The utter ignorance of such commentaries goes with the state of "intellectual" debate in India.

Skin color comments are not "race" or "racism." Like someone saying "my sister was fair and I was dark, so she was preferred" does not mean they were different *races*. 🤣
"English" Indians have these completely dumb debates because they have to fit themselves into categories of the West. "Massah has racism, we must also have racism."

Race is a particular construction in European history and consciousness, with a genesis in the Bible.
In Risley's census of India, he tries to fit European race theory into mapping "castes." Race theory was "scientific" & "rational"—a "progressive" idea of post-"enlightenment" Europe.

He uses factors including "nasal index" and eye size to classify races. Skin color is just one.
Scientific racism emerges from Biblical . Remember the Bible was still "gospel truth" for Europe, and social "scientists" internalized this.

They believed that humans descended from Noah and different races came from his different sons.

jstor.org/stable/2953314…
Noah's son Ham was evil and he was believed to be cursed to be Black. This Abrahamic belief drove the idea of the inferiority of Black Africans and their "evil" nature ("darkness of their souls.") This provided Abrahamic justifications for slavery.

nytimes.com/2003/11/01/art…
Scientific racism constructed race, based on different Risley-like attributes, then theorized the "inherent" superiority or inferiority of different races. Black was inferior and evil per Bible.

Race is a construction, propagated by "civilized" Europeans.
docs.google.com/viewer?url=htt…
There is no such concept in Indic traditions. Shiva, Krishna, Kali are all dark-skinned. Krishna literally means dark. Rama is also dark. Krishna and Rama are the most beautiful and alluring. None of this has anything to do with "race." This construct does not exist in the Indic.
So how did the skin color preference come about in India? As an artifact of Islam and European colonization. Their prejudices transferred and the "ruling" /"elite" classes were seen as fair-skinned.

The recent obsession is more from "modernity" and the English slave-culture.
Even so, skin color preference as a beauty marker is not "racism." So English #SlaveIndians just blabber stuff like "Indians are the most racist" without having a clue of what race is, as a European artifact, and what racism means.

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More from @sankrant

Feb 22
Just like आदमी comes from आदम or Adam.

बाबा आदम का ज़माना refers to Adam and belief in the story of "Adam and Eve."
Similarly "aurat" in Urdu-ized Hindi is a demeaning term for women. Mahila is a term of honor as is Stri or Shri, standing for the Divine Feminine.

Urduization of Hindi also carries Middle-Eastern misogyny with it. @GemsOfBollywood

Not that I am aware of. Middle-Eastern cosmology is very primitive. Till the early 20th century the Western world believe in a Biblical cosmology of the earth being 6000 years old (when "Adam and Eve" existed) vs the billions of years in Vedic cosmology.

Read 5 tweets
Feb 21
When one speaks about how "caste" in India was. creation of colonialism, people throw back the colonially-created myth of the 5000-yr old "caste system."

But colonialists even created a caste system in Latin America in the 17th and 18th century, before they did in India. Image
Because the Indian state is itself colonial. It is a legacy of colonial rule and embedded in the structures of colonialism. Thus it has made "caste" worse, not better.

Read 4 tweets
Feb 21
Does capitalism work in Medicine? Is a system that profits from disease sustainable?

cnbc.com/2018/04/11/gol… Image
A friend who's a researcher for Big Pharma said they were told to focus on "annuity drugs"—drugs one has to take for years or a lifetime.

If you cure them it's bad business. If you kill them it's bad business.

The best business for medicine is keeping people sick but alive.
No, there is a conflict of interest between business interests and health. Pharma cannot make money off of healthy people.

In traditional Ayurveda there is an idea of inherent paap in charging for medicine since one is benefiting from others' suffering.

Read 4 tweets
Feb 19
Nothing emerges out of thin air, everything has a history behind it. One characteristic of the West (borrowed from the Church) is that they steal and assimilate ideas, then pass off as their own. This is true in all fields of endeavor, the sciences, math, and civil structures.
And then they have a lot of sepoys running apologetics for it.

But even their masters are starting to acknowledge there was no model of representative government in Europe, and the US model may be copied from the Iroquois.

@harshmadhusudan

discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/d…
It is unfathomable for the @dhume that White people didn't invent everything; this is why there is so much resistance to acknowledge Indian contributions.

Even the West acknowledges it only after it has largely eliminated the culture it has stolen from.

sankrant.org/2014/04/dead-p…
Read 9 tweets
Feb 18
American academia and scientists were the basis of Nazi eugenics and the idea of creating a "master race."

This was led by scientists hailing from Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796
"The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz."

Elitists, utopians and "progressives" fused their race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world.
The eugenics idea was to identify "so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines." They craved "blond Nordic types."

"plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed inferior"
Read 5 tweets
Feb 17
The svastik is a sacred-symbol of the East. Hitler used the Hakenkreuz, Hooked Cross, a Christian symbol. This was translated into "Swastika" by Western scholars.

Call the Hakenkreuz what it is. Stop appropriating our cultural symbol, the svastik.

The notion of the "Aryan race" is another fantasy of Western scholarship. They mis-translated the notion of "Arya" which means "noble" in Sanskrit and made it into a fantasy of the "Aryan race." Contemporary Western scholars continue to peddle this; racism is deeply embedded.
हिटलर का स्वास्तिक था ही नहीं। टेढ़ा क्रॉस था। उसे ग़लत नाम दिया गया।

Read 9 tweets

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