So I started a Subreddit. You can start your own threads there. Eventually, that might make the “open threads” redundant (they are not scaling well with ~400 comments per week).
I’ve posted a few podcasts on the Patreon. One is a new podcast from Richard Hanania, where he takes a skeptical stance toward France in relation to the late unpleasantness. But several are from the Substack I’m starting shortly (probably next week). Probably won’t be posting those in the future.
The last few days have seen two separate terrorist incidents in France, both involving Muslim youth (both refugees, not French-born Muslims) beheading (or trying to behead) French civilians because of perceived outrage over blasphemy. In the first shocking incident a teacher named Samuel Paty tried to do what good teachers do; he was teaching about freedom of expression and wanted to show the cartoons that led to the murderous assaults on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. He told his Muslim students that if they felt uncomfortable seeing those cartoons, they could step outside the class. There is no indication that he himself said anything that could be construed as an attack on the prophet. But the very fact that he showed the famous cartoons in his class was enough to rile up at least one of the Muslim student’s parents, who started to outrage on social media, which led a Chechen youth named Abdullah to travel a 100 km, find the teacher by paying his students to point him out and then beheaded him on a public road before being shot dead himself.
If this was not bad enough, today another “refugee” (this one from Tunisia) went on a stabbing/beheading spree at the basilica of Notre Dame in Nice and killed 2 women and a 55 year old sexton. Another person, this time in Saudi Arabia, stabbed a guard at the French consulate before being arrested. At the same time there have been massive protests in Bangladesh, a mock beheading at a girl’s school in Pakistan, official protests from Pakistan and Turkey and boycotts of French products all across the Muslim world. Continue reading Why do Muslims React More to France Than to China?
Saw some very interesting conversations on caste in America in the recent Open Thread and wanted to hear more perspectives as well as sharing my own.
Growing up, I wasn’t aware of my caste nor my friends’ caste. I still am unaware of most other Indian-Americans’ castes (besides obvious ones like Sharma and a few Gujarati ones I know) and never thought too much of it. Caste just doesn’t seem to factor into 2nd Gens…except this trio of exceptions:
Group 1 seems like a case of White Guilt with a few drops of saffron. Read any BuzzFeed-esque article written by this group and you could easily Find & Replace “White” with “Brahmin” (or “Hindu” if they are really deep in the hole) and “Black” with “Dalit.” Simple transpositions on an infinitely more complex topic.
Group 2 is enrolling in the grand Oppression Olympics that is underway in America. While I recognize the dire need to address the discrimination against Dalits in India, I cannot for the life of me understand how any 2nd gen would even be aware enough to discriminate against another 2nd gen based on caste. I can’t memorize that many last names and their associated caste. Maybe it happens amongst immigrants, but I can’t imagine any impact between Indian-Americans born in the US.
Equality Labs is probably the vilest and most prominent example of this new vehicle in action where they even want to make caste an official marker in the USA.
Both Group 1 and 2 label any “Hindu” practice, no matter how inconsequential or innocent (like Holi, vegetarianism, pujas, tilaks, the literal color orange, etc…), as Brahminical Patriarchy, fascism, and/or casteism. The agenda is pretty clear cut. See my “Brahminism” post.
Group 3 is honestly a conundrum to me. I just don’t understand the “why” in this group. But the lack of understanding makes it the easiest group to lampoon. Can only listen to music where the word “Jatt” is rammed into the song at least 40x, or else it’s Hindi music. This clique proudly flaunts their caste like they’re back in India (oops, sorry I meant Punjab). They’re in an intermittent digital war with Hindu E-Trads (who are already a shitshow themselves), many times because of some unnecessary and out the way slandering of India/other Indian ethnic groups or E-Trads disgusting edgelording over 1984. There is a heavy pour of Punjabi/Jatt chauvinism (and Scythian???). In the end, it goes back to what I said at the beginning – I don’t get the “WHY” for this group.
When I initially asked my fairly religious Punjabi Sikh friends why the singers keep saying “Jutt” in all the bhangra music I listened to – they rolled their eyes, explained it’s a caste, and then called them dumbasses and we laughed off. They then told me to call anyone who engages in that behavior a “tatti di sabzi.” I think that’s a fair response for all of the above.
Save for these 3, I don’t think caste is that important to most Indian-Americans, including normal Brahmins, Dalits, Jatts (note – I am none of these so it’s just my outside perspective).
Going to post some notes on the latest podcast here. I talked to Fred Martin, who is of Haitian origin, but pretty stridently French, and a liberal. We discussed the killing of Samuel Paty, and Islam and Islamism in France. We also mooted the differences in relation to race between the USA and France, and our contrasting experiences. Finally, we talk about the coming winter of coronavirus in Europe.
A lot of the discussion centered around the contrast between France and the USA, which is always interesting to explore.
Thanks to everyone who is a Patron. I’ve started posting podcasts which you can’t find elsewhere yet there…
On Twitter, Suhag Shukla has been pushing back on the “caste is a huge problem for Indian Americans” narrative. I think she’s right on the specific issue. But, I am skeptical when she seems to attribute caste to colonialism, or, that it is not tightly integrated into Hinduism. I think Hinduism has a caste problem like Islam has a religious oppression problem. Religions are made by humans, and how they play out is a human matter. For whatever reason, Islamic societies have not been pluralistic in an egalitarian manner to other religions, while Hinduism in India is hard to disentangle from caste and jati. This doesn’t mean they’re necessary connections. Caste and jati are not major issues in Balinese or Cham Hinduism, though varna does exist.
The major dynamic which needs to be reiterated is that American Hinduism is very distinct from Hinduism in India, just as American Islam is very distinct from Islam in the Near East. I’m 99% sure that the Indian Americans I know (Generation X) would exhibit no caste bias of any note because in the USA it’s just not relevant in any way.
There is some discussion on “Hindu Twitter” and elsewhere about the French response to the murder of Samuel Paty. In short, France is going “medieval” on the asses of a lot of Muslims, even nonviolent but very conservative organizations. To use a German phrase, the French state is entering into a Kulturkampf against militant Islam. Or at least it is signaling that it is.
To all this, some on the Hindu Right are asking why some liberal or Left intellectuals are applauding or tolerating France’s reaction, which is hitting down hard on the Muslim community. Would they be so tolerant of India clamping down on Muslims? My own answer is simple: different nations have different histories, and abstract universal values and standards are often not useful.
The thread is open. Three new podcasts this week in case you aren’t subscribed. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with things and I just can’t be bothere with detailed show notes.
As I mentioned before I’m recording interviews for a new podcast I’m starting up separate from the others I run. I’m just throwing them on Patreon for now. Today I recorded an interview with the author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Looking at the tracks…he’s a very good talker!
I really recommend the book, it’s pretty well written. He also talks about his follow-up book, in terms of when we can expect and what it’s about.
Also, I may start trashing stupid comments now and then. Just to keep you guys “honest.”
Every now and then there is a controversy on Indian-Twitter which bleeds over into my timeline that I have to notice.
Some quick observations:
– There are those who lambast the critics of this ad. Many of the critics are low-IQ vulgarians. So the criticism is not without foundation. But, most of the responses dodge the gendered nature of the objection. The fact is that in Islam it is understood that Muslim men can marry non-Muslim women. It is also tolerated for Christians and Jews to retain their religion after marriage. The children are considered Muslim. This practice in a patriarchal society was seen as a boon to the Islamic nation.
The advertisement plays into this Islamic trope. The converse of this is that most interpretations of sharia ban the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men. Again, the rationale for this is straightforward: the children inherit the religion of the father, and therefore the children are lost to Islam. If the supporters of the beauty of the advertisement of interfaith marriage believe in this custom, then they should support more speech. In particular, they should support an advertisement where a Hindu man marries a Muslim woman in a Hindu ceremony to show that there is nothing wrong with this act so long as the people consent freely.
For TL;DR jump to My reasons for this position today are
Yesterday I tweeted about how OIT is becoming an Article of Faith on the Hindutva Wing in a thread related to Ruchir Sharma podcast where he dodged the AIT question. I further tweeted the change in my position of one supporting OIT (till 2018) to AIT by 2018 especially in face of the recent genetic evidence and following the work by Razib Khan. I was contacted by BP regular guest and host of the Carvaka podcast – Kushal Mehra and we had a long (3 hours) chat. His reading of the issue (Archeology and Rgveda) is much more robust than mine and I felt as Hemu’s army would’ve felt battling Babur’s projectiles. (though I am still not convinced by his argument). Hence I write this piece to evaluate my evolution with the Aryan question and also putting my current position & its defense in digital ink.
Like most Indians, I had read about the Aryan invasion theory as a historic fact and only got introduced to the inherent racism in the initial framing of the AIT after my schooling. In 2008 the paper, Reconstructing Indian Population History came out and the terms ANI and ASI got popularized. The media commentary on the paper (as with the Rakhigarhi paper) seemed to suggest the genetic data had refuted the AIT. Influential public figures like Subramanian Swamy (who appeared a lot more respectable to me in 2008-09) and few lesser-known Marathi influencers and others championed the debunking of the AIT myth in the public sphere which was not refuted except well enough except by historians like Romila Thapar (in whom I have low trust around politically charged topics as proven in Babri case). Things started getting heated in Indian Media around 2013-14 with after the publication of Genetic Evidence for Recent Population Mixture in India. But my interest in the Aryan issue came due to this article by scientist and influencer Anand Ranganathan on newslaundry (before then I had been largely ignored the arguments and counterarguments). I had some instinctive unease with these ANI/ASI argument against AIT but chose to ignore my doubts as Geneticists from India & commentators like Anand Ranganathan (who is a scientist), Sanjeev Sanyal, even anti-Hindutva Shashi Tharoor chose to concur with the views refuting the AIT.
In the following year or two, I read the following
I particularly saw the linguistic arguments for AIT to be weak largely attributable to my ignorance of the field. I see myself as extremely ignorant about history in general around then, for my interest in non-fiction is very recent (2015 onwards). In some ways, I am still not well-read compared to most authors/commentators here. I haven’t read any history from outside India other than British, American, and WW2.
Hence I was moderately convinced by Danino’s Sarasvati argument back then. Additionally following the Witzel-Talageri debate I found a lot of criticism of Talageri ad-hominem and patronizing. The dismissal of Talageri’s work as a bank clerk’s revisionist Hindutva did not seem scholarly to me (I mean Witzel’s criticism did not appear scholarly but ad-hominem). In my view, Edwin Bryant’s book confuses as it doesn’t take a position after 500+ pages. However in the end the lack of Archeological support for AIT (no significant change in material culture) made me convinced that the AIT was flawed. As I see this as a binary problem i.e either AIT or OIT has to be true to explain the spread of Indo-European languages, my position was that of OIT. I also felt AMT is a workaround for the problematic parts and holes in the AIT.
In 2017-18, around the time The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia hit the biorxiv and created quite a few waves in the Indian media, articles by Tony Joseph, Shoaib Daniyal, and Hartosh Bal made enough noise on my twitter timeline to make me take a renewed interest in the controversy. Around that time David Reich’s book was published and most AIT guys used Reich’s book to bolster their claims. By the time I had completed Reich’s book I was almost convinced of the AIT yet I made an effort to cross-check the counterviews. I reached out to Anand Ranganathan who sort of dodged my cross-questions. I also reached out to Swarajya Magazine (of whom I was a subscriber in 2018/19) and was not at all convinced by the explanation given by them here and here. On reading work by Razib & other genome bloggers who got a shout out in David Reich’s book I was even more convinced by their arguments. I read Tony Joseph’s Early Indians and it does a good job of laying out the data IMO. However one always notices the author’s political biases coming up especially around his handling of Caste( I find it extremely stupid to look back at events that are speculated 2000 years ago with today’s moral compass and use it making political points calling the Brahmins in 100 AD the original Tukde-Tukde gang.)
I have since, also read David Anthony’s book, Narsimhan and Shinde papers, read most BP blogs (including JR’s pieces) and comments on AIT/OIT, followed a small bit of linguistics, and listened to the views of Niraj Rai, Shrikant Talageri (on Carvaka), Koenrad Elst. I still continue to hold the view that AIT probably happened and more importantly OIT seems highly implausible.
My reasons for this position today are:
Closing comments:
Postscript:
I plan to read Talageri’s books, Asko Parpola’s Roots of Hinduism, Mallory’s book again in the coming years as I find the issue fascinating. I guess that Razib, Slapstik, and others who have been at this topic for years on the blog might be finding the topic boring by now. Still, I would urge them to comment and point out any inconsistencies or blindspots I may have had in my summary above. Same for OIT guys – as already mentioned I will be reading Talegiri – is he the main guy you rely on? How many of you are patrons of Kushal’s AIT/OIT work ? which appears to be very extensive.
I said above that Talageri is not Hindutva but have been corrected by Kushal made the change in the blogpost.
Coronavirus has been an economic disaster all across South Asia. But, beyond that, there are changes that have occurred before the pandemic and will continue after. For example, Bangladesh’s per capita GDP now higher than eastern and northeastern India:
Bangladesh’s per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is now higher than most Indian states in eastern and northeastern India, with the exception of small hill states such as Mizoram and Sikkim. According to the data from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Bangladesh’s per capita GDP was $1,905 in 2019, against West Bengal’s $1,566 in 2018-19 (FY19) — economically the most developed state in eastern India.
Bangladesh is not really comparable to India, which is a diversified economy that is more than an order of magnitude larger. But, it is comparable to West Bengal. On economic matters, I am broadly sympathetic to right-liberal economics, so I’ll spare you my interpretation of what’s going on.
Some cool podcasts will be posted soon. Already posted two on the Patron page, including a very cool one where Mukunda and Jahanarra talk to Michael Fortner. A professor at CUNY, Fortner is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
I’ve also posted a podcast with Devang Mehta on what’s wrong with science, and how to fix it (also, some advice for Indians who might want to get into the world of Western academic science).
Also, I will probably post a few previews of a new podcast I’m starting (solo) for patrons. This is going to be part of my new substack newsletter. This weekend I’ll be talking to an old friend from grad school who snapped and turned against wokism last week (he was involved with BLM since 2015, and I just got off the phone with him and he told me things he’s seen in BLM up until this summer left him very jaded, suspicious, and skeptical).
