They threw in all the buzz words (caste) while also sort of justifying that the Viceroys were benighted patricians. The Germans don’t write about their history in a similar way.
The “whitewashing” of Empire (expediently helped by WW2 victory) has built up this steady resentment in Britain against the EU.
Brexit is turning out to be the imperial reckoning that Britain has avoided so long.
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.
You can also support the podcast as a patron (the primary benefit now is that you get the podcasts considerably earlier than everyone else…this podcast was posted a while ago).
Dr. MJ & I speak to Professor Devji.
I loved the podcast and even MJ felt it was the best one we had done so far. Professor Devji touches upon:
(1.) how the BJP mobilises votes (the modernist party)
(2.) the Muslim question and the coded language concerning it (“appeasement politics” / vote banks)
(3.) the fact that a lot of Hindutva’s aims are to remove governmental control of Hinduism (in a way it can’t control minority religions) as opposed to “Hinduism controlling the government.”
(4.) Caste politics and how Hindutva frames the discourse
(5.) whether the “Overton Window” in India has shifted.
I’m hoping to get him to speak at Cambridge Majlis next term since he’s such a knowledgeable speaker.
As always please leave reviews, feedbacks and comments!
Lecture by Dr. Farzana Haniffa; who is Smuts Visiting Fellow.
The Slides are very dense so I’m paraphrasing what I am here. All mistakes mine and not the speaker.
Continue reading Live Blogging: Documenting post-war ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka
Dr. Sri Iyer is talking about her book.
riots INCREASE the vote share of the BJP by 5-7% /
Continue reading Live Blogging – the Economics of Religion in India
Thirty years ago, I stood in the centre of Tiananmen Square and took this photo of the crowd. A million faces: peaceful, fearless, filled with hope. They can never be erased from my mind. pic.twitter.com/AcIw2yigF2
— 马建 Ma Jian (@majian53) June 3, 2019
I am a bite tired of this anti-PRC propaganda. Since Tiananmen Square; the PRC has averaged an annual growth rate of 8% (the economy is doubling *roughly* every 10years if not less).
Coupled with the negative population growth rate (I don’t know if there is demographic momentum but I haven’t checked); China has managed to transform herself in 30years.
Maybe the protestors didn’t get what they want (Freedom) but they did get prosperity and China has managed to:
Our commentator Prat suggested I speak to Rajat Ubaykar. He and his colleague, Ozzie, hitchhiked for 6months through India.
We just wrapped up our podcast. I’m shocked by how much I learnt doing it. I feel the urban Hindu hegemonic viewpoint (that feeds on a victim mentality) obscures the profound pluralism that makes up India.
This is a business roundtable between the President and the PM. It’s fascinating that even though Britain’s Asian population is 5% of the population versus 1% Indian-Americans; there are 2 Indians (at least) on his side of the table.
British society is invisibly white and though there are some sectors that are *cosmopolitan*; we are certainly behind the US since class is an additional factor here. A privileged Etonian, who dropped out, is equally if not better placed than the state-school Oxbridge kid.
Finally this article is so witheringly racist; Sajid Javid not invites to State Banquet. One of his “friends” joked to the newspaper that perhaps it was that Palace confused him with another son of a bus driver (Sadiq Khan).
https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=326662301282907&_rdr
Related: Parsi Cafes, A Centuries-Old Tradition In India, Are Vanishing
A fascinating video about food from Kermanshah. I got confused initially that it was Kerman but this is the Kurdish Kerman. The city’s name has a very interesting story and they also have an extremely exotic minority, which I had only first heard about a few weeks ago (when I first read the article I assumed the religious minority in question were Bahais):
How the travel ban left a family of Iranian refugees stranded in Turkey
Anyway back to the original topic the reason why food is so *delicious* in Kermanshah (the most integrated Kurdish city in Iran because it’s inhabitants are Shi’ite) is because they use copious amounts of ghee.
While Iranian food is flavourful the most signature dishes also tend to be variants on Iraqi-Syrian food (grilled meat). Similarly the most delicious and well-known Turkish food comes from Gaziantep, which is on the Syrian border (and was a mixed city).
I am increasingly coming round to the idea (first floated by a Lahori friend of mine) that Arabic food is best when it comes to balancing taste and health.
I find it very difficult to eat Desi food healthily. There is just not enough protein in the diet and way too many carbs (rice & bread are accompaniments).
I’m sure it sounds like an oversimplified cliche but the Bedouin/nomadic food items of meat, spices & yogurt pared with the Mediterranean diet seems the ideal combination. It’s little wonder that Lebanese food is one of the world’s great cuisines; maybe not on par or as well known as Indian, Chinese, Franco-Italian but sort of like the Thai food of West Asia.
The first language controversy in the subcontinent emerged in Uttar Pradesh in the 19th century as a section of Hindus sought to replace Urdu – till then the language of administration along with English – with Hindi. As part of this politics, “Urdu and Hindi became proxies for Muslim and Hindu [political] mobilisation,” wrote Garga Chatterjee. “In that process, shoring up Hindi numbers became crucial. Many languages of North India like Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Braj, etc., were nominally fused into Hindi as a political tactic with devastating long-term consequences for the counted-as-Hindi-but-not-Hindi languages.”
I feel *Hindu* nationalism is a many headed Hydra. It builds on a millennia of humiliation but at the same time seems extraordinarily insensitive to actually diversity.
The only real defence Hindu nationalists have as to why their ideological brand is softer than the Muslim equivalents is simply because “Hinduism is a broad tent.”
I feel this obscures that Hinduism was the subject of intense reform over the last two centuries in a way Islam wasn’t. However it won’t surprise me if this tenuous commitment to liberalism falters after longer and more successful stunts of the BJP.
It seems the BJP has discovered the political power of Two Nation Theory and is really riding that perilous horse.
Not only is Hindi growing, it is changing. The Union government’s efforts to make it a “national language” have resulted in it being “firmly moored to a vastly associational Sanskrit with all its casteist baggage intact”, writes Mrinal Pande. “Its highly associational vocabulary is being used to purge thousands of words it has assimilated through the centuries from regional dialects and Islamic and European languages.” Of course, actually purging Hindi of all its Persian vocabulary would be an impossible task – the very name of the language is from Farsi.
Post backlash from T.N., mandatory Hindi goes out of draft education policy
Speaker Saloumeh Gholami
Research fellow at Goethe University of Frankfurt
Speciality is Iranian linguistics (Bactrian Grammar).
She’s going to speak on the endangered Zoroastrian dialects of Kerman.
Continue reading Live Blogging-Endangered Zoroastrian Heritage of Iran