Why Hindu modernity is incomplete without Hindu Capitalism

With the recent debate emerging on what constitutes Hindu modernity, the general conclusion of the discussion being that the first stage of Hindu modernity was the Bhakti movement which reflected social reform. It helped synthesizing complex philosophical metaphysics through devotionalism, reduced caste barriers and made incremental changes; to create a modified society without breaking its structural edifice.

The second stage of Hindu modernity would constitute the reforms of the 19th century starting from the Bengal Renaissance and then finally culminating into the caste egalitarian, temple entry movements all the way until the early to mid-20th century. Between these two milestones, a number of creditworthy causes such as abolition of child marriage, the removal of Sati, allowing widow remarriage and banning of dowry were also achieved. New religious sects such as Brahmo Semaj, Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission emerged, whose dynamism created a new way of looking at Dharma. While the first stage of Hindu modernity looked at making the message immensely acceptable to the masses, the second stage helped in enabling Hinduism to keep its feet into the modern world in the socio-cultural sphere. What was left out though from both these stages was economic development and general prosperity of the masses. For Hinduism to truly emerge in the contemporary world, it needs to bridge this final lap, the last mile to get it over the hump.

For any religious philosophy to truly emerge and make an impact on a world stage, it needs to be backed up not just by soft power but by hard power. For too long ashrams, yogis, gurus and mantras have helped keep Hindu soft power going but relying too much only on soft power can only take you so far. Greek and Roman philosophy had huge impact on the world stage as they were backed Alexander’s and Caesar’s feats of military innovation. The Druids who represented the elites of Celtic society also had a well-organized, structured and an established religion, but the core of their framework was lost and failed to make a mark, as they failed in defending their homeland. In the polytheistic world, the Gods were a free market with their rise and fall shadowing those of their patronized cities. Hence, going by this historical evidence, it is quite remarkable that Hinduism managed to make the impact that it did against all odds, despite facing centuries of hostile foreign rule.

It is because of the brutality of the Turkic, Mughal and British rule that almost all the reform movements tended to focus on religion, theology & society rather than economy. For the economic discourse to emerge, Hindus needed to be masters of their own destiny. While they most often resisted these foreign rulers, they were seldom truly able to enjoy uninterrupted and peaceful reigns to focus on their general economic well-being.

With the advent of Independence, a glimmer of hope had risen but with the economy left in tatters, after a long period of colonial rule and the following decades of socialism; Hindu vitality was lost. In fact, not only did fail to make a mark economically but even in matters of religion, there was an inordinate decline, with the Nehruvian consensus hitting at the heart of the Hindu Dharma in ways that even the foreign invaders did not in the past.

The 1991 reforms had created a hope and indeed worked initially. But the lack of follow-up, from successive governments led to the petering away of the advantages that were gained initially. The economy laboured through, from agriculture to services with vast rural to urban migration. The intervening stage of industrialization eluded it fully and India was neither able to create the required ecosystem for industrial growth, nor able to train enough skilled manpower to harness its demographic dividend. The result being that growth started stagnating and a vacuum was created.

Hindu society needs to address this vacuum quickly. For if Hinduism is to make the next level of modernization, it is important to resolve this very component with an immediate sense of urgency. For without this, all the philosophical gravitas and cultural capital it acquired in the previous centuries would be lost and the vitality of Dharma itself will be at a threat.

History Podcast Episode 12: Social Milieu of North India 700-1200AD

 

The History Podcast resumes on Brown Pundits.  In episode 12 Mukunda and Jay talk to Maneesh about the cultural and social milieu in North India from 700-1200 AD.

They talk about the waning influence of Buddhism and the evolution of various schools of Philosophy. Arts, science and role of temples in an era that sees North India’s first brush with Islam.

 

 

 

@raghman36    @jayvtweets     @maneesht

 

Sources and References:

1. Al-Hind, Volume 1 Early Medieval India and the Expansion
of Islam 7th-11th Centuries by Andre Wink
2. Prabandhacintāmani of Merutunga Ācārya, Translated by C. H. Tawney.
3. Hammīra Mahākāvya. Translated by Pandit Nathulal Trivedi Madhukar       Shastri.
4. Medieval Kashmir and the Science of History by Walter Slaje
5. “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India.” by Sheldon Pollock
6. “Epic and Counter-Epic in Medieval India.” by Ahmed Aziz
7. Representing the Other?: Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (Eighth to    Fourteenth Century) by Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya
8. Prithviraj Vijay Mahakavyam of Mahakavi Shri Jayanak Rachit translated by Madan Mohan Sharma.
9. Agamadambara by jayanta bhatta
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:1199689d-9bf6-43e2-a1fd-a6abac4d3ae7
10.  Abhinavgupta
https://archive.org/details/abhinavaguptag.t.deshpande/page/10/mode/2up
11. Hemchandra
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hemachandra
12. Kumrila Bhatt
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.19900/page/n11/mode/2up
13. Prabhakara Bhatt
https://archive.org/details/bhattaprabhakaramimamsaramulua._202003_721_D/page/62/mode/2up

 

 

 

The Survey of India

Survey of India

Hamid Hussain

 “We travel not for trafficking alone.

By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.

For lust of knowing what should not be known,

We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.” 

                                                                  James Elroy Flecker

 

 

Eighteenth century India and its neighboring regions were an exotic place for outsiders and not much was known about the geography and people of this large swath of land. An odd traveler or explorer published the details of his perilous journey among strange and alien land and people for the home audience.  Arrival of East India Company (EIC) for trade and later territorial expansion brought modern scientific methods of exploration and mapping that filled up the empty spaces on maps. 

 During military operations, officers collected localized information about terrain, availability of supplies to support troops and animals and information about local population.  However, this information was localized and limited to military operation at hand.  Knowledge about land and people ruled by EIC rapidly expanded.  Over the years, a small group of extraordinary British and native explorers contributed to sciences of geography and anthropology. This was an area where political, administrative, military and spying arts freely intermingled.

 In eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India’s frontiers were changing with territorial expansion of EIC.  In these decades, frontier moved from Oudh, Gangetic plains, Sindh and Punjab to Northwestern and Northeastern frontiers. In the context of defense of India, area of British influence also expanded to Tibet, Chinese and Russian Turkistan and Afghanistan.  The Royal Geographic Society (RGS) became the patron of the advancement of the field of geography on scientific grounds and published works of explorers of India and its neighborhood.

 In 1800, three separate surveys were started in India: Revenue, Topographical and Trigonometrical (later named Great Trigonometrical Survey – GTS).  In 1878, all three were amalgamated into a single Survey of India.  James Rannell (1742-1830), William Lambton (1756-1823), George Everest (1790-1866), Thomas George Montgomerie (1830-1878), Henry Trotter, William Johnson, James Walker, Colonel Frederick Bailey (1882-1967), Sir Thomas Hungerford Holdich, Godwin-Austin, Captain Francis Younghusband and others were exceptional individuals.  They were driven by a sense of adventure, exploration and duty.  They were highly committed individuals willing to suffer extreme hardships in strange and unknown lands. They instilled same spirit among their native assistants. Surveying in frontier areas was a dangerous task as locals correctly concluded that surveying was the steppingstone towards loss of their freedom.  There was an Afghan saying that “First comes one Englishman for shikar (hunting), then come two to draw a map, and then comes an army to take your land.  So, it is best to kill the first Englishman”.

 

 A surveying school was established in Madras in 1794 for training of natives in surveying techniques. A number of Anglo-Indians were also recruited as sub-assistants.  In the first quarter of nineteenth century, some natives who received English language education at Delhi College became qualified assistants to British military, civil and survey officials. The status of this new generation was higher than the ‘munshi’ who traditionally acted as clerk, scribe, translator and tutor of British superiors.  The new title of ‘Persian Secretary’ elevated the social and financial status of the new generation and proficiency in English language was the single most important factor of this advancement. Two members of the first class of Delhi College became well known travelers and wrote their memoirs in English based on daily journals that they kept.  Mohan Lal served with Alexander Burns and Shahamat Ali served with Resident of Ludhiana Agency Lieutenant Colonel Claude Wade and later Resident of Malwa.

 Father of Indian Geography James Rennell mapped EIC holdings of Bengal and Bihar in later part of eighteenth century. Rennell acknowledged the contributions of his native surveyors. In 1770s,  Gholam Mohammad surveyed the roads between Bengal and Deccan, Mirza Mughal Beg explored northwestern India and Sadanand surveyed Gujrat. This is the earliest written record of work of native surveyors. 

 

McCartney mentioned his two native assistants Zaman Shah and Mahmood Shah who assisted him in mapping Afghanistan. Alexander Burns relied heavily on his secretary Mohan Lal and surveyor Muhammad Ali.  Mirza Izzatullah Beg was from an influential family that had served Mughals.  He became an authority on his own due to his unique background, intelligence, education, hard work and travels. He used rigorous methods of accuracy and left written record of his adventures.  In 1812-13, he travelled from India to Tibet, Chinese Turkistan (Yarkand) and Central Asia. He served under Thomas Metcalf (helping collecting intelligence in Multan and surrounding areas), Mountstuart Elphinstone (travelled with him to Kabul) and William Moorecraft (reconnaissance mission to Tibet, Chinese Turkistan & Bukhara). He rose to become key secretary of the Delhi Residency.

 William Moorecraft in his trips to Nepal, Tibet and Central Asia had company of some exceptional natives including Ghulam Haider Khan and Pundit Harbalam.  He also had assistance of two brothers; Bir Singh and Deb Singh.  They were Bhotias: Indians of Tibetan descent. Another native Harkh Dev was assigned the task of survey and recorded distance by a measured pace.  This technique was later to be refined and used by ‘pundits’ during survey of Tibet and Chinese Turkistan. Sarat Chandra Das was one of the famous pundits’ who was a Bengali scholar of Tibetan language and culture.  In the last quarter of eighteenth century, Nain Singh, Kalyan Singh and Kishen Singh surveyed Chinese Turkistan.

 Arthur Conolly (6th Bengal Light Cavalry) in his travels to Tsarist Russia, Caucasus, Afghanistan and Baluchistan was accompanied by Syed Karamat Ali. Mirza Shuja served with Eldred Pottinger in Heart in 1837 and later conducted military survey around Peshawar, Baluchistan, large swaths of Afghanistan and Chinese Turkistan.  He also performed sensitive intelligence gathering while teaching English to Amir Dost Mohammad Khan’s sons in Kabul.

 Hayder Shah was from Peshawar and served as Havildar in Bengal Sappers and Miners. He along with another native explorer Ata Mohamad explored Dir, Swat, Chitral and Badakhshan.  Later, he undertook another survey from Kabul to Bokhara. Naik Ghafoor Shah also of sappers accompanied Hayder Shah on one of the journeys. In 1860, Mullah Abdul Majid was sent on a mission from Peshawar, crossing Pamir Mountain range to khanate of Khokand. In 1863, Abdul Hamid was sent on surveying mission of Chinese and Russian Turkistan.

 A jeweler’s assistant Mohsin Hussain proved to be such an expert in calibrating and repairing complex and expensive survey equipment that when his cantankerous British superior Henry Barrow was discharged, Mohsin took over the task. Surveys generated huge amount of data that needed complex calculations.  A team of ‘eight human computers’ processed this data. This team of Bengalis that included an exceptional gentleman Radhanath Sikdar earned the respect of British. It was freely admitted that their mathematical genius would be ranked very high in Europe.

 There was a saying that “in the east, nothing is ever forgotten, but little remembered with accuracy”.  Native surveyors changed that tradition and added European new methods of keeping daily journals, written knowledge based on facts thus incorporating text-based knowledge to the art of oral tradition and memory. Later generations of educated natives of Survey of India continued the traditions of devotion to duty and work ethics and setting high standards of proficiency and hard life in extreme climatic conditions. They also put a high premium on the value of education and made education of their children a first priority.  Children of ‘servants of the map’ proudly served in the armed forces and civil services of the successor states the Raj.

 “Frontiers are the razor’s edge on which suspended the issue of war or peace and the life of the nations.”                Lord Curzon

 

 

 

Notes:

 

Edney, Matthew,  Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

 

Meyer, Karl & Shareen Brysac.  Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999)

 

Dean, Riaz. Mapping The Great Game: Explorers, Spies & maps in Nineteenth century Asia (Oxford: Caseate Publishers, 2019)

 

Hopkirk, Peter. The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha America Inc, 1994)

 

Ward, Michael.  The Survey of India and the Pundits.  The Alpine Journal, (Vol 103, 1998), pp.59-79

 

Mathur, Tapsi.  How Professional Became Natives: Geography and Trans-Frontier Exploration in Colonial India. Ph. D Thesis. University of Michigan, 2018

 

Hamid Hussain

coeusconsultant@optonline.net

 

Defence Journal, June 2022

The flip side of globalization

It’s Bangladesh after Sri Lanka: Protests erupt over 52% fuel price hike:

Following the tragic situation in Sri Lanka, thousands of demonstrators flocked to the streets in many Bangladeshi cities when the Sheikh Hasina administration raised fuel prices to their highest level since the neighbouring nation’s independence by about 52%.

Global supply shocks due to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The US and other developed nations will do fine, but small developing nations, not so much.

Varna is Indo-European and jati is Indian

A casual comment…most Indo-European societies seem to have originally had some sort of occupational caste system. I’m talking here of Dumezil’s trifunctional hypothesis, warrior, priest and commoner. But only the Indian subcontinent has jati.

I was thinking about it when reflecting on work to come out soon from David Reich’s lab on ancient Pontic steppe ancestry in Bronze Age Greece. There is no stratification by class when it comes to steppe ancestry. From the talk:

In the Balkans, we reveal a patchwork of Bronze Age populations with diverse proportions of steppe ancestry in the aftermath of the ~3000 BCE Yamnaya migrations, paralleling the linguistic diversity of Paleo-Balkan speakers. We provide insights into the Mycenaean period of the Aegean by documenting variation in the proportion of steppe ancestry (including some individuals who lack it altogether), and finding no evidence for systematic differences in steppe ancestry among social strata, such as those of the elite buried at the Palace of Nestor in Pylos.

So why is India so different? One hypothesis that some make is that the Indo-Aryans were racially so different from the indigenous people. But I do not that that is the issue. Instead of bringing strict endogamy to the subcontinent, the Indo-Aryans adopted indigenous forms. There’s genetic differences indicating strong endogamy across South India among non-Brahmin groups. There is also a ‘mystery’ in terms of how the IVC was organized sociopolitically. I think I have a possibility: jati obviated the need for central political authority.

Thank God the British are working on South Asian genomics

The sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank:

We defined two other cohorts based on ancestry: African (XAF; n = 9,633; Extended Data Fig. 4) and South Asian (XSA; n = 9,252; Extended Data Fig. 5) (Fig. 3a–c). The 37,598 UKB individuals who do not belong to XBI, XAF or XSA were assigned to the cohort OTH (others). The WGS data of the XAF cohort represent one of the most comprehensive surveys of African sequence variation to date, with reported birthplaces of its members covering 31 of the 44 countries on mainland of sub-Saharan Africa (Extended Data Fig. 4). Owing to the considerable genetic diversity of African populations, and resultant differences in patterns of linkage disequilibrium, the XAF cohort may prove valuable for fine-mapping association signals due to multiple strongly correlated variants identified in XBI or other non-African populations.

Nearly 10,000 South Asians at high-quality whole-genome sequence scale is nice to see. Obviously, this is oversampling some groups (Mirpuris, Syhletis, and East African Indians who are mostly Guju), but it’s better than nothing. It’s really sad that the British are pushing forward with this. The Chinese have started to move into sequencing their whole nation (they have millions at low coverage). This isn’t that expensive; less than $100 per person at scale. Why is India tarrying on this? I don’t have inside info but I think the Permit Raj strikes again.

Start-up Ecosystem In India

Maneesh has a freewheeling conversation with Roshan Cariappa, founder and host of the Start-up operator podcast, on the start-up ecosystem in India.

The conversation encapsulates ‘ Dummies guide to Indian start-ups’, covers the industries and the geographies that make up for this space and ends with opportunities and challenges that abound.

 

@maneesht and @roshancarippa on twitter.

Podcasts on the Indian start-up ecosystem:

The Startup Operator Podcast: https://www.startupoperator.in/

Indian Silicon Valley Podcast: https://airtable.com/shrTOFf1z5UT0q9p8

VCPreneur: https://thevcpreneur.com/

The Indian Dream: https://www.theindiandream.in/

 

 

Indo-Turks and Anglo-Normans

Posting after a while, as this topic is very BP and I managed to write a rather long Twitter thread on it. So just compiling it all here in a neater format. May revisit and clean it up further later.

A short piece on why the Islamo-Turkic colonialism in India is not the same as the experience of the English who were colonized at roughly the same time by the Francophone Normans. Note Mahmud Ghaznavi died in 1030 / William Duc de Normandie was born in 1028.

Continue reading Indo-Turks and Anglo-Normans

The Indian migration to Southeast Asia

Ancient DNA from Protohistoric Period Cambodia indicates that South Asians admixed with local populations as early as 1st-3rd centuries CE:

Indian cultural influence is remarkable in present-day Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA), and it may have stimulated early state formation in the region. Various present-day populations in MSEA harbor a low level of South Asian ancestry, but previous studies failed to detect such ancestry in any ancient individual from MSEA. In this study, we discovered a substantial level of South Asian admixture (ca. 40% – 50%) in a Protohistoric individual from the Vat Komnou cemetery at the Angkor Borei site in Cambodia. The location and direct radiocarbon dating result on the human bone (95% confidence interval is 78 – 234 calCE) indicate that this individual lived during the early period of Funan, one of the earliest states in MSEA, which shows that the South Asian gene flow to Cambodia started about a millennium earlier than indicated by previous published results of genetic dating relying on present-day populations. Plausible proxies for the South Asian ancestry source in this individual are present-day populations in Southern India, and the individual shares more genetic drift with present-day Cambodians than with most present-day East and Southeast Asian populations.

No surprise to readers of this weblog. South Asians obsess about possible admixture/contact with West Asia and Europe for obvious reasons, but it’s been pretty clear for a while that the “Indian cultural influence” on Southeast Asia was also demographic. Mainland Southeast Asia and the western part of Maritime Southeast Asia have minor but consistent levels of Indian ancestry. It showed up decades ago in Cambodian males who carried R1a Y haplogroup. And it showed up in a 2012 methods paper that detected gene flow from Pakistanis to Cambodians (no Indian samples in the dataset):

Genetics is basically done now. You can observe, for example, that lowland Thai populations have Indian ancestry, while highland tribes don’t have it.

We now know that the influence of Indian culture of a southern flavor to Southeast Asia was mediated by large numbers of humans. Indian genetic imprint on Burma can be chalked up to being Bengal’s neighbor, but you can’t say the same about Cambodia or Bali. Who were these people? Well, in a way, you could say that they were the “Brown Rajahs” for ancient Sarawak…

Brown Pundits