Ummm - it's the Dutch who have the wooden shoes (and ice skates, windmills, dykes, doobage and red light district). The Danes have ... I dunno, a viking past?

I'm sure Abhi's doing a version of the Austria/Australia joke from Dumb and Dumber. Right, Abhi? ;)

What Ennis said.

Lego. Hans Christian Andersen. A Cool History of defying Nazis by all wearing yellow stars and having the king ride through the city on horseback. Moody Princes and Something Rotten. An International Court America has hobbled. And apparently really big dogs.

Yeah, I would call it More than Just Lego.

To be Denmark or not to be Denmark, that is the question.

miss norway is half-thai.

I knew there was something rotten ...

Personally, I'm rooting for Ms. Germany:

Miss Germany: Miss Asli Bayram's (right) participation in Miss Universe carries strong political undertones for Germany.
Ms Bayram, who is of Turkish heritage, may help mark an upturn in future relations between Turkey and Europe.
She told the official website that she had enjoyed a beautiful childhood until her father was killed - Ms Bayram said she saw her father murdered by neo-Nazis when she was just 12.
That day changed her perspective on life, she said, prompting her to devote her energies to fighting for justice.

not south asian related, but the japanese contestant is 6'1. WTF?!?!? Wow.

india can stand tall and proud, its delegate is whiter looking than half-nordic miss denmark.

Here's Sri Lanka; also possibly part-desi: Mauritius, Netherlands.

Razib: I never knew it was a contest to see which country had the whitest women. If I had known, I would have entered Michael Jackson as the US entry.

Seriously, "tall and proud" !?!?! You're giving your harshest critics a whole depotload of ammunition with that freudian slip.

Ummm - it's the Dutch who have the wooden shoes (and ice skates, windmills, dykes, doobage and red light district). The Danes have ... I dunno, a viking past?

I looked this up specifically before posting. I know that Holland is most famous for its wooden shoes (when I was a kid my parents brought back wooden shoes from there), but Denmark makes them also (Google it). It was a stretch, but the fact that Denmark isn't known for anything really (here comes trouble) made me take a chance :)

Here's Sri Lanka; also possibly part-desi: Mauritius, Netherlands.

Good catch Manish. In order to be consistent I should have pointed out the other South Asian contestants. That would mean going through all of them though. Why would I flip through a bunch of beauties to do a thorough job?

huh? what ammunition? i check out these boards and sometimes get the impression from some that USA is chock-full-of-racists opressin' us browns, but i see the bollywood movies my sister watches and see white-women in mild brown-face (some of this i gather is brown-women in mild white-face actually, but same diff). my personal aesthetic preferences lean toward blonde and leggy, i'm straight up about it, and i don't give a shit if you want to go freudian over every personal preference that makes one happy. all that being said, i really don't want to hear all this crap how racist america is when the beauty ideals in a nation of 1 billion (+300 pakistani and bangladeshi fellow travellers) mostly dark brown-skinned people leans toward a mediterranean olive ideal.*

now, when i asked a left-wing indian acquaintance of mine (who asked me seriously if i had to deal with lynchings and what not) about the bizarro tendency he simply told me, "look, you don't have ugly people on american TV, so we don't have dark people in the movies" (he himself on the black side of "wheatish"). there are dark-skinned people in these movies of course, but when my sister was watching this film i noted that the main dark-skinned character (of a hue far closer to the south asian median than the lead actors) was grinning in a simian fashion constantly and doing the comic relief schtick. great. at least chris rock and chris tucker do the bug-eye thang with some verbal acrobatics.

* i have offered before why males tend to prefer lighter-than-typical complexion in females judged by the population norm, but, i would offer that the bipasha-basu-is-dark-meme suggests that we are far beyond that in terms of culture amplifying genetic bias.

p.s. when my white friends who watch bollywood (i guess it's cool or chic) ask me straight up why the actors look so white, i kind of shrug (i don't really watch that stuff), but at this point i just smile and say brown people dig the brown as much as i do i guess ;)

... my white friends who watch bollywood (i guess it's cool or chic) ask me straight up why the actors look so white...

They don't look white, of course, even if they're olive-skinned (bigger eyes, different features). What your friends mean is 'why don't they look like the starving people I see on TV' ;)

well, it is a fair enough point that most south asian actors are obviously part of the south asian phenotypic range. but, they do draw from one particular part of the phenotype pool. that is fine of course...but this sort of stuff isn't as to dismiss by saying that this is part of the normal south asian range-punjabis and kashmiri women are noted for their "beauty" people they tend to fit the moold better (and men for their masculine back hair). the whole "black is beautiful" movement in the USA was meant to address some of the issues that occurred because of the idealization of "yellow" (that is, mulatta) women among the black middle class, i think some of the same shit might need to go down with browns.

i will offer a personal example, to my whitified eyes my younger brother and i are about the same color. but, to bangladeshis apparently he is a touch darker. this results in some peculiar asymmetrical treatment. seeing as how i don't like my brother, i am not totally against this, but seeing as how i think the whole color-coding thing is ridiculous (in the USA, i'm just brown).

basically, i get tired of colored folk (brown, black and yellow) talk of "white skin privilege" when there is a lot of "light skin privilege" being perpetuated in their own communities (speaking as a good-ole-wheatish-boy...i think?).

someone really should have edited Sri Lanka's written answers for her... terrible!

fact that Denmark isn't known for anything really

*Shakes head.* What self-respecting engineer never played with LEGO?

If we ever meet in person, remind me to tell you the story about twisted DNA, Lego, and the Tabla player. Where by "you," I mean any Sepia Mutineer.

fact that Denmark isn't known for anything really

tycho brahe, hans christian anderson and hamlet.

let me conclude my night's comments that i am simply mooting the possibility that a burkean imperfectibility of man is a human universal. there is often talk about the injustices of the west, historical and present, which i think is somewhat ironic in that i suspect that few commentors here are the children of the brown working class, but be as that may be, there tends to be an outcry when the there is a note that the pot is calling the kettle brown. perhaps olive-skin privilege is always going to be a structural feature of south asian society and/or culture. that might cause one to reflect on the the context of the injustices that we complain about now and then.*

p.s. check out the face book at globalbeauties.com. norwary, denmark, france and the netherlands have part or all non-white delegates to the miss universe contest. howz that for white skin privilege?

* often the problem is that injustice or western brutality is real, but extracted from the reality that humanity is defined more by normative barbarism than not, i feel that it is held up to exceptional opprobrium.

I was counting how many cheesecake posts y'all get up here, quite a bit, kinda of reminds me of Playboy (you know, where you tell your wife, girlfriend or coworkers that, "no, really, I read it for the articles").

Yes, well, to get back to the point: in a riot, a wooden shoe works better than a chappal, aerodynamically-speaking.

These beauty contests are flawed. I hate to sound cliche, but beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. There are Indian girls at my university better looking than Aishwarya Rai chick that everybody's makes such a big deal about... or at least I think so. In fact, I happen to think that the best looking Indian women have the darker wheat complexions and am therefore not into the whole "Bollywood Girl" look... but that's just me.

Anyhow, from Razib's face book link, I think it comes down between Antigua and Costa Rica, if you're just going by looks that is.

basically, i get tired of colored folk (brown, black and yellow) talk of "white skin privilege" when there is a lot of "light skin privilege" being perpetuated in their own communities (speaking as a good-ole-wheatish-boy...i think?).

I agree. Though I suspect the obsession with light skin is recent phenomena atleast when South Indians are concerned. South Indian movies couple of decades down the lane had dark skinned heroines. However, it's not all that depressing when it comes to my case. My father(reddish fair according to his proud kin) didn't find anything wrong with my mother's skin(a pure dark by any standards). His unbiased eyes might have seen her only as beautiful or educated. Nevertheless, his mother even now laments that he rejected a proposal of a very fair girl and married my mother instead. And like a good hindu she blames it on fate. So at least it's not only males who are partial to fair skin. If you browse Malayalee matrimonials not infrequently you will see one of the criteria for the boy is light skin.

On my part, I was on the darker side of the colour scheme till I finished my studies. Then the miracle happened. My exposure to sun came down after I started working(well, I hardly saw sun). And I became fair(sort of). My relatives from my father's side became very happy that I am getting their colour. Parents of my brahmin friends exclaimed that I had become fair.

But the worst thing is that my 6-feet, dark skinned younger brother feels low about his body(I'm optimistically 5'8"). My tall-dark-handsome consolations have no effect on him. As one of my friends said, it's only whatever-fair-whatever for Indians. In my opinion, the neo-fair shudras like me, who rarely get exposed to scorching sun, have fueled the craze for the light skin in South of Vindhyas. Though I guess situation is slowly improving in states like West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala as people are becoming more and more westernized.

razib

let me conclude my night's comments that i am simply mooting the possibility that a burkean imperfectibility of man is a human universal. there is often talk about the injustices of the west, historical and present, which i think is somewhat ironic in that i suspect that few commentors here are the children of the brown working class, but be as that may be, there tends to be an outcry when the there is a note that the pot is calling the kettle brown.

razib, I just want to say that I love you man. Anyone who can write a sentence that begins with 'let me conclude my night's comments that i am simply mooting the possibility that a burkean imperfectibility of man is a human universal' right before they go to bed is a freakin genius. Most people are thinking of brushing their teeth and worrying if they are going to get any jig-jig from their wife or lover just before they hit the sack, but you have some top-of-the-range philosophical speculation going on there. I really hope that you win the Nobel Prize one day, you deserve it. I'm not being funny, I really love your posts. Its as though Spinoza was reincarnated as a Bengali geneticist, and you write about Sunny Leone too and her preference for doggy style and Italian food. But right before you go to bed you have this mad philosophical speculation. What does your mind do when its not in sleeper mode?

Genius, genius, genius.

why not Pakistani delegate?? Indonesia and Malaysia both have one.

On another note, the Colombian delegate said "One of my main interests is applying my acquired knowledge in Industrial Engineeering, especially in Supply Chain Management." Some people like sports, others watch TV. She likes Supply Chain Management.

*Shakes head.* What self-respecting engineer never played with LEGO?

LEGOS are from Denmark? I didn't know. I LIVED off of legos as a kid. Space legos to be specific. I tended to arm all the vehicles of science with extra weapons though.

tycho brahe, hans christian anderson and hamlet

Great Razib, but how am I supposed to work in a refernce to Tycho Brahe into the title? None of the contestants have a gold nose.

why not Pakistani delegate?? Indonesia and Malaysia both have one.

malaysia usually sends an ethnic chinese to the contest, not a muslim malay. miss indonesia has been subject to controversy, though since the title holder is named "arktika sarita devi" you assume she is of the moderate muslim majority than the orthodox santri muslim minority.

the miss bangladesh was cancelled in 1998 due to protests from muslim groups. many arab countries who send contestants send christians.

Great Razib, but how am I supposed to work in a refernce to Tycho Brahe into the title? None of the contestants have a gold nose.

i think it was actually copper. or so says wikipedia. :)

PB,

thanks for the compliments, but a few minor points

1) i'm not a geneticist, i'm an amateur at all i do.

2) there's a lot of great stuff in the blogosphere. i think you are probably commenting on the range of the quality/tenor of my comments/posts as opposed to the median quality/tenor. that is, if i didn't act like a doofus now and then i would probably amaze you a lot less with my references ;)

3) there has to be some irony in making an comparison to spinoza, the father of the enlightenment in many ways, after i made an allusion to edmund burke, a man who made his intellectual career dissing the enlightenment.

Here's Sri Lanka; also possibly part-desi: Mauritius, Netherlands.

Ms. Netherlands, Sharita Sopacua, is of Indonesian origin. Of course, this doesn't preclude her from having some desi in her cocktail. Poor girl is from Den Bosch in the southern part of Holland - BO-RING.

Bollywood's representatives need not be reflective whiteboards or huddled masses yearning to breathe free *smile* How about a Ms. India who looks like one of the ladies flanking Ms. Thappar in this picture.

basically, i get tired of colored folk (brown, black and yellow) talk of "white skin privilege" when there is a lot of "light skin privilege" being perpetuated in their own communities (speaking as a good-ole-wheatish-boy...i think?).

razib, your sexual preferences for "leggy blondes" are your business (i prefer dorky jewish intellectuals and happy fobby progressive desis myself and would one day like to branch out to really, really hot guys) but your broader analysis is frustrating. The two trends you're pointing to are part of the same complex of ideas. You're going to exempt 200 hundred years of western power and monopoly over the media, education, government, and power in trying to understand why desis (and Latinos and many others) are racist within their own communities?

yeah, there's something universal about racism, xenophobia, etc. as well, but there's a lot of it has to be rooted in the last couple of centuries. otherwise, how do you explain that ethiopian women, clearly the most beautiful women on earth, are so underrecognized.

"Bollywood's representatives need not be reflective whiteboards or huddled masses yearning to breathe free *smile* How about a Ms. India who looks like one of the ladies flanking Ms. Thappar in this picture."

my gf was listening to the BBC and there was something about miss india on the news. she looked up femina's site, and told me that she thought that the woman crowned wasn't as attractive as many of the other one contestants, but she was lighter-skinned, and wondered if that had an impact. i didn't really know, but i told her i wouldn't be surprised. but i also offered that perhaps these less "south asian" looking contestants are chosen to gear toward a world-wide judging audience. don't know.

...though since the title holder is named "arktika sarita devi" you assume she is of the moderate muslim majority than the orthodox santri muslim minority....

Note that females names such as those above ending in 'devi' etc. are very typical in Indonesia. And the majority of Indonesians are moderate in their beliefs and an even larger proportion carry names with a Sanskrit heritage.
Its only a small percentage of those who are orthodox, and who cause all the trouble.

Razib makes a valid point – that it is a tad hypocritical for brown people to argue about white racism, when pop culture from the subcontinent elevates any Indian that looks white. After all, there are plenty of Indians with Chinese facial characteristics, particularly in Bengal and the NE states. Yet such Indians are nowhere to be found in films, tv shows, or magazines.

What makes this so interesting is that so much of the entertainment industry in India is politically left of center, much like their American counterparts. Yet with few exceptions, their product reinforces Indian prejudices. No woman can be darker than a hazelnut, and if you can find a mixed-Indian woman, even better. The webzine Little India had an atypically interesting piece on the demand for non-Indian actresses in Indian cinema, “Foreign Actresses Steam up Bollywood” (http://www.littleindia.com/april2005/ForeignActresses.htm)

There does not seem to be the same demand for foreign male actors romancing Indian women. I guess the female Indian directors (Gurinder Chadha) of the diaspora have a lock on that. But their films are for Western audiences.

Last night, our Bombay relatives wanted me to sit down for a bit to watch Kal Ho Na Ho. I don’t speak Hindi, and the VCD had no subtitles. When I asked why I would be interested, one said, “The whole movie is set and filmed in New York.” where I grew up (ok, Long Island). I then asked why do Indian filmgoers want to watch movies that feature very atypical looking Indians, and increasingly, in movies not set in India?

I then asked why do Indian filmgoers want to watch movies that feature very atypical looking Indians, and increasingly, in movies not set in India?

why do Indian filmgoers want to watch movies that feature very atypical looking Indians, and increasingly, in movies not set in India?

for the same reason they love the song-and-dance scenes in Europe, Australia, and Mauritius, complete with 12 costume changes... fantasy and escape.

Personally, I found it odd how Preity Zinta can jog from QNS, through Central Park, and down to Brooklyn, yet her mom meets her in Brooklyn as if it's next door... but my cousins in India ate it up with a spoon. That's what matters, I suppose.

Irma Dimas, El Salvador, hai mai merja!!!!!!

why do Indian filmgoers want to watch movies that feature very atypical looking Indians, and increasingly, in movies not set in India?

Razib makes a valid point – that it is a tad hypocritical for brown people to argue about white racism, when pop culture from the subcontinent elevates any Indian that looks white.

That is a ridiculous point. Indians probably prefer whiteness and thats not fair. But doing so doesn't mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists.

That is a ridiculous point. Indians probably prefer whiteness and thats not fair. But doing so doesn't mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists.

no one ever said the latter, but, as you said, life is not fair, time is subject to scarcity. each person weights their priorities according to an interal system of principles and probabilities.

i would hold for example that americans of south asian ancestry should be concerned about white racism. i would also hold that south asians who live within and identify with south asian nations should focus on their own problems (which do have a ethno-racial caste, so to speak) as opposed to "american racism." i will address saurav's point later, but i never said that white hegemony was off the table, rather, i was making a plea for an acknowledgement that moral equations are based on a host of assumptions, universal justice is an ideal, and where to draw various lines in the sand when demarcating issues is subject to personal intuition and communcal consensus. all these aspects often get lost during one-dimensional exchanges.

"Same reason why American filmmakers film in exotic locations like the Middle East and South Asia....because its different."

But most American films are not set in the Middle East or South Asia. Most are modern day America or in a galaxy far far away.

"But doing so doesn't mean they deserve to be subjected to white racism elsewhere. Nor do they lose the right to bring it up when it exists."

In 2005, an Indian is more likely to experience racism (or some other prejudice) at the hands of another Indian than any white person. Considering that millions of Indian women are not considered "marriage-material" because they are "too-dark", and that India is the top market for "Fair and Lovely." But Indians would rather object to bigotry practiced by whites than in their own country.

But most American films are not set in the Middle East or South Asia. Most are modern day America or in a galaxy far far away.

Likewise most Hindi films are set in India.

In 2005, an Indian is more likely to experience racism (or some other prejudice) at the hands of another Indian than any white person.

Debateable. Depends on where you live, how to define prejudice, etc. Could be an interesting sociological experiment.

Indians would rather object to bigotry practiced by whites than in their own country.

Indians are routinely racist against their own people, I agree completely. I don't know if this statement is correct though.

Look at it generationally...the diasporic first generation (parents) seems to be more intent on making money than about complaining about white racism. You never hear any uncles or aunties complaining about white racism, but you certainly DO hear them make racist comments about other desis as you said.

The people that complain about white racism, that are involved in public interest activities or politics in general are the second generation....the kids. They certainly do make a big stink of white (and non-white) racism (I submit: rightly so). But you don't hear them make the same kind of comments against Indians like their parents do. I think they object equally to Indian racism.

The statement may apply to desis in desi-stan, but then again the vast majority of them hardly even know whats going on in the world, they are too busy just trying to get by to worry about white global racism.

my personal aesthetic preferences lean toward blonde and leggy, i'm straight up about it

2.

which i think is somewhat ironic in that i suspect that few commentors here are the children of the brown working class

3. I'll focus more about skin color when I get a chance to post later.

So as a avid student of genetics, how do you reconcile your tastes which will not only result in mixed offspring but deprive the world of a pure caucasian that your "white" partner would have had if not for your race-mixing. Your personal preference deprive the world something you value

the preference is proximate, not an ultimate value. ie; just because i like ice cream, and eating ice cream means there is less ice cream in the world, doesn't mean i should eat ice cream. i like ice cream not for the taste, as opposed to it just sitting there as an aesthetic/value judgement. also, standard naturalistic fallacy stuff. just cuz it is my preference doesn't mean i think it is the "right" or "proper" or "correct" preference.

kind of a black & white answer, but i am short on time right now, might get back to it in a few hours.

ciao.

p.s. for the non-evo nuts and those who don't read my side, i think *ultimate* considerations (ie; long term fitness, etc.) are interesting, but i don't attach much value to them in a moral/political realm, they just are, and you have to work with them depending on what your values are. the proximate issues are something we have to grapple with, but again, how you grapple with them depends on your values. eg; if it was found that most straight males had a reflexively an aversion to gay male sex "hard-wired" into their brain, that doesn't mean that the reflexive aversion is OK.

should not eat ice cream.

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). i don't have much of a brown race consciousness, let alone white consciousness (also, i don't care if humans turn into cyborns in 100 years or transform themselves into computer simulations).

ok, just thought of a much better analogy, so i will post it before i jet for a bit.

say you are a butt ugly dude. you like hot chicks. you are butt ugly, so can't get 'em. say you get rich, and hot chicks pay attention to you all of a sudden. do you avoid getting a hot wife because your children (if good looks are heritable) would not be as hot, and some of the hotness in the world would decrease by your reproduction?

i think that makes things clearer.

Most people here are probably from family of privilege. Most people dont want to acknowledge that they are from a priviledged background.
The problem in India is not racism (heck, people in India are too busy with bread and butter issues) but the people of middle class background treating poor people as they dont count as human being.

But Indians would rather object to bigotry practiced by whites than in their own country

Don't you get it? You can probably trace racism in India come from the same place (the same way people in the Independence movement in the early 20th century started believing Western nonsense about "Eastern spirituality").

It's not hard to understand how it happened, either. Who do you think controlled South Asia's educational systems for 200 years? Who do you think taught India's political class in Cambridge and Oxford? Who ruled the earth as if it were a self-evident fact that it should be so? I'm not saying that that's the only place it comes from, but it's a major source.

And again, it's really silly to pretend it's an either/or; plenty of people object to discrimination (of all kinds) in India AND the US.

You can probably trace racism in India come from the same place

i have done some reading on the color classifications that south asians use, and apparently the specific ones in vogue around northern india date to the muslim period. it was a way for fair-skinned "white" persian and turco-afghan muslims to distinguish themselves from the "black" convert population. it seems from the historical reading i've done (somewhat patchy before the muslim period because of the relatively sketchy historiographical tradition among south asian elites) the basic outlines of the "south asian racial world-view" was already there.

but, what did the west bring? what i think they brought was science, understood as the rationalist+empirical+skeptical tradition that crystallized by around 1800 and onward. the science, fused with normal, universal, observations about differences and inequalities among peoples resulted in a systemetization of the vanilla xenophobia that is a human universal into a scientific racism of great power.

but, i think that scientific racism was a short-lived affair, dating between 1870-1910 at its apogee, and falling off the face of the west after 1945, and very fuzzy before 1800. i offer the as evidence the possibility that disraeli, a jew by blood, could become prime minister, or that a even after 1870 a parsi could win a british constinuency as an MP in the 1890s. or, that in the early 19th century, lord liverpool, was PM and was known to have brown blood on his mother's side (east india company family). the key is not something special about western culture in terms of racial ideology, as the transmutation of conventional bias, prejudice and stereotyping with the addition of science into a world-view.

to clarify this, i would offer the example of the chinese. in the early 18th century the dzunghar region of western mongolia was inhabited by bellicose oryats. this tribe challenged the manchu dynasty for hegemony, and was beaten to a pulp because of the use of gunpower. estimates of mortality rates in dzungharia are as high as 90%. several times in the 18th century the dzhungarian oyrats marched into the russian empire and placed themselves under the "protection" of the czars (or czarina catherine), and marched back, in treks that dwarfed the cherokee trail of tears in both tribulation and distance (the kalmyks of the lower volga are remnants of the oyrats that remained in russia after a large back-migration).

the manchus, leading a chinese empire, obliterated the oyrats as a people. dzungharia was basically sterilized of humans and kazakhs and uighers resettled that region (before the modern han influx). was this a genocide? in terms of outcome it was, but the intent was military and strategic. and yet the chinese (including the sinicized han) were a notoriously "racist" people. embassies to the khmer kingdom commented on the bestial blackness of the natives, their savage nudity, and what not. the mongol and turkic peoples to the north were assumed to be subhuman rat-eaters.

but it was not scientific racism, and the reason i assert this is the confucian mandarinate opposed scientific chinese racists when they arose in the late 19th century. these "progressives" simply transferred the european scientific physical anthropological nomeclature and methodology and ran with it. though the confucian mandarinate was bigoted, chauvanistic and provincial they opposed the systemetization of human differences because it ran against confucian ideals of human perfectibility. the chinese progressives, like western progressives and socialists like h.g. wells, saw the tide of brown color to the south as irritants who would be sterilized in a world divided between yellow and white.

i focus on the chinese because on an international scale it is in east asia that unalloyed scientific racism is dominant. and not just in the east. there are quite clearly high caste south asians who assumed that they are genetically "superior" and born to rule the low caste masses. prior to the modern era this might have been an implicit assumption, but the crystallization of its explicit systemetization is troubling to me.

personally, i do believe in non-trivial differences between populations in a host of variables. but, i also think

a) most attempts by lay persons to apply a "system" garbles the technical nuance that is often on display

b) naturallistic fallacy often applies

in sum, focus on the salience and historical reality of western/white racism is fine. but we are all moderns now, more or less (even the islamists who use videotape and violate the hyper-salafi ban on images). all peoples need to start being cautious about how they mingle their norms and the power of scientific systemetization. i would rather be a "paki" in england than a "barbarian" in china at this point (if you are talking on the global scale, and there are broad implicit assumptions and paradigms in the background about "white racism" in conversations about specific acts and instances).

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.

* it is much more complicated, and the standard punnett squares like above are used for illustration, don't believe them because that's not how hair/eye color are really inherited. if you are curious, go to my blog and type "MC1R."

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.).

but, i think that scientific racism was a short-lived affair, dating between 1870-1910 at its apogee, and falling off the face of the west after 1945, and very fuzzy before 1800. i

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.

i have done some reading on the color classifications that south asians use, and apparently the specific ones in vogue around northern india date to the muslim period.

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.

we are all moderns now, more or less (even the islamists who use videotape and violate the hyper-salafi ban on images). all peoples need to start being cautious about how they mingle their norms and the power of scientific systemetization. i would rather be a "paki" in england than a "barbarian" in china at this point (if you are talking on the global scale, and there are broad implicit assumptions and paradigms in the background about "white racism" in conversations about specific acts and instances).

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:

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?

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.

2. Because the combination of race, modernist tactics of taxonomy and all that, and administrative, economic and political power was an overwhelming combination. This happened elsewhere in colonized nations too--Latin American societies have serious race problems; American Black people have questions of color; the Japanese are intensely xenophobic. I'm not saying that colonialism was the only factor--what I'm saying is that "colonialism" and "imperalism" are not just forces, but a system of economic, political, and informational domination and indoctrincation that so throughly pervaded the wrold, that it makes little sense to try and understand a phenomenon like race in South Asia without incorporating that history into your understanding. I'm not excusing the overpowdered ladies and "must be fair skinned" matrimonials of desiland--I'm saying that because we live fifty years after the formal end of European colonialism in desiland (and less in other countries like in Africa), it's easier to underplay the enormous influence it has.

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?

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?

It just did. As you mentioned, India absorbed some things from Britain and not others:

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.

Take the civil service

Take religion.

The Brits may have pitted Hindu against Muslim to suit their ends, but they were taking advantage of fissures that were already there.

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

as for the part about "scientific racism," i didn't say it didn't exist

I was responding to KXB. Are Razib and KXB the same?

i didn't say it didn't exist, i simply stated that its apogee was between 1870-1910

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."

The Anglican church did not have nearly the same evangelical tradition as did the Catholic church.

this isn't true

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."

i hold that the evils unleashed by modernity would have been unleashed whether the face was yellow, brown or red (or white)

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.

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

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"

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."

"seven", for example, is "saith" in Welsh, "saat" in Hindi."

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

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!

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?

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.