost all pick up their own view of India via these “native informants”) that believes that: Continue reading Are the (TV) Mahabharata and Ramayan “Right Wing”?

What is a civilization?

Thinking about the Harsh Gupta podcast and what “civilization” is. What is this identity? how does it form and cohere?

In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order Samuel Huntington emphasizes religion. This makes total sense to a person from South Asia. Religion has become the major fault-line in the Indian subcontinent. But is it justified? I think it is. The ecologist-turned-quantitative-historian Peter Turchin has suggested that “higher religion” is a “meta-ethnic” identity. That is, an identity that transcends tribe, ethnicity, and race.

Contrary to what racial nationalists like to think, historically race has not been a major cleavage. Fair-skinned Frankish Crusaders intermarried extensively with the Christian Armenian nobility of the Near East when they arrived. No matter that genetically Armenians are very similar to peoples of the northern Levant.

These bonds are abstract and higher-order. They are not visceral and concrete. Aside from the most extreme goat-beards growing up in the United States as a Muslim of South Asian origin we never saw Muslims of other ethnicities outside of religious festivals. Arab contempt for non-Arabs was palpable. Persian superiority toward non-Persians was palpable. Rather, it was common to socialize across religious divisions for people of the same regional-ethnic background. And yet if you pinned my father down he would aver that his ultimate loyalty was to the co-religionists of different nationalities with whom he literally never broke bread.

Similarly, Indian Americans have a soft spot for Tulsi Gabbard, because she is a Hindu.

But East Asian society is different. Religion and religious identity has never been at the center of those societies. The insights from one culture are not generalizable to another.

Browncast episode 89: Dr Sunny Anand, part 2

Our conversation with Dr Anand was interrupted due to technical problems, so we recorded another session. This is session two of our talk with Dr Anand..

You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

As mentioned in last week’s session, Dr Sunny Anand is a highly esteemed Pediatric intensivist at Stanford who also works with the heart to heart foundation and provides quality heart surgeries and cardiac care across India (and other countries) in collaboration with Sai Sanjeevani hospitals. He talks about his work, the services provided by this chain of completely free top-of-the-line heart surgery centers, healthcare in the India and the United States, etc. Kanwaljeet J. S. ("Sunny") Anand, MD, has joined Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford and Stanford Children's Health as the new division chief of palliative care & critical care medicine. (Photo: Business Wire)

Those wishing to learn more about the heart to heart foundation (chaired by legendary cricketer and gentleman Suni Gavaskar) can check out their website here.