Hindu philosophy was mathematical, but Hindu nationalists are innumerate

In the early 2000s, there was a lot of demographic alarmism about Islam and European societies. Pundits such as Mark Steyn were predicting Islam would take over some European nation-states by 2020 as the majority religion. For a while, I credited that sort of thing. After all, Islam is an assimilation problem in most Western democratic societies.

This is the politically incorrect truth that the Left is even more vigorous in denying to this day than it was in the 2000s.

But I happened to change my views to be less pessimistic. One thing is that I read Philip Jenkin’s God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis. Jenkins is a thorough and objective scholar. An Episcopalian with moderate views on the whole, he reviewed the evidence of violence in the Koran and the Bible and came away surprised to note that the Bible was far more violent (in large part due to the Hebrew Bible). I recommend all his books but in particular The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died (Jenkins is neither a fundamentalist nor secular, so he operates in a good middle-ground).

In any case, Jenkins lays out the argument that Christian identity is far stronger in Europe than American skeptics presume. Islam will be a large minority religion in 2100, not the dominant religion. The numbers are with Jenkins here, though the demographics are concerning to me over the long-term.

I bring this up because too often Hindu nationalists and their fellow travelers undermine the credibility of their arguments by forwarding ridiculous numbers. Here is a comment on my other weblog:

Small number converted and demography did the rest.

Conversions really began after Shah Jahan & peaked with Aurangzeb in Panjab.

Christianity in Rome was similar.

You can look at old census of Bengal and Panjab to see the few% increase every decade till partition.

Turks (turkey) had numeric parity and lower tfr than Greek Armenia till ww1. Today 8x more,

http://yugaparivartan.com/2016/02/17/demographic-seize-of-al-hind/

Hindus were there from Indonesia to Armenia.

Probably by 2050ad will just be hated minority in India.

35% of newborns in India already Muslim. More in cities.. Only Hindu migration from countryside has prevented full slide to civil war with outside support by Abrahamic powers.

The comment piqued my interest because of the assertion of conversion in the period between 1650-1700. This seems interesting. I wanted to follow this up. But then the person claims that

1) 35% of newborns in India are Muslim
2) Muses that by 2050 Hindus will be a minority

This makes no sense. First, the TFR for Muslims is 2.6 vs. 2.1 for Hindus across India as of the late 2010s. Assuming that 70% of the reproductively active population are Hindus and 20% Muslims (being generous to the numbers above) I still only get 26% newborns Muslim. The point about this is that lots of people throw numbers around to add firmness and plausibility to their argument, but lying about numbers just makes you seem like a charlatan.

Second, even if 35% of the newborns in 2020 are Muslim, how is it that in 30 years the majority of the population will be Muslim??? It is theoretically possible, but very unlikely. Using current rates of differential fertility Muslims will overtake Hindus in 200 years, not 30 years.

The comment above isn’t actually atypical. Many of the Hindu nationalists on this weblog have left similar comments, while I have Hindu nationalist friends who have suggested to be widespread conversion to crypto-Christianity all across India.

I am very skeptical of this in a broad sense now for a simple reason: Narendra Modi is incredibly popular.  It could be that all of these hidden Christians and Muslims love Modi, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think the reality is Hindus are about ~80% of India’s population, and Hindus on the whole love Modi.

My logic is similar to the argument around Yezidi numbers. For decades there were arguments about Yezidi numbers in Iraq. The answer was clear when they voted en masse for a particular political party. It turns out the Yezidis were right that there were many of them, and the Muslims were wrong.

To be clear, when it comes to the Hindus vs. the Muslims, my own personal bias is probably with the Hindus because I am a murtad. The personal is political to some extent. But that does not mean that I will accept and promote lies, stupidity, and misrepresentations. The truth is strong enough to stand on its own.

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Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

The main thing about all this population dynamics is the states where both this rising Muslim populations (Bengal, Kerala) and “conversion to crypto-Christianity” (C-India, Andhra, TN) is happening, they themselves aren’t worried. For the rest you have rightly pointed out the muslim TFR is similar to Hindu TFR (UP,Bihar)

So the ultimate point being, if people in the former states themselves aren’t worried , y should people from other states be worried. The loss of political power (deep down it all comes to that) of “Hindus” in these states will be their loss and their loss alone.

Numinous
Numinous
4 years ago
Reply to  Saurav

both this rising Muslim populations (Bengal, Kerala) and “conversion to crypto-Christianity” (C-India, Andhra, TN) is happening

But is this “rising” and “conversion” really happening, or is it paranoia? I thought Razib was challenging this on numerical grounds.

Increased Saudi/Wahhabi influence has made Muslims everywhere in the world more likely to dress like Arabs. Local non-Muslims might mistakenly assume the numbers of Muslims are increasing when it’s just their visible distinctiveness. Evangelical and Vatican-sponsored groups also may be advertising their effectiveness out of proportion to their actual influence on the ground.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Numinous

Point being whether its rising or paranoia is immaterial. The first people to get affected are the people residing in those states. If they are ok, then others should be too.

It like CAA , W-Bengal doesn’t want it, Assam doesn’t too. But somehow N-Indians seem to be more worried about the plight of Bengali Hindus of Bangladesh.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Numinous

Muslims all around the world dress like Arabs? That would be news to all the Pakistanis (men and women) who continue to wear shalwar kameez.

Ali Choudhury
Ali Choudhury
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

“use your facility to be able to understand English. the commenter said “more likely.” there is a trend of dressing more like Arabs or aping an Arab sartorial sense among some reform Salafi types. this is not disputable.”

Jeans are far more popular than Arab thobes even among conservative and born-again younger Muslim men. Hijabs for women are somewhat more popular, the full-blown Gulf Arab abaya or niqab much less so.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

[redacted]

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

The key word is trend and not the actual numbers. Many commentators have already brought this fact to fore about increasing arabisation of dress in South Asia muslim societies.

The number of full burqa women in South Mumbai markets has only increased as an anecdotal evidence.

Roger Niles
Roger Niles
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Tyranny of the Minority – People realize this and are fearful.

https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/minority-rule/

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Yeah most muslims are concentrated in Nuh and Mewat districts look india religion and population map. The region is mostly backward with lot of youth mostly doing normal jobs and some gangs who are involved in scamming activities. My dad is working there for 3-4 years.
Truthfully said in the title that the number of people is what keep Hinduism alive and running and kind of stopped evolving and became defensive in nature.

Vijayvan
Vijayvan
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

\mass conversions in south India to Christianity. evangelicals brag about them too. but is it true? \
Christian influence is far more than official numbers would suggest – and that translates into numbers baptized also. Christian evangelism does not want it’s new converts to be torn out of their cultural settings , so it’s conversion is far more than it appears. It is low key, low profile and extensive and well funded.
Cauvery delta is strongly Hindu if you read history. If you drive around , you will find far greater numbers of mosques and Muslim villages and villagers.
Apart from numbers, in Media and Educational institutions, X presence is very strong , and all Christian edu insts come under minority reservation quotas , both for teachers, students and workers

froginthewell
froginthewell
4 years ago

This post is puzzling to me. Indians in general are stupid and they give out stupid and often self-defeating arguments on many topics, so you are bound to hear lots of bogus data on this matter too (like the 35% thing for new borns in all of India). This being a serious issue in some Indian states (especially Kerala and Assam, not Bengal so much), you will hear people being especially sensitive and shrill. This is a matter causing much trauma to many Hindus including myself.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago

@Razib
This is very long but here are a few points/questions I thought of :

1) I will again repeat that we should not read too much into Modi’s victory. Luck is on his side with an opponent like Rahul Gandhi and things like a cooperative CVC Vinod Rai who made up false corruption charges against UPA-2. Nothing ever came of billion dollar alleged ‘Coal scam’ , ‘Spectrum scam’ but Modi won the election. His victory is the final fruit of the seven decade long political campaign of Sanghis. He will be gone one day and India will lumber on without any change to it’s social fabric. India’s pacifism/passivity/disinterested-ness and syncretism/secularism are not due to the the constitution but are relics/artifacts of the ‘Hindu’ meta-current through its history and geography. I think that if all of India were Muslim then the entire spectrum from Pak-nationalists to left-leaning-Pakistanis would have been much more Hindu-philic. For all its fanaticism, racism, land-grabbing opportunism (of expelling Hindus), hatred (of denying their Hindu, native origins) even Pak-Punjabis are essentially an Indian/Hindu people. Their vices like racism ( Ashrafs from Iran LoL! ) and their virtues like shrine worship (albeit of sometimes ‘incredibly offensive’ Hazrats LoL! ) etc are uniquely Hindu. If India can’t win over its Muslims away from the the religion of the Arabs then the intricate almost tactile texture and vibrant colors of her children’s lives will inevitably wither away. I have complete faith in Indian Muslims (of all countries) to make this as difficult as possible but hopefully Hindus will still have demographic heft by the time Muslims see the lunacy of the religions born out of Schizophrenia+Conquest, and let go of the adamancy that led to killing one million(47) + one million(71) of our own brothers for making acronym-istan.

2) Would Islam maintain it’s steam for another century? It is a very special religion in things like its exclusion-ism and clear divine sanction for aggression.

I ask this because all my Muslim class-mates from college are doing extremely well in places like Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai ($30K/year and up in India) so early in their careers. Some are even trying tech-entrepreneurship, most are working for investment banks and top-tier global software companies. The ones who came with me for grad school in the US are also killing it. Then there are the new Muslim builders/businessmen (like https://www.shalimarcorp.com/, https://www.lulugroupinternational.com/) who are amassing money in India in a fair competition. Will numbers and success of such Muslims not buy them and their way of life, i.e. mild-religiosity, greater power among the world’s Muslims and mellow out this religion as a whole?

3) What is wrong with the educated Muslims going retarded over Islam in their late teens – early thirties? I have been seeing this happen surprisingly often, guys who have been into weed, gym, motorcycles and cricket suddenly growing the mustache-less beard or goatee and becoming religious. I have seen this in very well off Indians and mindbogglingly in children of immigrants in the US. One of my acquaintance (his parents were from Curacao) who was a hip-hop dancer suddenly did this. Now when I go to his place his Hindu (now maybe Muslim?) wife is in the full body blue niqab, he wears skull-cap and all they ever watch is some Arabic preaching channel. Hindus join organisations like ISKON/Sadhguru/SriSri/Isha/Brahmakumaris but they never go all out(except maybe Hare-Krishna). This worries me because if Muslims keep going overtly religious they will never feel ownership of non-Muslim elements.

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

I have faith in Indian Muslim’s as after all they are Indian and they can achieve anything they want in life . If Hindus have bend one way they have to bend as well.
Personally i think they can do better than some hindu communities. Just have to let to baggage of past and move foreward in life. Everthing depends upon the economic stability, amt of jobs available in the country.
Only Economy can save India now.
Make India great again!!!

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

@Bhimrao

Your insistence that Muslims are in some way Hindu brought to mind this quote from a revered South Asian Sufi saint (Khwaja Hasan Nizami) from the early 1900s:

“Musalmans are separate from Hindus; they cannot unite with the Hindus. After bloody wars the Musalmans conquered India, and the English took India from them. The Musalmans are one united nation and they alone will be masters of India. They will never give up their individuality. They have ruled India for hundreds of years, and hence they have a prescriptive right over the country. The Hindus are a minor community in the world. They are never free from internecine quarrels; they believe in Gandhi and worship the cow; they are polluted by taking other people’s water. The Hindus do not care for self-government; they have no time to spare for it; let them go on with their internal squabbles. What capacity have they for ruling over men? The Musalmans did rule, and the Musalmans will rule.”

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

Ma Kasam, Hoju, what got into you?

I really liked ur previous Dravidian avatar. Can u please revert back, so that we can spar again 😛

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Saurav

lol just wanted to share the perspective of the revered South Asian Sufi saint.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

I do recognize my starry eyed naivety and know that no one, especially the Muslims, is ever going to change. What troubles me is that the demand for partition was on such frivolous grounds i.e. Muslims who did dominate/persecute Hindus for centuries saying ‘Hindus WILL dominate/persecute us in future’ under democracy. This coupled with the repeated attempts to alter status quo, forming voting-blocks and insistence of Indian Muslims to look down/disown their Hindu heritage despite historically unheard of accommodation from Hindus eg. a secular state, willingness to give parts of Kashmir valley (in Swaran Singh-Bhutto talks India offered to cede thousands of square miles in Handwara, proper Kashmir valley and Kishanganga valley), actual ceding of land to Bangladesh etc have not won India many friends. If our own people i.e. Indian Muslims insist on destruction of their motherland and heritage then what can we possibly do?

1) A good example of this ass-holery is the revered South Asian Sufi saint , Khwaja Hasan Nizami whom you quote. The shameless weasel stayed back in Delhi after partition, like millions of others who voted for Pakistan, had Hindus of Pakistan exterminated and then conveniently decided to stay back in India. What is the solution to this moral treachery if not a de-emphasis of the ‘Muslim’ identity and development of a ‘Indian’ identity?

2) Hindus talk endlessly about the sins of Rama when he cheated and shot Vanara-raj Bali from behind, of how Krishna was mortally shot by (Bali reborn as) Jara due to his bad Karma from his last birth. Heck! when I was very young and pointed that Hanuman unnecessarily burnt down civilians in Lanka my grandparents actually started thinking and accepted that what he did was wrong.

And here we have ‘moderate’ Muslims who remain blind to the sexual depravity, barbarity and violence of Muhammad (pbuh for sensitive people) and openly revere fanatic, cruel sufi ‘saints’ like Khusru and Chisti. I can’t understand where the analytical facilities that are so sensitive to perceived religiousness of Gandhi’s Ram-rajya and secular credentials of INC goes when asked to contemplate the open call for rioting by Jinnah in Kolkata on direct action day. Where does it go when asked about ‘Sir’ Syed’s racism and communalism? The answer clearly is that Muslims learn of this creative/tactical blindness and suspension of logic from childhood to justify the twisted/schizophrenic teaching of the ‘holy’ quran. There will never be an all out Baba Saheb Ambedkar in Islam (atleast he won’t have a following and live long) who called out the disgusting bits about horse penis rituals in Hindu Vedas.

3) The ‘highest form Hinduism’ i.e. Vedanta is basically repackaged Buddhism whose founder Siddhartha Gautama (later appropriated as the supreme god Vishnu himself by Hindus) had denied/invalidated any authority of Vedic-Hinduism and lived and propagated his ideas freely. Where is Islamic reverence to accomodation? Where are the millions of Muslims who should have been going to temples to pay their respects?

4) Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians and Muslims never had their places of worship so wantonly desecrated when Hindus were in power , no jaziya, no pilgrimage tax, no spitting into mouths (chahh-naama). (two exceptions in violence : Mihirakula and an invasion into Sri-Lanka).

Where are the Jews of the middle east? Where are the Sikhs and Hindus of Afghanistan who numbered into hundreds of thousands mere three decades ago? Give it a few more decades and Muslims will say they were never here (like the Hindus driven out of Kahmir and Bangladesh) and we Muslims never persecuted them or that they all ‘peacefully’ converted like Nuristanis and Yezidis.

I am not blind to the blatant lying, cruelty and immoral human rights abuses of most of the Islamic majority states and how they wipe out the helpless aided by a Muslim intelligentsia that whitewashes these grave crimes.

I still can’t bring myself to hate Indian Muslims (including Bengalis and Acronymistanis) not because they have not done us enough harm but because how India has raised me. I want them to be happy and prosperous, I don’t want conflict/bloodshed and desire to live like brothers not as religious-hostages. The fact they will continue being an asshole is another matter.

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

“1) A good example of this ass-holery is the revered South Asian Sufi saint , Khwaja Hasan Nizami whom you quote. The shameless weasel stayed back in Delhi after partition, like millions of others who voted for Pakistan, had Hindus of Pakistan exterminated and then conveniently decided to stay back in India. What is the solution to this moral treachery if not a de-emphasis of the ‘Muslim’ identity and development of a ‘Indian’ identity?”

This is both highly Offensive and Problematic.

Khwaja Hasan Nizam is a Sufi saint of Islam and should be venerated as such.

Sufi saints of North Central South Asia represent the pinnacle of Hindu-Muslim harmony and syncreticism, and are a testament to the spread of the Religion of Peace through Peace.

There is no Delhi without towering figures like Khwaja Hasan Nizam.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

He was channeling Kabir

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

That was my Kabirian avatar.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

I’m not stupid and nor do I blindly defend Sufi saints. I’m sure that many of them said certain things that are offensive according to 21st century standards.

However, people who are anti even saints like Amir Khusrao and treat them as “Islamists” only reveal that for them no Muslim is good enough (if he believes in his religion even slightly). Hazrat Amir Khusro is the patron saint of musicians. He is said to have invented Raga Yaman, the sitar and the tabla. For someone like that to be considered an “Islamist” is bizarre. Also, I guess all those Hindus who go and worship at Nizamuddin’s dargah must be self-hating.

This same person also refers to my countrymen as “Acronymstanis” because apparently even typing the word “Pakistan” causes him great emotional distress. Reveals more about him than me.

Ugra
Ugra
4 years ago

The use of decadal-long-TFR in political analysis makes very low sense. There is an unacknowledged fat tail in the graph. The article link from Shoaib Daniyal disingeniously skips these islands of abnormally high M growth over the last 5 decades.

Rahul Gandhi chose to contest in Wayanad district in Kerala in the last Lok Sabha elections. This was his “insurance seat” because Smriti Irani was cutting it dangerously close (she won, eventually). But why Wayanad? It is 2000 kms away from Rahul’s domicile. Even Amethi was only 300 kms away.

With a 70% Muslim population, Malappuram and its sister districts form the core of Wayanad. No wonder, Congress tacticians saw this as a safe seat. If national politics can be so skewed by just one of 543 seats who will happily elect any entity as long as it opposes Hindu consolidation and aims – then it naturally follows that more such islands will be “nurtured” for political ends alone. Overall there might be 18-25 Lok Sabha seats like Wayanad who might swing close debates on critical issues in the Parliament.

There will be a counter-strategy to dissipate the political impact of such islands. Talking points like the Hindutva exaggeration aren’t meant for literal consumption but rather political moves to consolidate.

froginthewell
froginthewell
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

With a 70% Muslim population, Malappuram and its sister districts form the core of Wayanad.

you’re a retard. blah blah blah “i’m a moron going to throw in a number to impress all the retards.” now, “more retarded verbiage here to impress the other retards.”

Just to set the record straight, what he probably meant is that the parliamentary constituency called Wayanad (not the district called Wayanad) has a substantial intersection with the district called Malappuram, which in turn has 70% Muslim population.

froginthewell
froginthewell
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Sorry, I underestimated your knowledge of the constituencies there.

Ugra
Ugra
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Razib, I do not know what part of your world view did my statement offend, but perhaps the entire context of the Wayanad/Malappuram example is hidden/opaque to you. Whether you put me in a “basket of deplorables” is up to you, but this does not negate the perspective of a significant segment of Hindus who have started political mobilisation. I shall try to re-frame it in a better way.

The “demography is destiny” perspective is driven by non-convex phenomena. In Wayanad, every Ramzan season, minority Hindus are forbidden from eating publicly or opening their eating establishments during the day. Even public schools where mid-day meals are free to the students, there is significant pressure to suspend cooking and distribution. Whereas, in Hindu majority areas, no Muslim is prevented from fasting. Most of the Hindu minorities in Wayanad acquiesce to this arbitrary pressure. In the long run they move out. Such pressures aren’t limited to food and this month alone. The other months of the year bring other diktats.

The TFR analysis is devoid of concavity-convexity understanding. The worst that can happen to a Hindu minority isn’t the same as the worst that can happen to a Muslim minority. Asymmetry in losses is very much visible to even the most detached observer.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Thank you.

‘some of the devotional groups are non-case and confessional. but this seems exceptional not norm in Hinduism. islam and xtianity are confessional and not segmented communal.’

Quick questions :
1) What does ‘non-case and confessional’ mean?
2) What does ‘confessional and not segmented communal’ mean?

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago

@Razib

These numbers are designed to elicit a sense of urgency and personal loss for the reader. Act now and save 50% on listed price sort of marketing thing. Critical thinking is not factored in.

They should ideally have a short IQ test before you are able to read the article. Only if you are below a certain threshold, you are allowed to access it.

Otherwise the data backfires spectacularly instead of helping the cause.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

In most of India, i think the Hindu TFR mirrors the muslim TFR. Even within hindus the lower you go, the higher the TFR.

There are exceptions like Kerala and Assam. The only place it has become as issue is Assam. So even the politics responded organically, where last time Bengali Hindus voted along side their arch enemy Assamese Hindus to keep the Bengali muslim party (AIUDF) making gains.

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

So what are the arabian traditional dresses?
Is it true that chunni, dupatta, ghoonghat done by North Indian hindu and sikh communities is for similar purpose that of islam. Could these head covering not releated to convering to protect from heat or covering to protect from other men.
My mom also did ghoonghat whenever among in-laws and extended family.

Prats
Prats
4 years ago
Reply to  Harshvardhan

“My mom also did ghoonghat whenever among in-laws and extended family.”

Hindu/Sikh women in North India traditionally cover their head at home, especially in front of male elders. Muslim women generally cover their head outside the home.

Exceptions exist and there are Muslim-influenced practices that some Hindu communities have adopted.

My paternal grandmother’s mother came from a large land-owning family in Awadh and after her husband’s death, handled all the administrative stuff from behind a purdah as was the norm among elites in that region at the time.

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  Prats

Yeah i know that.Well my community is not land owning nor too educated till this generation.
One time she didnt have ghoonghat and some in-laws insisted to wear ghoonghat. And my grandfather don’t care now about the veil but i have seen that traditional women care more about the modesty of women i.e dont speak loud, do veiling and constant bullshit chatting (phusphusana). Just watch a saas bahu episode is based on truth. Just house politics wife or mom.

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

I stand corrected.

All I meant was that more people are seen wearing alien dress than what was used before in north India like chunni or ghoonghat as Harshvardhan mentioned.

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  iamVY

As far as modesty culture and dresses go India also have those dresses and then wearing burka, niqaab etc in india is weird to see, just wear shawar kameez and kurta pyjama etc with dupatta aur chunni for modesty purpose and ghoonghat is kind of similar to niqaab but less strict.

Its not just alien its like very symbolic white for men and jetblack for women in f*cking 40-45 degrees Delhi weather. Just because some wear niqaab means that they have more eyes on them than usual. Hijab is alright for me.

Ronen
Ronen
4 years ago

One notable aspect of this not limited to India would be to see the change in combined populations of the partitioned states of Bengal and Punjab.

——————————————————————————————

If you compare the hindu:muslim ratio of Bengal in the census of 1941 and compare it to the ratio today in WB + Bangladesh there is a noticeable difference in 75 years.

https://iussp2005.princeton.edu/papers/52236

According to the paper above, the Bengali H:M ratio was 42:55 back in ’41 (Sylhet was included in East Bengal later, but it wouldn’t have too large an impact on this ratio) Compare it to today’s Bengali population in the whole region gives you an H:M ratio of approx. 32:67. There still is a considerable TFR difference with 2.1 in Bangladesh and 1.6 in WB.

——————————————————————————————

As for Punjab, the difference in fertility between Himachal (1.7), Haryana (2.2) and Indian Punjab (1.7) is even starker when compared to Pak Punjab (3.4).

Add in the sum pop. total (with religious ratios) for Haryana + Ind Punjab + Himachal + Chandigarh and comparing it to the pop. of Pak Punjab gives a present-day hindu+sikh:muslim ratio of approx. 33:65 (though many Punjabi refugees settled in Delhi so adding their descendants would make a slight change to this). As with Bengal, this is a significant change from ’41, when the ratio was 44:53 (hindu+sikh:muslim) in Punjab.

https://punjab.global.ucsb.edu/sites/secure.lsit.ucsb.edu.gisp.d7_sp/files/sitefiles/journals/volume11/no1/6_krishan.pdf

For Punjab, I think the difference will grow even larger in the future compared to Bengal because of the greater gap in fertility rates.

——————————————————————————————

I remember a Sikh friend making a joke that if Partition had happened in 1997 instead of 1947, Pakistan may have got the whole of Punjab. Difficult to say given how greatly different the circumstances are but I can see his point.

Brown
Brown
4 years ago

i have rarely seen a urban educated job going muslim with more than 3 children. two children is the norm.
average will eventually become 2
many hindus have 2 children, in fact the second one bit late. there are cases of twins due to assisted conception, in the second attempt after the first child, thus making the count 3. certain religious types are regularly having 3 kids.
hum paanch, hamara pachees is over.
it will be interesting to see, which outside power will act as real support to the madrassas after the decline of saudi arabia.

DaThang
DaThang
4 years ago

“Hindu philosophy was mathematical”

Like Samkhya? 😉

thewarlock
thewarlock
4 years ago
Brown
Brown
4 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

most of them were from secular/non religious backgrounds.

Brown
Brown
4 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

ruling dispensation’s nod or non interference is needed for any meaningful size of conversions. this sort of happened with ambedkar led conversion to Buddhism.
ruling dispensation’s approval will come when the numbers matter.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

Man how did the whole section moved towards arab costumes from demography is a marvel.

Dravidarya
Dravidarya
4 years ago

Mehdipatnam is a muslim majority or at least you can see a lot of Islam in that area. Five years ago I was walking through Mehdipatnam bus station (one of the largest in Western Hyderabad) to catch a bus to the IT area of Hyderabad. I saw a huge billboard on top of a five or six storied shopping complex that said below words
Three holy jobs of a Muslim
1. kurbani (sacrifice of animals, bakr-id ??)
2. Praying and giving charity.
3. Having at least THREE kids.
I was shocked to see the third point. After coming to US, I asked some of my Pakistani Muslim friends about the third point. They were saying that nowhere in Quran it says to have at least 3 kids. I went to undergrad in NIT Calicut, Kerala from 2010-2014. Calicut is a Muslim majority area. The locals forced the college administration to enforce curfew for girls hostels after 6pm. Only after Shashi Tharoor got involved in 2018 the curfew was lifted. He was shocked to see that an institute of national importance is oppressing girls by enforcing curfew which prevented them to access library after 6pm. There used to be a roll call every day at 5:30pm and the grill to ladies hostels were shutoff after that. Anyways while in Kerala I saw a lot of muslims who have at least 3-4 kids. In fact a Hindu friend of mine who was a Calicut native told me that he regularly comes across posters/pamphlets by Muslims asking other muslims to have at least 3 kids. Most Muslims of Calicut dressed like Arabs and my friend was saying that the trend is increasing. I also came across a few Muslims who had names like Surya, Suraj, Arun etc and some Muslim girls who were trained in Kathakali, Kuchipudi, Mohiniyattam etc. I had a classmate who was a Hindu-Nair born and raised in Hyderabad and he was in a relationship with a Muslim girl from Calicut. He had to run away for a semester to escape from that girl’s family because he was threatened by them.
Razib can call things like hindu-nats are mathematically challenged, dumbos, idiots etc. Ultimately optics matter more than numbers.

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago
Reply to  Dravidarya

I don’t speak on behalf of Razib.

But I think more pressing/genuine the concern more articulate people need to get in order to highlight it.
In that respect I think this posts justs says there is no need to fudge / exaggerate / be careless about the numbers presented in order to make the case. By doing so the whole idea ends up being dismissed as non serious/ fake. Ends up having exact opposite effect of what was perhaps hoped by the OP ( the website that was cited above)

Instead of people taking notice, author can end up losing credibility!

South American Jew
South American Jew
4 years ago

I am more concerned about an ethnocultural conflict in Europe in 2,3 decades with the demographic shifts happening, not necessarily Islamization. Don’t you think that something like Yogoslavian or Labanese civil wars aren´t out of reach? For instance, many Lebanese maronites in the civil war weren’t necessarily Chistian devouts, but being maronite was certainly part of their identity and they fought for it. I have no doubt that something of the same characteristics could happen in Europe.

Ronen
Ronen
4 years ago

One notable aspect of this not limited to India would be to see the change in combined populations of the partitioned states of Bengal and Punjab.

——————————————————————————————

If you compare the hindu:muslim (H:M) ratio of Bengal in the census of 1941 and to the ratio today in WB + Bangladesh there is a noticeable difference in the last 75 years.

The H:M ratio was 42:55 back in 1941, whereas the present-day Bengali population in the whole region gives you a H:M ratio of approx. 32:67 (the inclusion of Sylhet in East Bengal wouldn’t have changed the ratio that much post ’47). In percentile terms that’s a rather big drop in three quarters of a century. There still is a considerable TFR difference with 2.1 in Bangladesh and 1.6 in WB.

——————————————————————————————

As for Punjab, the difference in fertility between Himachal (1.7), Haryana (2.2) and Indian Punjab (1.7) is even starker when compared to Pak Punjab (3.4).

Add in the sum pop. total (with religious ratios) for Haryana + Ind. Punjab + Himachal + Chandigarh and comparing it to the pop. of Pak Punjab gives a present day Sikh+Hindu:Muslim (S+H:M) ratio of 34:65 (many Punjabi families did settle in Delhi so that might change the proportion a bit). As with Bengal, this is a significant change in ratio from 1941, when the S+H:M ratio was 44:53 in undivided Punjab.

For Punjab, I think the difference will grow even larger in the future compared to Bengal because of the greater gap in fertility.

——————————————————————————————

I remember a Sikh friend making a joke that if Partition had happened in 1997 instead of 1947, Pakistan may have got the whole of Punjab. Difficult to say given how greatly different the circumstances are but I can see his point.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Ronen

Both Bengal and more so Punjab going by the original partition plan would have gone to Pakistan in 47 itself.

Its minorities within those states who fought to sub divide them.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

I guess perhaps the issues is ur talking to people who aren;t from the regions where all population boom and conversion and all is happening, so there is wild random numbers being thrown around.

I once had an gujju (recent immigrant) uber driver in NY who tried to guess from my name that i am a bengali. I didnt correct him, and the whole trip was full of random numbers of Bangaldeshi infiltration and Muslim pops increasing gazillion times and all, all received on watsapp.

Dravidarya
Dravidarya
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

“the point though is that Hindu nats need to make more sophisticated arguments for non-morons, else they’ll be dismissed.” I agree with you at least this much. In order to appeal to non-left leaning people like you (I think there is a fairly large number of people out there) and debunk the leftists hindu-nats should use more sophisticated techniques. I think it is slowly building up if you see some of the works of Infinity foundation and it’s likes. I firmly believe that optics also play a key role in soico-cultural issues like say hindu vs muslim etc. Leftists have mastered the sophisticated methods and Islamists have mastered the optics. Hindu-nats should develop both in order to gain momentum and it is a rough road ahead.

Slapstik
Slapstik
4 years ago

Lol, I like how you refer to Hindu philosophy in the past tense. Not one Hindu nationalist picked it up.

remark
remark
4 years ago
Reply to  Slapstik

nobody interpreted it to be a slight (which it wasn’t; Razib can confirm) but reflecting the fact that major Hindu philosophical works were composed in the past.
I may be wrong, but you like to sometimes highlight minor obscure/irrelevant even incorrect things to feel superior to Hindu nationalists. Have noticed this a few times 🙂

Slapstik
Slapstik
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

@Razib

My comment re “was” is in jest.

(But I see I have triggered some chuddies with it already)

remark
remark
4 years ago
Reply to  Slapstik

doubling down with “chuddies”.
Sure, the original comment was in jest 🙂

froginthewell
froginthewell
4 years ago
Reply to  remark

Perfectly put. Also it is quite dumb to “mind read” what others’ priorities are, and, on seeing that they are not acting on these imagined priorities, assume that they must be stupid so as to miss the “obvious” call for action.

froginthewell
froginthewell
4 years ago
Reply to  remark

I seem to have missed some of the action in this thread. A Sagarika Ghose level attempt seems to have been made by someone to trigger Hindu Nationalists, and unfortunately for him no Hindu Nationalist took the bait :). What a fall from grace for someone who tries some kind of “alpha talk” to construct for himself an aura of technical mastery, to try the yellowest and the least subtle of libtard techniques and spectacularly fail there.

saurabhsaurc
saurabhsaurc
4 years ago

>hindu nationalists care about islam, not hinduism.

Because Islam poses an existential threat to Hindus and their way of life. Hindus are not ‘Hindus’ because of a belief in a ‘Hindu religion’ (abrahamic way of thinking). It is an ethnocultural pagan identity. What a Hindu believes or does not believe is up to the individual. Islam on the other hand very much cares what you believe in ,and commands muslims to slaughter the non believers. Hindu nationalism is basically a socio-political response to this aggression.

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

I nominate Tulsi Gabbard to be our converted ambassador.

Unfortunately they tarnished her as a Russian asset and Modi-supporting Islamophobe until she bent the knee and dropped out and endorsed Biden.

Violet
Violet
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

“Nothing constructive comes from pure negation.”

But the fundamental philosophy is pure negation “Neti neti” – not this, not this.

Letting this go, “for” something means the fundamental fight is already lost.

saurabhsaurc
saurabhsaurc
4 years ago

>a deep problem. you know what you are against. but you leave rather unspecified what you are for, what is precious to you.

The problem is if a Hindu says that he believes in X, then other Hindus will pop up saying, but I don’t believe in X but I am still a Hindu. That is why being a Hindu is not based on a religious belief, so as to not cause problems.

Savarkar’s definition of Hindu is as follows:

Asindhu sindhu pariyantah yasya bharatbhumika
Pithribhu Punyabhu cha sa voh Hindurati smritah
(The land from the Sindhu river to the ocean is the land of Bharata. Those who consider it their fatherland and holy land are known as Hindus )

It is ethno-cultural-geographic definition that doesn’t consider adherence to any specific religious belief. Savarkar’s definition of Hindu is widely accepted by Hindu nationalists. Indian muslims do not qualify to be Hindus because their holy lands lie outside of Bharata.

For contrast, Islam requires you to believe that ‘La ilaha al Allah Muhammadur rasool Allah’ ( There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet ) if you don’t believe in this you are not a Muslim.

As far as converts are concerned: They usually convert to a specific sect or organization. (eg. ISKCON). This sect or organization may require them to hold specific beliefs or practices ( such as vegetarianism ). These are not beliefs or practices of all Hindus. Another example, Chattisgarhi tribals revere the Mahua tree and drink Mahua liquor. This is not a practice of all Hindus.

Harshvardhan
Harshvardhan
4 years ago
Reply to  saurabhsaurc

Are you from India mate?
Well apart from Hajj muslims have their shrines,monuments,mughal garden , masoleum or tombs etc that represents a higher culture for them.
Some liberal muslims will believe in gay marriage , uniform civil code but dare they speak against the Mullah dominated and left dominated English press that want to showcase the victimhood of minorities. Like i am an SC and my dad always says that quota is for financial but mainly for social Upliftment. Victim narrative just won’t sell in India even if it will in the west.
Yeah most of Indians are not nationalist but they still believe if Muslims population rises than it will be a threat to the democracy but they won’t say it.
Everybody lives in a ghetto Hindus , Muslims etc Christans less so. After independence its clear that the involvement of Muslims in arts , architecture , philosophy , writing etc is decreased. Back in the day lots of actors and singers comprised of Muslim now the situation is different. Participation is less that’s it. Potential is there everywhere.
Well Animism is a part of Hinduism. Isn’t it?
Kushal mehra podcast will tell you about the shortcomings of the minority community and how to improve on that:
https://youtu.be/QpaM5Ph-3q8
I will say Hinduism have it’s identity because of the Muslims. Hence muslims are important and integral part of India.

Vikram
4 years ago

“Because Islam poses an existential threat to Hindus and their way of life.”

This is cowardly and a prelude to genocide.

Hindus outnumber Muslims by a ratio of more than 5 to 1 in India. They control the levers of the economy, politics and media. Muslim fertility tracks the Hindu one both spatially and temporally.

India faces problems. Most of them are rooted in our sheer isolation from global markets, which is a result of both geographical bad luck and our elite itself not being cognizant of this isolation because it speaks English. The second order effect is casteism amongst Hindus, 98% of Hindus still marry within their own caste. The third order effect is the treatment of women, especially in North and NW India, child sex ratios are worse for Hindus than Muslims everywhere in India.

Muslim intransigence and orthodoxy is at best a fourth order effect which effective law and order can easily contain. But we cant have effective law and order in India because politics is based on caste.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Vikram

Can you explain the geographical bad luck aspect?

Vikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

Paper by Anirudh Krishna at Duke shows that even within a country, where labor and capital are mobile, distance to markets is a first order effect on economic growth.
https://vikramvgarg.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/distant-from-prosperity-the-rural-indian-economy-1993-2005/

The developed markets in the world are Western Europe, North America and East Asia and we are geographically distant from all of them. Only with modern IT technology, where trade can happen electronically could we leverage our linguistic proximity to the Anglo world to significantly boost economic growth.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

LoL. If random commenters on blogs and twitter annoy you, than obviously you haven’t encountered the dark world of far right h-nats, in whose fantasy world everything from taj mahal to kaaba was originally a hindu temple.

why blame the semi-literate h-nats, when even supposedly padhe-likhe (educated) h-nats peddles arguments which directly insults the listeners intelligence.

excuse me for posting a youtube link, but it is very relevant to the discussion here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDFRq48lb8o

in this video, a very articulate, english speaking, IIT post gradute in maths, is seen making arguments which makes one ROFL.

sample this. at t=1:00, he shows a poster of vishnu in varaha-avatar lifting the spherical earth on his front teeth, and boldly declares that this proves that hindus knew the earth was a sphere “10,000 years” ago. yeah sure, this argument would be valid if someone can prove that the poster on the wall is 10,000 year old. but of course it is not. the poster is a modern imagination of varah avatar myth.

in another part of the video (at t=4:09), he shows a twin star system consisting of two stars – arundhati and vashishta. This star system, he claims, is unique because both stars revolves about their common center of gravity. apparently according to him, in all other twin star systems one star revolves around the other one.

a little high school physics will tell anyone that every 2-body system locked in mutual gravitational field will revolve around their common center of gravity (cg). (it is true for earth-sun, or earth-moon system too). Also, the center of rotation can easily be translated to the center of either body in the 2-body system without any loss of precision.

obviously mr batliwala didn’t pay much attention to physics when studying for his maters in maths. the entire video is full of such unintentional jokes. watch it at your leisure.

the funny part is that this particular h-nat is not even hindu! (his name sounds parsi). with friends like these…

Dravidarya
Dravidarya
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

Internet is filled with such videos and this is one of the reasons nobody takes h-nats seriously. If a group develops that stigma then it is doomed. Not only h-nats but also Muslims claim to have invented relativity theory etc. I think it’s not about religion but about how sophisticated a person is or how exposed he/she is to real developments in science.

PS: I also agree that there were some genuine inventions by Bharatiyas which were way ahead of their times.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Dravidarya

“Not only h-nats but also Muslims claim to have invented relativity theory etc. ”

totally agree. one of my favorite pastime couple of years ago was to watch videos by zakir naik holding forth on wonders and miracles of quranic science. too bad indian govt banned him. he was one heck of a comedian, even without realizing it.

generally speaking, i think it is a safe assumption that nationalists/nativists/right-winger/conservatives of all hues stand a couple of steps below the leftists/liberals in cognitive skills. (remember the nazis with their ideas of jewish vs aryan physics?). leftists can be disingenuous too, but generally they are more likely to be intellectually dishonest than plain stupid.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

Hahaha, also don’t forget our (neo) vedic mathematicians.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

“Hahaha, also don’t forget our (neo) vedic mathematicians.”

i know where you are coming from. every few years a genius will pop up who will analyze the astrological clues hidden in ancient hindu scriptures, and use it to date mahabharata war or other such “historical” events. funnily, every subsequent vedic researcher pushes the dates of events of hindu mythlogy by 1000 years back in history. i guess the current accepted date of start of vedic civilization stands at 10 thousand year BP.

someday i plan to bite the bullet and actually verify their research with modern tools. calculating planetory motion is actually pretty straightforward.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago

also, a PS to the above comments..

h-nats also blame muslims for turning them innumerate. after all didn’t muslims destroy all those ancient universities and libraries…

thewarlock
thewarlock
4 years ago

Hinduism needs to be repackaged as something “normal.” Buddhism has been sold as this peaceful and actually somewhat logical system as far as religion goes, with people like Dawkins and Harris openly stating there is less to directly critique about than the Abrahamic faiths. Yet Buddhism has its own strange stuff like multiple levels of heaven and hell and demons and angels. But the practioners emphasize the enlightenment spirituality stuff more. Hinduism practitioners should do that through upanishads.

Middle Lion
Middle Lion
4 years ago

What do you think of Ramanujan, his infinity series, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and a devout Hindu….? most Hindu nationalists have not even heard of him- I do agree that at some level Hinduism seeks conceptual and elegant solutions which parallels mathematical divinity.

Vikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Middle Lion

I think Ramanujan would not have been able to do the kind of mathematics he did if he was not a devout Hindu. His mathematics was the purest of the pure, and he used to think of his math results as an offering to Lakshmi. It is one of the great realizations of nishkama karma.

We werent able to capitalize on his legacy. The IITs and JEE put paid to that.

Arjun
Arjun
4 years ago
Reply to  Vikram

“Ramanujan would not have been able to do the kind of mathematics he did if he was not a devout Hindu.”

This is a kind of romantic illusion.

Ramanujan would, very likely, have had ten times as much output if he had had the advantage of an early exposure to modern mathematics and not had to painfully re-invent many things.

In many ways his peculiar career is an endorsement of the Western academic tradition. Imagine if there had been no Hardy, no Cambridge, no academic freedom to spend money on such a long shot. Imagine an academic tradition where one’s devoutness mattered more than one’s intellect and where one’s accent mattered more than one’s results. The West may have much to answer for but Ramanujan is the West at her best.

Middle Lion
Middle Lion
4 years ago

Demography is related to female literacy and eventually a move away from entrenched patriarchy in nearly all religions. Is Hindu nationalism a reactionary swan song admission of loss of power in the home front amongst some men? Maybe it will be cleansing after the era fades away to a new more personal Hinduism.

Vikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Middle Lion

In all the uproar over Hindu women marrying Muslim men, no one has tried to make the argument that the empowered Hindu women, confident in her traditions and her self, would actually have a higher chance of nudging the Muslim towards Hindu world than vice versa. Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Naseeruddin Shah’s kids seem more Hindu and Western than anything else.

So the uproar seems to have little to do with protecting Hindu women, but only confirms the view that the Hindu right is either not confident that Hinduism has much to offer women, or view women as pure property.

Slapstik
Slapstik
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Maybe Muslim men just are more attractive, and Muslim women more in-group focused 🙂 And love jihad just sublimates the sexual frustrations of the less attractive Hindu brown boys…

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Vikram

Nice to see heterosexual brown men again trying to control the bodies of brown women. This obsession that Hindu nationalists have with “their” women marrying Muslim men is exactly the mirror image of the obsession Islamists have with converting “infidel” women to the one true faith.

Also nice to see that the “good” inter-religious marriage is the one where the woman “nudges” the man towards Hinduism. Conversely, everyone gets so upset that Kareena Kapoor Khan’s son is named Taimur Ali Khan and not something Hindu.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

You (perhaps deliberately) miss the point. This obsession that Hindu nationalists have with controlling “their” women is the mirror image of Islamists keeping “their” women under control and bringing “infidel” women to the faith. Women have agency and the right to marry whoever they please (this is the 21st century after all).

This is similar to the phenomenon of Pakistanis trying to tell the Turkish actress in “Ertrugul” that she needs to dress according to Islamic values. She’s white enough to desire but Muslim enough to control. Frantz Fanon referred to the colonized man’s need to control the bodies of colonized women.

(I guess you’ll just redact this as you do when you don’t like what someone says).

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

“Ertugrul, Esra Bilgic and the frustrations of Pakistani men”

https://images.dawn.com/news/1185257

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Did he ever strike you as intelligent?

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Jatt Scythian,

Questioning other people’s intelligence is the mark of an insecure person.

I have been educated at some of the best institutions in the West. Before you criticize others, perhaps you should provide your own credentials.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

Too much worry for Hindu nationalists. They would do fine. Their immediate goal was to attain political power. Now their goal is to perpetuate it. The “sophistication” will come only after the 2nd phase. Its good that they haven’t wasted time on all this mumbo jumbo ‘spiritual Hinduism’ and all and gone after things which matter like demography, land and resources.

For far too long spiritual/intellectual/philosophical/personal Hindu-ism walas have been saying Hinduism is not Hindutva. Its curious to see even they having such high hopes (and demands) from Hindu nationalists now. I guess they realized that they were paper tigers all this while and even whatever remote interest Hinduism gets now (which they exploit) , is on the shoulder of Hindu nationalists’s political power.

Hoju
Hoju
4 years ago
Reply to  Saurav

What gives you optimism for the 2nd phase being sophisticated? 2nd phase will probably be Yogi, so even less sophistication.

Modi on the national level went from economic development + moderate Hindutva to economic ruin + ultra Hindutva. His reign has been characterized by poor economic performance, widespread dissemination of communal fake news, and communal rioting. He’s getting dumber and dumber, and that trend will probably carry on to the 2nd phase.

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

Everything is not settled as you paint. Once we have anti incumbency and BJP is voted out (next time or time after that), there will be churn in the party.

It is by no means a foregone conclusion that Yogi will replace Modi. Once top man is out and the next in command does not enjoy similar popularity, internal dissent will see its chance.

Well you can say thats my wishful thinking. Maybe it is. Yogi doesnt look good in any case!

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Hoju

LOL, I am neither optimistic or pessimistic. Thats how in India party’s roll. The Left eventual domination of all intelligentsia was essentially a product of 70s Congress-Left pact . On the state level, various parties have first shown remarkable exclusionary and anti-intellectual behavior during their opposition and expansion phase. The BJP is in those stages.

Its only when a party feels confident that its power base is stable that it becomes sophisticated. Dravidian , Left , all parties have the same trajectory

Siddharth
Siddharth
4 years ago

Tangent to the topic of Hinduism and Mathematics, what do the more mathematically oriented pundits on this blog think about the oft-repeated assertions that Sanskrit is the most suited language for NLP? Does this fall into the ‘we had flying vimanas back in the day’ camp or is there some meat to this? I’m just getting into ML properly myself, but Sanskrit has always felt ‘information rich’ to me, in that every syllable is endowed with meaning. Which is why even basic shlokas or mantras when translated can seem so verbose in other languages

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Siddharth

Not an expert on ML/NLP at all but I had a thought recently that Sanskrit’s tables for singular to plural vs nominative to locative. I mean [ (sah, tau, te); (tam, tau, tan); …. ; (tasmin, tayoḥ, teṣu) ] type tables can be very easily encoded using onehot encoding. Maybe then we can cluster similar sentences easily using unsupervised learning (Clustering Alogorithms), I mean we can easily come up with some notion of distance between (the meaning of) two sentences.

Again I am not into ML so feel free to correct me. But the idea is so obvious someone would have seen it already.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

Just write a 21*1 dimensional vector(to take care of 7*3 dimensional table) with all except one element as zero. Put a 1 (or a larger/smaller number based on weighting) on the non zero element. Voila! shifting the position of the one will move the selected element in the table. Do this for verbs, nouns, pronouns etc. Suppose there are three words in the sentence then we will get [21*1,21*1,21*1] i.e. 63*1 dimensional vector which has only three ones and 60 zeroes. On a lower dimension think of instead of 21*1 our vector was only 3*1 and we had only two words in a sentence, First word [1,0,0] and second word [0,0,1] taken together the sentence would be [1,0,0,0,0,1]. Now suppose I change maybe the second word i.e. select a different entry in the 21*1 vector (7*3 dimensional table) for convenience/brevity surrogated here as a 3*1 vector. So instead of [0,0,1] I have [0,1,0]. Now the sentence is [1,0,0,0,1,0]. Basically our sentences are points in a 6-D space.

We can get a measure of distance between the two(a stand in for metric of how dissimilar these two sentences are) by just taking the cartesian distance between these two 6 dimensional vectors. so we get sqrt(0^2 + 0^2 + 0^2 + 0^2 + (0-1)^2 + (1-0)^2) = sqrt(2). If no word was different then the distance would have been 0, If both words were different distance would have been sqrt(4). Scikit has built in k-mean and mean-shift type clustering algorithms that use Cartesian distance as a clustering criteria.

We can get creative with weighting the one-hot encoding too i.e. instead of our new(second) word representing a change [0,0,1] >> [0,1,0] we could have written [0,0,1]>>[0,0,2] etc to get different clustering behaviors.

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Bhimrao

Note that when I defined the sentence the place holder has implicit information about the word involved I mean [ _ _ _ 1 0 0] is say a verb but [1 0 0 _ _ _ ] is a say a noun. Even though both look [1 0 0] the meaning is implicit in the order of placeholders, one reads from the table of the relevant verb another from the table for the relevant noun.

Again, I am getting carried away. The hardcore people over at openai and deepmind would be doing stuff 100 times more relevant, exciting and difficult before breakfast.

Slapstik
Slapstik
4 years ago
Reply to  Siddharth

// oft-repeated assertions that Sanskrit is the most suited language for NLP //

This is the first time I have read that assertion and it is wrong.
Sanskrit as a highly inflected Old IE language isn’t special at all. It is just a human language at a particular stage of evolution (if left to evolve in isolation, languages typically mean revert between inflected and analytic regimes).

What is special about Sanskrit is not the language but the way its grammar was formalised. Grammar is to Indic culture what geometry is to the Hellenic – our bitch[*]!

[*]Completely metaphorical use of language, with no disrespect meant to any human/animal gender(s)/sex(es).

Siddharth
Siddharth
4 years ago
Reply to  Slapstik

Ok, fair enough.
If I rephrase – would the structure and formalism of Sanskrit grammar make it more suited for NLP / ML than another language without these attributes? Does it enable the language to more efficiently encode information? Wasn’t it said after all of Sanskrit grammarians that they celebrated brevity of phrase as much as they would the birth of a son..

Asking as a complete novice in both linguistics and ML / information theory. And my knowledge of Sanskrit is only via the Indian languages that derive from it, as I imagine it is for most Indians..

Slapstik
Slapstik
4 years ago
Reply to  Siddharth

// more suited for NLP / ML //

What exactly do you mean by “suited” here? Because in most senses of the term being suited for ML means the suitable thing is rather dumb. It is not usually a compliment.

~

Grammars are not for encoding information, but for processing it. Grammars are algebras. The rules for computation.

Sanskrit grammar does not make Sanskrit a terse language but a well-defined one. Sanskrit grammar is Turing complete – ie rules one can write compilable programs in on any classical machine.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Slapstik

“Sanskrit grammar is Turing complete”

LoL. this makes just as much sense as saying that the chair i am sitting on is turing complete. the concept of turing completeness is not applicable to natural languages.

what you probably meant to say was that sanskrit grammar is very well defined and very consistent. this makes it very easy for a automated system to read a sanskrit text and infer its meaning – or in the reverse direction, to take a thought and write it down in sanskrit.

another area where sanskrit trumps over other language in being computer-friendly is its script. the most popular script to encode sanskrit, i.e. devanagri is highly phonetic. it is an abugida writing system that has a rich repository of vowels. its system of encoding a syllable with a consonant and vowel diacritic marks makes it very amenable for automated reading and writing.

contrast this with english, which has only 5 letters to encode all possible vowel sounds. or with abjad scripts like arabic, which are truly a grammatology nightmare. (the short vowels are optional. there are only 3 vowel symbols – alif, waw and ye, which also double as consonants). no wonder compared to these scripts, programming a computer to type sanskrit is much easier and cleaner task.

VijayVan
4 years ago
Reply to  Slapstik

\Grammar is to Indic culture what geometry is to the Hellenic\
In Tamil, it is grammar of the written language which is the bitch while spoken language and grammar is a cultivated blind spot. So, all efforts by the purists go in controlling written language and it’s grammar , the last book was written in 13th century.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Fanon’s specific point was that when the colonized man is emasculated by his encounter with Europeans he turns around and attempts to reclaim his masculinity by dominating the colonized woman.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago

I don’t care where you’ve been educated Kabir. All that education didn’t do anything for your intelligence. You read like typical SJW tumblr.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

Once again, criticizing someone else is cheap. Present your credentials or shut up.

Ali Choudhury
Ali Choudhury
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Yaar, credentials don’t mean that much. At our world-class university we had a guy in the Islamic Society who did not know Muslims existed outside of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

I couldn’t care less what school you went to Kabir. That doesn’t make you intelligent. I’m not going to get into a pissing contest about who went to a higher ranked school. Nobody outside of Asian/Indian tiger moms and high school seniors gives a shit about things like that.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

The point is that you have no business throwing personal insults around. I’m not going to stand for it. I have no interest in discussing anything with you. But if you come after me, I’m not taking it lying down.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Taking it lying down is actually more respectable than what’s you’re trying to pull. You’re going to fight back with the arguments of a high schooler. What type of adult actually brags about what school they went to?

I don’t care if you have no interest in whatever. If you’re going to parrot typical SJW talking points that look like they were copied from Tumblr I’m going to call you out on your bullshit. And so is everybody else as Razib already did.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

If you had a coherent rebuttal that would be one thing. It’s fine to disagree with someone. There is never any excuse to get personal. I will not tolerate personal insults. Try them on someone else.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago

You’re arguments are redundant and you make false equivalences (Hindu nationalist and Islamist mirror image comment) all the time. It’s getting boring. As far as getting personal what do you call bragging about the assumption that you went to a higher ranked school than me.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

Someone who can’t tell the difference between “your” and “you’re” and their appropriate use is clearly very intelligent.

You started the whole thing by making disparaging remarks about my intelligence.
Go to hell.

Also, “than me” is not correct English, Oh intelligent one. Anyone who is more than barely literate knows it is “than I”.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

I’m sorry. I’ll try to copy and paste from woke Twitter so I can sound more intelligent like you.
So you have no argument now other than to nitpick grammatical mistakes on blog that I’m posting on from my phone. You truly are a piece of shit in addition to being a insecure,egotistical prick. You’re just pissed someone called you out on your bullshit.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

“on blog”, it’s “on A blog” idiot. Don’t you know English requires the use of the indefinite article?

Learn proper English before addressing me in the future.

You are the one who didn’t have a proper argument and just decided to resort to personal insults. Can dish it out but can’t take it?

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

You’re so stupid. Do you think I actually made that mistake or do you think I made a typo? Keep on proving you have no substance. I bet you think it makes you sound clever. Everyone else sees a douchebag.

Also continue bragging about going to GWU. That’s not even a safety school.

arjun
arjun
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Did Fanon write about the idiotic pride the colonized take in mastering the colonizer’s language ?

Pakthings
Pakthings
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

jatt_scythian:
You are relatively new to this, so just a word of advice from someone who has been on this blog for a bit. This person repeats the same pattern every few months.
Apart from the fact that his logic and analytical skills are nonexistent, and his SJWism is at the freshman liberal arts undergrad level, there is not much else to see.
What about his vaunted credentials, you say? Let’st just say that even those are quite mediocre (and I see that you know where he did his undergrad and how “highly rated” it is :))
Don’t stress it and waste your time 🙂

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Pakthings

Haha. Thanks for the advice.
Nobody actually cares about where he went for his undergraduate education. There’s plenty of smart people coming out of poorly ranked schools. However, if you’re going to brag about where you went to school it better not fucking be GWU . The fact that I was wait listed at Stanford is more impressive than all of his credentials.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Pakthings

Waitlisted at Stanford? My father has a PhD from Stanford.

Who do you people think you are?

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Pakthings

Disclaimer: The 15+ above likes things is a joke in good spirit.

@Razib
No DDoS type scummy thing was done (both for the lack of talent/ability and lack of mal-intention). It’s just in good humour.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Pakthings

I actually have zero interest in attacking anyone personally (rather than their ideologies). But if people make personal attacks on me, I’m going to defend myself.

People who cannot use English properly have no business making any comments on anyone else’s intelligence.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir


Go to hell.
Also, “than me” is not correct English, Oh intelligent one. Anyone who is more than barely literate knows it is “than I”.

Kabir at heaven’s gate.. **

knock..knock..

“who is this?”

“It’s I”

“oh..another goddamn english teacher”

(** kabir can only go to heaven. hell is reserved for his tormentors on this blog.)

sometimes you guys can be so juvenile in your fights, its almost cute. seriously guys, do you really think being pedantic in language usage on casual blogs makes you look smarter?

also, a more important point, will you also make fun of any friend or relative who makes an occasional grammatical mistake in hindi/urdu/telugu/any-native-language? think deeply. in flaunting your expertise in english language, are you really betraying a colonized mind?

Bhimrao
Bhimrao
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

LoL!

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

The point is that those who want to disparage other people’s intelligence should damn well make sure they use correct English.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

LOL, come on folks.

thewarlock
thewarlock
4 years ago

yeah calm down guys. Kabir I think is pretty intelligent. I just vehemently disagree with his views. He has some intellectual blind spots. We all do. Jatt Scythian strikes me as a smart and curious guy too. Let’s all just relax.

I also respect Kabir a lot because he doesn’t exhibit a racialized hatred for Indians like many online Pakistanis do, that alone makes him someone who is easier to talk to, especially in the context of religion and politics.

I ironically respect Jatt_Scythian for the same thing, given the degree of trolling people from his usernamesake ethnic group do online, in terms of claiming to be some superhuman S Asian breed. He maintains an egalitarian mindset by a long shot and adds some good points, particularly about haplogroups. Moreover, he is amenable to changing his mind about things, when presented with new data, something sadly uncommon in the blogosphere, at least in my experience.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago

Yeah i like Kabir, he adds somewhat different dimension. Almost all others lean centre to conservative on the blog. Its good to have someone with a a different view.

I miss Indthings too.

Pakthings
Pakthings
4 years ago
Reply to  Saurav

Agree with most points except that I haven’t seen much evidence of his supposed intelligence that warlock vouches for. It could be that I am not perceptive enough 🙂

And Saurav – Pakthings is here, why miss Indthings

Vikram
4 years ago

“This is similar to the phenomenon of Pakistanis trying to tell the Turkish actress in “Ertrugul” that she needs to dress according to Islamic values. She’s white enough to desire but Muslim enough to control.”

Its good to see Pakistanis finding role models and reference points who are non-Indians. Pakistan needed a bit of help from the US and China to shore up its political sovereignty, and it will need help from Turkey and Iran to shore up its cultural sovereignty.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Vikram

Deciding to pretend we are Turks is incredibly stupid. Rather, we should own our own identity as the Muslims of British India. Instead of shows about the Ottomans, we should be making shows about our own Mughal emperors.

Vikram
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

Indeed, I wonder what prevents Pakistanis from making history pop about the Mughals. Wikipedia listing of shows about the Mughal Empire lists 13 Indian series, 3 Western but no Pakistani ones.

Even a simplistic series about noble Muslim conquerors rescuing Brahmin oppressed Indians will sell well in the Muslim world and probably garner favourable reviews in the NYT type circuit.

Saurav
Saurav
4 years ago
Reply to  Vikram

“Muslim conquerors saving Indian” demands a degree of sophisticated story telling, i doubt even Bollywood has it (forget Lollywood)

The best it can come up with slash and burn story of “real muslim” Aurangzeb vs “mountain rat” Shivaji. Or some Ghori vs Chauhan type of thing.

INDTHINGS
INDTHINGS
4 years ago

My plan to let you all stew with Kabir for a while has born fruit. I am now properly appreciated.

My official return to Brownpundits comment:

Punjabis were never Hindu, and if they were, they were the best Hindus, and you are all just imitator Hindus.

arjun
arjun
4 years ago
Reply to  INDTHINGS

Be careful. Kabir cannot be friends with anyone whose plan has ‘born fruit’. It will damage his good name.

thewarlock
thewarlock
4 years ago
Reply to  INDTHINGS

missed you comrade

Will the real slim hindus please Om up

iamVY
iamVY
4 years ago
Reply to  INDTHINGS

Oh the troll is back !

With a very intelligent statement that suits his high IQ.
The comeback statement shows he doesnt know whether they were hindu or not. But he certainly knows they were the best. Better than anyone else. Good now we understand your whole purpose of commenting here.

You could go back into hibernation.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago

Your father has a PhD from Stanford and all you could get was a BA from GWU? What a disappointment. So much for legacy admission helping idiots get into good schools.Guess you’re too much of a moron to even make use of legacy admissions.

Also why bring your father into this? His accomplishments don’t belong to you. You bragged about having been educated at the best institutions in the West. Having a B.A from GWU in a liberal arts major is hardly the epitome of that.

Also keep on nitpicking on grammatical/spelling mistakes. It makes you look like an pretentious douche with no argument of substance and zero analytical abilities. Also since when does intelligence equal the ability to make zero grammatical/spelling mistakes on a blog? Congrats Kabir. You’ve mastered how to write bullshit using correct English. You’re deluded if you think that somehow makes your starter pack SJW bullshit any harder to see through.

Kabir
4 years ago
Reply to  Jatt_Scythian

You have no business commenting on anyone’s intelligence. Rather than responding to the argument, you went straight for the personal. I responded in kind. It’s perfectly legitimate to disagree with someone on ideological grounds. Getting personal is not acceptable.

Please don’t ever address any remarks to me again. I’m not interested in engaging with you. Go bully someone else.

Jatt_Scythian
Jatt_Scythian
4 years ago
Reply to  Kabir

That’s fine with me.

Brown Pundits