Hidden Hindus

sadna #388

No, never been to Bosnia……but worked as a volunteer with Bosnian/Kosava refugees…

Rural India ka joo zikr kiya tu nay ham nasheeN Aik teer mayray seenay main mara keh haai haai

ok, when opportunity comes up, I will write about it… about the warmth and hospitability extended to me as a mehmaan….. about attending the dasehra festival….and literally pushed to sit in the front row to watch ram ji ki lila (stage show).. …about the lavish dinner our neighbors treated us to which they probably could not afford…..about some elderly Hindu men, who knew how to read and write Urdu...btw, written Hindi seems like lots of snaked lying together to me :)....people always giggled when i asked them about what was written on the wall or what was the number of this bus.....about smoking beedi and chewing baba 120 tobaco paan….about riding on bullock cart….about having a shave a facial and head message for 10 rupees(tip included)…. about how women, who didn’t even know me, cried when I was leaving… this was chand pur…..a very small town in bijnor… will never forget it…...then there was this place near Lukhnow.....can`t remember the name now....i was going to tell you a very interesting story about that place...but its rather long...so next time...remind me...

Passport par place of birth hai… aur Pakistan ka visa bhi…well, I am an optimist :)

fairdinkum #386
Liked your description of your Indian travels. Did you find rural India different in many ways from rural Pakistan? Do write more about it when the opportunity comes up(and I seem to remember mention of Bosnia,too :-)).
Come to think of it, maybe its something in your passport which gives you away :-)(just joking). Well, maybe the world will be a friendlier more trustful place in three months time(:-().
Sadhana

krashid #380:

``Satyavadi #375

Shame on you.

You are selling your conscience without paycheck.``

Main ro-uN ya has-uN karooN maiN kya karooN.

Sadhana,

accha…
CPM would be the communist party? Thanks for the url.. i read the report at rediff.. what internal security threats are they talking about? ISI infiltration? Is that why they didn’t give me the visa? :) Just kidding!

I have been to India you know… loved it….. especially rural India…and dehra doon valley and masori was good too…and agra was majical….. in delhi, I was staying in a hotel in the middle of the city…I had the window open while I was sleeping…and you know what….in the morning a monkey came in through the window…I could not believe it…ran downstairs to report at the reception…….and they looked at me strangely and then giggled….saab koi baat nahi aisay hoota hai … :) …. got lost in the market near Jamma masjid and had to pay the rikshaw man to get me out :)…. traveled from Dehli to Bijnor by bus… we were traveling to a small village near Bijnor… missed the connecting bus at bijnor…..a truck driver gave us lift to that village for ten rupees :) good service eh? :) in bombay, I got ripped off at the central station :) ….. bombay was good fun though…stayed at Johu beach….long way from the city…it all seems like a dream now… I was really looking forward to going again.. damn that visa officer…..:( I will try again in three months time…

fairdinkum #387
http://www.rediff.com/news/2000/oct/12tara.htm

fairdinkum, obviously, the topic of RSS merits a more detailed discussion, but in my opinion
a. seen solely from the grassroots level, in my assessement the original RSS was a totally different animal from the unattractive dimension it has taken on today.

b. I grew up in a region where RSS didnot seem to be a potent force in electoral politics and `Hindutva` was not even a known word, but low-level cadres of RSS and CPM such as shopkeepers and daily wagers used to keep killing each other in retaliation sprees, esp when CPM was in power. I never quite understood it, anyone? There exists a similar situation in WBengal, I`m thinking. The use of violence at the lowest level of politics is totally unacceptable, if the top level leaders even apolitical also use language which however high-faluting translates to eye-for-eye in the street, well, thats just not acceptable.

If I`m not mistaken, RSS has only recently appointed a media spokesman to explain its point of view to the public. Well, if finally they are wholeheartedly into politics, then they will be held accountable for their viewpoints and actions.

Sadhana

sadna, your comments..

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_970000/970321.stm

to krashid # 381

it is easy to laugh anything off.. but difficult to face it..

you are dragging me to the same argument which is going on ever and forever in chowk...

all what i said was that the stastics which u and your compatriots regularly use about 700000 lakh indian soldiers suppressing kashmir is not true.. i guess u lost the centrality of my argument and started pointing out one statement which is very peripheral.. we will come to that later...

do you really think all the 7 lakh soldiers are involved in counter insurgency movement??.. wake up man, even u cannot be that foolish , however blind u are..

we have to gaurd siachen, the entire Line of Control, the line of control to the east ( in leh) and some reserve units,

now how much will be left out of that 7 lakh to counter the isurgency movement or to ``suppress`` kashmiris is very easy to conclude....

all what i am pointing out is that the 7 lakh figure u use very often is wrong.. u got it? U GOT IT?

that was the main point o.k.? now if u still insist on the 7 lakh figure , so be it... no one except pakistan believes it...

now coming to the issue about which u pointed out my `` novice `` ness...

do you think the entire afghanistani movement is only about soviet union and afganistan mujahideen.. do you really think the afghanistan people could deter russians on their own...

u laugh at me.. i cant even do that.. i pity you ... the same is the case with kashmir or most of the other militant movements o.k.?

````````````If you think India is more super power and its soldiers very brave. And their moral high (with daily desertion in hundreds), I think you should reasses your thoughts on independence movement.``````````````

and when did i talk about india being more superpower and its soldiers being very brave...? if u want to say something about desertions in indian army about which i am hearing for the first time ( ofcourse that doesnt mean that it is not true..) , please dont use me as a ruse....

to end this , i agree that sometimes even 7 lakh soldiers will not be able to suppress the will of a community.. but that is only a peripheral statement o.k.? now dont hang on to it...

cheers,

jntuece99

Jay #371:

Thank you. Your `I AM Jay` caught my eye sometime back. :-)

jeunteuce#

Your remarks that if Kashmir movement could survive for 10 years with 700,000 army personnel.

I can only laugh at your novice.

In Vietnem, on one side was the superpower of world and on other side people. Do you know how prolonged is their struggle of independence. If not let me know.

In Afghanistan, on one side was the superpower of world and on other side Mujahideen. Probably you are aware that it has been an important contributor to downfall in Russian Economy and its breakdown. If you don`t let me know.

If you think India is more super power and its soldiers very brave. And their moral high (with daily desertion in hundreds), I think you should reasses your thoughts on independence movement.

Satyavadi #375

Shame on you.

You are selling your conscience without paycheck.

The ‘Other’ as outsider

Shereen Ratnagar

Let us return to the ``glory-continuity-roots`` paradigm mentioned in the first part of this article (Aryan-Harappan myth, October 11). Archaeologists agree that the Harappan script went out of use; that instead of the shallow street drains of Mohenjodaro, the towns of UP and Bihar in the time of the Buddha had more efficient sewage in the form of vertical ring ``wells`` and jars; that the network of land routes and sea trade serving the Harappan region terminated with the civilisation and new routes fell in place.

Even so, some suggest that Harappan traditions of bead-making still survive in the town of Khambhat. This, even though the modern industry utilises wage labour, iron pikes, diamond drills, and other elements absent in the bronze age, and even though no post-Harappan groups made the very long and thin red carnelian beads in which the Harappan beadmaker excelled. (The beads of later cultures were much smaller in size.)

Again, is it not hard to accept that the modern Sindhi ox-cart is a survival from Harappan times, if this kind of ox-cart is not continuously attested through all the centuries between these two periods? Tradition is not something that alternately freezes and thaws. Perhaps in a certain environment, modern cart-makers used similar raw materials and faced similar kinds of technological constraints as did the Harappans.

Much that has been said about proto-Hindu deities and practices in Harappan religion, too, originates with John Marshall, who, in the Twenties and Thirties, had no frame of reference other than ‘Hinduism’ in which to comprehend this newly discovered culture; in any case he did not give due attention to the work of Bhandarkar and misunderstood the character of certain Vedic deities. Yet, for decades scholars — and certainly this does not include ‘fascists’ alone — have uncritically followed his ideas on religious survivals from Harappan times.

There were abandonments of several Harappan villages, and of all the major cities, around 1800 BC, and it is of interest that, unlike the ancient Gangetic towns, the great Harappan cities never attracted settlement thereafter. Large-scale migration and resettlement points to the break-up/schism/fission and consequent re-forming of communities. This and the decline of State organisation would explain at least partly why the craft and writing traditions did not endure.

We are predisposed to the ‘continuity-roots’ idea because there is an old intellectual tradition that opposed the traditional and spiritual East steeped in religion, on the one hand, to the dynamic, technological, and rational West on the other. This is a European thought in origin, to which Indian academia has also been prone. Moreover, ‘it has always been so’ becomes a defence of hooliganism during the Ganapati immersion. This brings us to the crux of the issue.

Fundamentalism, whatever its colour, seeks continuities with a text or stage of development of a religion that is perceived to be the original stage. (In the case of the fundamentalist State of Pakistan, of course, it was essential to say that the great civilisation of Mohenjo-daro came to an end because the people had worshipped false gods.)

Movements that target groups within society as enemies require unquestioning allegiance. If the roots of the practice of Sati, or of caste divisions, lie in the remotest past, it is not easy to challenge them — and they become an aspect of being Indian. If Hinduism has been practised in this land since ‘time immemorial’, the ground is prepared to present the Muslim as the ‘Other’ outsider. The trend of singling out periods of the past for public attention, then, can in one sense be explained as Hindutva’s need for its ‘givens’, its unquestionable truths.

A very dangerous set of ideas follows from this kind of thinking, which is to ascribe actions, values, or beliefs, when convenient, to ‘Indianness’. We say that there is corruption not because we know we can get away with it, but because we are Indian. It is claimed that certain kinds of behaviour are ‘in the blood’ of Brahmins, others ‘in the genes’ of lower caste people.

Such thinking may well be fuelled by recent trends in which the study in America of Harappan and post-Harappan skulls and skeletons is being uncritically linked with questions of language (Aryans, for sure!) and even notions of identity. At Independence, we rejected the barbaric British notion that people of the ‘criminal tribes’ were born criminal — are we now veering back to such thinking?

It is essential to teach students of archaeology the social sciences of anthropology, history, and sociology, so that they can be equipped to study cultures other than their own, and cease to refer all their discoveries forward to the present.

But it is also reassuring that continuous vocal opposition over the last few years has not fallen on deaf ears. The new Harappan gallery in the National Museum has been set up with professional skill and displays little saffron garbage even if some Sacred Truths about continuity of religious practices still linger.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/121000/detOPI02.asp

To Satyavadi # 378

Hi, nice to see you again.. well, coming to the pay packet, scores of policemen, doctors, teachers, etc. etc. are ready to join u in ur migration to the other side...

ISI will get the distinction of becoming the biggest employer... another feather in its pack, biggest drug peddler, biggest destabiliser, biggest supporter of insurgency movements, etc.

what say? :-)

but dont ask me to join you.. i am very satisfied with the money i am going to make....

anyway see u in other threads..

luv,

jntuece99

Re: shankar

Yes, no one in their right mind in India would want some mohajirs coming back. Can you imagine having a Musharraf and krashid in India? We have Laloo and he`s problem enough.

Justnec or whatever your name is

This is the reason Why I begin to think that Indians are inhuman... I swore to Allah and you didnt believe me ... I challenge anyone on this forum to find me one textbook from Pakistan which said what it said...

How many of you actually read that article... could it be that it was written in a jest???? Maybe???

I didnot quote any WOlpert or Gandhian on this issue ... I told you that ``IT IS A FACT THAT THERE EXISTS NO SUCH TEXTBOOK IN PAKISTAN WHICH HAS K FOR KAFIR OR Z FOR ZALIM WITH A SIKH``

Show me the article on Dawn... and the article must have been written sarcastically if any such article exists ... why cant Indians distinguish between sarcasm and truth?????

That was a pathetic attempt .. your logic didnt even make sense.. it is almost that you are trying to start a conflict.

Jnteuece #372:

Hey there, welcome back.

I havent gotten my check from `the agency` for September. I am thinking of jumping to the one on the other side of the fence. Lets see :)

Satyavadi

Nine houses torched in Dalbandin

By Muhammad Ejaz Khan

QUETTA: A Hindu temple and few houses of the Hindu community came under attack at Dalbandin, 340 kilometres from the provincial metropolis, on Wednesday when an infuriated crowd protested against the alleged desecration of a religious textbook, said official sources.

The sources said Frontier Corps has been called in at Dalbandin to control the situation. The law and order situation in Dalbandin is under control now, officials claimed. Independent sources said a Hindu temple and at least nine houses of the community at a Hindu of Muhalla of Dalbandin were torched by over 5,000 enraged people when they came to know that four Hindus had distributed ``Parshad`` (sweet) in the pages of a religious textbook of class seventh.

The sources said the mob carrying batons and kerosene oil attacked the temple and the houses of the Hindu community. They sprinkled kerosene oil and torched the temple and the houses. However, no loss of life was reported.

Balochistan Home secretary Maj (retd) Shaharyar Khan Mahsud confirmed the incident to The News and said the FC has been deployed in Dalbandin to control the situation. The religious scholars of the area had played an effective role in de-escalating the tension in the area, Shaharyar said. The Dalbandin police told this correspondent that they had arrested four Hindus - Shaval Das, Chando Mal, Anand Lal and Sardar Dev Singh. The police said when the enraged persons attacked the temple some 16 cops of the police and Levies were performing their duties in the Hindu Muhalla. The police resorted to tear-gas shelling and aerial firing to disperse them but in vain, they said.

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/oct2000-daily/12-10-2000/main/main13.htm