Last week a Sikh police officer in India saved a Muslim man from being lynched by a mob, merely for standing near a temple with a Hindu girl.
This is a poignant illustration on that, by student Umar Khalid.
He wrote: “Salute, Gagandeep. You stood up against not just some local hooligans. You were effectively standing up against the forces of hate who are right now ruling our country, and ripping apart its social fabric!”
Sunny Hundal
I created a SurveyMonkey poll. Check it out….
(after you are done, you can check out the results)
I. The Question of Why India’s Muslims Are Poorer than Its Hindus India’s Muslim minority—as of the early twenty-first century, around 12% of its ethnically and religiously diverse population—lags behind the country’s Hindu majority economically. The average household income for Muslims is 76.6%, and per capita income 72.4%, of the corresponding figure for Hindus. In rural areas, the typical Muslim-owned farm is only 41.1% as large as the typical Hindu-owned farm. Muslims have relatively lower labor participation rates and higher unemployment rates in both cities and the countryside ðShariff and Azam 2004, vii; figs. 12, 15, 16, 18; tables 6, 7Þ. The 2011 Forbes list of the 100 richest Indians includes just three Muslims.1 The underperformance of Muslims is particularly striking in the management of its private companies. Shortly after India gained independence from Britain in 1947, only one of India’s 80 largest publicly traded companies had a Muslim at its helm ðGovernment of India 1955Þ. A half century later, in 1997, just one of India’s 50 largest business groups was headed by a Muslim ðTripathi and Mehta 1990, 340–42Þ. 2 In describing the economic performance of Muslims in independent India, Omar Khalidi ð2006, 88Þ infers from such statistics that Muslims “lack the ability to organize and plan enterprises on modern lines.”
My reading of the paper is that Muslim inheritance law (which divides the estates more or less equally) prevented capital accumulation to the same extent as Hindu family law. Essentially the Hindu joint family concept was very similar (structurally) to the joint-stock corporation; allowing mercantile Hindu families (especially in Western India) to rapidly accumulate capital and also move on to professional management sectors (as Sereno mentions in the previous post; privilege encompasses both financial, educational and social capital).
Furthermore Islam’s prohibition on credit made the waqf’s (essentially Islamic family trusts) less liquid and unable to allow Muslim families to fully take advantage of the assets that they controlled.
After the jump I’ve excerpted two paragraphs from the paper that touch on both the above points.
The four non-conforming Muslim castes (Khojas, Memons, Bohras and Ghiarasis – the last I had never heard of) were the only ones who maintained their pre-conversion Hindu family practises (Dina Wadia argued that the Quaid’s family estate should be divided as per Hindu law owing to his Khoja origins).
Continue reading Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences
One of the problems with Indian history is that a lot of the books are strongly biased toward the Muslim and colonial periods. There are numerous reasons for this. People are interested in the Muslim and colonial periods for nationalist and anti-nationalist reasons, if that makes any sense.
But some of it is simply source availability of. When I am curious about the period between the Han dynasty and the Sui-Tang I’ll pick up a book like China between Empires: The Northern and Southern Dynasties. In contrast The Gupta Empire is an out of print monograph.
Because at some point the Rakhigarhi DNA results will be coming out I want to do some more reading on ancient and medieval (using those epochs loosely in the South Asian context) history, but so much of it is archaeological because of the thin historiographical tradition in South Asia.
Do readers have suggestions?
(Please calibrate to my level of knowledge. I’ve already read Early India)
I liked sbakkurum’s bio and it set me wondering about our readers/regular handles..
(1.) are you male or female?
(1b.) Do we have female commentators or do we have female readers?
(2.) is Kabir the only commentator with a liberal arts education?
(2b.) is anyone not a STEMMIE?
(3.) are you desi?
(3b.) what is ur ethnic origin?
(3c.) if you are Hindu; are you Upper Caste?
(3d.) If not are you Dalit or identify as a historically backward/oppressed caste?
(Bonus) how are you privileged in a South Asian context? How are you privileged (or not) in a Western context? How do you check your privilege?
Americans, unusually provincial by global standards, are generally unaware of the degree to which the rest of the world watch what Americans say. My fear is that attitudes such as Mr. Eric Dyson’s will fuel and exacerbate global anti-Americanism. Mr. Eric Dyson is personifying the caricature of the “Ugly American”.
Continue reading How should we respond if someone says “mean mad asian man”?
Since BP in general lacks positively-inclined Pak-nuanced voices; I thought this was an important comment to highlight.
There was more than Jinnah involved in the ‘Pakistan Movement’ even if it was a one man show when it came to actual negotiations with the British.
Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani was instrumental in mass mobilization (using Islam khatray mein heh! naturally) and countering Congress’s anti-Jinnah propaganda campaign orchestrated by Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani of the JUH. This was the so called Muttahida Qaumiat movement that held that Jinnah and Aligarh Islamic Modernism was more dangerous than an independent India dominated by the Hindus.
In a nutshell, the insurmountable problem was simply this. Jinnah and some others (non-caste Hindus) wanted absolute safeguards for minorities before independence; Congress and caste-Hindus wanted independence first and then would decide whatever safeguards the minorities would get. As a part of this, Jinnah and others wanted a weak Centre and power devolution to the provinces/groupings while Congress (Nehru and Patel but not Gandhi, who was a hopeless romantic when it came to actual politics anyway) wanted a strong Centre and the provinces to have whatever powers the Centre didn’t want.
If you look at the Cabinet Mission Plan, that is EXACTLY what is being offered: a weak Centre. Of course Congress rejected it and Jinnah embraced it.
What must always be remembered is that the Pakistan Movement meant many different things to many different people.
His accent is obviously spot on; the fact that he’s Australian and has an American accent is a good example.
I find the Coloniser privilege in this video to be a bit OTT. Imagine if it was a black man speaking perfect Hindustani; there’d really be no interest. All a white man has to do is master the accent and then he can pass off as Kashmiri Brahmin; one of the “highest” stratas in Indian society.
It’s interesting that with Prince Harry marrying Meghan Markle; British society is really going the other way. The Royal Family, which is emblematic of privilege, is now connecting across the races and generations towards a new identity. It may very well be that the King George’s future Royal Cousins wouldn’t even be able to pass for Kashmiri Brahmins (they would be upto 25% Afram so who knows what they’d look like).
How many Desi parents would accept Meghan Markle for a Bahu?
I believe the world should attempt to surge the capacity and competence of Palestinians in collaboration with Palestinians. Foreign aid should be conditional on difficult Palestinian reforms to establish a globalized neo-liberal economic system based on meritocratic hierarchies of competence and capability. As this happens, the Palestinians will have the leverage and influence to negotiate a deal with Israel on their own terms and many of Palestine’s other problems will take care of themselves. This FT article covers some of challenges in surging Palestinian capacity.
When Faris Zaher, a Palestinian Jerusalemite, graduated in Hong Kong with a masters degree and returned home at the peak of the financial crisis, he drifted for a bit, working in consulting and property, and starting a website for classified ads.
Then he hit on his big idea: a start-up travel portal catering to the $50bn market for hotel bookings in the Middle East. There was no regional competitor back then and with the web opening up the prospect of borderless business, the West Bank city of Ramallah was as good a place as any to set up.
Less than five years later, Yamsafer is one of the region’s largest hotel booking sites, according to its founder. It recently closed a $3.5m funding round in one of the biggest venture capital deals the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories have seen.
Yamsafer employs 70 people in Ramallah, a place where too many young university graduates are chasing too few jobs. “The people we hire are more hungry than people you would have hired in Dubai, Jordan or elsewhere,” Zahar, who is 29, told me recently.
Please see starting 1 hour, 4 minutes in:
A serious and important question for the entire Brown Pundit community: Should we do anything if someone such as Mr. Micheal Eric Dyson calls us a:
“mean mad asian man and the viciousness is evident”?
I don’t know the answer, but the attack is coming. Already a plurality of the world’s billionaires are Asian. And soon a majority will be Asian. When I was fifteen I saw academics from American university attack “Asian fat cats”; and call Hindus/Buddhists “Nazis” and “Fascists.” Back then American academics were anti conservative muslim too (81% of American muslims voted for GW Bush in 2000).
Mr. Jordan Peterson is not an American and very likely most of his fans are not Americans. Mr. Michael Eric Dyson acknowledged knowing almost nothing about Jordan Peterson personally and launched this attack abroad, in Toronto, before a very large Jordan Peterson supportive crowd. Mr. Dyson knew the foreign crowd would boo him. He said it anyway.
If Jordan Peterson with his enormous international prestige can be attacked in this way, any of us can be attacked as a “mean mad asian man” far more easily. [Asian woman can be attacked as a “mean mad asian.”]