A sequel to FlyDie on South India. 19 comments, across 6 threads, in this second batch.
The three pillars of caste. Privilege never converged on one varna. Brahmins hold the social pillar, Vaishyas the economic, Shudras the political, and a jati’s rank follows its proximity to each: close to all three makes a Kshatriya, far from all three a Dalit. The Kshatriya is the mediator everyone wants and nobody needs; the Mughals played that part best, and the empire came apart when they stopped.
Varna was always negotiable. The lawbooks rejected one direction of mixed marriage and tolerated the other. Bengal’s Kulin Brahmins wrote jati origin myths to secure their own land grants, and “pure” Kshatriya lineages were invented as needed. The grey areas, he argues, are why caste survived 3,000 years.
Manchus are to China what Mughals are to India. A follow-up to his India-and-China comment. “Han” was a set of practices before it became an ethnicity; Sun Yat-sen, arch Han nationalist, was Hakka. The Yuan never assimilated and lasted barely a century, while the Qing sinicized and endured.
The Deccan blunder. Urban Muslim nobles could be killed and replaced; rural Maratha sardars could not. Aurangzeb’s destruction of the sultanates left the vacuum the Marathas filled. In his verdict, a great general and a bad politician.
What the Mughals took from the land. North India is Vaishnav, he argues, largely through Mughal patronage; even Adityanath’s Nath sect spread on Mughal-era networks. Mughal architecture began at Bayana in Rajasthan, where the chhatri was born from the Nagara mandapa and the Persian canopy.
The environment, not the man. Akbar’s tolerance was no outlier; Ibrahim II of Bijapur ran the same experiment. The conservative turn began in mid-Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb rode the wave rather than made it. Dara was always going to lose.
Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam
Against apologetics. Defending a faith from the outsider’s picture accepts the outsider’s frame; the prior question is whether culture reflects religion or religion reflects culture. Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian-descent Jewish convert who became a fakir, then a yogi, then nothing at all, fits no category the book allows. A Balkans-to-Bengal “Islamic world” cuts non-Muslims off from their own past while making Muslims the foreign other at home.
Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions
How the Rig Veda got written. A king named Sudas, a head priest swapped mid-composition (Vishwamitra out, Vasistha in), and a Battle of Ten Kings won by breaking a dyke; the victory, in his telling, forged the Kuru super-tribe. The fire Agni absorbs from a lake may preserve the memory of a burning Central Asian gas leak.
The Sarasvati was still flowing. The Haryana stretch of the Ghaggar-Hakra kept its Sutlej connection until about 1500 BCE (his source: River and Goddess Worship in India), so the Vedic poets watched a living river decay rather than recalling a dead one. The Indus-side channel had failed a thousand years earlier.
Failing to reject the null. On an Indus-Vedic connection, the evidence keeps failing to reject the null hypothesis. He wanted the link and, as he puts it, learned the hard way that there is little to work with.
Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries
Christianity’s expired advantages. The school-and-hospital edge died when the post-90s economy built better ones, the tribal frontier has closed, and the cult market now belongs to the biggest cult of all, ethnoreligious nationalism. His verdict: a marginal community, useful as a boogeyman.
Mappila means son-in-law. The name once covered Muslim, Jewish and Christian trading communities alike, born of merchants marrying in. The Jewish grandee Joseph Rabban received palaces and a Nair wife from the Chera king.
Kerala’s three-cornered trade. Muslim, Jewish and Christian Mappilas ran the ports of Malabar, Kochi and Travancore while Hindu castes held the politics. Today’s Muslim-Christian friction is Malabar money moving south into Christian territory, class and caste rather than communalism, and he expects migration to break the stalemate as Kerala’s fertility falls.
Religions built for feudalism. The major faiths were designed for a feudal agrarian world, and modern states no longer need to compromise with them. Disillusionment now sorts believers into atheists, the vaguely spiritual, and traditionalists who care more about how religion is practiced than what it believes.
Hinduism was never mostly Brahmanical. Naga cults grew out of monsoon ecology, and Skanda began as a child-devouring Graha. Tantra spread as far as Japan. Bhakti, when it came, was a mercantile movement: merchants financed the sects, and warrior ascetics cleared the highways for them.
How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims
Sanskrit as Medieval Latin. Proto-Indo-Aryan is archaic Latin, Vedic Sanskrit is Classical Latin, Classical Sanskrit is Medieval Latin, and Prakrit is the Vulgar Latin people actually spoke. Classical Sanskrit owed its rise to the Indo-Saka Western Satraps; the Satavahanas preferred Prakrit. His family’s own Ayurvedic lineage ended when a grandaunt fell into a well and his great-grandfather read it as a curse.
Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.
Appearance is not piety. A third of Indian Muslims told Pew they keep no meat restrictions at all, and Urdu is mother tongue to 4 percent of the country against a 14 percent Muslim share. What reads as rising religiosity is urbanization dissolving caste communities, with religious institutions filling the gap.
Bollywood is Sanskrit theatre. Hindi cinema keeps the Natya Shastra plot shape, tragic middle and dance numbers included: Sanskrit drama in vernacular speech, European camera technique, Indo-Persian costume. Its troubles are inherited forms without the theory behind them, and a Hindi belt too plural to give it a core region.
The hijab as a compromise. Purdah once meant a woman could not sit on the veranda or ride a bicycle; the veil was the conservatives’ bargain that let women out of the house without surrendering authority over them. Banning it turned a fading practice into a symbol of resistance.