Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
LONDON (Reuters) – China has betrayed the people of Hong Kong so the West should stop kowtowing to Beijing for an illusory great pot of gold, said Chris Patten, the last governor of the former British colony.
Beijing is set to impose new national security legislation on Hong Kong after a sustained campaign of pro-democracy protests last year in the city, which enjoys many freedoms not allowed on mainland China.
“The Hong Kong people have been betrayed by China,” Patten was quoted as saying by The Times newspaper. Britain has a “moral, economic and legal” duty to stand up for Hong Kong, he said.
Patten watched as the British flag was lowered over Hong Kong when the colony was handed back to China in 1997 after more than 150 years of British rule.
Hong Kong’s autonomy was guaranteed under the “one country, two systems” agreement principle enshrined in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration signed by then Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
But China’s plans to impose national security laws on Hong Kong risk destroying the Declaration, Patten said. The United States has branded the laws a “death knell” for the city’s autonomy.
“What we are seeing is a new Chinese dictatorship,” Patten said. “The British government should make it clear that what we are seeing is a complete destruction of the Joint Declaration.”
Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said her government will “fully cooperate” with the Chinese parliament to safeguard national security, which she said would not affect rights, freedoms or judicial independence.
Patten said the West should stop chasing the illusory promise of Chinese gold.
“We should stop being fooled that somehow at the end of the all the kowtowing there’s this great pot of gold waiting for us. It’s always been an illusion,” Patten said.
“We keep on kidding ourselves that unless we do everything that China wants we will somehow miss out on great trading opportunities. It’s drivel.”
The British government did not immediately comment on Saturday.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s spokesman said on Friday the government was monitoring the situation and as a party to the Joint Declaration the UK was committed to the upholding Hong Kong’s autonomy and respecting the one country, two systems model.
Documentary puts China’s literary hero into context: there is Dante, there’s Shakespeare, and there’s Du Fu
Theatrical legend Sir Ian McKellen brings glamour to beloved verses in British documentary
A ceramic figurine of Du Fu, a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty. Du is the subject of a new BBC documentary, thrilling devotees of his poetry. Photo: Simon Song
The resonant words of an ancient Chinese poet spoken by esteemed British actor Sir Ian McKellen have reignited in China discussion about its literary history and inspired hope that Beijing can tap into cultural riches to help mend its image in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The BBC documentary Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet has provoked passion among Chinese literature lovers about the poetic master who lived 1,300 years ago.
Sir Ian Mckellen read works of ancient Chinese poet Du Fu in Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet. Photo: BBC Four / MayaVision International
The one-hour documentary by television historian Michael Wood was broadcast on television and aired online for British viewers this month but enthusiasm among Chinese audiences mean the trailer and programme have been widely circulated on video sharing websites inside mainland China, with some enthusiasts dubbing Chinese subtitles.
The documentary has drawn such attention in Du’s homeland that even the Communist Party’s top anti-graft agency has discussed it in its current affairs commentary column. Notably, Wood’s depiction of Du’s life from AD712 to 770 barely mentioned corruption in the Tang dynasty (618-907) government.
“I couldn’t believe it!!” Wood said in an email. “I’m very pleased of course … most of all as a foreigner making a film about such a loved figure in another culture, you hope that the Chinese viewers will think it was worth doing.”
Often referred to as ancient China’s “Sage of Poetry” and the “Poet Historian”, Du Fu witnessed the Tang dynasty’s unparalleled height of prosperity and its fall into rebellion, famine and poverty.
Writer, historian and presenter Michael Wood followed the footsteps of the ancient Chinese poet Du Fu in Yangtze River gorges. Photo: BBC Four / MayaVision International
Wood traced Du’s footsteps to various parts of the country. He interviewed Chinese experts and Western sinologists, offering historical and personal contexts to introduce some of Du’s more than 1,400 poems and verses chronicling the ups and downs of his life and China.
The programme used many Western reference points to put Du and his works into context. The time Du lived in was described as around the as the Old English poem Beowulf was composed and the former Chinese capital, Changan, where Xian is now, was described as being in the league of world cities of the time, along with Constantinople and Baghdad.
Harvard University sinologist Stephen Owen described the poet’s standing as such: “There is Dante, there’s Shakespeare, and there’s Du Fu.”
The performance of Du’s works by Sir Ian, who enjoyed prominence in China with his role as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movie series, attracted popular discussion from both media critics and general audiences in China, and sparked fresh discussion about the poet.
“To a Chinese audience, the biggest surprise could be ‘Gandalf’ reading out the poems! … He recited [Du’s poems] with his deep, stage performance tones in a British accent. No wonder internet users praised it as ‘reciting Du Fu in the form of performing a Shakespeare play,” wrote Su Zhicheng, an editor with National Business Daily.
A stone sculpture at Du Fu Thatched Cottage in Chengdu city, China. Photo: Handout
On China’s popular Weibo microblog, a viewer called Indifferent Onlooker commented on Sir Ian’s recital of Du’s poem My Brave Adventures: “Despite the language barrier, he conveyed the feeling [of the poet]. It’s charming.”
Some viewers, however, disagreed. At popular video-sharing website Bilibili.com, where uploads of the documentary could be found, a viewer commented: “I could not appreciate the English translation, just as I could not grasp Shakespeare through his Chinese translated works in school textbooks.”
Watching the documentary amid the coronavirus pandemic, some internet users drew comparisons of Du to Fang Fang, a modern-day award-winning poet and novelist who chronicled her life in Wuhan during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Shanghai pictured in April. Devastation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has brought about a new suspicion of China. Photo: Bloomberg
The pandemic has infected more than 2.5 million people and killed more than 170,000. It has put the global economy in jeopardy, fuelling calls for accountability. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab last week called for a “deep dive” review and the asking of “hard questions” about how the coronavirus emerged and how it was not stopped earlier.
Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at University of London, said the British establishment and wider public had changed its perception of Beijing as questions arose about outbreak misinformation and the political leverage of personal protective gear supply.
“The aggressive propaganda of the Chinese government is getting people in the UK to look more closely at China and see that it is a Leninist party-state, rather than the modernising and rapidly changing society that they want to see in China,” Tsang said.
On Sunday, a writer on the website of the National Supervisory Commission, China’s top anti-corruption agency, claimed – without citing sources – that the Du Fu documentary had moved “anxious” British audience who were still staying home under social distancing measures.
“If anyone wants to put the fear of the coronavirus behind them by understanding the rich Chinese civilisation, please watch this documentary on Du Fu,” it wrote, adding that promoting Du’s poems overseas could help “healing and uniting our shattered world”.
English-language state media such as CGTN and the Global Times reported on the documentary last week and some Beijing-based foreign relations publications have posted comments about the film on Twitter.
Wood said he had received feedback from both Chinese and British viewers that talked about “the need, especially now, of mutual understanding between cultures”.
“It is a global pandemic … we need to understand each other better, to talk to each other, show empathy: and that will help foster cooperation. So even in a small way, any effort to explain ourselves to each other must be a help,” Wood said.
He said the idea for producing a documentary about Du Fu started in 2017, after his team had finished the Story of China series for BBC and PBS.
Du Fu: China’s Greatest Poet first aired in Britain on April 7 on BBC Four, the cultural and documentary channel of the public broadcaster. It is a co-production between the BBC and China Central Television.
Wood said a slightly shorter 50-minute version would be aired later this month on CCTV9, Chinese state television’s documentary channel.
The film was shot in China in September, he said.
“I came back from China [at the] end of September, so we weren’t affected by the Covid-19 outbreak, though of course it has affected us in the editing period. We have had to recut the CCTV version in lockdown here in London and recorded two small word changes on my iPhone!” Wood said.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Cases of coronavirus have risen sharply in South Korea, where the outbreak is worsening
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed concern at the number of coronavirus cases with no clear link to China or other confirmed cases.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the window of opportunity to contain the virus was “narrowing”.
Chinese health authorities reported a decrease in deaths and new cases of the coronavirus on Saturday.
But cases are on the rise in South Korea, Italy, Iran and other countries.
Outside China, more than 1,200 cases of the virus have been confirmed in 26 countries and there have been eight deaths, the WHO says.
They include two deaths in South Korea, which has the biggest cluster of confirmed cases apart from China and a cruise ship quarantined in Japan.
On Saturday, South Korea reported 142 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus, bringing the national tally to 346.
On Friday, doctors in Italy said a 78-year-old man became the first person in the country to die from the new coronavirus, Ansa news agency reported.
Earlier Italy had announced 16 more cases and its health minister said schools and offices would be closed and sports events cancelled in the affected regions.
China has reported 76,288 cases including 2,345 deaths. The new virus, which originated last year in Hubei province in China, causes a respiratory disease called Covid-19.
What did the WHO chief say?
Dr Tedros said the number of coronavirus cases outside China was “relatively small” but the pattern of infection was worrying.
“We are concerned about the number of cases with no clear epidemiological link, such as travel history to or contact with a confirmed case,” he said.
The new deaths and infections in Iran were “very concerning”, he said.
Image copyright AFPImage caption Iraq has been checking people at its border with Iran
But he insisted that the measures China and other countries had put in place meant there was still a “fighting chance” of stopping further spread and called on countries to put more resources into preparing for possible outbreaks.
What is the latest in South Korea?
Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun declared a public health emergency as the total number of cases surpassed 300 on Saturday.
The southern cities of Daegu and Cheongdo have been declared “special care zones”. The streets of Daegu are now largely abandoned.
The nation’s capital, Seoul, banned demonstrations in central areas.
Two cases were also reported in Busan, South Korea’s second-largest city, and one on the Island of Jeju on Saturday – the first in both places.
Media caption People in Daegu have voiced concern over the spread of the virus
All military bases are in lockdown after three soldiers tested positive.
The authorities suspect the current outbreak in South Korea originated in Cheongdo, pointing out that a large number of sect followers attended the funeral of the founder’s brother from 31 January to 2 February.
The sect – known as Shincheonji – which has been accused of being a cult, said it had now shut down its Daegu branch and that services in other regions would be held online or individually at home.
As of Friday, more than 400 members of the church were showing symptoms of the disease, though tests were still ongoing, the city mayor said.
Can we answer your question on the coronavirus?
Here’s what others have been asking
Once you’ve had coronavirus, will you be immune?
Could the coronavirus become a pandemic?
Is the coronavirus worse than flu or Sars?
Hand sanitizers and warning signs
By Hyung Eun Kim, BBC Korean Service, Seoul
Many people in South Korea are wearing masks on a daily basis.
Hand sanitizers have been placed at public transport stops and building entrances.
Warning government signs are everywhere. They say: “Three ways to prevent further infection: wear a mask at all times; wash your hands properly with soap for more than 30 seconds; and cover yourself when coughing.”
Image copyright EPAImage caption New norm: Mask-wearing crowd in Seoul
Koreans have also developed several apps and websites that tell you how much risk you face where you are. They show where the infected people are within a 10km radius.
“I can’t miss work, what I can do is minimise contact with others and stay at home during the weekend,” Seung-hye Lim, a Seoul resident, told the BBC.
“I do wonder if we reacted too laxly initially or if it really is because of the specific service practices of the Shincheonji sect.”
So-young Sung, a mother of two in Seoul, told the BBC: “It feels like my daily life is collapsing.”
She said she was struggling to find pharmacies that had masks.
She added that checking coronavirus-related alarms from her children’s schools and kindergartens was now a daily routine for her.
What about the Iran cases?
In Iran the outbreak is centred on the holy city of Qom, south of the capital Tehran, which is a popular destination for Shia Muslims in the region.
Iran reported two more deaths in Qom on Friday, adding to the two deaths it reported on Thursday. A total of 18 cases have been confirmed in the country.
Lebanon has reported its first confirmed case – a 45-year-old woman who was detected as she arrived in Beirut from Qom. The UAE, Israel and Egypt have also reported cases.
Image copyright EPAImage caption Lebanon has confirmed its first case – a woman returning from the Iranian city of Qom
Meanwhile Canadian officials said one of the nine cases there was a woman who had recently returned from Iran.
WHO officials said both Iran and Lebanon had the basic capacity to detect the virus and the WHO was contacting them to offer further assistance.
But Dr Tedros said the organisation was concerned about the virus’s possible spread in countries with weaker health systems.
What about China and elsewhere?
The virus has now hit the country’s prison system, with more than 500 inmates confirmed infected.
They include 230 patients in a women’s prison in Wuhan. More cases have been found in a prison in the eastern province of Shandong and the south-eastern province of Zhejiang.
Some 36 people at a hospital in Beijing have also tested positive.
Senior officials have been sacked for mishandling management of the outbreak.
Passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship who have tested negative continue to disembark the ship in Yokohama after more than 14 days quarantined on board.
However, 18 American evacuees from the ship tested positive after arriving in the US, officials said. More than 300 other US nationals have arrived back in the US after disembarking.
Media caption Coronavirus: Quarantined passengers released from Japan ship
More than 150 Australian passengers have been evacuated from the ship and have already arrived in Darwin, where they will begin two more weeks of quarantine.
Australian officials said on Friday that six people had reported feeling unwell on arrival in Darwin and were immediately tested. Two of those people tested positive despite having received negative tests before leaving Japan.
The first batch of people from Hong Kong have also flown back to the city, where they will similarly be quarantined.
LONDON (Reuters) – The British government has not talked to China about helping build High Speed 2, the major rail project given the green light last week despite being billions of pounds over budget, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said on Sunday.
A report in the Financial Times said China had offered to build the rail line, known as HS2, in five years and for less money.
“I’ve certainly had no advice on the subject, obviously I will be asking to see what the communication has been,” Shapps told the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday.
“This has not been a discussion with the department, it’s been a discussion with HS2 as I understand it.”
Shapps said he wanted to push ahead with major projects more quickly.
“There are things we can do to speed this up and I want to learn from everyone but I also want to make sure the British ingenuity and skills and apprentices and all the rest of it come through on this massive project,” he said.
Shapps also told Marr the resignation of finance minister, or chancellor, Sajid Javid on Thursday could result in a delay to the budget planned for March 11.
“This is a matter for the new chancellor Rishi (Sunak),” he said.
“I don’t think we’ve said it will definitely go ahead on the same date that was mentioned before in March, that will be a matter for the chancellor.”
British supermarket is investigating after newspaper report that six-year-old girl found message in card saying it was packed by Shanghai prisoners
Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco said it was “shocked by these allegations”. Photo: AFP
British supermarket giant Tesco suspended a Chinese supplier of Christmas cards on Sunday after a press report said a customer found a message written inside a card saying it had been packed by foreign prisoners who were victims of forced labour.
“We abhor the use of prison labour and would never allow it in our supply chain,” a Tesco spokesman said on Sunday.
“We were shocked by these allegations and immediately suspended the factory where these cards are produced and launched an investigation.”
donates £300,000 (US$390,000) a year from the sale of the cards to the charities British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK.
The Sunday Times said the message inside the card read: “We are foreign prisoners in Shanghai Qingpu Prison China. Forced to work against our will. Please help us and notify human rights organisation.
“Use the link to contact Mr Peter Humphrey.”
Peter Humphrey is a British former journalist and corporate fraud investigator.
Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng were both sentenced in China in 2014
for illegally obtaining private records of Chinese citizens and selling the information to clients including drug maker GlaxoSmithKline. The couple were deported from China in June 2015 after their jail terms were reduced.
The message inside the card was found by a six-year-old girl, Florence Widdicombe, in London, The Sunday Times said. Her father contacted Humphrey via the LinkedIn social network.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Humphrey said he did not know the identities or the nationalities of the prisoners who put the note into the card, but he “had no doubt they are Qingpu prisoners who knew me before my release in June 2015 from the suburban prison where I spent 23 months”.
Tesco, Britain’s biggest retailer, said it had a comprehensive auditing process in place.
“This supplier was independently audited as recently as last month and no evidence was found to suggest they had broken our rule banning the use of prison labour,” the spokesman said.
“If a supplier breaches these rules, we will immediately and permanently delist them.”
Sky News said the cards were produced at the Zheijiang Yunguang Printing factory, which is about 100km (60 miles) from Shanghai Qingpu prison.
The company, which prints cards and books for food and pharmaceutical companies, says on its website it supplies Tesco.
Two phone calls and one emailed request for comment to the company went unanswered after usual business hours on Sunday.
Humphrey and his wife said in their trial they had not thought they were doing anything illegal in their activities in China.
Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital of India’s southern Tamil Nadu state, is gaining notoriety as the disaster capital of the world – floods one year, cyclone the next, and drought the year after. But it is not alone. Environmental activist Nityanand Jayaraman explains why.
As I write this, it has rained in Chennai – the first real welcome shower, but one that lasted only 30 minutes. But, still, that has been enough to flood the streets and stall traffic. The irony is that Chennai’s vulnerability to floods and its water scarcity have common roots. Blinded by a hurry to grow, the city has paved over the very infrastructures that nurtured water.
Between 1980 and 2010, heavy construction in the city meant its area under buildings increased from 47 sq km to 402 sq km. Meanwhile, areas under wetlands declined from 186 to 71.5 sq km.
The city is no stranger to drought or heavy rains. The north-east monsoon, which brings most of the water to this region in October and November, is unpredictable. Some years it pours, and in other years, it just fails to show up.
Any settlement in the region ought to have been designed for both eventualities – with growth limited not by availability of land but of water. Early agrarian settlements in Chennai and its surrounding districts did exactly this.
Shallow, spacious tanks – called erys in Tamil- were carved out on the region’s flat coastal plains by erecting bunds with the same earth that was scooped out to deepen them. Essentially, the infrastructure for water to stay and flow was created first; the settlements came later.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
This agrarian logic valourised open spaces. Each village had vast tracts of land, including water bodies, grazing grounds and wood lots, demarcated as Poromboke or commons. Construction was outlawed in the commons. The three districts of Chennai, Thiruvallur and Kanchipuram alone had more than 6000 erys – some as old as 1,500 years.
So rather than transport water over long distances against gravity, early settlers had the technology and good sense to harvest water where it fell.
But this faded with the advent of modern technology.
As urban logic took root, built-up spaces began to be seen as more valuable than open earth. In fact, one could argue that Chennai’s date with “zero water” was made in the 17th Century when it was incorporated as a city by Royal Charter. Born a colony of the British, the city rapidly became a coloniser of the countryside.
The British commandeered a small irrigation ery in a village called Puzhal, and vastly expanded its capacity to supply drinking water to the city, in response to the Madras famine of 1876. Renamed the Redhills Reservoir, this was Chennai’s first centralised, big-budget drinking water project.
Reliance on a distant water source disconnected residents of the fast urbanising settlement from local water and landscapes. For the urban agenda, this was great as it freed up inner-city water bodies for real estate development.
In the 1920s for instance, the ancient 70 acre Mylapore tank was filled up to create what is now a bustling residential and commercial area called T Nagar.
The city has pursued its aspirations to become an economic hub by promoting itself as a major IT and automotive manufacturing centre. In addition to attracting new settlers to Chennai and vastly increasing the pressure on scant resources, these industries have dealt death blows to the region’s water infrastructure.
Land-use planning today is a far cry from the simple principles that prevailed in medieval Tamil Nadu.
Wetlands were off-limits for construction, and only low-density buildings were permitted on lands immediately upstream of tanks. The reason: These lands have to soak up the rainwater before letting it to run to the reservoir.
It is this sub-surface water that will flow to the lake as the levels go down with use and time. Unmindful of such common sense, the IT Corridor (a road which houses a large number of IT companies in the city) was built almost entirely on Chennai’s precious Pallikaranai marshlands.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Puzhal reservoir was Chennai’s first centralised, big-budget drinking water project
And the area immediately upstream of Chembarambakkam – the city’s largest drinking water tank – has now been converted into an automotive special economic zone (SEZ).
Other water bodies have been treated with similar disdain.
The Perungudi garbage dump spreads out through the middle of the Pallikaranai marshlands.
The Manali marshlands were drained in the 1960s for Tamil Nadu’s largest petrochemical refinery. Electricity for the city comes from a cluster of power plants built on the Ennore Creek, a tidal wetland that has been converted into a dump for coal-ash.
The Pallavaram Big Tank, which is perhaps more than 1,000 years old, has over the last two decades been bisected by a high-speed road with the remainder serving as a garbage dump for the locality.
In Chennai, the water utility supplies are barely a fourth of the total water demand. The remainder is supplied by a powerful network of commercial water suppliers who are sucking resources in the region dry.
Along the periphery of Chennai, and far into the hinterland, the land is dotted with communities whose water and livelihoods have been forcibly taken to feed the city. The water crises in these localities desiccated by the city never make it to the news.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES
The world won’t change unless we replace capitalism with other ways of doing business that are not premised on the exploitation of nature and people.
Our dominant economic model, with its blind faith in technology, is doomed.
Modern economy views open, un-built land as useless. It believes that value can be extracted from such lands only by digging, drilling, filling, mining, paving or building on it.
Degrading land use change is colliding with climate change in all the modern cities of the world, exposing their vulnerabilities.
Chennai’s struggles with water – be it flooding or scarcity – cannot be addressed unless the city re-examines its values, and how it treats its land and water.
Further growth and more buildings are not an option – it needs to actively shrink in size instead.
By ushering in policies to promote land-friendly economies in the state’s hinterland, the government can make it easier for people to migrate out of the city in a planned and feasible way.
Although difficult, this would be less painful than what would happen if they were to wait for nature to do the job.
A Google search for basic information on India’s caste system lists many sites that, with varying degrees of emphasis, outline three popular tropes on the phenomenon.
First, the caste system is a four-fold categorical hierarchy of the Hindu religion – with Brahmins (priests/teachers) on top, followed, in order, by Kshatriyas (rulers/warriors), Vaishyas (farmers/traders/merchants), and Shudras (labourers). In addition, there is a fifth group of “Outcastes” (people who do unclean work and are outside the four-fold system).
Second, this system is ordained by Hinduism’s sacred texts (notably the supposed source of Hindu law, the Manusmriti), it is thousands of years old, and it governed all key aspects of life, including marriage, occupation and location.
Third, caste-based discrimination is illegal now and there are policies instead for caste-based affirmative action (or positive discrimination).
These ideas, even seen in a BBC explainer, represent the conventional wisdom. The problem is that the conventional wisdom has not been updated with critical scholarly findings.
The first two statements may as well have been written 200 years ago, at the beginning of the 19th Century, which is when these “facts” about Indian society were being made up by the British colonial authorities.
In a new book, The Truth About Us: The Politics of Information from Manu to Modi, I show how the social categories of religion and caste as they are perceived in modern-day India were developed during the British colonial rule, at a time when information was scarce and the coloniser’s power over information was absolute.
Image caption Conventional wisdom says the caste system is a four-fold categorical hierarchy of the Hindu religion
This was done initially in the early 19th Century by elevating selected and convenient Brahman-Sanskrit texts like the Manusmriti to canonical status; the supposed origin of caste in the Rig Veda (most ancient religious text) was most likely added retroactively, after it was translated to English decades later.
These categories were institutionalised in the mid to late 19th Century through the census. These were acts of convenience and simplification.
The colonisers established the acceptable list of indigenous religions in India – Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism – and their boundaries and laws through “reading” what they claimed were India’s definitive texts.
What is now widely accepted as Hinduism was, in fact, an ideology (or, more accurately, a theory or fantasy) that is better called “Brahmanism”, that existed largely in textual (but not real) form and enunciated the interests of a small, Sanskrit-educated social group.
There is little doubt that the religion categories in India could have been defined very differently by reinterpreting those same or other texts.
The so-called four-fold hierarchy was also derived from the same Brahman texts. This system of categorisation was also textual or theoretical; it existed only in scrolls and had no relationship with the reality on the ground.
This became embarrassingly obvious from the first censuses in the late 1860s. The plan then was to fit all of the “Hindu” population into these four categories. But the bewildering variety of responses on caste identity from the population became impossible to fit neatly into colonial or Brahman theory.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption A leader of those formerly considered untouchable with a government official in British India
WR Cornish, who supervised census operations in the Madras Presidency in 1871, wrote that “… regarding the origin of caste we can place no reliance upon the statements made in the Hindu sacred writings. Whether there was ever a period in which the Hindus were composed of four classes is exceedingly doubtful”.
Similarly, CF Magrath, leader and author of a monograph on the 1871 Bihar census, wrote, “that the now meaningless division into the four castes alleged to have been made by Manu should be put aside”.
Anthropologist Susan Bayly writes that “until well into the colonial period, much of the subcontinent was still populated by people for whom the formal distinctions of caste were of only limited importance, even in parts of the so-called Hindu heartland… The institutions and beliefs which are now often described as the elements of traditional caste were only just taking shape as recently as the early 18th Century”.
In fact, it is doubtful that caste had much significance or virulence in society before the British made it India’s defining social feature.
Astonishing diversity
The pre-colonial written record in royal court documents and traveller accounts studied by professional historians and philologists like Nicholas Dirks, GS Ghurye, Richard Eaton, David Shulman and Cynthia Talbot show little or no mention of caste.
Social identities were constantly malleable. “Slaves” and “menials” and “merchants” became kings; farmers became soldiers, and soldiers became farmers; one’s social identity could be changed as easily as moving from one village to another; there is little evidence of systematic and widespread caste oppression or mass conversion to Islam as a result of it.
All the available evidence calls for a fundamental re-imagination of social identity in pre-colonial India.
The picture that one should see is of astonishing diversity. What the colonisers did through their reading of the “sacred” texts and the institution of the census was to try to frame all of that diversity through alien categorical systems of religion, race, caste and tribe. The census was used to simplify – categorise and define – what was barely understood by the colonisers using a convenient ideology and absurd (and shifting) methodology.
Image copyright AFPImage caption India’s constitution was written by BR Ambedkar, a member of the Dalit community which is at the bottom of the caste system
The colonisers invented or constructed Indian social identities using categories of convenience during a period that covered roughly the 19th Century.
This was done to serve the British Indian government’s own interests – primarily to create a single society with a common law that could be easily governed.
A very large, complex and regionally diverse system of faiths and social identities was simplified to a degree that probably has no parallel in world history, entirely new categories and hierarchies were created, incompatible or mismatched parts were stuffed together, new boundaries were created, and flexible boundaries hardened.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Dalits, or untouchables, were at the bottom of the caste system
The resulting categorical system became rigid during the next century and quarter, as the made-up categories came to be associated with real rights. Religion-based electorates in British India and caste-based reservations in independent India made amorphous categories concrete. There came to be real and material consequences of belonging to one category (like Jain or Scheduled Caste) instead of another. Categorisation, as it turned out in India, was destiny.
The vast scholarship of the last few decades allows us to make a strong case that the British colonisers wrote the first and defining draft of Indian history.
So deeply inscribed is this draft in the public imagination that it is now accepted as the truth. It is imperative that we begin to question these imagined truths.
TASHKENT (Reuters) – The trade war between the United States and China could be a risk to the world economic outlook if it is not resolved, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde told Reuters on Friday during a visit to Uzbekistan.
“Obviously, the downside risk that we have is continued trade tensions between the United States and China,” Lagarde said, referring to the IMF’s world economic outlook.
“And if these tensions are not resolved, that clearly is a risk going forward.”
The IMF last month cut its growth forecast for 2019 to 3.3%, down from the 3.5% it had previously predicted.
It warned at the time that growth could slow further due to trade tensions and a potentially disorderly British exit from the European Union.
“But we expect that at the end of 2019 and in 2020 it will bounce back,” Lagarde said of the world economic outlook on Friday.
The United States infuriated China this week when it announced it was putting Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker, on a blacklist that could make it hard to do business with U.S. companies.
On Friday Beijing suggested a resumption of talks between the world’s two largest economies would be meaningless unless Washington changes course.
BEIJING, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) — A promotional event for northern China’s Shanxi Province was hosted at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Monday.
As the 17th presentation of the MFA’s Chinese provinces initiative, this Shanxi event was themed “China in the New Era: Shanxi, New Transformation for a Shared New Future.”
“Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Shanxi has moved with the times and embarked on a new journey of innovative development,” said Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Wang added that Shanxi is vigorously promoting a greener economy and forging new industrial clusters.
Shanxi’s primary goals are to build a demonstration zone in transformation and development of a resource-based economy, become a pioneer in China’s energy revolution and turn itself into a landmark in opening-up among China’s inland provinces, said Luo Huining, secretary of Shanxi Provincial Committee of the CPC.
Shanxi is a province that boasts a glorious history and booming development, said Clemens von Goetze, Germany ambassador to China.
He added that Germany has discovered cooperation opportunities in Shanxi since the beginning of China’s reform and opening-up.
Mark Sutton, business development director with Johnson Matthey, a Britain-based global energy and chemical company, first visited Shanxi in 2005.
The environment over the past few years has become cleaner and inspiring, said Sutton, adding that Shanxi’s vision to protect the environment is valued. “I wish to spend more time at Shanxi’s historic sites and surrounded by natural sceneries during my next trip.”
The MFA hosted its first provincial promotional event in March 2016 in order to serve national development, facilitate regional opening-up and offer foreigners a platform to learn more about China.
More than 500 people, including diplomats from over 130 countries, representatives from international organizations, business people and journalists, attended the Monday event.
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