Recently my friend Michelle re-tweeted this tweet you see to the left from Aziz Ansari. When I was in college some Indian students would play cricket in the public spaces I had to cross to get between classes, and they would consistently stop what they were doing and give me an inviting stare down. Finally I asked them what was up, and one of the players wondered if I played cricket. I explained not only did I not play cricket, but I had no idea what they were doing most of the time. One of my interlocutors quipped that I looked like I should play cricket. I had to laugh at that, and went on my way.
So first, congratulations to India! I recall how excited Americans were when we won the Women’s Soccer World Cup in 1999, when frankly most Americans didn’t even follow the sport. I can only imagine the euphoria in India due to victory in a sporting activity which is near the center of national consciousness.
But this gets me to a broader issue: as an Indian American, Aziz Ansari serves as a representative in the minds of his fellow Americans of India. In several of the comedic references I’ve seen to his ethnicity Aziz seems to express curiosity as to the farcical nature that his representation of a billion people sometimes takes on. For example, when Slumdog Millionaire was in the public eye people would apparently discuss it with him constantly (Aziz naturally expressed wonder at what the world must be for like for white people, who are the subject of so many films!).
This proxy effect for 1 billion people can be quite ridiculous. Because of the nature of awareness of other cultures most Americans have only a few sketches of India in their mind. These vary by time and place. Mahatma Gandhi is a constant, but forty years ago many more would know Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Today a more salient image is the Indian call center. The latter is one reason that this weblog has tackled the topic of “outsourcing” over the years, from the 2004 presidential election, down to the present. India has over 1 billion citizens, and the Indian subcontinent has over 1.25 billion human residents. And yet we as brown Americans have to grapple with perceptions based on thin, often evanescent, slices filtered through both high and low culture. I say brown American because I am not an Indian American.
I was born in Bangladesh, but raised in the United States, and am an American citizen. My father was born (just barely) in British India, and then was a citizen of Pakistan, then Bangladesh, and now the United States. My parents have lived as many years in North America as the Indian subcontinent, and far more in the United States of America than in Bangladesh, a nation which had only seen a decade when they left. I lay these details out because I understand that there are strong nationalistic strains in the Indian subcontinent, and I try and tread carefully. As I have explained to both Taz and Reihan Salam I have a weak self-awareness as a Bangaldeshi American because I spent so little time there, and my ancestors have been Bengali far longer than they’ve been Bangaldeshi, which is a new identity. Additionally, I am not very invested in the geopolitical machinations of the subcontinent, and take no great offense at being confused for Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan (no one has every mistaken me for Nepalese or Bhutanese!). Though I will explain that I was born in Bangladesh.
As a child I recall that my family socialized with a wide range of people from the Indian subcontinent. They had many friends from Pakistan, others from India (often Bengalis), as well as Bangladeshis. In the 1980s you couldn’t be “picky” about your co-ethnic associations. A shade of brown and a predilection for spicy food would do (there was a time when we socialized a great deal with a set of Syrian Christians from Kerala, for example). Though my parents have some subcontinental political affinities (they supported the Awami League, and I have an uncle who is an active politician in that party) this was never a major issue in the house, and only as an adult have I become more aware of the salience of South Asian politics among Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan Americans. In addition, as an atheist with a strong detachment from religious identity (I am not a “cultural Muslim”) I don’t have much emotional identification with the communal conflicts which occasionally roil the subcontinent. Since on a fundamental level I see religions as interchangeable I sometimes thoughtlessly quip that all Hindus should convert to Islam or all Muslims could convert to Hinduism, in the interests of subcontinental amity.
I introduce this post with a biographical prefaces to explain where “I’m coming from.” In many ways I perceive myself as an “outsider brown,” and have felt so since my own participation on this weblog began in 2004 as a commenter, a friend of Vinod and Manish who was curious as to what this desi identity meant (we had had long running email list discussions in 2003 around this issue). Since then Sepia Mutiny has been a boon for data mining: I have spent much of my life being an involuntary ‘authority’ on ‘India’, but my knowledge is generally limited to books and data sets, not lived experience with the place and the people. One of the issues that any brown American must face is that we are perceived, depending on the context, as a generic whole. Therefore, I have been asked about Hinduism, as if I was a Hindu. I have even been told by strangers how much they admired my Gods! On other occasions the assumption is clear that I am Muslim. Sometimes I am asked to offer my opinion on Indian music. I can’t even offer my opinion on American music! (I am tone deaf) And so on. If only I were a comedian in more than my personal life! So much material.
But part of the issue at work here is the unfortunate tendency of humans to generalize so casually about so many and so much. The Indian subcontinent is after all a subcontinent. It is home to one out of six humans. The physical and cultural variation of the people is riotous. But as brown Americans, and for Indian Americans especially, there is a critical need to grapple with it today. Why? Money.
In the near future India will surpass Britain in terms of gross domestic product. Barring world wide catastrophe it is an iron law of prediction simply based on demographic and economic trends. An awareness of India is not just a matter of spiritual or personal interest, it is demanded by the bottom line. India is a market, an engine of production and consumption. On a plainly utilitarian level I am overjoyed by this. Wealth and prosperity are a positive good, and a reduction of human misery requires no justification.
In the aggregate things are looking up! But aggregates can hide more fine-grained trends which are still disturbing. I am broadly speaking a supporter of neoliberal economic policies, insofar as I think economic growth is the best weapon against poverty. On a subnational level I think over the long term economic uplift through investing in one’s own human capital is more efficacious, and more edifying, than a perpetual reliance on government transfers and fiat.
Consider this article from The New York Times, Business Class Rises in Ashes of Caste System:
Chezi K. Ganesan looks every inch the high-tech entrepreneur, dressed in the Silicon Valley uniform of denim shirt and khaki trousers, slick smartphone close at hand. He splits his time between San Jose and this booming coastal metropolis, running his $6 million a year computer chip-making company.
His family has come a long way. His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste people, and women of his Nadar caste, who stood one notch above untouchables in India’s ancient caste hierarchy, were once forced to bare their breasts before upper caste men as a reminder of their low station.
(parenthetical, there are three Nadars in the Harappa Ancestry Project)
Despite my general preference for economic growth, there is another side to this: the rise in inequality. Inequality in itself is not so problematic if the pie continues to grow so that the lowest in society also benefit. But this is not totally clear in India today. Much of the nation may be shining, but hundreds of millions continue to live in squalor. This is not a brown issue, this is a human issue. One-third of the world’s poor live in India, more than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa:
To compile the index, researchers analysed data from 104 countries with a combined population of 5.2 billion, 78% of the world total. About 1.7 billion – a third – live in multidimensional poverty, they found. This is 400 million more than are estimated by the World Bank to be in “extreme” poverty. The new index is also designed to track variations within countries much better. So while the poverty rate is more than 80% in the rural state of Bihar, it is about 16% in the southern state of Kerala.
My post “A civilization of regions” was a pointer to these sorts of realities. I have spent my life being somewhat uncomfortable about the perception that I represent these billion people in all their diversity, but now as an intellectual matter I’m aghast at the generalizations which elide gross differences in human well being. What has Kerala to do with Bihar? Everything, and nothing, both at the same time.
Most of you know that I have a biological background, and so am particularly interested in vital statistics such as the prevalence of malnutrition amongst children. Though some of the data needs to be interpreted more carefully (e.g., reductions in per capita calorie consumption can reflect a shift from physically taxing rural lifestyles to more leisurely urban ones), much of it is not easily dismissed. Some estimates suggest there are 500,000 cretins in India, an iodine deficiency induced form of mental retardation. This is probably the tip of the iceberg, insofar as retardation is a high threshold in terms of diagnostic measures.
A new paper in PLoS Medicine makes explicit the lack of connection between development and nutritional gains, Is Economic Growth Associated with Reduction in Child Undernutrition in India?:
We failed to find consistent evidence that economic growth leads to reduction in childhood undernutrition in India. Direct investments in appropriate health interventions may be necessary to reduce childhood undernutrition in India.
The paper is open access, so you can try and make sense of the statistical models yourself. I would like to see more district-level analyses, but the general gist jumps out at you when you look at state-level statistics. To the left is a table which reports the 2005 proportion of children underweight by Indian state.
Why am I inundating you with this data? Going back to Aziz Ansari’s insight: as brown Americans we implicitly represent and interpret what is brown for our fellow Americans. But, there is an unfortunate tendency of people conflating the particular with the general, of “speaking of how things are done in South Asia/India, when what they are really talking about is how things are done in their grandparents house.” This is a broader problem of cognitive bias. I had long been under the misimpression that mustamakkara, Finnish blood sausage, was a national dish. It turns out that in reality this is a delicacy of particular note in the Tampere area (some Finns who were from the Helsinki region wanted to clear this issue up strenuously!). This is orders of magnitude more problematic under the rubric of “Indian food.” Like “Chinese food” this is a jumbled construct, which in Diasporic contexts is transmuted and selectively presented. Personally, I don’t know anything about “Indian food,” but I do know a great deal about Bengali food (and I hope to get to know more about South Indian food, but that’s just me!).
As brown Americans we are not representative samples of the Indian subcontinent. My family in Bangladesh has problems with morbid obesity among some of their younger members. This is not a typical problem in Bangladesh. The face of the Scripps National Spelling Bee is becoming brown, but a significant minority of Indian citizens remain illiterate. Despite highlighting the malnutrition above, affluent Indians and Diasporic brown folk are hit very hard by diseases of nutritional excess. Around 10 percent of Indians are Dalits, but in my reading the comments of this weblog since 2004 only one or two individuals of this background have ever admitted this origin on these boards (also look at the backgrounds of Harappa Ancestry Project contributors).
The point? It is hard work speaking accurately, precisely, and contextually, about a region of the world where one out of six humans reside. And yet because of my physical appearance and cultural background I am often asked by friends in academia who take a deep interest in international affairs about social and political issues pertaining to South Asia. So I do what I always do when faced with ignorance: I read, I analyze. On a more personal note interacting with individuals on this weblog over the past seven years has opened for me a window onto the perspectives of many people who have different backgrounds from my own, who had had to represent brown just as I had, but began from very different positions. But, interacting with individuals on this weblog has also highlighted the narrowness and selection biasing of the American brown experience. A disproportionate number of us are clearly the children of professionals or academic brats. This fact is brought home forcefully by the minority who speak up about coming from working or lower class backgrounds, for whom college was an option which they had to fight for, and graduate school was not an expectation.
We can’t extract ourselves from our subjective experiences. But we can respect each other on a personal level. On a broader scale we need to be cognizant about the disproportionate element of privilege which we experience. The very fact that you are reading this on the internet indicates some level of privilege! (even if you are reading in a library because you don’t have a computer or internet access, you must live in a nation which has the resources to subsidize such services) As a political conservative I am not much of a fan of the way terms like “privilege” are used in contemporary “discourse.” Often they seem like power plays in the game of rhetoric, cudgels to silence and intimidate. But, in the broad scope of human development we are the privileged brown, those for whom the paunch tolls. This is concrete and real.
India will continue to shine. The Indian chapter of Joel Kotkin’s Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy will become even more relevant, as the Diaspora acts in a complementary fashion to energize the flows of capital, labor, and services, which characterize the global economy which India is becoming a major engine of. But there are those being left behind. To a large extent the world’s poor are the brown poor. Being brown does not, I believe, give them more of a claim to our compassion and consideration than being black, white, or yellow, would. But, I do think it adds an element of emotional connection when one considers the old maxim, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”
I am at the end of the day a person of data, not impressions. But data is slave of the passions. In my complacency and coddled Western existence I do attempt periodically to do a “reality check,” and reflect on the misery which my distant relations no doubt experience as their daily experience. Economic development will continue apace. Brown faces will continue to be prominent in Silicon Valley, and the economic “competition” from India will continue to be part of the policy discussion in this country. But we need to always keep in mind that the reality is that today most brown folk continue to live in grinding Malthusian poverty. That is what being brown is all about in the most coarse reading. There is no shame in this truth excepting our own neglect of its consequences for human flourishing.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
I must be one of your biggest fans, Razib. Your style and deliver is similar to another erudite South Asian – Fareed Zakaria.
Going forwards in the Subcontinent, I think that there is going to be more fellowship between Pakis and Indians. The Pakis realize that their have bigger problems within their borders.
Bangladesh will prosper at 5-7% GDP growth really soon or now.
Indians will be more proud of their heritage, BUT they will still prefabricate their “Lipka Tatar” background on Wikipedia.
Razib: “So I do what I always do when faced with ignorance: I read, I analyze”. This is what sets you apart from most “Brown” folks. Kudos for a well thought, well researched (as always) and occasionally bit emotional but overall classic “Razib” style. Abhi should have invited you long time ago as a “Guest” blogger. Hang in there!
Razib, I’m sorry I always irritate you with those comments about India. I love this post. I think I’m one of those people whose had a conversation with you where you said “You identify very strongly with India, don’t you?”
Razib, I’m sorry I always irritate you with those comments about India. I love this post. I think I’m one of those people whose had a conversation with you where you said “You identify very strongly with India, don’t you?”
irritate would be the wrong word 🙂 in your case it’s amusing, but expected. you actually have spent a significant portion of life your abroad, including india. in any case, i have had the broader general experience in my adulthood of meeting brown people who were born & raised in the states who nevertheless have very strong consciousness in regards to indian, pakistani, bangladeshi, or sri lankan national issues. it’s normal in the course of things. just not the way i was raised. i do think one has to be careful about geopolitical emotional entanglements if one is diasporic, and the “motherland” is of significance. india and china, and even pakistan, armenia, or iran, for example, are just too important for ethnic lobbies to ever been determinative in regards to policy as they are with cuba or israel.
Great and comprehensive article – was long but riveting to read. It captures the Zeitgeist of “Brownitude”.
As a side note I found your comment on Bengali vs. Bangladeshi identity to be very interesting. Its something I want to explore over at Brown Pundits (Punjabi exceptionalism vs. Bengali and Sindhi provincial identities) and I think would be good for you to elaborate in future posts (Bengal & Bangladesh) probably here at SM since BP is now hopelessly Islamicate (fault of mine).
I feel that in the decade (or more now) that I’ve been out of South Asia, I’ve forgotten its poverty and been caught up in the hype; geopolitical and all. This is a line all Desis (particularly the elitey stuck-up Western chip in the shoulder inferiority complexed one generously distributed across South Asia) should meditate on continuously:
“But we need to always keep in mind that the reality is that today most brown folk continue to live in grinding Malthusian poverty. That is what being brown is all about in the most coarse reading. There is no shame in this truth excepting our own neglect of its consequences for human flourishing.”
razib, interesting analysis of being brown. as an immigrant at 17 and now a citizen this is an issue that i never think about much, at least not anymore.
i don’t know if you have read the series of articles (2) that the WSJ has been publishing in its analysis of india, “india – a flawed miracle”. it says all the things you have mentioned, namely the so-called boom has not made much of a dent in poverty, illiteracy and child malnourishment. it also talks about the job opportunities that are being outsourced to nigeria and SE asia, because companies cannot find qualified people among indian graduates. these are call center jobs, not in nuclear science. pratham has found 5th grade children barely reading at second grade level. corruption is so deep businesses are wary of coming to india.
personally more and more i find what i thought of as home quite alienating.
i also find the question what are we talking about when we talk about indian culture, food, whatever very relevant. for this reason i like what writer jhumpa lahiri does. she hardly every writes about indians, she confines herself to bengalis. that is all that she can write about with some sense of authority. but this same quality of her writing bugs many of her readers.
Excellent post! Keep them coming..
nuanced indeed, after all there are so many shades of brown – and the same applies to the (sometimes) appalling variations in india.
The economist, with which I often disagree (too much supercilious brit twittery), does have an excellent note on indian malnutrition – I quote a couple of passages that rang true to me –
http://www.economist.com/node/18485871?story_id=18485871&CFID=167544458&CFTOKEN=93721496
Razib, this post was great. I’ve never thought about how it must be to be asked to represent a completely different country than your actual heritage… maybe this is what taiwanese people feel when asked about “life in china”?
It took me a long time to understand the rules of cricket – one of my younger family friends, an elementary school cricket captain in Chennai, finally sat me down a few years ago and explained a game play-by-play. It really made this world cup awesome.
At my university, the South Asian Society held screenings of the matches for us to watch. A phenomenon I found interesting was that while American-born desis would initially come to the games excited to cheer for their (somewhat removed) countries, the Desi-born desis did not treat them as welcome or even as if they should be there. The matches started at 4:30 am, and when someone would bring donuts (paid for with university funding) they would shared among the DBDs. (It’s not that I’ve never seen a donut before in my life, it’s just really awkward when the person offering donuts skips from your right to your left without even acknowledging you). Similarly, none of the ABDs could get into the keycard protected screening room by knocking on the door and asking to be let in. We had to wait for a DBD to be let in and sneak in behind.
I tell this story to illustrate the (perceived) paradox with representing “brown” in the US. When one is surrounded by non-brown people, one becomes the go-to for all things brown, and that increases one’s personal identification with the home countries. But then when actual citizens of those countries are present, i have found that (a) nobody asks them to explain various aspects of their culture, as it might be construed as offensive, and (b) the DBDs do not accept as sincere the ABDs’ identification with the home countries.
What’s up with this?
AtomicFunk … I will take you on your word about the social injustice donuts. I would however posit that your example would be an outlier to the usual phenomenon of who-treats-whom how. Anywhooo
Razib, Thank you for the time and effort that went into this post.
Regarding child malnutrition, I would propose that maybe being underweight is not an indication for malnutrition in India. It maybe that Indians are genetically prone to being underweight. I myself was quite underweight growing up and we were not exactly impoverished or lacking in food.
An interesting quote from the economist article in al_berunis link above: “Astonishingly, a third of the wealthiest 20% of Indian children are malnourished, too, and they are neither poor nor excluded.” They propose several other reasons for being underweight but maybe it is proof of my theory that Indians are genetically prone to be skinny. Any takers?
I cant believe that in modern India anybody has to go hungry. I’m just worried that the government would use this data to start another wasteful welfare program that only enriches the bureaucrats and does little to address the problem.
I am a DBD who came over as a grad student in his mid twenties, so the child malnutrition does not apply directly but I present my experience as an anecdote.I gained about 20 lbs within my first semester of coming stateside. I have lost most of the weight now, but what essentially happened was a total change of diet. I come from a relatively well to do family back home, so food was never an issue, but the types of food we ate and frequency of some of the food definitely made a difference. An example, something like coke was luxury (esp. when I was a student back home) but in US with 25 cents a can, wow – and to my desi tongue that was a delight. Similarly, we would have meat maybe twice a week back home and it turned to everyday thing here – meat is at time easier and cheaper to get than vegetables. More processed food is another big fact. I am not so sure of the genetic predisposition than effects of diet in this case….. well that’s my two cen… paisa 🙂
What the WSJ or Razib have mentioned is something that we were routinely taught at school, in TV, in billboards on auto-rickshaws and so on. The statistic that was always quoted was: The number of babies born each year equals the entire population of Australia. Where will we get the money to build schools for them, to inoculate them, to provide food for them,…. And so every radio station, every TV program, every bus, every train, … would carry commercials on family planning.
Unfortunately, the growth of the economy was very slow then. The state looked ineffective. The large private sector companies were no better. Here and there the State Bank of India loaned money to enterpreneurs and they were the best sign of dynamism. And it was perfectly clear that the West wouldn’t give us money, unless we became their client states. Russia was good to us, but they didn’t have money either.
What has changed now? The mood. The mood is more upbeat. We think we can generate money from within. No need to wait for the West to give us money.
Another thing that has changed is that we are a little more comfortable with our noisiness and dirtiness. Some Indian intellectual–I think Nirad Chaudhury–used to say how quiet English churches were, and how noisy Indian temples were. I cringed when I read that. I guess were all taught those days to be a little uncomfortable in our own skin, in our own culture. Today, that sort of thinking seems to have receded.
As a side note I found your comment on Bengali vs. Bangladeshi identity to be very interesting. Its something I want to explore over at Brown Pundits (Punjabi exceptionalism vs. Bengali and Sindhi provincial identities) and I think would be good for you to elaborate in future posts (Bengal & Bangladesh) probably here at SM since BP is now hopelessly Islamicate (fault of mine).
i don’t know what i have to say. it isn’t an issue that tears at me, or which i have to struggle with. it seems that bangladeshi identity matters for those who went through the revolution against pakistan, or had a visceral experience (my mother was mistakenly shot as a teenager by pakistani soldiers; luckily she was an upper middle class muslim and so not targeted for rape). it also matters for those old enough to remember pakistani hegemony, racism, and domination (“pakistani” meaning non-bengali, including biharis who arrived from bangladesh). then you have older people who still remember the period of hindu domination by the bhadralok of the west. bangladeshi identity seems to be heir of the nascent conception of one being both muslim and bengali, which was long marginalized by the mughali-aspirant muslim elite of bengal (urdu speaking) and the bengali hindu elite. i am aware of the secular formulation favored by the awami league, but operationally the secularism basically means opposition to the nutcase fundamentalism which is common in much of the islamic world, and the bangladeshi identity is becoming islamicized in the same way that greek orthodoxy is the greek national religion.
i think about it when i reflect the heritage which i will give my children. i’m mostly american identified, and have a particular attachment to culture-heroes who aren’t south asian (e.g., marcus aurelius, xun zi), but kids ask where they’re family is from in the states. and i guess i would say bangladesh, but as i note above it is such a new nation. there is no such issue with bengali identity, and there is no problem with bangladeshis identifying as bengali.
Razib, this post was great. I’ve never thought about how it must be to be asked to represent a completely different country than your actual heritage… maybe this is what taiwanese people feel when asked about “life in china”?
first, i’m not one who was ever offended by the confusion. i am not anti-indian, or pro-indian, and my attachment to bangladesh is minimal in a nationalist sense (i’m mostly keen that they relatives continue to keep having difficulties finding servants because of labor shortages due to textile employment!). my non-indianness is after a coincidence of history. south asia was india until 1947. the identification of the civilization/region of india with the nation-state has confused that issue. the point is that for non-indians pakistanis, bangladeshis, nepalis, and to a lesser extent sri lankans, might as well be indian. the similarities as perceived from the outside are pretty distinct.
as for the taiwan example, i don’t know. remember that tawain is technically part of china. though the native taiwanese are actually newcomers within the past 400 years, who arrived from fujian, with which they retain a close relationship. so there are analogs, insofar as bangaldesh is the home of one indian ethnicity, in part.
But then when actual citizens of those countries are present, i have found that (a) nobody asks them to explain various aspects of their culture, as it might be construed as offensive, and (b) the DBDs do not accept as sincere the ABDs’ identification with the home countries.
this is normal. as some DBDs have noted many ABDs reflect indian customs from their parents which are now antique or forgotten. ABD identity is a new brown identity, like mauritian or trinidadian (analogy: quebec).
Regarding child malnutrition, I would propose that maybe being underweight is not an indication for malnutrition in India. It maybe that Indians are genetically prone to being underweight.
i think this is true. there is some cross-national data which indicates this. but, i think that impacts things somewhat, but does not abolish the concern.
john jacobi
I think this is an important point, especially for the top 1/3 of the indian population. Many pregnant desi women in US are told that their babies are seriously underweight and so on. Much more data is needed here, I think….
The other point I would make is that the vegetarian diet in india tends to be heavily weighted towards carbs and sugar. I have so many relatives who eat rice and potatoes at every meal, topped off by seleral Tbsp of sugar in mishti/barfee. All of them could afford better quality food – so there is definitely an issue of public education and awareness.
guys, re: body size, see this post from last year:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/01/when-wealth-doesnt-matter-for-height-south-asia-africa
one of my siblings was very small as a child, and remains a small person today. she was born and raised in the USA, so her nutrition is fine. we’re just a small folk.
I think I harp on this every time Desi diets are brought up here. But I say again, coarse grains are your friend. This stuff. . . it is like a rock that sits in your belly. You will not be hungry again for like an hour. That and it’s got a fair amount of protein in it. I’ve never trucked with vegetarians though.
@Razib Khan “i think this is true. there is some cross-national data which indicates this. but, i think that impacts things somewhat, but does not abolish the concern.”
I agree that it does not abolish the concern of malnutrition. But these data on malnutrition appear to be based on the arbitrary notion of what a “normal” Indian child should weigh. And the result is alarming and possibly completely misleading statistics that half of India is malnourished. I think that the people who produce this data mean well; they are trying to get the Indian govt to do more for the poor. But putting out random data like this just leads to suspicion and maybe resignation.
But these data on malnutrition appear to be based on the arbitrary notion of what a “normal” Indian child should weigh.
right. another issue is the intra-brown difference in expected size. as it is, everyone is thrown into a aggregate mess, which may hide significant signals.
Just checking to see if I’m still banned.. I was banned a few years ago from this site. Occasionally check this site and after I moved back to India after a long stint (10+) years in US, I’m visiting this site more often. I always liked your insightful comments as a commenter. Glad to see you’ve become a blogger. It is true that people who comment here are mostly from privileged upper caste/class backgrounds. I’m not one but unfortunately I was banned. 🙂
Hey Ponniyin, Yeah, I got banned back then too. I think they’re calling it Hindu Kush II.
Great post, Razib!
Abhi only talked of banning you, Ponni. But he didn’t. Fact is, those who ban learn something about themselves.
But what caste are you? These days, it is the OBC who are the elite. So you might as well be open about it.
I got banned on (or just before) Aug 18, 2009. Anyways that is past..
In the “supposed” caste scale, I’m just above Dalit castes.. As a first gen. degree holder. my parents stopped with high school education because of responsibilities, I don’t necessarily fall in the category of elites. I grew up till 6th grade along with my siblings and parents in a 200 sq.ft dingy rented apartment.
Me & my sister both weighed around 7.5 pounds when we were born. In my family, the baby was considered underweight if it was less than 7 pounds. Most of my cousins were up & above 7 pounds (not all). I would say it is not arbitrary.
I have observed that in India being underweight is a clear sign of malnourishment but it need not be related to the economic status. Me & many of my friends who came from middle/upper middle class were underweight (The common theme i observed was every one of them were vegetarians) I come from a agrarian family. I have seen three main food trends & there effect on males. 1. My grandfather’s generation, where they ate ragi more & rice less (Not malnourished, very strong, tall [6 ft’ish]) 2. My father’s generation, where they ate rice for most part (Not malnourished, tall, few of my Uncles are diabetic) 3. My generation, we went out to study in residential schools. Rice/fast food for most part (Underweight, tall (except me) [Some are above 6 ft]) I have seen that females in my family have grown taller than the previous generation (My sister is 5.7′ & my granny/mom is like 5.1’/5.2′)
I am not convinced, we’re not small folks. I think if my family ate copious amount of meat instead of eating veg food i would assume they will be even more taller. Veg food in India is more concentration on crabs & very less proteins.
carbs 🙂 (also ‘there’ should have been ‘their’)
I am not convinced, we’re not small folks. I think if my family ate copious amount of meat instead of eating veg food i would assume they will be even more taller.
my family eats a lot of meat. including beef every other day (chicken the other days). my siblings who grew up here are short (though one of them is rather robust). i used to be more of a believer in the effect o diet before it turned out that shrimpiness is clearly heritable in my family. i’m the “tall” one at 5’8. my cousins in b-desh show a lot of height variation, from tall to short. they eat plenty of meat.
but it is hard to generalize about 1.25 billion people. the kerala vs. punjab data indicate to me though we should be cautious about making inferences about differences based on genetic potential re: height between populations. there is some evidence that the indigenous vs. white guatemalan difference in height disappears in the US.
“But these data on malnutrition appear to be based on the arbitrary notion of what a “normal” Indian child should weigh.”
Do indian children born in the well fed West to second generation or later desis also weigh less than the norm? For example is there data on the desi babies born in US, UK, Guyana, Surinam, Trinidad etc that can tell us what should be considered the normal birth weight for desi infants?
Secondly, even within India there are huge discrepancies in birth weight that can’t be explained away this way: Why are twice as many babies underweight in Gujarat than in Kerala? Even more strikingly: why are three times as many babies underweight in Meghalaya than in Mizoram (they are both in the tibeto-burman northeast)? Why is the northeast, on average, doing better than other states with similar or even better per capita incomes?
“His grandfather was not allowed to enter Hindu temples, or even to stand too close to upper-caste people, and women of his Nadar caste, who stood one notch above untouchables in India’s ancient caste hierarchy, were once forced to bare their breasts before upper caste men as a reminder of their low station.”
Shiv Nadar who also belongs to the Nadar caste is worth $5.6 Billion. The caste system is such an irrational travesty. I think it may be the main reason for the intractable poverty and backwardness of India. Why else is malnutrition lower in muslim Pakistan and buddhist Sri Lanka?
i’m sorry. I can’t get behind NYT mentions of people’s castes and how they have overcome the most shocking circumstances to get where they are now. the NYT invariably inserts little bits about Indians’ castes where they are completely irrelevant. So once, some women of some group had to bare their breasts in front of some perv. Did Ganesan have to bare his man-boobs? No. Today entire villages in Central Asia are burned if one girl dares to go to school. It’s irresponsible for the NYT to keep harping sensationally on people’s downtrodden great-grandfathers instead of focusing on modern issues of equality where we can actually make a difference.
Ganesan has obviously survived despite his grandfather’s inability to pray in a temple. Yay. The caste system in India right now is being used in such a way that it simultaneously hinders social progress for “higher-caste” people and really really “lower-caste” people. People who get into college on reservation (for obc, scheduled, whatever) have to stay in a shitty dorm all together and it is made very obvious that they have been let in only because the college administration had to, not because they wanted to. People who qualify to get into college – who are in the top ten of their cities/states – but who are classified as “high-caste” can’t get in because after all the reservation and the seats set aside for kids whose parents donate money and the seats for NRIs, there are only 2 seats left for every ten qualified applicants.
Several groups of Brahmins (high caste, right?) that work as temple pundits have petitioned the Indian government to be added as ‘scheduled castes’ because they are so poor they need government assistance but because they are ‘high-caste’ they do not qualify.
The Indian caste system should have actually been made illegal when that statement was proclaimed. Instead it drags on and on under various guises.
I fail to understand why Desis identify so strongly with cricket.Cricket is a colonial English sport. Tell any Chinese, Russian or American to play cricket and they will cringe. I remember Ravi Shastri interviewing an American couple at Firoz Shah Kotla. They told point blank that there was no American Revolution they would have been playing cricket.
1 billion people and one bronze medal at Olympics !!
It’s a game dude.
Not sure why you are so touchy about this issue. Is there any doubt that there were extreme patterns of caste oppression in south asia? To some extent, this remains true in the rural north, where one continues to see landlord/landowning groups (jatis) oppress mostly landless dalits and others.
No culture is immune from a history of oppression, it just expresses itself differently. God knows the treatment of black people in southern US prior to 1960s or european jews in central europe prior to 1950 was beyond appalling. Should we also try to softpedal those discussions as well?
The article generally has a very positive tone. It references an individual from a historically disadvantaged background, who is now a dollar billionaire. For every Shiv Nadar, there are 1000s of store owners and small business people from similar backgrounds. Thats part of the economic change in india. And, yes, india is still a poor country, so there are certainly many poor people with “upper-caste” ethnic background as well.
oops. previous message addressed to atomicfunk07
It’s important not to whitewash history, but it’s also important not to define an entire group or community by what has been done to them. Not only does that sort of grievance mongering breed resentment rather than reconciliation, but it denies those people their agency and makes them seem like passive victims of history rather than actors. This has a profound psychological effect on people as they grow up making them feel rootless and unable to change their lot in life. Over the long term that kind of fatalism does more to keep them poor and victimized than any system of exploitation.
atomicfunk07,
Let me add a point to al Beruni’s view. By any chance are you a TamBrahm? If so, you need to adjust to modern realities. The modern realities are: (1) The OBC accept that they are today’s elite. (2) The OBC accept that they they–not the brahmins–have the clout to decide whether India keeps the caste system or discards it. (3) The OBC accept, that if they do to keep the caste system, they must allow brahmins to practice, well, brahminism, whatever that is. (4) In practice, large numbers of OBC are making conservative choices, with full consciousness, not because some brahmin is telling them to do so. (5) When OBC run businesses, they are willing to work with brahmins.
Overall, there is no need to feel hurt. All you need to do is to remind left-wing columnists that they are out of touch with modern realities.
I do see that some ‘obc’ communities are pretty much recovered from previous oppression, but other groups are not. plus, some groups that previously enjoyed social acceptance are being marignalized. My point is that these particular obc communities are holding on to the perceived injustices of the caste system as a way to ensure their societal dominance – but actually india needs to have a serious discussion about equal rights. there is no reason that people cannot have equal rights and opportunities while still holding on to individual cultural heritage (food, festivals, etc).
My parents are Tamil which is maybe why I am aware of the serious politicking that goes on under the banner of ‘overcoming the caste system’. I am personally not invested in this issue, because I live in America, in a totally different social order. But it does bother me that the global media has not bothered to update their understanding of Indian society since independence. “low caste” does not mean “low class”
Razib, good article and thorough analysis/discussion per usual. Thank you for that.
Do you know if there is any significant differences in these trends when Gender is controlled for?
Do you know if there is any significant differences in these trends when Gender is controlled for?
a lot of the nutrition related stuff focuses on women, because they tend to get shafted. state level gaps are probably smaller if you just look at men.
“Since on a fundamental level I see religions as interchangeable I sometimes thoughtlessly quip that all Hindus should convert to Islam or all Muslims could convert to Hinduism, in the interests of subcontinental amity.”
Hahaha. Wow, HI-LA-RIOUS. If you see an Abrahamic religion as interchangeable with an Indian religion on a FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, you seriously need to study each more.
Reema , as a PanchVedi, what is your argument against coalescing Abrahamic religions with “Indian” Ones?
http://www.jesusreview.com/index.php?Itemid=29&id=27&option=com_content&task=view
Let’s not get too off topic.
“if i had a penny every time the media bothered me” Random tangent…have you heard anything about Indian coins being smuggled into Bangladesh to melt and fashion into other items? That should be some sort of qualitative measure of poverty!
That article you cite is such a heterodox interpretation of Christian history and scripture that it really doesn’t make sense to refer to it as “Christianity” at all. This is actually a fundamental mistake that Hindus make about Christianity. They think Christianity is defined by worshipping Jesus. It’s not. Christianity is defined by a doctrinal belief about what Jesus represents. And that is not simply regarding Jesus as an “Istha Devata” or some sort of guru. “Christ” was not his last name, it is a title that means “The anointed one.” Christianity doesn’t say Jesus is an avatar of God or a mere messenger. It says that Jesus IS God, the only God, and none may know God except through him.
Take that away and what do you have? A fellow who helped the poor and healed some lepers? That’s not anything more remarkable than what what most of the canonized saints did. If that’s your metric for God you might as well worship Dr. Jonas Salk. Most of these attempts to integrate Jesus into the Hindu frame just seem weak to me. The teachings don’t really add anything to the Hindu canon. There is really no reason for a Hindu to make such a big deal out of Jesus except as a way to try to make Hinduism more relatable to Christians. But I’ve always been the pugnacious sort who regards attempts to seek approval with disdain.
Or perhaps it can be used as a ploy to do to Christians what the Christians did to European pagans. The sort of thing where they went “Don’t want to stop worshipping Eastore? Fine. Her holy day is now dedicated to Jesus. Carry on with your orgy.”
If you see an Abrahamic religion as interchangeable with an Indian religion on a FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, you seriously need to study each more.
i’m reading adi shankara’s commentaries right now; makes as much profound sense as maimonides or origen. not much to me. all religions are made up on a FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL. i am aware of the nuances of how they interpret and execute their made up stuff. i have an interest in anthropology.
i would think malnourishment in children would be a clinical condition wich can be revealed through tests and observations – such as frequent illnesses, lack of growth and development. it is not necessarily just weight and height. also isn’t infant mortality pretty high in india? also an indication of poor health and sustenance among women?
also isn’t infant mortality pretty high in india?
yes. but there are huge regional variations.
But it does bother me that the global media has not bothered to update their understanding of Indian society since independence.
if i had a penny every time the media bothered me…. 🙂 do you blog about your irritation? i do periodically….
That should be some sort of qualitative measure of poverty!
migration is a better gauge. i have read that the “bride trade” whereby poor bangladeshi women are sold by “matchmakers” to indian men, usually in eastern U.P., has started to dry up because of the shift of young poor women int the garment industry.
It says that Jesus IS God, the only God, and none may know God except through him.
this is an accurate description of the athanasian “great tradition” which binds the christians who come out of the council of nicea. christians such as catholics, the eastern and oriental orthodoxy, and protestants. but do note it does not hold to heterodox self-identified christian groups who have come out of the radical wing of the reformation, such as the jehovah’s witness, unitarian christians, and mormons. some of these sects identify with movements which were marginalized or driven to extinction by the “great tradition,” the arians, universalists, ebionites, marcionites, etc.
in any case, to go back to reema’s original point, i know a great deal about religion. my issue with saying they’re fundamentally all the same is that on the cognitive and social level i think they serve the same end purposes. i do believe most humans have the impulse toward belief in the supernatural, even though i think the supernatural is fictive. as an atheist the tendency for people to kill each other over conflicts of religion is particularly tragic because people are killing themselves over literally nothing. though i do understand there are materialist and historical interpretations of such conflicts a level of religious homogeneity, in identity if not practice, seems to dampen the fissures a bit and allow for more fellow feeling (i.e., hindus vary a great deal in belief and practice, but broadly share a common identity, at least with the sanÄtana dharma). since i am anti-muslim personally, on the grounds of aesthetics and self-interest i probably favor a wholesale conversion to hinduism on the part of people who need to believe in this stuff for psychological wholeness and communal feeling. but it’s a moot point.
It says that Jesus IS God, the only God, and none may know God except through him.
also, to be clear, many liberal christians who consider themselves orthodox reject the last part in practice (including the head of the american episcopal church), though if you dig deep enough into the nature of their soteriology they have a set of word games which allow to slip non-christians through the back door. even the roman catholic church has become ambiguous on this point (the literature in this area is kind of abstruse, so my summary is that it seems that yes, only belief in jesus saves, but people can believe in jesus without knowing they’re believing in jesus).
Well, atomic
<
blockquote> My point is that these particular obc communities are holding on to the perceived injustices of the caste system as a way to ensure their societal dominance <\blockquote> One of those who spoke against the edits during the California textbook controversy was a man called Thillai Kumaran. It is quite possible that his testimony could have been nullified by the point you just made. However, there is little advantage in making any OBC look bad.
“also isn’t infant mortality pretty high in india?”
–yes. but there are huge regional variations.
high infant morality rates is due to poor health, a consequence of malnourishment. poverty and malnourishment among children is a problem no matter where it occurs in india. how does regional difference mitigate that?
how does regional difference mitigate that?
don’t read intent into my comments that i didn’t intend. EVER. i was being descriptive. a good way to NOT impute motives to people is to read what they’re saying, and not let your read-between-the-lines faculties kick in.
Razib, I did not mean to steer the discussion away from the main point of your extremely interesting and informative post. So, I apologize for harping on the sentence that was probably the most trivial in your mind; having said that, I do still disagree with it.
Anyway, I think you make a very good point, but I do feel like this is largely an American/North American phenomenon. I have been to Europe and have discovered that Europeans are far more knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the not insignificant differences between South Asian countries. They are well aware of the difference between India and Sri Lanka. Apart from the Europeans, people of the Middle East obviously are also capable of distinguising between South Asian nations. I’m sorry to say but it is true that Americans are infamous for their ignorance and self-absorbedness. They are only barely capable of distinguishing between the Chinese and Japanese, and this is only because of their long and tumultous history with Japan and now, China.
In other words, the average American only gives a shit about another country when they’re either at war with that country, or when they are facing the threat of being dethroned from their long held position of world superpower. And even if this is the case, they only know the bare minimum about the respective country. For example, I bet the only thing a regular American Joe thinks when you say CHINA is: Damn, those people are taking American jobs! and maybe also “I love me some Chop Suey”
Anyway, I think you make a very good point, but I do feel like this is largely an American/North American phenomenon. I have been to Europe and have discovered that Europeans are far more knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the not insignificant differences between South Asian countries. They are well aware of the difference between India and Sri Lanka. Apart from the Europeans, people of the Middle East obviously are also capable of distinguising between South Asian nations. I’m sorry to say but it is true that Americans are infamous for their ignorance and self-absorbedness.
there may be a straightforward reason for this: the vast majority of american south asians are indian americans. OTOH, the majority of south asians in norway are pakistani, bangladeshis are numerous in italy, and pakistanis have near parity with indians in britain. sri lankans are common in some nordic nations due to their refugee policy. when you have migrants from the second-tier nations you become more well versed in regional differences. there is something similar in the middle east, where muslim south asians are well overrepresented for reasons of prejudice and cultural comfort. and naturally pakistani muslims themselves will wish to distinguish themselves from muslims from kerala and bangladesh for reasons of racial pride.
also, america is diverse. so talking about the “average joe” may have less utility than elsewhere. this is a nation of san francisco and salt lake city.
“–yes. but there are huge regional variations.”
i don’t mean to get into semantics but an “yes, but” response is not merely descriptive. it is a statement. i am merely doubtful of what that means not diving into any motives.
malnourishment of children is a long term problem. merely skinny but healthy kids are not. malnourishment seems to me an absolute condition that can be determined clinically. i am not sure it is explained (away) by regional variations or desi physique peculiarities.
why so touchy?
“i know a great deal about religion”
You know a great deal about western religion…..and western history; western civilization in general. But as you have admitted you haven’t been much interested in desi civilization; which revolves around spirituality. Indian spirituality is quite different from the middle-eastern religion that became the state religion of the West during the rule of the Roman Emperor Constantine.
You are right to start with the study of Advaita, since you are intellectually inclined. But instead of getting bogged down with Shankaracharya commentaries on ancient Sutras I recommend you study modern exponents of Indian pantheism/monism/advaita such as Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi and Sathya Sai Baba. In particular Maharshi’s “Who Am I?” and Sai Baba’s “Jnana Vahini”. You can google and freely download them.
I know you are a hard core atheist/materialist so it may be hard for you to accept the fundamental teaching of Advaita that will turn your worldview on its head: Eternal unchanging Consciousness not ever-changing matter-energy is the fundamental reality and our true identity, the world we observe through our mind and senses is an illusion, the ultimate goal of life is to realize and experience this truth.
Once you are able to look at the world this way: consciousness> mind> senses> the world out there, everything you read in Advaita makes sense. Remember, consciousness remains a mystery to science.
“malnourishment seems to me an absolute condition that can be determined clinically. i am not sure it is explained (away) by regional variations or desi physique peculiarities.”
What is your point exactly? There are stark regional variations in underweight births as you can see above. What is your explanation for why babies are twice as likely to be born underweight in Gujarat than in Goa?
why so touchy?
because, i spent some time on this blog post. i said what i wanted to say. i’m not going to tolerate reinterpretations of what i mean when i didn’t mean that. 1) i know what i mean. 2) i don’t care what you think i mean. that is all. i understand that people take liberties on blog comments on the internet. that’s fine. don’t take liberties here. end of discussion (i’ll delete further comments in this vein).
You know a great deal about western religion…..and western history; western civilization in general. But as you have admitted you haven’t been much interested in desi civilization; which revolves around spirituality. Indian spirituality is quite different from the middle-eastern religion that became the state religion of the West during the rule of the Roman Emperor Constantine.
You are right to start with the study of Advaita, since you are intellectually inclined. But instead of getting bogged down with Shankaracharya commentaries on ancient Sutras I recommend you study modern exponents of Indian pantheism/monism/advaita such as Vivekananda, Ramana Maharshi and Sathya Sai Baba. In particular Maharshi’s “Who Am I?” and Sai Baba’s “Jnana Vahini”. You can google and freely download them.
i’ve read vivekananda. you are correct that i’m not interested in desi civilization in comparison to roman or chinese civilization. but, i still know quite a bit about south asian history, religion, culture. i’m grading myself on a curve 🙂 though in many areas my knowledge is not “thick” enough that i’m comfortable speaking about it in detail. a long way of saying that i am not “starting” with advaita. i have a long record of comments on religion on the internet, so you should know i don’t consider that the intellectual aspect of religion particularly important. it is just important for smart people who are religious, so i take an interest in it to speak intelligently about it. but, re: reema’s comments, i think it is in the intellectual aspects where religions really differ in any substantive fashion.
my reading of shankara is more a curiosity about the sources instead of intermediating interpretations/surveys. indian religious philosophy is as awesome to me as philosophical montheism. not much. i’ve read a few translations of the bhagavad gita, and the prefaces always seem to promise more than i found within the texts. has to be a lack of perception on my part.
“i think it is in the intellectual aspects where religions really differ in any substantive fashion.”
Advaita is fundamentally different. God is not something external to be prayed to, sacrificed to, ritually worshipped. It is your own true identity, the Truth within you, deeper than your mind.
“has to be a lack of perception on my part.”
Yes.