A millennium of exits from India

The last one thousand years has seen a consistent and substantial shrinking of the Indian world. There are three large scale processes involved in this folding. The first is the exit of the peasantry and warrior castes from India’s margins to the Perso-Islamic world. The second is the de-Indicization of South East Asia, first with Islam replacing Hinduism/Buddhism as the main religion in much of maritime South East Asia, followed by the West becoming the main source of cultural and political influence. The third is the exit of highly educated Indians (overwhelmingly upper caste Hindus) to the West, either physically as migrants or intellectually in terms of mindspace.

The development of a sophisticated, reflective culture in India and its culmination in literary and spiritual terms as the various Indian epics and religions was enabled by the complex intermingling of nomadic and settled societies and the abundant surplus of riverine India’s highly fertile land. Consider this, the pre-industrial population of Uttar Pradesh (47 million in 1871), was more than the population of all of Western Europe combined. But the last 1000 years has seen India contribute very little to the rest of the world despite its natural and intellectual riches.

As modern day citizens of the Republic of India become increasingly self aware about their customs, language and history, their mind will turn to why India remained subdued for such a long time. Notwithstanding convenient pronouncements about India’s ‘ability’ to ‘absorb’ various influences, it remains a fact that there are no Sanskrit or Tamil high words in Arabic, and there is no influence of Indian architecture or art on Persian expression. American and British courts do not refer to Indian law or judgements. The names of Indian scientists do not populate science textbooks. It is all one way traffic.

To be successful and worthwhile, reflection on this has to turn away from simplistic pronouncements about the cruelty of India’s various invaders and betrayals by self centred insiders to allow for an interrogation of the structure of Indian civilization.

What factors allowed for the growth of rule of law and democracy in medieval England,but prevented the same in medieval India ? Such institutions did not look on the horizon even in Hindu kingdoms of Kerala and Assam. Given Fukuyama’s contention that the appearance of these institutions is linked ultimately to Indo-European culture (does this explain the relatively smooth acceptance of democracy in India versus the resistance it got everywhere else ?), it is important to understand how little England got there before us.

What made the native Indian elites at the time of the Delhi Sultanate and the later Mughal Sultanate acquiesce to Persian as the official language ? One of the first actions of the Maratha Empire was the anointment of Sanskrit and Marathi as official languages. So if Indic options were available, especially Sanskrit, why did the Rajputs, Brahmins and Vaishyas not push for its position as the Sultanate’s official language ? After all the Turkic Qing dynasty in China maintained Mandarin as the official language. It is befuddling to imagine that they did not foresee the consequences this would bring.

The conventional response to such questions has revolved around caste as a dehumanizing and denationalizing force. But we know that caste did not play

The awakened Indian lives in an odious, depressing world today. A new generation of elite and middle class appears to have virtually no interest in India beyond superficial cliches. A lifeline was thrown to Indian civilization by Gandhi and the Independence Movement.

They make Nazis look good

People may be aware that there has been a small dustup in US media because the venerable New Yorker magazine invited Steve Banon for a debate and then withdrew invitation in face of mounting outcry. The question was that was it advisable to provide Steve Banon’s controvercial politics a venerable platform such as New Yorker. This is a debatable point. Debating Steve Banon in a celebrety gala that will surely be marked with one-line zingers rather than a substantial tussle of ideas and philosophy, is ofcourse a dabatable point. However, most people objecting were not objecting the platform but the very idea of debating with white ethno-nationalism or western nationalists (one-nation or less respectable) themselves.

 

What if everything that’s not a disease is polygenic?

In the early 2000s FOXP2 was dubbed the “language gene”. It was a sexy story. Humans exhibited accelerated adaptive evolution on this locus in relation to our relatives. Additionally, vocally oriented lineages such as birds and whales were also subject to the same process.

But over the past five years or so I’ve heard a lot of skepticism of the early claims as more genomic datasets have come online. Cell has a new paper which pretty much smashes the door down and breaks the skepticism out into the open, No Evidence for Recent Selection at FOXP2 among Diverse Human Populations:

FOXP2, initially identified for its role in human speech, contains two nonsynonymous substitutions derived in the human lineage. Evidence for a recent selective sweep in Homo sapiens, however, is at odds with the presence of these substitutions in archaic hominins. Here, we comprehensively reanalyze FOXP2 in hundreds of globally distributed genomes to test for recent selection. We do not find evidence of recent positive or balancing selection at FOXP2. Instead, the original signal appears to have been due to sample composition. Our tests do identify an intronic region that is enriched for highly conserved sites that are polymorphic among humans, compatible with a loss of function in humans. This region is lowly expressed in relevant tissue types that were tested via RNA-seq in human prefrontal cortex and RT-PCR in immortalized human brain cells. Our results represent a substantial revision to the adaptive history of FOXP2, a gene regarded as vital to human evolution.

Genetical clarifications on caste

A quick follow-up on my previous post, Genetical observations on caste.

1) I am aware that the term “caste” was introduced by Europeans. Which is why I used the terms jati and varna. That being said, a word is a word. I you can replace the word with a symbol.

2) I am not very interested in the food-fights that crop up between Allah-idolaters and Vishu-idolaters about whether caste is constitutive to Hinduism or excluded from Islam. Since I’m American caste almost never impinges on my thoughts, and it doesn’t really impact most Indian Americans (granted, most are of “higher caste” as commonly understood).

3) The population-genetic structure in South Asia is very unique. Most populations across a reasonable geographical scale are “random-mating”, with genetic structure due to geography. This is what you see in China and Europe. In a place like the Middle East there is a lot of cousin-marriage, so clearly it is not random-mating. But the deviations from random-mating are not ethnically freighted. In places like North India, you have exogamous groups which are still very genetically distinct. And this is due to deep structure.

4)

Kargil

Asymmetric Warfare in South Asia: The Causes and Consequences of the Kargil Conflict

Peter R.   ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009

[Reviewed by Teresita Schaffer; Survival 52, 5 (2010): 219-20]

This volume is required reading for anyone who wishes to understand Pakistan’s military decision-making or the half-war in Kargil in 1999, just a year after India and Pakistan tested nuclear weapons. Peter Lavoy, long a scholar of South Asian military affairs, assembled a first-rate team from Pakistan, India and the United States to examine the causes, conduct and impact of the Kargil conflict, based in part on an astonishing number of interviews with high-level participants from both sides.

 

The resulting book does not change the basic ‘storyline’ of Kargil that has been generally accepted for a decade: that Pakistan’s tactical victory in crossing the Line of Control with India ended in tactical defeat, and that the nuclear shadow under which the fighting took place had effectively frozen the territorial status quo. But it does offer numerous surprising and important insights below that macro level. Lavoy’s introduction directs a spotlight on, among other things, the implications of Kargil for nuclear deterrence theory, noting that one of its key postulates – that a nuclear environment fosters arms control – is contradicted by Kargil; and two others – that nuclear powers do not fight and that they do not initiate or escalate crises – are at least partly refuted.

In my view, two other conclusions in this book have special importance. The first has to do with the dynamics of Pakistan’s decision-making. Several authors note that, in Pakistan’s view, the Kargil operation was intended to create a ‘fait accompli’ that would change the status quo in Kashmir, and also to avenge decades of what Pakistanis consider India’s taking advantage of them (most importantly the Indian intervention in the Bangladesh War, but also India’s occupation of the Siachen Glacier in 1984). Together with a long history of military pre-eminence in Pakistan’s decision-making and the Pakistan Army’s institutional distaste for self-criticism after its military reverses, this genesis of Kargil led the Pakistani military leadership to assume, in ways that seem quite remarkable to outside observers, that India would not mount much of a defence.

This streak of self-delusion in a military organisation that is in other respects highly professional has important consequences for the region, not to speak of Pakistan’s relations with the United States.

A second arresting analysis is the discussion of the role of surprise in military operations. James Wirtz and Surinder Rana review the literature and conclude that surprise is most valued by military leaders who face a stronger adversary and who believe that surprise can neutralise the power imbalance. They also conclude, after looking at the results of a number of surprise operations, that the result is often tactical victory but strategic failure. This is of course how Kargil turned out. It also raises questions about how both analysts and especially military leaders do and do not absorb lessons from history.

As happens in nearly every edited volume, there is a certain amount of repetition, and one chapter, by Bruce Riedel, basically condenses and reviews material he has already published elsewhere. But these are minor flaws in a book that combines many important insights and a welcome readability.

HINDU-MUSLIM CONFLICT IN INDIA: A “PRE-COLONIAL” VIEW

Ajay Verghese of US Riverside is one of the up and coming political scientists who specialize on South Asia. His earlier book  “The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India” (Stanford University Press, 2016) argued that the geographic pattern of  mob-violence in India has its root in the Colonial era but in a surprising way. He argued that religious or communal violence (Hindu-Muslim usually) is associated with the former princely states (the Maharaja, Nawab states), while tribal and caste violence is associated with areas under direct British colonial rule.

 

 

I have always thought colonial studies infantalizing. Yhe british drew a few lines

Can Hinduism Survive?

One of our authors wrote a post with the title “Should Hinduism Survive“? I think it should, but leave that aside for the moment and consider a different question: CAN Hinduism survive? And if so, in what form (or forms) will it survive?

I do not consider myself knowledgeable enough to answer these questions with any confidence. What I intend to do instead is to set out some random thoughts and observations, and hope that our commentators can help us  approach an answer (or more likely, a range of possible answers)

One response to this question (and for various reasons this response is common among my liberal, secular and leftist Hindu friends) is to say: Of course it will survive. It is non-Hindus who should be afraid of extinction. Hinduism is the religion of over a billion people. It has survived for thousands of years. Groups that claim to be “Hindutvadi” are in power at the Federal and state level in India. Indians who are not Hindu are said to live in a state of fear and trepidation, with the specter of “Hindu-Fascism” hanging over their heads. Conversely, if you ask Hindu Nationalists you may be surprised to get a very different response. While there is a fair amount of jingoism and occasionally there is outright triumphalism, the dominant response is surprisingly pessimistic. I have not done a scientific poll, but I have asked this question of many friends and acquaintances who consider themselves “pro-Hindu” in some sense or the other, and a decisive majority tend to answer that better organized, better prepared and better funded “Abrahamic” religions are taking over India. Hindu survival is hanging by a thread and we probably won’t make it into the next century. Some of this is just the usual way Right wingers in all countries complain that the traditional mores of the people are under threat, the barbarians are multiplying and our leaders are weak. The sky will fall tomorrow unless XYZ is made the supreme leader and drastic (usually extra-constitutional) steps are taken to reverse our present course.  But at least in my experience, the Indian version is more deeply pessimistic and a lot of smart people really do feel their culture and religion will not make it past this crisis. Are they right?

The basis for philosophy in science are religion https://manasataramgini.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/the-basis-for-philosophy-in-science-especially-biology-and-religion/

Macranthropy and the saMbandha-s between microcosm and macrocosm

 

 

Brown Pundits