It’s not ‘loony’! I got chills looking at the image of the English man measuring the nose with calipers. I didn’t know such images were in circulation never mind on Getty images.
That’s the kind of pictures I have in the books I mentioned in the earlier comment. The British census takers would go village to village..they were obsessed with the angle of the nose and how flat it was up the face. To them these aboriginal features and skin colour were the basis of caste division.
And this wasn’t at all true. The Vedas divided people on the basis of their nature and their dharma or work or duty to society was based on their temperament. A weak vegetarian Brahmin who was keen to learn numbers and had the aptitude for math isn’t going to be riding horses and wield weapons to fight and die for the country. That was the job of the Kshatriyas. The divisions were there so there is a corps of people who did the best acc to their abilities. Was it perfect? No. Did they inter marry and also strive to live the best life exploiting the resources they had as well as their positions. Yes. But like a goat on a leash..they had a radius of free movement but were tethered by social restriction. A Vaishya could never be a king and a shudra could never become a priest. But neither could the king live without the Indian equivalent of democeles sword over his head nor could the Brahmin enjoy creature comforts. The system had nothing to do with the British understanding of caste which was racial.
Then they super imposed their understanding of race over the caste system. And this was patently ridiculous. The world’s understanding of caste system as promulgated by the British doesn’t resemble what is in the texts or what was in practice before they came along. Guess what happened to the all the ‘lower classes’? They converted to Christianity because the missionaries were always standing..waiting in the wings.
This is not to say that there weren’t terrible things that happened in India. We don’t crucify all black people because of a few criminals. We don’t crucify all whites people for the racism of a few. Not all homeless people are drug addicts. We don’t call all men rapists because of Harvey Weinstein. All Germans are not Nazis. Caste discrimination is not a Hindu blot. In all of the above cases, it was ‘humans behaving badly’.
I am blown away every time by how the uneducated untraveled masses are willing to believe second hand accounts of a colonizing power that reluctantly left a country that single handedly overfilled the coffers and granaries of The Empire.
Why is the victim being shamed and the rapist account being taken as gospel? Because the sick fucks went around villages and measured peoples noses like they are cattle and published their understanding of what it means to them first before Indians could master English ..you know in the past 70 years after freedom...to protest all the lies?
That’s the kind of pictures I have in the books I mentioned in the earlier comment. The British census takers would go village to village..they were obsessed with the angle of the nose and how flat it was up the face. To them these aboriginal features and skin colour were the basis of caste division.
And this wasn’t at all true. The Vedas divided people on the basis of their nature and their dharma or work or duty to society was based on their temperament. A weak vegetarian Brahmin who was keen to learn numbers and had the aptitude for math isn’t going to be riding horses and wield weapons to fight and die for the country. That was the job of the Kshatriyas. The divisions were there so there is a corps of people who did the best acc to their abilities. Was it perfect? No. Did they inter marry and also strive to live the best life exploiting the resources they had as well as their positions. Yes. But like a goat on a leash..they had a radius of free movement but were tethered by social restriction. A Vaishya could never be a king and a shudra could never become a priest. But neither could the king live without the Indian equivalent of democeles sword over his head nor could the Brahmin enjoy creature comforts. The system had nothing to do with the British understanding of caste which was racial.
Then they super imposed their understanding of race over the caste system. And this was patently ridiculous. The world’s understanding of caste system as promulgated by the British doesn’t resemble what is in the texts or what was in practice before they came along. Guess what happened to the all the ‘lower classes’? They converted to Christianity because the missionaries were always standing..waiting in the wings.
This is not to say that there weren’t terrible things that happened in India. We don’t crucify all black people because of a few criminals. We don’t crucify all whites people for the racism of a few. Not all homeless people are drug addicts. We don’t call all men rapists because of Harvey Weinstein. All Germans are not Nazis. Caste discrimination is not a Hindu blot. In all of the above cases, it was ‘humans behaving badly’.
I am blown away every time by how the uneducated untraveled masses are willing to believe second hand accounts of a colonizing power that reluctantly left a country that single handedly overfilled the coffers and granaries of The Empire.
Why is the victim being shamed and the rapist account being taken as gospel? Because the sick fucks went around villages and measured peoples noses like they are cattle and published their understanding of what it means to them first before Indians could master English ..you know in the past 70 years after freedom...to protest all the lies?