Rishi Sunak is no son of India
The elite diaspora have globalisation etched into their bones
Vivek Ramaswamy and the rise of Indian America
The millennial Republican is perfectly suited to the ruling class
Indra is absolved: The “caste system” predates the Indo-Aryans
In the near future the ancient DNA group led by David Reich will publish a bunch of stuff, and one paper will note that the variation in steppe ancestry in […]
America’s fake caste war
The media is confecting racial division
British imperialism didn’t destroy India
Colonial rule brought relative peace to the subcontinent
Why the West lost India’s culture wars
Rising Hindu nationalism has outflanked the global Left
India’s revolt of the petite bourgeois Jatt class
What’s going on in India with the protests of farmers? The New York Times has a report, and that’s the sort of place many Americans will get their news from. […]
Hindu atheist vs. Secular Jihadists
Just listened to a long podcast between Jarin Jove and the guys who host the Secular Jihadist podcast. Going in I had an open mind, as I myself differ on a lot of priors from the two co-hosts (unlike Ali I am not a Left-liberal, and unlike Armin, I don’t think people should adhere to …
Myth from history
There were many responses to my post on the Maratha Mindset: How to Control Your History and Emotions to Grasp the Future on Your Terms. I didn’t have the time to respond in detail, but a few conversations suggest I could be a bit more clear. The primary issue that I’m alluding to is that …
Brahmins were made in India, not the steppe
The above are Y chromosomes from ancient samples in the steppe, Iran/Turan, and South Asia. The time periods are obvious. EMBA = “Early Middle Bronze Age”, MLBA = “Middle Late Bronze Age” and LBA = “Late Bronze Age.” IA = “Iron Age.” H = “Historical.” And the other periods are Neolithic or Copper Age. This …
Continue reading “Brahmins were made in India, not the steppe”
Hindu nationalism amongst the nationalisms
Much of the discussion over the last few weeks on this weblog (see “Open Thread”) has involved the internal politics of India, and its clearer trajectory in regards to a Hindu sense of self. Most of the comments are not really worth reading, as they repeat platitudes. I have said little because I know very …
Continue reading “Hindu nationalism amongst the nationalisms”
The rise of China and Chinese identity was inevtable
I have heard that Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is the most assigned text at American universities. Before I had read the book I had heard it mentioned many times in the media or in print. Anderson’s narrow thesis is fine as far as it goes, but I […]
The Aryan Integration Theory (AIT)
Over the past week, there have been lots of reactions to the two papers which came out last week, The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia and An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers. The Insight is still on hiatus, but I managed to interview Vagheesh Narasimhan […]
Indians are just as stupid as Americans
There it is, guys. The seemingly secular Razib Khan let’s slip that he holds hatred towards “self-righteous white saviors” (by which he means white Christians). But would that hatred go away if they were brown Christians? Not on your life. Notice how he reiterates in the thread https://t.co/KppKQoJpdF — Vikram K. Chatterjee 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇮🇳 (@VikChatterjee) April …
Genes, memes, and Mundas
The Munda languages of the northeastern quadrant of the Indian subcontinent are quite interesting because they are more closely related to the Austro-Asiatic languages of Southeast Asia than to the Indo-Aryan or Dravidian languages which are spoken by their neighbors. The Munda are usually classified as adivasi, which has connotations of being an ‘original inhabitant’ […]
The blood on brown hands is a legacy of all of history
Yesterday I put up a tweet which went a bit viral (I won’t embed since it has a vulgarity). It was the result of my frustration with a very liberal Indian American who was using unfortunate tensions in the Indian subcontinent to attack “white supremacy.” My frustration was due to the reality that a major […]
Hinduism before India
Azar Gat is one of my favorite scholars. He does not seem to be one who bows before fashion. If you haven’t, I recommend War Before Civilization a great deal. With that being said, perhaps an overlooked work is his more recent Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. It […]
India is eternal but Indians are not
This week’s episode of The Insight dug deeply into the current scientific understanding of the genetic origins of the peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Recent publications and media coverage have caught the science in midstream, as scholars have to d…
The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 3: ANI, ASI, IVC and The Genetics of India
A scene from an ancient Indian epicThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Google Play) we discussed how the genetics of 25% of the world’s population, the people of South Asia, came to be. It’s a journey of thousands of years.We cited t…
Between the saffron and scimitar
On my other weblog I have a post, On The Instrumental Uses Of Arabic Science, which reflects on the role that the idea of science, the Islamic world, and cultural myopia, play in our deployment of particular historical facts and dynamics. That is, an idea, a concept, does not exist on an island but is … Continue reading “Between the saffron and scimitar”