Category: Popular

I haven’t written anything this week and I was going to flush out my thoughts on my written diary or locked blog but an interesting observations came upon me, which I would share.

I’ve noticed with Vidhi’s science-intensive path that it’s very uncharacteristic for our northwestern cultural streams. Sindhis, Punjabis and the lot are into different professions.

I also noticed that religious difference didn’t make so much of a difference (Sikhs in some ways are surprisingly similar to Muslims but one must not over-hype their kinship, their loyalties with the Hindu population will always come first) but it seemed that a region’s exposure to Islamicate ways reduced their inclination for science (the Gunpowder Empires were advanced in military tech but were reknowned for their aestheticism).

As an aside to deny that Hindu criticisms of the Mughals is not grounded in communalism is laughable. Louis XIV (whose reigns roughly coincided with the latter two Mughal Emperors) was renowned for his profligacy (Versaille is the mini-Taj of Western Europe) and his constant wars of conquest (Aurganzeb comes to mind). Nevertheless after a Revolution or so the French remain profoundly proud of their “Sun King” in a way the Hindu Right Wing do not towards the Mughals.

Back to the Brahmins; there are 5 sets of Brahmins who capture the Indian imagination.

(1.) The UP Brahmins who are the core of Hindu doctrine and society. Without them there wouldn’t be a coherent Hindu society or population (there are 20 million UP Brahmins).

(2.) The Bengal Brahmins who are the periphery of the Hindustani belt (but still very much a part of it with Bengal being significant in the Mughal era and core heartland in the Colonial one), emerged as a core of a more “Hindu cultural identity.”  Is it any wonder that the Indian national anthem is in Bengali?

(3.) The Kashmiri Pandits. Unique among Brahmins they were a minority among an overwhelming Muslim population. Surrounded by Muslims, they Mughalicised, became the Hindu Mughals and the political class of independent Indians.

(4.) The Maratha Brahmins. On the Edge of Aryavarta and the heart of the Deccan; they became the Hindu warrior class after the Rajputs were entirely coopted by the Anglo-Mughal establishment (the Rani of Jhansi was a Maratha).

(5.) Finally the Brahmin class, which sparked my initial thought. The Tamil Brahmins, furtherest away from the Islamicate world in every way possible (their Islam is similar to the Kerala, TN, Ceylon, South East Asian one) and most obsessed with the hard sciences. It’s pretty obvious Vidhi wouldn’t have been on her scientific path if she had grown up in the North.

In some ways the “millennia of humiliation” (not my words) splintered the Hindu response 5-ways, which is why any reconstruction of Hindu identity rests on a multi-regional response.

Ps: Shocking in a case of life imitating art – I was just browing girmit’s last comment and found out that the commentariat were discussing the exact same thing..

As a minority, it is the everyday discrimination that hurts me most

In a campaign led by a few other residents, the Hindu family was refused their basic right of acquiring the property. It was claimed that instructions to prevent Hindus from acquiring apartments had come from an army office located near the building, based on the so-called belief that all Hindus are Indian spies. That claim was later found out to be false.

Personal conversations revealed that the bigoted residents were actually really concerned about the family setting up idols in their home as part of their religious rites. There were some other, more rational residents, who suggested that what the Hindu family did in their home was their private business, but the voices of sanity were silenced.

The article is written by a Pakistani Christian and is couched in the language of engrained fear. No Pakistani minority will dare lash out in the same manner that Indian Muslims do.

I eagerly await Kabir Bhai and his fellow Pakistani liberals to lecture us:

(1.) Pakistan is a Muslim state so that there is absolutely nothing we can do about this.

(2.) India does the same thing with vegetarian colonies.

The Roots of Hindu Rage are very simple. They are seeing their Hindu kin being turned into second-class citizens all over the Muslim world, while the Indian Muslim minority flaunt (and exploit) their privileges in India. Compared to the Muslim minority in Myanmar, China or even Israel; Indian Muslims have it exceptionally easy.

AR Rahman and Adnan Sami were holding court like demi-gods in the Voice yesterday; I cannot think of a single society where Muslims & Islamicate culture hold so much prestige.

If the same thing had happened to India to a Muslim family; the Nehruvians, post-modernists and NGOs would make sure it’s front page news.

Nehru India as the “Deep State”

The Deep State of India is Nehruvian India, which is driven to ensure that the post-Independence constitutional settlement endures. The inane constitutional settlement ensures that India will always be a fractured nation and therefore will need a “Dynasty” to wield power.

Would HinduRashtra split India?

Hindu India would not lead to a fractured India because most of the Hindu states and population are anyway strongly Hindu. The only non-Hindu states (Punjab, some of the seven sisters) would be able to safeguard their own local traditions in the same manner Tamils have done with regards to Hindi; they are not pan-Indian ethnicities. There is only one minority that will screech and battle every step to Hindu Rashtra and that is the Muslim minority. They will never sing Vande Mataram or appease the Hindu majority. Babri Masjid need not have been destroyed; Hindus are not a vengeful people and Ram idols in the building would have turned it into another Balaji site.

What is happening is that Hindu Rage at Muslim behaviour is instead being deflected towards Islamicate culture (and the odd riot) and therefore Allahabad pays the prices for Allah refusing to share the limelight with Hindu deities.

Rahul Gandhi in context with the rest of the global Left

There is nothing miraculous about Rahul Gandhi’s resurgence; it is the same syndrome you see in progressive parties all over the world.

Rahul Gandhi is Jeremy Corbyn, Beto O’Rourke, Justin Trudeau and even Macron. The diverse left needs a straight white male figurehead/kingmaker to hold its coalition together whereas the right can experiment with different leaders (May, Merkel, Modi, Marine Le Pen).

Nehru India as the Brahmin bulwark against a Shudra HinduRashtra

The upper caste urban vote bank of the BJP feel their guilt expiated when they are able to vote for a OBC like Modi; it may be a reason why Advani (a Sindhi Brahmin) never made it as PM. Maybe the Brahmins of the BJP aren’t able to maybe fight tooth and claw or as hard their Shudra counterparts?

It also raises an interesting question that if Hindu India’s best dynasties were actually Shudra (Gupta, Mauryas), then is the Mughal-British-Nehruvian Deep State of India committed to Brahmin rule by the Nehru-Gandhi clan as opposed to Shudra Rule by the BJP?

The Vijaynagar Empire and the saving of the Hindu Majority

It is interesting how Indian history is taught in a very misleading way. Akbar and the Mughals are presented as Indian (which is questionable since their eye-watering opulence, the Peacock Throne apparently cost twice as much as the Taj) but the Vijaynagar Empire is seen as a footnote (there is an important twitter thread on it, which I can’t find).

The Vijaynagar Empire probably did save Hinduism from Islam by keeping South India structurally and absolutely Hindu. It is interesting that Northwest and north east India are majority Muslim (when one includes Pak & Bangladesh into it) but that South India, the other great wing of India, is 90%+ Hindu. There is no reason why South India & the Deccan, relatively far from the Brahmanical and Sanskrit core of UP, should not have had a substantially Muslim contiguous belt like the Punjab and Bengal.

There are different reasons as to why the Punjab and Bengal became Muslim but by the time the Muslim dynasties had infiltrated the South, there was an intellectually and ideologically resilient Hindu population.

I would also hazard that though the Deep State is optically secular-Hindu but structurally Mughal & British.

Part-Partition – the worst of all worlds

It explains why Nehru and Gandhi agreed to a “worst of all worlds” with a part-partition when they should have either gone for No-Partition or a Full Partition.

They could have made false promises to Jinnah, keep India united, wait for Jinnah to die and then set about their true scheme- that was the modus operandi of Jinnah and Iqbal to lie compulsively, promise everything and never settle except for what they wanted. Pakistan is only following the blueprint set by Jinnah and Iqbal.

Otherwise in a “Full Partition” Gandhi and Nehru should have insisted on a full and final exchange of populations in the mode of Greece & Turkey. Even though Greece and Turkey have a bloody history; it is not as tortuous as India and Pakistan. This is because India & Pakistan had an incomplete partition by Nehruvian-Gandhian design. Gandhi was assassinated on his way to advocated for the rights of Pakistan.

South India as the only “structurally” Hindu society

It is only South India and Bali that are structurally Hindu societies (is it any wonder that the great architectural monuments in the South are Temples and in the North are Mosques) but these thoughts are either for another post, my journal or my locked blog (sometimes my writings can be eye-watering controversial and I prefer them somewhere safe but private).

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         A Confirmation of the Vedic Tradition

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I had made a partial review of the recent paper on Indus Valley populations last time around where I tried to argue that the genetic evidence brought out by the paper confirms the Vedic tradition. As per the Vedic tradition the region of Haryana and Western UP was the Vedic homeland from where the Vedic culture, religion and language spread across the entire subcontinent. It is conceivable that this was accompanied by migration of people from the Vedic heartland into regions further inland spreading their genetic signature in the process. It is also conceivable that this genetic signature was present in higher proportion among the Upper Castes like the Brahmins & Rajputs than the lower castes in those regions. Such a signature,  found in higher proportions among the Upper Caste Brahmins and Rajputs, has been claimed to be identified by the geneticists but its source is said to come from the Pontic Caspian Steppe. Its entry into South Asia supposedly formed a group termed as ANI that then became the source population for the Indo-Aryan spread & expansion across South Asia and that the genetic signature on this Indo-Aryan expansion in the recipient groups further inland was in terms of their relative share of this ANI ancestry. In short, the Indo-Aryan and Vedic civilization spread across South Asia was accompanied by admixture with this ANI group by the recipient populations.

It has also been argued that the greater presence of ‘steppe’ ancestry among the Upper Castes is an implicit confirmation of this ancestry having brought Indo-Aryans and the Vedic culture into South Asia.

The present study under review shows quite clearly that a group presently living in the region of the ancient Vedic heartland, Rors (but also the much more numerous Jats), have the highest ‘steppe’ ancestry among South Asians and than they can be considered as that hypothetical  ANI source population. Since this puts the ANI source population squarely in Haryana & Western UP (places inhabited by the Haryanvi Jats) it suggests that Haryana is the genetic ground zero from where the genetic signature of ancient Vedic people spread across the subcontinent.

This inference is therefore clearly in support and confirmation of the Vedic tradition which revers the land of Haryana & Western UP as the ancient Vedic heartland from where the Vedic culture disseminated across the wider South Asian region.

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There is also some linguistic support for Haryana & Western UP being the Vedic homeland/heartland. Continue reading The Balto-Slavic & Indo-Iranian Connection