Author: Razib Khan

Christian conversions in rural India

Razib Khan · December 24, 2021 · 53 comments

Arrests, Beatings and Secret Prayers: Inside the Persecution of India’s Christians:

The Christians were mid-hymn when the mob kicked in the door.

A swarm of men dressed in saffron poured inside. They jumped onstage and shouted Hindu supremacist slogans. They punched pastors in the head. They threw women to the ground, sending terrified children scuttling under their chairs.

“They kept beating us, pulling out hair,” said Manish David, one of the pastors who was assaulted. “They yelled: ‘What are you doing here? What songs are you singing? What are you trying to do?’”

The attack unfolded on the morning of Jan. 26 at the Satprakashan Sanchar Kendra Christian center in the city of Indore. The police soon arrived, but the officers did not touch the aggressors. Instead, they arrested and jailed the pastors and other church elders, who were still dizzy from getting punched in the head. The Christians were charged with breaking a newly enforced law that targets religious conversions, one that mirrors at least a dozen other measures across the country that have prompted a surge in mob violence against Indian Christians.

Pastor David was not converting anyone, he said. But the organized assault against his church was propelled by a growing anti-Christian hysteria that is spreading across this vast nation, home to one of Asia’s oldest and largest Christian communities, with more than 30 million adherents.

The article makes it clear that this is mostly a feature of the “Cow Belt” and due to the conversion of Dalits and the like. This is The New York Times so I view this skeptically, but if this is happening it seems likely a large proportion of Dalits will convert to Christianity since the Hindu reaction here is depicted as literally reactive.

One thing that does cross my mind is that the Hindus in the piece are depicted as aggressive. But the Christians have an ambition of converting most of the population, and once and if they became the majority they would surely not be the gentle flock they are now. It’s sad, but true.

I for one welcome our new Brown overlords!

Razib Khan · December 22, 2021 · 32 comments


Amy Wax is on Glenn Loury’s show going off on Asian immigrants, and to a great extent, Indian American women who play the whole woke game.

First, I myself have written about the representation of Indians/browns among woke activist types. Amy is reflecting a descriptive reality; don’t deny it, it’s true. Though this is especially prevalent among the 1.5 and 2nd generation, there are some immigrants getting in on the game too (though proportionately far less).

Second, I know Amy a bit personally. We’ve met and hung out in real life at a conference. She’s clearly familiar with my work.

Third, to be candid, Amy is a Boomer, and her comments, observations, and sensibilities reflect her generation. If you listen to her earlier conversations she operates in a world of racial black-white dichotomies, which is the world she came up in. She’s trying to integrate other groups, but these are not people she necessarily grew up with, and she’s trying to understand them.

Fourth, don’t doubt her intelligence. She graduated summa in biological sciences and has an M.D. and a J.D.

Finally, to be honest, I find a lot of her structural analysis here kind of lacking, and I think Glenn made some good points. Some of her talking points, like the idea that Indians are conformist and subservient to power, are pretty widely disseminated on the dissident right, but let’s just say a lot of these observations don’t come from a place of detached analysis, as opposed to emotive reaction and fear. Unfortunately, I think Glenn’s suggestion that Indian Americans are just assimilating, very well, to professional-managerial-class norms, is spot on.

All of that being said, no matter what you think of Amy’s analysis between observation and conclusion, I think her endcaps are probably correct. As I noted above, the description rings true. There are these brown cadres everywhere, with fancy degrees and upper-middle-class upbringings, decrying America as a white supremacist terror regime. It’s embarrassing, offensive, and cringe. And, I also don’t think America as a whole will tolerate rule by a brown-faced elite with exotic names and mostly non-Christian religion. Yes, I can see an Indian American President. Until recently, the Supreme Court had three Jewish Justices (with RBG gone and ACB replacing her it’s Jewish to Catholic now). Imagine if there were three Indian Americans. Not sure the populace would be happy seeing those faces all the time and knowing how different they were than the rest of America.

A new way to say generic “Brown People”

Razib Khan · December 10, 2021 · 20 comments

They call it “MASA,” for “Muslim, Arab and South Asian.”

So this is a category that includes Norwegian converts to Islam, Assyrian Christians, and Bhutanese Buddhists.

Also, “South Asians” are now part of two overlapping acronym communities, as we’re already “AAPI.”

Caste in America

Razib Khan · November 18, 2021 · 10 comments

UC Davis quietly added caste to its anti-discrimination policy. Will it cause others to do the same?

Yes, it will. American liberals will now start talking incessantly about caste. Some notes

– <1% of Indian Americans are Dalits from surveys I have seen

– 30-40% of 1.5 and 2nd gen. Indian Americans out marry racially. Most do not, in my experience, in-marry in terms of jati when they marry other Indian Americans

– 25% of Indian Americans are Brahmin, but they are not wealthier or more educated than other groups on the whole. The richest Indian Americans seem to have names like Agrawal from what I have seen in private data

South Asian ancestry in Tajikistan

Razib Khan · November 9, 2021 · 18 comments

Genetic continuity of Indo-Iranian speakers since the Iron Age in southern Central Asia:

To model Tajiks, all 2-ways admixture models were excluded and we obtained one 3-ways admixture model (p-value = 0.49) implying around 17% ancestry from XiongNu, almost 75% ancestry from Turkmenistan_IA, and around 8% ancestry from a South Asian individual (Indian_GreatAndaman_100BP) representing a deep ancestry in South Asia.

…

Finally, we used DATES18 206 to estimate the number of generations since the admixture events. We  obtained 35±15 generations for the admixture between Turkmenistan_IA and XiongNu-like populations at the origins of the Yaghnobis, i.e. an admixture event dating back to ~1019±447 years ago considering 29 years per generation. For Tajiks (TJE, TJY, TJA) we obtained dates from ~ 546 ±138 years ago (18.8± 4.7 generations) to ~ 907 ± 617 years ago (31.2 ± 21.3 generations) for the West/East admixture. We also obtained a date of ~944 ±300 years ago for the admixture with the South Asian population.

Looks like most of the admixture from the Indian subcontinent dates to the period around 1000 AD, when the Ghaznavids were enslaving large numbers of Indians. This ancestry shows up in Afghanistan and eastern Iran.

The Sintashta horses!

Razib Khan · October 20, 2021 · 2 comments

The origins and spread of domestic horses from the Western Eurasian steppes:

Domestication of horses fundamentally transformed long-range mobility and warfare1. However, modern domesticated breeds do not descend from the earliest domestic horse lineage associated with archaeological evidence of bridling, milking and corralling…at Botai, Central Asia around 3500 BC3. Other longstanding candidate regions for horse domestication, such as Iberia5 and Anatolia6, have also recently been challenged. Thus, the genetic, geographic and temporal origins of modern domestic horses have remained unknown. Here we pinpoint the Western Eurasian steppes, especially the lower Volga-Don region, as the homeland of modern domestic horses. Furthermore, we map the population changes accompanying domestication from 273 ancient horse genomes. This reveals that modern domestic horses ultimately replaced almost all other local populations as they expanded rapidly across Eurasia from about 2000 BC, synchronously with equestrian material culture, including Sintashta spoke-wheeled chariots. We find that equestrianism involved strong selection for critical locomotor and behavioural adaptations at the GSDMC and ZFPM1 genes. Our results reject the commonly held association7 between horseback riding and the massive expansion of Yamnaya steppe pastoralists into Europe around 3000 BC driving the spread of Indo-European languages. This contrasts with the scenario in Asia where Indo-Iranian languages, chariots and horses spread together, following the early second millennium BC Sintashta culture.

The paper is open access. Basically the Sintashta seem to have triggered the equine revolution across Eurasia.

Brown Pundits