Category: Uncategorized

China’s demographic disaster impacts Pakistan

Razib Khan · May 8, 2019 · 15 comments

The AP has a long and sad story out, Pakistani Christian girls trafficked to China as brides. One must be careful of sensational stories that hit a lot of our emotional buttons, but it seems deeply reported, and names names.

Because of the surplus of men in China, there has been a recent tendency of “importing” girls and women from poorer East Asian countries. A milder form of this has occurred in South Korea, and earlier Japan. Generally, the men and families who have to make recourse to this are poorer and less attractive on the Chinese marriage market. Some of the same has occurred, to a lesser extent, in South Asia, with Punjabi farmers obtaining wives from eastern India and Bangladesh.

The fact that Chinese men are seeking wives from Pakistan is probably a function of the reality that Vietnam is getting too prosperous, and Laos is not particularly populous (I don’t know the situation in North Korea,  though with the nationalistic nature of that regime I don’t see that as being a sustainable option). And obviously, Pakistan’s alliance with China matters a great deal.

The fact that these are poor Christian women helps as well. To be frank, I suspect that the Pakistani elite does not see their traffic as a matter of honor due to a lack of identification for reasons of class and religion. Additionally, it is far more plausible for a Chinese groom to contend that they are converts to Christianity than they are converts to Islam (there are much stronger cultural conflicts between being Han and Muslim than being Han and Christian).

With 1.4 billion people, it is hard for Chinese matters not to impact its neighbors…

Pleistocene rock art in Maharashtra

Razib Khan · May 7, 2019 · 14 comments

Ancient Rock Art in the Plains of India-Two amateur sleuths have uncovered a collection of mysterious rock carvings on the Indian coastal plain south of Mumbai:

In the evening breeze on a stony hilltop a day’s drive south of Mumbai, Sudhir Risbud tramped from one rock carving to another, pointing out the hull of a boat, birds, a shark, human figures and two life-size tigers.

“They’re male,” he said with a smile, noting that the carver had taken pains to make the genitalia too obvious to ignore. He was doing a brief tour of about two dozen figures, a sampling of 100 or so all etched into a hard, pitted rock called laterite that is common on the coastal plain that borders the Arabian Sea.

The carvings are only a sample of 1,200 figures that Mr. Risbud and Dhananjay Marathe, engineers and dedicated naturalists, have uncovered since they set out on a quest in 2012. The two men are part of a long tradition of amateur archaeologists, according to Tejas Garge, the head of the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums for the state of Maharashtra, and the petroglyphs they have uncovered amount to a trove of international significance.

There are no depictions of bulls, so it is pre-agricultural. Additionally, some of the animals depicted disappeared from the area in the later Pleistocene. That means the carvings could date to people who lived in the area between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, right up to the Last Glacial Maximum.

2019 Brown Pundits Reader survey

Razib Khan · May 6, 2019 · 109 comments

“I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.”

-Terrence

One of the strange things is the comments on this weblog make it seem like many more of the readers are South Asian than is really case (or care about the India-Pakistan conflict). I wish more of you would speak. I’m brown, but I speak on Chinese history. It’s my history too. In a cosmopolitan post-national world the global chattering class should consider Terrence’s insights and be less bashful.

Continue reading 2019 Brown Pundits Reader survey

British Asians getting (much) taller?

X.T.M · May 5, 2019 · 16 comments

Whenever I’m with a group of Asians I’m usually among the taller bracket (5’9). In Britain I’m tall for an Asian, tallish for a Persian and decent in comparison for white height.

However at last night’s Bollywood dance (I was a bit rusty but I managed to keep up – we did the routine for Kar Gayi chull) virtually everyone was an undergrad (I imagined it would be the Desi postgrads).

What immediately struck me was that I was shorter than a fair few of them. I’m imagining that this generation of British Asians (born in the 90’s) are far more Westernised in their diet and upbringing, than their parents and grandparents. Continue reading British Asians getting (much) taller?

Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).

X.T.M · May 4, 2019 · 78 comments

I was overlooking Vidhi’s screen at the gym and saw the dance. Initially I thought Bharatanatyam (it didn’t have a title) is so elegant and mesmerising and I asked Vidhi, what it was.

She replied that it was a Kathak and I made a mini-rant about how India ignores Islamicate culture etc. Incidentally I only just learnt Vidhi had studied Katak and, surprisingly for someone from Chennai, not Bharatanatyam. Her mother (a Sindhi from the North) made the choice and chose accordingly. I’m trying to convince her to pick up Kathak again to offset the intensity of her research.

My point being is that while Kathak has distinctly Hindu/Indian origins; it is ultimately (like Hindustani music) a culmination of the Indo-Islamic culture (apparently Wajid Ali Shah was its finest patron).

My post is about another suggestion that I’ve been dwelling upon this am. I’m convinced that the noblest thing that Pakistani elites could do is resurrect the medieval Persian dialect of India. Continue reading Should the Pakistani elite revive Sab-ki-Hindi (the Farsi of India).

Statistics on Asian American interracial marriage statistics

Razib Khan · May 3, 2019 · 17 comments

I really don’t know what to make of some of the contentions in Zach’s post below, What’s wrong with fetishizing white men? (also, posting videos which Hindi means I have no idea specifically what is going on in the video) Some of this is probably due to differences between the UK and the USA. But there are some statistics from the 2010 USA Census.

The website Asian Nation has tabulated the outmarriage rates by generation (foreign-born vs. US-raised) and various Asian American ethnicities. You can see the results below as I’ve repackaged them to focus on inmarriage of various subgroups, stratified by sex.

Some notes

1) “Asian Indian” only includes people who are Indian nationals or whose ancestors were from the Republic of India. It excludes other South Asian nationalities (I am not “Asian Indian” for example). But since other South Asian nationalities are a very small number in the USA I think that’s fine.

2) The statistics are generated from subsamples of the Census. I would be a bit cautious on outmarriage rates for groups like Asian Indians and Koreans where in 2010 the number of those born or raised in the USA was still rather small compared to the foreign-born/raised population. One reason Indian Americans showed extremely low outmarriage rates in the early 2000 Census results is that there was a massive swell of immigration in the Clinton era from Indians, so the foreign-born immigrants overwhelmed the signal.

3) Both the Japanese and Chinese have multi-generational communities in the United States. There are large numbers of highly assimilated Japanese and Chinese Americans whose roots in East Asia are as far back as their grandparents, or even earlier. I think it is noticeable that there is sex balance here.

4) I know a lot of you like bullshitting. I will be doing other things for a while so not monitoring comments much. But if I come back and have to see 1,0000-word personal thoughts which are factless and emotional I will just delete them, even if you are a long-time commenter.

Continue reading Statistics on Asian American interracial marriage statistics

What’s wrong with fetishisizing white men?

X.T.M · May 3, 2019 · 27 comments

IndThings writes an interesting comment:

I would be careful of trying to ride this tiger however, lest Desis/Muslims end up like East-Asian men. Completely forced out of the sexual market-place by white-men basically, as what may have once been an earnest attempt at disenfranchising misogynistic Asian-male attitudes, has turned into a shameless fetish for white-men for no other reason than they are white.

Continue reading What’s wrong with fetishisizing white men?

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