Hindu racism against Muslims

I have a different interpretation of mindy kaling experience. She is a South Indian , and is from the older generation of upper caste/class urban immigrants ( nehruvian immigrants) . Both aspects make it very unlikely that her family setting would have anti – Muslim prejudice.

What she is channeling Is the recent N-Indian anti -Muslim prejudice which the 90s immigrants bought with them. And titled the balance towards the hindu right. She sees a story here and added the race angle to it to make it more west friendly. So all in all a good story which she knows NPR audience can understand.

On hindu nationalist views I think savarkar in his book “hindutva” put their view succinctly. For him the alien-ness of Muslim/Christianity rests on one pillar and one pillar alone. That their faith and their holy sites rests not in India. That alone disqualifies them as “indian”. They can be as brown as the next door hindu, but nothing counts. Whether one agrees with or not , that’s the hindu nationalist view.

There is another perspective which rarely gets acknowledged & which frames the issue like this – Indians have engaged with all religions since their earliest inceptions but in return those religions tried to wipe out their culture.

Non acceptance of this fact along with the kind of discriminatory constitution imposed on Indians by it’s founders fuels the anger among Hindus which politicians have used & using.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKgzHccdbwU
From 36 min. mark note why Indian constitution is so centralized & the kind of faith India’s founders have in Indians.

Till atrocities which Hindus faced don’t get international acknowledgement {which i den’t see ever happening as Abrahamic world being in majority} i don’t see how it can be resolved. Atleast Christians have tried {even if to a very little extent} but Muslims completely deny that.

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/archbishop-of-canterbury-apologizes-for-massacre-at-jallianwala-bagh-memorial-1568128801606.html

The issue is not about foreign engagement or foreign race/culture but about creating the ‘terms of engagement’ in an environment where both sides can engage honestly as each other’s equal considering there is a distinct Indian civilizational view Vs. other prevailing views.

Just a side note. Razib can you tell all you can about the ydna R2 and the maternal M49 Khasi line??? Please I want to know as much before I die. It would mean a lot when trying to find myself before it’s all over.

PS no dasa jokes.

To understand this thing one has to pay attention to the psychology of tribal conflict. If you are born to a tribe, naturally ppl will consider you to be the part of that tribe even if they know that you dont believe in the beliefs believed by the tribe. In the case of tribal conflicts you have to work in terms of hereditary demography. Hereditary demography is very important. So, a muslim-born atheist may be as hated as a believing muslim-born muslim…and I think this is the most common case

I am curious about USA. Are people there less hateful against irreligious/non-believing muslim-born people?

“Kaling’s peculiar interpolation of the Western view of Islam, as a “nonwhite religion,” has resonances in the Indian subcontinent with some Hindu nationalists, who view Muslims as an alien race, the scions of foreigners, and some Muslims, who proclaim their Arab, Iranian or Turkic antecedents. All the while, genetics and the plain evidence of our faces makes it clear we are basically all the same “race” (i.e., Punjabi Hindus and Punjabi Muslims aren’t really different except a tiny bit on the margins*).

* Muslims are more likely to have a bit of ‘exotic’ ancestry.”

I’m wondering if Kaling’s (and other supposedly “liberal” Americans’ as we’ve long talked about) interpolation of the western view of Islam as a “non-white” religion comes more from the fact that earlier on in US history, most Muslims were African American which set the tone of “this is a religion practiced by non-whites” to many people’s perception, or the fact that most Muslims are non-white (often recent) immigrants’ and immigrants’ kids (and the “immigrant” part adds an element of the “foreignness” to mainstream US culture but so did African Americans’ embrace of Islam and even if not Muslim, usage of Arabic names like Malik, Ayesha etc. even if said African Americans were native-born, since it’s a break from names like Joe or some Biblical name Americans up to then associated “typical” Americans, black or white with. Nowadays, though, it’s not “exotic” any more).

Maybe a parallel would be Catholicism earlier in US history (I’m no historian) — like Catholics obviously aren’t a “race” or “ethnicity” but because people saw the groups that Catholics belonged to as different “ethnicities”, like Irish, Italians (though obviously not as far as the black-white difference of course) despite lots of Catholic Americans being there since the founding, the conflation of ethnicity and Catholicism existed for so long (now it barely does — people will associate say Catholics with Hispanics but you rarely think of any one race, ethnicity or culture when you say “he’s a Catholic” to someone the way many would (correctly or incorrectly) think someone was non-white if you’d say “he’s a Muslim”).

“As I said on the podcast, I’d be disinherited if I ever dated a Muslim!”

This is true in India even among outwardly ‘liberal’ families. I have seen it from folks across religions – Hindus, Sikhs, Jains. Even Christians.

The fear of losing your child, especially daughters is very real.

Apart from religious differences, there are lot of complicating stereotypes about Muslims generally.
For example, in the north, Muslims are considered ‘naachne-gaane’ wale log (entertainers) and are consequently are looked down upon.

So much for high culture.