India

"The Greeks, in their mythology, were merely disciples of India and of Egypt."

"I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times."

"Joseph Waligore is equally critical but has no solution except that they did borrow ‘from Indian philosophy but only had limited contact with the Indians and could not penetrate the core of Indian thought’."

"No artisan can be expected to give his mind to his calling in the midst of a people who are either wretchedly poor, or who, if rich, assume an appearance of poverty, and who regard not the beauty and excellence but the cheapness of an article; a people whose grandeess pay for a work of art considerably under its value and according to their own caprice… For it should not be inferred that the workman is held in esteem, or arrives at a stage of independence. Nothing but sheer necessity or blows from a cudgel keeps him employed; he never can become rich, and he feels it no trifling matter if he have the means of satisfying the cravings of hunger and of covering his body with the coarsest garment. If money be gained it does not in any measure go into his pocket, but only serves to increase the wealth of the merchant."

"Two curious nations there have been - sprung of the same race, but placed in different circumstances and environments, working put the problems of life each in its own particular way. I mean the ancient Hindu and the ancient Greek. The Indian Aryan - bounded on the north by the snow-caps of the Himalayas, with fresh-water rivers like rolling oceans surrounding him in the plains, with eternal forests which, to him, seemed to be the end of the world - turned his vision inward; and given the natural instinct, the superfine brain of the Aryan, with this sublime scenery surrounding him, the natural result was that he became introspective. The analysis of his own mind was the great theme of the Indo-Aryan. With the Greek, on the other hand, who arrived at a part of the earth which was more beautiful than sublime, the beautiful islands of the Grecian Archipelago, nature all around him generous yet simple - his mind naturally went outside. It wanted to analyse the external world. And as a result we find that from India have sprung all the analytical sciences, and from Greece all the sciences of generalization. The Hindu mind went on in its own direction and produced the most marvellous results. Even at the present day, the logical capacity of the Hindus, and the tremendous power which the Indian brain still possesses, is beyond compare. ...Today the ancient Greek is meeting the ancient Hindu on the soil of India."

"There are around 35,000 sanitation workers in Mumbai. Of these, some 28,000 are and 7,000 are hired on contract. Permanent sanitation workers have their basic working conditions protected by law. They are provided with uniforms, payment slips, medical insurance, and paid leave. Contract workers have none of these benefits. As migrants, they do not have ration cards or permanent housing either. Most of them live in unauthorised shanties that are frequently demolished, which forces them to periodically search for a new spot to build their homes again. It is not uncommon for the work of permanent employees to also be subdivided among contract workers. After years of persistent ground-level organising, the movement has come closer to the abolition of the system of subcontracting, which has made sanitation work one of the most dangerous, precarious, and dehumanising jobs in India today."

"…grandees pay for a work of art considerably under its value, and according to their own caprice. … When an Omrah or Mansabdar requires the services of an artisan, he sends to the bazar for him, employing force, if necessary, to make the poor man work; and after the task is finished, the unfeeling lord pays, not according to the value- of the labour, but agreeably to his own standard of fair remuneration; the artisan having reason to congratulate himself if the Korrah has not been given in part payment."

"Notwithstanding the institution of castes, there is no country where men rise with more ease from the lowest rank to the highest. The first nabob (now king) of Oude, was a petty merchant; the first peishwa, a village accountant; the ancestors of Holcar were goatherds; and those of Scindia, slaves. All these, and many other instances, took place within the last century. Promotions from among the common people to all the ranks of civil and military employment, short of sovereignty, are of daily occurrence under native states, and this keeps up the spirit of the people, and in that respect partially supplies the place of popular institutions. The free intercourse of the different ranks also keeps up a sort of circulation and diffusion of such knowledge and such sentiments as exist in the society. Under us, on the contrary, the community is divided into two perfectly distinct and dissimilar bodies, of which the one is torpid and inactive, while all the sense and power seems concentrated in the other…"

"All of the contract workers employed by the are Dalits, who are migrants. [...] Several sanitation workers [...] are forced to leave their homes in rural areas in search of work because of drought conditions, which are becoming worse each year. The two main areas they come from are in Maharashtra, and Salem and in Tamil Nadu. They are often landless, or unable to make a living from the small plots of land they own. [...] The wages for contract workers are barely enough to survive on, and many of them are malnourished. They collect garbage with their bare hands, without hand gloves, facemasks, shoes, or a uniform. There are no facilities at the work stations for employees to wash their bodies. [...] The workers suffer from various illnesses because of the poor working conditions and often die at a young age. Tuberculosis and other lung diseases are common due to the kinds of gases they are exposed to and the conditions they work in. There are frequent accidents."

"Genetic variation in contemporary South Asian populations follows a northwest to southeast decreasing cline of shared West Eurasian ancestry."

"For me and for Toomas Kivisild, South Asia is logically the ultimate origin of M17 and his ancestors; and sure enough we find the highest rates and greatest diversity of the M17 line in Pakistan, India, and eastern Iran, and low rates in the Caucasus. M17 is not only more diverse in South Asia than in Central Asia, but diversity characterizes its presence in isolated tribal groups in the south, thus undermining any theory of M17 as a marker of a ‘male Aryan invasion’ of India. One average estimate for the origin of this line in India is as much as 51,000 years. All this suggests that M17 could have found his way initially from India or Pakistan, through Kashmir, then via Central Asia and Russia, before finally coming into Europe."

"So, in the migration scenario females with steppe-related ancestry move down across the [Indus] by the end of the bronze age and this leads to the formulation of the “patriarchal-steppe-warrior-chariot” bronze age hymns somehow in iron age India? And Iranians ... somehow manage to compose the Avesta before the Iranians migrate to western Iran and somehow the Medes and Persians separate around 1000 BCE. Also, by some miracle, the Mitanni reached West Asia around 1760 BCE. This is simply impossible."

"The anthropologists who have recently described the skeletons from Harappa remark that there, as at Lothal, the population would appear, on the available evidence, to have remained more or less stable to the present day."

"As for the question of biological continuity within the Indus Valley, two discontinuities appear to exist. The first occurs between 6000 and 4500 BC [with another discontinuity] at some point after 800 BC but before 200 BC. In the intervening period, [the data] reveals clear indications of interaction with the West and specifically with the Iranian Plateau."

"The data provide no support for any model of massive migration and gene flow between the oases of Bactria and the Indus Valley. Rather, patterns of phenetic affinity best conform to a pattern of long-standing, but low-level bidirectional mutual exchange."

"Overall percentages [of steppe ancestry] are generally very low, and in South Asia also too late for a plausible first arrival of Indic languages here (let alone Indo-Iranic as a whole). But however small and late, and however implausible that they replaced all languages from Iran right across to northern India, that is what has to be claimed for these weak signals, for the Steppe hypothesis to be right."

"Unfortunately, genetic studies sometimes draw conclusions about language, which is entirely incorrect. Genetics addresses the history of a population’s formation, including migration to new regions, mixing with other populations, and the processes involved—but nothing beyond that... A similar situation arises in palaeogenetics, where study results indicate that the population of the Indian subcontinent formed from neighboring substrates, yet the conclusions still incorporate the steppe homeland hypothesis. This notion may have delayed a successful resolution of the problem for many decades. It is necessary to establish a framework in which archaeological, palaeogenetic, and linguistic data do not contradict one another, as occurs with the Steppe theory. Since this is primarily a linguistic problem, the starting point should be language."

"Only 5% of the Y chromosomes of the R1a-Z93 subtype that occurs at 100% frequency in the steppe population are present in the Swat Valley population. Therefore, it is assumed that women were incorporated there. But if we assume that this population was responsible for 30% of the Indian population, a possible proportion of steppe genes decreases to 6-7% and the proportion of male chromosomes become infinitesimal... However, with such a low male contribution, even for the population of the Swat Valley, language change is doubtful, so it is an almost unbelievable proposition for India... [A]gainst the background of the lack of archaeological and genetic data on mass migration to the region with a high population density, it is more logical to assume that the ancestors of the North Indians lived somewhere close to South Asia."

"Nothing in the osteometric data shows that relationships existed between the populations of the Oxus Civilization and those of the steppes: these populations are separate, different. This would prove that if there were migrations, they were not significant at that time. Mixtures of steppe and oasis populations do not become significant until the time when corpses disappear through cremation or exposure."

"[The ancient Harappans] are not markedly different in their skeletal biology from the present-day inhabitants of Northwestern India and Pakistan... Of the Aryans, we must defer to literary and linguistic scholars in whose province lies the determination of the arrival and nature of the linguistic phenomenon we call the Aryans. . . . But archaeological evidence of Aryan-speaking peoples is questionable and the skeletal evidence is nil."

"Most genetic studies are built on unstated, unproven (and often unwitting) assumptions: not only that migration is the supreme mechanism to account for the spread of genes and languages, but also that, in India’s case, the said genes could only have spread unidirectionally. The studies then proceed to marshal evidence to ‘prove’ the assumption, in a classic case of circularity."

"[T]he present-day linguistic affinities of different Indian populations per se are perhaps among the most ambiguous and even potentially controversial lines of evidence in the reconstruction of prehistoric demographic processes in India."

"South Asia has indeed been at the crossroads for much of modern human prehistory."

"At first glance, Muslims seem more resistant to family planning than others. Research on Muslim fertility in India, for instance, concludes that Indian Muslims have been more reluctant to adopt contraception and family planning than Hindus or Christians, despite equal access. Muslims tend to have an especially large fertility advantage when they are in the minority. In Europe, India, Thailand, Russia, China and the Philippines, the Muslim fertility advantage is greatest. This is particularly true of zones of conflict like Israel–Palestine. One could argue that minorities in general, not merely Muslim ones, tend to have higher fertility rates than majorities. Yet in Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia, Muslims outbirth most Hindu, Christian and Chinese minorities, while in the Arab world, Muslim fertility is higher than that of the minority Christians and Druze."

"Any law against population control will be a conspiracy against Muslims... The rise in the country’s population is due to Dalits and tribals and not because of Muslims."

"In reading the genetics literature on South Asia, it is very clear that many of the studies actually start out with some assumptions that are clearly problematic, if not in some cases completely untenable. Perhaps the single most serious problem concerns the assumption, which many studies actually start with as a basic premise, that the Indo-Aryan invasions are a well-established (pre)historical reality. The studies confirm such invasions in large part because they actually assume them to begin with."

"In short, there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the northwestern sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture... All prehistoric human remains recovered thus far from the Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable as ancient South Asians... How could one recognize an Aryan, living or dead, when the biological criteria for Aryanness are non-existent?"

"Confusing language movements with demographic movements was a childhood disease of Indo-European linguistics before 1945. Especially after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), race thinking came to dominate the Humanities. There were warnings from Indo-Europeanists, including the much-maligned Friedrich Max Müller, to maintain the distinction, but the public and many professionals started speaking of “the Aryan race”, not in the vague sense common earlier (race = any group of hereditary belonging, from family to nation and race to humanity, Sanskrit jāti), but in the biological sense. After 1945, this went completely out of fashion in the West, but in India, not encumbered with the guilt about Nazi racism, time has stood still."

"When you consider the population trends in the Indian Subcontinent, it seems inevitable that Muslims will make up 50% of its population in less than eighty years. Extrapolating the trends within India, it will be less than fifty years until the Muslims are again 24% of the population, the percentage which in the forties was enough to enforce Partition. Add to that the millions- strong illegal Muslim immigration into India, which will only accelerate as population pressure increases in Pakistan and Bangla Desh. So, the majority status of the Hindus is by no means guaranteed. Moreover, the so- called minority is in fact the Indian department of a world-wide movement, from which it effectively gets moral and financial support."

"In fact, the migration figures are the best refutation of the "Hindu bully, Muslim victim" myth: as against the constant trickle of Hindu refugees out of Pakistan and Bangladesh, there is no Muslim flight out of India, but on the contrary a massive Muslim influx into India."

"Of­ficial census data show that the Hindu per­centage has decli­ned, and the Muslim percentage increas­ed, in every single successive census in British India, free India, Pakistan and Bangl­adesh... Ever since regular census operations were started, the per­centage of Muslims has grown every decade in British India, in­dependent India, Pakis­tan and Banglade­sh... The Muslim percentage has not only incre­ased, but the rate of increase itself has increased... The one general prediction to which the data cer­tainly compel us, is that the Muslim percentage will be increas­ing at an ac­celerating rate for at least another generation; and also beyond that, unless the present generation of young adult Muslims brings it procreati­on rate down to the average Indian level...So, every decade the Muslim per­cent­age in the Subcon­tinent incre­ases by more than 1%, with the rate of incre­ase itself incr­eas­ing. In India, the rate of incre­ase in the Muslim per­centage is considerable, though lower than the subcontinental total, but is rising faster due to the differential in the use of birth control and the incre­asing Muslim immigration... And why stop our conclusion with finding the Hindu position right? The data just surveyed also teach us something about the secularists who have ridiculed and thoroughly blackened the said Hindu position: they are wrong. We have not used any esoteric figures inaccessible to the common man; all these data were at the disposal of the secularists. Yet, some of them insist that the Muslim percentage will remain constant, or that the Muslim incre­ase is proportionate to relative Muslim poverty. The fact deserves to be noted: a whole class of leading intellec­tuals brutal­ly denies easily verifiable facts, i.c. the accelerating increase of the Muslim and the decrease of the Hindu per­centage..."

"Immigration from Bangladesh is of two types. Firstly there are members of the minority communities fleeing occasional waves of per­secution or the more general sense of being second-class citiz­ens under the Islamic dispensation. Few Hindus would disput­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­e their right to settle down in India. Secondly, there are Mus­lims seek­ing econom­­ic oppor­tunities or sheer living space, which dirt-poor and inten­sely overc­rowded Banglad­esh cannot offer to the ever-larger num­bers of newcomers on the hous­ing and labour market... The BJP argues that refugees from persecution and illegal economic migrants merit a different treat­ment, as is assumed in the arrangements for refugee relief of most countries... Terminology is a part of the problem here, with secularists systematically describing Hindu refugees as "migrants" if not "infiltrators", and Muslim illegal immigrants as "refugees"."

"The Pakistani fertility rate is slowly declining: In 1988 it was at 5.56 children, and since then it has lost only 0.9 percent annually. With 4.6 children in 2005, 6 the Pakistani fertility rate, the highest in this group, is far above that of the Arab world, except for Yemen. One cannot fail to be impressed by the alignment of the fertility of the Muslims of northern India with that of Pakistan: In 1998 –1999, it was 4.8 in Uttar Pradesh, 4.9 in Rajasthan, and 4 in Bihar. One might suggest a slight boost from the combined effect of minority status and the fact that Muslims in these states belong to the least privileged strata in social and educational terms. The minority effect must play the leading role, because elsewhere in India, in states where Muslims enjoy higher than average educational status, in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, they also have a higher fertility rate than their Hindu neighbors."

"The Muslim population of the Indian subcontinent would reach 820 million by 2050 against 1200 million non-Muslims. Equal numbers with and even bypassing of the non-Muslim would be possible by century’s end."

"Some commentators have drawn attention to the divergent courses of the fertility rates in the two parts of Bengal. In Indian West Bengal, which is three quarters Hindu, the fertility rate is 2.07, below the re- placement level. The contrast with Muslim Bangladesh, where the transition has been blocked, is striking. A shared language should have led to a convergence through cultural contagion, but a pietistic Islam seems to have frozen changes in patterns of thought in Bangladesh and, as a repercussion, provoked a halt to the transition. But a consideration of educational patterns leads to a rejection of the hypothesis of a direct effect of the religious variable on fertility."

"The Hindu population in East Bengal had declined from 33% in 1901 to 28% in 1941. It fell to 22% by 1951 due to the Partition and the post-Partition exodus, and to 18.5% in 1961. By 1971, it had fallen to 13.5%, partly due to the 1971 massacre by the Pakistani Army, partly due to intermittent waves of emigrati­on. The 1981 figure was 12.1%. In 1989 and 1990, due to "large-scale destru­ction, desecration and damage inflic­ted on Hindu temples and religious institutions", "clandestine migrat­ion­­­ by the Hindus to India went up"."

"Contrary to the noise in several quarters, careful analyses of the data show that minorities are not just protected but indeed thriving in India. This is particularly remarkable given the wider context within the South Asian neighbourhood where the share of the majority religious denomination has increased and minority populations have shrunk alarmingly across countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Afghanistan... By way of illustration, India is one of the few countries that has a legal definition of minorities and provides constitutionally protected rights for them. The outcomes of these progressive policies and inclusive institutions are reflected in the growing number of minority populations within India."

"It was in February 1912, while standing in the spacious hall of the Arya Samaj in Calcutta, that a Bengali gentleman, dressed in European habits, was introduced as Colonel U. Mukerji of the I. M. S. to me. His dress at first prejudiced me against him, but when he spoke to me of the pamphlet on which he was engaged and worked out mathematically how within the next 420 years the Indo-Aryan race would be wiped off the face of the earth unless steps were taken to save it. I learnt to respect his patriotism and resolved mentally that I would never be led away by mere appearance in judging of the worth of a man in future."

"In Scrafton, for example, the Muslim population consists of foreign conquerors as opposed to native Indians, and it is broken down into Arabs, Pathans, Afghans, Mongol Tartars, and Persians, plus slaves. There is no recognition of indigenous Muslims other than "slaves," and the numbers are hugely underrated: The Moors are not "the hundredth part of the natives". Rural Bengal's millions of Muslims are not yet visible."

"However, the seed of the debate on the differential population growth rates of the Hindus and Muslims was planted in the undivided India itself. Kingsley Davis, an eminent demographer, was one of the first to raise a debate on the Hindu-Muslim population growth rates in the sub- continent. In his famous book “The Population of India and Pakistan” (1951), he presented before the world the fact that Muslim fertility was higher than the Hindu fertility. For instance, the decline in the proportion of the Hindus from 75.1 per cent to 72.9 per cent in between the censuses of 1881 and 1901 (Davis, 1951) created strong reaction and fear among the Hindus that the Muslims would become the majority population in India in the future. Numerous research and review studies have been done on this area since then. But there seems to be no end to this highly debated topic and it still remains a very popular area for research studies among the research scholars and population scientists."

"In Asia, a prominent example of immigration-driven ethnic change is taking place in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam. A Hindu-majority tongue of Indian territory lying north of Muslim Bangladesh, Assam has long been host to large-scale illegal, but peaceful, Bengali immigration. Bengali Muslims grew 30 to 50 percent over the period 1971 to 1991. They now constitute more than 30 percent of Assam’s population and are believed to control the electoral verdict in 60 of Assam’s 126 Assembly constituencies. Numerous battles have taken place over whether large numbers of Muslims have the legal status necessary to add their name to the electoral rolls. Muslim growth has been the catalyst for ugly Assamese attacks against unarmed Bengali workers since the 1980s, and an Assamese political movement demands the deportation of illegal immigrants. This conflict is regional, but on the wider Indian level, the growth of the Muslim population through higher fertility and an often exaggerated degree of illegal immigration has been a red flag for Hindu nationalism. The Muslim population’s fertility advantage over Hindus was 10 percent at partition in 1947, but is now 25–35 percent. Only a fraction of this gap can be explained by relative Muslim poverty. Muslims grew from roughly 8 percent of the Indian total in 1947 to 14 percent today, and are projected to rise to 17 percent by 2050. These are not staggering numbers, yet have proven useful tinder for Hindu nationalists and sparked sporadic violent reprisals against Indian Muslims."

"In the whole of India the proportion of Hindus to the total population has fallen in 30 years from 74 to 69 percent, but this is partly due to the inclusion at each succeeding Census of new areas in which Hindus, if they are found at all, are a minority. Bengal contributes 24 millions or 36 per cent to the total number of Muhammadans in India. They are found chiefly in the Eastern and Northern Districts. In this tract there was a vigorious and highly successful propaganda in the days of the Pathan Kings of Bengal. The inhabitants had never been fully Hinduised, and at the time of the first Muhamadan invasions most of them probably professed a debased form of Buddhism. They were spurned by the high class Hindus as unclean and so listened readily to the preachings of the Mullahs who proclaimed that all men are equal in the sight of Allah, backed as it often was by a varying amount of compulsion. "Another less notable exception is found in Malabar, where the Mappillas are the descendants of local converts, the earliest of whom were made by the Arabs who began to frequent the coast in the 8th century. A certain number of new converts are still being made." "It should be added that even in Northern India the Muhammadan population is by no means wholly of foreign origin. Of the 12 million followers of Islam in the Punjab, 10 millions showed by the caste entry (such as Rajputs, Jat, Arain, Gujar, Mochi, Turkhan, and Teli) that they were originally Hindus. The number who described themselves as belonging to foreign races such as Pathan, Biloch, Sheikh, Saiyad and Moghal was less than 2 millions, and some even of these have very little foreign blood in their veins.” "The number of Muhammadans has risen during the decade by 6.7% as compared with only 5% in the case of Hindus. There is a small but continuous accession of converts from Hinduism and other religions, but the main reason for the relatively more rapid growth of the followers of the Prophet is that they are more prolific. This may possibly be due to their more nourishing dietery, but the main reason is that their social customs are more favour able to a high birth rate them those of The Hindus. They have fewer marriage restrictions, early marriage is uncommon and widows remarry more freely. "The greater reproductive capacity of the Muhammadans is shown by the fact that the proportion of married females to the total number of females aged 15- 40 exceeds corresponding proportion for Hindus. The result is that Muhammadans have 37 childrens aged 0—5 to every person aged 15—40 while the Hindus have only 33. Since 1881 the number of Muhammadans in the areas then enumerated has risen by 26.4 per cent while the corresponding increase for Hindus is only 15. 1 per cent." Writing on the comparative increase of the two communities in Burmah the census report proceeds in para 173:— "We have seen that in Burmah the Hindu settlers have a tendency to become absorbed in the Buddhist population around them, but this is not so with the Muhammadans. There are scattered communities of Muhammadans who have been settled in Burmah for several generations and still retain their faith unimpaired. When a Muhammadan marries a Burmese wife he brings up his children in his own religion. The offsprings of these mixed marriages are known as Zerbadis."

"In six decades (1881-1941)… at no census have the Muslims failed to improve their percentage and the Hindus failed to lose…” [It is due not only to the] “proportion of Muslim women married, but those who are married also have a higher fertility.”"

"The population of India in the present day is over three hundred millions, and every sixth man is a Muslim. Nine hundred years ago there were no Mohammedans east of the Indus..."

"Ever since 1951, "the propor­tion of Mus­lims has been gradually but steadily increa­sing every decade by roughly one percentage point"­."

"Of the whole population of Hindustan... five parts in six are composed of Hindus..."

"In short, while there can be no doubt about the presence of some Muslims in Sind, Gujarat and on the western coast of India, their number, till the end of the tenth century was almost microscopic. In Hindustan proper, east of the river Indus, there were hardly any Musalmans in A.D. 1000."

"Therefore, wherever Muslims made successful inroads, they reduced the Hindu population directly by slaughtering the men in large numbers and taking away the women and children as captives. It indirectly reduced the Hindu populace by rendering the remnant Hindu men unprocreative by depriving them of childbearing female partners. Since those women became the vehicle for breeding Muslim offspring instead, the final result was a reduction of the Hindu populace and a sharp rise in the number of Muslims. The growing Muslim population was to be maintained by the toiling of the vanquished Hindus, subjected to grinding taxes. This is roughly the same protocol, which Prophet Muhammad had applied to the Jews of Banu Qurayza and Khaybar."

"Although there were mass conversions, the country was too vast, the invaders too few, and the volume of immigration too small to change the social complex… India, therefore, never became a Muslim nation, but remained simply a Hindu country in which Muslims were numerous."

"It has been estimated earlier that there were about four hundred thousand Muslims in India in A.D. 1200. If their numbers became double in sixty to seventy years, they would have been about 3.2 million in 1400. The total population of India in 1400 has been estimated at 170 million. The Muslims would have been about 1.8 per cent of the total population with 50 to 53 Hindus to one Muslim."