Is there any example of a Hindu (m) Muslim (f) couple in Pakistan who have children raised as Hindus within the country? I ask because I cannot think of a single case, even in the public figure / celebrity circles.
I read up on this old Manu Joseph article where its quoted: “In any case, her son can’t marry a Muslim; Islamic law prohibits a Muslim marrying a Hindu.” referring to the famous designer, Deepak Perwani.
Can anyone confirm if this is true? I don’t mean just from a societal perspective, I’m referring to actual laws, is anything specifically mentioned on intermarriage? As in forbidding Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims and raising children in the respective non-Muslim religion?
According to the 2017 Pak census, there are ~ 3.3 million Hindus in the country, so ~ 1.65 million Hindu men, since the population is bottom heavy I’d guess 40% are from 18-39, so 660,000 Hindu men in this age group. It’s hard to imagine that there’s not even a single Hindu male in such a large population group married to a Muslim and with Hindu children, especially since Muslim (m) Hindu (f) couples occasionally make the news.
Marriage in Pakistan falls under family law determined by shariah courts. All the rulings espoused by these courts explicitly state its forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry anyone but a Muslim man. If a non-Muslim woman happens to convert to Islam while already married to a non-Muslim man, her marriage will be dissolved unless the man also converts.
“It’s hard to imagine that there’s not even a single Hindu male in such a large population group married to a Muslim”
If you are familiar with Pakistan its not at all hard to imagine. I would be stunned if there were any Hindu-male Muslim-female couplings in the country.
Numbers aren’t the issue (there are many Hindus in Sindh), its primarily a safety issue.
There are also racial/tribal issues involved. Most Hindu Sindhis are low-caste and impoverished, and even if they converted to Islam to marry a Muslim woman, I guarantee it wouldn’t help (unless the Muslim family was more impoverished than them).
The ones who stayed in Sindh are mostly lower castes.
Most Muslims in the Northwest are descended from low-castes only in the sense that they are descended from non-Hindus (who by definition were considered low-caste).
Apostasy is considered a crime according to Orthodox Muslims.
Specifically for Pakistan:
“As of 2014, there is no law that criminalizes apostasy in Pakistan.[304] A bill was proposed in 2007 to criminalize apostasy, but it failed to pass. It has been noted that, in theory, the principle of “a lacuna” could apply where a gap in statute law could be filled with Islamic law. However, as of 2014, there were no known cases of anyone being prosecuted for apostasy in Pakistan.[304] Apostates can be prosecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy law, if they desecrate the Quran or make derogatory remarks against the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.[305]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam
It is naive to pretend that lives in Pakistan are governed solely by the law – especially where issues “offensive to majority sensibilities” are concerned.
There have been cases within living memory of someone having to be spirited away to another country when they converted out of Islam. Ditto with cases involving blasphemy where majority feelings of outrage reliably trump any legal niceties.
Nothing in the link I posted contradicts what you are saying. The point is that apostasy specifically is not illegal in Pakistan as it is in some other countries. Obviously, the blasphemy laws can be misused against apostates.
In Islam, it is forbidden for both muslim men and women to marry a “polytheist”. But if he/she “converts” to islam then he/she is not a “polytheist” anymore
In Bangladesh, in almost all “inter-religious”(muslim and hindu) marriages the children get the “muslim” identity. In most cases, the hindu man/woman converts to Islam. So it is not exactly “inter-religious”. Some become very practicing muslims.
I personally know several cases….i guess in 50% cases, the man is muslim born and in 50% cases the man is hindu born
there’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance (modern english has elided that difference, but tolerance did not in ancient times connote equality).
An important reason why Bengalis are way more tolerant than Indians or Pakistanis is probably that we are culturally,ethnically and tribally way more homogeneous. I dont think it is genetic
why do you think bangladeshis are more tolerant than indians? i see no evidence of that. more tolerant than pakistan, yes, but that’s like saying you are taller than a dwarf.
A lot of reasons which may include:
*no deadly riots in independent Bangladesh which is common in our neighbouring countries
*disproportionately large number of hindus at top positions in public and private sectors
*more optional holidays for religious minorities and much less optional holidays for the religious majority
*a lot of isckon temples within Bangladesh (may be 3 times than that of India..not sure)
*pro hindu bias by our government. For example, there are some cases where hindu criminals go unpunished but not muslim criminals
*i know many hindus personally. So personal observation is another reason.
*in India, legally a Bangladeshi muslim has to pay 20 times more than that of a Bangladeshi non-muslim for overstaying. Such discriminatory laws dont exist within Bangladesh
*Minorities in Bangladesh never get killed by angry mobs(by burning or by beating) which happens in our neighbouring countries
*Religious and identity politics aint that popular in BD compared to that of Ind or Pak
*In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, laws are in favour of mongoloid racial minorities
*unlike Hindiya or Puckistan,we dont have fanatic MPs and ministers who say extreme stuffs against minorities
I have enough reasons (from personal sources and observation) to think that RAW
is working within Bangladesh to achieve some hindutva goals as they have an Hindiya-friendly government in Bangladesh…however that is entirely a different issue
BTW you are also a Bangladeshi?
PS. I always try not to say anything against anyone or any group. I usually say everything as a fact
Jai Shree Mountain❤
Jai Shree Tolerance❤
May our mountain ancestors make our tribe strong against malicious sky and mountain neighbours
Nagraj is an Indian comic book hero who can summon snakes. The TV show linked here has some real tacky plot lines and graphics. You might also enjoy it in the ironic “so bad it’s good” way.
Quote from the article: “The attack on Hindu women is part of crime against rural women in general in Pakistan. Hindus are rarely targeted because they are Hindus but since the justice system is so slow and in some cases biased against minorities, criminals here feel that they can get away with such attacks on Hindus. “.
This sounds similar to what many people (right-wingers generally) in India are saying today about the attacks on Muslims that have been in the news these past few years.
(Caveat: the article is from 2004, so conditions may well have changed)
NM
4 years ago
Rig Veda includes hymns praising Saraswati river. If it’s the ancient river whose drying up lead to the decline of Indus valley civilization, it throws up a challenge to the Aryan migration theory.
The river is supposed to have dried up much before Aryan migration to India.
What’s your opinion about this?
Why couldn’t the hymns have been composed well after the fact, based on folk memory? The composers would have had mostly IVC ancestry but have adopted variations of the IE language brought by their steppe ancestors.
The Vedic Saraswati has been tenuously tied to a river in Afghanistan. Even if that isn’t right, Vedic Saraswati does not necessarily refer to the dried up river in India.
In light of all of the other anti-OIT evidence, this one piece doesn’t warrant a fundamental re-examination of the whole subject.
My position is that the AASI were Aryans. And that many ancient civilizations were very advanced circa 8 thousand years ago, including ancient Egypt, ancient Sumeria and the ancient Arya varsha (which extended at various times from Iran to Armenia to Azerbaijan to Tajikistan to Turkmenistan to Uzbekistan to Xinjiang to Tibet to Java to Sumatra to Vietnam to the Philippines). Or that advanced civilizations extended across a vast area for many thousands of years.
Based on the texts the great Vedic saints who (along with their paramparas and jatis) composed the Vedic Samhitas arrived after the last great global flood via ship. Could this be 12,800 years ago?
Interesting post considering that not only is the real life identity/counterpart of Saraswati not clear, but people also willingly link it to IVC for some reason.
The locations of the closest approximation to Saraswati (assuming it was an actual physical river) isn’t clear, it could have easily been Helmand or some other river instead of the commonly associated Ghaggar-Hakra system which was dried up by the time of the arrival of the steppe Aryan component in India. So if the Ghaggar-Hakra is indeed the Saraswati then it should have always been referred to as a dry former river, not something that dried up in their presence.
“which was dried up by the time of the arrival of the steppe Aryan component in India. ”
…Or the sarasvati is pre aryan “memory” which the aryans just incorporated in the rig veda . Just like Shiva became an Aryan God, similarly Saraswati became an Aryan river.
Alright, that can be another argument against Saraswati being a hindrance towards the idea of AIT.
However, do we really know if Shiva is a local south Asian deity? I know that there were depictions of a Shiva-like figure from Bhimbetka caves:
However I do not know which period it belongs to. The period 4 and 5 (early historic) show later motifs associated with post-Aryan migration south Asia. So if the painting is from period 3 (copper age) or earlier, then it would be a good support for Shiva or at least Nataraja being a pre-Aryan figure of south Asian religion. Does anyone know the dating of this particular figure? assuming that it has been dated at all.
Leading theory is not that the Saraswati dried up, its that climate change caused the monsoon-fed river to become more intermittently flowing, which combined with disruption to adjacent water systems, made agriculture difficult enough that sustaining the large urban populations became too difficult.
Very likely the worst of it hit during the decline of the IVC, and by the time the Aryans penned the Vedas in Punjab (centuries later), it had recovered enough to be significant during the monsoon seasons.
This seems to be a much more likely and reasonable explanation, then questioning the entire scholarship on the Indo Aryan migrations.
I used to see this kind of reasoning when debating Muslims on aspects of theology. One one hand you’d have a large body of evidence pointing to human evolution, and on another you’d have someone say, “but recent studies have called into question when exactly the first homo sapiens diverged, the skeletons and genetic data now don’t match up”.
Which, you know, may be true, but it doesn’t all cast doubt on human evolution. I view these discussions on the Saraswati and chariot wheels in the same light.
Essentially the Saraswati declined twice, the first caused IVC’s decline.
Later it revived during the Vedic period and declined again during the Mahabharata period.
Are there any climatic studies which point to both these events? Could you please point to the sources?
The latest on Ghaggar-Hakra (the purported Saraswati in India) is a Nature paper from 2019: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53489-4
Quoting from the abstract:
“We establish that during 80-20 ka and 9-4.5 ka the river was perennial and was receiving sediments from the Higher and Lesser Himalayas. The latter phase can be attributed to the reactivation of the river by the distributaries of the Sutlej. This revived perennial condition of the Ghaggar, which can be correlated with the Saraswati, likely facilitated development of the early Harappan settlements along its banks. “
LoL. may be after listening to native punjabis mauling their dear vedas in atrociously nasal punjabi accent, they were left with no other choice but to pen them for the posterity.
Razib,
Since this is the place to throw out wild ideas, why can’t there be a back migration?
Hypothesis:
Vedics (not Steppe) wrote Vedas in India watching the Saraswati, went out of the country to other places, came back as Aryans (with Steppe flavor) and picked up Vedas again from the people that they left before. They completely missed out on IVC rise and fall.
This doesn’t seem that far-fetched based on your recent articles in gnxp about back migration to Africa and South-East Asia. Also, the fact that Iran-related ancestry is in IVC far longer than was thought.
Linguistics may show that PIE couldn’t have been that old. But how would genetics disprove back-migration scenario?
There is no memory of coming from “other” places in India either. It goes both ways.
In fact, other places don’t have such oral tradition (intact transmission despite other invasions), which implies India is the only place it continued.
Why are the people coming to India the only bunch of weirdos?
Razib, I have not quite understood why you (as an intellectual I respect) have not paid attention to RgVeda and the evidence it brings to bear on the PIE homeland question.
Since “discovery” and study of RgVeda in the late 18th century is what started the whole idea of IE and PIE homeland, and since it has one of the longest pristinely preserved literary evidence, its content seem clearly relevant. And if RgVeda contents point to OIT (and its not just Saraswati.. see Talageri’s thorough analysis of chronology), while other evidence says Steppe origin, I’d rather think the situation is ripe for a paradigm-shifting synthesis of new theories (like black body radiation before quantum theories). This deserves more attention by researchers and public intellectuals.
Be that as it may, I am just plain curious as to why you haven’t looked RgVeda and associated arguments critically.
Since “discovery” and study of RgVeda in the late 18th century is what started the whole idea of IE and PIE homeland
Yes, but the discovery was prompted not by the contents of the RV’s verses but by the suspicion (since affirmed over and over again) that the language those verses were written in had uncanny similarities to old Greek and Latin.
But the RV’s antiquity did make India the prime candidate as the PIE homeland for almost half a century until further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable. And it’s remained so ever since.
Numinous, can you point me to good summaries of “further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable”? Linguistic evidence appears ambivalent and weak (Kazanas, Elst vs Witzel; isoglosses: Hock vs Talageri), and genetic is too recent for what you said (within half a century). Literary (content of RgVeda) and Archaeological (no evidence of discontinuity within india) favors OIT at least mildly on balance, horse-issue notwithstanding.
(And even then, genetic evidence permits the alternative that Eastern-Iran-NW-India (IndusPeriphery without AASI?) population was a large PIE reservoir, leading to spread to Yamna intrusion/expansion later on (or some diffusion model),following which we all know the consensus story of steppe incursion into India, which was large but not overwhelming. cf. JR’s writings and what someone called back-migration above). At least those are not models that can be rejected out-of-hand.)
I believe the shift in thinking happened purely on linguistic grounds. All the things you cite (linguistics, archaeology) came later.
The original OIT model relied on Sanskrit being literally the oldest known relative to the hypothetical PIE. Then people worked out the mechanisms of sound changes (palatalization, etc.) and hit upon the centum-satem isogloss after analyzing all the known IE languages. The realization that Sanskrit would have been a significant deviation from the original PIE made people turn to homelands that were outside India and closer to the “centum” regions (Eastern Europe).
In addition, the diversity of IE languages was far greater in Europe and the Near East compared to the diversity of IA languages within India proper. This is most parsimoniously explained by a movement from somewhere in the middle (steppe or Anatolia) to the ends. The discovery of Hittite and Tocharian only bolstered this view.
Of course, there are pure linguistic models (posited by Elst and Talageri) that can plausibly support an OIT while taking into account all of the above evidence. But these models have only been created in the past generation in reaction to the prevailing theories; the problem is now we have genetic evidence that is strongly biased towards the prevailing linguistic models.
Black body radiation theory is a good enough approximation at a macro level, just like gravitation is compared to relativity. There’s no contradiction here like the AIT vs the OIT.
the vedas, like the bible or greek mythology, are not history. they have history embedded within them. but it’s dark and murky.
i don’t give the vedas any more weight than greek mythology. both are indo-european. neither recall any time of the peoples in question outside of their homelands.
The distinction is syllable-by-syllable preservation over at least 3200-3500 years. (and a wealth of verifiable chronological data identified by Talageri about which books of RgVeda overlap with Avesta and Mittani records, building on internal chronology of the books accepted by all).
Re: Greek mythology
It is one thing to write and another thing to preserve exactly what you wrote. Even bible doesn’t have exactly same copies and hundred interpretations of one possible mistranslation between versions of bible. And that is less than 2000years old.
May be I am wrong, but I don’t think we have any copies of exactly what Greeks wrote. Instead, they were back translations from other languages (and accompanying interpretations). no?
Violet May be I am wrong, but I don’t think we have any copies of exactly what Greeks wrote. Instead, they were back translations from other languages (and accompanying interpretations). no?
Dead Sea Scrolls
In the larger sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls include manuscripts from additional Judaean Desert sites, dated as early as the 8th century BCE and as late as the 11th century CE.[1]
Biblical texts older than the Dead Sea Scrolls have been discovered only in two silver scroll-shaped amulets containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers, excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom and dated c. 600 BCE;
I’ve been wondering why the audience of this blog is so Right-wing. In all the time I’ve been here, I haven’t come across that many people consistently articulating a Left of center viewpoint (Democratic Party in the US, Congress Party in India).
My view of why my center-left friends wouldn’t find this blog interesting. I think they are pretty well convinced of their viewpoints, have a limited view of what are credible voices and what the legitimate ways of framing the discourse around political issues are. Being over-curious about ancestry, creating cultural taxonomies, these are not things they are comfortable with. As for the hindu radicals and hindu realists (i don’t consider them all rightist, nativist, or conservative), I don’t think they are as smug and its probably a thrill for them to be part of a forum moderated by non-hindus, but tolerant to their worldview. Not to say they don’t have strong foundational convictions, but that the scaffolding of hindu nationalism is still a work in progress. I don’t share their loyalties, but many of them who comment here seem well thought out. There aren’t a lot a forums like this for “Hindu Realpolitik” as opposed to forums for rank and file true believers.
may center-left people i know (not all, e.g., see omar) are quite smug because they are smarter than me and know moret han me. they are, after all, center-left, so they are right.
razib – “may center-left people i know (not all, e.g., see omar) are quite smug because they are smarter than me and know moret han me. they are, after all, center-left, so they are right.”
???
did i read this right? do you really mean to say that there are people smarter than you in this world!
what happened to the famed attitude that pulls in the readers to this blog?
By Right-wing I mean that most people who comment here seem to be reflexively pro BJP/Modi. They have no problem with things like the annexation of Kashmir and the communications blockade, the Citizenship Amendment Act etc. They also see the Islamic period in India’s history as “1000 years of occupation” rather than viewing it with any nuance as a part of India’s rich history. There don’t seem to be many people defending Nehruvian Secularism or the inclusive and pluralist “idea of India”.
Where are the people who think that states belong to all their citizens and that the Indian government should not be introducing religion into citizenship laws?
Kabir, I think the anonymity of the internet makes it a great place for people with an axe to grind. I was at a friend’s house the other day for lunch. One of the guests had pretty hostile opinions about the anti-CAA protestors and to some extent Muslims at large. The room was full of corporate types, not an artsy or activist set, but his opinions were not welcome and he felt it. The prestige press and ramchandra guha opeds are for the nehruvians, they don’t need cover for their platitudes.
I work for a multinational corporation in India, and had a big argument with my co-workers about CAA/NRC, which then veered off into historical topics. Almost everyone in that group has spent many years abroad, like me. I ended up being the only person in the group who had not adopted the Hindutva version of history (as an example, everyone else thought of Nehru as a villain and traitor), and who was skeptical of the CAA and NRC for liberal reasons. I admit it was a surprise to me, but it showed me that those of us who don’t want to be part of Hindutva myth-making have to reconcile ourselves to being in a minority and just hunker down for a generation or two.
Heh, my parents also voiced their disgust of the CAA protestors (and I’m not a fan of them either.) They’re just the usual suspects…the Prada Meinhof JNU types and their Muslim friends.
Of course, Western Lefties have made them overhyped than the Star Wars Prequels.
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Anyways yeah, Indian politics is a rough, dog-eat-dog place. At the end of the day, my family knows that the BJP is the only party that will go to the mat for us. Everything else is downstream of that.
@Numinous: Interestingly enough, my family has somewhat *positive* views of Nehru and Indira. If you were to press them, they would say he was a good guy with some bad ideas and policies.
(They have mostly contempt for Rahul and a sheer, burning hatred for Sonia).
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Not too far off from my views. Nehru wasn’t a traitor or a villain, he was just a dude with a lot of outmoded and terrible ideas who ended up on the wrong side of history.
My dad was a fan of Indira (and voted for her) and he’s a big Modi supporter now. Not sure exactly what his views on Nehru are. I think he just likes tough decisive leaders who practice a muscular foreign policy (he also does have strong Hindutva sympathies.)
Personally, I’m not enjoying being in the position of Nehru apologist. I’ve long deplored his economic policies and also his short-sighted foreign policies (NAM turned out to be worse than useless, and we let China take the farm by allowing them to conquer Tibet.)
But the BJP today doesn’t really criticize him on those grounds (certainly not on economics; they seem to be practising their own version of a protectionist license-permit raj.) They criticize him for cultural reasons, for being a traitor to Hindus and to India, on grounds that range from murky to fake.
A lot of upper class/caste are silent BJP supporters. They know at the end of the day it the only party which will side with them. The BJP even in opposition in 2004-14 could clock in almost equivalent amount of revenue which Congress had.
On the whole right wing circlejerk, i am on watsapp groups with lot of Indian folks based in US who are liberals. Their delusion is also equivalent They think we are on cusp of revolution 😛
“I’ve been wondering why the audience of this blog is so Right-wing. In all the time I’ve been here, I haven’t come across that many people consistently articulating a Left of center viewpoint (Democratic Party in the US, Congress Party in India).”
my views are usually issue based. i am generally unsparing of cultural ravages wrought by islamic rule in india, so i guess i come across as a strong hindu right wing guy.
in terms of economic and social matters, i am really far left wing. i strong support a universal government run health insurance program in US. i am all for significant raise of minimum wage. ( i think it is a shame that if one is a minimum wage earner in US, he/she is condemned to a life time of long work hours, so prospects of owning a home, no prospects of good vacations etc.)
and i also support all the affirmative action programs (both in US and back home in India where they are called “reservation”). and i think america owns a debt to blacks and it should compensate them for the slavery.
however, i do not support governments running businesses. that is a sure recipe for economic mismanagement leading to economic decline. businesses should be left to capitalists, but they should be taxed more to support weaker sections of the society.
Really? So Bernie Sanders is the same as Donald Trump?
The left is the group that believes in extending equal rights to more and more groups (women, LGBTQ, minority religions etc) and in protecting the rights of minorities. The left also believes that society has a duty to take care of its weakest members. In contrast, the right believes in majoritarianism, ethno-nationalism, and big business.
The left believes in protecting Muslims because they are a minority in the West (and in India). This does not mean that the left supports “Islamism”.
These are platitudes. The left doesn’t believe in strict equality and hasn’t since the birth of socialism. What the left believes is in constantly producing some kind of balance based on Marxist theory and implemented by bureaucrats. Groups identified as underprivileged are to be therefore given more privileges than those identified as “privileged” to balance out the extra wealth and power those with privilege are supposed to possess (and somehow never lose.)
It is the Left which is fighting for universal healthcare in the United States (“Medicare For All”), for increasing the wealth tax, for staying out of the Middle East and for bringing troops home. Far better than the Right, which is anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, happy to get involved in endless wars, etc.
That doesn’t mean that the Left doesn’t sometimes go too far with identity politics, but overall their vision for the future is much more positive than the Right’s.
In India, the Left is fighting for the values of the Indian Constitution and the “idea of India”. The Right is happy to bring on the Hindu Rashtra. It’s pretty clear which side decent people should be on.
“…that society has a duty to take care of its weakest members”
This sounds admirable at first blush but on a closer look one has to ask how one decides on the “weakness” metric for any given individual. Normal (i.e. non-Left) people understand that privilege is not what mathematicians call a “total order” i.e. that the privileged-ness of a person can be incommensuable with that of another. How is one to decide if a Black male of the upper middle class is more or less privileged than a white WASP female who is homeless ?
The Left flattens out the resulting complexity by assigning what sound to the rest of us like arbitrary weightages to different attributes. This results in something that is not only repugnant to common sense but actually ends up perpetuating obscenities like the grooming pedophile gangs of Britain.
Privilege doesn’t exist in only one dimension. In your example, the Black male is economically better off and also has male privilege but presumably he also has to deal with racism. The White woman may be homeless but she is also White and therefore doesn’t face racial discrimination. The Left aims to address economic disparities as well as discrimination based on identity factors.
As an example of the fact that even rich and successful people can face racism, one only needs to look at how Meghan Markle has been treated by the British media and the royal family.
How do you distinguish between a black (or substitute any other historically underprivileged group) person getting flak for being an ass vs getting abused for their background (racism, etc.)? The modern left seems to always jump to the latter conclusion. Your example of Meghan Markle seems to prove the point; she’s unable to handle what other royals take for granted and turns around and calls it racism.
There is plenty of evidence for the British press’s racist treatment of Meghan Markle. She was criticized for doing exactly the same things that Kate did while Kate received no criticism. When Kate cradled her baby bump, it was charming and sweet. When Meghan did it it was vulgar. This is only one example.
Meghan and Harry’s baby was compared to a chimpanzee. That would not have happened with a fully White royal baby.
All this is to say that it is fairly obvious to me that racism plays a role in even how the most successful and rich African-Americans are treated.
People who are left enough for you tend to be extremely touchy, and get triggered by any platform with right of center viewpoints that aren’t marginalized or censured.
since kabir keeps posting comments here, empirically he’s not subject to this. BUT, he constantly expresses the exact same ticks, shocked and amazed that people would express views that would offend him.
hindu overrepresentation in professions is clearly due to higher qualifications. my father’s classes at dhaka university in the 60s were 50% hindu (math, physical science). there is clearly tacit discrimination against hindus in *executive* positions.
i don’t know whether it’s better to be a muslim in BIMARU or hindu in bdesh. but it is probably easier to be in a muslim in south india or in mumbai than a hindu in bdesh, though perhaps do a log-scale transformation, since the big problem is being a minority in pakistan.
I agree with what Bengalistani said. Except for some extremist mullah factions, nobody bothers about religious beliefs that much. All people in Bangladesh are treated equally as a human being. I don’t remember much about BNP regime, and they obviously aren’t better than Awami league anyway, 70% of my relatives support BNP, but Hindus in my hometown in BD never complained about anything. They freely practice their religion. Last time I visited my hometown, Kirtan was going on in Hindu quarters for a few weeks, all days and nights, very noisy obviously, the only time they interrupted was the time of Adhan and prayers. None of the Muslims stood against them nor got bothered by that.
My mom and I left Bangladesh for the first time to come in Europe during BNP regime in early 2000; I was just a kid but still remember the Hindu women in my village were crying for us.
Extreme stuffs that happen in Hindiya never happen in Bongo.
MPs or ministers in BD never said/say extreme stuffs against minorities. The situation within BD was always way better than that of our glorious sky neighbours.
“hindu overrepresentation in professions is clearly due to higher qualifications. my father’s classes at dhaka university in the 60s were 50% hindu (math, physical science). ”
Not anymore. Hindu Bengalis are not entirely a different race than Muslim Bengalis that they would have different intellect. A lot of time has passed. Now the qualifications are equal.
“there is clearly tacit discrimination against hindus in *executive* positions.”
At present, there is clearly tacit discrimination in favour of hindus in *executive* positions. I can’t tell u about the past.
“i don’t know whether it’s better to be a muslim in BIMARU or hindu in bdesh. ”
Depends on the Indian state. I guess there are some genetic factors linked to tribal tolerance
“but it is probably easier to be in a muslim in south india or in mumbai than a hindu in bdesh, though perhaps do a log-scale transformation, since the big problem is being a minority in pakistan.”
I believe that south indians are genetically more well behaved humans compared to Bengalis. Considering present situations, being a hindu in BD is probably way safer than being a muslim in North India. I gave you some reasons behind why i think so
India (and pak) needs LGBT for quantitative decrease and eugenics for qualitative increase?
May the Bangladeshi Mountain* blood flowing through your veins give you some wisdom
PS. Again, i have no intention to say anything targeting anyone
But the key issue is that if there are tribal differences within people there will be tribal conflicts. So we should try peacefully to reduce the tribal differences within people by means of tribal assimilation.
are minorities trying to leave you country? that’s a pretty good sign (though push/pull both matter). i doubt bangladesh is better for hindus than india for muslims. i think both are “OK”. a gentleman’s C. but pakistan definitely an F.
Nothing in South Asia Makes Sense Except in Light of the Steppe to AASI Ratio:
Considering good behaviour,tribal tolerance,morality etc: (probably)
South indians>Bangladeshis>Core Indians>North Indians>Pakistanis
However we Bengalis are probably one of the worst ethnicities ig.
Considering different factors, Bangladesh is comparatively more tolerant and peaceful than any other South Asian countries. A very important reason behind this is that we are probably the least diverse.
If there are less tribal differences, there will be less tribal conflicts. There wouldnt be any minority vs majority issue anywhere if everyone belonged to the same tribe.
Anyway, the entire South Asia needs East Asian biased eugenics.
“How a young KPS Gill’s life was changed when his mother gave him two swords in Lahore”
“Through all this, however, the memory of Partition, his intense sense of outrage at the appalling task he was asked to perform, and an enduring sense of the vulnerabilities of minorities and of the weak, guided K.P.S. Gill through much of his life. “It taught me,” he said, “that no human being should be subjected to this sort of choice, to such fears of mob attack without any protection from any quarter. This is a feeling that reasserts itself whenever a minority was brought under attack anywhere in my jurisdiction. Through my service career I have believed that minorities, the weak, the vulnerable, have to be protected at all costs, irrespective of their identities or the circumstances of their misfortune.” “
Mayuresh Kelkar
4 years ago
Kanpur horror: Cops arrest 2 accused after encounter, total ..
Which, you know, may be true, but it doesn’t all cast doubt on human evolution. I view these discussions on the Saraswati and chariot wheels in the same light.
“Reeaz Khan, 21, was hit with seven charges in the Richmond Hill attack on Maria Fuentes, including second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, first-degree attempted rape, first-degree sexual abuse and tampering with physical evidence.”
“Khan is an illegal immigrant from Guyana who was free despite a deportation order from federal immigration officials for prior assault and weapons convictions.”
Do you want to write some more detailed write ups on Bangladesh? Have you spent time in West Bengal? Elsewhere in India?
I would be very interested in hearing your perspectives on West Bengal and how West Bengal compares to Bangladesh.
The rest of India is very different from West Bengal. West Bengal is very different from Bangladesh.
In many parts of greater India–Jammu, Ladhak, Tibet, Delhi, Agra, UP, Ajmer, Maharashtra, Punjab . . . the muraqaba sufi irfan tilted muslims blend into the Dharmics (Hindus defined broadly to include Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains). Most of the people attending many large muslim centers are not muslim. Many tens of millions of Muslims attend Dharmic spiritual places too.
The place in India I see this least (albeit I have not been to every part of India) is West Bengal. I don’t understand why this is, and have always found this puzzling.
Many muslims say that there is no better place to be a Sufi or Shiite than India. And if you visit India it is easy to understand why many muslims believe this.
I know of many muslim/non muslim weddings. Almost all if not all of these muslims or Muraqabah or liberal muslims.
This leads to an observation selection bias.
Nonmuslims in India have little deep personal interaction with non Muraqabah/liberal tilted muslims. Muraqabah/liberal tilted Indian muslims appear to interact more closely with nonmuslims than they do with conservative Sunnis.
This might lead to a lack of understanding and awareness of conservative Sunnis on the part of nonmuslims and Muraqabah/liberal tilted Indian muslims.
Many conservative Sunni Indian males might be paranoid that there is a conspiracy of Muraqabah and liberal muslims, the BJP, RSS, VHP, Shiv Sena against them.
Having said all the above, in the 2019 West Bengal election, many muslims allied with the BJP. I am not sure how this data point fits in with what was written above.
West Bengal has also become extremely diverse with vast numbers of non Bangla speakers moving to West Bengal. It is to the point that it is difficult to get by in many urban places if someone does not have good Hindi.
Bangladesh seems far less diverse than West Bengal.
I would be very interested in hearing your perspectives on West Bengal and Kolkata (safest city in India). Perhaps on the West Bengal economic miracle too?
My understanding is that the migration of Hindus from East Pakistan may have seen a spike in 1947, but continued after 1947. The Pakistani Army victimized Hindus in 1971 as being anti-national. There is a belief that % of Hindus among refugees from Bangladesh in 1971 far exceeded their % in the population of East Pakistan. This fact was suppressed by Indira Gandhi regime in order to avoid backlash among Muslims in India.
I wonder how many of the Hindu Bangladeshis who sought refuge in India in 1971 went back to Bangladesh.
Has migration of Hindus continued after East Pakistan became Bangladesh?
you can google it, but it continued. but i have read most of it dates to 50 to 70 period, with 71 spike.
my family knows hindus who left their towns. the families often have a relationship with muslim families to watch their property so they are still officially around.
There are many different estimates. According to this one (which I partly disagree with): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Bangladesh#Religion
—Bangladesh was 69% Muslim during partition.
—Bangladesh was about 80 1/2% Muslim right before the 1971 genocide
—Bangladesh is about 91% Muslim now
The Hindu percentage of the population in Bangladesh has greatly shrunk over time.
This said, in the last two years the perception on the street is that security in Bangladesh has improved and many Indians are now visiting and doing business in Bangladesh.
I have many questions for Bengalistani, Son Goku as described earlier. Including:
—Your impressions of West Bengal?
—Bangladeshi impressions of West Bengal?
—Comparing and contrasting West Bengal with Bangladesh?
—Would you favor India opening an IIT Bangladesh and an IIM Bangladesh? Would you favor far closer education collaboration and entanglement between Bangladesh and India? Maybe having some shared unified education boards for K-10, 12th and university?
—Would you favor much closer economic integration between Bangladesh, West Bengal and India? {Free trade, free investment, free cross border R&D collaboration, student visas, work visas, tourist visas, religious visas agreement} [I 200% do.]
The first video is about the weakness of Bengali ethnicity due to partition. The second video is a debate about the quote ” The past of Bengali culture is of Kolkata, but the future belongs to Dhaka.”
“—Would you favor India opening an IIT Bangladesh and an IIM Bangladesh? Would you favor far closer education collaboration and entanglement between Bangladesh and India? Maybe having some shared unified education boards for K-10, 12th and university?”
I have no objection about education collaboration.
“—Would you favor much closer economic integration between Bangladesh, West Bengal and India? {Free trade, free investment, free cross border R&D collaboration, student visas, work visas, tourist visas, religious visas agreement}”
General public of Bangladesh doesn’t trust India afaik. I think first we necessitate to get rid of the poverty, illiteracy, religious discrimination, caste inequality etc. in our respective countries; then closer economic relations would be more appropriate.
“West Bengal has also become extremely diverse with vast numbers of non Bangla speakers moving to West Bengal. It is to the point that it is difficult to get by in many urban places if someone does not have good Hindi.”
I’ve heard that the younger generation in Kolkata is loosing their Bengali identity due to the multicultural environment. Even the veteran Actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay in the first video mentioned this issue.
This Pandit nonsense reminds me of Pak nationalists, who whenever the atrocities in the Bengal War are brought up, agree there were atrocities, but that the atrocities were committed by the Bengalis against the pro-Pakistan Urdu speaking Bihairs.
Guilty conscious tends to project its sins onto others.
Wouldn’t most Sindhi Hindus be upper caste? Most South Asian converts to Islam came from the lower castes (generally speaking), right?
the ones remaining in pakistan and bangladesh tend to be lower caste (selective migration). similarly, less well off muslims stayed in india.
the idea that muslims tend to be lower caste…somewhat true i would bet. but not nearly as extreme as people expect. e.g., the bangladesh muslims are where they should be geographically. panmictic.
Dravidarya
4 years ago
‘the ones remaining in pakistan and bangladesh tend to be lower caste (selective migration). similarly, less well off muslims stayed in india.’
I wonder what factors played in that selective migration! Poor couldn’t afford to take trains leaving Pakistan to India in 1947? Or did the top brass of Pakistan keep the then poor (generally lower caste) Hindus and Christians in Pakistan so that they can clean their toilets, cut their hair, wash their clothes, clean the bull (cow) shit? Similarly, many Muslims tend to be butchers in India. Both my maternal and paternal villages were virtually cleansed of Muslims (Razakar affiliated) during Hyderabad Police action, of course the poor and oppressed Muslims (by Razakars) were allowed to stay. Which means only very few poor Muslims stayed back who had no other occupation other than butchering. Muslims also tend to not get involved in agriculture in at least my part of the country.
More like couldn’t afford. More Hindus/sikhs could migrate in percentage terms from Sindh/Punjab because they were richer and lived geographically closer. The ones who remained were poor/lower castes, and many converted to Christianity because it seemed a “neutral” religion. As opposed to UP Muslims (the grand daddy of Pakistan project) who wanted to migrate but just couldn’t/ or was too risky. Lot of them still moved after 47, once the violence subsided. I think an Indian army general too did in the 50s.
That’s the reason why you still have liberal people argue on stuff like Indian muslims “chose” India, as if they are some sort of mind readers.
I wonder what factors played in that selective migration!
liquid assets probably allowed for migration. this is not uncommon, a lot of the ‘refugees’ in europe from mena/africa are more well off back home. the true poor can’t leave.
second, pakistan had ready-made jobs for the mohajjirs. the hindu elites had fled to india, and the civil service etc. was denuded.
The resilience comes from the family structure, where sons (especially elder) keep living with parents after marriage. Pew global data indicates that the subcontinent is a complete outlier when it comes to this kind of living arrangement.
I think this arrangement defines the subcontinent in many ways, even Pashtun, Baloch, Nagas and Mizo dont follow this model.
Re intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan is heavily contextualised on class. Middle class and below it’s almost unheard for the non-Muslim partner not to give in though to be fair lot of the culture would be transmitted but among the elite level I know of a Hindu boy (from the few Bhaibands remaining in the country) marrying a Muslim girl but not to go in the specific but he did convert, his inlaws did have some misgivings (the joke was whether he had gone the full hog).
Re the Hindu Sindhis there are two larger distinct groups (and two more actually but they are smaller). The easiest one to label as indigenous are the Haris, who stayed back after partition, and are the backward classes/castes (so they have to contend with both religious & caste discrimination in the land of the Pure).
The Sindhi Hindus (of whom are an equal number, ~2.5mm-3.5mm are in India & abroad) are descendant of very late medieval-early modern Punjabi-Seraiki Hindu khatris into Sindh (Kripalanis are an Amil-Brahmin caste who allegedly descend from a Sikh migrant into Sindh). They are the “ani” Sindhis and of course are predominant in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Bombay (textile traders across India and formed the early part of the post-partition Indian Diaspora).
It’s all very confusing and hard to parse and I’m married into the culture but suffice to say Sindhi Hindus are syncretic (it’s common knowledge that they follow some aspects of Sikhism) but have become more Saffronised over the generations (which is perfectly natural as was the case for castes that were neither Muslim or Sikh in the Indus, this is more a sociological comment rather than an opinion).
The other Hindus of Sindh are Rajasthani tribes on the periphery (Umerkot/Tharparkar speak Rajasthani languages) and the final “Hindu Sindhis” are those that bled over to Gujarat in the medieval era (probably because of Ghori/Ghaznavid invasions), most famously the Lohanas (who are separate to Kutchis, who could probably be considered Sindhis since their language is a dialect/offshoot of Sindhi).
@Vikram – yes this is true. Pakistan being a conservative society will preserve many of the “Hindu elements” long after India has shed them through Westernisation. Or more precisely the core South Asian cultural attributes that have been internalised into Pakistani Muslim culture. Pakistanis may have the same subliminal uptake of Western culture (elite mimicry etc) but like most Muslims they consciously reject or keep it at bay. However virtually every other Islamic population from practises strict nuclear family living, which means they are functionally much more Western (South Asian Muslims are probably the only Muslims not to wear a white western dress for instance).
The Hindu joint family comes to mind (which has morphed into the biraderi system, though admittedly as I was reminded the Bedouins do practise something similar) and also the obsession with caste/lineage. At least Indians pretend to not know their caste, every Pakistani is aware of their shijrah (hence explains the ethnic animus) Pakistanis are simply loathe to give up on their culture, which they have fused with religion.
The Indus is not the boundary of India but as Kesari taught us it’s the Hindu Kush which are the liminal zones. Maybe the Ghorids and the Ghaznavids are such demons in modern-day India because they really did serve the Ur-homelands civilisationally but that is speculation that I’m not particularly interested in. Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.
Re intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan is heavily contextualised on class. Middle class and below it’s almost unheard for the non-Muslim partner not to give in though to be fair lot of the culture would be transmitted but among the elite level I know of a Hindu boy (from the few Bhaibands remaining in the country) marrying a Muslim girl but not to go in the specific but he did convert, his inlaws did have some misgivings (the joke was whether he had gone the full hog).
Re the Hindu Sindhis there are two larger distinct groups (and two more actually but they are smaller). The easiest one to label as indigenous are the Haris, who stayed back after partition, and are the backward classes/castes (so they have to contend with both religious & caste discrimination in the land of the Pure).
The Sindhi Hindus (of whom are an equal number, ~2.5mm-3.5mm are in India & abroad) are descendant of very late medieval-early modern Punjabi-Seraiki Hindu khatris into Sindh (Kripalanis are an Amil-Brahmin caste who allegedly descend from a Sikh migrant into Sindh). They are the “ani” Sindhis and of course are predominant in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Bombay (textile traders across India and formed the early part of the post-partition Indian Diaspora).
It’s all very confusing and hard to parse and I’m married into the culture but suffice to say Sindhi Hindus are syncretic (it’s common knowledge that they follow some aspects of Sikhism) but have become more Saffronised over the generations (which is perfectly natural as was the case for castes that were neither Muslim or Sikh in the Indus, this is more a sociological comment rather than an opinion).
The other Hindus of Sindh are Rajasthani tribes on the periphery (Umerkot/Tharparkar speak Rajasthani languages) and the final “Hindu Sindhis” are those that bled over to Gujarat in the medieval era (probably because of Ghori/Ghaznavid invasions), most famously the Lohanas (who are separate to Kutchis, who could probably be considered Sindhis since their language is a dialect/offshoot of Sindhi).
@Vikram – yes this is true. Pakistan being a conservative society will preserve many of the “Hindu elements” long after India has shed them through Westernisation. Or more precisely the core South Asian cultural attributes that have been internalised into Pakistani Muslim culture. Pakistanis may have the same subliminal uptake of Western culture (elite mimicry etc) but like most Muslims they consciously reject or keep it at bay. However virtually every other Islamic population from practises strict nuclear family living, which means they are functionally much more Western (South Asian Muslims are probably the only Muslims not to wear a white western dress for instance).
The Hindu joint family comes to mind (which has morphed into the biraderi system, though admittedly as I was reminded the Bedouins do practise something similar) and also the obsession with caste/lineage. At least Indians pretend to not know their caste, every Pakistani is aware of their shijrah (hence explains the ethnic animus) Pakistanis are simply loathe to give up on their culture, which they have fused with religion.
The Indus is not the boundary of India but as Kesari taught us it’s the Hindu Kush which are the liminal zones. Maybe the Ghorids and the Ghaznavids are such demons in modern-day India because they really did serve the Ur-homelands civilisationally but that is speculation that I’m not particularly interested in. Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.
Mayuresh Kelkar
4 years ago
Dalit youth burnt alive in MP, BJP says Congress shielding accused from ‘minority community’ due to appeasement politics
Long shot but wondering if y’all could bring John Gray (the philosopher) on here. Would be quite a coup!
Also Omar would get to interrogate him about his friendship with Pankaj Mishra 🙂
Gilgamesh
4 years ago
Hi Razib,
Could you have a discussion with davidski from eurogenes (podcast or written) on the PIE controversy?
JRT been pushing ‘out of Subcontinent’ theories, but he now sounds more and more like the ruling party’s stooge.
We the readers, need some balance of opinions.
Saurav
4 years ago
@All
Could anyone recommend a good book/podcast on Roman history. Specifically one which illustrates the reasons of their rise, rather than other italian powers of that time.
Mayuresh Kelkar
4 years ago
justpuzzled wrote:
“Numinous, can you point me to good summaries of “further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable”? Linguistic evidence appears ambivalent and weak (Kazanas, Elst vs Witzel; isoglosses: Hock vs Talageri), and genetic is too recent for what you said (within half a century).”
2018 paper:
Five waves of Indo-European expansion: a preliminary model (2018) https://www.academia.edu/36998766/Five_waves_of_Indo-European_expansion_a_preliminary_model_2018_
Also google Johanna Nichols’ work who puts the homeland in BMAC based on loan word trajectories.
The linguistic evidence is quite solidly behind the OIT and totally prohibits the AIT/AMT. Just a couple of examples,
1. Fire worshiping Iranian are completely missing the most commonly found agni and puhuur type of words that are in abundance in every other branch. English, pyre,fire, ignite and so forth. If indeed IIr had separated from IE as a COMMON stock it would be absurd to think that Iranians forgot all their words for fire and invented a totally new word Athar/Azhar which incidentally IS found in the later Vedic period Athari (flame) and Atharvan (priest).
2. Iranian shares morphological features with Greek, Armenian and Thraco Phyrgian that they do NOT share with IA. That would be impossible if these languages would have been going their separate ways from the Pontic steppe.
lol more like Jinnah-pur. Because Sindhu-desh will be Sindhi-desh and not Mohajir-desh.
Also what a fall for Hussain. From being the leader of Pak 3rd largest party, to virtual no body.
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
altaf hussein is complete nuts, but i think even he has brains enough not commit the ultimate sacrilege. most likely a rumor floated by pak deep state.
btw, AF is uproariously funny, and murderously dangerous at the same time. (doesn’t that sound like a villain from some c-grade bollywood movie?)
some of his you tube videos singing bollywood ditties while completely drunk are classics. but do not let his online buffoonery fool anyone. people who dare to criticize him frequently end up dead in jute sacks. his favorite quip to silence his critics – tumhari bori tayyar hai!
“Although the visit of the MEPs was widely criticized in the international community for flouting diplomatic norms, it signals a new development in Indo-European relations: Far-right narratives have become part of the global mainstream. The far-right in these two regions are learning from each other, and their abilities to govern according to a shared ideological agenda rooted in Islamophobia are evolving in parallel.
Although transnational bonds between nationalists may seem counterintuitive, their visions are not necessarily contradictory, and they may continue to complement each other so long as the Muslim “other” remains their common enemy. If far-right nationalists have it their way, it is likely that Indo-European relations will be reshaped along Islamophobic lines.”
I don’t think the authors realize just how much of a pun “indo-european” is in this context.
The skyfather’s children are uniting ;). May he smile upon his entire family.
Jai Shree Ameen
Mayuresh Kelkar
4 years ago
2019 papers by archaeologist Alexander Semenenko
Semenenko, Aleksandr Andreyevich. The absence of the sword from Rigveda and Atharvaveda and the problem of Indo-Aryans’ origin
Semenenko, Aleksandr Andreyevich. The spread of zebu cattle from South Asia to the East Mediterranean region as a marker of Indo-European population dispersal
@ Xerxes, the joint family system is eventually rooted in Hindu inheritance law, where the eldest son is the sole inheritor. Apart from Khojas of Gujarat, no Muslim community in India follows this mode of inheritance. Therefore, I am not sure why Pakistani Muslims follow joint family systems.
“Pakistan is what it is and so is India”
Muslims in India share great congruence with Pakistanis due to Pakistan’s adoption of Urdu. There is very little divergence in outlook and values. The ‘westernized’ lifestyle you allude to in India is almost entirely practiced by Hindu families.
Scorpion Eater
4 years ago
“Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.”
I think indians and pakistanis are really two different people. left-liberals types in india usually highlight the similarities in language, food and dress, or fondness for bollywood etc to make a superficial claim that they are same people. this claim does not stand close scrutiny. the souls of indians and pakistanis are vastly different, and the difference can be put down to a single factor – religion.
to give an example – today almost all the countries on this earth enjoy pizzas. that does not make all of us italian. or just because we like hollywood movies does not make us americans. (i believe saddam hussein was a hollywood fan too. that did not stop the americans from hanging him).
any breakthrough in indo-pak relation can only come after acknowledging this core difference, and finding a solution centered around it. this is what i call as a realist’s worldview.
There are 200 million Indians who have the same religion as the majority of Pakistanis. Are their “souls” Indian or Pakistani?
The differences between Indians and Pakistanis are predominantly due to the political differences between the two countries and state indoctrination. Otherwise, the underlying culture is very similar.
@scorpion eater, since there is a common language, it will be difficult for India and Pakistan to diverge in the long term. There simply is no historical precedent for this, and logically it is easy to see why populations that can communicate cannot diverge significantly.
What is true however is that there is very little synergy between the Indian and Pakistani economies. Also, India is on track to be significantly richer and more globalized than Pakistan. So there is little interest in Pakistan from India, apart from the security angle.
Agree that the shared language and heritage of N Indians and Pakistanis suggest they are wedded to each other in the long run. I don’t see either going full N Korea hermit kingdom. Pakistan is way more western/global in its outlook than many people here estimate, and although losing ground to India economically, it has hardly been left in the dust. Lahore is still a significantly more impressive city than Amritsar. Pak Punjabis are pragmatists, with conventional ideas of prosperity. If the east Punjab to Delhi corridor were to flourish in an aspirational way, I see them open to cooption. The divergence is not great enough yet however.
On the other hand, south and east India aren’t permanently part of the arrangement. The situation seems stable in the short run, and would predict more standardisation of Indian culture and adoption of Hindi. But it will never supplant other languages in the deccan, south and the east as a mother tongue, and hence its influence will ebb and flow, like french and german in continental europe.
” The divergence is not great enough yet however.
On the other hand, south and east India aren’t permanently part of the arrangement”
LOL. I would say its the opposite. Its because India is not just N-India that there was some form of semblance towards our Pakistan policy. Had it been just left to N-India (which its increasingly becoming so) , we would mirror Pakistan in the rhetoric at bare minimum (which we are doing today) .
It was actually the non chalance of the South/East, towards Pakistan, which makes India appear “pragmatist”. Neither the N-Indian nor the Pak punjabi is “pragmatist” in any sense of term. You can forget co-option. The more South/East becomes N-Indian , the more the stance towards Pakistan will harden (which has been happening )
Saurav, I think you are describing the run up to the present fairly accurately, as well as the near future. Speaking of the long run, however, we over-estimate the durability of the ideological polity vs nations (of origin). In the current generation, we are overestimating the durability of Islam. Language is a huge determinant of cultural boundaries and the Punjab-Hindustan continuum is a coherent zone that can outlast alliances. This goes for Baloch and Pashtun going their own way as well. Am always surprised how little river Pakistanis know or care about the Iranic culture of their countrymen despite the supposed look-west orientation we assume of them. I find this analogous to the commonality of the Anglo world, despite bitter conflict. The Irish can’t even escape the fact that they have more in common with the English than they’ll ever have with the catholic French or Spaniards. And despite rhetoric suggesting the opposite, parochial Americans, Aussies and Brits have enormous commonalities as well.
The elephant in the room is the Pak military. Any Indo-Pak economic rapprochement will seriously diminish their control of Pakistan’s politics and economy.
Saurav
4 years ago
I would disagree. Regardless of language, culture etc , India and Pakistan will keep on “diverging” further.
We are talking about a subcontinent where identity trump economics etc. Where folks who essentially live in the same country have diverged over the years. And here we are talking about two separate countries altogether. Folks have needlessly romanticized pre 65 war Indo-Pak relations or late 90s Aman ki asha, those were always false dawns.
Economically, yes, they will diverge, a bit like Mexico and Spain are today. But the stories and media these countries are intelligible, and will continue to be shared.
Culturally, like Australia and UK.
Economically, like Mexico and Spain.
Politically, like North and South Korea.
Saurav
4 years ago
Culturally more like Ukraine and Russia.
Both countries trying to show, “we are at least better than the other” , even though no one seems interested.
“Politically, like North and South Korea.”
Bit harsh, no? 😛
Not very aware of Russo-Ukranian dynamics. But culturally, Pakistan doesnt make many waves in India beyond some newspaper articles. Indian movies totally dominate the Pakistani market, and make crores there despite bans and piracy, whereas revenue from India for Pak artists is minimal.
I dont see Indo-Pak political conflict resolving any time soon. There is an entrenched establishment in Pakistan whose sustenance depends on the conflict, and India has no reason to engage with Pakistan unless something truly catastrophic is on the table.
Mayuresh Kelkar
4 years ago
India and Pakistan Are Edging Closer to War in 2020: Michael Kugelman
Is there any example of a Hindu (m) Muslim (f) couple in Pakistan who have children raised as Hindus within the country? I ask because I cannot think of a single case, even in the public figure / celebrity circles.
I read up on this old Manu Joseph article where its quoted: “In any case, her son can’t marry a Muslim; Islamic law prohibits a Muslim marrying a Hindu.” referring to the famous designer, Deepak Perwani.
https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/jai-kali-karachi-wali/224396
Can anyone confirm if this is true? I don’t mean just from a societal perspective, I’m referring to actual laws, is anything specifically mentioned on intermarriage? As in forbidding Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims and raising children in the respective non-Muslim religion?
According to the 2017 Pak census, there are ~ 3.3 million Hindus in the country, so ~ 1.65 million Hindu men, since the population is bottom heavy I’d guess 40% are from 18-39, so 660,000 Hindu men in this age group. It’s hard to imagine that there’s not even a single Hindu male in such a large population group married to a Muslim and with Hindu children, especially since Muslim (m) Hindu (f) couples occasionally make the news.
Marriage in Pakistan falls under family law determined by shariah courts. All the rulings espoused by these courts explicitly state its forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry anyone but a Muslim man. If a non-Muslim woman happens to convert to Islam while already married to a non-Muslim man, her marriage will be dissolved unless the man also converts.
“It’s hard to imagine that there’s not even a single Hindu male in such a large population group married to a Muslim”
If you are familiar with Pakistan its not at all hard to imagine. I would be stunned if there were any Hindu-male Muslim-female couplings in the country.
” I would be stunned if there were any Hindu-male Muslim-female couplings in the country.”
I mean, TBF, u need to have Hindus in the country ( to even have those coupling) to begin with, dont ya think
Numbers aren’t the issue (there are many Hindus in Sindh), its primarily a safety issue.
There are also racial/tribal issues involved. Most Hindu Sindhis are low-caste and impoverished, and even if they converted to Islam to marry a Muslim woman, I guarantee it wouldn’t help (unless the Muslim family was more impoverished than them).
As INDTHINGS pointed out, in Islam it is not permitted for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim. The nikaah (contract of marriage) would not be legal.
A Muslim man can marry a Christian or Jewish woman, since Christians and Jews are considered “people of the book”.
Wouldn’t most Sindhi Hindus be upper caste? Most South Asian converts to Islam came from the lower castes (generally speaking), right?
The ones who stayed in Sindh are mostly lower castes.
Most Muslims in the Northwest are descended from low-castes only in the sense that they are descended from non-Hindus (who by definition were considered low-caste).
I mean, TBF, u need to have Hindus in the country ( to even have those coupling) to begin with, dont ya think
are you a moron? sindh is 5-10% hindu. that’s probably in the range of 4 million people.
again, are you a moron?
Could a Muslim woman or man convert to a different religion if they wanted legally speaking?
For marriage or just out of personal conviction ?
Apostasy is considered a crime according to Orthodox Muslims.
Specifically for Pakistan:
“As of 2014, there is no law that criminalizes apostasy in Pakistan.[304] A bill was proposed in 2007 to criminalize apostasy, but it failed to pass. It has been noted that, in theory, the principle of “a lacuna” could apply where a gap in statute law could be filled with Islamic law. However, as of 2014, there were no known cases of anyone being prosecuted for apostasy in Pakistan.[304] Apostates can be prosecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy law, if they desecrate the Quran or make derogatory remarks against the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.[305]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostasy_in_Islam
It is naive to pretend that lives in Pakistan are governed solely by the law – especially where issues “offensive to majority sensibilities” are concerned.
There have been cases within living memory of someone having to be spirited away to another country when they converted out of Islam. Ditto with cases involving blasphemy where majority feelings of outrage reliably trump any legal niceties.
Nothing in the link I posted contradicts what you are saying. The point is that apostasy specifically is not illegal in Pakistan as it is in some other countries. Obviously, the blasphemy laws can be misused against apostates.
In Islam, it is forbidden for both muslim men and women to marry a “polytheist”. But if he/she “converts” to islam then he/she is not a “polytheist” anymore
In Bangladesh, in almost all “inter-religious”(muslim and hindu) marriages the children get the “muslim” identity. In most cases, the hindu man/woman converts to Islam. So it is not exactly “inter-religious”. Some become very practicing muslims.
I personally know several cases….i guess in 50% cases, the man is muslim born and in 50% cases the man is hindu born
“In most cases, the hindu man/woman converts to Islam. ”
LOL. So much for tolerant BD.
there’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance (modern english has elided that difference, but tolerance did not in ancient times connote equality).
An important reason why Bengalis are way more tolerant than Indians or Pakistanis is probably that we are culturally,ethnically and tribally way more homogeneous. I dont think it is genetic
why do you think bangladeshis are more tolerant than indians? i see no evidence of that. more tolerant than pakistan, yes, but that’s like saying you are taller than a dwarf.
A lot of reasons which may include:
*no deadly riots in independent Bangladesh which is common in our neighbouring countries
*disproportionately large number of hindus at top positions in public and private sectors
*more optional holidays for religious minorities and much less optional holidays for the religious majority
*a lot of isckon temples within Bangladesh (may be 3 times than that of India..not sure)
*pro hindu bias by our government. For example, there are some cases where hindu criminals go unpunished but not muslim criminals
*i know many hindus personally. So personal observation is another reason.
*in India, legally a Bangladeshi muslim has to pay 20 times more than that of a Bangladeshi non-muslim for overstaying. Such discriminatory laws dont exist within Bangladesh
*Minorities in Bangladesh never get killed by angry mobs(by burning or by beating) which happens in our neighbouring countries
*Religious and identity politics aint that popular in BD compared to that of Ind or Pak
*In the Chittagong Hill Tracts, laws are in favour of mongoloid racial minorities
*unlike Hindiya or Puckistan,we dont have fanatic MPs and ministers who say extreme stuffs against minorities
I have enough reasons (from personal sources and observation) to think that RAW
is working within Bangladesh to achieve some hindutva goals as they have an Hindiya-friendly government in Bangladesh…however that is entirely a different issue
BTW you are also a Bangladeshi?
PS. I always try not to say anything against anyone or any group. I usually say everything as a fact
Jai Shree Mountain❤
Jai Shree Tolerance❤
May our mountain ancestors make our tribe strong against malicious sky and mountain neighbours
Came across this youtube video of Nagraj recently and thought folks here might enjoy a trip down memory lane.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCI764bEI7w
Nagraj is an Indian comic book hero who can summon snakes. The TV show linked here has some real tacky plot lines and graphics. You might also enjoy it in the ironic “so bad it’s good” way.
Just like India has “nationalistic” twitter muslims, i see a rise of “nationalistic” twitter Hindus on other side of the border now 😛
Quote from the article: “The attack on Hindu women is part of crime against rural women in general in Pakistan. Hindus are rarely targeted because they are Hindus but since the justice system is so slow and in some cases biased against minorities, criminals here feel that they can get away with such attacks on Hindus. “.
This sounds similar to what many people (right-wingers generally) in India are saying today about the attacks on Muslims that have been in the news these past few years.
(Caveat: the article is from 2004, so conditions may well have changed)
Rig Veda includes hymns praising Saraswati river. If it’s the ancient river whose drying up lead to the decline of Indus valley civilization, it throws up a challenge to the Aryan migration theory.
The river is supposed to have dried up much before Aryan migration to India.
What’s your opinion about this?
Why couldn’t the hymns have been composed well after the fact, based on folk memory? The composers would have had mostly IVC ancestry but have adopted variations of the IE language brought by their steppe ancestors.
The Vedic Saraswati has been tenuously tied to a river in Afghanistan. Even if that isn’t right, Vedic Saraswati does not necessarily refer to the dried up river in India.
In light of all of the other anti-OIT evidence, this one piece doesn’t warrant a fundamental re-examination of the whole subject.
Saraswati is described as a historic river in the texts that has now dried up. It goes through Triveni Samgam:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triveni_Sangam
My position is that the AASI were Aryans. And that many ancient civilizations were very advanced circa 8 thousand years ago, including ancient Egypt, ancient Sumeria and the ancient Arya varsha (which extended at various times from Iran to Armenia to Azerbaijan to Tajikistan to Turkmenistan to Uzbekistan to Xinjiang to Tibet to Java to Sumatra to Vietnam to the Philippines). Or that advanced civilizations extended across a vast area for many thousands of years.
Based on the texts the great Vedic saints who (along with their paramparas and jatis) composed the Vedic Samhitas arrived after the last great global flood via ship. Could this be 12,800 years ago?
Interesting post considering that not only is the real life identity/counterpart of Saraswati not clear, but people also willingly link it to IVC for some reason.
The locations of the closest approximation to Saraswati (assuming it was an actual physical river) isn’t clear, it could have easily been Helmand or some other river instead of the commonly associated Ghaggar-Hakra system which was dried up by the time of the arrival of the steppe Aryan component in India. So if the Ghaggar-Hakra is indeed the Saraswati then it should have always been referred to as a dry former river, not something that dried up in their presence.
“which was dried up by the time of the arrival of the steppe Aryan component in India. ”
…Or the sarasvati is pre aryan “memory” which the aryans just incorporated in the rig veda . Just like Shiva became an Aryan God, similarly Saraswati became an Aryan river.
Alright, that can be another argument against Saraswati being a hindrance towards the idea of AIT.
However, do we really know if Shiva is a local south Asian deity? I know that there were depictions of a Shiva-like figure from Bhimbetka caves:
However I do not know which period it belongs to. The period 4 and 5 (early historic) show later motifs associated with post-Aryan migration south Asia. So if the painting is from period 3 (copper age) or earlier, then it would be a good support for Shiva or at least Nataraja being a pre-Aryan figure of south Asian religion. Does anyone know the dating of this particular figure? assuming that it has been dated at all.
i have no idea about the saraswati river issue with no strong opinions.
if there was no no aryan migration to india, where did all the indo-europeans everywhere else come from? india? i doubt that’s the case.
I don’t disagree with you. But the puzzle of Saraswati in Rig Veda keeps posing a challenge. It’s like a piece of puzzle that doesn’t fit.
Lots of confusing opinions presented online. I was hoping readers of this blog could provide a coherent view on this.
Leading theory is not that the Saraswati dried up, its that climate change caused the monsoon-fed river to become more intermittently flowing, which combined with disruption to adjacent water systems, made agriculture difficult enough that sustaining the large urban populations became too difficult.
Very likely the worst of it hit during the decline of the IVC, and by the time the Aryans penned the Vedas in Punjab (centuries later), it had recovered enough to be significant during the monsoon seasons.
Interesting, the argument you’re making is that Saraswati recovered when the Vedas were composed and then died out a second time.
If I remember right the Mahabharata mentions a declining Saraswati?
How did you arrive at this theory? Any pointers?
Just reasoning it out, not “evidence based”.
This seems to be a much more likely and reasonable explanation, then questioning the entire scholarship on the Indo Aryan migrations.
I used to see this kind of reasoning when debating Muslims on aspects of theology. One one hand you’d have a large body of evidence pointing to human evolution, and on another you’d have someone say, “but recent studies have called into question when exactly the first homo sapiens diverged, the skeletons and genetic data now don’t match up”.
Which, you know, may be true, but it doesn’t all cast doubt on human evolution. I view these discussions on the Saraswati and chariot wheels in the same light.
Interesting theory.
Essentially the Saraswati declined twice, the first caused IVC’s decline.
Later it revived during the Vedic period and declined again during the Mahabharata period.
Are there any climatic studies which point to both these events? Could you please point to the sources?
The latest on Ghaggar-Hakra (the purported Saraswati in India) is a Nature paper from 2019:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53489-4
Quoting from the abstract:
“We establish that during 80-20 ka and 9-4.5 ka the river was perennial and was receiving sediments from the Higher and Lesser Himalayas. The latter phase can be attributed to the reactivation of the river by the distributaries of the Sutlej. This revived perennial condition of the Ghaggar, which can be correlated with the Saraswati, likely facilitated development of the early Harappan settlements along its banks. “
Lol @ penned the vedas. kākaḥ kākaḥ pikaḥ pikaḥ!
LoL. may be after listening to native punjabis mauling their dear vedas in atrociously nasal punjabi accent, they were left with no other choice but to pen them for the posterity.
Razib,
Since this is the place to throw out wild ideas, why can’t there be a back migration?
Hypothesis:
Vedics (not Steppe) wrote Vedas in India watching the Saraswati, went out of the country to other places, came back as Aryans (with Steppe flavor) and picked up Vedas again from the people that they left before. They completely missed out on IVC rise and fall.
This doesn’t seem that far-fetched based on your recent articles in gnxp about back migration to Africa and South-East Asia. Also, the fact that Iran-related ancestry is in IVC far longer than was thought.
Linguistics may show that PIE couldn’t have been that old. But how would genetics disprove back-migration scenario?
Vedics (not Steppe) wrote Vedas in India watching the Saraswati, went out of the country to other places
Then “other places” should have some memory of the Vedas and the Saraswati river, no?
There is no memory of coming from “other” places in India either. It goes both ways.
In fact, other places don’t have such oral tradition (intact transmission despite other invasions), which implies India is the only place it continued.
Why are the people coming to India the only bunch of weirdos?
Razib, I have not quite understood why you (as an intellectual I respect) have not paid attention to RgVeda and the evidence it brings to bear on the PIE homeland question.
Since “discovery” and study of RgVeda in the late 18th century is what started the whole idea of IE and PIE homeland, and since it has one of the longest pristinely preserved literary evidence, its content seem clearly relevant. And if RgVeda contents point to OIT (and its not just Saraswati.. see Talageri’s thorough analysis of chronology), while other evidence says Steppe origin, I’d rather think the situation is ripe for a paradigm-shifting synthesis of new theories (like black body radiation before quantum theories). This deserves more attention by researchers and public intellectuals.
Be that as it may, I am just plain curious as to why you haven’t looked RgVeda and associated arguments critically.
Since “discovery” and study of RgVeda in the late 18th century is what started the whole idea of IE and PIE homeland
Yes, but the discovery was prompted not by the contents of the RV’s verses but by the suspicion (since affirmed over and over again) that the language those verses were written in had uncanny similarities to old Greek and Latin.
But the RV’s antiquity did make India the prime candidate as the PIE homeland for almost half a century until further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable. And it’s remained so ever since.
Numinous, can you point me to good summaries of “further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable”? Linguistic evidence appears ambivalent and weak (Kazanas, Elst vs Witzel; isoglosses: Hock vs Talageri), and genetic is too recent for what you said (within half a century). Literary (content of RgVeda) and Archaeological (no evidence of discontinuity within india) favors OIT at least mildly on balance, horse-issue notwithstanding.
(And even then, genetic evidence permits the alternative that Eastern-Iran-NW-India (IndusPeriphery without AASI?) population was a large PIE reservoir, leading to spread to Yamna intrusion/expansion later on (or some diffusion model),following which we all know the consensus story of steppe incursion into India, which was large but not overwhelming. cf. JR’s writings and what someone called back-migration above). At least those are not models that can be rejected out-of-hand.)
I believe the shift in thinking happened purely on linguistic grounds. All the things you cite (linguistics, archaeology) came later.
The original OIT model relied on Sanskrit being literally the oldest known relative to the hypothetical PIE. Then people worked out the mechanisms of sound changes (palatalization, etc.) and hit upon the centum-satem isogloss after analyzing all the known IE languages. The realization that Sanskrit would have been a significant deviation from the original PIE made people turn to homelands that were outside India and closer to the “centum” regions (Eastern Europe).
In addition, the diversity of IE languages was far greater in Europe and the Near East compared to the diversity of IA languages within India proper. This is most parsimoniously explained by a movement from somewhere in the middle (steppe or Anatolia) to the ends. The discovery of Hittite and Tocharian only bolstered this view.
Of course, there are pure linguistic models (posited by Elst and Talageri) that can plausibly support an OIT while taking into account all of the above evidence. But these models have only been created in the past generation in reaction to the prevailing theories; the problem is now we have genetic evidence that is strongly biased towards the prevailing linguistic models.
like black body radiation before quantum theories
Black body radiation theory is a good enough approximation at a macro level, just like gravitation is compared to relativity. There’s no contradiction here like the AIT vs the OIT.
the vedas, like the bible or greek mythology, are not history. they have history embedded within them. but it’s dark and murky.
i don’t give the vedas any more weight than greek mythology. both are indo-european. neither recall any time of the peoples in question outside of their homelands.
The distinction is syllable-by-syllable preservation over at least 3200-3500 years. (and a wealth of verifiable chronological data identified by Talageri about which books of RgVeda overlap with Avesta and Mittani records, building on internal chronology of the books accepted by all).
Incidentally, probably a brief summary of non-genetics issues is in Elst’s preface to Talageri’s book, available here: https://www.academia.edu/41166848/The_unique_place_of_Shrikant_Talageri_s_contribution_to_the_Indo-European_Homeland_debate
From an OIT proponent, but reasonably balanced, I think.
The distinction is syllable-by-syllable preservation over at least 3200-3500 years.
how is this that much different from the greeks? they wrote down their myths 2,500 years ago.
@Razib,
Re: Greek mythology
It is one thing to write and another thing to preserve exactly what you wrote. Even bible doesn’t have exactly same copies and hundred interpretations of one possible mistranslation between versions of bible. And that is less than 2000years old.
May be I am wrong, but I don’t think we have any copies of exactly what Greeks wrote. Instead, they were back translations from other languages (and accompanying interpretations). no?
Violet
May be I am wrong, but I don’t think we have any copies of exactly what Greeks wrote. Instead, they were back translations from other languages (and accompanying interpretations). no?
Dead Sea Scrolls
In the larger sense, the Dead Sea Scrolls include manuscripts from additional Judaean Desert sites, dated as early as the 8th century BCE and as late as the 11th century CE.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea_Scrolls
Biblical texts older than the Dead Sea Scrolls have been discovered only in two silver scroll-shaped amulets containing portions of the Priestly Blessing from the Book of Numbers, excavated in Jerusalem at Ketef Hinnom and dated c. 600 BCE;
Razib
What are your opinions on this Saraswat Brahmin y chromosome gotra study?
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/2015/651415/
Does it support the Afghan origins theory of the Saraswati?
I’ve been wondering why the audience of this blog is so Right-wing. In all the time I’ve been here, I haven’t come across that many people consistently articulating a Left of center viewpoint (Democratic Party in the US, Congress Party in India).
My view of why my center-left friends wouldn’t find this blog interesting. I think they are pretty well convinced of their viewpoints, have a limited view of what are credible voices and what the legitimate ways of framing the discourse around political issues are. Being over-curious about ancestry, creating cultural taxonomies, these are not things they are comfortable with. As for the hindu radicals and hindu realists (i don’t consider them all rightist, nativist, or conservative), I don’t think they are as smug and its probably a thrill for them to be part of a forum moderated by non-hindus, but tolerant to their worldview. Not to say they don’t have strong foundational convictions, but that the scaffolding of hindu nationalism is still a work in progress. I don’t share their loyalties, but many of them who comment here seem well thought out. There aren’t a lot a forums like this for “Hindu Realpolitik” as opposed to forums for rank and file true believers.
may center-left people i know (not all, e.g., see omar) are quite smug because they are smarter than me and know moret han me. they are, after all, center-left, so they are right.
razib – “may center-left people i know (not all, e.g., see omar) are quite smug because they are smarter than me and know moret han me. they are, after all, center-left, so they are right.”
???
did i read this right? do you really mean to say that there are people smarter than you in this world!
what happened to the famed attitude that pulls in the readers to this blog?
is your IQ so low that you don’t get sarcasm? 😉
you must have missed the long comments about how a certain someone was more erudite and well-read than i am.
By Right-wing I mean that most people who comment here seem to be reflexively pro BJP/Modi. They have no problem with things like the annexation of Kashmir and the communications blockade, the Citizenship Amendment Act etc. They also see the Islamic period in India’s history as “1000 years of occupation” rather than viewing it with any nuance as a part of India’s rich history. There don’t seem to be many people defending Nehruvian Secularism or the inclusive and pluralist “idea of India”.
Where are the people who think that states belong to all their citizens and that the Indian government should not be introducing religion into citizenship laws?
Kabir, I think the anonymity of the internet makes it a great place for people with an axe to grind. I was at a friend’s house the other day for lunch. One of the guests had pretty hostile opinions about the anti-CAA protestors and to some extent Muslims at large. The room was full of corporate types, not an artsy or activist set, but his opinions were not welcome and he felt it. The prestige press and ramchandra guha opeds are for the nehruvians, they don’t need cover for their platitudes.
I work for a multinational corporation in India, and had a big argument with my co-workers about CAA/NRC, which then veered off into historical topics. Almost everyone in that group has spent many years abroad, like me. I ended up being the only person in the group who had not adopted the Hindutva version of history (as an example, everyone else thought of Nehru as a villain and traitor), and who was skeptical of the CAA and NRC for liberal reasons. I admit it was a surprise to me, but it showed me that those of us who don’t want to be part of Hindutva myth-making have to reconcile ourselves to being in a minority and just hunker down for a generation or two.
Heh, my parents also voiced their disgust of the CAA protestors (and I’m not a fan of them either.) They’re just the usual suspects…the Prada Meinhof JNU types and their Muslim friends.
Of course, Western Lefties have made them overhyped than the Star Wars Prequels.
—-
Anyways yeah, Indian politics is a rough, dog-eat-dog place. At the end of the day, my family knows that the BJP is the only party that will go to the mat for us. Everything else is downstream of that.
@Numinous: Interestingly enough, my family has somewhat *positive* views of Nehru and Indira. If you were to press them, they would say he was a good guy with some bad ideas and policies.
(They have mostly contempt for Rahul and a sheer, burning hatred for Sonia).
—-
Not too far off from my views. Nehru wasn’t a traitor or a villain, he was just a dude with a lot of outmoded and terrible ideas who ended up on the wrong side of history.
@HMB:
My dad was a fan of Indira (and voted for her) and he’s a big Modi supporter now. Not sure exactly what his views on Nehru are. I think he just likes tough decisive leaders who practice a muscular foreign policy (he also does have strong Hindutva sympathies.)
Personally, I’m not enjoying being in the position of Nehru apologist. I’ve long deplored his economic policies and also his short-sighted foreign policies (NAM turned out to be worse than useless, and we let China take the farm by allowing them to conquer Tibet.)
But the BJP today doesn’t really criticize him on those grounds (certainly not on economics; they seem to be practising their own version of a protectionist license-permit raj.) They criticize him for cultural reasons, for being a traitor to Hindus and to India, on grounds that range from murky to fake.
Second what Girmit is saying.
A lot of upper class/caste are silent BJP supporters. They know at the end of the day it the only party which will side with them. The BJP even in opposition in 2004-14 could clock in almost equivalent amount of revenue which Congress had.
On the whole right wing circlejerk, i am on watsapp groups with lot of Indian folks based in US who are liberals. Their delusion is also equivalent They think we are on cusp of revolution 😛
“I’ve been wondering why the audience of this blog is so Right-wing. In all the time I’ve been here, I haven’t come across that many people consistently articulating a Left of center viewpoint (Democratic Party in the US, Congress Party in India).”
my views are usually issue based. i am generally unsparing of cultural ravages wrought by islamic rule in india, so i guess i come across as a strong hindu right wing guy.
in terms of economic and social matters, i am really far left wing. i strong support a universal government run health insurance program in US. i am all for significant raise of minimum wage. ( i think it is a shame that if one is a minimum wage earner in US, he/she is condemned to a life time of long work hours, so prospects of owning a home, no prospects of good vacations etc.)
and i also support all the affirmative action programs (both in US and back home in India where they are called “reservation”). and i think america owns a debt to blacks and it should compensate them for the slavery.
however, i do not support governments running businesses. that is a sure recipe for economic mismanagement leading to economic decline. businesses should be left to capitalists, but they should be taxed more to support weaker sections of the society.
Ever since the left wing got into bed with Islamists, the words left/right have lost meaning.
“The words left/right have lost meaning”
Really? So Bernie Sanders is the same as Donald Trump?
The left is the group that believes in extending equal rights to more and more groups (women, LGBTQ, minority religions etc) and in protecting the rights of minorities. The left also believes that society has a duty to take care of its weakest members. In contrast, the right believes in majoritarianism, ethno-nationalism, and big business.
The left believes in protecting Muslims because they are a minority in the West (and in India). This does not mean that the left supports “Islamism”.
These are platitudes. The left doesn’t believe in strict equality and hasn’t since the birth of socialism. What the left believes is in constantly producing some kind of balance based on Marxist theory and implemented by bureaucrats. Groups identified as underprivileged are to be therefore given more privileges than those identified as “privileged” to balance out the extra wealth and power those with privilege are supposed to possess (and somehow never lose.)
It is the Left which is fighting for universal healthcare in the United States (“Medicare For All”), for increasing the wealth tax, for staying out of the Middle East and for bringing troops home. Far better than the Right, which is anti-immigrant, anti-people of color, happy to get involved in endless wars, etc.
That doesn’t mean that the Left doesn’t sometimes go too far with identity politics, but overall their vision for the future is much more positive than the Right’s.
In India, the Left is fighting for the values of the Indian Constitution and the “idea of India”. The Right is happy to bring on the Hindu Rashtra. It’s pretty clear which side decent people should be on.
“…that society has a duty to take care of its weakest members”
This sounds admirable at first blush but on a closer look one has to ask how one decides on the “weakness” metric for any given individual. Normal (i.e. non-Left) people understand that privilege is not what mathematicians call a “total order” i.e. that the privileged-ness of a person can be incommensuable with that of another. How is one to decide if a Black male of the upper middle class is more or less privileged than a white WASP female who is homeless ?
The Left flattens out the resulting complexity by assigning what sound to the rest of us like arbitrary weightages to different attributes. This results in something that is not only repugnant to common sense but actually ends up perpetuating obscenities like the grooming pedophile gangs of Britain.
Privilege doesn’t exist in only one dimension. In your example, the Black male is economically better off and also has male privilege but presumably he also has to deal with racism. The White woman may be homeless but she is also White and therefore doesn’t face racial discrimination. The Left aims to address economic disparities as well as discrimination based on identity factors.
As an example of the fact that even rich and successful people can face racism, one only needs to look at how Meghan Markle has been treated by the British media and the royal family.
Kabir,
How do you distinguish between a black (or substitute any other historically underprivileged group) person getting flak for being an ass vs getting abused for their background (racism, etc.)? The modern left seems to always jump to the latter conclusion. Your example of Meghan Markle seems to prove the point; she’s unable to handle what other royals take for granted and turns around and calls it racism.
Numinous,
There is plenty of evidence for the British press’s racist treatment of Meghan Markle. She was criticized for doing exactly the same things that Kate did while Kate received no criticism. When Kate cradled her baby bump, it was charming and sweet. When Meghan did it it was vulgar. This is only one example.
Meghan and Harry’s baby was compared to a chimpanzee. That would not have happened with a fully White royal baby.
All this is to say that it is fairly obvious to me that racism plays a role in even how the most successful and rich African-Americans are treated.
People who are left enough for you tend to be extremely touchy, and get triggered by any platform with right of center viewpoints that aren’t marginalized or censured.
since kabir keeps posting comments here, empirically he’s not subject to this. BUT, he constantly expresses the exact same ticks, shocked and amazed that people would express views that would offend him.
“why i never!”
omar is a democrat
*unlike Hindiya or Puckistan,we dont have fanatic MPs and ministers who say extreme stuffs against minorities
things were quite different when BNP was in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism_in_Bangladesh#Return_to_democracy_(1991%E2%80%93present)
hindu overrepresentation in professions is clearly due to higher qualifications. my father’s classes at dhaka university in the 60s were 50% hindu (math, physical science). there is clearly tacit discrimination against hindus in *executive* positions.
i don’t know whether it’s better to be a muslim in BIMARU or hindu in bdesh. but it is probably easier to be in a muslim in south india or in mumbai than a hindu in bdesh, though perhaps do a log-scale transformation, since the big problem is being a minority in pakistan.
I agree with what Bengalistani said. Except for some extremist mullah factions, nobody bothers about religious beliefs that much. All people in Bangladesh are treated equally as a human being. I don’t remember much about BNP regime, and they obviously aren’t better than Awami league anyway, 70% of my relatives support BNP, but Hindus in my hometown in BD never complained about anything. They freely practice their religion. Last time I visited my hometown, Kirtan was going on in Hindu quarters for a few weeks, all days and nights, very noisy obviously, the only time they interrupted was the time of Adhan and prayers. None of the Muslims stood against them nor got bothered by that.
My mom and I left Bangladesh for the first time to come in Europe during BNP regime in early 2000; I was just a kid but still remember the Hindu women in my village were crying for us.
“things were quite different when BNP was in power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinduism_in_Bangladesh#Return_to_democracy_(1991%E2%80%93present)”
Extreme stuffs that happen in Hindiya never happen in Bongo.
MPs or ministers in BD never said/say extreme stuffs against minorities. The situation within BD was always way better than that of our glorious sky neighbours.
“hindu overrepresentation in professions is clearly due to higher qualifications. my father’s classes at dhaka university in the 60s were 50% hindu (math, physical science). ”
Not anymore. Hindu Bengalis are not entirely a different race than Muslim Bengalis that they would have different intellect. A lot of time has passed. Now the qualifications are equal.
“there is clearly tacit discrimination against hindus in *executive* positions.”
At present, there is clearly tacit discrimination in favour of hindus in *executive* positions. I can’t tell u about the past.
“i don’t know whether it’s better to be a muslim in BIMARU or hindu in bdesh. ”
Depends on the Indian state. I guess there are some genetic factors linked to tribal tolerance
“but it is probably easier to be in a muslim in south india or in mumbai than a hindu in bdesh, though perhaps do a log-scale transformation, since the big problem is being a minority in pakistan.”
I believe that south indians are genetically more well behaved humans compared to Bengalis. Considering present situations, being a hindu in BD is probably way safer than being a muslim in North India. I gave you some reasons behind why i think so
India (and pak) needs LGBT for quantitative decrease and eugenics for qualitative increase?
May the Bangladeshi Mountain* blood flowing through your veins give you some wisdom
PS. Again, i have no intention to say anything targeting anyone
*Mountain=East Asian
Jai Shree Mountain❤
Everyone thinks their country is not as shitty (for the minorities) as the next one
Yes you are right.
But the key issue is that if there are tribal differences within people there will be tribal conflicts. So we should try peacefully to reduce the tribal differences within people by means of tribal assimilation.
are minorities trying to leave you country? that’s a pretty good sign (though push/pull both matter). i doubt bangladesh is better for hindus than india for muslims. i think both are “OK”. a gentleman’s C. but pakistan definitely an F.
Nothing in South Asia Makes Sense Except in Light of the Steppe to AASI Ratio:
Considering good behaviour,tribal tolerance,morality etc: (probably)
South indians>Bangladeshis>Core Indians>North Indians>Pakistanis
However we Bengalis are probably one of the worst ethnicities ig.
Considering different factors, Bangladesh is comparatively more tolerant and peaceful than any other South Asian countries. A very important reason behind this is that we are probably the least diverse.
If there are less tribal differences, there will be less tribal conflicts. There wouldnt be any minority vs majority issue anywhere if everyone belonged to the same tribe.
Anyway, the entire South Asia needs East Asian biased eugenics.
Jai Shree Eugenics❤
https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/how-a-young-kps-gills-life-was-changed-when-his-mother-gave-him-two-swords-in-lahore/351494/
“How a young KPS Gill’s life was changed when his mother gave him two swords in Lahore”
“Through all this, however, the memory of Partition, his intense sense of outrage at the appalling task he was asked to perform, and an enduring sense of the vulnerabilities of minorities and of the weak, guided K.P.S. Gill through much of his life. “It taught me,” he said, “that no human being should be subjected to this sort of choice, to such fears of mob attack without any protection from any quarter. This is a feeling that reasserts itself whenever a minority was brought under attack anywhere in my jurisdiction. Through my service career I have believed that minorities, the weak, the vulnerable, have to be protected at all costs, irrespective of their identities or the circumstances of their misfortune.” “
Kanpur horror: Cops arrest 2 accused after encounter, total ..
Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/73353737.cms?from=mdr&utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
Bengal rising. Kolkata a safe city:
https://www.whatshot.in/kolkata/the-city-of-joy-ranked-as-the-safest-city-in-the-country-for-the-second-time-and-we-are-c-19556?fbclid=IwAR1QMIOqZ2vvqEo5b0218ifvxWQfrxPC1OtBOweF1Gt9diCntd4ek7XgoQs
Which, you know, may be true, but it doesn’t all cast doubt on human evolution. I view these discussions on the Saraswati and chariot wheels in the same light.
analogy rings true with me.
https://nypost.com/2020/01/16/reeaz-khan-indicted-in-murder-of-92-year-old-queens-cat-lady/
“Reeaz Khan, 21, was hit with seven charges in the Richmond Hill attack on Maria Fuentes, including second-degree murder, first-degree manslaughter, first-degree attempted rape, first-degree sexual abuse and tampering with physical evidence.”
“Khan is an illegal immigrant from Guyana who was free despite a deportation order from federal immigration officials for prior assault and weapons convictions.”
Bengalistani, Son Goku,
Do you want to write some more detailed write ups on Bangladesh? Have you spent time in West Bengal? Elsewhere in India?
I would be very interested in hearing your perspectives on West Bengal and how West Bengal compares to Bangladesh.
The rest of India is very different from West Bengal. West Bengal is very different from Bangladesh.
In many parts of greater India–Jammu, Ladhak, Tibet, Delhi, Agra, UP, Ajmer, Maharashtra, Punjab . . . the muraqaba sufi irfan tilted muslims blend into the Dharmics (Hindus defined broadly to include Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains). Most of the people attending many large muslim centers are not muslim. Many tens of millions of Muslims attend Dharmic spiritual places too.
The place in India I see this least (albeit I have not been to every part of India) is West Bengal. I don’t understand why this is, and have always found this puzzling.
Many muslims say that there is no better place to be a Sufi or Shiite than India. And if you visit India it is easy to understand why many muslims believe this.
I know of many muslim/non muslim weddings. Almost all if not all of these muslims or Muraqabah or liberal muslims.
This leads to an observation selection bias.
Nonmuslims in India have little deep personal interaction with non Muraqabah/liberal tilted muslims. Muraqabah/liberal tilted Indian muslims appear to interact more closely with nonmuslims than they do with conservative Sunnis.
This might lead to a lack of understanding and awareness of conservative Sunnis on the part of nonmuslims and Muraqabah/liberal tilted Indian muslims.
Many conservative Sunni Indian males might be paranoid that there is a conspiracy of Muraqabah and liberal muslims, the BJP, RSS, VHP, Shiv Sena against them.
Having said all the above, in the 2019 West Bengal election, many muslims allied with the BJP. I am not sure how this data point fits in with what was written above.
West Bengal has also become extremely diverse with vast numbers of non Bangla speakers moving to West Bengal. It is to the point that it is difficult to get by in many urban places if someone does not have good Hindi.
Bangladesh seems far less diverse than West Bengal.
I would be very interested in hearing your perspectives on West Bengal and Kolkata (safest city in India). Perhaps on the West Bengal economic miracle too?
My understanding is that the migration of Hindus from East Pakistan may have seen a spike in 1947, but continued after 1947. The Pakistani Army victimized Hindus in 1971 as being anti-national. There is a belief that % of Hindus among refugees from Bangladesh in 1971 far exceeded their % in the population of East Pakistan. This fact was suppressed by Indira Gandhi regime in order to avoid backlash among Muslims in India.
I wonder how many of the Hindu Bangladeshis who sought refuge in India in 1971 went back to Bangladesh.
Has migration of Hindus continued after East Pakistan became Bangladesh?
Any data on the above?
you can google it, but it continued. but i have read most of it dates to 50 to 70 period, with 71 spike.
my family knows hindus who left their towns. the families often have a relationship with muslim families to watch their property so they are still officially around.
J T,
There are many different estimates. According to this one (which I partly disagree with):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Bangladesh#Religion
—Bangladesh was 69% Muslim during partition.
—Bangladesh was about 80 1/2% Muslim right before the 1971 genocide
—Bangladesh is about 91% Muslim now
The Hindu percentage of the population in Bangladesh has greatly shrunk over time.
This said, in the last two years the perception on the street is that security in Bangladesh has improved and many Indians are now visiting and doing business in Bangladesh.
I have many questions for Bengalistani, Son Goku as described earlier. Including:
—Your impressions of West Bengal?
—Bangladeshi impressions of West Bengal?
—Comparing and contrasting West Bengal with Bangladesh?
—Would you favor India opening an IIT Bangladesh and an IIM Bangladesh? Would you favor far closer education collaboration and entanglement between Bangladesh and India? Maybe having some shared unified education boards for K-10, 12th and university?
—Would you favor much closer economic integration between Bangladesh, West Bengal and India? {Free trade, free investment, free cross border R&D collaboration, student visas, work visas, tourist visas, religious visas agreement} [I 200% do.]
“Have you spent time in West Bengal? Elsewhere in India?”
Never been to India, would like to visit one day.
“—Bangladeshi impressions of West Bengal?
—Comparing and contrasting West Bengal with Bangladesh?”
I don’t know if you understand Bengali, Here are a few debate video between West Bengali and Bangladeshi intellectuals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrYcd38Xlz4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwNtjtCFjfI
The first video is about the weakness of Bengali ethnicity due to partition. The second video is a debate about the quote ” The past of Bengali culture is of Kolkata, but the future belongs to Dhaka.”
“—Would you favor India opening an IIT Bangladesh and an IIM Bangladesh? Would you favor far closer education collaboration and entanglement between Bangladesh and India? Maybe having some shared unified education boards for K-10, 12th and university?”
I have no objection about education collaboration.
“—Would you favor much closer economic integration between Bangladesh, West Bengal and India? {Free trade, free investment, free cross border R&D collaboration, student visas, work visas, tourist visas, religious visas agreement}”
General public of Bangladesh doesn’t trust India afaik. I think first we necessitate to get rid of the poverty, illiteracy, religious discrimination, caste inequality etc. in our respective countries; then closer economic relations would be more appropriate.
“West Bengal has also become extremely diverse with vast numbers of non Bangla speakers moving to West Bengal. It is to the point that it is difficult to get by in many urban places if someone does not have good Hindi.”
I’ve heard that the younger generation in Kolkata is loosing their Bengali identity due to the multicultural environment. Even the veteran Actor Soumitra Chattopadhyay in the first video mentioned this issue.
https://youtu.be/HA0FTYgiV7c
Kashmiri pundit family’s reaction to Shikara movie.
This Pandit nonsense reminds me of Pak nationalists, who whenever the atrocities in the Bengal War are brought up, agree there were atrocities, but that the atrocities were committed by the Bengalis against the pro-Pakistan Urdu speaking Bihairs.
Guilty conscious tends to project its sins onto others.
Sure, kick and scream and cry like a baby when it comes muslim brotherhood and islamic ummah!
Wouldn’t most Sindhi Hindus be upper caste? Most South Asian converts to Islam came from the lower castes (generally speaking), right?
the ones remaining in pakistan and bangladesh tend to be lower caste (selective migration). similarly, less well off muslims stayed in india.
the idea that muslims tend to be lower caste…somewhat true i would bet. but not nearly as extreme as people expect. e.g., the bangladesh muslims are where they should be geographically. panmictic.
‘the ones remaining in pakistan and bangladesh tend to be lower caste (selective migration). similarly, less well off muslims stayed in india.’
I wonder what factors played in that selective migration! Poor couldn’t afford to take trains leaving Pakistan to India in 1947? Or did the top brass of Pakistan keep the then poor (generally lower caste) Hindus and Christians in Pakistan so that they can clean their toilets, cut their hair, wash their clothes, clean the bull (cow) shit? Similarly, many Muslims tend to be butchers in India. Both my maternal and paternal villages were virtually cleansed of Muslims (Razakar affiliated) during Hyderabad Police action, of course the poor and oppressed Muslims (by Razakars) were allowed to stay. Which means only very few poor Muslims stayed back who had no other occupation other than butchering. Muslims also tend to not get involved in agriculture in at least my part of the country.
More like couldn’t afford. More Hindus/sikhs could migrate in percentage terms from Sindh/Punjab because they were richer and lived geographically closer. The ones who remained were poor/lower castes, and many converted to Christianity because it seemed a “neutral” religion. As opposed to UP Muslims (the grand daddy of Pakistan project) who wanted to migrate but just couldn’t/ or was too risky. Lot of them still moved after 47, once the violence subsided. I think an Indian army general too did in the 50s.
That’s the reason why you still have liberal people argue on stuff like Indian muslims “chose” India, as if they are some sort of mind readers.
@Saurav, are you saying that the vast majority of conversions to Christianity (of lower caste Hindus) in Pakistan happened after 1947?
https://scroll.in/article/816573/to-escape-partition-violence-in-lahore-these-hindus-and-sikhs-converted-to-christianity
I wonder what factors played in that selective migration!
liquid assets probably allowed for migration. this is not uncommon, a lot of the ‘refugees’ in europe from mena/africa are more well off back home. the true poor can’t leave.
second, pakistan had ready-made jobs for the mohajjirs. the hindu elites had fled to india, and the civil service etc. was denuded.
A friend forwarded this link – https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-25/karachi-is-where-pakistan-s-tenacity-is-on-full-display?fbclid=IwAR3hqGIwHntpsgQ5fBftzceKEdL6UCL9xwSPcnwOGSBEwMxQl86TBSvcgTw
I think much of the write up could apply to Mumbai, Kolkata, or perhaps Dhaka.
South Asia’s resiliency has developed over millenia. Not sure if this resiliency will be enough to get through the shock(s) of climate change……
Climate change is a paper tiger.
The resilience comes from the family structure, where sons (especially elder) keep living with parents after marriage. Pew global data indicates that the subcontinent is a complete outlier when it comes to this kind of living arrangement.
I think this arrangement defines the subcontinent in many ways, even Pashtun, Baloch, Nagas and Mizo dont follow this model.
Re intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan is heavily contextualised on class. Middle class and below it’s almost unheard for the non-Muslim partner not to give in though to be fair lot of the culture would be transmitted but among the elite level I know of a Hindu boy (from the few Bhaibands remaining in the country) marrying a Muslim girl but not to go in the specific but he did convert, his inlaws did have some misgivings (the joke was whether he had gone the full hog).
Re the Hindu Sindhis there are two larger distinct groups (and two more actually but they are smaller). The easiest one to label as indigenous are the Haris, who stayed back after partition, and are the backward classes/castes (so they have to contend with both religious & caste discrimination in the land of the Pure).
The Sindhi Hindus (of whom are an equal number, ~2.5mm-3.5mm are in India & abroad) are descendant of very late medieval-early modern Punjabi-Seraiki Hindu khatris into Sindh (Kripalanis are an Amil-Brahmin caste who allegedly descend from a Sikh migrant into Sindh). They are the “ani” Sindhis and of course are predominant in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Bombay (textile traders across India and formed the early part of the post-partition Indian Diaspora).
It’s all very confusing and hard to parse and I’m married into the culture but suffice to say Sindhi Hindus are syncretic (it’s common knowledge that they follow some aspects of Sikhism) but have become more Saffronised over the generations (which is perfectly natural as was the case for castes that were neither Muslim or Sikh in the Indus, this is more a sociological comment rather than an opinion).
The other Hindus of Sindh are Rajasthani tribes on the periphery (Umerkot/Tharparkar speak Rajasthani languages) and the final “Hindu Sindhis” are those that bled over to Gujarat in the medieval era (probably because of Ghori/Ghaznavid invasions), most famously the Lohanas (who are separate to Kutchis, who could probably be considered Sindhis since their language is a dialect/offshoot of Sindhi).
@Vikram – yes this is true. Pakistan being a conservative society will preserve many of the “Hindu elements” long after India has shed them through Westernisation. Or more precisely the core South Asian cultural attributes that have been internalised into Pakistani Muslim culture. Pakistanis may have the same subliminal uptake of Western culture (elite mimicry etc) but like most Muslims they consciously reject or keep it at bay. However virtually every other Islamic population from practises strict nuclear family living, which means they are functionally much more Western (South Asian Muslims are probably the only Muslims not to wear a white western dress for instance).
The Hindu joint family comes to mind (which has morphed into the biraderi system, though admittedly as I was reminded the Bedouins do practise something similar) and also the obsession with caste/lineage. At least Indians pretend to not know their caste, every Pakistani is aware of their shijrah (hence explains the ethnic animus) Pakistanis are simply loathe to give up on their culture, which they have fused with religion.
The Indus is not the boundary of India but as Kesari taught us it’s the Hindu Kush which are the liminal zones. Maybe the Ghorids and the Ghaznavids are such demons in modern-day India because they really did serve the Ur-homelands civilisationally but that is speculation that I’m not particularly interested in. Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.
Re intermarriage between Muslims and non-Muslims in Pakistan is heavily contextualised on class. Middle class and below it’s almost unheard for the non-Muslim partner not to give in though to be fair lot of the culture would be transmitted but among the elite level I know of a Hindu boy (from the few Bhaibands remaining in the country) marrying a Muslim girl but not to go in the specific but he did convert, his inlaws did have some misgivings (the joke was whether he had gone the full hog).
Re the Hindu Sindhis there are two larger distinct groups (and two more actually but they are smaller). The easiest one to label as indigenous are the Haris, who stayed back after partition, and are the backward classes/castes (so they have to contend with both religious & caste discrimination in the land of the Pure).
The Sindhi Hindus (of whom are an equal number, ~2.5mm-3.5mm are in India & abroad) are descendant of very late medieval-early modern Punjabi-Seraiki Hindu khatris into Sindh (Kripalanis are an Amil-Brahmin caste who allegedly descend from a Sikh migrant into Sindh). They are the “ani” Sindhis and of course are predominant in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Bombay (textile traders across India and formed the early part of the post-partition Indian Diaspora).
It’s all very confusing and hard to parse and I’m married into the culture but suffice to say Sindhi Hindus are syncretic (it’s common knowledge that they follow some aspects of Sikhism) but have become more Saffronised over the generations (which is perfectly natural as was the case for castes that were neither Muslim or Sikh in the Indus, this is more a sociological comment rather than an opinion).
The other Hindus of Sindh are Rajasthani tribes on the periphery (Umerkot/Tharparkar speak Rajasthani languages) and the final “Hindu Sindhis” are those that bled over to Gujarat in the medieval era (probably because of Ghori/Ghaznavid invasions), most famously the Lohanas (who are separate to Kutchis, who could probably be considered Sindhis since their language is a dialect/offshoot of Sindhi).
@Vikram – yes this is true. Pakistan being a conservative society will preserve many of the “Hindu elements” long after India has shed them through Westernisation. Or more precisely the core South Asian cultural attributes that have been internalised into Pakistani Muslim culture. Pakistanis may have the same subliminal uptake of Western culture (elite mimicry etc) but like most Muslims they consciously reject or keep it at bay. However virtually every other Islamic population from practises strict nuclear family living, which means they are functionally much more Western (South Asian Muslims are probably the only Muslims not to wear a white western dress for instance).
The Hindu joint family comes to mind (which has morphed into the biraderi system, though admittedly as I was reminded the Bedouins do practise something similar) and also the obsession with caste/lineage. At least Indians pretend to not know their caste, every Pakistani is aware of their shijrah (hence explains the ethnic animus) Pakistanis are simply loathe to give up on their culture, which they have fused with religion.
The Indus is not the boundary of India but as Kesari taught us it’s the Hindu Kush which are the liminal zones. Maybe the Ghorids and the Ghaznavids are such demons in modern-day India because they really did serve the Ur-homelands civilisationally but that is speculation that I’m not particularly interested in. Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.
Dalit youth burnt alive in MP, BJP says Congress shielding accused from ‘minority community’ due to appeasement politics
https://www.opindia.com/2020/01/dalit-youth-burnt-alive-in-mp-bjp-says-congress-shielding-accused-from-minority-community-due-to-appeasement-politics/
@Razib @Omar
Long shot but wondering if y’all could bring John Gray (the philosopher) on here. Would be quite a coup!
Also Omar would get to interrogate him about his friendship with Pankaj Mishra 🙂
Hi Razib,
Could you have a discussion with davidski from eurogenes (podcast or written) on the PIE controversy?
JRT been pushing ‘out of Subcontinent’ theories, but he now sounds more and more like the ruling party’s stooge.
We the readers, need some balance of opinions.
@All
Could anyone recommend a good book/podcast on Roman history. Specifically one which illustrates the reasons of their rise, rather than other italian powers of that time.
justpuzzled wrote:
“Numinous, can you point me to good summaries of “further discoveries and analyses made that theory untenable”? Linguistic evidence appears ambivalent and weak (Kazanas, Elst vs Witzel; isoglosses: Hock vs Talageri), and genetic is too recent for what you said (within half a century).”
2018 paper:
Five waves of Indo-European expansion: a preliminary model (2018)
https://www.academia.edu/36998766/Five_waves_of_Indo-European_expansion_a_preliminary_model_2018_
Also google Johanna Nichols’ work who puts the homeland in BMAC based on loan word trajectories.
The linguistic evidence is quite solidly behind the OIT and totally prohibits the AIT/AMT. Just a couple of examples,
1. Fire worshiping Iranian are completely missing the most commonly found agni and puhuur type of words that are in abundance in every other branch. English, pyre,fire, ignite and so forth. If indeed IIr had separated from IE as a COMMON stock it would be absurd to think that Iranians forgot all their words for fire and invented a totally new word Athar/Azhar which incidentally IS found in the later Vedic period Athari (flame) and Atharvan (priest).
2. Iranian shares morphological features with Greek, Armenian and Thraco Phyrgian that they do NOT share with IA. That would be impossible if these languages would have been going their separate ways from the Pontic steppe.
These are platitudes.
what more can you expect from kabir? he is a vessel for platitudes, nothing more, nothing less.
Gilgamesh wrote:
“Could you have a discussion with davidski from eurogenes (podcast or written) on the PIE controversy?”
R1b- L51
i am getting breaking news on whatsapp that altaf hussain has quit islam and converted to hinduism! how true is that?
Scorpion Eater
“i am getting breaking news on whatsapp that altaf hussain has quit islam and converted to hinduism! how true is that?”
Don’t know about conversion but recently they were demanding a Sindhudesh while carrying his picture among those of others.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1218577078397755392
lol more like Jinnah-pur. Because Sindhu-desh will be Sindhi-desh and not Mohajir-desh.
Also what a fall for Hussain. From being the leader of Pak 3rd largest party, to virtual no body.
altaf hussein is complete nuts, but i think even he has brains enough not commit the ultimate sacrilege. most likely a rumor floated by pak deep state.
btw, AF is uproariously funny, and murderously dangerous at the same time. (doesn’t that sound like a villain from some c-grade bollywood movie?)
some of his you tube videos singing bollywood ditties while completely drunk are classics. but do not let his online buffoonery fool anyone. people who dare to criticize him frequently end up dead in jute sacks. his favorite quip to silence his critics – tumhari bori tayyar hai!
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/21/india-kashmir-modi-eu-hindu-nationalists-rss-the-far-right-is-going-global/
“Although the visit of the MEPs was widely criticized in the international community for flouting diplomatic norms, it signals a new development in Indo-European relations: Far-right narratives have become part of the global mainstream. The far-right in these two regions are learning from each other, and their abilities to govern according to a shared ideological agenda rooted in Islamophobia are evolving in parallel.
Although transnational bonds between nationalists may seem counterintuitive, their visions are not necessarily contradictory, and they may continue to complement each other so long as the Muslim “other” remains their common enemy. If far-right nationalists have it their way, it is likely that Indo-European relations will be reshaped along Islamophobic lines.”
I don’t think the authors realize just how much of a pun “indo-european” is in this context.
The skyfather’s children are uniting ;). May he smile upon his entire family.
Jai Shree Ameen
2019 papers by archaeologist Alexander Semenenko
Semenenko, Aleksandr Andreyevich. The absence of the sword from Rigveda and Atharvaveda and the problem of Indo-Aryans’ origin
https://www.academia.edu/38344745/Semenenko_Aleksandr_Andreyevich._The_absence_of_the_sword_from_Rigveda_and_Atharvaveda_and_the_problem_of_Indo-Aryans_origin
Semenenko, Aleksandr Andreyevich. The spread of zebu cattle from South Asia to the East Mediterranean region as a marker of Indo-European population dispersal
https://www.academia.edu/38485662/Semenenko_Aleksandr_Andreyevich._The_spread_of_zebu_cattle_from_South_Asia_to_the_East_Mediterranean_region_as_a_marker_of_Indo-European_population_dispersal
@ Xerxes, the joint family system is eventually rooted in Hindu inheritance law, where the eldest son is the sole inheritor. Apart from Khojas of Gujarat, no Muslim community in India follows this mode of inheritance. Therefore, I am not sure why Pakistani Muslims follow joint family systems.
“Pakistan is what it is and so is India”
Muslims in India share great congruence with Pakistanis due to Pakistan’s adoption of Urdu. There is very little divergence in outlook and values. The ‘westernized’ lifestyle you allude to in India is almost entirely practiced by Hindu families.
“Pakistan is what it is and so is India; there are similar enough to be confused but different enough that a million lives were lost, 15 million people displaced and 5 wars fought since. Make of what it what you will.”
I think indians and pakistanis are really two different people. left-liberals types in india usually highlight the similarities in language, food and dress, or fondness for bollywood etc to make a superficial claim that they are same people. this claim does not stand close scrutiny. the souls of indians and pakistanis are vastly different, and the difference can be put down to a single factor – religion.
to give an example – today almost all the countries on this earth enjoy pizzas. that does not make all of us italian. or just because we like hollywood movies does not make us americans. (i believe saddam hussein was a hollywood fan too. that did not stop the americans from hanging him).
any breakthrough in indo-pak relation can only come after acknowledging this core difference, and finding a solution centered around it. this is what i call as a realist’s worldview.
There are 200 million Indians who have the same religion as the majority of Pakistanis. Are their “souls” Indian or Pakistani?
The differences between Indians and Pakistanis are predominantly due to the political differences between the two countries and state indoctrination. Otherwise, the underlying culture is very similar.
@scorpion eater, since there is a common language, it will be difficult for India and Pakistan to diverge in the long term. There simply is no historical precedent for this, and logically it is easy to see why populations that can communicate cannot diverge significantly.
What is true however is that there is very little synergy between the Indian and Pakistani economies. Also, India is on track to be significantly richer and more globalized than Pakistan. So there is little interest in Pakistan from India, apart from the security angle.
Agree that the shared language and heritage of N Indians and Pakistanis suggest they are wedded to each other in the long run. I don’t see either going full N Korea hermit kingdom. Pakistan is way more western/global in its outlook than many people here estimate, and although losing ground to India economically, it has hardly been left in the dust. Lahore is still a significantly more impressive city than Amritsar. Pak Punjabis are pragmatists, with conventional ideas of prosperity. If the east Punjab to Delhi corridor were to flourish in an aspirational way, I see them open to cooption. The divergence is not great enough yet however.
On the other hand, south and east India aren’t permanently part of the arrangement. The situation seems stable in the short run, and would predict more standardisation of Indian culture and adoption of Hindi. But it will never supplant other languages in the deccan, south and the east as a mother tongue, and hence its influence will ebb and flow, like french and german in continental europe.
” The divergence is not great enough yet however.
On the other hand, south and east India aren’t permanently part of the arrangement”
LOL. I would say its the opposite. Its because India is not just N-India that there was some form of semblance towards our Pakistan policy. Had it been just left to N-India (which its increasingly becoming so) , we would mirror Pakistan in the rhetoric at bare minimum (which we are doing today) .
It was actually the non chalance of the South/East, towards Pakistan, which makes India appear “pragmatist”. Neither the N-Indian nor the Pak punjabi is “pragmatist” in any sense of term. You can forget co-option. The more South/East becomes N-Indian , the more the stance towards Pakistan will harden (which has been happening )
Saurav, I think you are describing the run up to the present fairly accurately, as well as the near future. Speaking of the long run, however, we over-estimate the durability of the ideological polity vs nations (of origin). In the current generation, we are overestimating the durability of Islam. Language is a huge determinant of cultural boundaries and the Punjab-Hindustan continuum is a coherent zone that can outlast alliances. This goes for Baloch and Pashtun going their own way as well. Am always surprised how little river Pakistanis know or care about the Iranic culture of their countrymen despite the supposed look-west orientation we assume of them. I find this analogous to the commonality of the Anglo world, despite bitter conflict. The Irish can’t even escape the fact that they have more in common with the English than they’ll ever have with the catholic French or Spaniards. And despite rhetoric suggesting the opposite, parochial Americans, Aussies and Brits have enormous commonalities as well.
The elephant in the room is the Pak military. Any Indo-Pak economic rapprochement will seriously diminish their control of Pakistan’s politics and economy.
I would disagree. Regardless of language, culture etc , India and Pakistan will keep on “diverging” further.
We are talking about a subcontinent where identity trump economics etc. Where folks who essentially live in the same country have diverged over the years. And here we are talking about two separate countries altogether. Folks have needlessly romanticized pre 65 war Indo-Pak relations or late 90s Aman ki asha, those were always false dawns.
Economically, yes, they will diverge, a bit like Mexico and Spain are today. But the stories and media these countries are intelligible, and will continue to be shared.
Culturally, like Australia and UK.
Economically, like Mexico and Spain.
Politically, like North and South Korea.
Culturally more like Ukraine and Russia.
Both countries trying to show, “we are at least better than the other” , even though no one seems interested.
“Politically, like North and South Korea.”
Bit harsh, no? 😛
Not very aware of Russo-Ukranian dynamics. But culturally, Pakistan doesnt make many waves in India beyond some newspaper articles. Indian movies totally dominate the Pakistani market, and make crores there despite bans and piracy, whereas revenue from India for Pak artists is minimal.
I dont see Indo-Pak political conflict resolving any time soon. There is an entrenched establishment in Pakistan whose sustenance depends on the conflict, and India has no reason to engage with Pakistan unless something truly catastrophic is on the table.
India and Pakistan Are Edging Closer to War in 2020: Michael Kugelman
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/31/afghanistan-taliban-nuclear-india-pakistan-edging-closer-war-2020/