Sanskrit is unusual in that it greatly affected Chinese, Arabic and European philology and linguistics. William Dalrymple's new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World highlights this. This has infuriated shitty Indian origin historians. One such, Kiran Kumbhar. a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Shitting on India, University of Pennsylvania, writes angrily in India Forum-
The Indocentric Road Taken
People should not be taking Indocentric road. They should shit on India while squatting in Pennsylvania.
An ode to a “forgotten” India which needs to be given its rightful place in a Euro-American-centric globe
It is becoming China-centric. The Chinese aren't going to read shitty Indian historians. They may read Dalrymple because he is actually English and thus can write that language properly. It will be helpful to India for the Chinese to be reminded of what they owe to the land of the Buddha. I don't suppose a lot of them read Victor Mair.
ends up replacing one form of cultural supremacy with another.
Did you know Brahmins learn Sanskrit mantras? Also, many Brahmins have dicks. Thus Sanskrit is very evil.
The obsession with an original centre of intellectual genius
as opposed to boring, modish, plagiarised shite of the sort this cretin specializes in
ignores cross-cultural exchanges and knowledge produced out of labour.
only in the sense that it ignores the sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos by the invisible cock of a Joe Biden who has flagrantly defied his constitutional duty to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Why did Dalrymple not mention this in his book? Is it because he is a FASCIST?
BTW only knowledge produced out of this shithead's asshole was the product of labour.
Before Google Search, there was Tell Me Why. Author Arkady Leokum’s multi-volume American book series of that title, inaugurated in the 1960s, was a compilation of easy-to-understand answers to a large number of questions about the world. For decades the series was a common and reliable resource to many children and parents in the English-speaking world, who might have wanted to know “Why does the tiger have stripes?” or “How did the calendar begin?”
Kiran is ignoring cross-cultural exchanges across his own asshole. Why? Is it because of Joe Biden's invisible cock? Or is he a FASCIST?
In the late 1990s, by a stroke of luck, a consolidated volume titled The Big Book of Tell Me Why entered my life when I was about 12.
i.e. smarter than he is now.
It was a thick tome – 600 pages chock-full with that intoxicating thing called knowledge – and I consulted it almost every day for years thereafter.
It was one of the cross-cultural changes occurring across his own asshole. Kiran found this very intoxicating. Was he also able to cram Dalrymple's book up his pooper? If not, why not?
Today, the book’s contents are a distant memory for me, but there is one thing I still vividly remember: the thrill I’d experience whenever I encountered a mention of India in its pages. That feeling was really something else, a kind of innate childhood euphoria triggered by praise for “my” country and its people, especially its scientific past, in a glossy “international” book.
firmly lodged up the lad's rectum.
The world has come a long way since the 1990s.
Kiran hasn't. Still, we can hope for a brighter future for his asshole which Joe Biden's invisible cock may leave dripping with cum so as to facilitate cross cultural exchanges.
Folks across the world can access far more than just scattered titbits and cursory references to Indian ideas and intellectual achievements. Especially so this year, with the release of William Dalrymple’s book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World, which bills itself as a comprehensive, magisterial story of India’s “often forgotten position as a […] civilisational engine at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds.”
It was completely forgotten by Indian shitheads who pretend to be historians or social science savants.
My 1990s self would have found Dalrymple’s aims of focusing fully on the Indian story, and enlightening a still largely Euro-America-centric world about the arts, cultures, and sciences of people from the subcontinent, highly exciting.
When I was 12 I read Basham's 'the wonder that was India'. I suppose Dalrymple saw that there is still a market for Basham's book whereas there is none for, Basham's student, Romilla Thapar's shite.
But in 2024, I am a child no more, and having read the book now as a scholar,
he couldn't have read it anytime before, even as a scholar, because it wasn't published till now. Kiran is truly as stupid as shit.
I feel ambivalent about the ways in which Dalrymple has chosen to narrate the “Indian” story. Take, for instance, an emblematic statement on the first millennium CE, when, Dalrymple writes: “Indian religions, philosophies and sciences spread out in all directions across the Indosphere, like the shifting rays of a Sanskritic sun that sometimes penetrated surprisingly deeply into far distant recesses of the world around it.”
The Buddhists had abandoned Pali for Sanskrit which did reach Kyoto and Ulan Bator and Baghdad.
Historians […] will no doubt cringe at the reduction of the majestic diversity of the subcontinent’s religions, philosophies and sciences, as well as languages, into a singular “Sanskritic” sun.
Modish Lefty historians will. Why has the great contribution of disabled Telugu Lesbians to the development of Chinese linguistics not been acknowledged?
Those are some striking statements about what the author terms the “Indosphere” and the “Sanskritic sun”. Historians of science will be quick to recognise the parallels between “Indian” philosophies and sciences “spreading out” to distant recesses of the world, and the much-critiqued framework of “Western” science “diffusing out” to the global “periphery,” proposed in 1967 in a well-known Science article.
Western science has replaced everything else everywhere. No doubt, Kiran would prefer it if Indian IITs focused only on Vedic mathematics and the miraculous power of cow-dung.
Furthermore, historians of South Asia who are cognisant of the centrality of caste in the region’s past and present, will no doubt cringe at the reduction of the majestic diversity of the subcontinent’s religions, philosophies and sciences, as well as languages, into a singular “Sanskritic” sun.
This cretin thinks only Brahmins knew Sanskrit and that they refused to let low castes study that language. Did you know Ambedkar had to go to study Sanskrit in Germany because Brahmin Viceroy, Rufus Isaacs, threatened to cut his head off if he did so in India?
Finally, many scholars will exasperatedly recognise in that quote yet another instance of the ahistorical shrinking of the South Asian rainbow of peoples and cultures into the hackneyed “India” monochrome.
Many scholars may only very exasperatedly recognise that India is an actual nation state. There is no Lesbian Dalit Telugu nation with a vote at the UN.
Dalrymple presents this book as his ode to a “forgotten” India which needs to be given its rightful place in a Euro-American-centric globe.
No. He presents his book to a readership he has built up over the years by doing a bit of research and writing good English and seeking to present an absorbing narrative to a middle brow audience which despises 'woke' shitheads pretending to be savants.
But by describing that place to be the very centre of the premodern world, he ends up simply replacing one form of cultural and technoscientific supremacy with another.
Only in the mind of this shithead. We get that India couldn't have been that special because, currently, India is as poor as shit. Also, till recently, it was ruled by an Italian lady.
Knowledge of the head and of the hand
The Marathi author P.L. Deshpande was known for
being a Brahmin and for having a dick. Thus, he was definitely a FASCIST.
writing up biographical sketches of the striking individuals he would now and then encounter. One such personality was an elderly Parsi man, Pestonji Hubliwala. Starting as a worker in a railway workshop in late colonial India, Pestonji retired as an assistant foreman after three decades of diligent service. During his conversation (probably in the 1970s), with PL –as Deshpande was better known in literary circles as – the retired foreman wistfully recollected his work with the railway department, contrasting the colonial period with the post-independence era. PL labelled this, in jest, as the yearning of a generation of older Parsis for the “good old British days,” but his reproduction of Pestonji’s thoughts are telling. “In the railway workshop my white engineer bosses never thought twice before taking off their coats and shirts and getting their hands dirty on engines that needed repairs.
Their wives and daughters insisted they also taking off their dresses and their bras and panties.
But the engineers nowadays, all these Subramaniams and Joshis and Kulkarnis..
i.e. Brahmins
I tell you ... They are so scared to get their hands dirty. They have zero practical experience, these silly bespectacled fellows!”
Nehru had zero practical experience when he took power. India paid a corresponding price. Was this because he was a Brahmin and had a dick? No. It was because he was Indian, not a genuine Britisher like Dalrymple.
It is unlikely that Pestonji was well-versed in radical anti-caste critique,
No. It is unlikely that he didn't understand what people like Ambedkar were saying.
but his observation about South Asia’s elite caste groups (“Subramaniams,” etc) religiously keeping their distance from manual labour is a historical reality.
Whereas White plantation owners didn't maintain any such distance. It is a canard that they brought in Black slaves to pluck the cotton or cut the sugarcane.
Equally true is how the elite everywhere write themselves into histories of knowledge to the exclusion of expertise produced by the non-elite.
If the 'non-elite' have some useful 'expertise' they soon rise into the ranks of the elite. Meanwhile, Kiran is doing manual labour by shitting on India at the University of Pennsylvania.
The historian Patricia Fara contrasts ancient Greece’s “wealthy philosophers who thought profoundly about the Universe,” like Archimedes, with the “far greater number of people from lower social orders” that have largely been forgotten.
Cicero says he was of humble origin. He first rose to prominence for building a war machine. Moh Tzu, the great Chinese utilitarian philosopher, was an artisan by birth.
Many aspects of knowledge-making and science, Fara says, originated from the latter groups: these were “people who used their expertise to keep themselves alive–miners who developed ore-refining techniques, farmers familiar with weather patterns, textile workers who relied on chemical reactions.”
Not to mention prostitutes spreading their legs. Fara, it is sad to say, was not one of the plebians she pretends to celebrate.
For South Asia, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd
who is OBC, not Dalit
distinguishes the privileged caste groups
like his own which exploits the fuck out of Dalits
from the “productive castes”: “the Dalit–Bahujan masses” who established technologies like “leather processing, pot making, house construction technology and the technologies of food production, based on trial and error in their struggle for survival.”
Kiran is struggling to survive by pretending to care greatly about Dalit-Bahujan masses.
The knowledge-makers Dalrymple chooses to typify as unknown and forgotten stars of South Asia are not the highly skilled and consistently neglected pot-makers or farmers,
or prostitutes
but the very ubiquitous Archimedes’ of the subcontinent.
They weren't ubiquitous at all. India then, like India now, possessed few great intellects.
In The Golden Road, it is Pestonji’s “bespectacled” version of science that predominates,
Kiran wears spectacles. He is not a medical researcher or a Doctor who has to get close to smelly patients. He is a pointless pratt of a Pundit. His parents must be so proud.
one where science is primarily a theoretical enterprise carried out by people poring over manuscripts and books with little need for the practical experience of getting one’s hands dirty.
Kiran is getting his hands very dirty extracting volumes of 'Tell me why' from his anus.
The knowledge-makers Dalrymple chooses to typify as unknown and forgotten stars of South Asia are not the highly skilled and consistently neglected pot-makers or farmers, but the very ubiquitous Archimedes’ of the subcontinent: the Aryabhatas and Brahmaguptas.
Did you know Isaac Newton was an illiterate stone-mason? Einstein was a prostitute who operated a spinning wheel when her hands were not full of dick. That is why both are celebrated in the history of science.
Considering the kinds of “literature, arts and the sciences” that occupy the bulk of this book, one might well come away believing that it was only Brahmans and adjacent privileged-caste groups who had the ability to conceptualise and create anything of value in South Asia.
No. One would come away with the belief that only smart peeps wholly dedicated to scholarly pursuits achieved great things in their fields. Similarly, when reading about the great mathematicians of our own times, we would understand that though everybody has some mathematical ability, almost all the great achievements made in that field are attributable to professional mathematicians not mechanics. This is a story about specialization on the basis of acquired or comparative advantage.
To be sure, the kinds of pursuits that Dalrymple writes about, primarily maths and astronomy, are not trivial. However, an overwhelming focus on such a handful of sciences, recorded in some or the other form of writing mostly in Sanskrit, inadvertently ends up dismissing as trivial the numerous other forms of making knowledge and doing science that dotted the premodern South Asian world.
Very true. In my 'Golden Showers in the Gupta Age' I lift the veil on the contribution of Indic prostitutes to the techniques of pissing on people for a profit. Why has my book not found a publisher? Is it because I iz bleck?
Such implicit bias in favour of “the knowledge of the head over that of the hand” – not that the latter is ever divorced from intellectual analysis – is a persistent problem in how histories of science have conventionally been imagined.
You can have useful 'histories of science' which focus on the discoveries of professional scientists or you could have useless books about prostitutes discovering new ways to piss on punters.
It is the reason why for a long time women were mostly absent as actors in historical accounts of science and medicine,
because few were professional scientists or doctors.
despite being skilled frontline healers and nurturing a tremendous repository of medical knowledge.
Agnodice went to Egypt to learn medicine. As a mid-wife she helped many Athenian women. She was acquitted of the charge of seeking to corrupt the morals of young women. This was because she could raise her tunic and show she had a hairy vagina, not a cock and balls.
It is also the reason why the majority of South Asia’s people and communities – the “lower”-caste and “untouchable” Bahujans and Adivasis – are either a marginalised minority or completely absent in the region’s science histories: including, unfortunately, in The Golden Road.
Why is Kiran absent from the history of science? Is it because he is bleck? No. It is because he is stupid and useless.
There is one tantalising moment when Dalrymple acknowledges what he considers the overwhelming visibility of Brahmans among the subcontinent’s immigrants to Southeast Asia, and notes that “many other non-literate Indian caste groups were also present and may have been predominant.” However, this potentially exciting analysis of the “varied diaspora rather than just the boatloads of literate Brahmins” is only a page long, based mostly on a DNA-based study.
Why does the history of the British in India concentrate on upper middle class folk and aristocrats rather than illiterate Irishmen like the 'Raja from Tipperary'? The answer is that their class could follow through, generation after generation, and thus their achievements acquired permanence. There may have been village Hampdens, or Srinivas Ramanujans, but they were not appreciated by their own class and left no legacies.
More disappointingly, after making such a crucial revelation about the predominance of Bahujan caste groups in the diaspora, Dalrymple jumps right back into the Brahmanosphere: “Whatever their DNA contribution to the region, the Brahmins did bring with them from India three crucial gifts that proved irresistible right across the region: Sanskrit, the art of writing and the stories of the great Indian epics.”
There is no way of telling 'Brahmin' genes from those of 'Shramans'.
That Sanskrit was a language only of the elites with its exclusivity strictly enforced,
unless you could pay a little money or threaten a Pundit or Monk or simply enslave the fellow and take him away with you
and that the epics of Mahabharata and Ramayana prescribed violent actions in order to protect and pursue a caste-based social order, are contexts within South Asia that remain unexamined..
Many Indians eagerly emigrated to Jim Crow America precisely because 'violent action' had been taken against the indigenous people and slave population with the result that 'Boston Brahmins' had lots of money and the leisure with which to pursue STEM subject research.
But these contexts are indispensable to in The Golden Road’s major themes, because when we account for the fact that the prejudices and oppressive laws of Sanskrit-literate elites were central to how “literature, arts, and the sciences” operated in the subcontinent, then the book’s major bold claim, that “Indian” influence across Asia was spread “not by the sword but by the sheer power of its ideas”, loses much of its sheen.
Kamala Harris and Vivek Ramaswamy have Iyer, that is Brahmin, genes. Even in Amrikaka, we are seeing an obscene type of Brahmin superiority! Trump should kindly take action. Deport those cunts!
One-way traffic
For decades now,
soi-disant
scholars have worked hard to lay to rest earlier ways of writing history,
They failed. Vivek Ramaswamy rapidly gained fame, as he had previously rapidly gained a fortune, by vigorously excoriating the 'woke' Grievance Studies industry.
wherein one group of people would be portrayed as a docile, passive recipient of some other group’s “superior” ideas and materials.
Nonsense! One group would be portrayed as eager to adopt what was 'best in class', wherever it might be from.
A pertinent example is the so-called civilising mission of European colonists: both colonisers and sympathetic Euro-American scholars loved to proclaim that colonised Asian and African people were grateful recipients of Western science, medicine, democracy and so on.
Not RFK Jr. He isn't grateful at all for vaccinations and scientifically tested medicines. I don't suppose he is a great fan of Democrats either. Kiran must be thrilled with his new Massa.
Thankfully, over time, more rigorous scholars have painstakingly worked to show that entities like “Western science” are less Western or European and more global in character.
Only because Europe is part of the globe.
They have taught us that a fuller historical picture of interactions between different cultures can be grasped not through a one-way transfer or “diffusion” framework, but only when we carefully “peel apart the onion layers of resistance, accommodation, participation, and appropriation” engaged in by the involved parties.
Why bother? It is obvious that shithole countries produce shitheads like Kiran. But they may also produce people keen to get ahead through 'Tardean mimetics'- i.e. imitating and then seeking to out-do the 'best in class'.
Even though Dalrymple on occasion alludes to the presence of multi-way exchanges, even disinterest in some South Asian ideas, the evidence is eventually left out of his main thesis of Indocentrism.
The guy is writing a middle-brow book for a mass market. Kiran writes shit for fellow shitheads.
The Golden Road, unfortunately, bypasses these decades-old trends in historical analysis.
Those were the decades when such analysis turned to shit and turned into a branch of Grievance Studies.
Did you know that prostitutes in St. Petersburg whose labour produced the golden showers enjoyed by Trump have, even to this very date, not been identified and rewarded with Nobel and other such prizes? How is that fair?
It throws light on earlier major blindspots in how South Asian history is generally imagined across the world,
it is easily enough imagined. The place turned to shit once the Muslims overran it. That's what happened to Byzantium and the Balkans.
but it also itself overlooks a large amount of relevant historical evidence and argumentation that’s been around for decades.
There is no evidence. Shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your faeces about isn't 'argumentation' even if it gets you intellectual affirmative action.
The glowing Eurocentric accounts of past historians are replaced in this book by a modest but nevertheless definitive Indocentrism: “India […] set the template for the way much of the world would think and express itself, and would significantly alter the trajectory of the history of a great swathe of mankind. For more than a thousand years it was a garden that issued the seeds that, once planted elsewhere, flowered in new, rich and unexpected ways.”
Stuff like Zen Buddhism or the seminar system which originates in German Indology.
There are few layers of nuance in the book’s luscious servings of arguments, particularly when it comes to interactions of South Asians with people from Southeast Asia and the Arabic world. Even though Dalrymple on occasion alludes to the presence of multi-way exchanges, even disinterest in some South Asian ideas, the evidence is eventually left out of his main thesis of Indocentrism. He notes that casteism and “ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes” were rejected by the communities in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Cambodia, women remained owners and disposers of property, “something from which the wider Indian Brahmanical tradition excluded them.”
Women were owners and disposers of property in Brahminical India. That's how come Lord Buddha and Lord Mahavira could receive rich gifts from women- including gifts of land.
But these ideas are not followed through, and The Golden Road remains largely about a one-way traffic of ideas and materials out of “India”.
Also it is written in English. Why not Telugu? Also, how come the author has a dick? Did you know that dicks cause RAPE? They should be banned immediately.
Standing on the shoulders of others while offering them one
is wrong. You should shit on everything.
If we take the Indocentrism with a fistful of salt, The Golden Road is a great, eminently readable book. My hope is that it will be the last of the great books in its genre.
Our hope is Kiran dies by gorging himself on his own shit. Only thus can Grievance Studies articulate its protest against honkys with dicks who write great books.
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