Tag: Culture

Interesting interview of Zoomers by Millennial Hasan Minhaj. Especially interesting to me because I’m Gen-X.

Near the end, there is a reference to the fact that the diversity within Indian Americans is something that these kids wish people understood more. One of the things that the old Sepia Mutiny blog made many Gen-X and Millennial brown Americans aware of is that there was a lot of variation we didn’t understand or comprehend since we were often the only representatives of all things brown for our social circle.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that many of the people who immigrated between 1965 and 1990 are now becoming grandparents as their 1.5 & 2nd gen offspring become parents. These people often left an India (or Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, etc.) that had been independent for only a few decades. Their children grow up on stories of the “old country”, but that country no longer exists. It’s been more than two generations now since the early professional immigrants left.

A commenter below mentioned offhand how they didn’t like beef. Myself, I love beef. And growing up beef curry was something we ate a lot. Since we were Bengali we ate more fish and shrimp of course. I had assumed that among Muslims in the Indian subcontinent this would be common, least outside of Hindu-majority areas. But when I hit Google it seems “Bangladeshi beef curry” is one of the top hits.

Our of curiosity, is beef curry not eaten much among Muslims in Pakistan?

This brings me some confusion, and makes me wonder what else I don’t know. What’s the most curious or interesting aspect of regional Indian cuisine? For example, Lisa M. claims that a lot of classic Bengali food is actually from Odisha (chefs from that state went to work in Bengal).

Probably the strangest thing about Bengali food, aside from the copious usage of mustard oil, is many of us really love dried fish (shutki).

Obviously I have not had much time to write on my blogs recently. But I thought I would pass on a casual judgement I have come to in regards to Indians, and particularly Hindus. Their mentality is powerfully shaped by the Other.

This is true of modern Muslims as well obviously. As Bernard Lewis would famously assert, the victory of the West over Islam in geopolitics in the 19th-century induced a psychic trauma which Muslims are still reacting to. Postcolonialism suggests that this is the condition of all non-Western societies. They can be only understood in their reaction to the West.

In general, I think postcolonialism is not helpful. Obviously, there is some truth in the framework, but most people don’t have a “thick” understanding of history, so they simply use Theory to invent “facts.”

But, it is clearly the case that modern Indian, and Hindu, Weltanschauung, whether “secularist” or “Hindutva” or something altogether different, is hard to understand without colonialism. But it is not simply Western colonialism. It is also Islamic colonialism and conquest.

The peculiar and curious aspect of modern Indian/Hindu mentality then is the double-colonial layer. That is, the long-term sublimation of the Indian civilization under the temporal rule of Other civilizations. One could assert that China was ruled by Manchus for 250 years before its quasi-colonization. But this analogy is clearly weak because the later Manchus became so thoroughly Sinicized that Manchus as an independent ethnicity have disappeared in modern China (Manchus today are those who have descent from Manchus, not those who practice a non-Han culture).

Basically, it’s always modern complicated in India…

India is one of the top countries on Twitter. And, since many Indians have some command of English, they interact somewhat with the English-speaking Twitter crowd which is mostly based in the USA and UK.

But, the differences in style, idiom, and cultural references, make conversations often very difficult and totally incomprehensible. Despite the fact that two interlocutors may speak the same language, with only minor syntactical and semantic differences. The difference exists between British and Americans as well, but the cultural gap here is much smaller, and some of the confusions I see with conversations with Indian Twitter happen far less.

This is not a function of how much similar British English is to American English. It is a function of the uniqueness of Indian culture and expectations, and particular idioms and frames. The usage of English allows for Americans to be exposed to this, but there is a level of opacity that is novel and surprising.

To me, my engagement with Indian Twitter is more a matter of anthropological curiosity than dialogue. Twitter lacks the nuance and density to puncture the incommensurable aspects easily.

A comment on Twitter about the lack of the Islamic world’s own Arundhati Roys, and therefore the lack of Leftism. My own reaction is that this is wrong. There is plenty of Leftism in the Islamic world, just not the sort of cultural criticism that Arundhati Roy specializes in.

To give an example, the PLO has several Communist member parties, and its largest element, Fatah, is Left-nationalist. Though the high-tide of Marxism in the Islamic world, and the developing world in general, was in the 1970s, the ghost of Left-nationalism haunts us to this day (the Syrian Ba’ath party has its origins on the Left, though today it is basically an Assad family enterprise). India, there remains to this day a militant Marxist movement.

So what’s going on with people like Arundhati Roy? I think the best way to understand her is that she is part of the global English-speaking intelligentsia, and as such caught up in cultural currents which are beyond, and above, her Indian milieu. She applies the tools and concerns which are validated among the global cultural Left to an Indian context.

It’s not just an English-speaking phenomenon. There is a global elite cultural movement united by share mores and disposition. Consider the movements for gay rights in East Asia, which seem to be clearly shaped by Western precursors. But, I think the Indian English-speaking elite exhibits the tendency to imitate and replicate far faster than in other developing societies because of its shared cultural presuppositions and linguistic fluency with the Anglosphere.

Priyanka Chopra tweeted during a time when we were this ?? close to sending nukes to one another. Instead of advocating for peace she tweeted in support of the Indian army pic.twitter.com/LhbMkOW59v

— Ayesha Malik (@Spishaa) August 11, 2019

If you are lucky, you are not aware that Priyanka Chopra got “called out” by a young Pakistani woman for “encouraging nuclear war against Pakistan.”

On the face of it seems very unlikely that Chopra was doing anything more than making a vanilla patriotic statement during a very tense time (I assume literally no one except for insane people would have wanted nuclear war in any case or even a conventional war!).

Though the initial stories referred to a “Pakistani woman”, you can tell by the accent that she was raised in the USA. In fact, she was naturalized as an American citizen at a very young age (she posted the certificate on her Facebook page). To be honest, even when I heard her referred to as Pakistani (she refers to herself as such), I was a bit skeptical and suspected perhaps she was actually American because this sort of self-righteous grandstanding is what America teaches the current generation.

Ayesha Malik is self-centered, ignorant, and milking an issue of genuine geopolitical concern to elevate her own individual profile as a beauty vlogger. Very American.

It’s cool how Jake Tapper compares occupied Palestinians to white nationalists while he’s actually giving them a platform on his own show (Richard Spencer most recently). Collect your man @cnn.

— Sana Saeed (@SanaSaeed) August 5, 2019

There is a little Twitter tiff going on because of what seems like a misunderstanding (misrepresentation?) of what Jake Tapper said on his CNN show on Sunday. The source of the misunderstanding (or, as Tapper stated, the lie) is a journalist at AJ+.

AJ+, of course, is the English-language social media-oriented arm of Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is controlled by the government of Qatar, an authoritarian monarchy. Not only is Qatar authoritarian, but it is a very explicit caste society.

As a person of South Asian descent, I am quite aware that the United States gives me a far better “fair-go” than an of the Gulf monarchies would, including Qatar. Money is fungible, but the reality is that the funds in Sana Saeed’s bank account almost certainly derive in some way from the exploitation of South Asian laborers in Qatar.

To get a sense of Qatar, you can read this article, Lamborghinis, Burkas, Sex Party Invites And ‘Chop Chop Square’: A New York Lawyer’s 15 Years In The Middle East. It’s basically a hit piece. There’s nothing surprising or novel about the facts reported. It was probably written to satisfy our Gulf allies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Both of these states run on exploited labor and operate as caste societies (well, Saudi Arabia less so since it has indigenized more).

Qatar’s game kind of reminds me of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Soviets, correctly, pointed out America racism. But, they did not shine much of a light on their own prejudices and brutality toward ethnic minorities (they literally engaged in ethnic cleansing several times for reasons of geopolitics). And, Communist anti-racism was fundamentally shallow, as evidenced by the well-known racism among the populace of the post-Communist states.

As with my post on Mehdi Hasan, my point is not to say that people getting their paychecks indirectly from the exploitation of South Asian laborers shouldn’t be able to express opinions. But, considering that they are employed by a media outfit controlled by a mildly racist and very authoritarian regime, perhaps one should be a bit more skeptical of their good faith.

I mean, if Israel is an apartheid state, what would they call Qatar?

Addendum: Also, AJ+ journalists should chill on the guilt-by-association. Their Arabia language channel platforms some really nasty people.