A sequel to FlyDie on South India. 19 comments, across 6 threads, in this second batch.
The three pillars of caste. Privilege never converged on one varna. Brahmins hold the social pillar, Vaishyas the economic, Shudras the political, and a jati’s rank follows its proximity to each: close to all three makes a Kshatriya, far from all three a Dalit. The Kshatriya is the mediator everyone wants and nobody needs; the Mughals played that part best, and the empire came apart when they stopped.
Varna was always negotiable. The lawbooks rejected one direction of mixed marriage and tolerated the other. Bengal’s Kulin Brahmins wrote jati origin myths to secure their own land grants, and “pure” Kshatriya lineages were invented as needed. The grey areas, he argues, are why caste survived 3,000 years.
Manchus are to China what Mughals are to India. A follow-up to his India-and-China comment. “Han” was a set of practices before it became an ethnicity; Sun Yat-sen, arch Han nationalist, was Hakka. The Yuan never assimilated and lasted barely a century, while the Qing sinicized and endured.
The Deccan blunder. Urban Muslim nobles could be killed and replaced; rural Maratha sardars could not. Aurangzeb’s destruction of the sultanates left the vacuum the Marathas filled. In his verdict, a great general and a bad politician.
What the Mughals took from the land. North India is Vaishnav, he argues, largely through Mughal patronage; even Adityanath’s Nath sect spread on Mughal-era networks. Mughal architecture began at Bayana in Rajasthan, where the chhatri was born from the Nagara mandapa and the Persian canopy.
The environment, not the man. Akbar’s tolerance was no outlier; Ibrahim II of Bijapur ran the same experiment. The conservative turn began in mid-Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb rode the wave rather than made it. Dara was always going to lose.
Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam
Against apologetics. Defending a faith from the outsider’s picture accepts the outsider’s frame; the prior question is whether culture reflects religion or religion reflects culture. Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian-descent Jewish convert who became a fakir, then a yogi, then nothing at all, fits no category the book allows. A Balkans-to-Bengal “Islamic world” cuts non-Muslims off from their own past while making Muslims the foreign other at home.
