anthropologists-from-india

"| want to assert this because nowadays under the influence of some theory of the other from the west we forget our basic task, which is to record the life of our people as truthfully, as honestly, as we can do."

"Intensive studies of individual tribes are very important and I think ASI (ie. the Anthropological Survey of India) will always help scholars studying tribal society in different parts of the country. We should not leave the study of Nadars of Tamil Nadu or Patidars of Gujarat to foreign scholars. We should study them ourselves. This is very very necessary particularly because their intellectual and political perspectives are different from our own."

"A press report on a recent anthropological survey led by Kumar Suresh Singh explains: “English anthropologists contended that the upper castes of India belonged to the Caucasian race and the rest drew their origin from Australoid types. The survey has revealed this to be a myth. ‘Biologically and linguistically, we are very mixed’, says Suresh Singh (…) The report says that the people of India have more genes in common, and also share a large number of morphological traits. ‘There is much greater homogenization in terms of morphological and genetic traits at the regional level’, says the report. For example, the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu (esp. Iyengars) share more traits with non-Brahmins in the state than with fellow Brahmins in western or northern India. (…) The sons-of-the-soil theory also stands demolished. The Anthropological Survey of India has found no community in India that can’t remember having migrated from some other part of the country.”"

"[I]n religious matters, the present-day Hindus are the descendants of the Indus valley people."

"Chatterji is also a standard and predictable face at major events supporting Kashmir separatists, having declared herself to be working on ‘self-determination in Indian-administered Kashmir’. At one such conference on Kashmir, organized by the Pakistani Students Association at George Washington University, the Embassy of Pakistan, and Pakistan’s Minister of Kashmir Affairs, she spoke of the ‘growing concern among civil society groups about human rights crises in Indian-occupied Kashmir in the areas of social, political, cultural, religious, and economic rights’. She accused India of ‘continued occupation of [certain areas of] Kashmir’. Muhammed Sadiq... explains how Angana Chatterjee uses human rights concerns in a lopsided way to play in the hands of Islamic terrorists: [Angana Chatterji] announced the formation of the ‘International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Administered Kashmir’ on 5 April in Srinagar. Interestingly, this organisation too insists that the focus of HR investigations should be on the Indian side of Kashmir and not in PoK too. Moreover, this is a fault-finding mission. Its only aim is to slam the Indian security forces, further highlight HR issues and vitiate the situation. There is no attempt at reconciliation, offering succour to HR victims or working with the government to ensure that HR violations do not take place. Dr Chatterji, like many before her, are, intent on primarily demonising the Indian security forces and thereby fanning hatred."

"The lockdown and its humanitarian consequences have begun to fundamentally challenge the mind-set and modalities of India's welfare architecture. We can no longer afford to live with or simply look away from the exclusion 'errors' of the past. Many of the most painful and humiliating effects of the lockdown are likely to remain simply unacknowledged, let alone adequately accounted for or compensated. But, ensuring that people have enough food and cash to survive the crisis should remain non-negotiable. [...] The lesson we are learning now is that for India to actually release the grain to citizens, she requires the entire system to go against the grain of deeply entrenched state beliefs and practices. After decades of distrust, it’s time to cultivate some moral fibre."

"The current welfare system cannot deal with the Covid-19 crisis. [...] During a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude, the need of the hour (and by now the days, weeks, and months) is to move to a demand-based system of relief and welfare, where those in need of food and cash, whether or not they are currently listed as beneficiaries, are able to reach out, ask for and access it. But this is in fact the complete antithesis of the current welfare system, which has been constructed by successive Indian governments. It also goes against some fundamental and longstanding assumptions. One, that we don’t have the . Two, that we don’t have the implementation capacity. And therefore, three, that we have no choice but to limit the beneficiaries in any given scheme through processes of enumeration, identification and authentication. The problem is that in the absence of strong, decentralised and responsive administrative capacity, these very processes of identification and verification exclude many intended beneficiaries at any given time. So, in practice, infrequently revised quotas mean that even those identified as legitimate beneficiaries must routinely be kept pending until others drop out or are bumped off the list."

"To understand why this welfare system persists, we need to acknowledge that at its root, targeting and its attendant exclusions are ultimately also justified and sustained by a sense of suspicion that implicates both the public and the state’s own functionaries. So, delivery is designed on the assumption that dominant local elites and intermediaries — who will otherwise use every opportunity to exploit the poor and while diverting and extracting entitlements and benefits — must be, at least in theory, excluded and bypassed. The poor themselves, even if materially deprived, are often cast as morally undeserving, susceptible to manipulation, expedient, and irresponsible (one only had to witness the discourse around Monday’s nationwide run on liquor stores for proof). And finally, that corrupt and rent-seeking bureaucrats and who only work the system rather than keep it working must have their discretion clipped. The result is a welfare architecture that is so invested in minimising errors of inclusion that it continuously chooses fiscal, bureaucratic and technological ‘solutions’ that systematically enable ‘errors of exclusion’ to multiply."

"The table for Bengal shows that the Chandal who stands sixth in the scheme of social precedence and whose touch pollutes, is not much differentiated from the Brahmin (…) In Bombay the Deshastha Brahmin bears a closer affinity to the Son-Koli, a fisherman caste, than to his own compeer, the Chitpavan Brahmin. The Mahar, the Untouchable of the Maratha region, comes next together with the Kunbi, the peasant. They follow in order the Shenvi Brahmin, the Nagar Brahmin and the high-caste Maratha. These results (…) mean that there is no correspondence between social gradation and physical differentiation in Bombay."

"Father Hermanns is particularly angry with a publication titled The Adivasis — So-Called by G.S. Ghurye, the great social scientist who had mapped the nasal indexes and skull indexes of all the communities in India. Speaking with authority, Ghurye rejects the motivated notion of “adivasi”: as the article’s title eloquently says, the so-called adivasis are not more adivasi than the targeted non- adivasis. Nearly all Indians are sons of the soil, and no one in India has any more right to call himself a true native than the next man. The pure race is a myth, a myth that has become frowned upon thanks to Hitler's terrible use of this myth. But in India, interested quarters continue to use this myth of “racial integrity”. Father Hermanns calls it an “aboriginal claim”, though it is in fact a Western notion attributed and taught to the tribals by the missionaries, because this myth has been serving them so well for over a century now."

"It is significant that the vast majority of the numerous publications on caste fail to mention Ghurye’s important work even in their biblography; as for Ambedkar, his explicit rejection of the AIT-cum-racial explanation of caste goes equally unmentioned in the copious pro-Dalit and Indian Marxist literature."

"But Ghurye was a great man, author of ten thousand pages on subjects as diverse as caste and costume, Shakespeare and sadhus.... Ghurye’s extraordinary productivity (his bibliography lists 30 books) reflected his mode of production. He dictated his later work, and careful study has shown that his basic theoretical stances did not change through- out his career. He remained faithful to Rivers’s diffusionism despite the parade of functionalism, structuralism, Marxism, and postcolonialism across the landscape of Indian sociology during his long life. Caste and Race is his best book, for it was written rather than dictated, and its argument is fresh and passionate in a young scholar’s mind. Had Ghurye written nothing else, this book alone would have made him an important figure."