I dislike the “GDP wars” that sometimes crop up on this message board. Comparing India to Bangladesh or Pakistan is apples to oranges. India is economically a collection of nations, and the average can be misleading. That being said, a lot of the Indian commentators also seem to engage in a lot of cope when it comes to GDP comparisons between Bangladesh and India; on the whole I often agree with them…but the fact that there can be a comparison despite India having relatively dynamic economies in Gujarat, Maharashtra, and around Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad, should lead to some soul-searching about inter-regional inequalities, rather than arguing about statistics.
But, as a biologist I like looking at health indicators. Harder to fake (thought not impossible), and clearer in interpretation.
First, let’s be honest: Pakistan is now the “slow kid” in the subcontinent. Mind you, many South Asians will admit that they are more handsome people because they are taller and lighter skinned (let’s be frank here), the advantages Pakistan accrued through its Cold War alliance with the US and less strident adherence to socialism than India have been frittered away. Anytime India sees itself clustering with Pakistan, it has to wonder “what are we doing wrong???” (again, the story in India is inter-regional variation). Despite over a generation of war and strife, Sri Lanka still had a lead in these indices, but the other nations are catching up. Finally, Bangladesh’s status is a basket case still shadows some of the numbers, like the number of physicians per thousand and age at teen births and motherhood. All that being said, what’s the good of having physicians if your life expectancy isn’t that great?
‘Bangladesh’s GDP wars’
It is always some teenager Bangladeshi edge lord doing their thing…
Indians don’t look up to Bangladesh in anything (yet), mostly because of Bangladeshi (Rohingya? idk) illegal migrants (‘infiltrator’) who usually work as rag pickers across North India.
Most people find (Indian) Bengalis conceited, loud and needlessly argumentative. I guess the stereotype gets used on Bangladeshis too. Also, direct action day, Suhrawardy, exceptionally undisciplined Bangladeshi army, are also things people remember.
By and large India-Bangladesh will get along. India is helping build the Nuclear power plant, L&T built a lot of Dhaka metro. Lots of Bangladeshi products in Indian markets…
Best wishes, good luck. This is a good competition.
—
Bangladesh’s medical schools enroll 10K new MBBS (~MD for Americans) medical students every year. Of these, ~1.5K-2K are Indians.
—
the spike in physicians in 1990, what is that?. strange. nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. especially for young children, under nutrition is a crime. One reason to hate modi govt , did not do enough.
Agree on this point. I said before, focusing on childhood and prenatal nutrition was one thing that UPA did good. But there are limits to how much government can do. Food grains have been practically free all over India since 2013 and even earlier in south.
From my anecdotal experience in rural areas, this has lead to culture slacking and worst of all increase in liquor consumption. The meta level data on liquor revenue for states bears this out.
Glad to see BD doing well. Reduced inflow of migrants + hopefully shut up our bhadralok economists. Concern is political stability and direction after hasina. My understanding has been that BD has been able to focus on employment intensive manufacturing. Guess that lack of caste and lower capita land holdings makes it easier to push land acquisition for industries. This can provide a clue as to when we might see similar trends in lagging IN states.
nutrition is not equal to rice and basic food. proteins and basic minerals are important. my idea has always been, provide nutripacks to mix and drink in milk / water everyday. simple. In india, it is not just children suffering under nutrition, even adults suffer as well. This is very important for over all productivity of society.
A typical farm laborer in my part of the woods makes inr 400/day. The family gets X amount of wheat/rice + lentils + sugar and in some cases cooking oil from PDS at subsidized/free rate. They typically sell the excess amount in open market. Typically no mortgages or other expenses. The average farm laborer works a few days to earn enough to buy himself a daily liquor packet from the government licensed store. Are you telling he can’t decide to buy milk + nutrition from his inr 400 instead? Kids at school already get their lunch + protein serving. Need balance in how much government can and should do.
nutrition is basic. this govt shud do. it wont cost much overall, govt is already considering fortified rice.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/govt-fortified-rice-will-carry-health-warning-101653329346169.html
https://theprint.in/india/whats-fortified-rice-why-is-modi-govt-pushing-it-why-some-experts-arent-excited/1111091/
Indians don’t look up to Bangladesh in anything (yet), mostly because of Bangladeshi (Rohingya? idk) illegal migrants (‘infiltrator’) who usually work as rag pickers across North India.
if I ever post Bangladesh GDP long long time ago there’d be lots of coping comments about “how actually if you look at….” (which i agree with). but it’s obvious ppl are engaging in dick-swinging games. this is long before pencilman’s cringe and immature comments. years before.
Most people find (Indian) Bengalis conceited, loud and needlessly argumentative. I guess the stereotype gets used on Bangladeshis too. Also, direct action day, Suhrawardy, exceptionally undisciplined Bangladeshi army, are also things people remember.
I believe the personalities are the same. my family socialized with a long west bengalis when I was younger. aside from beef everyone eats the same food (ok, most ghoti ppl can’t eat shootki) and most educated bangladeshis can speak kolkotta-basha.
so, apparently pakistanis are more fair and lovely than the rest of the south asians. but what has that gotta do in a writeup on dry statistics of human development index?
the huge bong inferiority complex against punjabis slips out inadvertently.
next time you pull that shit i’ll block you. i know you don’t care, and i sure don’t
I have no inferiority complex. unlike you, I live in America, and “we all look the same.” pakis are dark as fuck to me. I’m just being candid that Pakistanis always feel superior because of the positive feedback they get from other subcontinentals. sri lankas could have GDP $20K but they’ll always be kala
anyway, you post something like that again I’ll ban you with no warning, so I invite you do to so now to end this. i don’t find your midwittery particularly enjoyable and you’re smug too (common among your ilk)
This guy Bhimrao that keeps talking smack about Bangladeshis is hilarious. Buddy, you’re from Bihar lol. An area that is comically impoverished area even by Indian standards. I’ll refrain from using the slurs I used before btw but you’re in no position to be talking when your entire region is used in such a disparaging way lol. BIMARU I believe they use to refer to your region. Again, you’re literally bottom of the table lifestyle and economy and HDI wise, comparable to Sub-Saharan African banana republics.
Also, there are no “illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators”. This is just a cope that the Indian politicians have come up with. Sheikh Hasina actually brought this up with one of their leaders in the past, I hear. She told them to provide a list and they couldnt do that lol. Nobody besides themselves report on it. I can buy it if migrants from the Middle East or Africa or Asia illegally go to Switzerland or Croatia or something, those places have far higher HDIs than their native lands AND there are many people reporting on them. Now this on the other hand? just lol. This isn’t Germany we’re talking about.
Also, Scorpion Eater, inferiority complex? Us? lol. Just in the last thread, there was some Indian who brought up how “West Asian” their MUH PUNJABIS were out of nowhere and about how Bengalis looked like something. lol If there’s someone with an inferiority complex, it’s you, buddy. You accusing Bengalis for having an inferiority complex is quite rich because Indian users literally go on and on about how they look “Meztizo” and “Harnizo” Caucasoid Latino Nordic here lol.
Your post reeks of projection, which is like the most defining trait of Indian posters online
It’s that weird snark again lmao. They talk shit and then try to act like the better man at the end of the paragraph so that you become the villain if you reply to them. Just lol tbh.
That there are Bangladeshis in various Indian cities, having entered the country through “informal” means, working low-skill odd jobs is a fact and not speculation. Though I have no idea how high the numbers are. If Americans can’t track the number of illegal Mexicans and Central Americans, what hope do we have of counting a similar cohort of Bangladeshis?
Anecdotally, I have interacted with, and used the services of, such people. Having grown up close to W. Bengal, I know the Bengali accent, which such people possessed. They also did not have cell phones, because it’s virtually impossible to get a SIM card without a valid ID (somehow we are able to enforce this law as a country.)
In case my sentiments weren’t clear, I have no problem with these people being in India and making a living, just like I didn’t have a problem with illegal Mexicans in the US. I used to live in LA and other parts of the West Coast, which would shut down and self-combust if those people disappeared.
The US Mexico and other nations have all reported on the influx of illelgal immigration from Mexico to the US. Even the Mexicans acknowledge it lol. Meanwhile, its only the Indian politicians who go on about this so called illegal Bangladesh immigration problem with only them complaining about it lmao. The US is leagues ahead of Mexico HDI and money wise while India has an inferior HDI and income. Also, the US regularly detains illegals that dont have papers lol yet the Indian govt cant seem to provide proof of their illegal migrants
You wanting something to be true wont make ur propaganda true lmao you need facts which you dont have. The BD government has asked for their info many times but they didnt get anything in return lmao
Did you even read Razib’s blurb about Indian stats being an average over several subnations?
There are cities and states in India that are better than BD in all economic and human development indicators. No shit poor Bengalis would move to Switzerland, but that’s almost impossible, so the bird in hand is to illegally migrate to Indian cities which are no Switzerland but have better prospects than anywhere in BD.
Please don’t argue with people’s lived experiences. They may be anecdotal but not untrue.
Also, I think things have rapidly changed over the years. Maybe I should try searching for the 2022 equivalents for this charts?
And yeah lol doctors per capita is pretty useless when a country like Bangladesh with far lower per capita doctors has a higher HDI and life expectancy than you. ALso, Razib, did you forget about the infant mortality rate or do you just not think much of it as a biologist?
The current infant mortality rate of BD is lower than India and Pak also. 22.6 in BD compared to 27 in India.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/infant-mortality-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20infant%20mortality%20rate,a%204.28%25%20decline%20from%202020.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/infant-mortality-rate#:~:text=The%20current%20infant%20mortality%20rate,a%203.61%25%20decline%20from%202020.
Looks like the higher doctors per capita thing isn’t helping much
My intuition is that the Physicians graph has the population density confounder. The higher the % of population living in dense cities, the lower the physicians / 1k people metric (scale efficiency).
also Razib you did say you worked in biology so this may have been deliberate but did you forget about the infant mortality rate or do you just have you own opinions on it?
Because as of 2022, Bangladesh has an infant mortality rate of 22 compared to India that has a significantly higher rate of 27, despite the big differences in doctors per 1k people along with a higher HDI and longer life expectancy. I’m guessing the Bengali doctors are generally more competent, it seems, statistically.
But yeah, I think gender ratio is important too. Bangladesh has more women than men even in the younger cohorts. India on the hand is overwhelmingly male. The rates of abortion of female babies in India is insane. I do think Bangladesh needs to work on the other issues too.
On the West Bengal thing, I found out a while back that this dude I thought was Bengali(Bangladesh) was actually from India lol I was so surprised because his mom and my parents were friends and stuff growing up cuz we lived in the same area. He looks pretty Bangladeshi, not Indian, tbh
It really depends on the class. I don’t expect Indian Bengali descendants of the Zamindars of East Bengal to have a particularly favourable view of us lmaooo
It’s very cringe when South Asian nationalists get smug over their country/state having a $2700 GDP per capita compared to $2500 per capita for another state/country.
As stated at the beginning of the article, by a combination of political geographies and the application of the dictum “the average represents no-one”, we tend to gloss over the best and worst performing regions in South Asia (Akhand Bharat).
There are three outstanding health, mortality and maternal indicator zones – (Kerala+TN+Sri Lanka), the NorthEast and a zone in the Lower Himalayas consisting of Himachal, Uttarakhand and Punjab.
The worst performers are the Gangetic continuum (including Bangladesh) and the NorthWest (Pakistan).
The zone of (Kerala+TN+Sri Lanka) is head and shoulders above every other region on HDI and health indicators. Chennai is THE medical tourism destination for Asia and Africa – the very first Public Health Act was passed in the erstwhile Madras State.
The zone of (Kerala+TN+Sri Lanka) is head and shoulders above every other region on HDI and health indicators.
Don’t know about “head and shoulders above”, but relatively better, yes. Though such trajectories may change. The south was poorer in the early and mid 20th century. Lots of people, including my folks, went north for better job opportunities.
If this zone were ever to become a separate country, people from there would likely engage in the same kind of dick-measuring contests that seem to animate the likes of Pencilman (what an apt handle name!)
(In case people jump on me, my ancestry is Tamil.)
@Pandit Brown
Only an excel approach to metrics will give you “relatively better”. There is marginality at work here. The interaction effects show a completely different picture.
If you look on the ground, there are zero South Indians traveling to Bangladesh for medical treatment. The traffic is all in the opposite direction….head and shoulders above.
Again it’s the typical Indian “fake modesty” at play here. If only a segment developed the voluble quotient of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis…..
Again it’s the typical Indian “fake modesty” at play here. If only a segment developed the voluble quotient of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis…..
are you joking? indians, mostly men, never shut the fuck up about everything happened in India.
my understanding is that the stereotype is south indians are less voluble than people from the north.
(what you say about medical tourism seems correct tho)
@Razib
The Indian intellectual complex (Nehruvian Brahmin) is fully self-degrading. It has been noted by all and sundry. Decades of “poverty entrepreneurship” have evolved a certain academic mentality that cannot but rank India with sub-saharan Africa only.
Especially with Muslim neighbours, the Nehruvian complex wishes to portray the Hindu as the subaltern in need of Islamic egalitarianism.
The Indian you are referring to is the “Internet Hindu/OBC ” who tries to outcompete his social superiors with some legit numbers but deafening volume levels.
I think an under-discussed challenge for South Asia is the relatively weak trade integration. This is also an issue for most of Latin America like Brasil, Chile etc.
Typically, neighbours trade most with each other. Look at Mexico’s trade partner (USA 70%) or Germany’s trade partners (mostly other Europeans). The single biggest trade partner for Vietnam or Korea is China. Increasingly, now even these smaller Asian countries are tightening ties with each other:
https://en.qdnd.vn/economy/news/vietnam-to-become-rok-s-third-largest-trade-partner-547875
Yet in South Asia, the biggest trade partners are often far away. The hope is that India can act as a focal point, but given the enmity between it and Pakistan that does seem unlikely. Bangladesh also has surprisingly low trade integration with India, which is harder to defend. There should have been a pan-South Asian trade pact long ago.
Given how Sri Lanka has collapsed and Pakistan is on the verge, I’m not too optimistic about this. Even Bangladesh is now seeing its international FX reserves being fritted away. India is looking to sign free trade deals but characteristically mostly with advanced nations like Australia, UK, EU etc.
I don’t think trade integration would help much. I mean India itself is a giant free trade area and the country is still poor. Adding Bangladesh and Pakistan won’t change the figures all that much.
Ill wait for actual proof lmao the Indian govt cant seem to provide any proof to the BD administration. Even the Mexicans acknowledge the illegal immigration that takes place and the US govt detains many of them so thats a false equivalence. Also its the us compared to honduras mexico etc. INDIA has a lower HDI than Bangladesh lmao so its not even remotely comparable.
It’s hard to deny illegal immigration from Mexico into the US in the face of copious video evidence of people crossing, for example, the Rio Grande or the Sonoran desert. Nothing of the sort (or the scale of migration) exists on the India-BD border.
You could be right that there are few (or no) illegal crossings from BD into India these days, but it definitely seemed like a thing a few years ago. As I mentioned in my previous comment, I’ve interacted with some of those folks in both Delhi and Bangalore.
Regarding difference in HDI: you are looking at this through a “first-world” perspective. In reality, relative opportunity matters, however low. It’s like osmosis. Both Nepal and Bihar (+ Jharkhand) are piss-poor and have been so for a fairly long time. Yet, when I grew up in the latter, Nepali laborers and servicemen were quite common there. Explain that!
Anyway, as I’ve said earlier, I have no problem with illegal immigration on principle. I’m sort of an open-borders person. If I were Sheikh Haseena (or AMLO), I’d just shrug and tell my counterparts in India or the US respectively to deal with it.
Also, Bangladesh is cleaner with better sanitation and almost non existent open defecation from the UN and USaid stats unlike India where the rate is in the 20s so bangladesh is not as filthy as India factually speaking
There are also more women than men in BD unlike Indias extremely sexist and dangerous society. Zero idea where the pluck comes from considering the shit yall do to girls even cows have more rights than women in India lmao.
Then you got the endless kvetching with absolutely zero sources to back up the claims which would make sense considering the Indian government has never been able to provide proof of identity and identification etc of the so called illegal migrants for decades to the Bangladeshi leadership while the US actively detains illegals all the time and the governments of mexico honduras etc are aware of it. They also have good estimates but more importantly people know. Only Indians seem to be sspreading this muh illegal intruder bs thing hilarious
It really depends on the class. I don’t expect Indian Bengali descendants of the Zamindars of East Bengal to have a particularly favourable view of us lmaooo
chill on the insults or I’ll ban you. i know you are keeping yourself under control, but I’m not going to tolerate this turning into a shit tossing fest from the beginning.
also, the insult is weird. my family were landlords. what’s wrong with that? are we Marxists now?
Lol. Yeah I wasnt insulting you or those zamindar descendants Razib. Many of those Hindu zamindar types literally had to run in the middle of the night leaving behind everything they owned in 1947. I was just saying that those guys probably wouldnt have very nice thinfs to say about us.
fwiw, my father’s maternal grandfather was a brahmin landlord and factory owner. i advise you someday to stop thinking about “us vs. them,” because you might be surprised what that really is. i find your parochial attitude as unpalatable as that of the internet hindus that show up here. but I guess that’s something you share with them, perhaps your common culture.
Lol in general maybe ur right about my parochial worldview but in this case I was actually pretty chill I brought up the class divide to talk about the point regarding if people from BD and West Bengal folks get along. I doubt the people who have lost everything of theirs in one country will have a lot of affection for them. Not really anuss vs they thing per se
do you know any bangals?
my cofounder at my startup is the child of refugees from jessore (he grew up WB). he is quite fond of bdesh. (he likes shootkee so…)
p.p.s. his paternal grandfather was murdered in communal riots in jessore
There are also more women than men in BD unlike Indias extremely sexist and dangerous society.
again. average. what has punjab to do with kerala?
this is the kind of thing that’s totally discreditable to the argument.
The basic sanitation numbers above are surprising.
I see other desis throwing shade, but India seems to have caught up.
@bhimrao – general perception tends to lag behind reality. Many people still think the world is headed into an Malthusian trap with an endless increase in population .
understanding is modi admin pushed on the sanitation issue…
Dont know if anyone noticed SL does not have data after 2005 for teenage marriages (below 15).
However, pre marital sex is quite common, The average age for women to get married is 24. Teenage pregnancy (defined as pregnant before 19) is about 6.5% in 2009. In 2017 teen pregnancy was 4.6%. In the US it is 16%.
consistent declining trend in pregnancies among women less than 19 years of age was observed from the year 2000 (8.1%) to 2006 (5.4%). Marked inter district variations were noted. The highest percentage of teenage pregnancy was among the Sri Lankan Tamils. The rural sector showed the highest percentages while the estate sector showed the lowest. High percentage of illegitimate births in the estate sector was noteworthy.
I think the high teen pregnancy in Tamil Areas was probably an artifact of the war. Girls probably got themselves married and pregnant to prevent being recruited by the LTTE. The LTTE was notorious for conscripting child soldiers.
Are the teen pregnancy numbers higher in US, because the govt supports teen mothers. ?
* Prevalence, trends and district differentials in teenage pregnancies, Fernando et al 2011. JOURNAL OF THE COLLEGE OF COMMUNITY PHYSICIANS OF SRI LANKA Volume 16, No. 02, December 2011
The Indian intellectual complex (Nehruvian Brahmin) is fully self-degrading. It has been noted by all and sundry. Decades of “poverty entrepreneurship” have evolved a certain academic mentality that cannot but rank India with sub-saharan Africa only.
the final pagan generation.
Better GDP Wars than other types of wars.
I think it’s a net good for human collectives to argue/whine/diss each others on who has the bigger Economy. If it pisses someone off the easy answer is well, Have the Larger Economy and you win. If its so easy or meh shouldn’t be a challenge.
But it is not easy in reality. The only country India can be compared in the world is really China and vice-versa and the comparison there devolves in Indians becoming akin/similar/sort of like Pakistanis get with India/Indians.
And on top of that most Indians aren’t even aware how large the gap to China actually is fundamentally now. The number lacks nuance of what it actually means.
Funny to see Bengalis flexing so much for a country with $2700 GDP reliant on single industry and no real army. This GDP flexing trait and stat padding seems to be quite the trend amongst various Indian groups.. especially the ones that considered themselves lower in hierarchy (for whatever reason they base this on skin color). Guys let history play out, this is just the first session of a 5 day test match and some are celebrating like they have won decisively after a minor advantage.
you seriously think it’s a demerit that a nation doesn’t waste it’s time and energy on geopolitical games when it may have issues feeding its own populace? talk about a values different.
@Qureshi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOXEsu4xt7M
Pakistan’s Economy – Problems and Prospects | Dr. Miftah Ismail and Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy
—
idk why even Chad Pakistanis like Miftah celebrate ‘manpower export’ as if it is something to be proud of.
—
“the first session of a 5 day test match”
The only advantage(??) Pakistanis believe they have are numbers. Even in a 10 day match, Pakistan will still at best be 1/4th India’s numbers.
Pakistanis pretend that they engineered this situation, as if they have thought this through and made choices to get here or have gotten extremely lucky, and now due to the very natural dynamics of the system they will get glory. I believe this confidence is because Pakistanis have never really tackled any real problem, they are just lazy and it is cheap to think like this. They don’t even try to make things better, run to Canada and then resume this nonsense.
The love Indians have for India is qualitatively different from the way Pakistanis love Pakistan. This shows in how both countries mourn their partitions (47 and 71).
—
The only way forward for Pakistan is Imran Khan. Pak army will destroy that country.
—
“The love Indians have for India is qualitatively different from the way Pakistanis love Pakistan.”
very insightful. you know what – the reason lies in their respective religions. hinduism is strongly tied to the land of india. hindus revere its rivers, mountains, forests, the entire flora and fauna. all their holy places are in india.
paksitanis follow a confessional religion; an ethereal belief system detached from the land except the holy city of mecca. no wonder they dont really love their motherland with the same intensity as the indians.
in fact i would go even farther and claim that if the choice in front of a pakistani was to save either mecca+madina or pakistan in a nuclear holocaust, they will readily sacrifice pak for their holy cities.
Yes, I agree. But we risk being self-congratulatory. Let history play out… Pakistan has millions of patriots, they just love their country differently than us.
I believe the newness, pretentiousness, and ‘foreign-ness’ of ‘klisht’ Urdu is also one of the reasons. There is something really ‘odd’ about this language.
Only native language speakers can ever properly love a land. Without the local idioms, proverbs, … how can you love something?
Bhimrao
Urdu is actually the older and more proper version of Hindi. Hindi is the new language ( if it’s even distinct from Urdu which it is not) with its tatsam Sanskrit loans needlessly inserted to make the language unintelligible. The word Hindi comes from Farsi. (The word Hindu comes from Farsi too) The langauage cannot be spoke intelligible without the use of Perso/Arabic loanwords (and these days, add in English loan words – another foriegn language). It originated in Delhi and spread to centres of powers in Lucknow and Hyderabad. However rural locals (95% of the population) spoke their respective local languages like Bhojpuri/Braj/Haryanvi etc Those “locals” now increasingly speak Hindi or English – foriegn languages. Question their love for the country without their mother tongue lol
I would argue that actually it’s easier to love one’s country when you speak a language that is heavy on poetry. Pakistan got some good patriotism evoking Urdu songs that cemented nationalist tendencies. Don’t think those songs would exist in any other langauge.
“Urdu is actually the older and more proper version of Hindi. Hindi is the new language”
Agree to disagree. Can’t debate this endlessly. When I see a Pakistani drama on ARY at my local barbershop, I know I am right.
“( if it’s even distinct from Urdu which it is not) with its tatsam Sanskrit loans needlessly inserted to make the language unintelligible.”
I am from Bundelkhand + lower-Awadh, I do see some of what you are talking about. Again, can’t argue this endlessly.
In Bundeli there are songs about Alha-Udal, who fought Prithviraj’s invasions. Plenty of songs about resisting excesses of Mughals and on how Sher Shah Suri was killed…
These things just don’t translate well to Hindi.
“The word Hindi comes from Farsi. (The word Hindu comes from Farsi too)”
This makes little difference. Hindu comes from Sindhu, …
“However rural locals (95% of the population) spoke their respective local languages like Bhojpuri/Braj/Haryanvi etc”
Braj/Bhojpuri/Haryanvi/Khadi-Boli are Hindi’s dialects. But Pakistan’s Punjabi and others are not as closel related to Hindi.
“Question their love for the country without their mother tongue lol”
I do question the love of Indians who exclusively speak in English and live in SoBombay, SoDelhi. Indians can be a very wannabe people and speaking exclusively in English is often the first symptom. I also question love of 1.5-2nd gen coconuts raised abroad. People talk tall, may even be religious, but will they do something for country/community? highly unlikely.
“I would argue that actually it’s easier to love one’s country when you speak a language that is heavy on poetry.”
I didn’t mean poetry. No one reads poetry. The ones who do usually immigrate…
“Pakistan got some good patriotism evoking Urdu songs that cemented nationalist tendencies.”
Yes. Some are very good.
“Don’t think those songs would exist in any other langauge.”
The only ‘regional’ language that have tried it is Bengali. They do a good job.
Who do you think is more likely to die for country? and love it more?
A English speaking Bong from Kolkata or a Bengali speaker from Bolpur?
A Punjabi raised in Lyalpur who can speak Punjabi or Urdu speaker from Hyderabad? I believe the Punjabi will plant his boots in his soil and die. Any Mojahir who can, will eventually move to the west. Not every able Punjabi will move.
For one or the other reason, ‘weird shit’ gets preserved in regional languages. When things are translated, only stories confirming to the morality and mores of when they were translated make it through. That is why modern ‘Rajput Rap’ only sings about Rana Sanga, Rana Pratap, … about Bose, and Bhagat Singh and Shivaji,… but not about hundreds of other ‘regional heroes’ who died doing some Hatim-tai type weirdo shit.
@S Qureshi
> Urdu is actually the older and more proper version of Hindi. Hindi is the new language ( if it’s even distinct from Urdu which it is not) with its tatsam Sanskrit loans needlessly inserted to make the language unintelligible.
This gets me so mad.
This is Khusrow –
एक थाल मोती से भरा। सबके सिर पर औंधा धरा।।
चारों ओर वह थाली फिरे। मोती उससे एक न गिरे।।
(आकाश)
खुसरो की एक पहेली।
Tell me if this is Urdu.
Its even funnier because Pakis are even poorer and literally a Subsaharan African tier basketcase LOL lets see what Pakistans HDI and Gdp is cuz its not even close to 2750 its actually 1500.
Maybe the Pakis should divert some of its military resources to feed its starving populace. Oh wait they cant cuz their army runs their shit kek. Having a big army wont change the fact that Pakistan is a fucking shithole of the worst kind.
Also keep coping with cricket lmao idgaf about that literal garbage sport. Also its nice to see that the Pakis jerk off over skin color as is expected of them lmao this loser brings up skin tone because his muh fairskinned brethren are a punch of brokeys with no future so hes gotta cope with light skin
i laughed…but be chill please.
Cricket is an excellent game.I wish Rohingyas go back to Bangladesh.
“the first session of a 5 day test match”
Ditto for Afghanistan. Pakistanis did some random shit, now are getting buttfucked by Taliban. Really retarded zero sum games IMO.
Then there will be random Pakistani ‘geo strategists’ all over twitter/reddit/pakdefence making convoluted stories…
Itne hi kaabil ho toh kabhi rail line bhi bicha liya karo, badhiya car-waar banao, …
IMO North Indians and Pakistanis should learn atleast something from Bangladesh.
Guys, the most important part is the fertility chart. Countries with $2,500 GDP per capita now have fertility equal to the countries that have $40,000 GDP per cap. If you think, this is not an issue then soldier on.
Pakistan’s economy is fundamentally fucked, firing only on one cylinder when 7 others are down, since the very beginning – due to elite capture, feudalism, military rule, perpetual wars, lack of abundant natural resources, etc etc. What a great achievement it is then that India and Bangladesh have surpassed Pakistan’s GDP per cap after 75 years. And suddenly start flexing. I’ve been using the internet since 1998 and never did I ever see such a flex from Pakistanis when the opposite was true. (Pakistanis did make fun of lack of sanitation in India, but that they still do) This is why it’s all so amusing to me.
Just chug along, things may change in the next 15-20 years again.
@Pencil Man,
“Also keep coping with cricket lmao idgaf about that literal garbage sport.”
Yeah but entire Bangladesh does.
“Also its nice to see that the Pakis jerk off over skin color as is expected of them lmao this loser brings up skin tone because his muh fairskinned brethren”
Where did I start the discussion on skintone? I’m merely replying to people bringing our skin color in discussion mockingly.
“Bhimrao
>The love Indians have for India is qualitatively different from the way Pakistanis love Pakistan. This shows in how both countries mourn their partitions
Indeed, Pakistanis don’t mourn 1971, because there is very little in common between Pakistan and Bangladesh save for Islam – and for both sets of population, Islam is more of an identity than a religion (this is historical baggage from the times when people lived with Hindus).
Indians seem to apparently mourn losing it’s fair colored population. Otherwise they would have integrated Bangladesh back into India in 1971. I didn’t believe in all these theories about skin color but subconsciously they are true. Large part of the Indian population thinks like this.
—–
Pakistan army has both united and divided Pakistan. I think the usefulness of their autocratic ways is now over. They have played their part in directing the formation of a Pakistani identity, now their interference is just harming the country.
—
TTP carrying out lone wold attacks against frontier policeman is just a minor nuisance in the grand scheme of things. The future of Afghanistan looks bleak, and ISI has enough leverage to make it even bleaker if the Taliban don’t play ball. Already their are rumors of rifts between the Taliban’s Kandahari faction and the Haqqani faction over the recent women education/work ban. Also, ISIS is always knocking and Pajshiris can also be employed. I don’t worry about the western borders much, only worry is if generals are busy playing game of thrones in Pakistan and their attention is diverted from security.
I meant collateral damage. Pakistani ‘Geostrategy’ kinds are very blase about fellow countrymen dying or suffering.
The GDP war between India and Bangladesh is a touchy topic. Here are a few relevant things that are not widely known.
1. Organizations like IMF and World Bank do not collect the primary data that is necessary to calculate things like GDP or health related indices. When IMF or World Bank says the per capita income of Bangladesh is 2800 nominal dollars it just means that the per capita income of BD is 2800 USD according to the data they received from the government of Bangladesh. The same holds for life expectancy, hunger index and all health related parameters.
2. Bangladesh is a one party communist state and represents Orwell’s 1984 better than any other South Asian country. All the data related to the economy and society are managed by an organization called BBS (Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics). For things related to agriculture there is also an organization called the Department of Agricultural Extension. Both are govt. entities and have no independent power.
3. It’s possible to have crude estimates using ground level data that can not be tampered by the Bangladeshi government. All of them suggest that the per capita GDP of BD is around 1400 USD (nominal), about half of what BD govt. claims.
If anyone is interested in the technical details, please let me know.
Do you think Bangladesh is statpadding GDP figures because it incorporated women in formal workforce, while women participation rate in formal workforce in Pakistan and India is relatively lower? Those women at home still do work (food, child-rearing, politicking etc), just unpaid and unaccounted.
details
Here are the details of one such estimate.
Since most people have some idea about the prices of common items, when a corrupt state wants to project a fake per capita nominal GDP figure it has only three options : inflate the production volumes, deflate the population figure or use a fake exchange rate. If we look at the Bangladeshi data, it’s quite clear that Bangladeshis consume an unrealistically large amount of food. An average Bangladeshi consumes about 280 kg of food grains (rice plus wheat plus pulses) although no other country crosses the 200 kg mark. Per capita calorie consumption in BD is 3800 kcal, 40 percent higher than the corresponding Indian figure. Assuming Indians and Bangladeshis have similar BMI this translates to a 30 cm difference in height. As Bangladeshis are not bigger than Indians in reality, the only plausible explanation is that BD govt. is using a combination of the first two options to inflate the per capita GDP by 40 percent.
We should also note that BD govt. controls the entire dollar market. In such cases the state can easily create a fake exchange rate by taxing imports and subsidizing exports at a high rate. Now the dollar prices of almost all the essential imported items like rice, wheat and sugar are higher in BD compared to India by 50 percent or more, even after taking transportation costs into account. This indicates that BD govt. is also using the third option and the real exchange rate is 50 percent higher than the official rate.
We combine these two observations and deduce that the per capita nominal GDP of BD is inflated by a factor of 1.4 times 1.5 = 2.1.
Half asleep,
Can you post the sources for this? Especially the stuff about the calories.
Anyways, I don’t see how this disproves the per capita numbers, all governments control the informationa and data about their economies lol this isn’t exclusive to Bangladesh, China etc. This sounds like sour grapes from an Indian tbh, which is actually quite a common trope as we’ve seen so far haha.
Using things like height is a terrible proxy for this btw and the way you’ve used it is not even close to scientific. Vietnam has a much higher HDI, GDP per capita, and development than India Bangladesh Pak etc yet the average Vietnamese male is 5’4. By your logic, their numbers are also fake. Same goes for the Japanese, who are actually more developed than many Euro nations but they are 5’7 on average(which would make them the shortest in Europe), meaning that their GDP numbers are also, in your eyes, according to your faulty logic, fake.
Seriously, this is the textbook definition of sour grapes lol. Things like height are impacted by region (Northern populations can be taller/tend to be), wheat heavy heights, consumption of animal proteins and dairy consumption. Bangladesh consumes very little meat per capita, though it is not a taboo. This affects things like height moreso than “MUH ORWELLIAN BANGLADESHI CONSPIRACY”
Some comments that I post with links usually get filtered out I’ve found so IDEK if this comment will be visible but here goes…
This study conducted on Dhaka University students back in 2018 seems to suggest that the average Bengali male is around 1.66 m or 166 cm. 519 men were tested, along with 192 women. Go to page 3, “Results” to find out about the data.
http://ijses.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/610-IJSES-V2N4.pdf
I’d say a 5’6 average for young adult males born and raised in Bangladesh is fairly accurate from my anecdotal observations imo. The ones that tend to be really freakishly short are those of the 1970s 1980s generations/cohorts.
I’d say Bengalis my age are 5’8ish on average, many of us weren’t born and raised in Canada, like me for example I came to Canada at age 5.
Development is a harder game in India compared to Bangladesh. Having a robust “civil society” (in other words, hordes of rabid NIMBY activists), strong organized labor (which prevents poor wages and working conditions required to attract investors), and a lot of political energy going into sorting out centuries-old blood feuds mean not much is left for development.
I would not be surprised to see us lag behind them until the 2100s or so. That does not make me happy, but I recognize that we have a harder burden to bear than most, so I do not worry with comparisons to Bangladesh or Vietnam that come up regularly on Twitter.
Oh my second favorite people after the Dravidians , the bongs !
The comments section seems to be a cesspool of supremacists of different varieties. Though never really thought that I would ever meet a “Bangladeshi nationalist”.
I guess there is always a first time.
GDP numbers dont give the full picture. a lot depends on the general feel of the country. by and large, india is the best place to live in if the choice is limited to south asia.
the small civil liberties we take for granted in india are not universally available in south asia. one needs to be able to relax with a beer in the evening after a hard day of work. one needs to be able to vent off against one and sundry – politicians included – without having to look over one’s shoulders. you can’t do these things in pak and bangla. and the excessive religiosity in pak is added suffocation. you can literally get lynched for accidently tearing up a wrong piece of paper.
i used to like sri-lankans. i thought they were pretty chilled, till they surrounded 40,000 civilians who were caught up in the war, and murdered them all. they are plain bastards for me since then.
It is true that developing a state while maintaining civil liberties is hard, india took a harder path but it made many compromises even on civil liberties. so, while the path it took is harder, there is no reason to believe it will benefit from that. no free speech on religious issues, so it is actually worst of both worlds, no benefit of being liberal and no benefit of being autocratic leading to faster development.
i used to like sri-lankans. i thought they were pretty chilled, till they surrounded 40,000 civilians who were caught up in the war, and murdered them all. they are plain bastards for me since then.
LTTE Tamil propaganda. No different from what the Sikhs / Khalistanis claim of 17,000 killed in the 1984 Sikh Massacre.
Then there was the IPKF war crimes in Sri Lanka.
It perpetrated a number of human rights violations, including rapes and massacres of civilians. Several neutral organisations pointed out that the Indian Army acted with scant regard for civilian safety and violated human rights. This led to considerable outcry and public resentment within Sri Lanka as well as India, especially in Tamil Nadu
These include complicity in the incidents such as Valvettithurai massacre in which on 2, 3, and 4 August 1989 over 50 Tamils were massacred by the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Valvettithurai, Jaffna. In addition to the killings over 100 homes, shops and other property were also burnt and destroyed
From October 1987, the IPKF commenced war on the LTTE in order to disarm them. During this conflict, the IPKF raped thousands of Tamil women.[37] One IPKF official excused these rapes by stating the following: “I agree that rape is a heinous crime. But my dear, all wars have them. There are psychological reasons for them such as battle fatigue.”
Another notable incident was the Jaffna teaching hospital massacre on 22 October 1987. Following a confrontation with Tamil militants near the hospital, IPKF forces quickly entered the hospital premises and massacred over 70 civilians. These civilians included patients, two doctors, three nurses and a paediatric consultant who were all in uniform. The hospital never completely recovered after this massacre.[33][34][35]
The IPKF was also accused of complicity in murder of Sinhalese civilians. The then Sri Lankan government accused the Madras Regiment posted in the Trincomalee district of complicity, although the Indian officials denied responsibility, they withdrew the Madras Regiment from Trincomalee district.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots
Scorpion Eater
India trained the LTTE killers to destabilize Sri Lanka.
When the LTTE started attacking the IPKF retaliated by raping and killing Tamil Civilians
The LTTE then came to India and killed your PM Rajiv Gandhi.
Isnt Karma wonderful.
murdered them all. they are plain bastards for me since then.
Bastards or not India got its just just desserts. A through thrashing by the very people, the LTTE whom India trained.
The worst defeat in Modern Indian history.
paksitanis follow a confessional religion; an ethereal belief system detached from the land except the holy city of mecca. no wonder they dont really love their motherland with the same intensity as the indians.
modern nationalism emerged in Christian Europe. there is no problem with confessional religion, in particular protestantism, and hypernationalism.
“modern nationalism emerged in Christian Europe. there is no problem with confessional religion, in particular protestantism, and hypernationalism.”
i see it from a different angle. european hypernationalism developed when they dialed down on their christian identity and started giving precedence to the ties of blood, language or ancestral lands (for e.g. revolutionary france or nazi germany). christianity was really a check upon run-away hypernationalism.
pakistanis are still in reverse gear. they keep doubling down on their inslamic identity. there still is no real rooted-in-the-soil kind of nationalism in pak.
case in point – gandhi had gambled on the assumption that jinnah would never divide india if he really was a nationalist. (he actually said that publicly). jinnah went ahead and did exactly that.
it all makes sense because all confessional religions were by design meant to create a new community of people that transcends the older ties of blood and language.
comparing islam to christianity has to stop. It is clear that islam continues to behave differently from christianity. so it does not matter any longer where nationalism evolved from or anything else, what matters is this, have all religions moderated to the same degree with respect to criticism of them, rights of religious minorities etc.
The measure of reciprocity is the only true measure. it does not matter whether islam will come to something similar after 500 yrs or 300 yrs. fact is right now, with all the information discovered and available, it is clearly behaving differently. so, they dont believe in dialogue or philosophy or anything as such in modifying their behavior.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBHDcnK60Ws
” Had islamic emirate considered the development and civilization of people as their real aim, then there would have been no need for war to begin with. could have handed over osama to them and given freedom like they demand now. The system was already there, why was the need to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of martyrs?. Allah’s religion does not allow us to accept what those infidels want. Allahs book is mandated by allah’s book….
If they impose sanctions on us, drop a nulcear bomb on us, start a war against us or have any other plan, we are still compelled to implement the commandments of our religion.”
There is no education minister of any other religion anywhere else in the world in the year 2022 says and does this. This is unique. islam is chalking its own path.
willing to accept nulcear bomb over conceding womens rights. who says this. irrespective of how this turns out in the end, this is unique.
Again, I do not mean to say that Pakistanis love their country any less. They just do it in a weird, maybe even modern, less emotional way.
Another example to consider is Bangladeshi Muslims vs Hindus? Who loves Bengal more? Who is more Bengali? Who will produce more ‘Bengali’ literature, songs, music, philosophy? I would say Bengali Hindus.
Pakistan’s people follow Islam and their chosen language is wannabe-Islamic which has relatively weaker connection to the land (relative to Hindi-Braj/Khadi/Bhojpuri connection). Can’t have Basant or revere Indus and be a good Muslim at the same time. Therefore Pakistani nationalism is different. Bangladeshi nationalism is in the middle of India and Pakistan. They at least get the language right.
>When I see a Pakistani drama on ARY at my local barbershop, I know I am right.
You shouldnt be surprised to know that this is how people like Bhagat Singh, Sarvarkar or Nehru also spoke and wrote. You should check out the Urdu ghazals Sarvarkar wrote . You may consider English or Urdu speaking Indians as foreigners but these English and Urdu speaking people literally shaped “Indian” nationalism and delivered independence from the British in one (oops.. two) pieces. People speaking local languages would have never achieved this.
>Braj/Bhojpuri/Haryanvi/Khadi-Boli are Hindi’s dialects. But Pakistan’s Punjabi and others are not as closel related to Hindi.
This is incorrect. These were always separate languages historically. Infact it was only after the independence of India that they were classfied as Hindi. If you are awadhi and your ancestors were rural, its likely that Hindi/Urdu is not your mother tongue. Khariboli dialect spawned Hindi/Urdu.. and it’s quite western shifted.
—-
Coming onto the theory about how people not rooted to the land are never going to fight and die for that land. Sorry to say but this is crap. Mohajirs are over represented in Pakistan army relative to their population. They also defended their turfs in Sindh with extreme prejudice, despite their roots being here only one or two generations. This is better than singing folk songs about resistance but doing jack shit for a thousand years when it comes to actual resistance. Folk songs = not effective. So yes, I don’t make bets when it comes to fighting for your land, English speaking Bong is just as likely to fight a colonizer than a Bengali speaking Bong, and Urdu speaker from Hyderabad is just as likely to die for his country as a Punjabi from Faisalabad. You don’t understand nationalism if you don’t understand this.
Local languages are limited. They don’t promote nationalism, just tribalism. People who are restricted to local languages, at best they will be pawns in the game of big players, at worst they will be crushed after which they will write songs about resistance without actually resisting.
National and international languages evoke national and internationalism, new ideas, new consciousness.
—-
Most people are going to be patriotic to the land they are born as long as they interact with the flora and fauna and the environment around them is not artificially restricted and is somewhat static. This is simply because their formative growing phase and how they interacted with the world is through the lense of the land they were born in and live in. So the ‘love of land’ is natural. You don’t need 200 generations of ancestors to have lived and died on that land to love it.
—
I have mentioned this before and I mentioned this again: people who claimed Hindus are more ‘rooted to the land’ than Muslims.. consider that Sindhi Hindus left overnight to India after partition, without any violence at all. The same happened in South Punjab/Seraiki belt. You also see the same in case of Kashmiri Pandits, left en masse without any large scale violence against them. On the opposite, Indian Muslims in places like UP, Bihar, Bengal, Kashmir valley where there was little violence stayed put in their ‘ancestral lands’. (Only exceptions are Punjab and Jammu where there was violent ethnic cleansing)
So who is ‘rooted to their land more’?
Just because Muslims have a more international outlook, and are not that insular, you based your entire argument on this as to them.
In a Gallup poll, participants are asked ”will you fight for your country”. People who said yes, as follows:
Pakistan 89%
Bangladesh 85%
India 75%.
https://twitter.com/adam_tooze/status/826194914019012608?lang=en
That should answer your question Bhimrao.
KPs and Sindhi traders had lost their fighting spirits millennia ago by delegating the fighting to warriors/farmers. Once the bottom of pyramid no longer followed Dharma, they literally had no base to stand on.
I think the question is not of fighting spirit. Farmers/workers will always stand up and fight for their homeland. I think the question is about the trade-off between internationalism aka ummah vs tribalism. will PK fight for its interests against a future caliphate in case there is a conflict of interest?
I think Hindutva overplays the caliphate issue in Islam and Hindus have always used it to question the loyalty of Muslims. A united caliphate in the Muslim world has not existed after the assassination of the third caliph in 656 CE. This is 1400 years ago. All caliphates after the first 4 were mostly nominal. Did you know that Ahmed Raza Barelvi (Barelvism is the largest sect in South Asia) gave a fatwa against the Ottoman caliph and deemed it’s leadership invalid?
In return, the Hindus usually don’t show loyalty by fighting. As you said, they just say they outsourced the fighting to the Rajputs/Thakurs (Kshatriyas).. who actually fought in Mughal and British armies and gave them Hindustan on a platter.
Im not gonna deny that Muslims don’t have trans nationalist tendencies (ummah). Christianity does as well, it just transitioned into western civilization and now these former Christians have a transnational bond named as ‘the west’ and spreading western values throughout the world. It never made them incapable of fighting for their native land however.
Im not gonna deny that Muslims don’t have trans nationalist tendencies (ummah). Christianity does as well, it just transitioned into western civilization and now these former Christians have a transnational bond named as ‘the west’ and spreading western values throughout the world.
Qureishi, the new religion is Democracy and Human Rights.
Its not the “West”, its the “International Community”
“I think Hindutva overplays the caliphate issue in Islam and Hindus have always used it to question the loyalty of Muslims. A united caliphate in the Muslim world has not existed after the assassination of the third caliph in 656 CE.”
the lack of a united caliphate doesnt mean that muslims didnt have extra-terrestrial loyalties. muslims in british armies were always reluctant to fight fellow muslims in empire’s numerous wars, and this was well known to british. this issue came to a head in WW-1 when britain officially entered into a war against the ottomans. there were numerous mutinies by the muslim soldiers in the british army. the most serious one was the singapore mutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1915_Singapore_Mutiny
as i said before, this is just one example. there were numerous examples of individual muslim soldiers deserting the british army. colonial literature of that period is replete with these references. the only reason the british kept muslims in the army after the war was probably because they were needed to check the hindus.
Qureshi@
I believe you are referring to this barelvi fatwa thread https://mobile.twitter.com/UzairYounus/status/1609057299884302336.
Iirc recently a pk tv anchor also made the same point in context of IK march I.e. except for Sikhs till ranjit Singh, punjabis have acted as collaborators in every incursion of central Asian raiders. Punjabis then turned around and collaborated with British against the afghans. I don’t have any issues if PB/PK choose to be flag bearers of any international “ummah” but PB/PK have a demonstrated record of collaborating with foreign imperiums to extract rent from rest of IN.
sbarrkum@
All imperiums have different ideas undergirding their enterprise viz. human rights (west), egalitarianism (communism, Islam). The common theme though is political, economic , cultural subordination of peripheries to the imperial core.
You are wrong about the SoBo, SoDelhi, SoKolkata angreji bit. Mojahirs will bail. Let history play out .
—
KP ‘no violence’ bit is rubbish Islamist argument. They were forced out. But worry not, this won’t be a sad story, Hindus will return the favor in force.
‘So who is ‘rooted to their land more’?’
Ones who were not forced out by majority? When Hindus decide it’s time to act, they do muscle people out as Muslim Bengalis learnt after Noakhali, and Muslim Punjabis learnt after Rawalpindi.
India is secular and her Muslims are safe because Hindus let them be, in hopes they will learn and reciprocate.
—
I never said Pakistanis won’t fight for their land and country. They just fight for a different thing than Indians.
Love of land is not natural to people who have transnational loyalties. Europeans and Canadians who are letting in Islamic fundamentalists will learn this when Pakistans (and Bangladesh) type partition on religious grounds happen there.
I do not think Ilhan Omar is loyal to the American people.
my comment is not visible
@Qureshi Can you tell me why Pakistan doesn’t have loud Punjabi Nationalists? India,Lanka&Ban have Ethno-Nationalist majoritarians but i’ve never seen a Pak-Punjabi chest beating and declaring Punjabi the National Language of Pakistan. The vocal Punjabi Nationalists on the internet seem to be mostly Hindus/Sikhs.
@Enigma
A simple answer is the British caused this.
Hindustani majoritarians in India are there because British made Hindustani the official language in many states in India. Bengali majoritarians are there, because the British did not make Hindustani the official language there but rather kept Bengali. In Pakistan, Punjab had Hindustani as its official language since 1848. Similar, there are Sindhi nationalists in Pakistan, because the British never made Hindustani official in Sindh.
To add to the previous post, Punjabi Muslims are the biggest winners of partition (minus the partition violence), since historically they were dominated by Afghans and Sikhs but they got rid of both Afghans and Sikhs after 1947. The military and feudal elite already spoke Urdu (thank the British) so there was no need to rock the boat by advocating for Punjabi, as that would in turn raise more calls for other regional langauges to be given same status and could also cause divisions with Punjab itself as to what dialect of Punjabi. So Punjabi Muslim nationalists are Pakistani nationalists now.
Some Punjabis in diaspora are even coming up with weird theories about Indus nationalism to give it a historical cover, although this is not mainstream in Pakistan.
Interesting perspective. First the Sikhs benefit from the decline of Mughal power, but also from the results of the third battle of Panipat which put a check on Maratha expansion into Punjab.
Thereafter, despite the defeat at the hands of the EIC, Sikhs won the respect of the EIC. The Sepoy Mutiny saw the rehabilitation of the Sikhs (and to a lesser extent the Punjabi Muslims) in the eyes of the EIC. 1957 rehabilitated Sikh elites in the Punjab.
And 1947 became a debacle for the Sikhs.
yugoslavia also didn’t have serbian nationalists until the end. the reason is that the state was de facto ersatz serbia. i think there is a similarity with Pakistan. punjabis are the majority ethnicity and they know they implicitly run the show no matter who is in charge. other ethnicities rule and participate at their sufferance. excessive ethnic jingoism would just destablize the equilibrium which is fine for them.
also, i think the idea it’s just the British re: urdu is too much. a lot of Muslims in the subcontinent accepted urdu as their elite language by the 19th century. dhaka was a center of urdu poetry and Muslim elites in bengal often spoke and learned urdu as their first language (at least second). the bengal renaissance was a hindu thing for a reason. the adherence and attachment of Muslim middle and upper classes in bengal to bengali is relatively recent (there was a earlier period of Muslim patronage of bengali, but this declined under the mughals). the reasons are complicated and beyond my understanding. but the Punjab situation is probably the default hypothesis
Since Qureshi brought it up, here is Bhagat Singh on language:
https://dapra.medium.com/what-were-bhagat-singhs-views-on-language-imposition-148ca7571590
I don’t need to say much about Nehru and Savarkar.
Something to think about, Russia (17 mill sq km and 11% of land mass) is twice as big in land area to the next big countries (Canada, China and US each are approx 9 mill sq km and 6% land mass each). I would assume Russia has twice as much or more untapped natural resources.
For us Sri Lankans, next door India is the 7th largest country with 2% land mass,
Sri Lanka is is 123rd in land mass size, (less than 0.0%) smaller than Ireland and bigger then Costa Rica.
A little bit of sarcasm, Sri Lankans have the Napoleon complex. Outsize opinion of themselves, compared to their country size.
https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in-the-world/
@bhimrao
“The Punjab Hindi Sahitya Sammelan had organised an essay competition on the above subject in 1923. It was for that competition that Bhagat Singh wrote this article. The General Secretary of Sahitya Sammelan, Shri Bhim Sen Vidyalankar (now expired) liked the article much and preserved it. Bhagat Singh got a prize of Rs. 50 for this article. ”
And even in this article originally written in Hindi, the use of Farsi loan words is ubiquitous.
When he was in jail (in 1931), he was penning couplets in Urdu and writing letters in Urdu:
https://twitter.com/rekhta/status/844792892786802688?lang=en
Changes nothing about what he actually thought about the matter.
He was 15. Watch what he is doing when he is about to hang
“Indians seem to apparently mourn losing it’s fair colored population. Otherwise they would have integrated Bangladesh back into India in 1971. “
@qureshi. cant stop laughing man. tell me you were joking, or i will seriously start doubting your sanity. so apparently the real defense BD has against indian territorial expansionism is their (supposedly) darker skin. i guess their military brass theorizes in their strategy sessions – “see, as long as we have skins a shade darker than indians, we are safe. just make sure to get enough sun. dont use skin lightening creams… ”
this blog has an unhealthy obsession with physical looks and skin color and genes etc. this is why i rebuked razib earlier in a comment just to trigger him.
i guess this is a reflection of the young age of the majority of commenters. things like physical beauty matters only in young age. once you are over 30 or so, these things cease to matter. so coming from somebody who is most probably > 45 yrs old (deducing from an earlier comment that you have been using internet since 1998), this is really side-splittingly funny.
Scorpion
I’m not 45+. Subtract 10 to 15 from that. Just started using internet forums quite young.
Many things you outlined I n the other post, I already know. Will respond to that later.
But to bring the point home about Indians caring about skin color… this is the only explanation I can find about them mourning the loss of Pakistan. How many Indians do you see mourn the loss of East Bengal? I have seen my fair share of Indians fantasizing about skin color of NW. I have also seen lot of Indians racially degrading Bengalis. This realization came to me during the India vs Bangaldesh 2011 world cup openers. Some Indians i was watching it with commented on the Bangladeshi crowd.. said Bengali girls in the crowd look like maids of our household. This is not comment from Punjabis but gangetic Indians
Obviously people refrain from saying things outright in real life but deep down many think like this. Alternatively, fantasizing Pakistan is also based on the same reason. Don’t tell me the average Indian cares about historical importance of NorthWest. They don’t.
you make some good points that i agree with SE. but you are such a smug fuck (you think you’re smarter than you are), I banned you. if you want to evade it’s up to you, but I’ll ban you again.
‘This is incorrect. These were always separate languages historically. Infact it was only after the independence of India that they were classfied as Hindi. If you are awadhi and your ancestors were rural, its likely that Hindi/Urdu is not your mother tongue. Khariboli dialect spawned Hindi/Urdu.. and it’s quite western shifted.’
This is just not correct. You talk as if I grew up in US and have to win debates to prove what is obvious. The simplest counter examples are Ram Charitmas and Hanuman Chalisa are in Awadhi from 1500s. It is basically Hindi, not very different from how it is spoken today. Awadhi, Maithili, Brajbhasha, Bhojpuri,… are all dialects of Hindi. I don’t get the Bengali Gaudiya Vaishnav aaratis, and I accept Bengali as a separate language.
Punjabi or Sindhi are not dialects of Urdu.
https://hanuman-chalisa-bhajan.blogspot.com/2010/01/shri-hanuman-chalisa-english.html
Here is Awadhi from 1500s… Now how can you lie that it is not Hindi?
Bhimrao.. This is not Hindi.
Hindi/Urdu directly spawned from Khariboli. Braj and Haryanvi are possibly direct ancestors. Awadhi/bhojpuri/punjabi are distant cousins.
You are mistaking modern hindi dialect awadhi and conflating it with historical awadhi so you will find similarities. However this is not ancestor of Hindi.
If there is any other old language that can be called Hindi, it’s probably Braj.
This is Hindi. What can I say beyond what I have said. You just keep obfuscating.
“You are mistaking modern hindi dialect awadhi and conflating it with historical awadhi so you will find similarities. However this is not ancestor of Hindi.”
You are wrong. As we say in Hindi: ‘Haath Kangan ko aarasi kya, Padhe likhe ko Farasi kya?’ the following are all words used actively in Hindi:
Jai,gyan,gun,sagar,Kapi,tihun,lok,ujagar,Ram,doot,atulit,bal,Anjani,putra,Pavan,sut,naam,Mahabir,vikram,Bajrangi,Kumati,nivar,sumati,Ke,sangi,Kanchan,varan,viraj,su-bes,Kanan,Kundal,Kunchit,Kesha,Hath,Vajra,Aur,Dhwaja,Viraje,Kaandhe,moonj,janeu,saaje…
to the point that this is not only intelligible, it is the same thing.
Tulsidas is as intelligible to modern Hindi speakers as Shakespeare is to modern English speakers imo.
They were contemporaries.
So if we want to accept Shakespeare as an English playwright also need to accept Tusli das as a Hindi poet.
Even if the term Hindi itself comes from Persian. This seems to be the same sort of argument that people use for Shaivaite Cholas not being Hindu.
Keep in mind the term Hindi, Hindavi or Hindui is a Farsi term.. this was used by Farsi speaking foriegn Muslims to refer to the language the locals spoke. This in the 13th or 14th century would be Braj (near precincts of Delhi). By the 18th century.. Hindi was distinct from Braj..
This is like if a language doesn’t have a name, it isnt a language.
Till recently we called Bhojpuri – Bhaiyya Bhasa.
If someone speaks in Hindi in East UP, people still say – khadi me bola la – speaks in Khadi Bhasha.
Hindi is from 13th century (or is older). You can listen to Abhishek Avtans’ talk on Brownpundits itself.
If you want to read history of Hindi, read Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla.
Read the book from Hindi to Urdu by Dr Tariq Rehman. You can find it free online pdf. It traces the history of the language in quite detail. I can actually go in detail but it’s a useless argument since the topic is quite complicated. One thing is for sure is that you are mistaking modern Hindi’s local dialect with historical Awadhi. This is a mistake. Hindi & Urdu have literally 99% the same grammar. They have the same origin. They are not even different dialects. Awadhi on the other hand is distant relative, has no *direct* relation with Urdu just like it doesn’t with Hindi.
*groan* Trust the N Indians and Pakis to make this all about them and Hindi/Urdu.
@Razib – could you add the ‘outer fringe’ S Asian nations of Afghanistan, Nepal and Myanmar to the plots as reference? I would say Maldives as well but it’s probably too small to draw any meaningful conclusions from..
—————
Good to see BD do well in the metrics. They’re doing very well given the rather rotten hand they’ve been dealt in terms of geography and demographics. Just like SL, most Indians would wish them well and wish for a joint future of shared prosperity and commerce, this isn’t a zero sum game.
Pakistan on the other hand is a different story, sad as it is the longer the generals spend plotting their geostrategic grand plans with their economy a dumpster fire, the better for India as in this day and age the only way they can truly become a threat is with a serious economy. Not gonna happen though as the worldview of the generals and the Paki elite seems to have crystallised in the Alexander Burns/Great Game/Martial race theory BS fantasy framework.
one of the common fallacies of smart people is they always see the world in a predictable fashion. When in fact, it should be looked at in a probabilistic way. no one would imagine anything from saudis for example over 150 yrs ago. That we dont know shit is important to always know. The important thing is to get rid off evil from the table, the longer it survives, the longer it gets to play in russian roulette and get lucky.
no one imagined over 50 yrs ago after defeat in 1971, that it would get nukes and bankroll its jihad for many decades under threat of nuclear umbrella to the world either.
Made some synthetic coodinates with one of my friend’s admixture results from k23 (he’s from Rangpur) and ran the coords on Vahaduo. The NE:SE Asian ratio was similar to mine, at 5:1. It seems like the Tibeto-Burman in us Rangpur folks was mediated through groups like the Naxi, who also score a 5:1 ratio in the NE:SE Asian thing, from the results I have seen.
Or it could be a multilayered mix but I think ratios do matter here.
For the Bengalis curious, use the VNM Dong Son samples and the CHN Yellow River samples to find out your breakdowns. VNM Dong Son represents SE Asian related ancestry while CHN Yellow River represents Northern Asian ancestry.
At first I thought it was Tibetan, but Tibetans would score far less SE Asian than me and my buddy. Or it could be TIbetan and part of my SE-Asian is just AASI related.
For a moment I thought this was going to an Albion’s Seed type of analysis of various South Asian populations and cultural proclivity.
Also yeah Bengali Brahmins look veeeeery different from us Bengali Muslims and those non Brahmin non-Dalit Bengalis. Kishore Kumar was a Bengali Brahmin and I swear I’ve never seen that phenotype in us, ever.
If you’ve grown up thinking that all of them are generic Bengalis even the Brahmins then you’ll say “oh yeah tons of Bengalis look like that” but those “tons” will just be Bengali Brahmins and not much of non-Brahmins.
It’s the additional Steppe and IVC ancestry they (BengaliBrahmins) have that we (BengaliMuslims/generic) lack, it does show.
In general ofc this is a rule of thumb not an absolute law like most things. Mamata Banerjee is probably the exception, apparently her mother’s maiden name was Gayatri Devi.
Check this video out. An actor by the name of Abir Chatterjee with an interviewer who is Bengali. 0:50 is the moment. The differences between the Brahmin(Abir Chatterjee), a man descended from gangetic migrants from Kannauj, and the local Bengali man is so obvious. The flatter nose, the lips, the eyes and the face shape in the Bengali man is so different.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrgtOtnyTDc
Again no hate. I just like learning stuff about genealogy, phenotype etc. It’s fun.
@PencilMan bro. I assume you are joking with this post. A lot of non-brahmin Bengalis can have a similar face like that of Abir Chatterjee. Even in my hometown in Comilla people on average shows more protruding nose. Bengali Muslims can be quite diverse looking and i’m sure you know that as well. Both guys in the video have typical bengali look imo
Som Goku,
Just lol. Are you posting from Comilla? You have zero idea as to what you’re talking about. i saw a comment from you where you said that your family looks Afghan with no Asiatic influence despite scoring typically. Thats hilarious tbh u actually think your family looks like that but not Asiatic influenced. Are YOU joking? We don’t look Afghan, stop embarassing me.
Ur just one of those brown folks that worship muh Afgans and muh west eurasian lookz. Kishore Kumar is meh looking Abir Chatterjee is good looking but good or bad they still look very unlike us lol
PencilMan bro,
I go to my hometown from time to time therefore I had enough opportunity to observe them in real life. And some of my maternal uncles indeed look like Pathans (It was probably a very old post somewhere when I was new to genetic stuff. I don’t claim anything like that now). But of course, that has nothing to do with Afghan ancestry as I cluster with other Bangladeshis, especially those from Eastern Bangladesh. I don’t know why you are so obsessed with the phenotype difference between us generic Bengalis with Bengali brahmins. The fact is both groups will show significant variation in appearance based on their diverse ancestral origin. The scores/percentage is secondary IMO as only a little %age affects traits. You will find both Iran_N/steppe and AASI-type traits in both groups. Moreover, some will show east Asian influence as well, even in Bengali brahmins.
Son Goku,
There you go again claiming your relatives look like Pathans. LMAO seriously wtf? No they don’t. 99.9999% chance they do not and I’m certain your uncles are not part of that 0.0001%. This is so predictable and so un freaking believably cringe!!
Also, about my “obsession”, this is literally a hobby that I am interested in (phenotype, anthropology, genealogy etc) I’m allowed to be passionate. I’m allowed to be interested and passionate about whatever lol.
The Brahmins that do “look” Bengali like Mamata Banerjee or Saswata Chatterjee will almost certainly have different results and will be the outliers/exceptions. Mamata’s mother also seems to have been a generic Bengali non-Brahmin Hindu woman. I’ve been told by some that many people adopted Brahmin surnames to move up the ladder
PencilMan
One of my uncles was been asked if he’s a Pathan by a Pathan FYI. So There must be some significant semblance. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t look Bengali, because he does look Bengali too. It is shared Iran_N/steppe influence obviously. I hope you got my point here.
I’m glad you have a hobby in phenotype, anthropology, and genotype. We need more Bengalis interested in those fields. However, I’m afraid you are giving a conclusion too early without reasoning adequately with the complex nature of the genotype-phenotype correlation. You said Mamata Banerjee looks Bengali when in reality she looks more like Koch Rajbongshis or Assamese rather than proper Bengali. Nonetheless, I agree that heavy mongoloid countenance can show up among proper Bengalis occasionally. In the same way, a heavy Iran_N/Steppe face can also appear.
LMAO there it is AGAIN AND AGAIN, you uncle does not look “Pathan” HAHAHA wtf is this cope?
Also, Mamata wouldn’t be an outlier in the more East-shifted areas like in Rangpur Division where many of the results are literally like 20% combined Asian on Vahaduo, with g25 coordinates.
PencilMan
It is what others think and there is nothing wrong with it. All people around the world are related to each other in the end. You can say whatever is your opinion, I don’t care. I don’t even care if you think 20% e.asian equals Mamata Banerjee’s look because even people with 25% or more e.asian may show 0% mongoloid in traits. Your unostentatious conclusion is not true to life.
Buddy, you’re a very deluded individual if you think the East Asian doesn’t influence the look but somehow you have “Pashtun” looking people lmao that is quite literally peak delusion
You are not Pashtun. You will never be Pashtun. Neither will your uncle. This is so embarassing lol “my uncle looks Pashtun” which doesnt even make sense because Bengalis are very distant from Pashtuns, I’d accept it if some dude from Iran or something said it fair enough but not fucking Bangladesh.
This is so common on social media from brown people btw, mainly Pakis and Indians ( I dont see Sri Lankans or Guyanese or Carribeans do this as much, ditto for Bengalis but types do exist). I even saw some South Indian girl go like “people think I look Hispanic!!” when she looks like the most averaged face of a South Indian. It’s so weird. there’s no way your uncle looks Pashtun with generic Bengali results, that’s just typical cringe inducing West-Eurasian worship
Pencilman
Again. I dunno why you’re taking the statement seriously. I said and repeated it here for sake of this discussion only. I never claimed it anywhere after understanding Bengali genetics. It is you who brought that notion here. Calm down, I’m not your enemy but one of your Bangladeshi brethren. I read your posts here most of the time, but your topic with Bengali phenotype seemed wrong to me, that’s all. I don’t have any interest to discuss with you about that. Different people will have a different opinions and there is nothing wrong with that. You behave like YOU are the only right person here, which alludes to infantilism.
TFR trends show that Pakistan will eventually converge to a population density on par with India, so to around 1/4 after starting out from a much lower base. This will put enormous stress on their cities, I’m wondering how good the infra planning is, has that been outsourced to the Chinese like in SL? I was till recently under the impression that Paki cities are cleaner and more orderly than their Indian counterparts but looking on YouTube that doesn’t seem to be the case (Karachi looks particularly bad) with the exception of ISL which is to be expected..
————–
Recently visited SL (Colombo and Jaffna) after 5 years, the change especially in Colombo is striking. Still relatively clean and more orderly but saw loads of beggars and slums unlike the last time. Gone is the swagger, the recent hyper inflation seems to have taken a hit on the average SL guy. Almost no Euro tourists yet unlike the last time I was there, but loads of Indian tourists. Surprising number of service staff able to speak some Hindi. Many people looking to save and get out to the ME or wherever, “it’s the most beautiful country but there’s no future” seems to a common mantra.
Stark contrast to India where the lower SES folk always seem to have a positive outlook of the future – interviewer bias maybe?
———–
Would love to visit Dhaka sometime, how easy is it to get around with no knowledge of Bengali?
If Chris Hemsworth could get around Dhaka , just by saying ‘proman dao’ , then you can too.
Siddharth
Recently visited SL (Colombo and Jaffna) after 5 years, the change especially in Colombo is striking. Still relatively clean and more orderly but saw loads of beggars and slums unlike the last time
First I not been to Colombo for ages (since 2019), except for a very very dear friend and classmates funeral. Arrived at around 12, and head back to my sisters in the distant suburbs.
Anyway, lot of the cleanliness and urban beautification was by Gotabaya Rajapakse. Much of urban beautification was done when he was Defense Secy in 2005-2015. He also was the head of Urban Development Authority. Micro managed and after end of the war. used the Army in his cleanliness and beautification projects. Slum dwellers were given housing, in 6-10 storied flats in outer Colombo. Now that Gota is gone, assume they have made their way back to slums, to be closer to daily wage work.
Were your observations of North Colombo, Kotahena and Dematagoda areas. Those areas have always been slummy, industry and wholesale business with housing.
One thing to keep in mind is that SL Urban population is just 20%. 80% of population is rural, with most having electricity and piped water. Much more than India’s 66% rural population.
Out here in rural Sri Lanka not much has changed. The usual complaints of high prices, specially imported basics like milk powder and lentils. Alcohol is up by 20% a few days ago. Almost USD 10 for 750ml. That said a 750 ml of the cheaper hooch is LKR 600 (about USD 1.75). The better hooch, made from fruits is LKR 1000 (about USD 3). Good enough that old childhood friends partner from the US (she is loaded, two houses in SL, who knows how many in US) took 6 bottles of the stuff. Said was going to use if for Sangria and punch. (Something like 60%+ of price of legal booze are Govt Taxes).
Unskilled Labor Daily Wages in this area have gone up very slightly, LKR 2,000 (USD 5.7) for a woman and LKR 2,500 (USD 7) for a guy. Local stuff is still reasonable, includes veggies, meat and fish. Fresh water fish is about LKR 500/kg (USD 1,4) . The legal meat prices (pork, beef and chicken) not much different from Colombo. Beef the most expensive is about USD 5 per kilo). The illegal stuff, venison (deer meat), wild boar are half the price.
These are photos of the area I live. Keep in mind this is the driest regions of SL (less than 1,500mm rain). However, because of canals and reservoirs built by the ancient Sinhalese kings looks lush and green.
Much of Sri Lanka is like this, need to get off the beaten path.
https://imgur.com/gallery/9iv4JTe
Many people looking to save and get out to the ME or wherever, “it’s the most beautiful country but there’s no future”
Mid East employment has been the safety valve for over 2-3 decades. It brings in the biggest foreign exchange (30%). During 2020 and 2021 the Mid sent back workers. Kind of resumed mid 2022. Then halted because of FIFA World cup. Has resumed beginning of 2023. No restrictions for Saudi but reluctance to go there. A house maid gets USD 1,500+ sign up fee for Saudi even before she leaves.
In the other Gulf countries a maid gets USD 500+. Hopefully she saves USD 10,000 out of her wages. Thats LKR 35 lakhs. Enough to build a 600+ sq foot i bed room house with a indoor toilet. The achievable dream of many a housemaid.
WSJ: Ancient DNA Paints a New Picture of the Viking Age
A study of nearly 300 ancient Scandinavian genomes reveals sources of Vikings’ genetic ancestry
Some DNA samples were obtained from human remains in the wreckage of a warship that sank off Sweden in 1676.
PHOTO: LARS EINARSSON
By Aylin WoodwardFollow
Jan. 5, 2023 11:00 am ET
Bones and teeth of ancient Scandinavians excavated from burials, a sunken warship and the sites of a violent massacre have helped an international group of scientists craft an unprecedented picture of the region’s storied Viking culture.
The researchers looked at ancient DNA spanning 2,000 years of Scandinavian history from such remains to piece together a comprehensive look at the movement of peoples into the region during the Viking Age, more than a millennium ago. These genomes are among new means to understand and explore the Vikings’s history and legacy.
The findings, published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Cell, revealed that a surge of people coming into Scandinavia from the British-Irish isles and the eastern Baltic region introduced new genetic information into the Viking population between about the years 750 and 1,099—around the height of the Norsemen’s dynamic era of conquest.
“The so-called Viking Age has always been understood as a time of movement, but the ways in which this has been understood have changed,” said Neil Price, an Uppsala University professor of archaeology who wasn’t involved in the research. “We used to speak of a ‘Viking expansion,’ in which the ancient Scandinavians somehow pushed out into the wider world in search of portable wealth, trading contacts, and lands to settle.”
Yet genetic studies such as this one, Dr. Price said, help demonstrate that “this was a world of movement in all directions—into Scandinavia as well as out of it.”
Archaeological work at Sandby borg, a circular fortified settlement on the Swedish island of Oland.
One of the best explanations for the new findings was that the Vikings raided regions around Scandinavia in part to acquire slaves, according to Mark Collard, an evolutionary anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia who wasn’t involved in the study.
“It is clear from archaeological artifacts and historical documents that they also took captives,” he said, adding that the new study suggests the number of slaves brought back to Scandinavia by the Vikings was enough to influence genetic composition of the region.
The study revealed, too, that primarily females were moved into Scandinavia from the east during this time—which “suggests that the Vikings may have preferentially targeted women and girls as slaves,” Dr. Collard said.
Some of the people coming into Scandinavia may have also been Christian missionaries or monks who voluntarily immigrated, as well as diplomats and traders, according to Anders Götherström, a co-author of the new study and professor of molecular archaeology at Stockholm University.
But these newcomers to Scandinavia didn’t flourish, the genetic analysis showed. Dr. Götherström’s team looked at nearly 300 ancient genomes from individuals who died between the beginning of the first century to the mid-19th century and were discovered in archaeological sites and graves across Sweden and Norway. They then compared those genomes to genetic data from more than 16,600 individuals currently living in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The researchers found that, following the Viking Age, there was a notable decline in Baltic and British-Irish ancestries among Scandinavians. While there remains some genetic influence from these regions today, it is “not as much as we would expect,” Dr. Götherström said.
“The only credible way I can explain that is a lot of these people that came into Scandinavia during the Viking period didn’t build families and weren’t as efficient in getting children as the people who were already living there,” he added.
While ancient DNA is crucial to generating a clearer picture of a region’s history, teeth and bones containing such genetic information are limited. Finding such remains that date to the early Viking era is tricky, as cremation was the common burial tradition in Scandinavia at that time, according to Dr. Götherström.
“So every burial where we’re getting DNA is deviating from what was common,” he said, adding that he believes his team’s analysis is still “getting the bigger picture correct” because of the large number of genomes involved.
The study’s conclusions need to be tempered by the idea that these 300 ancient genomes may not be wholly representative of the region’s overall population, according to Ellen Christine Røyrvik, a geneticist at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many of the genomes used in the new analysis were collected from individuals uncovered in burial grounds, grave fields and churchyards. But some samples came from people who died in unusual circumstances—including sailors from a Swedish warship that sank off the country’s southeastern coast in 1676, and inhabitants of a settlement known as Sandby borg who were likely massacred during an organized attack in the fifth century.
“There is a question of how much you can call it population genomics as opposed to kind of lots of little vignettes,” Dr. Røyrvik said.
Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com
Mamata Banerjee is a brahmin and looks very bengali. (i agree a lot of bengali brahmins look quite different from the average bengali tho)