Apparently the Miss Universe contestant from Denmark, Gitte Hanspal is half-Indian. Does this matter, besides the fact that it proves to the doubters that there are Indians in Denmark? No. I just needed the thinnest of reasons to put this picture up [tip from Pooja Makhijani]. The Miss Universe contest will be on May 31st in Thailand.
Occupation: I am currently working part-time as a student at IBM Software. My job is to assist the sales staff in different areas and on different projects, in order to relieve their workload.
She’s beautiful AND on her way to becoming and IT geek. Oh, and please let’s not forget about Miss India, Amrita Thapar.
Razib, Your analogy of preference for blondes and mixed kids to eating ice creams is an extremely poor one. You stated “and eating ice cream means there is less ice cream in the world” Well the more ice creams you eat, the more they will be produced, unless the raw material required for producing ice creams was in scarce supply. However if you and your blonde partner end up making an inter racial non blonde child, there would be one less blonde woman who could have mated with someone else to produce even more blonde children. You also stated “addendum: i am not worried about the fact that there will be fewer blondes in the world because of hardy-weinberg effects (recessive traits show up at frequency q^2, so they are masked by dominant traits)”. Could you please explain this in layman terms.
al, i was going to stipulate one ice cream, but i figured it would be superfluous. but i think my second analogy works better. in any case, the first analogy still works because i am evaluating the value of ice cream from an egoistic/proximate angle. if my gf marries some other dude and produces blonde daughters i could pair up with them, but it makes no difference if i pair up with her or not. basically, in the chain of values “world filled with blondes” is trivial next to “me with a blonde.” but this gets to ultimate vs. proximate, people seem to be assuming that if i say “i like A,” -> “i think that A has transcendent value.” not really.
HW is basically a equilibrium state where you have two alleles, “B” (brunette) and “b” (blonde). we all have two copies of any gene, and the theory* is that you need two copies (“bb”) to be blonde and only one copy (“Bb” or “BB”) to be non-blonde. so non-blonde is dominant. so, at HW equilibrium the gene cominbations are (frequency of B)^2 + 2*(frequency of B * frequency of b) + (frequency of b)^2, so, the frequency of blondes is the last, because you need two copies. so, it is unlikely that “blondes will die out” because their alleles will hang around, and some people carrying the alleles will still hang around. you wouldn’t need to much work to generate “blondes” form a miscegenated population…brazil seems to have recreated “whites” and “blacks” through assortative mating in a few hundred years.
there would be one less blonde woman who could have mated with someone else to produce even more blonde children.
the “someone else” is a the rub, why should i care? i’m an egoist. not an unbridled one, but friends and (far lesser extent) family are my primary ultimate values. everything else is proximate and egocentric.
if mr. bose knew this i doubt he would have asked the question in the first place 😉
p.s. some white nationalists get angry at me and ask how i could date blondes if i liked blondes, since i am destroying the phenotype. but i don’t think in terms of “the blonde race is great” or whatever, i think in terms of “blonde babes are great for me.” you take the “me” out of it, and you’ve lost me.
btw, HW has a lot of conditions. i don’t think it was relevant to me getting my point across, so i left them out (no selection, random mating, etc.).
You generously limit what you call “scientific racism” to a 40 year period. In fact, such racism both preceded and proceeded that time period.
John Stuart Mill, knowing for his work on rationalist “logic” described India as wallowing in an “ahistorical” (much you as you did) condition before the Brits rolled through. It was stuck in antiquity, enmeshed by prejudice and custom. This came from a completely uninformed locus…simply put, he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. In fact, India had enjoyed a dynamic history (along with robust recordkeeping), religion, and culture, not to mention significant connections and bridges with other cultures, ranging from the Romans, Ethiopians, Arabs, Mongols, Alexander’s armies to the Portugese, French, etc. Indian scholars had already made great advancements in mathematics, the political sciences, law+justice, and elsewhere that Mill could not account for. Mill’s writing on India were before 1870. It wasn’t till William Jones that the Brits actually realized that Hindi and English shared innumerable similarities and were simply cognates of a common root language. Mill is but one example of early Western science-gone-awry. The entire East India Company and early Raj were about using every method available, in every realm (from law to art history to history to politics/religion) to legitimize and enhance their ascendancy.
Scientists measured skull shape and size well into the “modern” era in efforts to determine everything from intelligence to criminal dispotion. Elsewhere in the West, Hitler and his legion of advanced scientists rigorously and scientifically promoted discursive philosophies, programs, and experiments that were racist to the core. As you said elsewhere, Sweden practiced eugenics till the 1970s (will let you verify that to yourself). About 10 years ago, “The Bell Curve” came out, purportedly ascribing higher intelligence to whites and mongoloids.
Scientific racism has existed in the West for as long as science has existed in the West. That includes today, our “modern” condition notwithstanding. Especially given this modern condition, racism in the West manifests itself in India to this day.
There are cogent arguments that the color preference loosely dates itself to the varna division of labor from Vedic times…so that lighter-skinned mostly-Aryans could dominate over darker-skinned mostly-Dravidians.
Razib, I fully agree with this, especially your first sentence. Where I disagree with you is that I think you underestimate the impacts of the many acts that were part of colonialism and its subsequent legacies, some of which you listed explicitly. To draw an analogy–it’s written (if contentious) and unsurprising to me that there were religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims before the British arrived; however, the introduction of the census, divide and rule tactics, the constant message that desis were inferior to the British, etc. have left a lasting imprint that you can trace all the way to current Hindutva arguments against separate electorate, for a uniform civil code, sectarian oppression in Pakistan, etc., violence in all three countries, as well as the international tensions that elites in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh all exploit, which now includes a nuclear arms race.
In my view, it would be virtually impossible for elite desis (as opposed to uneducated desis) who made up the nationalist movement to escape the various schools of thought of European racism given that they were educated through a European created system and that they were ruled by a European elite and that they were subjected to a European media and, most importantly, constantly surrounded by a world in which most of the “important” news was generated by the sheer fact of European power and the subordination of the rest of the world. And this is for at least 90 years (if you don’t count E. India company rule or the neocolonial period afterwards, which might be fair, given that India tended to turn towards the USSR more than the US until the former’s collapse). Otherwise, why would Russia’s loss to Japan in the early part of the 20th century have been so shocking and disturbing to Westerners.
I don’t know how else to explain that one family member in Calcutta, a decent person, who has never been outside India (to my knowledge) or met an American Black person, is racist against them, or that another, when 13, thought a funny dirty joke was “An African woman is black; her nipples are blacker.”
My point is not to draw blame onto the European supremacists as people as much as to argue that what you’re saying about the introduction of science and other modernist approaches to human society in South Asia and the general shaping of the world and its worldview as it exists today extends further and deeper and in far more complex ways than you’re acknowledging, regardless of what the precolonial views on race were. As you say, we are all modern now.
That said, I understand why you would want to position your understand of contemporary events in a different way and focus on different issues and I actually share your apprehensions about racism in China (and in India actually–I’ve seen Indians talk about Bangladeshis the same way Americans talk about Mexicans) and imprecise thinking about these issues.
At the same time, you can and should be critical about being treated as a “Paki” in Britain (if you are), invisible in the U.S. (if you are), and a “barbarian” in China (if you are) on the grounds that none of those roles recognize your underlying humanity, even while you recognize that the three situations aren’t equivalent in terms of how badly you’re being treated. Not a quest for an ideal of justice; just a way to engage a process of getting by and helping others do the same.
Saurav,
There is an inconsistency in what you wrote How is it that South Asia absorbed racial notions from the West, and yet managed to discard other, more everyday ideas and practices from colonial times?
Take the civil service – Nehru considered the civil service left by the British to be one of India’s assets. Yet, no other system has produced such corruption and impoverished millions. Bureaucrats knew the system did not work, and yet continued to choke the economy and stiffle entrepreneurs. Any degree of professionalism that the British may have kept during their rule quickly disappeared once India became independent.
Take religion. Whereas the former Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Philippines are now among the biggest Catholic nations, Britain (whether by intent or neglect) never really saw an expansion of Christianity on the subcontinent. Why did the Hindus of the region not just abandon their faith? After all, the elite adopted the English language, notions of English common law, they could have just as easily embraced the Englishman’s god.
Or how about public sanitation? The Brits were in India for 200 years, and yet in all that time, Indians did not absorb Western notions of public hygiene. The train tracks of Bombay act as a mass toilet for the slums. I’ve seen my own relatives gather up the food scraps from their dinner table, and casually toss them a few feet into the open street in front of their house.
Prejudice is not a western import. It was in South Asia well before that. The Brits may have pitted Hindu against Muslim to suit their ends, but they were taking advantage of fissures that were already there.
If I have one complaint about India’s changing ways – it is one thing to adopt Western dress, Western lingo, and Western material comfort. But India will be better off if it also adopts Western notions of individualism and civic mindedness.
I fear I may be the last one to leave the party in responding, but here goes anyway:
Here are some attempts at answers: 1. It’s just something that happened. Why it happened would take a level of detailed analysis that I’m not capable of.
Take this for example: can you imagine the United States had it been governed over 100 years by an unreconstructed, imperial, Russian supremacist USSR? Can you imagine what changes there would have been to the way we work, the way we live, the newspapers we read, the discussions we have, the perspectives we form, the way we view property, the way we view civil liberties, the way we view Russians, the very way our language and discourse and thinking are changed? Those are profound, profound effects–the culmination of a million little and big things–that can’t simply be underplayed or dismissed. It’s not that prejudice is imported, it’s that particular prejudices are used in the machinery of the ruling elite (whether British or desi) and exacerbated to promote the interests of that elite.
I imagine those other factors you refer to–tranparency in government, etc., either 1) were not relatively important enough to the British to emphasize (like religious evangelism–colonialisms are different, and Spanish colonialism in Latin America had a very different style than British colonialism in South Asia) 2) were propped up by the British without collaboration from the local elite and hence fell apart afterwards 3) served no psychological, economic, or political benefit to the desi elite and were therefore dropped and/or 4) were undermined by preexisting cultural trends that had been contained or had not yet developed during British rule.
Ok I’ve come in very late in this debate, but I’d just like to say a few things: I’ve noticed that people outside India, have no clue as to the variety of people who live in India. The point I’m making is that for F*CKS sake, Miss India is not “White”-wannabe. Lots of people from North-India are as fair (if not fairer than her). Guess what – the majority of people who migrated outside India are NOT from North India. So she may be white-looking to you, but she’s frikking typical Delhi girl(regardless of whether she’s from there or not) to me. Outside India, idiots of Indian origin have told me that I don’t look “Indian” (I am Punjabi). What the fuck is “Indian”. Fuck that as a definition for how somebody looks. Furthermore, bollywood movies – they were not created as an art form – they were created to allow the tortured daily masses from having to remember their daily grind. Therefore, logic and reality are optional in bollywood movies. Stop applying bloody “White” standards to bollywood movies. I’m curious, why do you complain about Miss India looking “White” and yet complanin about bollywood movies not being up to the “standard” of hollywood (the producer of such greats as Gigli, no less). One more newsflash for ya – Indians (most) are of Aryan-Dravidian origin. Guess what – aryans come from the Caucusus. Do you know what they call people from the Caucusus? CAUCASIANS. You don’t have to be fucking white to be a caucasian. So gee, surprise surprise, Miss India look caucasian. Now can we all stfu?
It just did. As you mentioned, India absorbed some things from Britain and not others:
Whether the civil service system works or not today doesn’t matter. Point is, it was carried for 100% from the British system (like a lot of other things).
The Anglican church did not have nearly the same evangelical tradition as did the Catholic church. The British replaced religion with the “religion” of hauty and pompous cultural superiority. Indians “converted” in that sense. I can hear echos of it everytime a relative says “Rubbish!” or “What a blood fool” etc.
Yes and communal hatred/dissension would not have been so bad in the absence of the Brits.
Minus the offensive language, I totally agree with TTG. Everytime this skin color debate comes up on Sepia Mutiny, thats almost exactly what goes through my head. Since when is being darker considered more Indian than being fair-skinned? If anything, I find that offensive to all the rest of us who are 100% Indian but light-skinned. I don’t like apologizing or feeling less Indian just because I am not South Indian dark. If one comes out and talks about being more attracted to darker skinned girls/guys, they are a hero on this site, but if its the other way around, all of a sudden they are “prejudiced.” Very very silly debate.. I think you guys should move beyond discussing this
TTG and SSM, Most North Indians are not of the same color as the Miss India contestant. They are atleast 2-3 shades darker than her on average. Also her facial structure is more caucazoid than the facial structure of most North Indians.
No one is suggesting that light-skinned Indians are somehow less authentic. Nor is anyone objecting to someone having a personal preference for light-skinned Indians. The complaints start when virtually every image of an Indian, whether it is in movies, TV, magazine ads, or on a billboard, are bleached white.
I have seen Indian families turn down potential wives for their sons, solely on the basis of skin tone. Forget their character, their education – is she fair or not becomes paramount.
Again, this is not any hostility towards light-skinned Indians, cause otherwise I’d be hating on myself. While having dinner once with a Marwari woman several months back, who was quite fair herself, she told me, “If you did not tell me you were Indian, I would never have guessed it. You have more of a Middle Eastern appearance.” Thankfully, that does seem to be the case when I board an airplane.
The Anglican church did not have nearly the same evangelical tradition as did the Catholic church.
this isn’t true. many of the utilitarians had evangelical fellow-travellers who wanted to reform and reconstitute south asian culture around christianity. the east india company blocked such attempts at evangelization for the sake of profit, but later the british missioanries, whether anglican, methodist, or later american presbyterians and baptists, tended to have success only in northeast india (or among dalits) where hinduization was not advanced (or non-existent) when the british gov. caved on the missionary issues (they also cordoned off the northeast for the sake of the missionaries). if you want a contrast, see africa, where the majority of the world’s anglicans now live. or see mindanao, where the spaniards never managed to convert the “moros” who had been islamicized before the spanish colonial hegemony. just as hindus tended to be resilient in the face of islamicization, they were reslient in the face of christianization, because they had an alternative intellectual and institutional religious system. you can see a similar process in africa, where peoples whoere islamicized never christianized, but those who remained “traditionalists,” and so without the intellectual and institutional buttresses that sustained a “world religion,” generally converted to christianity.
as for the part about “scientific racism,” i didn’t say it didn’t exist, i simply stated that its apogee was between 1870-1910. during the time of mill, as i stated, the PM was of part south-asian heritage. this was known. after mill a jew became prime minister. this certainly could not have happened in the less philo-semitic times of t he early 20th century. scientific racism under the influence of secular polygenism was prominent already in the 18th century. but the full crystallization of systematic scientific racism occured around the turn of the 19th century, in part under the stimulus of darwinian theories of natural selection. ergo, the shock of defeat of the russians by the japanese-in contrast, in the 18th century the europeans still had to treat with manchu china as an equal, and in the 17th century they had to negotiate to trade in the mughal realm.
saurav, as for the impact of european colonialism, i hold that the evils unleashed by modernity would have been unleashed whether the face was yellow, brown or red (or white). the genie is out of the bottle. the chinese were never officially colonized, but they are at least as racist as south asians. similarly, the thai are also rather racist (again, never officially colonized). neverthless, for all its concomitant evils i think Modernity is a Good Thing. and the West created Modernity, no matter what other international inputs there were into it. to use a specific analogy: i tend to believe that christian evangalizers are are unseemly in their duplicity (on occassion) in the fashion that they convert the down-trodden, but, if it results in hindu groups competing to be less inhumane and show their fellow hindus that they are not subhumans, christian evangelizers are all for the good (and if a dalit is treated like a beast by his “fellow” indian nonetheless, all for the good that he/she turns his/her back on the gods their ancestors and repudiates what they were for a different future, if they can grasp it).
p.s. as for desis abroad, there are large communities of punjabis from pakistan and india in the UK, and sikhs are probably second after gujaratis in numerical preponderance in the USA. finally, Ioan Gruffudd is as british as anyone else, but, one would begin to wonder if 90% of british actors had his complexion and look.
edmund burke on indian governance. an interesting contrast with the cold calculationism of the utilitarians (though full disclosure, i lean mildly more toward the views of mill than i do to burke’s respective for “traditional cultures”).
saurav, re: blacks, well, it wasn’t europeans who introduced blacks into asia. many blacks from eastern africa served in the armies of muslim potentates in south asia, and the slave trade was omnipresent enough that black “pets” were known in the court of the ming and ching dynasty courts in china.
in south asia there were many blacks in the service of the dynasties of southern india (because of the trade with arabia and eastern africa), some in high positions as generals. one ethiopian general ruled bengal for a period after the decline of the delhi sultanate and before rise of the mughals.
most of the blacks did not reproduce (enuchs) or were absorbed into the native population, but the siddhis of western india are remnants of the black slave trade who have created their own ethnicity based around their common race. a small minority have even converted to hinduism! (most are muslim)
as for south asian attitudes toward blacks, in the great-chain-of-being blacks have been rather low for much of history, but this did not start just with the europeans, the arabs enslaved the “zanj” brutally and engaged in latifunda style slave labor in places like southern iraq. additionally, it is a common abstraction of the simply reality that the muslims rulers were relatively fair to the south asians whom they ruled that low even darker are inferior. it is a common extension of the observation that the elite tend to be fair and caucasoid in any given region vis-a-vis the lower castes that those who would phenotypically resemble lower castes would also be objects of contempt or derision.
this is not to deny the power of the european slave trade and dehumanization of blacks as factors in south asian hatred of them, but local factors must play some role, unless south asians are a particularly colonized people. i have read that black diplomats dislike working in south asia precisely because of the racism (though russia is probably #1 now on the “shit list,” and china also likely up there). the fact is that south asians are the second darkest group in the world, and it makes sense for them in a “racial chain of being” to emphasize their differences and contempt for a group that has relatively low status.
in any case, my point is simple: europeans did not bring anti-black racism de novo into south asia. rather, as in many aspects, europeans amplified and systemetizing local biases and gave them more rigidity. but the answer is not to return to a pre-european influenced mindset where the majority of south asians live in small hamlets and till the land as humans have for the past 10,000 years, but to create anew our conception of “civilized.”
Saurav’s point (in post #56 supra) is right on. And in response to KXB’s query, Saurav and Vurdlife, you could go further. The reason why racial attitudes were adopted and, say, public sanitation was not (though it might have been — I don’t want to get into that here) is because racial attitudes are something you INTERNALIZE. You don’t internalize systems of public administration or methods of urban infrastructure development. These are political decisions. Attitudes are psychological.
It’s not productive to compare White on Brown racism with Light Brown on Dark Brown racism; both exist, and they are inherently linked. It’s not useful to ask which one is worse or more urgent to address than the other. Both are the manifestations of the psychological effects of the colonial relationship.
The colonial relationship produced psychological effects in both the colonizer and the colonized. We are dealing with the fallout from this in many ways. After all, the explicit colonial system didn’t end all that long ago, and in many parts of the world implicit colonial power relations remain in place. Besides, the psychological impact is the hardest to address and correct, although it can take on new forms due to global economic and social change since those times, notably globalization and mass migration.
Some of the important thinking about the psychological dynamics of the colonial experience is in the work of Frantz Fanon, but to anyone interested in the topic I’d recommend you start with Albert Memmi’s “The Colonizer and the Colonized.” Written in the early 1960s it is lucid, clear, concise, and makes points that are still extremely valid today.
peace
I was responding to KXB. Are Razib and KXB the same?
You did say it was a “short-lived affair” and as I briefly touched on before, far from being short-lived, scientific racism has pervaded “modernity.”
Virtually all of today’s countries that were colonized by Spain are over 90% Catholic (The Philippines is a Catholic country, Mindanao notwithstanding.) Population-wise, the vast majority of former British colonials are not even majority Christian. Prime examples: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt.
Also, none of the British churches were as complicit in widespread colonial pillaging and forced conversions. Conversion was part of Spanish colonialism, not really for British colonialism. E.g. “Tribes that resisted Christianity quickly faced the power of the Spanish army.”
This may or may not be true. I lean towards the latter because as racist as Chinese, Japanese, and Thais may have be…I’m not so sure colonial-free desis would be as racist. They were routinely exposed to different cultures (unlike, say the Japanese) and probably would have had a rather tolerant attitude.
Regardless, the point is that even if those evils would have been unleashed anyway, fact is they were unleashed by European colonialism. If two people shoot a victim, and that person is dead before the second shot, the first person is guilty of murder, the second of attempted murder (which has a bit less culpability). Doesn’t mean you let the first guy go by saying “the victim would have died anyway”
Specifically on the colonial evangelization point, it’s tricky. In Ghana, for instance, as well as in the southeastern part of Nigeria where the most active colonial presence was felt, Protestantism caught on a great deal. It spread through schools run by missionaries. The schools were the ticket to civil service jobs or access to higher education.
One reason Catholicism has spread so effectively in countries that Spain, Portugal or France colonized, is that it lent itself to (and the authorities tolerated) syncretism — the re-identification of local divinities with Catholic saints, and the emergence of local forms of the various Catholic practices.
Protestantism, being what it is, did not approve of such developments. So it was not of that much appeal to colonized populations — except, as noted above, as the ticket to some future benefit.
Today, on the other hand, it is Protestantism that is spreading all over the world. But note that it is charismatic Protestantism, which is strong on ritual and local culture, and not the dour Calvinist stuff that the Scottish missionaries taught.
peace
Vurdlife:
Razib and I are two different people. He’s a Bengali, lapsed-Muslim, and prefers blondes. I’m a Bengali, lapsed-Hindu, and prefer mocha.
One of the chief problems with the idea that Britain solidified racism in India is that for many Indians during the British Raj, they did not even know the British were there. Most Indians did not interact with the British, the population was largely illiterate at the time, and aside from the few Indians needed to staff the civil service, the Brits did not undertake any great effort to encourage education of the natives. Indeed, if an Indian did have to interact with an imperial soldier or clerk, that face would usually be brown, not white. Factor in the dozens of princely states over which Britain exercised no control, and their reach becomes even less.
The arrival of Islam into India had a far greater cultural impact than the British. Arab, Persian, and Turkish influences entered language, food, architecture, music, and letters to an extent that the British never attained. Unfortunately, discussing the Islamic legacy in India leads to by two camps – the rabid Hindutva crowd that likens Mughal rule to that of the Nazis, and leftists who believe that Islamic rule had no negative effects on India at all and to suggest otherwise is to be anti-Muslim.
As for the anti-black attitudes held by many Indians, while it is odd that they have it since few Indians have interacted with an African – but in the wide selection of Indian prejudices, it is a rather small one. After all, the extent of prejudice and mistrust between Hindus and Muslims, or higher castes and lower castes is far larger in scale.
The aim of this blame the British attitude is to absolve Indians of their own prejudices. India has been independent for 58 years – if prejudice still exists now it has less to do with British intentions than the simple unwillingness of Indians to change their attitudes. This does not mean Indians are somehow more prone to prejudice than other groups. Bear in mind, Eisenhower had to send in armed troops to escort black students to the University of Arkansas. If you want Indians to be less prejudiced, you have to exert pressure on Indians alive today, and stop concerning with what Indians may have been exposed to by the British a century ago.
If British culture never affected most Indians, why is it that the English language is the only language that unified all of India 150 years ago (before English became global lingua franca) and continues to do so today? Why is it that the average layman Indian today has a better grasp of English than the average Chinese or Japanese person? Language is inextricably linked with knowledge and teaching. Easy to see how non-linguistic ideas eeked their way in as well….(“good”, “bad”, “barbarian”, “civilised” etc.)
Indians were all-too-aware of the British system and its effects. First of all, Britain extracted wealth in the form of taxes, resource extraction directly from the people. Yes it may have passed through a system of zamindars but this system made their lives a whole lot harder…and it existed in princely states too, which had to pay for protection (guess where they got it from). So the average person felt it financially. Where there is money there is power. Britain had an excrutiating stranglehold on India by its…..pursestrings.
Moreover, there is plenty of scholarship on how the British helped/forced both Hindus and Muslims to codify their religions, castes/classes and societies to a much greater extent than pre-British times. In doing so, they influenced the belief systems that the masses took up. Check out some of the work by Nicholas Dirks (chair of anthropology at Columbia), he discusses the effect of colonialism on the popular consciousness.
While I am no linguistics expert, I understand that North Indian languages have some similarties to English, since they are in the same language family.
“Searching for the Welsh-Hindi Link” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4328733.stm
Some selected paragraphs from the article:
“Ms Mathur’s own research on basic words, such as the numbers one to 10, found that many were similar – “seven”, for example, is “saith” in Welsh, “saat” in Hindi.”
“She later spoke to professor Colin Williams of Cardiff University’s School Of Welsh, who specialises in comparative languages.
He suggested that the similarities are because they come from the same mother language – the proto-European language.
“It was basically the mother language to Celtic, Latin, and Sanskrit,” Ms Mathur added.
“So basically that’s where this link originates from.”
On the other hand, East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese have much less in common with English or other European tongues. Keep in mind, the Chinese alphabet is a series of images, while Indian languages are based on phonics.
While the words and alphabet may be different, the manner of speaking and writing between English and many Indian languages is similar.
In administrative terms, India may have been unified by the British with the aid of English, but that had more to do with the building of railroads than the English language.
You wrote, “Language is inextricably linked with knowledge and teaching.” But, one can speak a language without being able to read it. India’s decades long fight against illiteracy demonstrates that.
I can remember sharing a cab ride in Calcutta with my dad, hearing him yell at the driver cause he was lost, and as we found out, could not read the signs in either English or Bengali. The driver spoke Bengali, I could read it better than he could.
The notions of “good” and “bad” did not come with the English language. After all, we had “bhalo” and “kharap” for centuries. For gentlemanly behavior, you had “bhadralok” and for ill-manned men, there was “bodmaish”
Here is a great book by Dr. Subhash Kak (Luisiana Tech. Comp. Science faculty) which deals with similarity between Sanskrit and Latin in initial chapters.
Although later chapters become too much like a text book, I enjoyed this book.
There are lots of these. Kamiz (Hindi), camisa (Spanish), chemise (French), shirt; aatth, ocho, huit, eight.
Then there are the identical words. Turkey also uses maidan for square, but I’m guessing India got that from the Mughals.
Virtually all of today’s countries that were colonized by Spain are over 90% Catholic (The Philippines is a Catholic country, Mindanao notwithstanding.) Population-wise, the vast majority of former British colonials are not even majority Christian. Prime examples: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt.
vurd, i hold that the reason that this is true is because
1) spanish catholicism is more evangelical than anglicanism (catch the linguistic irony in that!) to a minor degree
2) but the targets of spanish catholicism (latin america, the phillipines, etc.) did not have established institutional religions.
3) this assertion is tacitly supported by two spanish relationships with muslims: the expulsion of huge morisco populations (muslims) around 1600 because the catholic church couldn’t eradicate their religion. and the fact that spanish morocco remained muslim.
the rest is quibbling and i will give it a rest.
i would prefer not to be called a lapsed muslim. i never believed, so how can i be lapsed? my cultural origins are muslim, but i disavow that religion explicitly and have never been a believer.
If British culture never affected most Indians, why is it that the English language is the only language that unified all of India 150 years ago (before English became global lingua franca) and continues to do so today?
the vast majority of indians can not speak english. it has unified the elites. it may unify the nation yet, but the yet is to happen.
Moreover, there is plenty of scholarship on how the British helped/forced both Hindus and Muslims to codify their religions, castes/classes and societies to a much greater extent than pre-British times.
there is some truth to this, but the muslim orders like the naqshbandiya had already started the process. this codification and emphasis of difference has been occurring in places like indonesia without colonial input for the past generation or two, the modernate muslims are becoming “orthodox” while a sizable number of moderate “muslims” have converted to forms of balinese hinduism.
remember, hindu was once simply an inhabitant of india. the rise of a muslim confessional sect which set itself apart from hindus, explicitly at the elite levels, far less so among the masses, began the process where hindus began thinking of themselves as a specific confessional religion as opposed to a national identification. in other words, the british hastened the process through, nothing more. islam is based on a book, and when literacy spreads and a large ulema class develops a rejection of “non-muslim” practices tends to ensue.
anecdote: my extremely muslim uncles are the least concerned about my poor bengali skills. they are bengali, but they don’t attach a specific sentimental value to it, as long as i remain true to islam. my more “secular” relatives though are terrified by my illiteracy and lack of bengali cultural fluency.
Razib…
u really never believed? which religion do you identify with then? whether a person is christian, buddhist, jewish, or whatever, to NOT believe is just unbelieveable. a spiritual person is one worthy of respect, and enlightens everyone they converse with. a person void of spirituality is just a body…their soul limited…
“Am I not your Lord? YES, You are our Lord”, all the souls replied, in the Time before time began, (in the barzakh).
So, you (your soul) did believe. Search deep in your soul’s affirmation. Everyone was asked and everyone affirmed it, so that we can never go back and say, no one ever told us…
You have lapsed.
It’s very late, so forgive me if this is not fully thought through or rambling.
razib, you say, “the evils unleashed by modernity would have been unleashed whether the face was yellow, brown or red (or white).” This claim may be true (I, at least, agree with it), but the more important question is whether it’s relevant in the context of this discussion. The reality is that Western Europeans were the ones who were lucky enough (or lucky and clever enough or however you want to put it) to stumble upon technologies or be in the right situation at the right historical and cultural and technological moment. They were the ones who dominated the rest of the world, and as a concomitant to that, their racial hierarchy (and many other things…like their languages and clothes and forms of transportation and ideas about the proper relationship of states to minority groups) also came to dominate the way that the world’s people see each other and heavily influenced the reality of the world.
I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that geopolitical power has shifted over the past 150 years or so from Western Europe–>Settler Colonies and Outliers of the same culture (U.S., Russia)–>dominant Asian countries and Latin American countries. It’s no coincidence to me that Black countries are the poorest in the world today or that the Modernist race hierarchy plays itself out in European immigration policies and American domestic politics, among other things.
Consider also the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan and the way they are perceived vs. the Holocaust and Kosovo. Consider the enormous disparity in how much effort has been put into paying attention to the disputes in Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine vs. in Kashmir as “issues” of concern.
These are just a few examples of how the influence of that racial hierarchy through imperialism and colonialism has pervaded myriad acts and policies and steps and wars which make up history over the past 500 years. It’s never the sole factor, but it’s almost always an overarching factor.
As you hint at in your reference to the intellectual interchanges between people from the Arab world and people in South Asia, ideas about race in Europe and South Asia and elsewhere probably didn’t develop independently of preexisting cultural ideas or interchange with other areas. Regardless, my argument is that a more important factor is the overwhelming political, economic, and military power that administered (either directly or indirectly) essentially the entire world by the eve of WWI, not political formalities. it doesn’t matter that China wasn’t “officially” colonized or not; China was dominated (spheres of influence and all). It doesn’t matter whether Japan was colonized or not; Japan was confronted with the power of the West (Matthew Perry) and the ideas of the West and forced to make choices in how to react politically, culturally, militarily.
Yes, I am oversimplifying, but I want to just reiterate that this was the major macro force in shaping the way that people in different cultures came to see themselves and each other in terms of race hierarchies and most likely played a significant role in countless micro situations.
I don’t contend that there were no preexisting racial ideas in South Asia, because the history of South Asia and East Asia and South East Asia and Northern Europe and the Mediterrannean World are more linked in premodern times more than Western historiography has traditionally acknolwedged (just try to understand European history without Chinese gunpowder or the Renaissance without Islamic scholarship or temples in Southeast Asia without desi colonialism and trade); it makes little sense to view the precolonial Eastern Hemisphere as “The West” and “The East” as Western social scientists traditionally did and ignore the cultural interchange and the overall increase in technology and knowledge of the natural world over the whole area (although particular areas have their ebbs and flows). But it’s important to recognize that, with Modernity, things changed drastically.
The question for me is not whether Modernity is “good” or “bad”; it’s giving an accurate-as-possible rendering to what it was and what exists today is and looking at the world around us and responding to the particulars in the context of that broader understanding. I respect you for problematizing things and looking at the specifics in different locations, but, to some extent, I feel you’re deemphasizing some important aspects of the big picture.
somewhat off topic, but
why was I always told, and of the understanding, that you couldn’t convert to Hinduism? I thought it was non-proselytising. -But then, there are 2 distinct schools of though: Hinduism as a religion, versus Hinduism as a culture/philosophy… so it may depend on the perspective of “what” Hinduism is…
anybody?
My uninformed guesses:
I don’t know the origins of the idea that Hinduism is non-proselytizing (i’d guess it has to do with purity and pollution), but its a misinterpration (that probably serves a particular purpose…like the idea that Hidnuism encompasses all religions).
It’s reportedly not a social reality today. Sangh Parivar allegedly actively proseletizes indigenous peoples through their “tribal schools.” It’s also hard to believe that people from various Hindu traditions weren’t allowing conversions given the spread of those traditions to various regions (particularly Southeast Asia). Also, I’d guess another form of “conversion” was to apply doctrines like caste to people who don’t believe in them and thereby bring new populations into the fold by labeling them “untouchables” or assigning them a lower caste.
I think a lot of this confusion comes from the fact that Hinduism as an identity doesn’t exist (at least in an rigidly defined way as today) until various mechanisms created it as it exists today during the colonial period. I’m sure there are many other “conversions” that have happened as the traditions that became Hinduism got wrapped up in modernity and political power and economics and all these other things.
My uninformed guesses:
you are correct from what i have read. rulers of central asian descent were christened (so to speak) as kshatryias by the brahmins while the mongoloid ahoms of assam also attained that status through feat of arms (and defense of indigenous hindu traditions and customs against the mughals).
Now you can buy those clogs online from Cloggieshop Dutch wooden shoes
Amol
@Razib Your statements that states that the spanish were hardly in Mindanao with all respect is false, you might have ben misinformed. See http://www.phildig.com/pdf/issue_63.pdf and take a look on page 16. The spanish have been in Mindanao and had influence otherwise there would not have been a reason to start the Katipunan revolution. I know the moro’s don’t like this part of the history, but the truth is the truth. I know a woman from Mindanao and she speaks spanish as her first language.