Every few weeks or so I “get into it” with parts of Hindutva Twitter. Some parts of Hindutva Twitter I’m quite friendly with. Other parts, not so much. There is the weird incel-like “Trad Twitter” faction…that always ends up to be strange perverts. But I don’t want to focus on them.
Rather, I want to highlight what I feel is descriptively a fact that though Hindutva and “Woke” factions are opposed in a theoretical sense, the former draws on the style of “thinking” of the latter quite a bit. E.g., the emphasis on many Hindutva sectors on feeling, the lack of humor, and, identitarianism.
The identitarianism is straightforward. Despite the fact that I’m an atheist they regularly accuse me of being a Muslim. In some cases, this is an honest false positive. Look at my name! In other cases, they assume since I’m making fun of them, I must be a secret sulla with Muhammad or whoever. I’m against them, so I’m for their enemies, or with their enemies. Sometimes they revert to forms of racism (e.g., they are upper-caste Punjabis, so genetically superior, despite being J1 Dasyus!). The ultimate takeaway is the fixation on the group and historical identity, rather than updating to individual identity.
Remember when Ayanna Pressley said someone had to be “politically black” to be black? A sort of primitive identitarianism has taken root amongst Woke people where individual views are derived from group identity, and individual views can negate one’s group identity because the two are so closely tied.
Second, the lack of humor. On my Twitter posts, I engage in a lot of prodding and poking at Hindu shibboleths as well as synthesizing it with absurd genetic points. The whole performance is ludicrous…but some portions of Hindutva Twitter find it problematic. OK, they wouldn’t say “problematic,” but it’s the same reaction. Woke ideology is a form of secular sacredness. Similarly, Hindutva Twitter has sacred cows which I gore now and then. Sometimes people react back playfully…but other times, they don’t get the joke, and when others point out that it’s a joke, they refuse to believe it’s a joke and move to identitarianism. That is, the joke is fake, and I’m actually a Muslim.
A truncated and shriveled sense of humor is common on the modern Woke Left (google Social Justice Comedy; it’s like Communist opera). It is also a feature of very religious Muslims and Christians. A portion of Hindutva Twitter suffers from this.
The last to me is the most important, the emphasis on feeling. This is a personal bias, as I’m a bit “dead on the inside,” so have always been weak on the feels. I hurt the feelings of these people, making fun of them, mocking them, and making light of their culture. I’m a bit of an online barbarian, like the scorpion, I’m going to sting. A portion of Hindutva Twitter can’t understand that my behavior isn’t due to the fact that I hate Hindus, but because I’m an unfeeling asshole. I’m R1a1a-Z93 and U2b. Those who know what this means know that I was born to be a lord over you Dasyus!
There are more than 1 billion Hindus in the world. India is 80% Hindu. This emphasis on feeling, on hurt pride, is classic “wounded civilization” stuff. Hindutva cannot realize whatever its ambitions are until it looks forward, positively, and without concern for feeling, into the future. Woke ideology is deeply regressive, despite its adherence to the label of progressive. Its fixation on “white supremacy” and “colonialism” looks backward, not forward.
All this goes back to Audrey Truschke. My point is that Truschke point in the generality is correct. Indians should object to her scholarship, not to her person. Truschke herself is a hypocrite about this, getting into ideological food fights, and bringing her gender into the discussion. But Hindu nationalists who engage in “Woke Olympics” can only win by hamstringing their own attempts to fashion a positive identity. Woke Olympics is the to maximal oppression and lack of self-respect and dignity.
To end the Kali Yuga you can’t use the tools of the Kali Yuga.
Woke people are living in rich first world country that boasted to be a super power over decades.
Hindutva people had first super majority government that actually addressed their concerns for less than a decade and had enough food to think about other things for less than two decades.
Hindus are psychologically fragile. This comes due to economic fragility for many generations (a lot of my parents generations are always watching out for social credit because that’s the one to keep them alive and safe due to weak state). I can write paragraphs on the literal lived experience of this fragility.
It is a very real threat in India even for a supposedly high-caste and upper middle-class family to this day. Cruelty of life stares at your face with many existential threats. It is hard to explain that fragility to anyone who didn’t live in India a middle class or below life in non-urban areas .
You can mock their feelings but feelings are all you can have when you have to cope with a lot of very real life stresses. You want them to be rationalists and be “feelings-less” within one lifetime. Your friend was correct to say that you are punching down when you compare “feels” of woke SJW and Hindu nationalist as the same.
It is like comparing a fat kid crying for an extra cookie with a starving mal-nutrition kid fighting for extra dessert. Scolding the second kid for asking for “more” or not acting with good manners is just sad at many levels.
I’m almost 42. I wonder how old you are. (Of course, you have no obligation to reveal your age.)
The reason I wonder is because I grew up as part of the demographic you are talking about: non-urban, very properly middle class (we had a house, but we got a phone and a car for the first time when I was on the verge of going to college, I never lives in a house with air conditioning until I was an adult). My impressions are quite different from yours.
There was most definitely no food shortage in the country when I was a kid (in the socialist 80s, before liberalization) as that problem had been solved by the so-called Green Revolution of the 60s.
All other goods were scarce, of course, and rationed. Youngsters today may be astonished at the following anecdote: my dad had to register to buy a scooter, and then had to wait for many years to get one from a govt-designated Bajaj facility. The resulting economics were so perverse that a 10-year old scooter, which you could buy freely from anyone, was MORE EXPENSIVE than a new scooter which could purchase from Bajaj after waiting many years.
All of this clearly caused some stress in peoples’ lives, but they aren’t the kinds of stresses you seem to be alluding to. And the reason as well as the solution were quite simple: our general public, governments and politicians (including right-wing ones) had zero imagination, and stuck with a stupid economic theory. They preferred instead to fight over irrelevant cultural issues, as left and right continue to do today while taking the easy populist way out when it comes to economics.
What I’m saying is that our public was complicit in this state of affairs, so I’m much less inclined than you to cut them slack. Feeling should have been hurt earlier (VS Naipaul tried) so people could have woken up from their stupor. But as long as people continue to focus on useless things, that’s not going to happen.
Numinous,
We are the same age. You are much more privileged than you realize but you consider yourself the common man. I am not sure how I can explain this to you. Your family owned a house in 80s! That’s rich people zone in my book.
Your statement as to “no food shortage in the country” is misinterpretation of what people actually experienced. There were so many government schemes of free food or low-cost food introduced in 80s for political gain (mid-day meals, Rs2/kg rice) because most people didn’t have access to enough food.
The fragility of a population comes from four factors: 1)security of wealth, 2)access to health care, 3)social status/capital and 4)access to education. It appears you had no concerns on any of these axes. Good for you for being that fortunate.
Unfortunately, most of the population is not. Some local politician can take over your open land but you could do zilch about it and lose your dream of building a house (low on axes 1 and 3), or the sole earner could fall sick and forego health care to save money (low on axes 1 and 2) or you can be land-owning and high-caste in a village but there is no hospital or high school in your village (low on axes 2 and 4). Most of these people would consider themselves as “middle-class” but they had to watch out for one or more of these axes from knocking them out of middle-class.
Not much time for imagination or economic theory.
But I think even what Numinous describes is well beyond what American SJWs ever experience. He may be partly coming from the fact that when one grows up being used to it, one doesn’t feel it as a big deal, but that doesn’t warrant negating your (Violet) point even for someone of his economic class (which seems to have been similar to mine).
Families would carefully decide which soap and which toothpaste to buy. Variations on the ration shop theme applied to every little facet of life. Pears soap and cuticura powder were somewhat fancy stuff, while bata shoes were very upscale (a few years ago I bought some bata footwear, and experienced strange mental vibrations at the realization that it was not anywhere near upscale in terms of what I can afford today). There was a general sense of guilt associated to not being efficient in consuming soap while taking bath. Many students would argue with a ticket conductor about eligibility for students’ concession (with no mental maturity to imagine that the poor conductor was similarly struggling for the revenue of the bus rather than just being nasty to the students). There were movie comedy scenes with the hero putting extraordinary efforts, e.g., innovating by using a hammer, to extract a little bit of paste from an almost finished tube. I doubt if people find such scenes funny today, but with the lived experience of those days, it was funny.
With all this, the “establishment” of that day was telling us that our poor quality of life was because we wouldn’t work hard like the Japanese, and that we were so pathetic in spite of, not because of, having such brilliant leaders like Nehru. Imagine, well-meaning and sincere teachers inculcating in students the life lesson that indolence atypical for the world average was hard-wired into the general populace they were a part of (and implicitly, in them therefore).
Parody songs available on audio cassette, or that people sang in a “cultural programme”, sang about how everything was a flop in India, how Indian cricket team would eternally lose and blame it on the climate and the helmet etc. How Indians could only win an Olympic medal if a spitting competition was introduced, and that being countered by another saying that if it became an Olympic sport the Chinese would practise and overtake us.
It was a way of telling us that we were unworthy human beings. In many ways we were still more privileged than African Americans and Hispanic Americans are today, but I would also argue there were ways we were *less* privileged. This bloody unidimensional view of privilege should simply go.
The clever argument that we just witnessed makes a show of not denying our lack of privilege – it recognizes it, but then cherry-picks convenient standards for comparison so that our privilege level can be put in the same broad bucket as that of American SJWs.
Sorry for the long comment, as usual. I realize I this is somewhat off-topic, but hopefully this is not entirely unusual for BP?
Frog,
I totally relate to what you said in the second para. Older members of my family still behave in similar ways even though we have more discretionary spending power now (and I won’t deny at all that I personally am very fortunate today in fiscal terms, at least by Indian standards).
But overall, I’m confused. Were you trying to say that my thought process was similar to that of an American SJW?
@Numinous – No, I didn’t say or imply or even believe that you were an SJW. I was trying to formulate a version of Violet’s point from a different perspective. It is on which buckets to put various privileges and disprivileges in, that we disagree.
BTW I hope it is obvious that I am not asking for affirmative action or any other sort of consideration for Hindus in the US. At least I believe such a thing would, if anything, hurt us.
What instead I bother with is principally the left’s virtual monopoly in deciding privilege buckets, and deciding the status games and their rules with respect to those privilege buckets. e.g., the left wants to put the rural southerner and the east coast WASP in the same privilege bucket, into which Hindus are sought to be included too.
One thing I am envious of the Chinese about: they have social welfare and even affirmative actions (quotas?) but not endless discussions on who should consider themselves privileged. I think social welfare is *more* effective that way as it frees it up from silly status games of the elite or inter-group competitions in a bread and circus democracy.
@Froginthewell,
Agree to what you say about privilege buckets. Thanks for reminding me those days where betting against India was seen as a better strategy.
Also, agree about the frugality even among those reasonably well-off. But I think the key thing was not just about frugality but an attitude of being subservient to others. Hurt feelings narrative comes due to this passive-aggressiveness over ever finer grades of hierarchy. (e.g. pedavadi Kopam pedavi chatu..etc).
It takes ages to get over the inferiority complex drilled into everyone’s heads while growing up (irrespective of actual wealth or privilege). You need somewhat autistic tendency to ignore those messages and substantial family protection not to face serious consequences due to risk-taking self-confident behaviours.
But overall having an unidimensional privilege definition (either by shade of skin colour or caste or wealth) just doesn’t work for Indian society. That’s why someone wrote that the British understood India well as they could map the class system to caste system. (e.g., Kate Middleton was called commoner even though her parents were millionaires). Americans have difficulty in getting this.
Since we are off-track anyway, I don’t know if you watched “Flop show” growing up, it was hilarious. Watch out for Kenny Sebastian doing middle class jokes, he is still funny.
Didn’t know about this quote about the British class system facilitating understanding India better than Americans did, thanks, and very interesting. pEdavADi kOpam pedaviki chETu is quite an apt and poignant metaphor.
Saw some flop show episodes on dvd long after it stopped running, but this being more casual than anticipating and watching on screen, didn’t remember plots or notice the actors (other than Jaspal Bhatti of course and knowing that the wife of his character was the character played by his wife Savita Bhatti).
By the way on the multidimensionality of privilege:
(just so I don’t get dismissed by any possible default assumption on my caste, I am not a Brahmin).
Violet,
To clarify, we own a long-term lease on a house but not the land (which is still owned by the company). Also, houses were really really cheap in those days. Adjusted for inflation, my grandparents got it for a pittance compared to what I would have pay today for a flea pit in a big city.
Anyway, I totally recognize that I was privileged in very many ways. High (highest) caste, no food problems, great education opportunities. But if that’s not the class of people you are referring to, I’m still puzzled. Because my class of people are THE backbone of the Hindu right today. They haven’t faced dire resource scarcity for 2 generations or more now but their needs are slightly up Maslow’s hierarchy, hence the cultural angst. People who are still struggling at a more basic level should perhaps be thinking more about economics than culture in my opinion but I could be wrong.
Numinous,
BJP got 70%vote. How do you account for that many people solely from your type of description?
What I see is from my own extended family where nobody owned anything other than a hut in the village until my generation. The village is also the kind without electricity until 1992.
They are the ones to readily believe everything about glories of the past now that they have a job and flat (spent most of their life in acquiring those*). Access to internet led to social media, rather than any critical analysis. The Indian media became such that no one believes it anymore.
What I see on Twitter from this group are the common emotional behaviours they had while growing up. They haven’t had a chance to grow up from that and feel security in their bones.
*btw, I am proud of them for their single minded focus to achieve that economic stability given where they started. But it is unkind to think they should’ve focused on the country at a time when there was strict rationing of food at home and enormous pressure to perform well enough for good EAMCET rank/engineering/IT job. And crushing joblessness in late 80s/early 90s (until COBOL craze for Y2K) where unemployment trope had it’s own comedy genre.
Because my class of people are THE backbone of the Hindu right today.
I presume you are a Brahmin and you mean that by “class”. With that assumption, I don’t agree with the above comment at all: a larger percentage of Brahmins may well vote Hindu Right than the other jAti-s, but that cannot make them the backbone of anything because they are too few in their share of the total population. On the other hand, I think a portion of (atheist beef-eating) Brahmins may have a greater claim to be the backbone of the anti-Hindu left, the demographic irrelevance being counterbalanced by their collective and distributed sUtra-dhAratva of the great political drama. Ditto if you replace Brahmins by Brahmins + some so called “ritualistically privileged” jAti-s.
@froginthewell
No, I was not talking about Brahmins. I’ve never been part of a Brahmin “community” anyway, if you discount extended family get togethers. I was simply referring to the Hindu middle class as I knew it and still know it to some extent. Primarily based in north India. Some of them may be Brahmins, others not, but they all share the characteristics you listed earlier. (I have almost zero caste consciousness. I wouldn’t be able to tell you the castes of most of my friends from school onwards.) In addition, lots of them have some “foreign links”, family members who went abroad to study or work and who may still live there.
But locally in India, they are not part of the business elite (rich business or industrial families) or the political elite (well-connected and influential people who win elections or have the bureaucracy eating out of their hands) or the intellectual class (journalists and intelligentsia in the big cities). They do have a fair amount of discretionary spending power now but otherwise are ordinary people with ordinary peoples’ problems.
Fair enough.
I interpreted your philosophical point as “A white can know more about Indian history than Indians despite the latter’s lived experience”. But I think Sai Priya interpreted you as saying that Truschke’s views on Aurangazeb have merit. The staunch-pro-Hindus view this like Jews with ancestors who died in holocaust might view endorsement of Hitler.
I am not endorsing the misinterpretation of your philosophical point, but merely pointing out what might be the source of the fight. I disagree with you that this particular one is wokish; this is misinterpretation plus Jewish-style sensitivity.
Making this comment separately because it is likely to go into spam:
I won’t go into how right or wrong Truschke’s views are, but even staunch anti-Hindutva cultural left has people who are disgusted by what they see as apologism for Aurangazeb’s violence:
https://scroll.in/article/856178/aurangzeb-was-a-bigot-not-just-by-our-standards-but-by-those-of-his-predecessors-and-peers
Let me quote from this article:
To end the Kali Yuga you can’t use the tools of the Kali Yuga.
Yeah, this was my observation I dissed the Emissary’s post complaining about Hinduphobia (a valid concern, but I disliked his argumentation).
It ultimately shows that many Hindus are still uncomfortable making a forthright illiberal argument, which I argue is an inescapable necessity if you have seriously thought through these issues. Hindutva is at its core a collectivist identitarian ideology. Liberalism is about the primacy of the individual above all other forms of political organisation.
But Hindus fluent in English on the internet tend to be high-status, whether they live in the West or in India. And so they tend to care about deeply about their social station. The Western elite is largely liberal and India’s elite is more mixed, but liberalism is still overrepresented among them than among the general population. This means if you’re sensitive about relative status, you have to conform to liberalism. Hence we get these mongrelised “hot takes” infused with wokeness.
FWIW, I think this is a transitory phase, at least among elite, English-speaking Hindus living in India. I am less sanguine about Hindus living in the West, since many of them have high ambitions and that means joining an increasingly authoritarian neoliberal ruling class which does not accept dissent for prospective new entrants. And unlike in the past, when you could get away being a bit of a reactionary in your private life when it came to Indian politics, these days the US neoliberals are obsessed with Hindutva and “India’s turn to fascism”. So people *will* find out. And many times the snitches will be other Indians, who see a pathway of success open up in front of them by trampling on other Hindus.
“There is the weird incel-like “Trad Twitter” faction…that always ends up to be strange perverts.”
The worst of both worlds.
I’m a bit of an online barbarian, like the scorpion, I’m going to sting. A portion of Hindutva Twitter can’t understand that my behavior isn’t due to the fact that I hate Hindus, but because I’m an unfeeling asshole.
Please never change! We desperately need more unfeeling assholes on the internet.
That is a very strange diagnosis. OTOH, Razib has enough interesting things to say with enough knowledge and thought behind them that occasional jerkassery comes off as a spice, not the substance.
I think people dont get jokes or sarcasm on internet. second, we are still under 3 trillion dollar economy, we dont do humanities , doesnt pay well. people use the tools available in fashion, they dont create own tools. Also, many people are smart enough to see bs in humanities but are not well read enough to checkmate them . Requires too much investment of time . But fight and disputing the claims are the things one can easily do. Requires less investment. Also, when people in humanities use their authority and knowledge to make false claims, that is in many ways more wrong than this. Also, the subtle art of ignoring people is something Hindus have not learnt.
trads are the worst.
Audrey’s aurengzeb book is translated into tamil and published soon
Last roll of the dice by the Dravidians.
Subtelity, nuance and humour escpaes many people when they read or write.
will safron inside and woke outside be a better strategy for Hindutva?
“Sometimes they revert to forms of racism (e.g., they are upper-caste Punjabis, so genetically superior, despite being J1 Dasyus!)”
You handle them well on your own. Just know that the whisperer is always in your corner, if you need him. While he specializes in taming the internet bigoted steppe shudra troll, his skillset is expansive.
Truschke is a fraud — a bigot on steroids — who thinks just because not everything was destroyed by Aurangzeb means he was a great ruler.
Assumptions//wrong arguments by the trash historian:
1. It assumes that he was so powerful that he could do anything. In fact, he tried doing so, but he was defeated in battle many times — in Assam, Maharashtra, Deccan, Punjab, etc — and yet that imbecile of a historian thought he could do anything. At best, he was a mediocre military commander who attempted but did not succeed in exterminating all Hindus. So, he chose a path of brutal suppression.
2. Whenever Aurangzeb could get away with oppressing Hindus, he did that.
3. He kept Hindu shrines as hostages for good behaviour. He destroyed prominent ones as they were sufficient for his purpose of scapegoating. More than that would result in an all out revolt.
4. How great a ruler was he? Lost a bunch of battles; bankrupted state treasury; left his heir an empire plagued with insurrection; no economic development, etc. All this shows he was a CEO who exited the company just before it blew up. And that is his claim to fame!
In short, the propagandist Audrey does not really have any argument in the first place. It would be like arguing Ottoman rule was “good” for Serbians or Christians in Turkey — incidentally, not all shrines were destroyed here too —as they somehow eked out their lives.
Unfeeling assholes ftw!
Those who take themselves and the world around them too seriously deserve to be mocked. I used to be one of these types myself, but after a few years of getting gently soaked on muddy walks in ol’ Blighty I’ve learned to absorb, look on the bright side and move on. Gotta learn from the Brits on this one, they went through their great power and great patriotic nation building phases, suffered a gentle fall from grace and have made it to the other side with their humour intact
I agree. The amount of shit been thrown at the Brits and the way they take it in their stride is remarkable.
just photos
http://fakti.org/srpski-duh/britanci-za-185-godina-vladanja-indijom-pobili-i-umorili-gladju-85-miliona-ljudi
According to one English study, out of 200 countries in the world only 20 haven’t experienced British agression.
I said it once and i’ll say it till the Cows come home. Hindutva is SHAM, it doesn’t exist outside vacuous political rhetoric, its not an organic cultural movement or an “Identity”. When you remove “THE OTHER/Muslim Antagonist” out of the picture, Hindus are divided into a trillion sub-groups that are at each other’s throat, Hindutva is only as real as the “Muslim Threat” is to the average Hindus, statistically a Hindu is more likely to get fucked over by a Hindu cus 80% of Indians are Hindus.
I like Dharmic Schools of thought and all that esoteric good shit but Hindutva’s penchant obsession with Muslims&Pakistan is pathological, Hindutva has fuck all to do Philosophy&Culture, Its about an having a dick measuring contest with Muslims. I consider the West&China as worthy rivals for India not fucking Pakistan, but that’s just me, some people just want to pretend like they’re living under the Mughals, so that they can “Rebel” against Muslim Tyranny. The idea that Hindus have their fate in their own hands, still hasn’t dawned on them.
“they are upper-caste Punjabis, so genetically superior, despite being J1 Dasyus”
NOOOO, take that back scientist man! WE WUZ ARYANS AND SHEAT!!
Trad got hurt.
When you remove “THE OTHER/Muslim Antagonist” out of the picture, Hindus are divided into a trillion sub-groups that are at each other’s throat
30 years ago the Soviet threat ended. How’s America doing these days?
I have never seen humans unite, except against an enemy.
//I have never seen humans unite, except against an enemy.//
Hindus did not unite against ‘an enemy’ for almost a 1000 years. So either
– there was no real enemy in the past which kind of destroys the foundational myth of Hindutva
– or Hindus are really exceptional, and not in the positive sense.
Imagined enemies are not really strong unifying forces. Common language, culture, religion, race, these are the things that can be strong basis for a nation, not imagined (or even real) enemies.
Hindus did not unite against ‘an enemy’ for almost a 1000 years. So either
this is a stupid point midwit.
look at the history of the crusades or the ottoman invasions. europe as a whole did not unite, there were fractions and factions within it (e.g., france had a tacit alliance with the ottomans, while hungarian protestants marched with the turks, and the crusades were mostly a french-speaking affair).
//look at the history of the crusades or the ottoman invasions. europe as a whole did not unite//
When did anyone claim that Europe is a united entity? Europe has been infighting for thousands of years. And this is why EU project keeps hitting so many roadblocks, it’s doomed to fail as soon as Germany (it’s economic might) and France (it’s military might) start to have their own geopolitical ambitions.
“Common language, culture, religion, race, these are the things that can be strong basis for a nation, not imagined (or even real) enemies”
Exactly, but we know the drill by now. We point out this obvious flaw in Hindutva to RSS folks and they go into denial. They start out with claims that all Indians share the “same” ancestry(Racial Homogeneity), when we point out that they’re ignoring Y-DNA, they move the goal posts to “All Indian Languages&Cultures come from Sanskrit, IVC Spoke Sanskrit!”(Aryan Ethnic Solidarity). When we ask them, where do the 245 Million Dravidians that do not come from the Holy Sanskrit’s womb, fit into this Indo-Aryan Nationalist Identity? They respond with “What ABOUT them?”, 245 Million people are an afterthought to these genius Nation builders.
To be honest,I think ancestry is a much better option for uniting Indians,particularly the autosomal one.
The autosomal ancestry does not show that great of a variation among the Indians(except NE Indians and some AA tribes.
Even different Y DNA Haplogroup is not that much a problem because no ethnicity has 100% homogenous haplogroups.
Guys, you’d be surprised as to how strong RSS outreach is in the South and abroad amongst South Indians. Other than Tamils, others do-not have a problem in “acknowledging” Sanskrit as the mother language even when it’s not scientific. Even Tamils are getting tired of Dravidian political ideology and are open to RSS outreach.
“Guys, you’d be surprised as to how strong RSS outreach is in the South and abroad amongst South Indians”
When i meet S-Indians in US, I feel the entire S-Indian Hindutva crowd has moved aboard and no one back in India to really vote for BJP, LOL.
One suggestion to Razib, just read what they teach in schools in India and the amount of misinformation they are fed. The PDFs are available here: https://www.ncertbooks.guru/ncert-history-book/ . It probably wont take you more than a few hours. Given that you engage with Indian audience a lot, this will give you a lot of context that you might be missing.
Again, as I said a while ago, the yearly gifts that Ibrahim X Kendi receives from corporate overlords is at least two orders of magnitude more than all the funding given to historians in India. In that respect, “studying” India is the best bang-for-the-buck for western academics because they can write whatever bullshit and there is no critical analysis of their work and like Audrey, the academia showers them with praises because she is “civilizing the barbarians”.
FYI: I agree with your assessment that desis lack a sense of humor and mimic the tactics of woke, but it could also be language specific and they are wielding the tool that has been wielded on them for a while.
I’m a bit of an online barbarian, like the scorpion, I’m going to sting. A portion of Hindutva Twitter can’t understand that my behavior isn’t due to the fact that I hate Hindus, but because I’m an unfeeling asshole.
You are an outlier and proud of it. But why expect general masses with low exposure to western-style discourse understand that fact? Engaging in this mockery is like going to a cricket field, pitching like baseball, and laughing at people for not following rules of baseball when they complain about lack of proper bowling.
Strangely, I see parallels between this and Pewdiepie mocking Indians for T-Series.
Strangely, I see parallels between this and Pewdiepie mocking Indians for T-Series.
why strange?
Strange because I didn’t think you needed the same marketing mobilization as Pewdiepie given your target audience. Of course, you know your audience the best.
It makes more money to sell more units of an average product than a costly high quality product to niche audiences. There’s no strangeness in that part though.
“I’m R1a1a-Z93 and U2b. Those who know what this means know that I was born to be a lord over you Dasyus!”
When will you stop peddling your horse shit, “Aryans came with their horses and took over South Asia” ? Perhaps never….
watch your language or i’ll ban you.
(warning to others)
jesus, you ppl love to be victims.
Like politics is not about policy, victimhood is also about status, including status in the form of semi-guaranteed immunity from vilifying speech.
That said: while I disagreed that Sai Priya’s arguments were woke Hindutva and said it was just misinterpretation, I will mostly agree if someone says that many of my own arguments are woke Hindutva.
well i don’t think what audrey speaks or writes matters very much in india. the word that these are ‘fake arguments’ has gone deep and wide. humanities in india is not a preferred choice as chances of making a lively hood are very less at least in south india. a history ma will not take you anywhere.
soon, the ideas like the oit, ivc was aryan, all languages evolved out of sanskrit, we were slaves for 800 years, etc will be in the mainstream.
It is most unfortunate for anyone to have ydna J. I’d rather be born with ydna E1b if I was forced at gunpoint to pick between the two.
At gunpoint you would accept to be a Serb (=16% of E1b)? Unfortunately, if you accept this you still can be J which have couple percentages of Serbs. I know some (e.g. Mr Tanuj M.) which would not accept to be Serbs with moustaches even at gunpoint.
If not at gunpoint I would pick C1a2 out of all ydna haplogroups. Gunpoint basically meant only having 2 choices. E1b, especially the E1b of North Africa, Near East and Europe seems to have an interesting prehistory.
I wrote before about E1b which is very present among Lusitanian Serbs (today’s Germany). I also wrote that ‘I’ was the only haplogroup originated in Europe but actually, there was also very, very minor C1a2 group, too.
I-M170 is way too common for me to pick if unlimited options are available.
Excellent choice! It means Dinaric Serbs. Let me see what I can do about this. I’ll try my best.
bruda. what about your Y H bros like me. We da OG
My view is usually neutral towards common haplogroups. But for some reason I just don’t like J. As for my own haplogroup, IDK what it is, would be amazing if it is C1a2, but I think it will just turn out to be L.
i find the constant and mechanical berating of woke-ism on this blog a bit tiresome now. and i also feel that some of the chamcha followers of razib indulge in it without even thinking for themselves.
what’s so wrong in people protesting against present (NOT past) grievances? for e.g., i found the BLM protests of last summer legitimate protests, because were were rooted in current-day grievances.
Problems with woke-ism is the insistence on self-identified pronouns and ignoring biological basis for gender, cancelling of legitimate researchers and good-faith rationalists (Steven Hsu, Scott Alexander of slate star codex) from public spaces.
I have no opinion on BLM other than that I still consider COVID a bigger threat. Given how many people I have known didn’t take it seriously enough and got it, it is just my personal opinion that public safety should outweigh the grievances without solutions.
(e.g. Police were praised in Canada for stopping a guy from running a truck through a crowd, and random shootings from a crank. The protest to defund them within the next couple of months made no sense. Now they are target again because they are breaking up church congregations and shinny hockey to prevent COVID). I would respect a protest if it had a legitimate demand. Just like occupy Wall Street, a show of protest without any defined outcome is wasted energy.
what is chachma?
Chamcha. Mindless follower/servant.
chamcha – sycophant
Scorpian wrote: ” for e.g., i found the BLM protests of last summer legitimate protests, because were were rooted in current-day grievances.”
How would you summarize the current day grievances of BLM? How do these greivances compare to the greivances of most other Americans or people around the world?
BLM is a global movement that is very large across South America, Central America, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Africa. BLM is also active in Japan and some parts of Asia.
In general I have found all protests and rallies (ANTIFA, BLM and MAGA) during COVID-19 to be highly objectionable.
antifa and blm are obviously organised by superorganisers and have assigned role to do, they will be cancelled or separated from oxygen when they imagine that they are organically grown
@Razib
The phenomenon of locating Muslim intellectuals or persons with Muslim sounding names in an anti-Hindu or anti-Indic confirmation bias is not new. It has been in prevalence for quite some time now. The tragedy is that the average Indian Muslim who lives in a Tier B town or village is fully immersed in Hindu cultural customs. They also support and mimic many Hindu tropes/memes on societal behaviour. So where does this bias arise from?
It is the significant body of Indian Muslim marxists/atheists who are responsible for this tarring. Starting with establishment marxist historians like Irfan Habib to neo-marxists like Umar Khalid, there is a strong line of atheist muslims involved in tearing down Hindu symbols of either state power or cultural renaissance. Irfan Habib, for example, is quite clear on downgrading the “Golden Age” status for the Guptas, as that might start an irreversible slide into saffronisation of Indian history. Umar Khalid has more radical views on the Indian establishment and its geopolitical actions within South Asia.
An atheist muslim is much more dangerous than a normal muslim in the eyes of a native – because a normal muslim would never even pretend to be derisive of Indian cultural symbols or treasured ideas of Hindu renaissance – because that normal muslim has so many bodies in his own cultural deep freezer.
Despite the fact that I’m an atheist they regularly accuse me of being a Muslim.
This is where you go astray in the deconstruction of the bile. Your atheist-ness plays a very significant role in the moments before perception crystallises into bias. If you were just a normal player (average muslim), then they would make some snarky comments about cousin marriage/72 hoors and such and move on. But now, you are like the judo player with no left hand – and therefore the opponent has no urawaza to counteract the attack.
In general, I have a very pessimistic view of the future of muslim atheists operating in Indian society. They face a double distilled contempt from the majority (including Hindu atheists) and their own co-religionists. They can only survive by hiding in dank spaces (like JNU).
Your trials on Twitter arise from deeper confluences than you think. If you have to get your point across, then you must improvise. How? – I do not know. No muslim atheist has ever crossed into Mordor.
No muslim atheist has ever crossed into Mordor.
a muslim atheist is a contradiction in terms.
i am not a muslim
I think your position must be respected i.e. you are not a Muslim . Normally I would have called you atheist Muslim or atheist of muslim culture/background, etc. You are an US intellectual, that is it
I think your position must be respected i.e. you are not a Muslim . Normally I would have called you atheist Muslim or atheist of muslim culture/background, etc. You are an US intellectual, that is it
my positions on this
– i don’t get offended if people call me “muslim atheist”; it’s just a word
– but, it gives ppl a wrong sense of my cultural background. i was raised in the US around christians, and never went to masjid more than on the holidays. i was never much of a believer, and an atheist from when i was 8. i am not married to a muslim and the only people who are muslim i interact with regularly are my parents.
– so i am not an atheist who lives in or grew up in a muslim cultural context
so i think the term misleads people. i have more emotional attachment to being from oregon, than my ancestral muslim origins…
“Due to restrictions on freedom of movement, we were forced to carry out a coup d’etat at home this year”
Is Secret Sulla your non-denominational version of Secret Santa? Worst gift-giver gets proscribed.
I have no problem with an academic studying Aurengazeb and coming with diffrenet conclusions, which man on the street in India won’t like. On the Aurengazeb issue I have not read her book and so I will let it go as I have no opinions.
What IS objectionable is becoming an activist against India, in Twitter or actually in person , Hindus and Hindutva in the US and in Indian also. Not that I have a brief for Hindutva, but as a foreigner she should not throw mud on all things coming from India in the worst far left manner and in cahoots with Islamists. She is bringing bad reputation on Indologists or Sanskrists or even historians in the west