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”
The Muslim intrusion into India was probably inevitable
Taking after Edward Gibbon it is often stated in some histories that the Islamicization of Europe was probably prevented by the defeat of the Muslim armies coming up from Spain by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. This is probably wrong for several reasons. First, with hindsight, it seems clear that people like to … Continue reading “The Muslim intrusion into India was probably inevitable”
India vs. China, genetically diverse vs. homogeneous
About 36% of the world’s population are citizens of the Peoples’ Republic of China and the Republic of India. Including the other nations of South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.), 43% of the population lives in China and/or South Asia. But, as David Reich mentions in Who We Are and How We Got Here China is […]
Brown Pundits, big in India!
I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll reiterate something I’ve noticed recently: this website is getting bigger and bigger in India. More precisely, though traffic is increasing in the USA, traffic is increasing from Indian IPs even faster. Here is the breakdown for the last month: Country % Users United States 35% India 29% UK 6% Canada … Continue reading “Brown Pundits, big in India!”
The quiz show contestant
I think I’m in love with an Australian game show contestant. pic.twitter.com/F9q1bzUECR — Kevin O’Keeffe (@kevinpokeeffe) March 31, 2018 The above click is “going viral.” One of the things that crosses my mind: would a guy who looks like this ever get a shot in Bollywood, or more generally Indian, film industry as a leading … Continue reading “The quiz show contestant”
The maturation of the South Asian genetic landscape
The above is a stylized map from the preprint, The Genomic Formation of South and Central Asia. In broad strokes, it says some things that are very expected, and some things that are not so expected. The abstract is long, but I’ll reproduce it in full: The genetic formation of Central and South Asian populations […]
The Elephant, dragon and eagle
The relationship between China and India is clearly one-sided: India is obsessed with a China which is approaching lift-off toward becoming on the verge of a developed nation within a generation (certain urban areas are already basically developed, albeit not particularly wealthy in comparison to Hong Kong or Singapore). Often when I see interviews […]
Castes are not just of mind
Before Nicholas Dirks was a controversial chancellor of UC Berkeley, he was a well regarded historian of South Asia. He wrote Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. I read it, along with other books on the topic in the middle 2000s. Here is Amazon summary from Library Journal: Is India’s caste […]
Indian genetic history: before the storm
Over at Brown Pundits I’ve mentioned the continuing simmer of controversy over a recent piece, How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate. This has prompted responses in the Indian media from a Hindu nationalist perspective. One of these notes that the author of the piece above cites me, and then goes on to observe […]
Indian genetics, the never-ending argument
I am at this point somewhat fatigued by Indian population genetics. The real results are going to be ancient DNA, and I’m waiting on that. But people keep asking me about an article in Swarajya, Genetics Might Be Settling The Aryan Migration Debate, But Not How Left-Liberals Believe. First, the article attacks me as being … Continue reading “Indian genetics, the never-ending argument”
Across the chasm of Incommensurability
The Washington Post has a piece typical of its genre, A Chinese student praised the ‘fresh air of free speech’ at a U.S. college. Then came the backlash. It’s the standard story; a student from China with somewhat heterodox thoughts and sympathies with some Western ideologies and mores expresses those views freely in the West, […]
Aryan marauders from the steppe came to India, yes they did!
Its seems every post on Indian genetics elicits dissents from loquacious commenters who are woolly on the details of the science, but convinced in their opinions (yes, they operate through uncertainty and obfuscation in their rhetoric, but you know where the axe is lodged). This post is an attempt to answer some questions so I […]
Women hate going to India
For some reason women do not seem to migrate much into South Asia. In the late 2000s I, along with others, noticed a strange discrepancy in the Y and mtDNA lineages which trace one’s direct male and female lines: in South Asia the male lineages were likely to cluster with populations to the north an […]
How Indians are a lot like Latin Americans
Pretty much any person of Indian subcontinental origin in the United States of a certain who isn’t very dark skinned has probably had the experience of being spoken to in Spanish at some point. When I was younger growing up in Oregon I had the experience multiple times of Spanish speakers, probably Mexican, pleading with […]
The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…
The future of the three “Pakistans”
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan bets that India’s fertility will be sup-replacement within 20 years. My first inclination was to think that this was a totally easy call for Caplan to make. After all, much of southern India, and the northwest, is al…