What’s going on? Will be posting multi-part series on the steppe on my substack.
Also, BP-brand is growing on Clubhouse. Android will come on soon.
Author: Razib Khan
The Mughals!
The Brown Pundits Clubhouse channel hosted a discussion on “the Mughals” yesterday that went on for a while. There seem to be two polarized extreme views
1) The Mughals were great Indians! Long live the Mughals.
2) The Mughals were genocidal colonizers and induced inter-generational trauma.
Most people occupy a position in the middle. As for myself, I think it is clear that the Mughals were to some extent an alien and occupying influence because that is how they viewed themselves more, or less. They were Turanian Muslims of Turco-Mongol provenance. No matter how much Rajput or Persian blood they had, their paternal lineage came down from the Turk Timur. The maternal lineage of Babur was Genghiside. If India had been mostly Islamicized this would have changed. But it wasn’t. Despite the deep cultural synthesis between Mughal culture and that of India and their indigenization of the generations, there remained a connection between ashraf Muslims and Persia and Central Asia. They were not equivalent to Muslim Bengali peasants or Ismaili traders in Gujurat.
And yet the flip side of this is that the Mughals, and Muslims as a whole, in particular Turks, drove change within Indian society. To some extent, the native reaction and response in the dialectical synthesis can only be understood in the light of the Islamic shock. More generally, an Islamicate civilization evolved that extended beyond the Mughals and included the Rajputs and Marathas (reciprocally, the Mughals internalized many Rajput values, but this is to be expected due to their long residence in India and intermarriage with Rajputs).
Those Hindus who are traumatized by the impact of Islam are free to feel this way, but I am genuinely curious about an Indian culture stripped away of Islamic influence. What would that look like? Perhaps Odisha and Sri Lanka might come close?
More generally, the excited and emotional response of both Hindus and Muslims and their inability to engage in epoch茅 makes me think that the prospects for deeper analysis are poor. Emotion has reason by the leash.
The Uber Eats” murder
GoFundMe for Uber Eats Driver Allegedly Murdered by 13- and 15-Year-Old Girls Surpasses $1M. It feels like the 1980s.
Open Thread – 03/27/2021 – Brown Pundits
Been quiet on this blog for a while. Hope the world is quiet?
Did people forget the BP Reddit?
Open Thread – 03/20/2021 – Brown Pundits
What’s going on? Lots of “brown” chat on Clubhouse.
Caste in America!?!?! Don’t believe the hype
Everyone is talking about this piece from Bloomberg, How Big Tech Is Importing India鈥檚 Caste Legacy to Silicon Valley Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology are highly sought after by employers. They can also bring problems from home. If you are not a Bloomberg subscriber using “incognito mode” in your browser should allow you to read it. Two comments:
– The piece is mostly about India. Not the USA or Silicon Valley. To me, this indicates there wasn’t much real material in Silicon Valley to report on
– It seems that the American press is recycling the same incidents and quoting the same experts. There’s no deep scholarly analysis, just anecdotes and assertions
Overall, I think there really isn’t much of an issue around “caste” in the USA. Part of it is the fact that Americans of Indian origin are not representative of the demographics of India. 25% are Brahmin, but for the other groups, there is no variation in income education and income (or not much). I’ve seen the data that consulting firms use that is not widely shared. The selective sieve is strong. There are very few self-identified Dalits. About 1%. It could be these Dalits are on the receiving end of prejudice, but there aren’t that many of them for this to be pervasive.
This is not to deny that there aren’t issues with the Indian American community, which is mostly immigrant and dates to after the year 2000. But it’s not a simple and easy morality story that the media and social justice activists want. So they are manufacturing this, and that really angers me, because I dislike lying and propaganda.
Open Thread – 03/13/2021 – Brown Pundits
A long (paid) piece on Substack, They came, they saw, they left no trace…
except for all of Western Civilization. This is about the genetics of Italy.
My usual 7 PM PDT Friday night chat on Clubhouse will be about the genetics of Italy (Saturday morning India time). this link should work (if you are on an iPhone click it).
What Can Biden鈥檚 Plan Do for Poverty? Look to Bangladesh. The usual Nicholas Kristof thing. That being said it is interesting that when there is talk about Bangladesh’s economic success (relative), a fair number of Indians point out major issues (reliance on the single sector for export). This is all fine…but honestly, it feels l ike sour grapes. In 2020, a horrible year, Bangladesh was #3 in growth in the world (and the fastest large nation).
Going to do an interview with a linguist who studies Proto-Indo-European for my podcast. Interesting how his papers suggest Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic are a clade. R1a FTW!
Update: Someone on the Subreddit found the archives of the original BP site from 2011/2012 (I have the archives in MySQL but haven’t loaded them; we suffered intense hacks from Hindutva in 2012/2013 so moved to blogspot for a while).
Also, BP got a Clubhouse Club! So we’ll do chats there soon.
Political correctness is “just politeness” (for your friends)
Audrey Truschke is mixing it up again with the vilest dregs of “Hindu Twitter”. In response, I tweeted “For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” What did I mean here? Rutger’s unequivocal defense of academic freedom, even unto trolling, shows their hand in terms of whose feelings they value.
You can go to the FIRE website, but if you know modern American academia you know that the administration does not care about academic freedom when push comes to shove. The regnant ideology in modern left cultural discourse is that “the feelings of marginalized people/communities” trump “objectivity” and “truth.” Rutgers’ general statement is one I agree with, but I’m a 20th century “liberal.” Rutgers is not a place for 20th century liberals, nor is academia in general.
What this illustrates is that the American left does not think it needs to be “polite” to Hindus. Their feelings don’t matter. Perhaps the Central Committee of the Inner Party has a list of marginalized communities, and Hindus were left off. I don’t know.
Suffice it to say this is total hypocrisy. If Truschke’s career involved wrestling with Muslim trolls online they’d find something more ambivalent to say. Even with tenure universities can fire professors on pretexts as well. They choose not to. They choose the law. Because Hindus are not their friends.
Addendum: The fact that many “internet Hindus” behave like vile cretins with subnormal IQs does not help. But I don’t think this is the main cause. First, many people who are “against” “internet Hindus” who are Indian are quite vile and exhibit subnormal IQ online (my experience with Jat Sikh anti-Hindutva racists is the exact same as with Hindutva trolls; Indians online tend toward troll behavior more than other groups). Also, Truschke offends many more conventional and humane Hindus, but their feelings do not warrant obsequious submission.
West Asian ancestry in South Asian Muslims
Recently a Bohra Patel emailed me to express some exasperation that people are quoting me saying that the ancestry of South Asian Muslims is almost all from Hindus (or non-Muslims). Basically, I say things like this “99% of the ancestry of South Asian Muslims is indigenous.” This means some people are going to be 75% indigenous, but the majority probably have no West Asian segments of DNA. This does not mean they don’t have a genealogical line of descent. I myself am ~100% South Asian if you look at my genes…but my maternal grandmother’s father was from a lineage that had migrated to Bengal in the 19th century from Delhi. Before they were in Delhi they had left Persia in the 17th century with the forced conversion of the whole religious class to Shia Islam. This is validated through a Koran with all direct male line descendants listened. I am not one of those descendants (my maternal grandmother is not “in the book”), but I’m pretty sure my distant cousins who are paternal descendants no longer have any detectable Iranian ancestry either. Why?
The reason is that eight generations back there is only a 50% chance that you will any segment of identifiable DNA from an ancestor. Another way to say this is that 200 years ago you had many ancestors, but there’s only a 1 out of 2 probability that you will have identifiable DNA passed down through the generations from that person. Since my Iranian lineage (a man who left Iran, settled in South Asia, and married into the South Asian Muslim community) dates back 350 years, it’s totally unsurprising that there’s no evidence that isn’t documentary at this point.
In any case, I’m looking more closely at the assertion I made above. I ran a supervised analysis on some samples. You can see the results below. I’ll probably do f-stats too…but that takes a while to run. I may ‘update’ my estimate from 1% to closer to 5%, though I’m not convinced. The Bohra Patel is in the sample, it’s clear they are enriched for “Yemenite Jewish” ancestry. But, even with 200,000 markers, there are Hindu individuals that are 1-2% (Tamil Brahmin) because of the way the model is set up.
Really what’s needed are huge Y chromosome panels. Since that’s an unbroken lineage, and the gene flow is mostly through men from everything we know.
But the real problem is Iranian ancestry because there is something of a “cline” in the northwest of the subcontinent. How exactly are we supposed to detect Iranian ancestry in Punjabis that is recent? Ultimately it’s going to have to be IBD segments in large panels.
That being said, there is an indirect way to detect Muslim West Asian ancestry: look for Turkic and African segments. These come from Muslims, and so can serve as a tracer that is much more distinct from the Indian genetic landscape.
Finally, the flip side of these comments about the minimal impact of West Asians on the genes of South Asian Muslims is that it should make us more skeptical of the arguments of some Hindu nationalists and Muslim fundamentalists about how brutal the Turks were. I’m sure they were brutal…but they didn’t leave much of a genetic impact on Muslims, let alone Hindus. Most people were likely pretty insulated from the predations, probably because cities were demographic sinks anyhow.
Open Thread – 03/06/2021 – Brown Pundits
A Muslim Indian is kind of annoyed that I say “Muslims in the subcontinent are descended from Hindus.” By this, I mean 99% of the ancestry.
Of course, it can be hard to see the impact of Iranian ancestry. I’m going to look more closely to update my estimate.
I recently got contacted by a British research group. They sample thousands of Bangladeshis, and unlike the Pakistanis, they saw no internal structure aside from some individuals who seem to be a Tibeto-Burman tribal people. Like I said: the Bangladeshis might be called Hindus by Pakistanis, but the Pakistanis marry like they’re Hindus, the Bangladeshis don’t.