The myth of Brahmin supremacy!
It seems in this globalized world many intellectual movements deploy the same abstractions. For example, the terms “Brahmin privilege” and “Brahmin supremacy” are clearly constructed as perfect analogs to “white privilege” and “white supremacy.” Brahmins cannot have their own independent history, but operationalize a general model of power relations predicated on the white-black dynamic in …
The myth of the “model minority myth” probably tells us about the pervasiveness of lying
Recently I was listening to a radio interview with an Asian American professor. At one point she had to expound about the “model minority myth,” which refers to the fact that the public has a misimpression about the state of Asian Americans (after prompting from the white host). The idea is that while the public […]
Looking to the east: a different secularism than the West
Why Hagia Sophia, Turkey And The Charismatic Figure Of Erdogan Bristle With Resonances For India: The Hagia Sophia reconversion ultimately points to the failure of the Kemalist project of top-down secularism. Much like the state secularism of nationalist authoritarian leaders in Egypt, Iran, Iraq etc had failed to lead to the secularisation of the wider …
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The triumph of idealism over materialism in the long run
1,500 years ago the Justinian the Great had some grand ambitions once he became ruler of the only Roman Empire left. They called him the “Last Roman.” He was the last East Roman (Byzantine) Emperor who grew up speaking Latin as his native language. He was the last Emperor whose vision reflected the polity of […]
Maratha Mindset: How to Control Your History and Emotions to Grasp the Future on Your Terms
The film Panipat is on Netflix, and I watched a bit of mostly for anthropological reasons. It seems a typical melodramatic Bollywood gloss on this period, and I found the depiction of Ahmad Shah Durrani rather amusing. But it brought to mind a broader issue that I’ve been reflecting on over the past few years: …
How the Arabs Created The Iranian Golden Age
I recommend Michael Axworthy’s A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind because there are very few books aimed at the general audience that survey the history of Persia from the ancient period down to the modern one with some balance. Often the Iranian Revolution and contemporary events are given too much space. Or, ancient […]
Preparing for the end of the age
James J. O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire is a poorly edited book laced with a tendentious thesis: that Justinian ended a glorious period of multicultural amity and synthesis. The poor editing shows insofar as the book is far too long, and the author is given to prosaic flourishes. The thesis is shoehorned into […]
Lord Indra the brutal!
In the post below a question comes up: what about the Indo-Aryans?. First, before we move on, I want to stipulate that I am going to assume that the Indo-Aryans were intrusive around ~1500 BC. I believe this is true, though I understand not everyone does. Stipulating that this is true, was the intrusion brutal? …
Haunted by history
Today Genghis Khan is a hero in Mongolia. This, despite the fact that the rise of his Mongol Empire was associated with mass death. This mass death resulted in reforestation, which changed atmospheric CO2 levels. There are many histories of the rise of the Mongo Empire, but Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, …
Browncast Episode 104: The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above! You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the …
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People of Indian ancestry need to learn things outside of India or they will sound stupid
At my other blog, The Decline Of Genocide And The Rise Of Rents. One of the comments is from someone with an Indian name: The problem with the whitewashing of the islamic invasions of India is that first, nobody does that with the christian invasions of sub saharan Africa and even more so, central and …
The decline of genocide and the rise of rents
About half a decade ago Steven Pinker wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. There were many criticisms of the book, but on the whole, I think it pushes forward an argument that is a reasonable description of reality: descriptively, violence has declined over the Holocene. Why? Carl von Clausewitz asserted […]
Let’s hope the 21st century is not another Red Century
A few years ago The New York Times had a strange series of articles about Communism, “Red Century”. Some of the pieces seemed almost laudatory of Communism and the Soviet Union. I don’t necessarily think that everything I read should have the same moral stances as I do, but much of the contemporary media is […]
The Persian captivity
I have long suggested to readers of this weblog to inform themselves of the histories of peoples outside of the Indian subcontinent to understand better broader human dynamics and get out of the box of parochialism. But, the comments of this weblog don’t suggest that many are taking me up that advice. Let’s start with …
They came, they conquered, & they were swallowed
A reader sent me a post they wrote, The Aryans were Invasive to India: The Aryan Migration into India was invasive; characterized by violent conquest, rape, racism, and religious supremacy. This was not a unique phenomenon in the premodern era, but a relatively standard episode that would ensue when two different tribes had to struggle …
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A Mongol India, a pagan India?
On Twitter there was a thread which posited what “might have been” if the Mongols had forthrightly smashed the Delhi Sultanate and added India, at least its north, to their vareigated domains. After the death of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire split into four broad political-geographical zones. – to the north and west, was the …
To beat the dragon be the dragon
In The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire Kyle Harper argues that the Plague of Cyprian, between 249 to 262 A.D., served as a massive exogenous shock to the Roman Empire that changed history. Harper observes that the structures of Roman society were reordered in the face of near collapse […]
How Europe became the Faith
Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome is a work of monumental scholarship. The late author was a master of the textual sources to such an extent that no non-specialist can truly comprehend the force of his argument or its veracity in a deep manner. That being said, the book is essential reading in large […]
How Europe became the Faith
Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome is a work of monumental scholarship. The late author was a master of the textual sources to such an extent that no non-specialist can truly comprehend the force of his argument or its veracity in a deep manner. That being said, the book is essential reading in large […]
The limits of their knowledge are the limits of their world
Back in the 1990s I read David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series of future history science fiction.* Set in the year 2200, Wingrove depicts a world in which China is not only ascendant but in some ways the world is China. For me, an implausible “twist” is that the political and cultural elite of this period […]