I did a mini-gasp on social media when I saw Drew check in “Azad Kashmir.” Surely he would have been aware of the hyper-political language.
I would like to call him a Coloniser but since I’m in Turanian, rather than Tharoorian, phase at the moment; he’s one of the good guys.
PewDiePie on the other is a racist low-class wannabe Coloniser..
Also (related but not really):
India in 2019: 1. Nehru’s great-granddaughter signals that her family still follows obscure Kashmiri Brahmin custom. 2. Apparently manages to get the festival’s name wrong. 3. Person handling Twitter account doesn’t know how to use apostrophes. https://t.co/DRuyW5HR0H
— Sadanand Dhume (@dhume) April 6, 2019
i’ve done some research on pewdiepie since you streisanded him into my life 😉 he’s actually upper-middle-class and self-consciously so 🙂
I am feeling that the last few posts of the Shahenshah in which his majesty blames “colonizer trash” and Whites for everything that is wrong with brown lands is uncalled for. This in my mind only displays a thin skinned nature.
Does not behoove the Shahenshah of Iran-o-Turan.
I’ve always been doing that..
Drew probably referred to the region as “Azad Kashmir” because that is what it is officially called in Pakistan. If he was travelling in India, he would probably have called the valley “Jammu and Kashmir” as opposed to indian-held Kashmir. He’s neither Indian nor Pakistani so why should he really be expected to take a position either way?
I think it was overtly political; there is also the “city” or just Kashmir. Those checkins are possible.
I don’t think he thought about it very much. He just called it by the name that it is called in Pakistan, since that is where he had been travelling. He’s not expected to have deep nationalistic feelings about the whole dispute. The Indians who are freaking out that he has “hurt their sentiments” seem to be overreacting. It’s like if Pakistanis were to freak out every time someone didn’t call the Valley Indian-held.
For what it’s worth, I think both countries need to accept reality. The fact that Indian maps insist on showing all of Kashmir as India is really funny, when Azad Kashmir and G-B have never been part of the modern nation-state of India. Similarly, Pakistani maps show Kashmir as part of Pakistan (though they do mostly label the Valley as Disputed Territory). This is mostly posturing for the domestic audience, since everyone knows that neither territory is going to realistically change hands.
I have nothing to comment on the “azadi” of “AjAta kAshmIra”, except that I find its Sanskrit anuvAda very ironic 🙂
~
I know Priyanka Gandhi did follow some Kashmiri Pandit customs even at college as my eldest cousin was her classmate in Delhi. Even wore the deji-hūr at her wedding. A little odd as she is only a quarter Kashmiri by ancestry but then human culture always trumps genes and Indira was a bit of a control freak.
The use of “nauroz” for Navreh is explainable by the fact that the sub-culture of old Kashmiri Pandit khandans of the Moghal court (incl Nehrus) is quite Persianized (understandably). I have heard people from that background refer to our New Year as nauroz before. Though I must say I prefer the correct Kashmiri term.
Re Dhume’s comment on Priyanka’s tweet, I think his usage of “obscure” was ill-advised. Maybe he should have used a word meaning “less well known” without negative connotations.
Azad is a Persian word surely not Sanskrit.
I hear that they are supposedly “Persianised” but I simply find them Anglicised. If they were so Urdufied etc then Nehru would not have been an advocate for Hindi etc.
TNT communalism perfectly maps the language divide ultimately religion sorts out ur language affiliation (Urdu/Dakhini) except in Bengal, TN and Kerala.
Azad is Persian. However, AjAta is its exact Sanskrit cognate – it literally means “new born” or “kid” (which is also the original meaning of azad in Old Persian, cf. suffix -zadeh, whence the metaphorical connotation of “free”).
I am not sure about Nehru’s political attitude about Hindi, but his entire sub-culture was quite Persianate. Also Nehru was quite pro-Hindostani rather than Sanskrit-infused “shuddh” Hindi.
Re TNT, I think like most historical events it was a combination of accident and volition. Shit happens and we make the best of what we have.
(Didn’t realize you’d deleted your comment until after I posted mine. Pl keep/delete it as you see fit)
I deleted it after the Khushwant Singh post lol
Hello Slapstick
Is the word AjAta written as आजात् in Devanagari?
Also, is this a real word in Sanskrit, or a neologism? Are there any examples of its usage in Sanskrit literature?
What you’ve written is right but with a schwa at the end. BTW neologisms are real words too 🙂
But no, this one isn’t a neologism. Rather an actual cognate attested in RV too. E.g. the penultimate verse of the famous nAsadIya sUkta – the hymn of creation – in the Rk:
ko addhA veda kaH iha pravocat kuta *AjAta* kuta iyam visRSTiH
arvAgdevAH asya visarjanena athA
ko veda yata AbabhUva
(Usage above in the sense of new born or arisen!)
Thanks Slapstik. Located the word here.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rvsan/rv10129.htm
If the RSS finds out about it, soon they will start using it as a substitute for Azad. (Note their tendency to use Hindusthan हिन्दुस्थान in place of Hindustan हिन्दुस्तान .) 🙂
Finding cognates of Persian in Sanskrit is easy. The challenge is finding the substitutes for the load of Arabic words in Hindi. No wonder they are still struggling to find the correct Dharmic word for “shaheed”. 🙂
And apologies for eating up the schwa. I am a north indian so schwa deletion comes naturally to me.
They could use shastrahat, yodhshanna or raNshrita. shastrahat attested in Skt lit. Apparently there was even a shastrahat-parva to honour the memory of fallen heroes etc.