Category: Religion
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Deception All the Way Down
A review of a ‘documentary’ film on Doordarshan about India’s heritage. First published in The Wire (PDF).
A nation is an ‘imagined community’, wrote Benedict Anderson in his influential book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). A nation is imagined, he argued, because its members feel a sense of solidarity with one another, even though the vast majority of them are strangers. Nations are not natural or pre-existing entities, but are modern social constructs. They are forged by the dominant classes in each society, who emphasize certain cultural, social, and political ideas that ‘glue’ people into a sense of shared identity and belonging.For every nation, the past plays a pivotal role in creating the ‘imagined community’. Stories about a nation’s past, including stories about its origins, shape its members’ collective memory and identity, creating a ‘national consciousness’. Certain historical moments, figures, and symbols are elevated to a position of great importance within the imagined community. These help fortify the ideas, beliefs, and values that are said to underpin a ‘national identity’. This is also why nations fixate on history curriculums so much.
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Zoomorphising Humanity
[This essay appeared in “What Have Animals Ever Done for Us?”, an anthology put together by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in celebration of their bicentennial year. All essays, including ones by Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, also appear on the RSPCA website.]
India is known for its cows wandering the streets, but no less common are its feral dogs. On a December night in Goa, as I walked towards my hotel, one such mutt dozed next to the footpath. Lean, yellow, frizzy-haired. She glanced warily at me, while I stopped to empty my ‘doggie bag’ from dinner onto the pavement near her. After I stepped away, she ate every bite. The following night, she was there again, this time seated in the middle of the path, alert, between two of her friends. I was tickled when she approached me, dancing with merriment, glad I’d arrived as expected. Her friends, meanwhile, kept their distance, their heads low, their tails wagging as they circled round us. They weren’t begging for food; they were checking me out.Even though I’d only given a paltry gift the previous night, this happy dog had bragged about it to her friends. This wasn’t the first time I’d befriended a feral dog who then brought her friends to meet me. It wasn’t the last time I’ve felt a stray was trying to tell me about his social world or had communicated something about me to his fellows. Even in my casual observations of street dogs in my Delhi neighbourhood, I’ve noticed that those who claim human friends are sometimes granted a degree of special regard within their cohort, as if their pals think they’re cool. Sometimes this also provokes jealousies.
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India: A Forecast
A thread of 20 tweets, on what I see ahead in India. Click below to read the rest.India: A Forecast 🧵
India is on a sinister path, much darker than most worried citizens foresaw in 2014. Things have gone downhill rather fast. So what do I see as the near-term outlook (5–7 years) for India? I offer my provisional thoughts in this thread. Hope I’m wrong. (1/20)— Namit Arora (@NamitArora0) May 3, 2022
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Stories of Collapse
[The 17th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.
Category: 3QD, Animals, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion -
Toward a Polyphony of Stories
[The 14th in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.Category: 3QD, Anthropology & Archaeology, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Religion, Science -
Namit Arora interviewed by Scroll
Scroll commissioned my friend and fellow writer, Abdullah Khan, to interview me over email. I enjoyed responding to his excellent questions. Read it here, or read it on Scroll.in where it was first published with the title below.
________________‘No one person gets to limit what it means to be Indian’: Namit Arora, author of ‘Indians’
To write his book, Arora travelled to the seats of the different civilisations of India
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, History, Justice, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel -
Of Gods and Men and Human Destiny
[The eleventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]
In the beginning, the god of the Biblical creation myths makes the Earth and sky. Over the next several days, he makes the sun, moon, and stars, grasses and fruit trees, most of the animals, and rain. Then, scooping up a bit of fresh mud, he molds a being who looks much like himself, a man, and into this homunculus he breathes life. As a dwelling place for this newborn Adam, he plants a lavishly abundant garden, filling it with beautiful and delicious plants. The creator tells Adam, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Then, realizing that Adam might feel lonely, the deity gives him cattle, fowl, and all the “beasts of the field.” Yet none of these quite seems a suitable companion, so from one of Adam’s ribs, god fashions a woman.Quite pleased with his handiwork, the divinity instructs his new humans on how to live. He tells them they must increase their population. They must also replenish the Earth, and in doing so, subdue it and exercise dominion over all its living things. The almighty then leaves the newlyweds alone to get on with their business of eating, procreating, replenishing, and dominating, which they apparently take to just fine. Indeed, neither of the pair has any memorable comment on their situation, until the day Serpent piques Eve’s curiosity, telling her that if she and Adam were to eat from the one forbidden tree, rather than die, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Now Eve takes new notice of this tree, understanding that it could make her “wise.” Enticed, she picks a fruit and munches it. Whatever she discovers then—new knowledge or wisdom or just fine flavor—is simply too good not to share with her husband and, despite their creator’s clear injunction to him, Adam follows his wife’s lead. Yet soon the hapless couple realize that this new state they find themselves in—their eyes having been opened—is indeed problematic. They seem to have transgressed some cosmic order and find themselves possessed now of a discomfiting self-awareness, of moral judgments and political motives, just like the god who made them—and distinctly unlike the beasts they lived among.
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Sex and the City in Medieval India
(This essay first appeared in The Globalist)
What explains the disappearance of erotic sculptures from Hindu temples in India?
Among the most captivating and enigmatic features of medieval Indian art is the explicit erotica on the walls of temples like the UNESCO world heritage complex at Khajuraho. However, modern Indian temples have no trace of it. In fact, most Indians today are so prudish that they feel scandalized by this imagery from their past. So what motivated it back then. And why did it disappear so completely? -
Namit Arora interviewed by the Asian Review of Books
In which Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, interviews me about ‘Indians’ (~40 minutes).
“We can sometimes forget that “India”—or the idea of a single unified entity—is not a very old concept. Indian history is complicated and convoluted: different societies, polities and cultures rise and fall, ebb and flow, as the political makeup of South Asia changes. Namit Arora, author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, details some of these changing cultures. From the early Harappans, to the Buddhist centers of Nagarjunakonda and Nalanda, and ending at Varanasi, Arora takes his readers on a journey through South Asia’s rich and diverse history. In this interview, Namit and I talk about the many different cultures featured in his book Indians. We share the stories of some of India’s illustrious foreign visitors, and what it was like for Namit to research these lost histories.”
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Namit Arora featured on Cyrus Says
I’m the sort who dreads even the thought of appearing on live broadcasts with AMA style audience Qs, but I quite enjoyed my conversation on Indians with Cyrus Broacha, the smart, funny, inimitable host of the podcast Cyrus Says. Do listen! (Apple, Google, Spotify, Adori, etc.)
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Books & Authors, Culture, History, Humor, Politics, Religion, Travel, Video -
Namit Arora on Indians: The Avid–BLF Lecture
I spoke about Indians in an online lecture, my first one based on the new book (1:08 hr). Hosted by Avid Learning and supported by the Bangalore Lit Fest, I delivered it on 25 Feb to listeners on Zoom (occasional choppy audio). If history or Indians interest you, check it out.
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INDIANS: A Book Trailer
My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. 🙂
A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Justice, Philosophy, Photography, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel, Video -
Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization | Namit Arora
Dear friends, I’m delighted to announce that my third book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, was launched today by Penguin Random House India. Among other things, it’s a story of the defining cultural ideas, megatrends, and conflicts of Indian civilization. It’s a history of migration, conflict, mixing and cooperation. It’s also a book of journeys and discovering what it means to be Indian. Click HERE for more details. 🎉🥁🍹This book, over its multiyear gestation, has gained from influences too numerous to mention. Among these are my life partner, my editor, family and friends, and many scholars whose efforts I’ve leaned on. I’m grateful to them and to others who gave advice, opened doors, offered contacts, aided us on our travels, or shared their stories and time. I’m indebted to friends who read early versions. Finally, the six endorsements on the cover come from writers and scholars I admire greatly, who gave me their time and trust—what can be nicer? For their generosity I’m grateful.The book’s release got delayed by the pandemic, but here it is—and open for preorders on Amazon.in (it’ll happen on Amazon.com and other int’l sites in a few weeks; check for links here). The cover shows no Indians, but can you spot the cute stray doggie?
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A Day of Shame
A double whammy day: a year of Kashmir in chains and a vulgar display of majoritarian pride in Ayodhya. Today, it’s worth listening to Baba Laldas, the former priest at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, on the motivations behind the Ram temple movement and its leaders. This is an excerpt from the documentary, Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992) by Anand Patwardhan, now on YouTube. Laldas spoke openly against Advani’s rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri masjid. He was shot dead within a year and the case remains unsolved.
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Satire by Pushpa Jijji
I recently discovered Pushpa Jijji (Cheshta Saxena in real life), a talented satirist who performs mostly in Bundeli. I was especially charmed by her use of Bundeli language that I often heard growing up in Gwalior (Hindi speakers should get most of it). She has been putting out short videos on YouTube in which she pokes fun at Indian patriarchy, politics, and, lately, their interface with the pandemic (no subtitles). As with most good satire, the laughs lie uncomfortably close to a substrate of grim realities.
If you like the episode below, check out a few others I liked: one, two, three, four, or visit her YouTube Channel.
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A Collective Madness
What Modi’s victory says about today’s India. (An op-ed published in Himal Southasian, where it has received many comments.)
In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot — Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.I entered Assi Ghat with a numbing sadness. Was this really Kashi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, known for its religious pluralism and massive density of gods, creeds and houses of worship, with its long history of largely peaceful coexistence? The Kashi of the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak? The Kashi of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, who lived in its tangled gullies and regularly played during the aarti in Balaji temple, or of Hindustani vocalist Girija Devi, whose family kept mannats on Muharram? What still remains of its famed Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb? No, I consoled myself, my auto driver was not the norm in Varanasi, but he did herald certain fundamental changes now sweeping the country.
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What Freedom Means
(This essay appeared in Outlook India on the occasion of India’s 72nd Independence Day. It’s now also on Medium.)
Freedom is the ability to pursue the life one values. This view of freedom is inclusive, open-ended, and flexible. It embraces our plural, evolving, and diverse conceptions of the good life. It also admits other long-standing ideas of freedom, such as not being held in servitude, possessing political self-rule, or enjoying the right to act, speak, and think as one desires.Some people naively equate freedom with an absence of social restraints. But should I be free to do whatever I want? Should I be free to pollute the river, not pay any taxes, or torture the cat? To play loud music on the metro, not rent my apartment to Dalits, or incite hate or violence against other groups? I hope not. My freedom requires limits, so that others may enjoy their freedom. Edmund Burke held that freedom must be limited in order to be possessed. A freer society is not necessarily one with fewer social restraints, but one with a wisely chosen set of restraints as well as provisions, such as public education, healthcare, and ample safety nets for all.
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Coming to America: The making of the South Asian diaspora in the United States
[First published in the October 2017 issue of The Caravan magazine (PDF). The text below includes additional (minor) edits and photos.]
1.
ON A SEPTEMBER NIGHT IN 1907, an angry mob of about six hundred white people attacked and destroyed an Asian Indian settlement in Bellingham, in the north-western US state of Washington. Many of the traumatised residents fled to Canada. A San Francisco-based organisation called the Asiatic Exclusion League, dedicated to “the preservation of the Caucasian race upon American soil,” blamed the victims for the riot, adding that the “filthy and immodest habits” of Indians invited such attacks. Despite the small number of Indians in the United States—there were fewer than 4,000 at the time—the Asiatic Exclusion League had been warning of a “Hindu invasion” of the country’s west coast. Two months later, another angry white mob struck a settlement of Indian workers in Everett, Washington, forcibly driving them out of the town. In 1910, the US Immigration Commission on the Pacific Coast deemed Indians “the most undesirable of all Asiatics” and called for their exclusion. -
There But For Fortune, Go You Or I
Dr. Mohan Rao, Professor, School of Social Sciences, JNU, takes on The Lottery of Birth for The Book Review. I’m drawing attention to this because it’s the first media review of TLOB. It is unfortunately behind a paywall but here is a PDF of the printed version. Excerpts below.
To understand what is structural violence and what causes it, is this remarkable book of essays … Namit Arora is an unlikely writer of a book such as this, and thus is all the more convincing … written with honesty, intelligence, sensitivity and with ease. Arora has read all the relevant literature in history, anthropology and political theory and writes for the general reader. What is significant above all, is his respect for data, skillfully analysed…How did caste originate in India? How did colonial anthropology and laws shape it, and indeed cast it in stone? Do the Vedic scriptures both create and nurture the system, despite its immorality? Yes, indeed, finds Arora, adding to the voices of those labelled anti-national today. But how reassuring it is to find an anti-national emerging not from JNU, but from the hallowed nationalist portals of IIT! … When voices are being silenced, when debate is being stifled, we need more argumentative Indians than we have. Namit Arora’s brilliant book has contributed to this, and we must thank him for that.
Genetics and the Aryan Migration Debate
“The thorniest, most fought-over question in Indian history is slowly but surely getting answered: did Indo-European language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India sometime around 2,000 BC – 1,500 BC when the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end, bringing with them Sanskrit and a distinctive set of cultural practices? Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.” (—Tony Joseph in The Hindu; more here.)Even before these genetic studies of recent years, it has long been clear which way the scholarly evidence has overwhelmingly leaned, though the evidence had gaps that the “out-of-India” folks exploited to advance their rival theory. These new findings from genetics, if correct, imply that Vedic Sanskrit, the Holy Vedas and various cultural practices of these migrants (especially the varna system) are not Subcontinental in origin (at least their precursors are not). They came via migration, as did Islam, the Qur’an, and the Persian language. In other words, the religious beliefs of all contemporary Indians—Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and others—have descended from what migrants brought in (and subsequent accretions, fusions, innovations, conversions, appropriations); nor is India the mother of all Indo-European languages.
This ain’t going to make the “out-of-India” theorists too happy. They’re largely a brigade of proud Hindu “scholars” obsessed with the idea that there was no Aryan migration into South Asia, allowing them to claim South Asia as the indigenous homeland / birthplace of Hinduism’s earliest scriptures and their language (Sanskrit, but also its earliest ancestor, proto-Indo European)—and so also of Hinduism (of Brahminism, more accurately, but that’s a separate discussion), which evolved out of them. They also claimed that the language of the Indus Valley Civilization was a proto-Sanskrit, though its “linguistic script” remains undeciphered (it’s not even clear that the inscriptions represent a linguistic script)! Trolls have plastered such claims on countless Internet forums, but they’ve been mostly led by nationalistic windbaggery (aka Hindutva), wishful thinking, and gaps in rival theories—not on solid evidence from linguistics, philology, archaeology or anything else.
