I’ll write a short note since my name has been taken in vain repeatedly in the past few days (I only believe we should take Muhammad the Pedophile’s name in vain).
Our resident hero, Kabir, writes:
The demand for Persianization/Arabization is not coming from Pakistanis but mainly from outsiders on this blog. I fail to understand the logic of trying to change a country’s national identity when there is no grassroots demand for it.
Addendum: What have Pakistanis accomplished or achieved in the English language? I can only think of Kamila Shamsie, who won an award for Home Fire. Decolonisation must begin with the gradual displacement of English from prestige to merely technical.
I get a fair amount of email related to questions about Indian genetics, as well as calls for me to adjudicate various controversies. A major problem with any “Aryan invasion theory” or its descendants, which posit non-trivial gene flow from the Eurasian steppe, is the possibility that the Indo-Aryan ancestors of nearly all South Asians (albeit, in extremely varied proportions) were a thousand men with the bright faces, azure eyes, and flaxen locks. Paul Bettany times a thousand astride chariots.
The anachronistic neocolonialism obviously makes Indians uncomfortable. Or that’s my psychoanalysis. I don’t care much either way. What does Lord Indra’s scion care? We are the unbroken lineage, grasping Eurasia’s heart, from the Baltic to the Bay of Bengal!
The flip side of this is people of European ancestry, some of whom are white nationalists, do come close to making this claim. That is, that the Aryans were white Nordic people. The genetics from the Sintashta and Andronovo cultural complexes do indicate that they resemble many of the contemporaneous European populations. Their ultimate locus of origin probably is the Pontic steppe, which is in the geographic boundaries of Europe, as such. Finally, these steppe peoples exhibit genetic signatures of reflux from Europe. That is, they’re not just Yamna-descendants but derived from Yamna-like people who moved west, mixed with local indigenous Europeans, and moved back east along the Eurasian steppe corridor.
Lord Indra’s face? NO!
Looking at some of the ancient forensic DNA some of these individuals have suggested that I must admit that the Indo-Aryans were genetically like Europeans, and phenotypically like Europeans as well. They know that I won’t lie like some people, and just want me to admit this.
We had some discussion on Twitter about Sikhs and I mentioned that my Punjabi Nationalist dad once said that he had thought about converting to Sikhism, but after he spent time with some Khalistani Sikhs in America, he decided their priests are as bad as ours, so he dropped the idea. Continue reading Are Sikhs Exceptional?
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…
Dear leader (aka Imran Khan) was in Sohawa laying the foundation stone of “Al-Qadir University” and he gave a speech that is a good summary of his (childish, Aitchison college and Pakistan studies) worldview. The guy introducing him mangles one of Iqbal’s finest urdu poems and then Imran Khan takes it from there.. He manages to mangle Ahle suffa, Roohaniyat, history, sufism and science in this speech.. worth a listen.
But today I am not concerned with his worldview (which at least has a certain childish sincerity about it), I am just concerned about the name “Al Qadir University”. We are told that this university is named after Abdul Qadir Jilani. Supposedly Imran Khan and his wife Bushra Maneka came up with this name. But why? Why the “Al”? Al-Qadir just means “THE Qadir”. If it is named after Abdul Qadir Jilani then there is no reason to call him “THE Qadir”. Why not “Abdul Qadir Jilani University”? or just “Qadir University”?
Al-Qadir is one of the names of Allah. It would make sense if the university was named for Allah, but dear leader himself says it is named for Abdul Qadir Jilani. Hence the confusion.
I suspect that this name is an example of the neo-Punjabi tendency to add “Al” to anything they want to Islamize or make attractive by making it sound Arabic. Hence we have “Al-Bakistan”, Al-Mashhoor Fried Chicken and Al-Sultan Shoes and suchlike. It looks like the name of this university is another example of this (unfortunate) practice.
This short blog post is my personal contribution to improving the naming traditions in neo-Punjab. May Allah bless our efforts with success.
This is an interesting endeavor by a self-styled expert on drones from the University of Southampton in United Kingdom.
I first read about this great expert on drones in a review by one Mr. Phillip O Warlick II of Air Command and Staff College who elevated the book and its author to prophetic heights.
Having witnessed some drone strikes personally and having extensively travelled in the area affected by the so called US drone program I decided to buy this book which was quite a blunder as I now reflect in retrospect.
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.
“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.
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?