Book To Review: To Stand With The Nations Of The World: Japan’s Meiji Restoration in World History, Mark Ravina

This article at The High Table (this is, indeed, the new āṅgla-nāma for our goṣṭhī) will serve as a succint review of Ravina’s contribution to understanding the Meiji Restoration and the people that drove Japan to radical change. In addition to giving you a quick guide on the book, and whether you should read it or not, I also hope to shed light on my understanding of Meiji-era Japan and where it is located in 18^th-19^th century Asia.

Japan, the only Asian nation to stand toe-to-toe with the European world at the peak of its power, has held a special place in the hearts and minds of most of the colonized world for many centuries, but especially for the Indian Subcontinent and Eastern Asia, given our close cultural, religious and political ties. 1 We study Japan so we can make sense of our counties, and some of the reasons they failed to go on the same path: the why. It is the same for me, so the Meiji Restoration was not a new topic, but not one I had re-visited in a long time. After reading this book a few weeks ago, I spent some time thinking about the issue of modernization structurally and I think I finally understood the why, which I will link back to the contents of the book.

Let us begin, alam vistareṇa.

The title of the book, bankoku ni heiritsu suru, itself tells us a lot about how the Meiji reformers saw themselves, standing separately but equally with the tallest nations of the world. This theme of maintaining separation (of religion, culture, identity, founding mythology) but having equality (of industry, army, technology, strength) is something that echoes throughout the book, with Ravina usually listing out the Japanese words and phrases related to cultural pride and modernity that gained public parlance in the Meiji-era. The phrases or words themselves are not important to memorize, and you will likely even forget most of them, but an impression of a people hyper-aware of and concerned with both the preservation of their unique national identity, and the transformation of their material reality will be imprinted in your brain.

Ravina divides the book into six main chapters, with two additional chapters that serve as the introduction and conclusion. The first two main chapters focus on giving the reader a context of the origins of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and the political-cultural sphere that the Japanese people had inhabited for the better part of a millenia in the 19^th century. The introduction sets up the central theme that Ravina finds in Japanese history: Japan is a nation that has, for more than 1500 years, constantly inhabited a politico-cultural realm dominated by a greater power, and it has constantly borrowed, innovated and adapted political, cultural, religious and technological ideas from them, changing them to fit Japanese realities; hence, the Meiji Restoration was not a one-off and unique event, but the conclusion of a long process that the Japanese people had always been used to.

He puts to pen two concepts that we subconsciously understand, and any reader of history will recognize: cosmopolitan chauvinism and radical nostalgia. This is the idea that radical changes to the decaying present of a country are justified as a return to the glorious past, and any borrowing of ideas from other cultural spheres are actually universal values not unique to the culture that created them, and thus, their universality actually rendering them useful to the culture that is doing the borrowing.

This is a pattern we are familiar with: whether it was the Arya Samājī reformers who justified the abolition of older Paurāṇika ideas as a return to the glorious Vaidika tradition, the Puritans in New England who justified abolishing Christmas on the charges of Pagan idolatry, or the Salafis who cast aside old Sunni tradition, on the grounds that they were bringing back even older Sunni tradition from the first three generations of Muslims (the Salaf). I think Ravina does not do enough justice in highlighting how radical nostalgia was never unique to Japan, and a lay reader might end up viewing it as a Japan-specific innovation.

The uniqueness of the Meiji reformers lay not in their ability to cast the present and future in the vocabulary of the past, or the fact that they mimic the courtly rituals and political symbolisms of the Tang Dynasty, but that they generally steer clear of wrong policy choices, and do the right policy decisions, consistently, for the better part of half a century. They speed-run the entire process of modernization, and during the process, they rarely make radically wrong decisions, and the ones they do, they self-correct on.

The average Meiji reformer reminded me much of Sardar Vallabhai Patel, consistently more sensible than not-sensible, and somehow driven by a north star of national integration and prosperity maximalization. The difference is that while we had one, or two Patels, the Japanese state was filled with thousands of them, from the top to the bottom. As a result, the not-so-sensible people in the Meiji state generally ended up on the losing side of the equation, either through war, or through elite replacement. A noticeable reversal in the way most third-world countries operate, where the somewhat-sensible elites are a needle in the haystack.

Why was this the case?

The first and second chapter of Ravina’s book offers the clues that one has to read through. The Meiji Restoration was not a completely unexpected reform movement and novel worldview that sprung out of nowhere, out of some static and feudal past, but it was the final conclusion of a much older project of reformation and power consolidation that had begun in the Tokugawa Shogunate itself. For my Indian readers, understand it this way: The Tokugawa Shogunate can be seen as a hypothetical Indian dynasty that had managed to consolidate complete power, break sub-national feudal domains and local dynasties, conquer most of the country and be at relative stability for centuries, then begin reforming on its own during the last stages of its rule, upon first contact with the Europeans.

The Tokugawas were the Marathas if they had been in power for two centuries across India, and had ample time to consolidate everything or the Mughals if they had immediately started learning Copernicus and Newton upon contact with the English. So the Meiji reformers begin with a state that is already national, consolidated, under a single imperial identity and has been absorbing European ideas for a while. Their job is to take it to the finish line, then beyond, and they do that very well.

The Kyōho reforms are largely economic and bureaucratic, and Ravina covers them in a few pages in the first two chapters. A more interesting insight is into some of the ideologues behind the reforms, men like Ogyu Sorai and Nishikawa Yoren. These state-connected philosophers openly advocate for embracing European knowledge via the Dutch, who used to trade in Japan then. 2 This Dutch studies movement, rangaku, runs parallel to a nativist movement, kokugaku, that wants to purge not only Western but also Chinese influence from Japan, seeking to reconstruct Japans old pantheon of Gods free from the shadow of the Han, and purge the language of Chinese vocabulary.

The middle-ground is found in the Mitogaku school, which originates from the Mito domain (c.f. domain is a very large zamindari, sometimes like a princely state) and fuses the best of both ideas, coining the infamous phrase Sonno Joi: Revere The Emperor, Expel The Barbarians. The author points to the irony of how the Mito domain, where the school is from, is ruled by a cadet branch of the Tokugawa House, and how the ideological fuel for Imperial Restoration and reform that brings down the Tokugawas, was provided by the Tokugawas. This is a trend we see again and again throughout this period: Samurai bring down the Samurai order. Mito scholars like Aizawa Sensei, whom we have posted about before, writing in the 19th century, argued about how Christianity served as a way of mobilizing and consolidating political power for Europeans, and how Japan likewise needed to unify and integrate around the idea of the Imperial Throne.

By the end of the second chapter, it becomes clear the seeds of what would become the Meiji were more than in place, they were sprouting plants, and the political structure was still a lot more united than anything we had in India. Any post-Mughal Indian power had to first focus on the project of political power consolidation by conquering different recalcitrant dynasties in a much larger geosphere, before they could even focus on reform. This project was cut-short by the British Raj, but in Japan this project had been completed centuries before. It only needed a regime change.

The next four chapters discuss in detail the period from the 1850s-1880s and the book roughly cuts off there. So for someone looking for a complete political and socioeconomic history of Japan well into the 20th century, the conclusions of the Meiji period and the beginnings of the new Japanese State, this is not the right book. This is a small and tasty morsel that makes you extremley curious about the period, and encourages you to feast upon whatever else you find.

Ravina discusses that before Perry even came to Japan, the cost of military modernization had become an important topic in Japanese politics, since most of the different domains did not want to pay out of their pocket to build warships and the tax base of the Shogun was limited. Upon his arrival, the desire to modernize simply gains more steam, it does not just spring up from nowhere. His arrival brings neither astonishment nor fear, but evokes even greater curiosity.

The period between 1854-1868, the Bakumatsu or last days of the Shogunate, sees the Shogunate lose political authority quite rapidly, at the cost of a rising Imperial loyalist faction and greater Daimyo authority. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last Shogun, was a very competent leader who had begun a massive modernization program and regained authority for the Shogunate with the Imperial court, and by 1867, the Shogunate was arguably more ‘modern’ than an Imperial-restoration coalition made up of the Satsuma-Chosu domains that was opposing it.

The Tokugawa Shogunate was not finally toppled because it was a static and closed system that was only jolted to action by the iron battleships of Commodre Perry, but because the militarized domains of Southwestern Japan, led by the newly industrializing Satsuma domain, wanted to carry out a coup and believed they could do the mission of modernization better, and faster. In fact, the key demand of Imperial restoration, the desire to bring power back to the Emperor, had been granted by Yoshinobu before the coup even began, much to the fury of the ‘Imperial’ coalition, whose demands were now more or less exposed as the naked power grab that they were.

When war began, it was not a coalition of modernists fighting a coalition of feudalists, it was two modernizing parties from different dynastic domains fighting for control of the nation. As Ravina points out later, the new Meiji State was simply the old Tokugawa State with a new ruling regime since a large chunk of the old elite had been incorporated into the new state. The pace of reforms would stay slow, and gradual over a decade, till they finally got radical enough to dismantle the old Samurai order completely, which would trigger, much like the United States, the Japanese Civil War of 1877, led ironically, by the Satsuma domain.

You would think what triggered a civil war is the Meiji State issuing a proclamation to end the Daimyo order and abolish the feudal domains, but on the contrary, Ravina says the old order goes away without a fight when the proclamation to end the domains is given in 1871, because the liege-lords had themselves been co-opted into the new Meiji regime, given generous pensions, privileges and senior gubernatorial positions ruling their own domains but as servants of the state, not hereditary feudalist lords. This is only partially correct.

While the Samurai elites had been co-opted in most of the country, many common Samurai increasingly found themselves developing resentment at both the nature of reforms, as well as the direction of Meiji foreign policy. The nascent Meiji ruling elite had split itself into two: a delegation that toured the Western world for two years, known as the Iwakura Mission, and a caretaker government in Tokyo that stayed behind to govern the country. Both factions were comprised of the Samurai aristocracy that had helped topple the Tokugawa Shogunate, but both took increasingly different approaches to the future of the Japanese polity and its foreign policy.

The Iwakura Mission was star-struck by the nature of development and industrialization that it witnessed in Europe and America, and wasted no time in learning the historical and political context behind these changes. They absorbed the Napoleonic Wars, the Rise of Prussia, the American Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of England. They quickly became converts to the Prussian state-building model and became suspicious of the excesses of the French Revolution, becoming convinced that a pre-modern and agrarian country could not be industrialised with mass democracy and a cacophony of bad advice from all corners.

The caretaker government back home had become swooning defenders of the principles of the French Revolution, and saw the creation of a populist Republican democracy with individual rights and liberty as essential to the process of modernization. Ravina takes care to point out that historically, the caretaker government were seen as conservative reactionaries opposed to industrialization, but in contemporary writings they were using the all-too-familiar language of the rights of man. The detail that matters here is that they had fused Republican ideals with Samurai populism. Rapid social reforms by the caretaker government were justified as the democratization of the Samurai spirit to all of Japan. Rather than discarding everything about the old ruling caste of the country as antiquated and backwards, the government would extend the best of their values to the entire nation: stubborn Samurai honor, aggressive war diplomacy and mass conscription that will make the common peasant pay the price of building modern Japan in blood.

Of course, it is a different matter that some Japanese peasants literally thought the last part was about a blood tax that would be sucked out of them, so they started panicking. Dissenters within this ruling bloc argued that Japan was an extremely backwards nation that was unprepared for such hasty and unthoughtful policy. It did not have a comprehensive tax structure, any modern civil or criminal law code and it had no governing structure of who could do what, which agency was responsible for what, if it even existed. It could not be made into France or Germany with two years of primary schooling and brash rhetoric about conquering Korea on the slighest of perceived insults.

The Iwakura Mission would come back horrified to find that the state was catering to populist sentiment of disgruntled Samurai and riling up common peasants to go invade Korea and Taiwan. Rather than taking a measured approach to building state power and carrying out state-led industrialization, they were teaching Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man to illiterate Samurais in Satsuma and recklessly printing money to finance their public spending without first reforming and streamlining their domestic revenue collection.

Almost all Samurai had been given generous stipends and grants after 1871, but many squandered that money rather than investing it or starting a business with it, since they saw knowledge of business as an insult, and took pride in being financially illiterate, to the point where doing business like a Samurai (shizoku no shōhō) became a phrase of mockery. To people like this, you can see why the idea of invading Taiwan to defend Imperial honor or extending Samurai honor culture to all of Japan sounded quite appealing; it provided one avenue to avenge their lost pride and status by an instrument they were all too familiar with.

The caretaker government losing power to the returning Iwakura Mission that cracked down on all of these reckless antics would not be seen kindly by this dissatisfied faction, sowing the seeds of rebellion.

Shortly after the Iwakura Mission takes back power with the support of the Imperial Court, the now terminated members of the caretaker government form a political oppositional bloc that doubles down on the need for democratic values, free speech and a free press. Democracy is essential to get your views across when one is not in power, and it is essential to appeal to the demos to hold on to power. What if appealing to the demos is not the right thing to do at the time? This is not something to worry about for now.

Mimicry of the West was mostly seen as high status in Meiji political discourse across both sides of the aisle by now, so the opposition to the Okubo-led government would style themselves as American revolutionaries opposing no taxation without representation, while the Okubo 3 government would see itself as prudent and careful Prussians cutting down the false siren of Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

The similarities to the United States would not just be limited to boisterous rhetoric by one side, with even the Okubo-administration taking conscious policy decisions to mimic Americana, nudged by their American advisors on the issue, they would go on to create their own ideal of Manifest Destiny with the ‘settler-colonization’ of Hokkaido. The fact they have a civil war on the issue of the nature of reforms in Japan shortly after the American Civil War is just cherry on the cake. To me, it really did seem like Japan speed ran 100 years of American history in 10 years. Perhaps this is a comment on how quickly transformative change spreads, but how slowly it originates, or perhaps it is just my sentimental reading of the whole thing.

Another thing that I realized, which I had not thought about before, was that Japan was behaving and acting like any other ambitious European (or, American) country that was behind England in the 1870s. Japan was not starting its reforms after the start of the post WWII socioeconomic liberal order, but almost a hundred years before it. Japan’s Civil War was nearly contemporaneous to America’s Civil War. Japan became a world power standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States, it was not thrown into a duo-polar hegemony as a post-Colonial nation whose confused elites were educated with the progressive wisdom of the 1920s. It could afford to ignore bad advice, because to a good extent, there was a lot less of it. Most ‘enlightened’ countries then agreed on the primacy of nationalism, on the value of industrialization, and the need for a national identity.

They differed on how to go about getting it, but by the 1960s, there wasn’t even a consensus on these things. In the 1960s, there were changed expectations on how a nation should act and behave; it was not normal to fight a bloody civil war to crush oppositional dissent or casually speak of denying franchise to illiterate peasants or burn endless coal to build factories. The world had changed. There were international agencies to regulate everything now. There were carbon credits. There was universal adult franchise. There was world peace. Japan, unlike India, did not come into this changed world as a still-born; Japan is what led to it.

The inevitable Civil War of 1877 that we were building upto so far was a coalition of a wide-range of actors who all shared some grievances with the Okubo government, and the only thing that united them was, ironically, their dislike of the government. The powerful Satsuma domain that led the Meiji restoration leading the rebels might come of as surprising till you realize that it had the highest Samurai population in all the domains. Nearly 1/3^rd of the domain was Samurai, and they extended all the way into the deep rural areas of Satsuma. That was a lot of disgruntled people who felt betrayed by the very state they helped create. The people who fought to bring on the restoration would now be its first real casualties of war.

Satsuma was entirely governed and controlled by rebellious Samurai led by the great Saigo Takamori, one of the ‘Three Great Nobles’ who brought about the Meiji Restoration. A high population of Samurai combined with regional military training academies (Sagakko) and a disgruntled but respected grand old man led to fertile grounds for rebellion, and Tokyo was rightfully concerned about it, frequently granting them special exemptions to national laws and ignoring loose implementations of land tax reform.

This was, however, not just a rebellion of disgruntled Samurais clinging on to ancient privileges, but it had popular support from ‘Samurai populists’ who saw themselves as enlightened and educated Samurais opposing the tyranny of an autocratic government that was defiling Japanese honor by either not creating a popular national assembly, or not having a more militaristic approach to international diplomacy. This was linked to the broader political climate of the time, with the Okubo government cracking down heavily on dissenting newspaper articles in a country that was increasingly reading more and more.

Just like at the start of the Meiji Restoration, even now, both parties in the Civil War wanted a strong and powerful Japan that honoured the Imperial Throne, and both parties did not want to abandon Japanese tradition. They different on how to get there, what pace of reforms to have and which Western idea or nation to emulate. Sure, there were radical Samurais that wanted to fight with steel swords and consult oracles before every battle, but even the most reactionary and the most well-respected of their leaders, Saigo Takamori, was committed to the above-mentioned principles.

There was no doubt that Japan could not progress ahead on all this without finally having a long-due reckoning on what was going on, and for that reason, it seems as if the Civil War was essential in their roadmap of nation-building, for it removed, for once and for all, the possibility of bringing about radical change in the country through violence and bloodshed.

The Satsuma Rebellion ended on September 24, 1877 when Saigo and his lieutenants died in a final suicide charge. Much like the American Civil War, these were not two alien powers from distinct cultures and nations fighting a war of conquest, they were brethren who had fought together to bring about this new order but were not spilling each other’s blood to decide who would shape it. This woe is perhaps best captured in Yamagata Aritomo’s final letter to Saigo asking him to surrender, not included in this book, but worth quoting here.

Okubo would have his own John Wilkes Booth and was assassinated just around six months later, on May 17, 1878, by six former Samurai who claimed to be upholding the true principles of the Imperial Edict of 1875 against the tyranny of the autocratic government.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

The book ends about here, with the three great men (Kido, Okubo, Saigo) who brought about the Imperial Restoration all dead, and with Ravina taking a few more pages of the last chapter to hastily explain the political changes and power grabs after Okubo’s death. This is perhaps not the best treatment of the period between 1878-1890, since it seems that Ravina is trying to just end the book here, but it does give us one clear idea. The Meiji oligarchy would finally agree to a National Assembly and Constitution, but one that it would write. It would take on the pretenses and ritual necessities of being a sensible constitutional monarchy, but still hold on to the reins of power as the paternalistic guarantor of prosperity for the Japanese people. Much like Bismarck, it would have a rubber stamp assembly, and it would ‘listen’ to popular discourse in newspapers and by dissenting political parties, but still do what it felt was best. Just like the United States or early Britain, it would have the right to vote, but only for 1% of the population.

Above all, the state would be committed to the idea of gradualism.

What emerges from the crucible of these twenty years of turmoil is a settled national consensus on the approach to governance and development. For better or worse, this consensus would dominate Japan till the Second World War. Ravina’s book is a hard recommend for a short understanding of this period of turmoil. It is the backdrop to the big picture that Japan will produce shortly after, and it is also the backdrop to understand our own countries, and the causes of their failures in not building the same consensus.

Japan had the fertile ingredients of reform: it was a largely ethnically and linguistically homogeneous country ruled by one Imperial House for almost 2000 years. It was not yet a nation, but it was ripe to be one. It had a long tradition of absorbing knowledge from China, from India, from the Dutch and the Portuguese, before first encounter with Perry’s Americans. It was in the right place, at the right time, it just caught the last ticket to the ship of rapacious industrial growth at all costs before it sailed, and it caught the last ticket to the ship of limited popular franchise in a largely illiterate and agrarian world. It had enough sailors from the elite section of its ruling caste that could steer the ship, people who were willing to abandon their own privileges for the greater good of the nation, and it had enough grit to put down those same people when they threatened the Restoration.

These were ships we failed to board as a nation, these were winds and tidings we lacked and capable sailors we did not have. So here we are.

Over the past few centuries, all reformist movements in the subcontinent have made a gross mistake in interpreting our past: they have taken prescriptive texts written in a certain historical context in the pre-modern age at face value. As a result, they have created a scare-crow of how our past looked like, and used it to frighten anyone who has asked the forbidden second question: why do we judge the past based on the moralities of the present?

Let us first understand why we think what we think. The modern idea of what is right and what is wrong, what is justice and what is injustice, come from two things:

1. The values of liberty, equality and fraternity that were products of the Enlightenment and The French Revolution, universalized and spread after the second World War in the package of Western, Liberal Democracy (WEIRD) by the unipolar and dominant Anglo-American world order. 1

2. Mass abundance, prosperity and high disposable incomes of the post-Industrial Revolution Western World. The automation of most manual labor in the developed world, and mass literacy creating a new civic culture which looked down upon hierarchy due to the greatest rate of social mobility in millenia.

You are able to worry about inequality, lack of social mobility and birth-based injustices because you live in a world of abundance where you do not worry about where your next meal will come from. You open an instant food-delivery app and order a dosa or biryani while scrolling X posts about environmentalism, unfairness, and inequality. Do you understand the luxury you enjoy? Can you possibly think of the world in the same way as a Bronze Age agriculturalist in 1500 BCE Punjab who lives in a tribal society?

You cannot. This is an important and honest admission to make. You cannot conceive of the world, of your relation to reality, the village, society, community, hierarchy and survival in the same way as your ancestors 3500 years ago. Can you possibly think of jyotiṣa in the same way as a Vedic-era man from 950 BCE Kurukṣetra? When he looked up in the sky, he saw this (c.f. pic below). Every hour of the day, every month.

Ever wondered why the Sarasvatī and Dṛṣadvatī were thought to literally be celestial rivers descending from the sky on the sacred ground of the Land of The Kurus? See this, this is what they saw, every single day when they looked up. What do you see when you look up? What do you hear when you close your eyes on a road at 6 PM? Can your noise and light polluted eyes and ears possibly have the same relation to nature that someone in the Bronze Age did back then? Be Honest.

Before I explain the historical context of hierarchy and caste, I want you, the reader, to stop making judgements on the past based on the world you live in today. Can you do that for me, for 15 minutes?

Civilization was built on extracting surplus value from agriculture, and using that food, that agrarian surplus, for occupational specialization. The primary worry of most small-scale tribal societies was day-to-day survival. Hierarchy was not only seen as completely natural, but also essential for the act of converting order into chaos, and controlling the entropy of the universe, to some extent. Most occupations that could move beyond agriculture or the labour related to it and gain control of land and labour, generally rose up in the ladder in any tribal society. People passed down fiercely contested fiefdoms and occupational specializations to their own kin: if you are a warrior and control a domain because of your skill with the horse and sword, why would you transfer that advantage to people who are not your kin?

This is a world defined by scarcity, and it is a world defined by tribal relations and limited social mobility. There are no degree-granting universities in the Bronze or Iron Age for you to graduate from or LinkedIn portals to apply to for a job. You do what your father did, and he does what his father did. Social mobility in the pre-modern is limited not by some evil moral choice of keeping the have-nots down, but because most people simply do not trust the weak state and world they live in to take care of them, if they lose their only advantage in life. Risk-taking, by definition is extremley low (though it brings great rewards).

You yourself see many hierarchies as perfectly natural, do you complain about having a manager, director, professor, teacher or parent? Perhaps you are a rebel, and you do. What truly bothers you is the fact you associate the Hindu Caste System and all pre-modern hierarchy with immutability, permanence and unfairness attached at birth.

The problem is, you blame these things on prescriptive idealistic texts like the Mānava Dharmaśāstra, and give no charity to the socioeconomic structure of society in the Bronze Age or the world those people lived in or the historical context of the texts. In reality, there was always a fair degree of mobility within all pre-modern hierarchies as well as a fair-bit of rigidity. We’ve understood that hierarchies are less mobile, natural in the pre-modern world and exist due to the relation of land, labour and capital that is different from ours. This is part of the socioeconomic context.

Let us see the historical context of the oldest origins of distinction.

The Hindu Caste System was born as a tribal hierarchical system of the Indo-Aryans. They were a tribal, semi-nomadic and pastoralist people living in a country occupied by other tribal people (who often did not follow their rites, worship their Gods or speak their language). They had good relations with some tribes, and bad relations with others. The fourth varṇa, that of the Shūdra, was their way of assimilating rival para-Indus tribes who did not worship their Gods or follow their rites. The entire system of the three, and then four varṇas, provided a framework to expand their population, spread their religion and culture, and assimilate newer tribes into their worldview. The word is not of Sanskritic origin, and it is the name of a tribe that existed somewhere in the North-West of the subcontinent.

The Rigveda contains names of Harappan (likely) chieftains designated as Dāsa-s that are completely non-Sanskritic in origin. However, these Dāsa chiefs are rich and wealthy landowning patrons who worship the Vedic dieties and patronize Vedic poets.

श॒तं दा॒से ब॑ल्बू॒थे विप्र॒स्तरु॑क्ष॒ आ द॑दे । ते ते॑ वायवि॒मे जना॒ मद॒न्तीन्द्र॑गोपा॒ मद॑न्ति दे॒वगो॑पाः ॥

A hundred did I, the vipra, receive from the Dāsa Balbūtha, from Tarukṣa. These are your people, O Vāyu, who rejoice with Indra as their protector, who rejoice with the gods as their protectors.

What kind of a Sanskrit name is Balbūtha Tarukṣa? You don’t even need to be a linguist to see it is not. These are non-Arya people, much like the Shudras of old, who were assimilated into the order of the Arya. When the oldest legal texts of the Arya are talking about the fourth varṇa, they are talking of it in the inherited context of a rival non-Arya tribe that frequently conflicts with the Arya. The fact that these people are a tribe is pretty clear when you look at the Atharvaveda mentioning them along with groups who are clearly tribes. 2

The Veda, its language, the rites and religious sacrifices were limited to the first three varṇa-s because those are the varṇa-s that literally made up the Proto-Sanskrit and Vedic dieties worshipping Arya people. Why would a pre-modern tribe ever include a rival tribe that does not speak its language, does not worship its Gods or believe in rites as part of their in-group? This does not happen even today in Amazonian tribes, some of which practice ritual cannibalism against the others, forget Bronze Age tribes. 3

The modern word Shudra, and the later varṇa, however, is not a tribe: it is a label. Just as the word Slave does not mean of Slavic origin today, the word Shudra becomes a label for anybody the expanding Arya people refuse to assimilate or do not get along well with. Now we get to the heart of something important: a legal text or Vedic era manual written in a historical and socioeconomic context of tribal warfare is stripped of its entire context, and suddenly used as a universal text that is describing a historical reality of senseless evil.

If the historical Shudra were a far North-Western non-Sanskrit speaking tribe, how on earth does a modern farmer from Assam or Telangana (who might feel like he belongs to the label Shudra) have anything in common to do with those people? And how on earth does that modern farmer and his “Shudra” caste fit into the historical context of the texts the earliest ritual and legal manuals were written in? He does not.

Not only were hierarchies normal in that world, so was tribal violence and tribal warfare. There was nothing inhumane about two rival tribes fighting each other and degrading each other in their texts or writings.

You blame the Vedic people for this because their side of the story is the only one that survived, due to their complete dominance in spreading their religion. The other side of the story simply died out. This is why you have no oral texts, no written inscriptions or religious works from the Bronze Age non-Sanskrit speaking, non-Vedic worshipping tribes. They simply died out, or assimilated into, and became Arya. Do you think Bronze/Iron Age Tribes that fought the Vedic people would have spoken nicely of them in their own stories?

There is a lot more context I can go into, but this is an article, not a book. I might make more posts on this if the demand exists. I wanted to use one example to give you a peek into how scripture is actually to be interpreted and seen when you view it from the lens it was written in, and don’t just cast immediate judgements.

I now come to the second part of his question. The idea that certain ideas are fixed to be divine in our religion. This assumes two things:

1. No traditional scholar or school in Hinduism ever interpreted scripture non-literally (i.e: we are forced to accept the entire received tradition as unfallible, ahistorical and unchangeable).

2. There are no contrary opinions with regards to Varṇa in the received tradition.

This is again, untrue. Hinduism, like most polytheistic religions, is extremley ecletic and open to diversity in a lot of peripheral viewpoints, which is what makes the multiplicity of regional acāra-s and their limited but real validity for all legalist authors. What is also true is that no primary and organic religion that has survived for four-thousand plus years has done so without constantly evolving in a lot of things. Secondary religions, like Islam or Christianity, are frozen in time and frozen with one corpus of texts, this is what defines them. Scriptural literalism is the bedrock of their faith because their faith rests on historical facts; ours rests on the codification of eternal truths of our species into a formal system of philosophy and ritual.

If Christ literally did not rise from the dead, or did not view himself as God, as most Biblical Scholarship views today, then all of Christianity is meaningless, and it falls from its foundations. Whether the core of the Rāmāyaṇa happened in 1500 BCE, or 800 BCE, or whether a Smṛti from 300 CE is divine revelation or not, does not serve as the litmus test of our religion. The Vaiśya Varṇa evolved from refering to agriculturalist producers (as it was in the RV, AV) into urban landowning merchants (as it became in the Jaṭaka texts). This does not falsify or prove anything about our religion.

The meat of the cow was eaten in the age of the Gṛhya Sūtras, but it has been prohibited for us for thousands of years now. This does not mean we will pick verses from those time and justify this habit today, because, truth be told, in a religion so vast and so old, you can justify anything from scripture. Historically, how evolutions and new ideas about right and wrong were codifed into our legal texts was based on collective wisdom of the smartest people in our religio-political sphere, combined with state power enforcing or shaping those ideas. The concept of Kalivarjya, or activities forbidden in the age of Kali, is not a concept that exists in the Apastamba Sutra that is dated to many centuries before the Common Era, but it is mentioned in every early-modern Smṛti since it serves as a powerful tool by the Siṣṭa-Jana of the time to rationalize their encounters with modernity.

In fact, an entire Smṛti, the Parāśara, comes up that declares itself as the legal text of the Kali Age (kalau pārāśarāḥ smṛtāḥ). Another Smṛti from Sindh, the Devala, declares the exact process for ritual purification and re-conversion of Hindus who were made Muslims and forced to eat beef, or Hindu women who were forcibly converted to Islam and made to have children with the Arabs in Sindh. Are these by any means situations that someone in the Vedic Age would have to deal with or discuss? If the legal code and its interpretation was frozen the way most Islamic jurisprudence is, could we have dealt with any of this? What about the ban on sea-travel, which started two thousand years ago in the Baudhayana but was cleverly done away with by great scholars like Mahāmahopādhyāya Tāranātha Tarkavācaspati during the 19^th century? Can we in any shape or form, pretend to harbour a serious religious tradition if we believe in every legal injunction from every Smṛti without paying heed to the world around us?

The problem you face today is a tradition that has no funding, no state patronage (lost in the 11^th century) and no mass recognition beyond lip-service is incapable of coherently providing modern defenses or interpretations that keep the best elements of our past while advancing forward. Take the question of caste.

In the pre-modern world, a stable hierarchical system that provided kinship, clan, business and marriage served as a building block of missing state capacity in a rural world that was centered around survival. Jāti networks helped enforce legal contracts in a world where the state’s legal apparatus was often missing. Different Jāti-s claimed to represent and belong to different Varṇa-s of the old three/four-fold classification.

In the past few centuries, have we ever tried to decide what the traditional approach to this should be in the modern world? Should we advocate for the survival of Jāti networks but the dissolution of Varṇa-based claims? There is, after all, the well-known idea in scripture that all the Varṇa-s were one in the Golden Age, and all of them will dissolve into one by the end of the age of Kali. (c.f. Bhṛgu-Bharadwaja dialogue in the Shanti-Parva, na viśeṣo 'sti varṇānām). Should the state take this approach? Should we do the opposite? When the Japanese were attempting to modernize, they would always rationalize present day measures (i.e: the abolition of certain caste distinctions) as pre-existing traditional solutions that always existed in the old Japanese state. If the Samurai caste was to be abolished, it was because in the old Japanese religion/state, before the Ashikaga Shogunate, it had never existed. It was a temporary measure that served its purpose and hence dissolving it was a return to tradition as well.

In India, the state and the people have never seriously engaged with any of these questions. Rather, our modernization has been a bonafide adoption of English Common Law and Western ideas wholescale into our society, with no hoots given to tradition. This creates a mess where every individual is left to decide his own opinion on these issues. Rather than updating our legal jurisprudence in line with our own inherited tradition, we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

So you get a society which not only does not want to modernize, it blames the past for the problems it suffers today, it harbors a deep distrust of pre-modern hierarchy and caste, while at the same time institutionalizing it in the political architecture of the state. The elements of our society that claim to adhere to the old traditional religion, do so with deep suspicion of any modernization, and view all of it as an affront to an eternal, unchanging and fixed tradition.

The complete lack of leadership by the Indian state post-independence for half a century created a boiling pot of distrust and suspicion among all communities, the brunt of which was inevitably borne by a religion that was a lot smarter than its adherents today. Hinduism suffers from a caricature of something it never was. A religion and civilization that, more than two thousand years ago, spread from Kabul to Sumatra, is today seen as an insular and restrictionist tradition due to the failures of those who claim to adhere to it today.

Over the course of one generation — from 1990 to 2020, the world saw China transform itself from a backwater filled with rice farmers, plagued by the depravities of Maoism and the burden of conformist Confucian tradition into the world’s largest and most dynamic factory. The Han transformed quaint fishing villages in Guangzhou into bustling megapolises with beams of steel that pierced the heavens. In our last article, we looked at the structural and economic reforms needed to bring about this transformation in China, and briefly glanced over India’s failure to bring about a similar transformation in the 1990s and 2000s. In this article, we will look at the policy reasons for this failure, the failed attempts to reform in the 1980s leading to financial crisis and the aborted efforts to liberalize in the 1990s, which lead to an era of rapid but unsustainable growth. India’s dominant IT services export industry led to it being known as the world’s backoffice, but China was the world’s factory, and outsourced customer service simply does not pay as much as building cars, ships, planes and power plants. The structural road-blocks in rapid sustainable development in India (infrastructure, education, research, land/labor reforms) only began to be fixed in the last decade after the rise of the Modi government but even then a lot of the solutions are stymied by the nature of India’s political electorate.

The 1980s reforms, debt-driven growth and seeds of crisis

The first wave of economic change in India began in the 1980s, after Indira Gandhi came back to power and the Janta Party coalition collapsed. The 1970s had seen the rise of stagflation in the Western world due to the oil shocks of 1973, 1979 and 1980. Political instability and crisis in the Middle East, with the Yom-Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution had cut oil supply and sent costs soaring across the world. 1979 was one of the worst years for the Indian economy, with nearly ~20% inflation and negative 6% YoY growth. In fact, 1965-1979 was the worst period for the Indian economy with nearly double digit inflation on average and sub 3% GDP growth. Crude oil import had gone from a mere 11% of the import bill in 1972 to almost 30% by 1975 and before the situation could stabilize, the second oil shock of 1979-1980 sent oil imports to nearly ~50% of India’s import bill. Exports as a percentage of GDP stagnated at 4-5% despite the rupee devaluation in 1966 and India was fast running out of foreign currency to finance it’s government. To stabilize this situation that she inherited in 1980, Gandhi seeked a crucial US$5.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1981, betting on the neo-liberal climate being in her favor, since this was the age of neo-liberal reform, with western leaders like Reagan and Thatcher triumphing on a pro-business and anti-regulatory free market agenda.

This is something not a lot of people know but by mid-1981, Indian foreign exchange reserves had fallen to cover just 3.5 months of imports, and IMF India Executive Director, Dr M Narasimhan, urged Indira Gandhi to go to the IMF. The United States was in split-minds over going India this loan (in 1966, the IMF had given India it’s first loan, and it was this loan which had even forced the Indians to devalue the rupee on instructions) but Narasimhan met with the Treasury Secretary who told him the US would not veto the loan if it came to the board, but they opposed this from a fiscal perspective. The US State Department was in favor of it, and De Larosiere, IMF Executive Director was also sympathetic to India here. India had already received additional assistance from the World Bank before this in the late 1960s, and the World Bank was also in favor of India being given the loan. Thus, it was to secure this funding that any reforms in India even began, this is a trend that the readers must already see repeated in 1990-1991, when the IMF refused to assist India anymore until comprehensive reforms in addition to collateral (gold) was given. In India, economic policy change in the 80s and 90s was not being driven from within unlike in China, but it was the desperate act of a sinking ship to try to stay afloat. Her Industrial Policy Statement (1980) relaxed licensing requirements for 34 industries, allowing firms to exceed production limits and retain surplus output for exports. Operation Forward (1982) cautiously opened sectors like electronics and telecommunications to foreign technology and capital while retaining state control over "core" industries. Small-scale industries saw asset limits doubled (₹10 lakh to ₹20 lakh) to boost entrepreneurship. Fiscal measures included introducing the Modified Value-Added Tax (MODVAT) in 1986 to streamline indirect taxes and reduce cascading effects. The Sixth Five-Year Plan (1980–85) prioritized growth (5.2% target) through public sector efficiency and private sector stimulation, funded heavily by external borrowing.

However, the biggest issue with all these smaller reforms was that there was still no push in fixing the long-term structural issues plaguing the country nor was a base for some export-led industrial growth laid out in these crucial years, the picture of China having started it’s reforms in 1979 and India in 1991 is only half correct: India and China started ‘reforming’ around the same time, but India wasted a decade and later governments (Rajiv Gandhi) halted any reforms after a plethora of domestic scandals rocked them. The second biggest issue was that from 1980-1990, India racked up foreign debt to finance it’s budget like a drug addict desperate for his next shot. Nehruvian self-reliance had been disastrous in many fields but the self-reliance principle had made India generally shun foreign markets and keep operating a failed state. Nehru also benefited from British foreign aid that dried up around the late 1960s and hence the foreign reserves could not be bolstered by it. The impetus to reform, and the first external aid/loan payments helped India stabilize itself and raise growth up to 5% but foreign debt more than doubled in just five years from 1980 to 1985.

After the assassination of Indira Gandhi, a massive wave of sympathy for her across the country led to the Indian National Congress sweeping the 1984 elections with ~47% vote share and 414 seats out of 573 in parliament. It was, and remains, the biggest political victory handed out any political party in independent India. Her younger son, Rajiv Gandhi, had always tried to shy away from the political spotlight, but the death of Sanjay Gandhi, who had practically run the government during the Emergency (1975-1977) from the “Prime Minister’s House” (PMH, pun on PMO), had made Indira rely even more on her own family, and so she had pushed Rajiv Gandhi into politics. A youthful face, with a foreign wife, western education, the 40 year old gaven an address to the US Congress on Capitol Hill that got a standing ovation.

I am young and I too have a dream. I dream of an India - strong, independent, self-reliant, and in the front ranks of the nations of the world in the service of mankind.

Unfortunately, this brief hope of glimmer was not to last for long. Rajiv Gandhi started out as a technocrat friendly leader, seen as a major reformist with technocrats like Sam Pitroda and liberal economists like Montek Singh Ahluwalia by his side. Ramnath Goenka, of the Indian Express would would go from one of Rajiv’s biggest supporters in 1984 to his biggest foe five years later, echoing a betrayal of the sentiment that a small section of educated Indians and businessmen had felt come from Rajiv, a betrayal of his reformist roots to return back to socialism for maintaining political capital.

Rajiv Gandhi began by launching the 1984 New Computer Policy to indigenize the electronics sector and focus on creating IT hardware. Import tariffs on hardware/software were cut from ~140% to ~60% and this is the era when companies like Wipro switched to the electronics and computer industry from making vegetable oils and familiar household Indian names like Infosys came about. Gandhi also established the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). In addition to these small but appreciable changes in the IT Sector, Gandhi carried out a lot of industrial deregulation. The Open General License (OGL) was expanded 1170 capital good items by 1988 from a mere 76 in 1977. Items on the OGL list like sewing machines or chocolate bars received tariff exemptions. The government monopoly of import of certain items in a certain sector (canalisation) was also reduced by increased domestic production and end of government import monopolies on some items like cement or rubber. By 1987, canalised imports made up just ~25% of all imports, from a high of nearly ~70% in in 1980. A small push to incentivize exports was made with the REP licenses (Replenishment License) which allowed exporters to get a license to import certain restricted goods based on a percentage of their export earnings. These licenses were tradable (and transferable) on a secondary market, which created a big room for corruption and rent-seeking based on arbitrage. The other issue was they were inefficient ways of promoting export earnings and still banned the import of items on the negative list, like electronics.

Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, discusses how difficult it used to be import a computer in those days.

There was also such a strict licensing regime to import a computer that it took me three years and I went about 50 times to Delhi. Those days I couldn’t afford a flight, so I took a train. I had to stay in some seedy place near Old Delhi Railway Station. Even that cost money for a fledgling company. For new companies, there was such a heavy tariff because even before you got a licence, 50 visits meant — even if it was $500 a trip (at that time, it was Rs 6 per dollar) — $25,000 spent on a $100,000 computer before you bought it or got a licence. The officers did not know anything about computers. They would quibble about small things. Why do you need 64MB of memory? Go with only 48MB, they would say. Let’s say, if one got a licence after two years of running around, one would discover that the models one got the licence for had become old in the US.

How can you have a Samsung or Sony when having 1100 items up from 76 on your “Open License List”, 70% tariffs instead of 150%, a 50% tax rate instead of 55% and three years to import one computer is seen as the cornerstone of your “reforms”?

The 1991 crisis, the surplus labor paradox

The main issue wasn’t even with the lethargic speed of reforms, it was at the rate at which India had racked up foreign debt without any growth in exports. Readers will remember from our last article that in a very similar situation around the same time in the 80s, Chen Yun, one of the eight elders of the CCP at the time, and the strongest ‘fiscal hawk’ had said:

Some people make fun of cautious people, making it seem as if cautious people believe that the less steel we produce the better. Ridiculous. Yes, we should borrow funds and technology from abroad. But how much can we be sure that we can repay from our People’s Bank? We need to ensure that we will be able to make the repayments.

How much time have we wasted since the Opium Wars? 100 years? What is 3 more?

Unlike in China, there were no large scale land reforms in India during Gandhi’s tenure either, and no changes in the labor laws of the time. In fact, these issues would prove so politically charged and dangerous that the 1980s and 1990s would see no reforms in land/labor, with all leadership choosing to sidestep the contentious agrarian issue and focusing on high-tech IT reforms. India’s land and labor reforms stagnated post-Nehru due to entrenched elites, institutional inertia, and political survival calculus. While China pursued relentless state-led reforms (e.g., Deng’s SEZs, Zhu’s SOE restructuring), India’s democracy prioritized short-term stability over structural change. The 1980s and 1991 reforms sidestepped these issues, leaving a legacy of still-birth. IT reforms were easier to carry out because it was a novel industry that was not linked to the political futures of elected representatives, and this is one place where we warrant the criticism of how Indian democracy has stymied India’s potential. However, the fact of the matter remains that the other governments did not even carry out the changes which could have been done (infrastructure investment, health and education, judicious borrowing). India’s democractic structure is an inevitable reality of it’s diverse and heterogeneous character, but India was also mired by extremely poor leadership at the center for most of the 20^th century.

To give an example of how restrictive some of these laws were, the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA) of 1947 required private firms with >100 employees to seek government approval to fire anyone, and since this approval was rarely granted, it was impossible for promoters to scale their companies without the fear of being stuck with a permanent “hire but never fire” system where job security was nearly certain for any worker. Later amendments in 1976 and 1982 even lowered this 100 employee limit to 50 (a limit that still stands) and private firms as a result simply stopped having permanent employees, instead choosing to rely on contractual labor that was poorly trained and ironically, even more exploited due to a total lack of job security. The other main problem this causes in India is the lack of scalability in industry, there can never be an exponential multiplication of manufacturing power and wealth generated from exports in India because 50% of Indian SMEs (producing just 4% of output) fail to even graduate past the 10 employee stage. In fact, it wasn’t until 2020 with the Four Labor Code reforms that any government even managed to change the laws significantly for the good. The Modi government tried to in 2015 and in 2019, only to get the jibe of “suit boot ki sarkaar” (government of the elite) both times by the opposition and millions of people striking out in the open to bring a halt to government until the proposed labor codes were pulled back. Another main problem was Rajiv Gandhi’s government had a historic mandate of 414 seats, with absolutely zero opposition on ground and a ripe environment to carry out reforms, but back-to-back political debacles made him scale back on any reforms and return to a socialist shell.

The Bofors scandal in 1987, involving kickbacks from a ₹1,437 crore Swedish arms deal, irreparably damaged Rajiv Gandhi’s reformist credibility, casting his tech-focused liberalization as elite-driven crony capitalism. This crisis triggered a socialist backlash within Congress, where traditionalists like Arjun Singh accused reforms of betraying Nehru’s "pro-poor" legacy. Finance Minister V.P. Singh, a key reform architect, resigned in 1987, condemning corruption and forming the Janata Dal to mobilize rural voters against "foreign capital appeasement." Opposition leaders like Devi Lal weaponized Nehruvian rhetoric, framing reforms as a "sell-out" to multinationals, forcing Rajiv to abandon deregulation and revive subsidies (e.g., ₹2,500 crore fertilizer subsidies in 1988–89) to placate rural bases. The scandal and ideological infighting derailed India’s reform momentum for a decade, exposing how elite-driven modernization falters without political coalitions to absorb backlash.

Gandhi had also faced Hindu backlash in 1985 due to his blatant disregard for the rule of law in the Shah Bano case (Mohd. Ahmad Khan (The Union) v. Shah Bano Begum). Rajiv Gandhi carried out a policy of communal appeasement. After the Supreme Court granted alimony to Shah Bano under secular law, Muslim conservatives protested, prompting Rajiv’s government to pass the Muslim Women Act (1986), overturning the verdict and restricting maintenance to the iddat period. This perceived capitulation to clerical demands sparked accusations of "Muslim appeasement" and alienated Hindu voters. To counterbalance this, Rajiv’s administration unlocked the Babri Masjid gates in 1986 via a judicial order, legitimizing Hindu claims to the site and fueling the BJP’s Ram Janmabhoomi movement. This tactical pivot to Hindu appeasement backfired, magnifying communal polarization and empowering the BJP’s narrative of "pseudo-secularism." The BJP, leveraging Ayodhya as a rallying cry, surged from 2 seats (1984) to 85 (1989), setting the stage for its eventual dominance in the late 2010s and 2020s.

India's rigid labor laws created structural barriers that stifled labor-intensive sectors like textiles and apparel. Firms were encouraged on their own to seek contractual labor, avoid scaling up in size, and had no incentive to export outside India. Despite our vast labor surplus (just like China), firms preferred capital-heavy industries (e.g., automobiles, machinery) and not labor-intensive ones (textile). This misalignment eroded competitiveness in labor-driven sectors: textile exports plummeted from 25% of global trade in 1947 to 4% by 1990, as Bangladesh and China captured markets with flexible labor policies and cost efficiencies. Meanwhile, India’s manufacturing workforce fragmented into the informal sector, which housed 93% of workers by 1995. These informal enterprises, averaging just 2.3 workers per firm, operated with minimal productivity gains, lacking access to technology, training, or economies of scale, a stark contrast to China’s factories averaging 15+ workers with streamlined operations. China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs), which waived labor restrictions and offered tax incentives, attracted massive FDI (e.g., Foxconn’s Shenzhen factories employed 500,000 workers under flexible contracts by 1995). India, by contrast, averaged just $200 million annually in FDI (1985–1995) versus China’s $38 billion, as bureaucratic red tape and labor rigidity deterred investors. This divergence locked India into a low-productivity informal economy that it has not been able to get out of yet while China leveraged labor flexibility and state-backed industrialization to dominate global manufacturing.

The crisis of 1991 arose after external debt obligations became impossible to manage again, with more than 30% of export earnings going to interest payments and external debt at an all time high of ~$85 billion (tripled from 1980). India was also on the losing side of two historic events: the USSR had collapsed in 1991 and the Gulf War just broke out, oil prices went through the roof and India lost it’s largest trading partner (~30% of all exports), and biggest source of rupee-convertible trade. The Rupee-Ruble trade mechanism (1953-1991) allowed India to conserve it’s dollars since the Soviets accepted rupees for ⅕ of the total trade, letting India acquire oil without having to waste foreign exchange it simply couldn’t earn on it’s own. The collapse of this mechanism hit Indian trade hard, and imports from ex-Soviet states dropped by 65% with the trade deficit being ~3.5% of GDP in 1991 and the fiscal deficit ~10% of GDP. Ironically, the Modi government brought back Rupee-Ruble trade in 2022 with the Ukraine War, letting India buy Russian oil in Rupees at a discount and then sell it back to the West to earn more valuable currency like Euros.

In March of 1991, India’s reserves were in free-fall and the Chandrashekhar Azad government was forced to pledge and airlift 67 tonnes of gold from India to England to secure an emergency loan of $600 million. Such a move was borne out of pure desperation, given the emotional attachment the country had to gold, it was almost a testament to the fact that the country was broke, and just like a struggling Indian household, it was in such dire times it had to sell it’s gold to survive. By June of 1991, foreign exchange reserves had fallen to a paltry ~$1.2 billion, enough for just three weeks of imports and the new government under PM Narasimhan Rao and FM Manmomhan Singh Kohli was forced to do something to get out of the mess given to them once again. Facing a severe balance-of-payments crisis in 1991, India again went to the IMF to seek a bail-out, just like it had in 1981, but this time it faced hostile opposition from all fronts. The IMF and the US refused to assist India until it agreed to carry out a series of reforms that finally dismantled the License Raj once and for all, and India became open to free-trade. The reforms were focused on trade liberalization and deregulation, not necessarily on boosting manufacturing export-led growth (the ‘Washington Consensus’ of the IMF and World Bank emphasized free-trade and free-markets as the key to prosperity), in fact they forced India to abolish any export-related subsidies in place (like the REP licenses) and they did not come with conditions attached to land, labor reforms, so the government could entirely skip out on those reforms. India managed to secure $2.2 billion under a strict conditional plan of bringing down the fiscal deficit and ending the high-tariff regime.

During the reforms, Rao and Kohli had to overcome fierce opposition within their own Congress party. Senior leaders like Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar opposed privatization as a betrayal of Nehruvian socialism, while MPs decried fuel price hikes (40% for LPG, 30% for fertilizers) as "anti-poor." As detailed in Half Lion by Vinay Sitapati, Rao navigated resistance by retaining control of the Industry Ministry to directly oversee deregulation, rebranding reforms as a "return to Nehru’s vision" to placate critics. Key measures included a 24% rupee devaluation (July 1991), abolition of the License Raj in July 1991, and partial currency convertibility by 1993, abolishing capital controls. In the financial sector, the Narasimham Committee’s recommendations drove key changes: statutory liquidity (SLR) and cash reserve ratios (CRR) were slashed from 38.5% and 25% to 25% and 10%, respectively, freeing up capital for lending. Interest rates, previously controlled by the RBI, were gradually deregulated, starting with long-term deposits to encourage savings. Public and private banks faced new competition from foreign players, supported by relaxed branch licensing and operational autonomy. Simultaneously, capital markets were restructured and SEBI gained statutory powers to regulate transparency, replacing direct government control with investor-focused oversight. These steps aimed to modernize a rigid banking system and attract domestic and foreign investment through competitive, market-driven practices.

On the industrial and trade fronts, licensing requirements were scrapped for all but 18 strategic sectors, dismantling the License Raj. The MRTP Act, which stifled private expansion, was repealed, while public sector dominance shrank from 17 reserved areas to 8 (like railways and atomic energy). Trade barriers were dismantled and imports shifted from a restrictive “positive list” to a limited “negative list,” slashing tariffs from over 300% to 50%. FDI rules eased, allowing automatic approval for up to 51% foreign equity in priority sectors, later raised to 100%. The rupee’s 20% devaluation in July 1991 aimed to boost export competitiveness amid a balance-of-payments crisis. These measures, coupled with the creation of the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB), marked the end of economic protectionism in India to a significant extent, but were half-baked because they refused to address deep-rooted structural issues in land, agriculture, labor and manufacturing.

Post-Reforms, the ‘Back office of the World’, and Modi-led infra push

The reforms finally secured the a $2.2 billion IMF bailout and $1.8 billion in World Bank loans, alongside the desperate airlift of 67 tonnes of gold done very clandestinally to secure $600 million. By 1994, GDP growth surged to 7.6%, and forex reserves rose from $1.2 billion (1991) to $20 billion (1995), stabilizing the once distraught situation. The rest of the 1990s and the 2000s would see the rise of services-led growth in India for more than two decades, without any major changes in the underlying structure of the country (IT, Telecom and Finance attract 60% of all FDI inflows and India’s IT services exports went from $150 million in 1991 to $190 billion in 2021. The magic word we heard in India growing up those times was “FDI”, it was this foreign investment that was supposed to make India as rich as China, replicating the Han miracle. FDI or Foreign Direct Investment is really important because it lets multinational companies from advanced companies invest directly into your country (providing an infusion of foreign capital, at no interest cost) and train your workforce in modern technologies and efficient systems of production. Foreign Investment is not a loan, so it does not come with interest payments or default risks, and it also brings the company investing in you as a direct partner that is obligated to increase the value of it’s investment by transferring knowledge and technology to you.

In India, FDI has risen to ~$80 billion by 2020, and when big names like Amazon or Suzuki (Maruti) invest in India and open factories or offices, they help train employees to world-class standards and the resulting ToT improves Indian capacities in those sectors. Indian growth was always fueled by domestic consumption (making up 70% of our GDP) and services export (which benefited tremendously from FDI). Indian car manufacturers with foreign partnerships like Maruti haven’t really managed to expand to become a global car company like BYD has in China, so the FDI-led growth has been services led growth (55% of Indian GDP comes from the service sector). From 1991 to 2000, India had a modest GDP growth rate of 5% pa, which went up to 8% pa from 2001 to 2011, and slowed down for an average of 6-6.5% from 2012-2024. In contrast, China grew at 10% straight from 1991-2011 and and growth slowed down post 2011 due to the overleveraged nature of the domestic economy, falling consumption, trade wars, coronavirus and a property-sector crisis.

Another big hurdle to manufacturing investment in India is the problem faced with respect to land acquisition due to local and political malcontent. Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory was built in 10 months, while in India, the Korean steel giant POSCO was forced to stay in legal limbo for 15 years while tribal and environmental groups in Orissa halted the process of land acquisition. The $12 billion planned plant at Jagatsinghpur was finally scrapped after POSCO backed out from the venture. In other examples, the Shiv Sena-led (Thackeray) MVA government dismissed the Mumbai-Ahemdabad High Speed Rail project as a "vanity initiative," stalling approvals in bodies like the Thane Municipal Corporation and delaying forest clearances for 32 hectares. Land acquisition lagged at just 22% (vs. Gujarat’s 85%), with protests from farmers and tribal communities in Palghar/Dahanu over livelihood losses and environmental lawsuits. Administrative hurdles included delayed land transfers and Maharashtra withholding its ₹5,000 crore equity share. However, after the Eknath Shinde-BJP coalition took power in June 2022, land acquisition surged to 98.22%, forest approvals were fast-tracked, and tenders for Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex station resumed. As of 2025, 100% of the land acquisition for the Mumbai-Ahmedabad HSR is complete, with 81% of the project being funded by an interest-free loan from Japan to the MH government.

As a result, Manufacturing as a percent of GDP has stayed at a constant 15% from 2000-2020 (slightly up to 17% in 2020) and a phenomenon referred to as ‘Premature Deindustrialization’ by Dani Rodrik has set in, where emerging markets are becoming full service economies before going through the full cycle of industrialization. Developing countries, including India, are experiencing a decline in manufacturing employment and output at much lower income levels compared to early industrializers like the U.S. and Europe. This trend, driven by globalization, labor-saving technologies, and competition from manufacturing giants like China, has forced many developing nations to shift prematurely toward service economies without fully reaping the productivity gains of industrialization. In India, this has resulted in a limited manufacturing base, with urban workers moving into low-productivity services rather than factories. Manufacturing share of output and incomes peaks and then begins to decline at the country attains middle income levels. India has started deindustrializing at a per capita income $2000 while Western countries began the same transition at a per capita income of $10,000. India sees 12 million people enter it’s workforce every year, and it simply does not have enough service sector skill intensive jobs to employ all of them.

Bad debt (thankfully, internal debt this time) would become a thing once again in the mid 2010s, leading to a NPA (bad loan) crisis in Indian public sector banks due to corruption and inefficiency that would not get fixed for a decade. NPAs had surged during the UPA era, peaking at ₹8.95 lakh crore in FY18, with systemic issues such as aggressive lending, political interference, and corruption leading to stressed assets. The government implemented measures like the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which enabled faster resolution of bad loans, recovering over ₹10 lakh crore between 2014 and 2023. Recapitalization efforts infused ₹3.1 lakh crore into PSBs between 2016 and 2021, strengthening their balance sheets. Reforms included improving governance, adopting technology, and merging weaker banks to create stronger entities. As a result, the gross NPA ratio of PSBs declined from a peak of 14.58% in March 2018 to 3.12% by September 2024, while profits soared to over ₹3 lakh crore annually.

The other major reforms that the Modi government has carried out since then were a massive investment in basic infrastructure: complete electrification, toilet construction and expansion of the highway network. It is bewildering how despite 60 years of governance, India had not even achieved full electrification of it’s villages by 2014. Through initiatives like the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY) and Saubhagya Yojana, all 18,374 un-electrified villages were electrified by 2018, with over 2.86 crore households gaining access to electricity. The average daily electricity supply in rural areas increased from 12.5 hours in 2014 to 22.6 hours in 2025, while urban areas now enjoy 23.4 hours of power daily, ensuring minimal disruptions for industries. Simultaneously, the government tackled sanitation challenges through the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, building over 110 million toilets and achieving open defecation-free status by 2020, benefiting over 600 million people. Enhanced power generation capacity (up by 79.5% since 2014) and expanded transmission networks have reduced energy shortages from 4.2% in 2014 to a mere 0.1% in 2025, ensuring reliable power for industrial growth without interruptions.

The National Highway network expanded by 60%, from 91,287 km in 2014 to 1,46,145 km in 2023, with highway construction reaching a record pace of 37 km/day. The Bharatmala Pariyojana has completed 15,549 km of highways under Phase I, while rural connectivity improved with 3.74 lakh km of roads built under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana. Railways have seen modernization through 100+ Vande Bharat trains, electrification of 93.83% of broad-gauge tracks, and the redevelopment of 1,318 stations under the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme. Urban mobility has been transformed with metro rail expansion from 248 km in 2014 to 945 km in 2024, now serving 21 cities. In aviation, the UDAN Scheme operationalized 545 routes and added 84 airports in the last decade. Additionally, initiatives like the Sagarmala Programme and National Waterways Act have enhanced port-led development and inland water transport.

Then there is the creation of the digital ‘India Stack’, a digital public infrastructure comprising Aadhaar (biometric identity), UPI (real-time payments), and mobile connectivity. Aadhaar, covering over 1.4 billion people, ensures secure identification for welfare distribution, while UPI, launched in 2016, has become the backbone of digital payments, processing over 10 billion monthly transactions by 2024. The JAM trinity (Jan Dhan bank accounts, Aadhaar, and Mobile phones) has facilitated Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT), eliminating middlemen and saving ₹3.5 trillion in leakages since 2014. Welfare schemes like PM-Kisan and LPG subsidies are now directly credited to beneficiaries’ accounts. The digital push was further accelerated by Reliance Jio’s entry in 2016, which slashed data costs by over 90%, making high-speed internet accessible to millions. This democratization of connectivity enabled rural Indians to access online banking, education, and telemedicine. With minimal infrastructure costs, small vendors now accept digital payments via QR codes, integrating them into the formal economy

The government has also focused on a core export-linked incentives scheme to boost manufacturing in India, the PLI (production linked incentives) scheme launched in 2020 has been a transformative initiative to boost domestic manufacturing, attract foreign investment, and reduce import dependency across 14 critical sectors. With an outlay of ₹1.97 lakh crore, the scheme incentivizes companies to scale production by offering financial rewards based on incremental output. The electronics sector has been a standout success, with India transitioning from a net importer of mobile phones to a global exporter. Companies like Foxconn, Wistron, and Pegatron, key suppliers for Apple, have established manufacturing units in India, contributing to smartphone exports worth ₹80,769 crore as of 2022. The scheme has also expanded into sectors like automobiles, pharmaceuticals, food processing, and telecom, fostering innovation and creating over 8.5 lakh jobs. For instance, the PLI for telecom equipment has achieved 60% import substitution, while the food processing PLI has enhanced farmers' incomes by promoting domestic sourcing.

Conclusion

Despite all these success stories, real GDP growth has not been more than ~6.5-7% per annum, and one of the most important reasons for that is the slowdown in global growth. It’s much easier to grow at 10% when global growth is at 5% and much more difficult to do the same when the entire world has slowed down. Export-led growth works the best when the advanced economies purchasing from India have a consumptionary environment with low interest rates and low inflation, leading to more discretionary spending power to buy goods from countries like India. The peak of global growth from 1980-2008 was fueled in large part by taking on a lot of public debt, which eventually has to be paid back, and when advanced economies are paying back debt they do not have the same fiscal environment that is conducive for a very export-led growth model for emerging economies. There is a lot less money to go around for everyone, and hence not every country can hope to become the next China by capturing global markets.

The main ideas to take from this article have been the fact that economic reform in India, whether in the 1980s or in the 1990s, was something the state was forced to do to merely survive, unlike in the East Asian tigers that purused a comprehensive policy of industrial reform to become developed economies. In the 1970s, global oil shocks and a decade of stagflation in the West forced India to borrow from the IMF, and Indira/Rajiv Gandhi carried out a small series of changes to License Raj along with pursuing a debt-driven growth model. Rajiv Gandhi’s political scandals made him dial down the reforms and he retreated back to his socialist shell to seek political reelection. Foreign borrowing did not end and by 1990 the country was spending 30% of it’s export earnings on servicing interest payments. This external debt built up to such a large amount that the 1991 collapse of the USSR and the Gulf War brought the country down to its knees again, forcing it to finally end the tariff rule once and for all. In India, reform in crucial sectors (land, agriculture, labor) could not be completed due to political problems, and investment in infrastructure was very limited until 2014 onwards. Narasimhan Rao’s government succeeded in ending the License Raj but did not bother tinkering with politically more sensitive reforms, or with a capex push to modernize India’s infrastructure. The hyperfocus on formal sector reforms and lack of trade barriers led to a bustling IT exports sector that did not have the same interest groups demanding regulation of it, and hence India used it’s large English-speaking population to become the back-office of the world, with the idea of a call center becoming synonymous with the country.

Manufacturing as a percent of GDP stagnated at 15% for 20 years and people mistakenly assumed that the high-growth environment of the 2000s would last forever. The 2008 financial crisis and the rising NPA crisis in Indian banking put an end to the era of constant 8% growth in the Indian economy, with advanced economies heavily leveraged already and dealing with high inflation post-COVID, the global environment for growth looks bleak at the moment, and China’s bull run from 1990-2010 does not really seem replicable, even for countries like Vietnam which offer promise as the next big manufacturing hub. Structural reforms in the Indian economy only started again post 2014, with the Modi government using its electoral mandates to push for reforms in labour codes, in agriculture and in manufacturing. Rapid infrastructural development and the creation of a digital ‘India Stack’ has helped resolve a lot of the fundamental issues holding back growth in India, and the fruits of these reforms will be apparent if India continues to maintain a growth rate of around 7% in the near future.

However, these post-2014 reforms under the Modi government, while ambitious, have faced their own set of challenges, including widespread protests over agricultural laws and uneven implementation of labor code changes, reflecting the persistent political complexities that have historically hindered India's economic transformation. India also continues to grapple with persistent challenges in human capital development that have lingered for over two decades, alongside a lack of significant progress in bolstering research and development (R&D). India’s performance in the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)—the only year it participated—highlighted severe deficiencies in educational outcomes. Indian students, sampled from Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh, scored an average of 336 in reading, 337 in mathematics, and 337 in science, placing the country second-to-last among 74 participating nations and regions, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan. These scores were well below the OECD average of approximately 493 in reading, 496 in mathematics, and 501 in science, underscoring a significant gap in foundational skills among 15-year-olds. This poor performance reflects systemic issues such as inadequate school infrastructure, teacher shortages, and a rote-learning-focused curriculum, which have not seen transformative improvement since. Meanwhile, on the R&D front, India’s investment has remained stubbornly stagnant, hovering around 0.6–0.7% of GDP for years. For instance, according to World Bank data, R&D expenditure was 0.74% of GDP in 2000 and barely increased to 0.64% by 2020, a stark contrast to countries like China (2.41% in 2020) or South Korea (4.81% in 2020), which have prioritized investments in human capital and R&D. The government has not significantly ramped up its investment in R&D, with gross expenditure in this area failing to breach the 1% of GDP threshold long targeted in policy rhetoric, limiting India’s capacity to develop cutting-edge technologies and a skilled, innovation-ready workforce. Together, these shortcomings in human capital and R&D investment constrain India’s ability to shift from a services-dominated economy to a more balanced, industrialized powerhouse.

The push for manufacturing through initiatives like "Make in India" aims to boost the sector's share of GDP, but it contends with global supply chain shifts and competition from more agile economies like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Infrastructure investment has indeed accelerated since 2014, with projects like highways, ports, and digital connectivity receiving significant attention, yet the pace of modernization still struggles to keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing population and an increasingly urbanized workforce. India’s IT-driven growth, while a success story, has not been complemented by a similar revolution in manufacturing or agriculture, leaving the economy overly reliant on services in an era where global demand is volatile. As the world grapples with post-COVID economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, India’s ability to sustain and deepen these structural reforms will determine whether it can finally break free from its legacy of reactive, survival-driven economic policies and chart a proactive path toward becoming a developed industrial power.

When one thinks of ‘ancient civilisation’, five names usually come to mind: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, India and China. There were other ancient civilisations, like the Olmecs in Mesoamerica, one of the founding ‘New World’ riverine civilisations independent of the Eurasian transcultural network, but these five names invoke the mental picture that we associate with the first men who tamed the wilderness of nature, became the first farmers and built the first cities. This picture is not entirely correct, for there were farmers in Anatolia thousands of years before Babylon and Egypt, but mental pictures are often about perceptions and not technical realities. Out of these five, only four go back to the 3^rd millennium BCE; the perception of Greece as ancient is a testament to the dominance of occidental civilisation in recent years. Of those four, only two survive today in any meaningful form related to their polytheistic past: India and China. These two ancient civilisations started on vast alluvial planes with rivers rich in sediment carrying the silt necessary for agriculture to flourish. For millennia, the river systems of the Indus, the Ganga, Yellow and Yangtze rivers fed two great nations, and the agrarian surplus gained from this land became the backbone of urban civilisation and occupational differentiation in the two civilisations; it also led to thriving and densely populated cities, with Pāṭaliputra, the Mauryan capital, having almost half a million residents at its peak, and Chang’an, the Imperial Tang capital, at over a million.

Pre-Modern GDP and the Indo-China picture

When people speak of economic growth or discuss the vast populations of India and China, which have created massive consumer markets and the largest urban middle class in the world, they forget that the historical reason for this vast population is that India and China are simply the oldest civilisations in the world and have always had the most people. India had more people than Sweden, even in 10,000 BCE.

This certainly comes down to a combination of geography and extensive state formation for multiple millennia, leading to various waves of urbanisation. This article will discuss the economic histories of the two countries and the great divergence between the two that started more than fifty years ago now, but what has to be kept in context before we even begin is that economic might and GDP in the modern, post-industrial world are not as much of a function of population as they were in the ancient world. Whenever these two countries are compared, we see infamous charts talking about India contributing to more than 30% of the world’s GDP , with the usual historical GDP data taken from Angus Maddison. This is all well and great, but it always leaves the most important point unsaid in favor of brass jingoism: India and China together make up more than half of the world’s population. Such charts comparing the two countries seem to lead to the unspoken assumption that it is India’s ‘rightful’ place in the sun to be a global economic giant, just like China. India will eventually get there on its own, just like before.

This is not true, and it obscures something very important: there was no guarantee China would ever become the industrial giant it is today; no arc of history or Han manifest destiny guaranteed such a future. It happened with careful planning, decades of correct industrial policy measures, and ever-increasing state-capacity to govern such a large nation. There was a playbook to follow, and China consciously followed it to the dot.

By 2016 they will account for around 40% of world trade, compared with 15% in 2006. That’s roughly the position they occupied about 200 years ago. Economist Angus Maddison has calculated that in the 1800s, China and India together accounted for 50% of global trade. It is impossible to make predictions about the integration of these countries into the global economy, because past events, such as Germany’s reunification and the fall of the Iron Curtain, don’t compare. After those occurrences in 1990, a large number of people entered the global economy, but the numbers pale in significance when compared with the China–India double whammy. Like it or not, the world’s future is tied to China and India.

It is 2025 today; forget 40% of global trade combined; India does not even clock 5% of international trade. This article by the Harvard Business Review, quite mild in its praise of the ‘India Story’ in the early 2000s, was and is emblematic of a lost sense of ephemeral optimism that burnt out all in a decade when the twilight of the global economic boom led to double-digit real growth in India, fueling the belief that it might become another China. No attention was ever given to the structural reasons that India never became the first China to begin with, and no attempt was made to understand what the blueprint to successful industrialization was, despite there being live examples of countries that had just finished the journey: Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Japan.

What China did, and what India did not, was nothing very novel, and it did not just involve “economic liberalization” or “opening the free-markets” and “cutting red-tape” as is popular perception. The purpose of this article is manifold, it briefly aims to go over the origins of modern capitalism, and understand how the first ‘rich countries’ got rich, how these policies were replicated by some poorer countries and what were the exact reasons for the Indo-China divergence that happened less than two living generations ago. It is clear that Fabian Socialism and Maoism, the dominant economic ideologies of the older Indian and Chinese elite, failed tremendously, but why these ideologies even took a hold, how exactly did they fail, and how China buckled the trend by succeeding, is what we want to look at here. We also want to look into the post-war years, leading up to the 1980s, and the period after that. We can use many countries for such a case study, and in subsequent articles, we will look at all of them individually. Still, we begin the comparison with China due to the instant comparator it provides in terms of scale and population. Lee Kwan Yee’s record in Singapore is extremely impressive. Still, a small dirigiste city-state whose economy runs on a combination of financial services, corporate tax haven and concentrated human capital is not very analogous with India.

The Great Divergence and the Infant Industry Model

We have already highlighted how GDP data from the ancient and medieval world was a function of population, geography, and the duration of civilisation. This trend only started changing after productivity differences in populations grew to such an extent that more economic value could be created by tiny Switzerland than half of Asia, and these productivity differences came about due to a combination of intellectual, cultural, institutional and policy differences. This is the famous ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe, especially North-Western Europe, and the rest of the world, and while Economic historians disagree on when it exactly begins, mostly people agree that it was completely over by the beginning of the 20^th century, with Japan being the only Asian nation that managed to semi-industrialize and compete with the European powers on its own terms. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5^th century saw the end of European centralization and the rise of feudalism with the overbearing hand of the Roman Catholic Church in all walks of European life, the ‘Dark Ages’ had begun. It was not until 1936 that Rome had a population of 1.5 million inhabitants, a number it had actually achieved two thousand years ago at the peak of the Roman Empire. There was complete intellectual decline in Europe for almost a millenia, even the ability to read Ancient Greek had been lost. To highlight the absolute poverty of Western Europe in the sciences in the middle ages, we can look at private correspondence letters from 1020 CE of two Catholic scholars – Raoul of Liège and Ragimbold of Cologne. These two lacked basic knowledge of geometry and were unaware the angles of a triangle make up 180 degrees, unaware of what an exterior or interior angle was. The two were unaware of the square root of two, as it wasn’t a rational number. Just five centuries later, a few parts of Europe such as England, the Low Countries and regions of Northern Italy had already surged well ahead of the rest of the world, reaching an adjusted GDP per capita of almost $1500 (1990 Intl.)

In comparison, India sees complete stagnation and a slow decline from the Mughal Period onwards, and by the 1500s, Northwestern Europe is already thrice times as rich as India and China, even before the Industrial Revolution takes off. The divergence begins around the 1100s-1200s, coinciding with the ‘12^th century Renaissance’ when Europe began re-interacting with the Hellenic intellectual tradition that it had lost access to during the Dark Ages. The Abbasid Caliphs like Harun Al-Rashid had preserved a lot of Greek philosophy and translated it into Arabic via their newly conquered Byzantine subjects. The Spanish reconquista of Al-Andalus led to a lot of this knowledge falling back into European hands, spurring a translation movement in centers like Toledo of the entirety of Aristotle and Plato into Latin. This intellectual spurt coincided with the development of educational institutions of higher learning, the establishment of Europe's first universities: Bologna in 1088, focusing on law; Paris in 1150, emphasizing theology; and Oxford by 1167. Scholasticism, a method of critical thought, reached its zenith with Peter Abelard's "Sic et Non" (c. 1122) and later Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica" (1265-1274). The rediscovery of Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (compiled 529-534 CE) in the late 11th century revolutionized legal studies, influencing secular governance as seen in Frederick Barbarossa's Roncaglian Decrees of 1158. Technological innovations manifested in Gothic architecture, these were the years when Europe built the Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral.

In England, these changes in intellectual traditions were accompanied with constant institutional changes such as Henry II’s strengthening of land rights and the Baron’s revolt leading to the Magna Carta in 1215. The issue of the powers of taxation was the central dividing line between the English barons and their liege-lord, and parliament was ironically created as the means for a recalcitrant aristocracy in ensuring its protection from the absolute despotism of a monarch. By the end of the English Civil War in the 17^th century, the move to a constitutional monarchy had been complete, similarly Holland had established a Republic a century before after overthrowing the Habsburgs in the Dutch Revolt. England witnessed a relatively stable transition to parliamentarianism and had a strong national identity in the form of a centralised nation-state quite early on, unlike the splintered principalities and states of Germany. The highly commercialized and trade-driven economy of the merchant Republics of Italy saw the most rapid growth in the High Middle Ages. Rates of urbanization (20%) were double that of Northern Europe (10%) and Milan had a higher population than London. Innovations in accounting like double-entry book-keeping also came about first in Florence, and the entire Mediterranean trade was controlled by Italian city-states. All these changes had made this part of Europe ripe for rapid transformations, which came about with the Black Death and the Renaissance.

The Black Death was the deadliest plague in history and wiped out as much as ~40% of the European populaton, but the economic effects on the peasant who survived were largely positive. Scarcity of labor and abundance of land led to higher wages, and the loss of bargaining power in the Manorial system. The quality of life in England and Holland went up while it stayed relatively constant outside the North Sea region. In England, GDP per capita went from 714 dollars before the Black Death to 993 dollars in the period of 1348-1500. In Holland, this was from 876 dollars to 1301 afterwards. For a lot of reasons, the North Sea countries had reacted like pseudo ‘market-economies’ after the Black Death, that is, they followed supply-demand cycles as wages rose due to high demand, and cost of capital and land went down, all of which increased labor productivity and GDP per capita. They were not perfect market economies, for example, the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 had started from a series of laws Edward III had passed to to freeze prices of wage labour to pre-1348 levels, circumventing market value increases in wages. Laws (Apparel Acts of 1363) even had to be passed to prevent the peasants from buying fashion erstwhile worn by the elite. These were all eventually squashed, leading to the weakening of serfdom, abolishment of poll taxes and continuation in the erosion of royal power but highlight the pre-modern and feudal nature of England at the time.

By the 17th century, the divergence in institutions and human capital (literacy) had grown due to the Protestant Reformation splitting most of the North Sea countries away from the Catholic Church and due to the investment in human capital in Northern Europe, even before the spread of the printing press. During the Middle Ages, rates of book consumption per capita were highest in Flanders and Italy, however, by the start of the 1500s, the Netherlands and Germany had caught up to them. The average years of schooling for every citizen was 0.5 in England and 1.0 in Holland in the 1500s going up to 1.2 and 1.5 by the 1700s. Literacy rates in England and Holland were more than 40% in the mid-17th century and numeracy rates were much higher than the rest of Europe due to high rates of commercialization and the mercantilist economy. By the 1700s, the systems of capitalism and the liberal governmental institutions that accompanied them in the Anglosphere were also being penned down. The Scottish Enlightenment in the mid 18th and early 19th century had led to thinkers like Adam Smith creating the first treatises that had formalized capitalism as an economic ‘science’, and the Anglo-Dutch transcontinental empires were characterized by a lot of the elements we associate with a modern free-market economy; the East India Companies were Joint-Stock corporations you go buy shares in, and the South Sea or Tulip Bubbles were one of the first example of overinflated pricing of stocks due to market speculaton leading to a market wide financial crash.

By the 1800s, the industrial revolution had come about due to a combination of these factors: high human capital, plenty of deposits of coal, rapid technological innovation, parliamentary democray, enclosure acts. This lead to annual growth rates of around ~1.3% for the UK from 1822-1900 (which was astronomical for the time, since Holland was growing at only 0.7%). What is important for us to understand for the purpose of this article is that the laissez-faire economics advocated by Adam Smith was not some social reality in England at this time, and it was not accepted economic wisdom that was used by the United States or other industrial giants like Germany to industrialize. In fact, England and the United States had a long history of using protectionist policies like tariffs and import substitution combined with export-led growth to industrialize. The best example for this, and one which our readers can instantly relate with, is the rise of the English textile industry. In the middle ages, England was mostly an exporter of raw wool and cotton, chiefly to the advanced Low Countries of Belgium and Holland. Over a few centuries, it had systematically begun transforming itself into a textile exporter using protectionist policies by Edward III and the later Tudor monarchs, and then used it’s colonial empire to gain captive markets for it’s exports (the Thirteen Colonies, later India).

Robert Walpole, Prime Minister under George I summarized his ideas on trade as follows ‘it is evident that nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw material’ and this was followed by a series of legislation such as the Calico Acts of 1700, 1721 that banned the import of manufactured cotton textiles into England, the Wool Act of 1699 also banned the import of finished woolen textiles into the country, other legislation reduced export tariffs on finished goods and on raw materials, while adding tariffs to the import of finished goods. By 1875, more than 50% of all English exported textiles went to India. This strategy, of promoting domestic manufacturing by importing cheaper raw materials and exporting expensive finished products was something all the East Asian countries would follow two centuries later. In fact, one of the main contentions between the American colonies and Britain was that Britain had laws such as the Hat Act, Navigation Acts which forced the colonists to buy hats, tea, tobacco, sugar only from England via English ships (which had gotten it from their colonies). England also had the famed Corn Laws from 1815-1846 that even banned the importation of of grain like corn to keep British farmers protected, the repeal of these laws generally seen as the end of British protectionism.

By the time the British had removed most protectionist measures, their economy was already so advanced and their technology so far ahead of everyone that their manufacturers would dominate global markets. One of the biggest criticisms of ‘free trade, open market’ policy is it does not account for the differential historical development of national industry and commerce. This fact was recognized by the Americans and the Germans back then as well. Alexander Hamilton was probably the first proponent of what is now called the ‘infant industry’ argument, the idea that domestic industry in it’s nascent stages is like an infant that must be protected and nurtured till it grows up to compete with the rest of the world. The argument was further developed by German economists such as Friedrich List who criticzed the British for promoting free-trade because they had already ‘climbed the ladder’ and wanted to kick it away.

It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam Smith, and of the cosmopolitical tendencies of his great contemporary William Pitt, and of all his successors in the British Government administrations. The English tell the entire world to embrace free trade now, after they have raised their manufacturing power & navigation (by means of protectionism) to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with them.

This infant industry argument is usually not a part of the traditional classical or neo-classical economic advice given on industrialisation that was followed seriously by the Prussians, Meiji Japan, and the later East Asian tigers of the post-war world. The East Asian (Japan, Korea, Taiwan) relied heavily on an export-led growth model in conjunction with infant industry policies (Singapore and Hong Kong focusing on exporting financial services). Now that we have briefed ourselves on this, we can delve into the Indo-China divergence and realise the policies followed were often very similar to the roadmap laid centuries ago.

India and China after WWII, the rise and fall of Socialist ideology

India and China were on a relatively bad footing in the immediate decades after WWII. While we saw how the British had decimated the indigenous textile sector of India with a combination of tariffs, colonialist market capture and protectionism, the British owed a war-debt of more than £1.3 billion (US$ 5.3 billion) to the Government of India, since they had made the Indian State finance all war expenditures in India, pay for half the cost of all capital acquisitions in defence related modernizations and even pay for a large portion of the cost of Indian troops stationed abroad. In fact, Britain’s total Sterling debt after the war was more than 60% of the money it had acquired from the United States under Lend-Lease, and India alone held ~40% of this debt. During the course of the war, from 1938-1946, almost 75% of total expenditure was on the military and the budget was completely imbalanced. Money supply went up 500% from 1939-1946 and inflation soared, the WPI (Wholesale Price Index) went up 200% - inflation was over 50% in 1942-1943. This ‘Sterling debt’ was never fully paid back to India, was not convertible to gold, and the Sterling lost it’s status as the reserve currency of the world after the Bretton-Woods agreement, when most of the world’s major economies barring the Soviet Union agreed to peg their currency to the US dollar, with the dollar being pegged to gold at a fixed exchange rate. If this was not enough, the newly partitioned India had suffered gruesome communal violence, especially in Punjab and Bengal, and was immediately plunged into a war with Pakistan over the Kashmir issue in 1947. Pashtun lashkars or militiamen supported by irregulars of the Pakistani Army had entered the 96% Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, citing it’s demographics as the reason for making it a part of Pakistan.

Similarly, the Chinese people had witnessed the long and slow decline of the Qing Empire, the last ruling Imperial Dynasty of China, and faced a ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of Western powers, as well as by the once subordinate Japanese, who had conquered Korea in 1910 and had launched an invasion of Manchuria, the homeland of the former Manchu-rulers of the Qing. Internally, the fall of the Qing had created a power vacuum and the nation was ravaged by a Civil War between the Communists, led by Mao Zedong, and the Kuomintang led by Chiang Kai-Shek. After a brief collaboration between the two during the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, fierce war broke out again after the fall of Japan, and the Communists led by Mao emerged victorious. The Kuomingtang fled to a small island off the South China Sea, taking gold and silver reserves of hundreds of tons with them to stabilize the newly created Taiwan that was recognized as the successor state of China till 1971, and the CCP led by Mao was left to govern an internationally isolated mainland China.

Thus, in 1950, we find Nehru and Mao, the defacto rulers of the largest nations in the world given a relatively even hand. China did not have representative government, and could utilize it’s sociocultural & ethnic homogeneity to push policy easily without domestic dissent, something which we will see they made ample use of later on. India was mired by internal conflict along many axes: religion, caste, language, ethnicity and ideology but had inherited Asia’s most powerful military with millions of battle hardened veterans from the Great Wars and the strongest Navy and Air Force in Asia. India also had much better relations with the West than China, and could leverage this to great extent as a leader of the ‘Third World’.

India got it’s first aircraft carrier in 1961 from the British, the INS Vikrant (HMS Hercules), while China would not have one till as late as 2012 (!). To highlight the poverty of the Chinese in advanced military tech, they had to pretend to buy the HMS Melbourne from Australia in 1985 to ‘scrap it’, and then tried to reverse-engineer the tech to no success, while India was simply sold a carrier straight by the British. Even in areas like Nuclear Technology, the Nehruvian state benefited immensely from civilian technology transfer from the Anglosphere, the CIRUS reactor, built in 1954 at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, was a Canadian project to give civilian nuclear energy to India, but was later on used to produce weapons grade-Plutonium for ‘the bomb’. India could very well have had a functioning atomic weapon in the 1960s if the political climate was in favor of it. Still, successive generations of leaders from Lal Bahadur Shastri to Indira Gandhi to Rajiv Gandhi displayed extreme hesitation in weaponizing India’s nuclear program. China had likewise acquired atomic technology from outside, from the Soviet Union and had tested their first device in the mid 1960s, after the Sino-Indian War of 1962. The fact that the Nehruvian state lost the 1962 war to a decisively less modern PRC, was a testament to bad leadership and inaction rather than genuine deficiencies in the Indian military compared to the PRC at the time.

What was common to both India and China was an intellectual ruling elite (Nehru, Mao) that was educated on Western classics and sought for solutions from the politico-economic ideologies of post-French Revolution Europe. Nehru and Mao were two wealthy sons of regional elites who were raised on Rousseau, Darwin, Huxley, Kant and Marx, who had grown up reading the exploits of Bonaparte and Washington, and who had decided to fix the rot in their respective countries by latching to the dominant ideology of one or the other European great power in their midst. After WWI, the excesses of crony capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in Europe had created a very fertile atmosphere for socialist and egalitarian thought. Marxism was borne out of this crucible of falling living standards, smot-filled factories, stunted heights due to malnutrition, the senseless tragedy of the ‘Great War’, a complete exploitation of wage-labor at the hands of the owners of the modes of production and inexorablu linked to European Imperialism. In the United States, the ‘Gilded Age’ (1870s-1900s) had led to some of the same problems, and these were dealt by the rise of the Progressives, who wanted to create a centralized bureaucratic government with a welfare state that provided for everyone.

In Nazi Germany, the economic and political failures of Weimar had led to the centralization of power under the National Socialists, and every major country had in some way or the other co-oped parts of Marxist ideology to make sure that mass dissent from capitalist exploitation was kept under control. This was a time of increased pushback against the anti-egalitarian modes of government of the Old World, and the end of the aristocratic-feudal system as we know it today. When we keep all this in perspective, it makes a lot of sense that Nehru was a member of the Fabian Society of Democratic Socialists, and Mao was a Marxist-Lenninist revolutionary. In fact, one of the major reasons for the death of Marxist ideology in Europe was the fact that almost all of Europe had adopted the Democratic Socialist model of the welfare state after WWII, and thus taken away some of the biggest drawing point that the communists had held till then (the exploitation of the proletariat at the hands of the capitalist).

Stephen Kotkin, in his Armageddon Averted (The Soviet Collapse: 1970-2000), described the disillusionment that had set in even hardline communists by the 1970s when card-carrying members of the party would go to Europe on vacation and see that the modern post-Marshall plan Capitalist giants of West Germany, France or Italy have socialist policies like paid maternal leave, in addition to rapid consumerist growth that raised living standards.

“In the inter-war period, during Stalin’s violent crusade to build socialism, capitalism had seemed for many people to be synonymous with world imperialism, the senseless slaughter of the First World War, goose-stepping militarism, and Great Depression unemployment. Against that background, the idea of a non-capitalist world—with the same modern machines but supposedly with social justice—held wide appeal. But in the Second World War fascism was defeated, and after the war the capitalist dictatorships embraced democracy. Instead of a final economic crisis anticipated by Stalin and others, capitalism experienced an unprecedented boom, which made the Depression a memory and homeownership a mass phenomenon. Economic growth in the United States, after a robust 1950s, hit a phenomenal 52.8 percent in the 1960s; more significantly, median family income rose 39.7 percent over the decade. In Japan and West Germany, losers in the Second World War, economic “miracles” led to revolutions in mass consumption. New media technologies, such as cinema and radio, which had seemed so convenient for inter-war dictatorships seeking to spread propaganda, turned out to be conduits of a commercial mass culture impervious to state borders. Finally, all leading capitalist countries embraced the ‘welfare state’ overflowing with inexpensive consumer goods, expanded health and retirement benefits, and increasingly democratic institutions were weapons altogether different from Nazi tanks”

Nehru and Mao, both committed socialists, had simply bet on the wrong horse to win the race, enamored with glitz of revolutionary ideals in the interwar period, when the future of capitalism seemed the most bleak, they had decided to reshape the future of their country on the barely tested ivory-tower ideology of Marx that had grasped their mind. Nehru, who had converted to socialism sometime in the mid 1920s, had gone as far as saying Lenin was one of “history’s immortals” and the world only had a choice between “some form of communism and some form of fascism”

Both of them had embraced the state-led command economy of the Soviets with regular five or ten year plans, and Mao had gone on to collecticize agriculture as well, banning all private property and expropriating more than 200 million acres of land. Soviet industrialization had really kicked off in 1928 with the first FYP (five-year-plan) under Stalin, and by all metrics, it was a resounding success compared to China or India. After the first two FYPs, heavy industrial output had gone up by more than 300% in almost every sector in the Soviet Union, and the economy grew at roughly 5% every year. The Soviet model was extractive authoritarianism, and the cost of human suffering of labor was ignored by Stalin in the pursuit to rapidly industrialize. The Soviets also had many parts of the puzzle which others did not: they leached of Western technical know-how before the start of the Cold War: Albert Kahn, for example, was an American architect who had designed the Ford assembly line at River Rouge, and helped the Soviets build hundreds of their largest factories like the Stalingrad or Chelyabinsk Tractor Plants; he helped train thousands of Soviet engineers of the Gostproekstroi and gave them the technical know-how to build efficient assembly lines. Hugh L. Cooper, another American, helped the Soviets build the Dnieper Hydroelectric Dam, with turbines sourced from General Electric for the same, a pivotal event in the Soviet GOELRO plan to achieve total electrification of the country.

Soviets emphasized scientific and technical education in some fields, becoming pioneers in the Space Race, world leaders in mathematics, chess and most importantly, after the 1960s, they became the largest petrostate in the world: 80% of their export earnings coming from selling oil and natural gas. After OPEC cut production in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War to punish Western support of Israel, the astronomical increase in oil and gas prices poured billions into Soviet coffers, helping them maintain their rusted and lethargic industrial production economy, and finance unneccesary wars like the ones they fought in Afghanistan. One of the most important socialist ideas was the importance on self-reliance and independence from foreign trade, which is why agricultural and industrial production was focused on meeting demands of domestic consumption, not on exports, and which is why there was a lot of focus on heavy industry independence by both China and India from the 1950-1960s. However, both China and India failed in this initial push to build their heavy industry, and ended up draining their limited foreign exchange reserves.

Okay

Mao’s China, Nehru’s India: 1950-1975

The failure was especially stark in China, characterized by an extreme anti-intellectual atmosphere and rigid party culture that made it impossible to criticize Mao. This can perhaps be best demonstrated by Mao’s desire to double steel production annually from 1958 onwards, going up to 80 million tons by 1962 (up from just 5 million tons in 1957). After the Soviets expressed their skepticism at this target, and dismissed the traditional Chinese approach of smelting steel as inefficient and wrong, Mao doubled down on his target and took the whole thing on his ego. China would go on to encourage peasants to forego agricultural duties to start ‘backyard furnaces’ in their communes to smelt steel; even though these small furnaces could only produce pig iron, the fact that the peasants lacked the technical knowledge needed, and the fact that this was compromising agricultural output. There was also a shortage of raw materials and supply chains necessary in steel production were very limited.

To avoid displeasing Mao, a level of wilful ignorance was adopted by everyone who knew how unrealistic and incorrect his ideas were. Provincial secretaries had been issued orders of halting the ‘misuse’ of all resources that were not directly used to fulfil the steel production goals for the year. In other bouts of madness, Mao launched a campaign to eradicate sparrows, since they ate grain stores, and encouraged all Chinese to take part in this mass extermination. This ended up simply destroying an ecological feedback loop that kept locusts in check, destroying grain stores even more. Needless to say, China never met it’s steel production goals, and it’s grain output tanked so much that the Great Leap Forward saw one of the worst famines in Chinese history, with as many as 45 million perishing after crop yields went down by 30% in just two years. Anti-intellectualism was the norm in Maoist China, with the CCP often adopting quack theories like Lysenkoism, discarded even by the Soviets, and then implementing them brute force on the command of Mao without any research or thought in the policy proposals.

In India, the first FYP was relatively fine, the investment in agriculture (27%) was much higher than in heavy industry (12%) and India had a lot of foreign exchange reserves; Britain released a total of £815 million (US$ 3.2 billion) from 1947-1952 as repayment of the ‘war debt’ to India. Hence, the reliant on exports was not that high, and these Sterling releases were used to balance the budget, fund central and provisional government pensions and import machinery/defence equipment. Despite nearly a 25-30% investment in heavy industry from the second FYP onwards, in FY 1973 almost 50% of all imports (~US$1 billion) were still of machinery and steel. There was no investment in the textile industry, which only grew 4% from 1952-1964 and India’s share of world exports declined from a peak of 2.5% in 1947 to 0.9% in 1966.

The problem started increasing when India’s foreign exchange reserves dried up after a decade, and exports grew anemically, at a CAGR of 2.4% from 1950-1970. Without a concret export-led model of growth that brought in a current account surplus, there was no way to import consumer goods or machinery and raw materials that was needed to industrialize. The problems here were multifold, firstly, these heavy industries were not globally competitive, and did not produce export-quality products (China’s ‘backyard furnace’ pig iron passed off as ‘steel’), secondly, heavy industry was too capital-intensive and created a misallocation of labor (in plenty supply) and funds (in short supply). Since little money was left to invest elsewhere, there was weak domestic demand for these finished products from downstream industries. For example, the Haldia plant of Hindustan Fertilizer Corporation Limited (HFCL) that employed 1500 people did not even produce an ounce of fertilizer for over 20 years while all the employees got paid regularly, living in newly built townships for the plant. Systemic corruption and inefficiencies in PSUs characterized the better part of five decades in India.

Since there was no foreign investment, and no exports, the only way to create money was to print it out of thin air. This led to double digit inflation in starting in the 1960s, all the way till the 1990s. Since the rupee was still a pegged currency then, it became increasingly difficult to maintain the peg and the rupee was devalued in 1966, making imports even more expensive. Around the same time, India had also lost the Sino-Indian War in 1962, and fought another war with Pakistan in 1965, further putting strain on an already faltering economy.

The inflation was passed down to grain prices, though the government tried it’s best to issue price controls and severe droughts in 1965-1966 led to a grain crisis, though nothing as bad as the Great Famine in China. One of the biggest drawbacks of the Nehruvian system was the lack of resources spent in upgrading human capital: health and education. Since the state always had virtually no foreign reserves for the above reasons, there was very little left to invest in education and health.

The complete failure of the Nehruvian socialist state in investing and upgrading India’s human capital can be seen when we compare it to pre-reform (pre-1978) China. The Maoists had better health and education metrics despite the Cultural Revolution disaster. It is hard to put this into perspective: Mao was issuing insane decrees of ‘exterminating all sparrows’ and shutting down the national entrance exam for a decade, and China still managed to have better metrics in health and education than Nehru-Gandhi’s socialism.

If the 1960s was tumultuous for India, it was a nightmare for China. In India, the parliamentary representative mode of government ensured limited upheaval due to the slow-grinding wheels of democracy, but in China whatever lunatic policy Mao had was swiftly enacted without much opposition to it. This uni-party system worked very well if led by an enlightened leader, but was a disaster if led by someone who could not create good policy solutions. The Cultural Revolution remains the biggest blot in the history of the CCP, with the party publicly acknowledging its ‘greatest mistake’ and sentencing the ‘Gang of Four’ deemed responsible to death (later commuted to life sentences). The Sino-Soviet split in 1961 had isolated China from it’s largest trade and technology partner; stripped it of the technical assistance it needed in things like its nuclear weapons program. There was also fear that counter-revolutionary fervor in the country would dilute the core Marxist ideology of the party and led to a bourgeoise takeover, which is what Mao thought was happening in Russia with Nikita Khrushchev denouncing Stalin. It was also a way for Mao to consolidate power again after his failure in the Great Leap Forward. The cultural revolution led to a decade of complete cultural and intellectual rot, a purge of some of the smartest individuals in the country and destruction of the education system. Buddhist and Confucian temples were vandalized, including the cemetery of Confucius himself, missile engineers like Yao Tongban were beaten to death, millions of young urbanites were forced to move to the rural areas and Red Guards massacred suspected ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and their families all across the country. Upto two million people died, and thousands of China’s leading scientists were disgraced or persecuted.

Most universities in the country remained closed from 1966-1972, and a directive from Mao ended the university examination system and replaced it with a recommendation system, in which peasant-workers were recommended to university based on their political views and background, rather than a meritocratic examination system. The goal of university education was to give the technical skills necessary for modernization, and so Mao tolerated it just barely. The university was especially vilified as the home of the ‘bourgeoise intellectual’ and hence anyone with such a background was distrusted. On the other hand, Mao really wanted to give universal access to primary and secondary education to everyone across rhe country, especially to the masses of rural peasantry. This mandate did have some success, before 1966, less than half of Chinese children finished primary school, 15% completed middle school and 3% completed senior middle school. By the end of the revolution, all children finished primary school, ⅔ completed middle school and ⅓ completed senior middle school. The effects on high level university education were pretty disastrous, and the national examination system was not restored until 1977 by the great reformist Deng Xiaoping.

Post-Mao China, the Rise of Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was the former CCP Secretary General and Vice-Premier who had been branded as a ‘capitalist roader’ and purged twice by Mao and his allies, eventually rehabilitated in an hour of need as a pragmatic reformer. He came back to power after Mao’s death in 1977 and had secured dominance by 1978 to become the defacto supreme leader of China. His economic and political reforms made put China on the track for world dominance by the 1990s, which is when they picked up escape velocity and road the wave of the 1990s-2000s global economic boom to become the world’s second largest economy and the largest producer. In the graphs below, we can see how it takes a period of roughly 12 years from 1978 (Deng’s ascension to power) to 1990 in which China roughly stays on parity with India on paper, while the internal chaos created by decades of Maoist extremes is cleaned up.

拨乱反正 (Boluan Fanzheng) was the phrase from the Chinese classics used to describe this period of reform by Deng himself, literally meaning “to repair chaos, and return to justice”. In multiple speeches in 1978, Deng clarified what he meant by this reform, often quoting Marxist-Lenninist literature and the Chinese classics at the same time, displaying ancestral pride in the old Chinese nation and beseeching his countrymen to admit their shortcomings and learn from the best in the world today. He invokes the concept of the ‘four big modernisations’ (agriculture, industry, defence and science). He says that the Chinese nation should aim to be a 小康社會 (Xiaokang Shehui) or a ‘moderately prosperous middle-class society’ as the CCP uses the term today. However, 小康 means ‘small tranquil’ and is a Confucian description of a prosperous and tranquil society.

Inspiration for reform was sought from Singapore, a small city-state in the Malay peninsula that had become a maritime and financial services hub. Singapore was a Chinese majority city-state ruled by a charismatic and brilliant statesman, Lee Kuan Yew. The PRC saw it as a model to become a rich nation without giving up complete government control. Singapore was a wealthy city-state run by a Chinese majority that had managed to turn a poor multiethnic city into one of the richest countries in the world, all the while still having an authoritarian uniparty state where the government even micromanaged racial demographics in housing neigborhoods to promote ethnic harmony. Between 1990 and 2011, more than 22,000 Chinese officials travelled to Singapore to study public administration and policy governance at Singaporean universities. Lee Kuan Yew made more than 30 visits to China, meeting Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao and even Xi Jinping, multiple generations of Chinese leaders.

Other visits were made to Japan, normalizing political relations and opening trade talks. Hong Kong and Macau (administered by the British then) were chosen as safe initial city-states to allow ‘foreign’ investment from in the neighboring province of Guangdong, which was given three SEZs (Special Economic Zones) in Shenzhen, Shantou and Zhuhai where the CCP could experiment with foreign direct investment and private ownership by ‘foreign’ individuals, who in most cases were ethnic Han that had deep older ties to the Communist Party or the former Imperial Chinese state and thus were much more trustworthy than Europeans or Americans. Within 7 months, the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian were given the authority to attract FDI from ethnic Chinese into the provinces, and start building factories using imported machinery and tools, with local labor, to export manufactured- assembled goods. FDI was necessary at this stage since the party did not have the cash to invest in the SEZs, but could provide the land and the authority to raise funds from foreign investors. At the same time, talks were also started to take Hong Kong and Macau back into China, a process that would be completed in 1997 and 1999 respectively, after Deng had passed away.

Since there was limited money to carry out most of the ambitious investments the pro-reform Chinese business leaders and officials wanted, it had to be allocated properly, based on what was prudent at the time. Chen Yun, one of the ‘Eight Elders’ and one of the most important members of the CCP at this time, summed up the issue they faced.

We have 900 million people, over 80 percent of whom are farmers. We are very poor. There are still people begging for food. We all want to modernize, but the question is what can we achieve? We need balanced development. In considering basic construction, we must first consider agriculture. We want to produce lots of steel, but we cannot possibly produce 60 million metric tons by 1985. We lack electricity, we lack transport facilities. Supplies of coal and oil are inadequate to meet needs. Some people make fun of cautious people, making it seem as if cautious people believe that the less steel we produce the better. Ridiculous. Yes, we should borrow funds and technology from abroad. But how much can we be sure that we can repay from our People’s Bank? We need to ensure that we will be able to make the repayments. Officials have not done the calculations. Local industries are competing with our big national projects for materials. Five people want to eat when there is only food for three. We have made mistakes in our work; we still lack experience. I can only do my best

Under Chen Yun’s direction, investment in Chinese heavy industry was shunned so light industry (consumer goods, textiles, electronics) could grow in these SEZ manufacturing clusters that were importing foreign technical know how, cutting all labor and industrial regulations, lowering taxes and rapidly absorbing rural agricultural labour into the factories. Chen and his gang of ‘fiscal hawks’ were crucial in moderating expectations and not overspending a tight budget, since there was the fear if China overextended itself it would take on too much debt it could not pay back in risky investments.

Chen famously saying “How much time have we wasted since the Opium Wars? 100 years? What is 3 more?” Thus, moderated expectations and slow but consistent reform was a key part of China’s growth strategy, completely avoiding the blunders made under Mao. One such incident was halting the construction of the Baoshan Steel Plant in 1981, which would have cost the PRC $2.7 billion in contracts to Japanese companies. After providing apologies to an angry Japanese business community, construction resumed later with aid from Japan’s OECF overseas fund, and the plant was completed in 1985; 30 years later it would become the world’s largest producer of steel. By 2006, the five SEZs accounted for over 22% of China’s exports and 5% of total GDP. All kinds of SEZs combined (including all industrial parks) accounted for 22% of GDP and 60% of exports in 2007, generating more than 30 million jobs and generating ⅓ of the country’s high-tech output. Some of the biggest Chinese companies like Huawei and BYD Automobile were founded in Shenzhen SEZ. American giants like Apple had sourced their assembly to Chinese SEZs entirely by the mid 2010s.

Agricultural Reforms, Ansei Province, Wan Li

The next main issue that the reformers tackled was the agriculture sector and it’s gradual de-collectivization so that grain output could go up, the import bill from food grains could go down, and the agrarian surplus could facilitate the transition of excess labor into the manufacturing sector. In China, the agricultural sector was in much worse shape than in India, which had improved yields enough with the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s not to have to worry about starvation and famines. The Chinese had to go back to individual household farming and modernize their agricultural sector using chemical fertilizers, water pumps, and higher yielding variety seeds. Deng again picked the poor mountainous province of Anhei as an experiment to test out individual household farming, so that success here could then be used to convince the old guard of the CCP to ditch the ‘Dazhai’ model of collectivist farming and let all provinces or villages choose their model. Wan Li was the CCP secretary in charge of Anhei province, had created a successful ‘household responsibility’ model in which the farming households were free to sell their crops in the free-market at market prices after they had contributed to state quotas, while still having the option to sell to the government at government prices, all the while the land was owned by the state and leased out to the tenant farmers who were put in charge of production. This was combined with electric power and fertilizer supply doubling in the four years from 1978-1982, and by 1982, 98% of all rural households had ditched the Maoist-era collective farms. Rural peasant income also went up 100% from 1978-1982 and grain production went up to 400 million tons in 1984. In just 4 years, from 1981 to 1985, China went from being the 4th largest importer of cotton to being a cotton exporter, and Chinese farmers began diversifying into cash-crops from just grain.

While stabilizing the agrarian sector, the reformists were also expanding their intellectual base. More than a million Chinese students were sent abroad to study between 1978-2008, and more than a quarter of them returned to China. There was very close co-operation with the World Bank during this period. The paranoia of the CCP made sure that they did not hastily accept any advice which made them liberalize their market control overnight, or lessen the role of the state, for example, the World Bank wanted China to get rid of the dual-price system since they thought it was prone to corruption (a bureaucrat could buy at government prices and sell at market prices) but the Chinese refused to tinker with it, since they wanted to guarantee agricultural incomes to their farmers (who by this time were relying on the quota prices as a form of subsidy, since increased grain production had crashed prices). Regardless, the World Bank became one of the largest lenders to China, giving almost $25 billion by 1993

China was ending it’s isolation with the global financial system and its institutions, and gradually started participating in the World Bank, IAEA (joining in 1984) and IMF. China also co-operated extensively to train it’s bureaucrats in formal methods of Western economics using the World Bank’s contacts, sending it’s top economists to study at Oxford for a year; more than 70 such economists were trained at Oxford between 1985-1995 and later occupied key positions in the Chinese government. Co-operation was most extensive with Japan, which provided China with funding, technology transfers and technical know-how on industrialization via an export-led growth strategy. Okita Saburo had set up a Japanese advisory group for China that till 1992 gave the Chinese government advice on how to build stable institutions, allocate resources based on promoting domestic industry exports, and showed them the inner-workings of MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry).

The Chinese were impressed with how the Japanese state nurtured their key private industries and provided them with the technology and resources to compete globally: Mitsubishi, Honda, Toyota, and Casio. The 1980s were Japan's Golden Decade, and China was learning everything it could from them. The Chinese learned the technical know-how to operate advanced machinery and scale factories from small to mid-size firms to large corporations by working hands-on with people from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Europe, etc.

Deng’s Blunder

One of Deng's biggest mistakes was his premature liberalisation of price controls in 1988. As mentioned earlier, even the World Bank noted that the dual-price system was very susceptible to corruption. In his eagerness to stamp out corruption, Deng had decided to move to market prices and a market-led economy. Despite receiving advice against the opposite from officials concerned about a weak supply chain that could not handle inflationary pressures, Deng removed price controls starting with alcohol and tobacco in July, 1988. This proved to be short-lived, for the mass panic and more than 200% price increase shortly thereafter forced Deng to reverse party policy. This was his biggest mistake since 1978 and since he had gone against popular consensus within the party to do it, he paid the price for it by stepping away into a less active role. This encapsulates another trend we see in the CCP, which was generally missing in the nepotistic dynastic rule of the Indian National Congress. When leaders made mistakes, they paid the price for it.

Shortly before this, Premier Hua Guofeng had disagreed with agricultural reform, favoring the collective model, and had eventually been forced out of power by Deng when it was clear that the individual household farming model first run in Ansei had proven way more efficient at raising agricultural productivity. Mao had stepped down from power after the failure of the ‘Great Leap Forward’; all of this was in line with the older Maoist idea of doctrinal self-criticism, and this culture carried on even after Mao, though not always perfectly. The Chinese economy had rough years from 1988 to 1990; growth slowed to 3%, and the retail and consumer price index doubled in 1988 and 1989. However, by 1990, inflation had gone down dramatically, and the economy was recovering again. No doubt that faltering growth and high prices contributed to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which the CCP crushed with an iron-fist, while the failures of Perestroika (Soviet pro-market reforms) and Glasnost (pro social transparency reforms) led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. One thing that constantly characterised the CCP in the 1980s and 1990s was a cautious desire not to dilute state control on society and the economy unless deemed necessary for the nation's benefit. So political reforms paused after 1989, and so did economic reforms. It wasn’t until 1994 that a new scale of fiscal reforms was unleashed, especially targeting the bloat in PSUs (SOE), changing the tax codes for more centralization and finally ending the dual-price system during a period of low inflation so subsequent price increases would be more tolerable. Deng’s successors carried out these reforms — Zhu Rongji, Hu Jintao and Jiang Remin;. However, Deng had officially retired, and he was still the de facto leader of China, even if not actively involved in day-to-day affairs.

Zhu Rongji and the Rise of Chinese Industry

Zhu Rongji reformed state-owned enterprises (SOEs/PSUs) by treating them like profitable companies, with the worst performers being shut down and the best performers growing. This was the policy of ‘Grasping the big, letting the small go’ (抓大放小). These SOEs were treated as corporates, and the most dominant ones were to become oligopolies in that sector, then compete with other state-owned oligopolies in cut-throat competition. This was formalized by Zhu with the creation of SASAC (State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission) in 2003, which was given the responsibility of managing the mergers, acquisitions and privatization of hundreds of 200 largest SOEs in China. All the firms were given profit targets, run like cutthroat corporations with executives being graded on performance, and used by the government to constantly keep weeding out the losers, with the 200 in 2003 falling to 150 in 2008 to just 97 today, and contributing to almost ¼ of China’s present GDP, with total assets of more than US$100 trillion, and yearly profits of more than $12 trillion. China also controlled the largest ‘upstream’ firms that supplied raw materials and controlled telecommunications with this strategy, so that the state was far more insulated to price shocks due to international supply chains, and hence the impact on the domestic consumer was much less. For example, when price of crude shot up in 2008 right before the GFC to $147/barrel, China ordered SinoPec and PetroChina not to raise the oil price, and they took on losses of $30 billion in just one year. This was, of course, the classic East-Asian developmental strategy followed by Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea before, and China followed it to the dot after the initial reforms of Deng and others cleared up the base for it.

The government funds these SOEs, and given subsidies when necessary (to promote export discipline, to control prices), usually by the Chinese Development Bank (CDB), also setup in 1994 by Rongji. The Chinese ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ is in part funded by state investment banks like these who use these investments as an opportunity to scale domestic firms (giving them the building contracts in China, or SE Asia, Africa etc) and also assist local manufacuters (who supply the machinery and hardware), and build softpower with the countries they do business with. This is similar to the policies pursued by Japan and Korea a few decades earlier (we saw the example with the Baoshan Steel plant itself). In some cases, the Chinese gain access to the asset they constructed if the foreign nation cannot payback the loan it took to build it; for example, the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka taken over by the Chinese in 2017 on a 99-year lease after cash-strapped Sri Lanka failed to pay back the loan on it (the port was built by China as well, with financing coming from China too)

If we can compare this to India, then we see that significant budget deficits combined with multiple wars, need for raw materials to support heavy industry and lack of foreign earnings had made India print so much money that inflation was close to 10% for the better part of two decades from the 1960s-1980s. The reason India was forced to open up it’s economy in 1991 was because it had drained all it’s foreign exchange reserves, was rocked by the loss of the Soviet Union (largest trade partner), the Gulf War had sent oil prices soaring. No one was willing to give India an emergency bailout till it agreed to fix it’s economy. Compare this to the slow, calculated but cautious approach of the Chinese in liaisoning with the World Bank, IMF, Japan and Europe, and in having multiple power centers within the CCP Politburo that could balance out policy, as well as the accountability when big leaders made bad policy choices. China had not only fixed Mao’s mistakes, it fixed any mistakes Deng made, and built upon that legacy with competent people all through the upper echelons of the Politburo, and competent regional administrators like Zhu Rongji being rewarded with power when they performed well in their regions or cities. After Rhongji’s reforms, China was primed to become the largest manufacturer in the world, with it’s combination of human capital, quick absorption of foreign trade norms and manufacturing standards, and good leadership that enacted the reforms without any red-tape. China also benefited from one of the most liberal times in the world to trade (the 1990s-2000s) and took full advantage of it, surpassing the Japanese economy in 2010, and using Beijing 2008 as it’s ‘coming out’ moment.

China had invested tremendously in public infrastructure using the export earnings it was getting from manufacturing, building a complete High Speed Rail network of more than 40,000 km by 2020, with inland waterways of more than 125,000 km (the largest inland water transport network in the world), and quadrupled it’s road network from 2008- 2020 to more than 5 million km today.

Even the picture of China as a low-quality manufacturer of textiles or even just electronics (Apple) is today more than a decade outdated — with China leading in shipbuilding, telecommunications, solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing. Chinese companies dominate the power production market, leding in solar, wind and thermal turbine manufacturing. In Solar, China produces about 90% of all the solar panels in the world, and has the second largest reserves of Lithium in the world, with 75% of Lithium-Ion battery manufacturing coming from China. Over 40% of all global shipbuilding comes from China, with state companies like China Shipbuilding dominating in production of Suezmax ships (largest possible vessels that can go through the Suez canal, with tonnage of 160,000 DWT). China also dominates the NEV (new energy vehicles) sector, with companies like BYD being multinational automobile giants, and China accounting for 60% of the global EV sales. BYD, a private Chinese company, started out as a battery manufacturer in the 1990s and soon went into making cars, reverse engineering Japanese cars to begin with and soon extending into electric vehicles as early as the 2010s. However, the company faltered by the mid 2010s due to a lack of cash flow, and did not have the money to learn to get good at making electric vehicles, since margins were already so thin in conventional vehicle sales. The Chinese government identified it during the same time. It pumped billions of dollars into it’s EV sector, with BYD receiving more than $4 billion in subsidies in 2023, up from just $200 million two years ago, when it’s yearly profits were just about a little less. BYD was given $500 million in foundational funding between 2010-2015. This year, BYD is on track to export more than half a million EVs to Europe, India, Latin America, and SE Asia. It had a market capitalization of $750 billion, up from $25 billion in 2010. This is classic infant industry approach combined with export discipline, and Chinese companies have succeeded tremendously. Favorable government policy combined with no cost lines of credit or interest free loans, grants are essential for companies to thrive and grow in technological capabilities. The state must only prevent rent-seeking, using government subsidies and funding while not focusing on raising competency.

Final Takeaways

As we had said at the beginning of this article, GDP in the modern world is not a function of people. Still, of productivity, market environment and government competence, and despite growing at more than 10% for three decades with controlled inflation and capturing most of the world’s manufacturing, China still has a GDP per capita (US$13,000) just about that of Mexico — the poorest OECD economy. Economic growth and industrialization do not scale with population. There is a reason Singapore can have a per capita GDP of US$50,000 by serving as a financial services hub and tax haven with no indigenous manufacturing. However, China had to slog for 30 years to become a world leader in producing everything and still barely managed to reach Mexico's levels of wealth.

This puts into perspective the challenge faced by India today, which started out reforms in 1991, and grew fast for a few years at the peak of free trade sentiments, and now has to grow in the post-COVID world with rising protectionism and a manufacturing market already taken over by other emerging markets like Vietnam. There are a few takeaways that India can gain from the Chinese experience. The Chinese invested heavily in human capital even during the idiosyncratic ruinations of the Mao era, health and education based metrics were higher even in Maoist China than Indira or Rajiv Gandhi’s India. The CCP had internal self-correcting mechanisms, ensuring that leaders had to take responsibility for these decisions. If they went wrong, they were usually put out of power (Mao, Gang of Four, Deng, Chen Yun, Hu Guaofeng). Leaders enjoyed sufficient power and control over decision-making as long as their decisions kept bringing results. When results failed, so did leadership. This ensured the party was never taken over by a cult of personality dictator that could not deliver results again (like Mao). The Chinese followed the same approach when it came to their state-owned corporations, following an infant industry approach with tight export discipline that created manufacturing giants and culled the worst performers, a situation like the Haldia plant running for 20 years and not producing anything while salaries were paid would be unimaginable in China. The pace of reforms was very gradual; there was no ‘big bang’ and China reacted slowly and cautiously to changes in the global economy to make sure its citizens did not have to suffer tremendously (stepping in price control via state organizations whenever needed). The Chinese state was very cautious in dealing with Western advice, especially in terms of liberalizing their market or giving up state control, and hence avoided the fate of post-Soviet Russia when it opened it’s economy up and privatized all state assets, which were taken over by oligarchs at dirt cheap prices. In contrast, Western consumer goods flooded the domestic market, increasing prices like anything. The Chinese did not hesitate to use military force to crush opposition to the CCP like in Tianamen 1989 and hence also avoided the fate of Soviet Glasnot, where Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union after forcing to use military action to quell rebellions. At the same time, China made sure to learn from the best (Singapore, Japan etc.) and actively tried to educate it’s best young talent abroad (Oxford, Cambridge, NUS Singapore) while still having them come back to take up senior positions in the Chinese government.

Not all of these can be followed exactly by any government that rules India due to the different modes of political organization. India is a multi-ethnic nation with many regional power centers, but much can be done. In the next article, we will look in detail at all the policies the Indian government took out from the beginning of Indian reforms, and try to look at the failure of Indian manufacturing compared to the East Asian tigers.

The 1931 Census provides us some hard data, and gives us numbers of Muslim sub-castes, along with other tribes living in the Valley. We see that there were ~61k Kashmiri Brahmins in the Kashmir Province and ~2000 in Jammu. There were an additional ~2000 non-Kashmiri Saraswat Brahmins (Mohyals, Dogras) in the Kashmir Valley. This gives us a total of about 63k Kashmiri Brahmins (KPs) in J&K. The total population of J&K was 3.64 million, and of Kashmir 1.57 million (out of this only 1 million were ethnic Kashmiris, excluding Gujars, Punjabis, Dogras, Paharis etc)

Hence, KPs were just 1.7% of J&K and about 4% of Kashmir. What’s baffling to note is that the census says the Dar sub-caste of Kashmiri Muslims alone has 110k people in the Kashmir Valley, which would make them more than 10% of all Kashmiri Muslims, and this is just one sub-caste! The Dar caste claims to be of Brahmin origin (Dhar being the Kashmiri Pandir surname). We can already see how these figures are starting to sound ridiculous, since upon taking all Muslims with Bhatt, Pandit, Raina, Dar, etc surnames, you’ll end up with something like 20-25% of all Kashmiri Muslims being Brahmins, which is flat out fantastical.

So what is going on here?

It’s obviously a case of social mobility in a society where 96% of the population is Muslim and it is easy to raise one’s status by claiming to be a Brahmin (or a Syed, Sheikh, Pathan, Mughal etc) once you acquire a little bit of wealth or education.

Now that maybe the case, but where did the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas of Kashmir actually go? (Obviously, the Shudras are still there, in the sense of being most of the population, being the butchers or boatmen or artisans). It seems that they lost all caste origins and merged into a non-varna based tribal identity, for example the terrorist Burhan Wani had a surname that comes from Vanij (‘trader’) in Sanskrit and is cognate with Baniya in other Indic languages. These are clearly the echoes of the former Baniya or Vaishya caste of Kashmir.

The Imperial Gazetter provides us more information, essentially, there are four castes among Kashmiri Muslims: Sheikh, Sayed, Mughal, Pathan. The names such as Wani, Bat, Raina, Dar etc are krām (clan) names and hence the Sheikh caste is made up of Hindu converts of mixed ‘clans’ that can all intermarry. The other three castes are said to be of foreign origin (something clearly false based on simple common sense, plus the genetics as we will see). So what’s going on here is once the caste system in Hindu Kashmir ended, the Muslim converts carried their ancestral surnames in many cases, even following the same profession, but formed newer Arabic name castes or started claiming foreign ancestry.

However, there might be more to this too. The Kashmiri Brahmins are also divided into krāms, the three krams being Jyotishi (astrologer), Bachabatt (priest), Karkun (writers, clerks). The priestly division does not intermarry the other two and the Karkun or working service class make up the vast majority of Kashmiri Brahmins. There are further two divisions: Malmās and Banamās. The former are descendants of the original eleven families of Brahmins who did not leave the valley during the brutal persecution wave of Sikandar Shah Buttshikhan, and the Banamas are those who returned once the oppression lowered a good bit.

On the oppression of the Kashmiri Hindus and the sadness felt by Shrivara on seeing the Islamization of Kashmir, I have some good posts and translations from Sanskrit, see these below.

1. https://x.com/arya_amsha/status/1455189206003638282?s=20

2. https://x.com/arya_amsha/status/1454817144718254082?s=20

With this being said, notice KP names such as Razdan. This name comes Rājanaka or Rājanya of Sanskrit and is very clearly a Kshatriya coded name, the same goes for Raina (Rana). However, these are Brahmin names in Kashmir now right?

The theory goes that whatever Hindus in Kashmir did not convert, they were absorbed into the Karkun class of Kashmiri Pandits. So Kashmiri Hindus of non-Brahmin varnas got absorbed in this class too, as Brahmins were the last line of defense in the sense of being the only caste to have resisted mass conversion.

Would this theory be explained by genetics perhaps? Let’s see.

For those new to this blog who are not familiar with genetics, the Indus_Farmer ancestry is Tepe_Anau_Chalcolithic and the AASI is Indian Hunter Gatherer, the Steppe is Sintashta-Andronovo and the Asiatic is Tibeto-Burman plus Austroasiatic

What’s surprising to note is that Kashmiri Pandits vary a good bit in their ancestry, and can be as low as 17% Steppe to as high as 30% Steppe, as low as 45% farmer to as high as 55% farmer. 19% AASI to 30% AASI! This is a lot of variation. Sure, there is internal variation amongst castes, but this seems a bit too much. Something like this would make a lot of sense if KPs were a mix of an original Brahmin nucleus with other Hindu castes.

Now, let’s look at Kashmiri Muslims of India.

Not only do the Kashmiri Muslims cap out at a much lower Steppe ancestry, they also have a much higher AASI on the extreme side with as much as 38%! Now of course you can say this is an outlier, but even if you remove this sample, it’s obvious that Kashmiri Muslims have a distribution for Steppe ancestry that isnt as high. There is a lot of overlap however. Notice how none of the Kashmiri Muslims have any foreign ancestry either. The claim of being Arabs is obviously bogus.

qpAdm can be ran on all these samples, and this was just a quick post, but I think the hypothesis we discussed are fairly reasonable and seem to show in the genetics. Next time you see a Muslim from Kashmir claim to be of Brahmin ancestry, the chances of that being true are probably very far fetched.

We should picture this. It is the second decade of the 14th century and the greatest Hindu Kingdoms of India have fallen like dominoes to the Turks. The Shāhī-s in our own native Gandhara fell the first to the Turkic Ghaznavids, the Cāhamāna-s were next, followed by the Gāhaḍavālas of Kannāuj. In one sweep, and a few decades put together, the campaigns of the Qarluk Turk, Mohammed Ghazni and his dynasty's usurper, the Tājīk Mohammed Ghori, had put an end to 1000 years of Hindu rule from Kabul to Kannāuj. These conquerors were not like the last Central Asians who invaded India; the polytheistic Kuṣāṇ-s who shared with us an Indo-Iranian syncretic pagan milieu; these conquerors were chiefly Turks, once Buddhist Central Asians, they were now the sword of Islam. Fearsome once-nomadic Steppe horselords with the latest siege warfare equipment, artillery and weaponry at their disposal; they were hard to beat. Of course, they were not all Turuṣka-s…

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A few days ago, a new paper with 102 samples from the Greek Islands came out. I had seen a presentation on it a few weeks ago, so I knew what to expect, and wasn’t very surprised. I had even tried my own hand at modeling the samples and found the results to be fairly typical of what one would expect Early-Middle Bronze Age Greeks to have.

However, @agenetics1 brought something strange to my attention, some of these Bronze Age Greeks allegedly had Indian ancestry (Pakistan_Loebanr_IA) in his model.

Naturally, I was pretty surprised, so I decided to see if formal statistical tools used to model populations such as qpAdmix also reflect this Indian DNA. Thankfully, I had already merged these new Greeks in my dataset, and hence could use them to check if this claim was true.

It turns out, it was. I’m not sure exactly what happened here, but a good number of these Bronze Age Greeks probably have legitimate Indian ancestry. I modeled the first two samples with the highest Indian DNA (AID017, KRO008). First I used Loebanr_IA as the Indian source and then I used Andamanese Onge as the Indian-Hunter-Gathere proxy (IHG) just to confirm the presence of excess IHG DNA (which would be a sureshot indicator of Indian ancestry).

Greece_Logkas here represents Northern Proto-Greek type samples, while Peloponnese is Neolithic Farmer with some extra Anatolian/Caucasus ancestry. Loebanr_IA are Iron Age samples from Gandhara.

Now, checking for Andamanese DNA in Krousonas KO008. (I checked for Andamanese in Aidonia too, just didn’t make a doughnut of it, but you can view all the files in this link below).

Now, let’s see how old these samples are and what the archaeological context is.

Both these samples are women, so we don’t have haplogroups, and I haven’t tested the other individuals yet (this is a hasty post, and I am somewhat busy at the moment), however, 1200 BCE for KRO008 does not sound too unreasonable, and Late Helladic or Mycene Period for AID017 (Late Helladic (c.1550–c.1050 BCE).

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What’s going on here? I’m not sure, but then I remembered a paper I had read months ago that said the Minoan writing script for their own language, Linear A, could successfully be decoded to contain some Sanskrit words.

Evidence of Indo-Aryan dialect in 10 Minoan Linear A inscriptions and Minoan Indo-Aryan etymologies of 16 Greek words

Here’s the Abstract.

The advantage of this paper is it uses the same system used to decipher Linear B and the same sound-values for the graphemes (this is the consensus in Minoan scholarship, that Linear A&B are mostly the same script used to write two completely different languages. Think about Naskh used to write Arabic, Persian and Urdu)

Skipping the decipherment, (which does make a lot of sense in some aspects), the author gives us etymologies for some extremley cryptic Greek words (in classical philology, these words are thought to have come from some Pre-Greek substrate)

I must say, I am not one to get convinced by wild theories, but all this is making a lot of sense to me. These etymologies are fairly convincing. The author preempts some criticism and answers it. Isn’t it possible to read *anything* as Sanskrit?

Skipping this part, but essentially, he tries to read Linear B (with an accepted Greek reading) as Sanskrit, but finds it doesn’t work like Linear A did. The author believes that the Mittani Indic warrior elite imposed it’s rule on the Minoans, and hence the Sanskrit.

Is that what truly happened? I don’t know. We need to investigate this a lot more, and we could turn out to be wrong also, but the Andamanese DNA in these samples means we cannot neglect the possibility of recent Indian migrants.

What were these Iron Age Indians doing in the Age of Achilles and Hector? No idea. Perhaps they decided to hop on an epic conquest to win back a stolen bride, a story they were all too familiar with ;)

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The past few years have been somewhat of a revolution in South Asian archaeogenetics with the two massive papers published by Vagheesh Narasimhan that took a look at hundreds of South-Central Asian genomes from the Bronze-Age all the way to the Historic Period.

The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia went on to become the most downloaded genetics/genomics paper in the history of the bioRxiv pre-print server. The story as we got from that paper was this: South Asians and Europeans share a similar demographic history. Both landmasses were first populated by hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years, before migrating Neolithic farmers from Iran and Anatolia respectively brought agriculture to both places, mixing with the local hunter-gatherers and creating civilizations such as the Harappan, Minoan or Etruscan.

In the case of South Asia, there is a po…

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When I checked their position on a PCA, I realized why this was so. These Brahmins and Rajputs are all shifted towards Sino-Tibetans, moreso than even Bengali Brahmins are. So what we have here are a bunch of Brahmins and Rajputs shifted more towards East Asians than even Bengali Brahmins (who have 1-5% EA ancestry).

However, the cluster isn’t homogenous, and some of these samples are far closer to the mainland Indian cluster, yet still significantly Tibetan shifted. So I decided to label these ones separately and model them on the Harvard Admixtools2 software by the geneticist Robert Maier.

Notice how they are closer to Tibetans, but a few of them are on the Indian cline.

Here are the models I came up with. Now, do keep something in mind. Riang is the East Asian/Sino-Tibetan proxy, the best one for modern Indians. Riang are a modern Tibeto-Burman tribe from the Indian state of Manipur. Irula is a proxy for Onge/AASI ancestry but Irula is not 100% AASI, rather it is only around 47% AASI, so I have accordingly calculated the Onge/AASI from the Irula score and made the piechart with the Onge/AASI figure for both Rajputs and Brahmins.

Tibetan-mix UP Brahmin (UBR.SG)

Russia_MLBA_Sintashta: 24% ± 2.1
Irula.DG: 18% ± 10.7
Indus Valley: 44.8% ± 7.8
Riang.SG: 13.1% ± 3.4

Tibetan-mix Rajasthani Rajput (RAJ.SG)

Russia_MLBA_Sintashta: 26.7% ± 2.7
Irula.DG: 17.1% ± 14.2
Indus Valley: 40.2% ± 10.9
Riang.SG: 16% ± 4.1

In my opinion, the fact that these people have such substantial Steppe ancestry rules out them not being Brahmins/Rajputs. However, they consistently have 13-16% Tibetan ancestry, which isn’t a coincidence.

Keep in mind, these are the Brahmin/Rajput samples with the lowest Tibetan like, the main cluster must be 25% Tibetan. I think the likely explanation is these are a bunch of Pahadi/Garhwali Brahmins and Rajputs who were mislabelled as being UP Brahmins/Rajasthani Rajputs, OR they are migrants from those states living in UP/Rajasthan. It is well known that Pahadi Indo-Aryans are mixed with Tibeto-Burmans, just like the Nepalese Indo-Aryans are.

Regardless, this gives us a look into the DNA of Indo-Aryans mixed with Tibetan ancestry.

A few months back, I tried my hand at translating a modest amount of Old Persian (henceforth: OP) from the Achaemenid royal corpus into Classical Sanskrit (henceforth: Skt). This test-run of ours was on the Naqsh-e-Rostam inscription of Emperor Darius. It served to illustrate (rather convincingly) how close OP and Skt are. Chronologically speaking, the two represent a similar stage of linguistic evolution in Indo-Iranian; they’re also almost contemporary to each other. The parent language of OP is not attested (OP is Western Iranian while Avestan was Eastern Iranian) but rest be assured it would’ve been close to the late-Vedic dialect of the Brāhmaṇa texts.

With this second iteration we return to our translation exercise; however, this time we will take a crack at the Behistun Inscription of Darius. I must duly inform you all that I don’t know any OP: inflection, morphology, vocabulary or syntax. This, however, adds to the charm of my whole endeavor. How much Old Persian can a person who knows sufficient Sanskrit plus some Indo-Iranian linguistics pick up after a few readings?

Let us begin, alam vistarena.

Behistun Inscription: Column I, lines 1-8

adam dârayavauš xšâyathiya vazraka
xšâyathiya xšâyathiyânâm
xšâyathiya pârsaiy
xšâyathiya dahyûnâm
vištâspahyâ puça
aršâmahyâ napâ
haxâmanišiya

thâtiy dârayavauš xšâyathiya
manâ pitâ vištâspa
vištâspahyâ pitâ aršâma
aršâmahyâ pitâ ariyâramna
ariyâramnahyâ pitâ cišpiš
cišpâiš pitâ haxâmaniš

thâtiy dârayavauš xšâthiya
avahyarâdiy vayam haxâmanišiyâ thahyâmahy
hacâ paruviyata âmâtâ amahy
hacâ paruviyata hyâ amâxam taumâ xšâyathiyâ âha

Classical Sanskrit translation: Column I, lines 1-8

aham dhāravasuḥ kṣatriyaḥ vajrakaḥ
kṣatriyaḥ kṣatriyāṇām
kṣatriyaḥ pārasaḥ
kṣatriyaḥ dāsyūnām
viṣitāśvasya putraḥ
vṛṣāmasya naptā
sakhamanayaḥ

śaṃsati dhāravasuḥ kṣatriyaḥ
mama pitā viṣṭāśvaḥ
viṣitāśvasya pitā vṛṣāmaḥ
vṛṣāmasya pitā āryaramana
āryaramanasya pitā [ciṣpaḥ]
[ciṣpasya] pitā sakhamanāḥ

śaṃsati dhāravasuḥ kṣatriyaḥ
avasyarādhasi vayam sakhāmanasaḥ śaṃsyāmahe
sacā pūrvyataḥ amātyāḥ smaḥ
sacā pūrvyataḥ yat asmākam tokmā kṣatriyaḥ āsa

English translation

I am Darius, the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia, king of lands, Hystaspes’ son, Arsames’ grandson, an Achaemenid. Proclaims Darius, the king: My father is Hystaspes; the father of Hystaspes (is) Arsames; the father of Arsames (was) Ariaramnes; the father of Ariaramnes (was) Teispes; the father of Teispes (was) Achaemenes. Proclaims Darius, the king: That is why we are called Achaemenids; from antiquity we are noble; from antiquity has our dynasty been kings.

Notes:

Old Persian uses kshayathiya but in Sanskrit both kshatriya and kshaita can work. Kshaita is more archaic and Vedic, so it might be a better theoretical fit but I used the more familiar kshatriya. I had already translated some of the Persian proper names into their Sanskrit equivalents in my last post on this, so I just used them. One thing I noted is a lot of the words/adverbs used in this OP truly had their cognates in Vedic Sanskrit rather than Classical (c.f - hacā, amahy, vishta, arshama, tauma). A lot of the syntax is awkward for Sanskrit, and we have to take some liberties. For example, the Persian pronoun avahya exists in Vedic (ava - this/that) but it’s only used as a genetive dual (avayor). I had to here extend the stem to make it a genitive singular (avasya). Then, radiy in OP is cognate to rādhas in Sanskrit (locative case), but this construction simply doesn’t exist in Sanskrit.

In OP, ava (gen) + radiy = on account of this, which was transposed into Sanskrit to maximize cognates. The word tauma in Persian means “family, lineage” (like kula in Sanskrit) but the direct Sanskrit cognate (tokman) just means “youngone, offspring”

As for the word cišpiš, I had no idea what its etymology is. I looked it up then and saw it might be an Elamite loan, which would then explain why it looks so foreign. For ariyaramna, I assumed the second part is a verbal noun so extended √ram to make ramana and made a compound āryaramana. The rest were easy.

Here’s a Hindi transliteration.

Old Persian original

अदम् दारयवौष् क्षायथिय वज़्रक क्षायथिय क्षायथियानाम् क्षायथिय पार्सैय् क्षायथिय दह्यूनाम् विष्तास्पह्या पुच अर्षामह्या नपा हखामनिषिय थातिय् दारयवौष् क्षायथिय मना पिता विष्तास्प विष्तास्पह्या पिता अर्षाम अर्षामह्या पिता अरियारम्न अरियारम्नह्या पिता चिष्पिष् चिष्पाइष् पिता हखामनिष् थातिय् दारयवौष् क्षाथिय अवह्यरादिय् वयम् हखामनिषिया थह्यामह्य् हचा परुवियत आमाता अमह्य् हचा परुवियत ह्या अमाखम् तौमा क्षायथिया आह

Sanskrit translation

अहम् धारवसुः क्षत्रियः वज्रकःक्षत्रियः क्षत्रियाणाम् क्षत्रियः पारसः क्षत्रियः दास्यूनाम् विषिताश्वस्य पुत्रः वृषामस्य नप्ता सखमनयः शंसति धारवसुः क्षत्रियः मम पिता विष्टाश्वः विषिताश्वस्य पिता वृषामः वृषामस्य पिता आर्यरमन आर्यरमनस्य पिता [चिष्पः] [चिष्पस्य] पिता सखमनाः शंसति धारवसुः क्षत्रियः अवस्यराधसि वयम् सखामनसः शंस्यामहे सचा पूर्व्यतः अमात्याः स्मः सचा पूर्व्यतः यत् अस्माकम् तोक्मा क्षत्रियः आस

Having clarified my position, let us begin.

So far we haven't gotten any samples from Ancient India that might plausibly have high enough Steppe ancestry to be identified as a proximal carrier of said ancestry into India. We know that most Iranians get modelled quite well with Turkmenistan_IA, an Iron Age sample from around 900 BCE Turkmenistan that is a mix of BMAC & Andronovo in a 47:53 ratio. Mountain Iranians like Pamiri Tajiks and Yaghnobis (who live quite close to the original homeland of these BMAC:Andronovo mixed pops) have as high as 85-93% TKM_IA ancestry (plus some Xiongnu/East Asian and some Peninsular Indian). This tells us that some Tajiks can essentially be thought of as Proto-Iranians in genetic admixture. What about Proto-Indo-Aryans? Surely, they would've initially mixed with the Harappans in a close to 50:50 ratio just like Steppe Iranics mixed with BMAC?

We do have more than a hundred samples radiocarbon dated to ~1000 BCE from the Swat Protohistoric Graves (SPGT), but most of them cluster with modern day NW Indians and show a reduced 20-25% Steppe ancestry. This tells us nothing of their ancestral population.

Recently, I looked closely at Narasimhan's supplement again. He called this bridge population formed through mixing of 100% Central Steppe MLBA with 100% Indus as "ANI" or Ancestral North Indian.

We found that we could jointly model all individuals on the Steppe Cline as a mixture of two sources, albeit different from the two sources in the earlier cline. One end is consistent with a point along the Indus Periphery Cline. The other end is consistent with a mixture of ~41% Central_Steppe_MLBA ancestry and ~59% from a subgroup of the Indus Periphery Cline with relatively high Iranian farmer–related ancestry.

However, the Kalash are confidently estimated to have non-negligible AHG-related ancestry (4±1%), and thus while it is possible that they had the same mixture of ancestries as the ANI, it is also possible that the ANI was an unsampled population that existed in the past that was the true source of the Steppe pastoralist-related ancestry in the Modern Indian Cline and that had even less AHG-related ancestry

So, according to Narasimhan et al, the Steppe ancestry in the Steppe cline is maximized at 41% (that's why he says the Kalash are 70% ANI in his 2018 paper). If the Kalash are 70% ANI with 30% Steppe_MLBA ancestry, then the ANI had approximately 40% Steppe_MLBA ancestry. When did this admixture happen approximately?

The published estimate of admixture in the Kalash is 110 ± 12 generations (55), suggesting a post-IVC date of formation of the ANI

110 ± 12 generations gives us a time range of 1466 BCE - 906 BCE for the admixture in the Kalash and hence one estimate of the formation of the ANI. However, what about the 100+ SPGT samples? When did admixture happen in them?

Using this approach, we infer that the Steppe Pastoralist-related admixture in SPGT occurred 26 ± 3 generations before the average sampling time of our SPGT individuals (919 BCE, range: 1263 - 808 BCE), corresponding to a 95% confidence interval of 1815 - 1479 BCE

This would mean Steppe ancestry had definitely entered the Indian subcontinent by 1500 BCE. Narasimhan suggests the dates from the SPGT individuals are more reliable than the hypothetical ANI ones obtained from the Kalash.

This is similar to, but more precise than, the dates we obtain for ANI ancestry in Kalash in our study (Table S 5) or reported in earlier work

Of course, a good confirmation that Steppe ancestry existed in subcontinentals by the 16th century BCE is an outlier individual found in Bustan, Uzbekistan at an otherwise post-BMAC site. This site belongs to the latest period of the Sappali Culture. Most of the individuals clustered with the main BMAC Gonur site, but there were some outliers. One such outlier was labelled Bustan_BA_o2. Here is the profile of the individual.

Bustan_BA_o2 (n=1): This individual has additional ancestry related to the hunter-gatherers of South Asia. While the radiocarbon date of this individual places it to 700 years prior to the Swat Proto Historic Grave complex, the genetic ancestry appears to lie along a cline established by these individuals. We assign this individual the Bustan_BA_o2 analysis label.

• UZ-BST-015, Site 4, Grave 4, 57-27 (I11520): Date of 1613-1509 calBCE (3280±20 BP, PSUAMS-4605). Genetically male.

Let us run this sample on both a PCA and then do a qpAdm/G25 of him. Sure enough, this man from 16th century BCE Uzbekistan lies in the North-West Indian and Ancient South Asia cluster.

What about his genetic admixture? Does he have Steppe ancestry or IVC ancestry? Can he be modelled without BMAC ancestry? What about haplogroups?

Y-haplogroup: R2a3a2, mtDNA haplogroup: HV2a2

R2a is autochthonous to the subcontinent, and HV2a can be West Asian/Harappan.

Here are qpAdm results for Bustan_BAo2, models highlighted in green were successful.

The model that gives the highest p-value uses Indus I8726 which has around 90% Iranian farmer like ancestry. For some reason, all Ancient Indian samples and NW pops like Kalash fit best with I8726. Bustan_BA1 is proxy for BMAC, being from the same site. Quite interestingly, we find not a single model with BMAC works. Only two models pass, and all models with BMAC ancestry in leftpops (source) fail.

Steppe + IVC + Andaman ancestry found in Uzbekistan in 1500 BCE! In almost the exact same mix it exists in 2000 years later. Let us check G25 distances.

An individual with almost the same ancestry as modern North West Indians lived approximately 2500 years ago in Uzbekistan! This means this ancestry had been formed for the first time a bit before that.

Two scenarios come up. This individual likely was either a Harappan migrant in a BMAC site who interacted with Andronovo migrants, or he was part of a population that already had received an infusion of Steppe ancestry by 1500 BCE, and he migrated out to Sappali Culture after this Steppe infusion. The second makes more sense to me, for why wouldn’t this individual have BMAC ancestry if he was a migrant who had been living there for a while? And how would he get Steppe ancestry but not BMAC? This somewhat confirms the above dates given in Narasimhan et al that Andronovo ancestry reached the subcontinent in the first half of the 2nd millenium BCE.

Now, the most interesting part is that one outlier exists in the Loebanr Cemetery that has close to the theoretical maximum 42% Central_Steppe_MLBA ancestry. It’s a female sample so we get no Y-DNA but the mtDNA was T1a1a which is from the Steppes. Here’s the grave and sample description.

SPGT_o: Swat Protohistoric Grave Type outlier (n=1). This individual is a mild genetic outlier from the SPGT cluster in PCA, and hence we give them a separate analysis label.

• Grave 140, single burial, 547 (I12138): Context date of 1000-800 BCE. Genetically female. Single burial with individual resting (flexed) on the left side. The assemblage includes 20 vessels and miniature vessels, beads of semi-precious stones, an iron pin and a spindle whorl (see pages 207-208 of ref. (180)). The chronology of the pottery is associated to the middle/late phase of the Swat Protohistoric Graves assemblages.

Let us first see it’s position on a PCA. On the G25 West Eurasian PCA, Loebanr_o is clustered inbetween the Rors of India and Tajiks of Tajikistan. This makes sense, considering both these groups have Steppe_MLBA ancestry in the 40% range.

On the South Asian PCA, the outlier is slightly more shifted towards Tajiks (perhaps some BMAC ancestry?)

Let us see qpAdm models.

4/6 successful models. Prima facie, I am going to say the passing models without BMAC are less likely, the reason I say this is because Loebanr_o would cluster almost perfectly with Indian Rors or Hindu Jats if it had no BMAC. However, we see it is shifted towards Tajiks on both PCA and G25 distance plots.

Loebanr_o is shifted towards Iranic populations that have BMAC ancestry, and towards Indo-Aryan isolates like Kalash who also definitely have BMAC ancestry.

If it truly was 40% Steppe_MLBA, 55% Indus_West and 5% Andaman, it would be the closest to Indian Rors, who mostly have the exact same mixture. Therefore, I think Loebanr_O is likely around 40% Steppe_MLBA, 10% BMAC, 43% IVCp_west and 6% Andamanese. (I think 22% BMAC seems too much, so I’m ruling it out based on a pure hunch, this is not gospel). Please always keep in mind that IVCp_west is *very different* from IVCp_pool. The former is 80%~ Iranian farmer, while the latter is 60% Iranian farmer.

I think this is amazing, because it shows us that individuals that were nearly 100% ANI-like existed approximately 6-7 centuries after the initial Steppe admixture into India (based on Narasimhan et al 2019).

At this point, I got a brilliant idea, why not try modelling the elusive Kalash (who are allegedly 70% ANI, 30% ASI) with this almost 100% ANI like population? I have tried a lot models on the Kalash, and most of them failed. Please keep in mind that Narasimhan was not able to model the Kalash successfully either (the 30% Steppe three way model does not pass on qpAdm as he himself notes in the supplementary)

Let’s see if Loebanr_o helps us in some way. I will bore you the details, but since I wrote the last sentence, it has taken dozens of failed models to finally come up with one that passes, and believe me –– Loebanr_o is the only population that has made Kalash pass successfully so far on qpAdm. So our hunch was right, the nearly 100% ANI type woman can be used as a source for 70% ANI Kalash.

After my first few models failed, the gendstats showed Kalash needs more BMAC type + WSHG. I already knew from G25 models that some type of BMAC ancestry (8-10%) will be needed. I tried adding BMAC + Tyumen just to have it fail, then I searched for ancient populations closest to Kalash and found KGZ_Aigryzhal to be very close on G25 distances. If you look up the admix of KGZ_Aigryzhal, it’s basically 70% BMAC + 30% WSHG, or 55% BMAC + 45% Kumsay. I also knew that Indus_Pool is a terrible choice for Kalash but I still tried it, it failed. Any model that had extra BMAC in the form of Gonur1/BustanBA also failed, once again confirming my own G25 models that Kalash don’t have a lot of BMAC. (For these old models, see this post)

After a lot of more failed models, I decided that even Andamanese wasn’t working, so I replaced it with Irula (couldn’t find Paniya in the dataset). I noticed my model almost passed now, (p-value > 0.05 = pass). Taking a look at the other models qpAdm rejected, I found the second most favored model had a p-value of 0.068 (chi sq = 14.572) but put the Indus_P_max as 0.000. Maybe Kalash simply doesn’t need that much excess Iranian farmer, so I removed it and voila, our model passed.

I have been trying to model the Kalash for a long time, and believe me, this is the only successful model I came up with. My original hunch based on the 100% ANI (Loebanr_o) used to model Kalash (70% ANI) was right.

Here are the models, the first one: https://pastebin.com/hDVHFSTQ

the successful one: https://pastebin.com/kYRRcLN8

Final admixture of the Kalash. For those curious, here is basal ancestry breakdown.

Steppe_MLBA: ~26%
Iranian Farmer: ~25%
Andamanese: ~15-20%
WSHG: ~16%
BMAC: ~13%

(BTW, just to check, I tried modelling Kalash with the Barikot or Udegram IA samples and found they failed quite miserably). The Steppe estimate of 26% is quite close to Narasimhan’s estimate of 27% (while using IVCp_west).

However, Narasimhan got a p-value of 0.0000.. while we have managed to get one around 0.0512. Well, there is the mystery of the Kalash solved. How and where this Aigryzhal comes from, I don’t know. Maybe it was some type of admixture only pops in Chitral and Swat received? On that note, I wonder if we can model most Punjabis with Loebanr_o too? I have to test it out, and I eventually will. For now, this shall suffice.

To conclude, we found an outlier from 16th century BCE Uzbekistan that is similar to modern North Indians, we found a proximal source for ANI in the form of the Loebanr_o and we modelled the Kalash successfully.

It has been on the back of my mind to write a document of a few pages against Charvaka empiricism. Most pop culture treatment of this school of ancient Indian materialism has been extremley shoddy, both by those who advocate for it (Neo-Charvaks) and those who write against it. Their arguments are generally simple, fideistic and draw from a superficial understanding of epistemology, as they are not well-versed in Nyāya: the logico-realist school of Indian philosophy. If they are well versed in Nyāya, they’re often not well versed in the philosophical terminology of English. This is also not something we can expect academic scholars to address, since writing polemical treatises is not part of their oeuvre. Therefore, I spent an hour and a half yesterday when I had some free time and wrote a small document discussing the Charvaka view in detail first, as pūrvapakṣa, and then refuting it quite thoroughly.

I hope to make a small and limited contribution to this. On that note, subscribe to my substack below if you haven’t. It’s free (for now!)

I’m attaching my Pages document as a public PDF file on this substack post, for easy access. The link is below, which you have to click on to download the document. By the way, don’t worry, your personal email information won’t be visible when you view or download the link from dropbox.

Download Link:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/avhal9aw5blii4w/aastika-response1.pdf?dl=0

Here’s another link, in case the first one ever stops working: https://pdfhost.io/v/kM4CQJmgC_aastikaresponse1

Following are important excerpts from Armin Mohler’s Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland; these excerpts provide useful working definitions of conservatism and explain why the adjective revolutionary has been appendaged to it. The Conservative Revolutionary movement has long been eclipsed (and appropriated!) by Nazism, or the brand of fascism peculiar to Germany after the Weimar interregnum. This has led to the dogmatic branding of a coterie of thinkers as proto-Nazis: Julius Evola, Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, Oswald Spengler and Moeller Van Den Bruck; however, this is not the case and is very reductionist. These thinkers had uncertain relationships with Nazism, and were more often than not bitterly critical of the hyperrealist biological reductionism of Nazi fascism, as well as its upending of the Prussian aristocratic order, which had been replaced by one man; the ‘Führerstaat’ (Führer’s state) as Evola called it. Hitler had, in fact, faced assassination attempts from the Prussian aristocracy and his state was considered a bourgeois revolt against the erstwhile blue-blood of Germany. For people like Thomas Mann, a noble laureate and member of the Hanseatic Mann family, Hitler was too democratic & too plebian. He called Nazism a movement “against everything noble”, a power grab by the “common scum”

Digressions aside, I recommend Mohler’s book as the best summary on the Conservative Revolution (though it is in German).

A few helpful English overviews: Critics of Modernity: The Literature of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1890-1933 and The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic.

Herein lie the translated excerpts:

In colloquial usage, the word "conservative" is used to denote the effort to preserve something that already exists and to hold on to it under all circumstances. This also applies to most of the German and non-German political parties which have written this word on their flags. The "Conservative Revolution", however, believes that this is misunderstood conservatism (A 1.5), and seeks to give the word a new content. What this new content is is best illustrated by the counter term "reactionary."

This word seems to have been created in the first half of the 19th century on the side of progress as an abusive nickname (Schimpfname) for all attempts to maintain or restore the conditions before the French Revolution. Which, if successful, would be a "setback" from the point of view of progress. The "Conservative Revolution" takes up this abusive nickname (of reactionary) and uses it to eliminate all insincere or bogus (unecht) conservatism.

"Reactionary" from its point of view is, for example, anyone who still clings to a restoration of the Hohenzollern kingship after the collapse of 1918. This new conservatism, then, does not share the adherence to surviving individual forms. It respects and protects what is still a living tradition, and in this it differs from the belief in progress, which fundamentally wants to replace the existing with the new.

The new conservatism thus recognizes the constant flow of individual forms. Behind this superficial (vordergründigen) movement, however, it recognizes the tranquility (Ruhe) of the whole. Moeller van den Bruck writes in the chapter Reactionary of the Third Reich: "In the history of a people, whatever wants to change may change with time: the unchangeable, which remains, is more powerful and more important than the changeable, which always consists only in the fact that something is subtracted or added." The new conservatism does not believe that anything changes at the core. Thus, for example, the idea, indispensable to progressive thinking, of a human being who is gradually perfecting himself, who is basically predisposed to the good and is only prevented from doing so by adverse circumstances, is alien to him. For him, people will always wear different clothes and cultivate different customs. But their disposition to good and evil remains the same for him. Perfection belongs only to the whole; the individual has access to perfection only through his return to this whole.

Thus, for the "Conservative Revolution" the word "preservation" has no justification in the active sense: the individual remains an individual and subject to the whole, and therefore does not possess the freedom to preserve something that is destined to perish. But passively the word becomes meaningful: everything is "preserved" and nothing can fall out of the whole. Thus it is to be understood when Moeller van den Bruck writes about the chapter ‘Conservative’ of his main work: “Conservatism has eternity to itself” (Konservatismus hat die Ewigkeit für sich).

The definition of "conservative" that most aptly illustrates the new meaning of the word comes from Moeller van den Bruck's circle. It dates from 1931 and can be found in Der Ring, the journal of the circle around Heinrich von Gleichen. Albrecht Erich Günther writes there: With Moeller van den Bruck, "we do not understand conservatism as a clinging to what was yesterday, but as a living out of what is always valid. This means that the conservative does not live in the future alone like the believer in progress and not in the past alone like the reactionary - he lives in the present, in which, insofar as it is a fulfilled present, past and future are united. The "Great Midday" (of Nietzsche) echoes.

But our movement calls itself "Conservative Revolution". What does the word "revolutionary" have to do with the word "conservative"? Doesn't it belong entirely to the space of progress? There it means the removal of obstacles to progress. If the revolution succeeds, something new is added to what has gone before. The word "revolutionary" cannot have this meaning within the "Conservative Revolution. Here, the "revolution" could rather be compared to a bloodletting (Aderlaß). The individual, whose time has passed, is not to be held on spasmodically, as the reactionary would do. Rather, it is to fall, and this is helped. A quick cut is better than slow rotting, when the downfall has been decided anyway. "Revolution" here is therefore not, as in progress thinking, an in-between faster pushing forward within the slower "evolution". What is meant is a pruning of life-inhibiting growths. "Every revolution wants to shatter constricting forms," says Rauschning in his description of this conservative "revolution".

But now it would be wrong to see in this conservative "revolution" something like "reform". "Reform" is always something bloodless, while it is not surprising to the conservative that birth must be paid for with destruction. Moreover, in "reform" something is added to the existing. For the conservative, however, everything is always already there, and "revolution" for him can only have the result of a new structuring of what is already there.

One could therefore call this kind of "revolution" "aimless," because it does not need a vision of a final kingdom in the distant future; one might call it "skeptical," because for the prudent it is by no means capable of shaping a better world; one could also call it a "passive" revolution, because it has traits of suffering attached to it and is not, like the revolution of progress, shrouded in the pathos of an arbitrary control of world history. And it should also be noted that in the "Conservative Revolution" war is often understood as revolution.

This renders the definition of revolution as civil war as opposed to national war useless for understanding our kind of revolution.

In the editorial cited in A 3.7, there is an attempt to call the revolutionary process "revolution" on the conservative side and "evolution" on the progressive side. This makes sense insofar as the distinction between revolution and evolution is superficial according to the mere presence or absence of bloodshed and the use of violence. Destruction knows many other colors than just the red of blood. Then even if jerky progress towards a certain goal is called "evolution" there. Of the "revolution," on the other hand, it is said: "Revolution, however, means: Re-volution, rolling back, reappearance of an earlier state. However, there it goes beyond our interpretation of the "Conservative Revolution" with the assertion of a rolling back to the beginning, the origin. To what extent this is also a "linear" conception, or to what extent here merely a process of the one (cyclic) world is circumscribed with the comprehensible terms of the (linear) other - that depends on the interpretation of the word "origin", which is much used in the "Conservative Revolution" and is multifaceted. But this is one of the many questions we have to leave open.

In any case, one thing becomes clear: in the "Conservative Revolution" lives a will to change certain conditions by force, which justifies the use of the word "revolutionary" and which is also repeatedly called "revolutionary" by the opposing side. Since, as already said, our task is not the establishment of a logically elaborated system, but the description of an existing world view, we can leave it at this delimitation of the words "conservative" - "reactionary" - "revolutionary".

Our religion is very old, the oldest religion that is still practised. (Mazdayasna is a close-second, followed by the roots of Rabbinical Judaism). Not only is our religion very old, but it was also fertilized in an oral tradition that looked down upon the written word. If this wasn’t enough, our oral tradition managed to preserve our canonical scripture better than any of the people of the book. The Rigveda is a tape-recording from the late-Bronze Age. Our religion and that of our cousins, the Parsees, formed the basis for reconstructing the putative Proto-Indo-European religion of our ancestors. This hoary past of an oral-culture that ‘froze in time’ and never lost its continuity (unlike the Hellenes); seamlessly flowing into the 21st century, complicates things a lot. It bring out the best of the inner skeptic of those who want to readily discredit our theological, ritual and doctrinal continuity: secular scholars, Occidental polemics, agnostic atheists. It colors their perception as sometimes they simply cannot believe it. This often lead to attempts to straight away deny that Hinduism is a religion; it is labelled a colonial construct, an amalgamation of dozens of closely related doctrines. Such views have been rebutted quite thoroughly (see Andrew J. Nicholson’s work or that of Walter Slaje writing on Hindu-Muslim identity in medieval Kashmir)

However, some views have gone relatively unchallenged till now. One of these is that the Upanishads represent a monumental schism from an orthopraxic and sacrifical priestly-religion of the Samhita and Brahmana. This view was popularized by 19th, early 20th century orientalists like Whitney, Müller, Keith & gained widespread currency. The Upanishads had gained a Renaissance-esque mystique & classical canonical reputation in German Idealism, with Schopenhauer himself saying that the European discovery of the Upanishads is an event of the same level as the rediscovery of Plato in the 15th century. In fact, Schopenhauer would recommend his audience not to spend time on the “priestly-garbage” (Priesterwirtschaft) of the Vedic ritual corpus (Samhita, Brahmana).

It was taken for granted that the ingenuous and moralistic doctrine of karma, as well as that of reincarnation, were later innovations. Some Buddhist scholars such as Johannes Bronkhorst have gone as far as proposing a completely revisionist history of late-Vedic India in which the Shramana movements of ‘un-Aryan’ Magadha influenced the Upanishads first, and not the other way round. This questionable hypothesis says that neither was the dogma of karmic retribution developed by Arya Brahmins, nor was it readily accepted by them.

Unbeknownst to many who may be reading our post, this view has not gone unchallenged. There has been a lot of scholarly literature (see the Bibliography) that shows quite convincingly how the doctrine of karma and reincarnation was already a part of the Brahmana corpus. The mention of how to overcome punarmṛtyu (rebirth) in the Jaiminiya Brahmana is well-known.

In fact, in many ways, retributive karma represented the natural conclusion of Vedic ritual. It did not spring out of nowhere. In this post, we will look at some of the earliest references to reincarnation in Hinduism; that is, in the Rigveda.

It must be noted that I am not suggesting that Hinduism is immutable while other religions keep changing.

All translations into English are my own unless specified. I will add long footnotes to the translations, as they are not easy at all.

Please read the footnotes at the end of the post for more details, some of which are necessary.

RV 10.16.5

अव॑ सृज॒ पुन॑रग्ने पि॒तृभ्यो॒ यस्त॒ आहु॑त॒श्चर॑ति स्व॒धाभिः॑ 
आयु॒र्वसा॑न॒ उप॑ वेतु॒ शेषः॒ सं ग॑च्छतां त॒न्वा॑ जातवेदः  1

O Agni, release him to the forefathers, and again [down from them]
[he] who has been offered to you, [he who] travels by his own will.
Let him, who is wearing life [as a cloth], come [down] to his offspring.
Let him unite with his body! O Jatavedas

RV 10.14.8

सं ग॑च्छस्व पि॒तृभिः॒ सं य॒मेने॑ष्टापू॒र्तेन॑ पर॒मे व्यो॑मन् 
हि॒त्वाया॑व॒द्यं पुन॒रस्त॒मेहि॒ सं ग॑च्छस्व त॒न्वा॑ सु॒वर्चाः॑ 2

Unite with the forefathers, unite with Yama,
[unite with] the merit of sacred rites [stored up] in the highest heaven.
Having left behind imperfection, come home again.
[You who is] full of vigor, unite with your body.

Shatapatha Brahmana 11.2.7.33

तुलायां ह वा अमुष्मिंलोक आदधति यतरद्यंस्यति तदन्वेष्यति यदि साधु वासाधु वेत्यथ य एवं वेदास्मिन्हैवलोके तुलामारोहत्यत्यमुष्मिंलोके तुलाधानम् मुच्यते साधुकृत्या हैवास्य यचति न पापकृत्या 3

Let him therefore sit down, touching the right edge of the sacrifical altar; for, indeed, they place him on the balance in that [other] world; and whichever of the two will rise, that he will follow, whether it be the good or the evil. And, verily, whosoever knows this, mounts the balance even in this world, and escapes being placed on the balance in that [other] world; for his good deed rises, and not his evil deed.

In this passage, it is clear that the world after death sees a sort of karmic judgement based on the qualia of the deeds performed (good or bad). The good and evil deeds are balanced, weighed out, and if the good outweights the bad; he escapes punishment. Herein, we have nearly arrived at the classical conception of karma. The deeds here could have been the ritual sacrifice (someone who performs ritual sacrifice all throughout his life is judged favorably) or even moral deeds of any type.

Another passage from the Shatapatha Brahmana displays a terrified Bhṛgu who has come into a reverse world where people who had hurt animals in another world are being eaten up limb by limb by those anthropomorphized animals in this reverse world. A clear nod to the idea of karmic retribution.

Bibliography

1. Vedic Hinduism by S. W. Jamison and M. Witzel

2. Fire, Death and Philosophy: A History of Ancient Indian Thinking
Joanna Jurewicz

3. The Vedic origins of Karma. Herman Wayne Tull

4. Der Rigveda und seine Religion. Oberlies, Thomas

5. Imagining Karma: Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. Gananath Obeyesekere

The functions of the past tense in the indicative mood of the verbal stems of the earliest layers of the vedic language is one of the most daunting tasks at hand. Right before I begin, I must admit that this post will be loaded with linguistic terminology and I will not try to spend too much time explaining it. I intend for this post to serve as a “primer” on vedic tense usage for those already familiar with Saṃskṛta.

There are three stems in saṃskṛta which are used in past-tense or related usages – present, aorist and perfect. The present stem forms the imperfect tense (लङ्)*, the aorist stem forms the aorist past (लुङ्) and the perfect stem forms the लिट् and the ‘pluperfect’ (लिट् + an augment “a”).

Note: the imperfect tense does not have the meaning of “ a continuous process” as used in Latin/Greek. The terminology is a mere calque given by Occidental grammarians using Greek as an analogue.

What does “Stem” mean?

Just to quickly elucidate, the stem is the prātipadika of pāṇini formed from the dhātu (verb root) by addition of some infix (suffix or affix).

As defined by pāṇini, 1.2.45 अर्थवदधातुरप्रत्ययः प्रातिपदिकम्  “prātipadika (verb stem) is that which has meaning but is not a dhātu (verb root) or a pratyaya (infix)”

There are 4 stems – present, aorist, perfect and future. In our present post, we’re only concerned with the first two. Part-II will cover perfect (this is a huge topic, so another post for it).

Example - Take the verb root (dhātu) पच्

1. The Present Stem – प॑च
2. The Aorist Stem – अपाक्ष्
3. The Perfect Stem – पपच्
4. The Future Stem –  पक्ष्य

All four of these stems have a continuum of “tense-aspect” embedded in them.

These tenses in the earliest forms of the vedic language has multiple uses that derive from their “aspectual” function. An argument for them being polysemous can be made. Our task here is to list all their uses neatly without getting into debates about how/why these uses originated or make them fit in a reichenbach-ian framework of aspect. We are currently not concerned with that and simply want to see how these tenses work.

Let us begin with the easiest tense to understand:

The Imperfect (लङ्): This tense is formed from the present stem. It has one simple usage. It is a basic preterite used as a narrative tense in the samhita and brāhmaṇā-s. It is formed by an augment (a) + secondary endings. This tense has *no* relation to present time at all. This is important to note because the other two tenses often have a relation to the present time which complicates their functions. The imperfect picks out a specific, localized past time of the historical or remote past. It is a pure tense which locates an incident that happened before speech time.

Pāṇini defines it as अनद्यतने लङ्  (3.2.111) which means “in reference to non-recent (remote) past time, we use the la~N” Another subtle distinction is this is usually technically witnessed historical past (defined so because the perfect (liT is parokṣe “unseen” remote past). Keep this in mind just, the imperfect is the standard tense of narration in vedic, it narrates stories and events that are following a common them without interruption.

Let us now look at an example:

म॒हाँ ऋषि॑र्देव॒जा दे॒वजू॒तोऽस्त॑भ्ना॒त्सिन्धु॑मर्ण॒वं नृ॒चक्षाः॑ 
वि॒श्वामि॑त्रो॒ यदव॑हत्सु॒दास॒मप्रि॑यायत कुशि॒केभि॒रिन्द्रः॑ 

mahān r̥ṣiḥ deva-jāḥ deva-jūtaḥ astabhnāt sindhum arṇavam nr̥-cakṣāḥ
viśvāmitraḥ yat avahat su-dāsam apriyāyata kuśikebhiḥ indraḥ 

“The great sage [RSi] born of gods, impelled by gods, having the sight of men–– stopped the flowing river. When Vishvāmitra carried Sudās [across the river], Indra made friends with the Kushikas”

All 3 verbs in this verse (astabhnāt,avahat,apriyāyata) are in लङ् and convey a narration that happened in the remote past. There is no reference to present time. The verb locates an incident that happened before speech time.

One other minor usage of the imperfect is a “plurperfect” usage (I had done, I had said, I had eaten.. etc) in a relative clause. This usage is shared with the aorist and mostly carried out by the aorist only.

Example –

न वै त्वं तद् अकरोर् यद् अहम् अब्रवम्
“No, certainly you did that which I had told you [to do]”

Here, we see the pluperfect proper usage “I had done XYZ” in the relative clause introduced by “yad/yat/etc” This is all for the imperfect.

The Aorist (लुङ्): Here starts the hard work. Brace in! Be sure to pay close attention to every different usage here. The Aorist and Perfect are very polysemous. The Aorist has simple aspect* and also expresses an action that occured in the past but with reference to the present. It does not describe duration or continuity, it simply states a fact [this use is prominent in non-indicative moods which we won’t cover here]. (here comes in the “simple aspect” function of the tense). What does this mean exactly?

*What does aspect meant? it gives information on how the verbal act is being done
1) I did – simple aspect (no information about duration of process of doing).
2) I am doing – continuous aspect (information about duration of process of doing is given).
3) I have/had done – completed aspect (the action is completed and flows into a state in present time with “have” but is not flowing in present time with “had”).

The aorist has 3) and 1) type uses of aspect but never 2). The 3) use, the so called “proper perfect use” arises because of the function of the aorist as described by Pāṇini. Let’s see this and then understand

Pāṇini officially defines it as भूते लुङ् (3.2.84 + 3.2.110), “lu~N in the past” . The lu~N is really the generic standard past of acts witnessed by the speaker in vedic (much like Ancient Greek) with a very specific role of representing recent immediate past. This is it’s primary usage and hence most often it is to be translated with a “has done, has eaten, has jumped, has risen etc” sense. In general, it indicates what has just taken place; and oftenest something which the speaker has experienced, commonly by the statement made as witness of an action.

It is due to this immediate past usage that the aorist takes on “completed aspect” because the action was completed recently, it has led to a state that flows into the present. This is what we meant by saying the aorist/perfect ‘refer to the present time’ An example – “I have just eaten, let us discuss now” here the action of eating just recently got over and the state of having eaten is flowing into present speech time. “I had eaten [a while ago], lets discuss” here the action of eating was completed a long time ago and there is no flowing of the state into the present. (remember, this is one of the functions of the imperfect as we described above. now do you understand what reference to present speech time is?)

Let us see examples of this immediate past function in vedic texts.

वस॑न्नरण्या॒न्यां सा॒यमक्रु॑क्ष॒दिति॑ मन्यते 
vasan araṇyānyām sāyam akrukṣat iti manyate 
“In the forest at night, one imagines that someone has just screamed“

Someone has *just* screamed as shown by akrukṣat. Sayanacharya translates this as “koShati” meaning “cries” indicating the “flow” of the action of crying into the present state of speech time. Think of a forest, someone just shrieked and you are hearing the reverberations of the shriek in your head. This is the mental imagery that is trying to be conveyed.

चि॒त्रं दे॒वाना॒मुद॑गा॒दनी॑कं॒ चक्षु॑र्मि॒त्रस्य॒ वरु॑णस्या॒ग्नेः 
आप्रा॒ द्यावा॑पृथि॒वी अ॒न्तरि॑क्षं॒
citram devānām ut agāt anīkam cakṣuḥ mitrasya varuṇasya agneḥ ā aprāḥ dyāvāpr̥thivī iti antarikṣam 
“The brilliant face of the gods has risen.. the eye of mitra, varuṇa and agni. It has filled heaven and earth and the space between them”

प्रति॒ दि॒वो अ॑दर्शि दुहि॒ता 
“The daughter of heaven has appeared“

परी ’मे गाम् अनेषत पर्य् अग्निम् अहृषत, देवेष्व् अक्रत श्रवः
“These here have led about a cow, they have carried around the fire, they have done honor to the gods “

These are sufficient examples for the main function of the aorist. There is one “subfunction” of t. It’s used in an occasion in which, 1) It expresses what results from a ritual act or is antecedent to it.

पुत्रस्य नाम गृह्णाति, प्रजाम् एव अनु सम् अतनीत्
“He gives his son a name, he has thus extended his race”

Now let us look at the second major function of the aorist. The aorist in relative clauses (who/whom/whose/when etc clause introduced by the yad/yatha/yadā type of words) marks “relative anteriority” of the 3) aspect. The proper pluperfect usage “had done, had eaten, had killed” If you remember, we have mentioned the imperfect also has this function, but this is mostly carried out by the aorist. In this usage, the event does not need to be “recent”

We begin with a main clause usually that has a narration in the imperfect tense, then the aorist comes in to switch the narrative to denote an act that had happened relatively before the verb of the main clause.

Example –

विश्वे॑ दे॒वासो॑ अमद॒न्ननु॑ त्वा 
शुष्णं॒ पिप्रुं॒ कुय॑वं वृ॒त्रमि॑न्द्र य॒दाव॑धी॒र्वि पुरः॒ शम्ब॑रस्य 
víśve devā́so amadann ánu tvā;
śúṣṇam pípruṁ kúyavaṁ vr̥trám indra yadā́vadhīr ví púraḥ śámbarasya 
“All the gods cheered you, O Indra, when you had smashed śuṣna, pipru, kuyava, vṛtra and the forts of śambara”

Notice how the pluperfect “had done” usage is introduced by the relative clause adverb “yadā”, also note how the main verb is in imperfect (amadan) while the relative clause verb is in aorist (avadhīḥ). This pattern of verb switch + relative marker should indicate the pluperfect usage.

तदिद्ध्य॑स्य॒ सव॑नं वि॒वेर॒पो यथा॑ पु॒रा मन॑वे गा॒तुमश्रे॑त्
tat it hi asya savanam viveḥ apaḥ yathā purā manave gātum aśret
“The oblation indeed has fulfilled it’s purpose, just as it once had prepared the way for Manu”

उ॒ग्रम॑यात॒मव॑हो ह॒ कुत्सं॒ सं ह॒ यद्वा॑मु॒शनार॑न्त दे॒वाः 
“The two of you went to the terrible one. You took Kutsa, when the gods had united you with Uśanā”

With this, we finish the second main function and come to the last major function of the aorist in indicative tenses. The aorist functions as a statement of fact. The aorist who have this function typically occur amidst imperfects being used in a narrative dialogue, often at end of a narrative or to show a change in point of view. They can carry the story forward, comment upon it or summarize it. While the imperfect “reports narration”, the aorist carries it forward or summarizes it or changes the narrative in some manner.

Examples –

न्या॑विध्यदिली॒बिश॑स्य दृ॒ळ्हा वि शृ॒ङ्गिण॑मभिन॒च्छुष्ण॒मिन्द्रः॑ 
याव॒त्तरो॑ मघव॒न्याव॒दोजो॒ वज्रे॑ण॒ शत्रु॑मवधीः पृत॒न्युम् 
“Indra struck down Ilībiśa’s forts and split apart the horned Shuṣna . . . with your thunderbolt you have slain the enemy (o Indra)

Notice how the imperfects are used for the entire narration of the indra story and then aorist comes in the fact to summarize the narration and comment upon it in a closer.

For this function, just remember the aorist comes inbetween or at end of a narration that uses the imperfect tense all along to close it or state a fact summarizing it. Imperfect is the standard “reportiong narration” tense.

With this we come to a close but make two final remarks. The aorist rarely has a “present” usage  because the boundary between what has just been and what is is an evanescent one, and is sometimes overstepped, so that an aorist appears where a present might stand, or was even rather to be expected.

In non-indicative moods (optative, subjunctive etc), the aorist simply marks aspect telicity. [but don’t worry too much over this for now, its just a final note irrelevant to the above usages, which are in indicative mood]

Sometime in the next month or so, we shall try to list out all uses of the most complex tense the perfect (liT) in a “Part II” to summarize the theory of vedic tense.

Who is indigenous to India? Who is aboriginal to India? Who is a foreigner? Who is a native? This straightforward question has drawn a lot of ire over the decades because of how politically charged it is. In this article, we must attempt an unbiased and fair analysis that judges popular notions of aboriginality using a consistent standard. Till date, there doesn’t seem to be consensus in India. I argue this is because of epistemic lethargy as most popular newspapers and journals on both sides of the political spectrum have not spent much time in defining the label. This relative haziness around who is indigenous helps serve political purposes in some cases and is just dismissed as common-sense in others. Before you start reading this article, I recommend you to read this article where I explain the genetic history of India. Now, we must begin by listing stereotypes.

The popular perception in Indian academia is that the Aryans are foreigners. The language they spoke is Sanskrit and their religion is Hinduism; this makes both Sanskrit and Hinduism foreign intrusions into India. The aboriginal natives of India are considered to be the Dravidians who inhabited the Indus-Valley Civilization before the Aryans displaced them. Indra therefore, stands accused. One-step above this view is a more nuanced take (often propagated by people who publish non-academic histories) which considers the Dravidians to be foreigners as well (immigrants speaking Proto-Elamite) while a third group, one closely related to the Jarwa of Andaman are deemed indigenous to India (“First Indians”). Another view, common in (but not limited to) Indian nationalist circles, is that the Indus people are the Aryans and they spoke Sanskrit. This makes both Sanskrit and Hinduism indigenous to India. This view is deemed scoffworthy and chauvinistic in academia, influenced by a desire of Indian nationalists to project an eternally untainted and pure past (with nativity corresponding to purity).

However, all the views listed above seem to be abiding to one severely flawed standard of aboriginality. Whether they realize this or not. In short, to be indigenous you must be the direct descendant of the first homo sapiens to reach your geographical land mass after the migrations out of Africa. Indadvertently, all these above positions seem to abide to the doctrine of discovery and the idea of terra nullius to assign land claims to particular groups, which assigns aboriginality and nativity.

I call this standard severely flawed; because first, it is arbitrary. It makes the cut-off the OOA (out of africa) migrations of Homo Sapiens and assigns aboriginality to the first Homo Sapien discoverers/settlers of different landmasses. (keep in mind, other zoological & taxonomic humans such as Neanderthals and Denisovans had already discovered and settled in most of these lands). Second, the definition never explains when someone stops being indigenous or whether the matter is one decided by culture, genetics, language or all of the above. Does an aboriginal in Australia stop being aboriginal if his mother tongue is now English and his culture Western? If not, then aboriginality is genetic. However, does an aboriginal with 25% or 50% or 75% or even 85% European ancestry stop being aboriginal because he is not a direct descendant? (The Australian government doesn’t seem to think so, see this for example).

The third reason; this is not how international cooperative organizations like the United Nations, whose views serve as a directive & unbiased ‘world governance’ standard for media and academia, define aboriginality. This is also not how many state and national governments decide who is indigenous or not, neither is this how popular media outlets in India define autochthonity.

The United Nations for example defines indigenous people as “inheritors and practitioners of unique cultures and ways of relating to people and the environment. They have retained social, cultural, economic and political characteristics that are distinct from those of the dominant societies in which they live” — there is zero mention of aboriginality here or when the ancestors of these indigenous people came to live here. In short, for the UN, someone is indigenous if they have a unique culture that is necessarily a minority culture.

This is what lets them consider the Sami to be indigenous to Scandinavia despite them coming to Scandinavia at least a millenia after the ancestors of modern Norwegians and Swedes (see Ancient Scandinavia : an archaeological history from the first humans to the Vikings, pg 311 onwards for further discussion).

This is also the same standard that lets them consider the Gond, Ho, Munda and Santhal Austroasiatic speaking tribes to be indigenous (ādi-vāsi, lit. first inhabitants) to India despite recent genetic & linguistic evidence showing them to be relatively recent (3-3.5 millenia old) Austroasiatic migrants to India from South-East Asia. This means it’s quite plausible that the much demonized Aryans and the much romanticized tribals came to the subcontinent at the exact same time, or that the Aryans even came to India before the Austroasiatic tribals did. The only difference being where they came from and where they settled (North-West vs. South East).

What to make of the fact that Bantu people like the Zulus (who are today considered indigenous) came to South Africa less than a millenia ago when it was already settled by the Bushmen; thus, by definition, making them colonizers. (For further discussion on the Bantu Iron Age package brought to South Africa, refer to this and this).

What of the Polynesian (and by extension, Austronesian) people, who originally come from modern-day Taiwan but spread all over the Pacific by virtue of their superior sea-faring abilities? Are they indigenous to Taiwan or to New Zealand (where they arrived just 700 years ago)?

Fig 1: the Austronesian expansions. The Maoris reaching New Zealand in 1200 CE

Clearly, pop culture and world government organizations like the UN deem all the above listed people to be indigenous. Though, the definition being used is one based on them being either supressed minorities or having recently faced European colonization. Then you have governments like Australia, which make indigenous identity something based on self-identification. So it doesn’t matter if you speak English or have 90% European ancestry, you are indigenous if you identify as such.

The media doesn’t take these narratives of aboriginality lightly and aggressively pushes for them to be mainstreamed. For example, in India, popular media outlets such as the Scroll erroneously label tribal people as the “original Indians” (ādivāsi) despite the Government of India (GOI) refusing to sign the United Nations C169 - Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169). The Indian government never uses the term ādivāsi either, see this for example.

This means that while the Indian government officially does not recognize any indigenous or ādivāsi people and has refused to be a signatory of the UN convention on this, media outlets and NGOs repeatedly keep pushing the unsubstantiated idea of labelling a section of Indian people as the “original inhabitants”

This does not even take into account that genetic and linguistic research shows many of these tribals (Gond, Munda, Ho, Santhal) are simply ‘foreign migrants’ themselves. If you’re an attentive reader, you’ve understood by now what is going on. There is no scholarly objective (and consistent) standard of aboriginality and the indigenous label is simply being used to delegitimize some groups (majority cultures, dominant groups, recent colonizers) while legitimize other groups (minority cultures, recently colonized people etc). Whenever two groups exist, their power dynamics are judged and the one with the more power is more liable to be considered ‘foreign’ while the one with less power is automatically given the privileged badge of indigenous. I don’t care about the politics behind this; I’m aghast at how no one is talking about what’s really going on here. The average person don’t really think twice when he hears the Munda being called ādivāsi and accepts it prima-facie that the Munda’s ancestors have always been here (for that is how the word indigenous, ādivāsi, native is colloquially understood) while his may not have always been here.

After such a long overview of the whole situation, we must come back to the original conundrum and the pop-culture views of history we listed. We must strike at the heart of the question. What makes the Aryans who came to India four millenia ago (according to modern scholarship) “foreigners” but Austroasiatic tribals who came to India around the same time or slightly later (according to modern scholarship) as ‘adivasi’ ? The answer now seems simple, it is only politics and delegitimization of the dominant ethnic groups.

The solution I propose is quite simple. The Aryans and the Harappans are both native to the Indian subcontinent. Both of these groups have been in the subcontinent for at least 4000 years, stretching up to 9000 or 11,000 years in the case of early Mehrgarh. Rigvedic culture (c. 2000-1200 BCE) was formed not by the Proto-Indo-Aryans but by a population that was a mixture of the Aryans and the Harappans. (See this for further genetic information on this issue).

Most importantly, the Rigvedic people never identified as being foreigners or having a foreign culture that was antagonistic to the ‘locals’

You will find no mention of the Pontic-Caspian Steppes or Balochistan in the Rigveda and for good reason. The tribes that composed this piece of poetry were born and raised in modern-day Punjab, Harayana and Western-Uttar Pradesh. This was their home and the locus mundi of their life. The rivers they praise are the Saraswati, Ganga and Yamuna – not the Volga or Amu Darya. For all practical purposes, these Rigvedic Aryan people considered themselves indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. The Harappan people who mixed with them quickly adopted their culture, language and even their Gods. Many of these putative Harappans would rise to the rank of tribal chieftain (Balbutha, Bribu) and some would even become seer-poets (Kavasa, Kanva) of the Vedic culture. (For more scholarly discussion on this, refer to Harvard Professor of South Asia, Dr. Michael Witzel’s work on Indian prehistory - here and here).

Fig 2: Geographical locus of the Rigveda and its poets.

The table above by Dr. Witzel shows that all the Rigvedic poets lived in India and all the books of the Rigveda were composed in India, specifically in the Punjab. The Rigveda is considered to be the canonical foundational text of Hinduism and it’s complete localization in India by default affords Hindu canon scripture a more privileged status of aboriginality that it affords the Quran or the Bible. This should be non-controversial and quite clear to most. The Bible does not become an Old Norse text composed by Vikings just because someone wants it to be; it arose out of a Jewish culture in the Levant and was redacted by Jews in the Levant. The Quran arose in a Middle East where people were either Christians or Pagan Arabs or Zoroastrians. The Quran was composed by Arabs and in Arabic. The holiest sites of Islam are in the Middle East, not in India. Hinduism by contrast, originated wholly in the subcontinent of India. The holiest pilgrimage sites of Hinduism are in India. It’s scripture speaks entirely of India and puts India as a privileged land (karmabhūmi) above other lands. This should suffice to explain why Hinduism gets privileged status in nativity claims in India but Islam and Christianity don’t.

To conclude this post, it must be kept in mind that the standards being used to classify aboriginality cannot be different for different cultures. If your arbitrary standard is that first homo sapien settlement in a landmass makes someone indigenous — then be my guest and get most of the world to stop calling themselves indigenous first. Start policing a 100% blood-quantum and linguistic purity to ensure that only “real descendants” of the “first settlers” can be indigenous. This won’t happen, ever. Neither will pop-culture media, NGOs or the United Nations stop considering later-migrants like the Mundas or Sami or the Zulu as indigenous people.

So why should most non-tribal Indians of the dominant culture, be whatsoever their caste or regional status, stop considering themselves indigenous to the subcontinent? And why should they stop considering their religion indigenous to the subcontinent? The question is rhetorical but the answer is simple; they shouldn’t.

For all practical purposes, we are suggesting that ethnic groups such as the Marathis, Bengalis, Tamils, Telugus, Kannadas etc are all indigenous to India. Not just the limited number of 8% tribals.

Old Persian: baga vazraka auramazdā, hya imām būmim adā, hya avam asmānam adā, hya martiyam adā, hya šiyātim adā martiyahyā, hya dārayavaum xšāyaθiyam akunauš, aivam parūvnām xšāyaθiyam, aivam parūvnām framātāram, adam dārayavauš xšāyaθiya vazraka, xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām, xšāyaθiya dahyūnām vispazanānām, xšāyaθiya ahyāyā būmiyā, vazrakāyā dūraiapiy vištāspahyā, puça haxāmanišiya pārsa pārsahyā, puça ariya ariyaciça 

This is the vulgate text of the DNa inscription (by Emperor Darius the First at Naqsh-e-Rostam, circa 490 BCE). I will attempt a rendering of this Old Persian (OPr) into Sanskrit [Skt]. Then we shall translate it into English. A thing to note is that I no knowledge of the OPr language. However, the striking intelligbility of the text caught me by surprise and motivated me to write this post. This post might serve to illustrate how much OPr someone who knows fluent Sanskrit (and some Indo-Iranian linguistics) can understand. I will attempt to place a cognate at every position rather than just translate meaning.

Sanskrit: bhagaḥ vājaḥ asuramedhaḥ, yat imām bhūmim adāt, yat amum aśmānam adāt, yat martyam adāt, yad ānandam adāt martyāya, yat dhāravasum kṣetāram akarot, ekam purūṇām kṣetāram, ekam purūṇām pramātāram, aham dhāravasuḥ kṣetā vājaḥ, kṣetā kṣetṝṇām (* kṣatriyaḥ kṣatriyāṇām) , kṣetā dasyūnām viśvajanānām, kṣetā asyām bhūmyām vājāyām, dūramapi viṣṭāśvasya putraḥ, sakhamanayaḥ pārasaḥ pārasasya, putraḥ āryaḥ āryacitraḥ

English: Great is the god Ahura Mazda, who gave [created] this earth, who gave that sky, who created mankind, who gave happiness to mankind,  who made Darius [lit. bearing good] the king,  one king of many,  one overlord of many.  I am Darius: great king,  king of kings, king of the lands of all men,  king on this great earth, far and wide, son of Hystaspes, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan descent.

NOTES: A few things to note in the translation. I tried my best to literally reconstruct and reverse engineer each word back to its cognate root or noun. If none existed, I made my own nouns [like kṣetṛ from √kṣi “to rule”]. This caused some awkwardness, such as the word dasyu [enemy/slave in Skt] being used to denote “land” [cognate with dāhyu [land] in OPr]. I rendered the name “Darius” into Skt by calquing it. I did the same for Achaemenid. Darius in OPr is dārayavahu [lit. bearer of good]. This was easy to render into Skt as dhāravasu [m]. Achaemenid in OPr is haxamanishya [lit. companionship minded person] which I rendered as sakhamanaya in Skt. I also calqued ahurāmāzda [lit. god of wisdom] into asuramedha. I shifted the gender of medhā > medha using a bahuvrihi.

Coming to the ease or quirks of the reading. I understood maybe 50% on my first read and a lot more everytime I read a line closely trying to mentally reverse engineer words into Skt. The relative pronoun hya gave me trouble but I figured “great god ahura mazda, X gave this earth” was the perfect place for a relative clause which solved this mystery. The word šiyāti troubled me a lot though and I could not think of any cognate [either root or noun]. I don’t think any exists so I looked up the meaning in a dictionary and plugged in ānanda [bliss] for the Skt. Now, I wasn’t sure what role avam played. I went with a safe bet that it is related to asau/amu [that, yonder – Skt]. Asmāna of OPr did have a cognate which is aśman but this is used only for a stone in RV. A closer meaning is “cloud” but still not quite “sky” – But as it is a cognate, it will do in line with the scope of my translation being word-for-word. ariyaciça puzzled me for a while but the ingenuity struck me a lot once figured out! [āryacitra – in the image of an Aryan].

• Earliest CWC individuals till date, STD003 (northwestern Bohemia, 3010 to 2889 calibrated (cal) BCE), VLI076 (central Bohemia, 3018 to 2901 cal BCE), OBR003 (central Bohemia, 2911 to 2875 cal BCE), and PNL001 (eastern Bohemia, 2914 to 2879 cal BCE), showing that CW was widespread across Bohemia by 2900 BCE.

• The first genomic data from CW individuals without steppe ancestry, thereby elucidating the social processes of interaction between CW and pre-CW people. Observing only females (four of four) among early CW individuals without steppe ancestry (Figs. 2B and 3C) suggests that the process of assimilating pre-CW people into early CW society was female-biased. The CW non-steppe females were carrying significantly more HG ancestry than the Bohemian MNeolithic cluster.
  

• A sharp reduction in Y-chromosomal diversity going from five different lineages in early CW (mean age > 2600 BCE) to a dominant (single) lineage in late CW (Fig. 4A). R1a-M417 (xZ645) went from 27% of all lineages in early CWC to more than 91% of all lineages in late CWC. This was a nonrandom increase in frequency with these males having 16% more surviving offspring per generation relative to males of other Y-haplogroups. Population bottleneck is ruled out as change in Y-frequency is extreme compared to changes in autosomal frequencies within the same males. The Y-lineage in early CWC males was supplanted by a nonrandom process.

This suggests a few things. Yamnaya or a Yamnaya-like culture founded the CWC (VL1076 dated to 3018 BCE shows nearly 95% Yamnaya-like ancestry). The founding lineage was likely already higher in R1a (20%~) than standard Yamnaya Samara (from which I know of zero published R1a samples). R1a and R1b were likely carried by different sub-clans with strict patrilocal ancestry & patrilineal descent. There was a conflict or struggle which wiped out the R1b lines (which was by far the most dominant line in Yamnaya proper) and the R1a males with high reproductive fitness & exogamous marriage secured their dominance. Further, the victorious R1a clan must have also taken european neolithic farmer & hunter-gatherer women for wives (as evident by the 4 Corded Ware women with zero steppe ancestry). This may sound gruesome but keep in mind the chance that paternal lineages in a war-like and deeply patriarchal bronze age horizon switched peacefully is far-fetched fantasy that best not belong here. The alternative is R1a clans were more successful at getting mates (due to wealth possibly?) and just eventually outcompeted the R1b clans. To what extent this can be separated from violence between the two, I'm not sure.

David Anthony has suggested that R1a was present in Yamnaya all along but was not an elite lineage (hence not being buried in Kurgans). He seems to hint at some sort of social struggle perhaps to do with the relative inequality faced by the R1a plebians culminating in an "overthrown of the patricians" and supplantation of the lineages.

He says and I quote.

"Later Corded Ware populations, although derived from Yamnaya ancestry, were largely Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a, which had been present in the steppes during the Eneolithic and could have remained present but been excluded from kurgans through the Yamnaya era, re-emerging as a dominant male lineage in in the Corded Ware population. This shifting of male lineages within a broadly related set of steppe-derived populations could indicate a succession ofrestricted male-defined clans gaining access to political power and to memorialization under prominent burial mounds while excluding other males from such positions. The regionally suppressed patrilines such as those that inherited the R1a haplotype would in this case have become almost invisible archaeologically in the steppes because of their exclusion from Yamnaya kurgan graves, but then emerged as migrants in central Europe. Social and politicalcompetition between patrilines could have encouraged migration to new regions. But if burial under a kurgan was restricted in this way, then aDNA is sampling only the dominant elite, notthe whole population"

A counter to this argument may be that either Yamnaya lacked R1a completely (leading to another implication, discussed below) or they had it but it was a very small lineage that only gained steam during the CWC expansion of R1a lines. Hundreds of Yamnaya samples have been published and not all were in Kurgans but none have R1a. This would work against Anthony's hypothesis.

We now look at the Bell-Beakers.

• Bohemia_earlyBB (>2400 BCE) and lateBB (<2400 BCE). Late BB carry 20% additional middle-eneolithic ancestry. R1b-L151 is the most common Y-lineage among early CW males (6 of 11, 55%) and one branch ancestral to R1b-P312 (Fig. 4A), the dominant Y-lineage in BB (5). Although it is not possible to determine whether the P312 mutation(s) occurred in one of the early CW R1b-L151 males from Bohemia, we note that most Bohemian BB males are further derived at R1b-L2/S116 (R1b1a1a2b1), in contrast to BB males from England whom are derived at R1b-L21(R1b1a1a2c1), showing that English and Bohemian BB males cannot be descendants of one another, but rather diversified in parallel.

The takeaway from this is that while we do not have R1b-P312 sampled in the CWC per se, the ancestral lineage to it is already found in the CWC. One of the late CWC samples has R1b-Z2103 which pretty much confirms relation with the Yamnaya (among whom this is the dominant Y-lineage).

There is only one open ended question left here, that is where did the CWC come from? Were they actually descendants of the Yamnaya or perhaps close cousins that descend from a related (but presently unsampled) group between the forest & arid steppe?

Coming to the Ferghana Valley now, two interesting individuals from Uzbekistan are spotted in Narasimhan et al 2018. Both of them (I4255, I4153) are carbon dated to 3050 ybp which puts them at around 1100 BCE. Both of them carry R1a but I4255 carries R1a-Z93. The Z93 clade is by far the most supradominant one in the Indian subcontinent accounting for nearly all R1a lineages there. I4153 has mtDNA U5b2b and I4255 has mtDNA N1a1a1a1, both of which are mtDNA found in the Yamnaya and other WSH populations. What is remarkable is just how close to India these two men were buried. The Ferghana Valley lies right above the Pamir and the Hindu Kush. It is also just next to, in fact a few miles away from Alexandria Eschate (Alexandria the furthest), the furthest Greek settlement in Asia.

I ran these Ferghana Valley samples up on G25 to check their putative admix and here are the results. Nearly 68% Yamnaya ancestry with a small bit of 2.2% Paniya (AASI-like) ancestry in I4255. I4153 has negligible Paniya ancestry.

Finally, I'd like to look at the Greeks. We've known for a long time modern Greeks have a substantial Slavic contribution in their DNA but just how much, we don't know. I decided to model modern Greeks as a mix of GRC_Myceanean and Hun_Avar_Szolad (as proxy for Slavs who invaded Greece around the 6th century CE under the leadership of the Pannonian Avars). Here were the results.

Anatolian Greeks and Cypriots were very bad fits, this was expected as they had almost little no genetic influence from the Slavic invasions. However, the rest of Greece, especially the Peloponnese saw a good chunk of Slavic ancestry rising up to 40% in Macedonian Greeks.

The title of this post would be familiar to most theologically hip westerners as the infamous statement of the early church father Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220 CE), “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” The tension that is transparent in this statement may be a very familiar feeling to the western christian but is almost certainly unknown to us. So some background is required. Here, we will discuss how early christianity dealt with the greco-roman philosophical & intellectual tradition.

Writing in the 2nd century CE in his Against the Heretics, a little over a hundred years after the birth of Christ according to the Gospels, Tertullian says:

Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis? quid academiae et ecclesiae? quid haereticis et christianis? Nostra institutio de porticu Solomonis  est qui et ipse tradiderat Dominum in simplicitate cordis  esse quaerendum. Viderint qui Stoicum et Platonicum et dialecticum christianismum protulerunt. Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post euangelium.

What then hath Athens in common with Jerusalem ? What hath the Academy in common with the Church ? What have heretics in common with Christians ? Our principles are from the "Porch" of Solomon, who himself handed down that the Lord must be sought in simplicity of heart. Away with those who bring forward Stoic or Platonic or dialectic Christianity. We have no need of speculative inquiry after we have known Christ Jesus; nor of search for the Truth after we have received the Gospel.

We must pause to think what exactly is being said here. Tertullian is asking what does the tradition of the Hebrews have to do with the Greeks? Why should the Christians use Athenian philosophy at all? They must not he affirms. The truth of the Gospels needs to Platonic or Stoic intellectual boorishness. We must ask ourselves too, what does a Semitic-speaking monotheistic faith descendant from the tradition of the Jews (spiritually and physically) whose holy cities lie in the Levant have to do with a polytheistic and Indo-European Hellenic speaking one? They clearly are very closely related today. But they do not descend from a common ancestor or even share a common Weltanschauung (the Mosaic distinction). So how did this convergence of pagan greek philosophy and monotheistic christian theology come about? And why did it come about? How did the patristic tradition react to this?

The rapid rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire was accompanied by an uneasy silence as an impeding clash with the pagan world was foreseen. The silence gave way to insecurity, because the nascent christian faith was in no form the intellectual equal of the titan that is pagan greek philosophy. If the christians {the most outspoken polemics of the polytheistic mediterranean horizon and the youngest religion on the bloc} were dependent on the intellect of pagan philosophers like Plato or Aristotle to justify their own faith, then on what leg could they claim any superiority? They neither had the intellectual tradition nor the hoary antiquity of their tradition, which the Jews possessed to some degree but which the Greeks and Egyptians were undisputed masters of. How would this dilemma be solved? How could philosophy be “sanitized” for the biblical tradition? This problem was not exclusively christian but one inherited from the jews who had been living increasingly hellenized lives in the diaspora. (Why do you think the gospels are written in koine greek?)

Philo of Alexandria (20BCE - 50 CE) was the first Jew to attempt to marry Hellenistic thought with Hebrew theology. He was a Roman citizen, a Hellenized Jew who was more comfortable in Greek than in Hebrew. This attempted marriage would become very popular for the early Christians as they soon found themselves in control of Rome after three centuries of ignominy. The question of the century was: Should pagan philosophy be appropriated when it can be, then digested into biblical monotheistic thought or should it be completely discarded? Some of the church fathers like Tertullian were against this marriage, some like John Chrysostom went as far as cultivating a hatred of the pagan philosophers. In his homily against the greek philosophers, he lists out many reasons as to why they are despicable and says God has cursed them because they rejected him in their intellectual arrogance, they stayed idolators and tried to bring God down to the status of a graven image or idol. The conclusion is clear though. Chrysostom says:

So that one should not so much marvel at them (greek philosophers) for their wisdom, as turn away from them indignant and hate them, because through this very thing (philosophy, argument, debate) they have become fools. For had they not trusted what they have to reasonings and syllogisms and sophistries, they would not have suffered what they did suffer.

On the other side of this argument were church fathers like Augustine of Hippo (c. 354 – c. 430CE), who were very eager to use pagan philosophy to whatever extent they could to try and justify the christian faith. There was however a hurdle to be crossed. The dilemma we spoke of above. This was a time in Greece when much like India, how old something was added worth to how true it was. The past was idealized and man lived with the Gods in the Golden Age. As Hesiod says, we live in the Iron Age – the worst age to be born in. A life of decadence awaits man, the Gods forsake us. In such a cultural horizon, how could Christianity be both new and true? Christianity had to assert itself in front of the Greek tradition before it even tried to digest their philosophy. They had to earn the legitimacy bestowed to tradition, by hook or crook. The Christians & Jews both put Moses in the witnessbox as their claim to possess authentic tradition. To be accurate, the Jews did this first – claiming Moses to be the oldest of all the lawgivers, older than any of Greece or Egypt. The Christians, seeing themselves as inheritors of the Jewish tradition latched on to this claim.

Justin Martyr, (100 – c. 165CE) the first christian apologist, would state that Plato got his knowledge from Moses who has greater in antiquity than all the greek philosophers. Hence, the Hebrew tradition was once again the springwell of all intellectual thought in pagan writing anyways. In Ad Graecos, (9-12) he tries to prove that Moses is older than the entire greek tradition, that Plato got his knowledge from him and then he lists verses that are taken out of context or mistranslated to prove that every great greek philosopher actually believed in only one unbegotten eternal god. He would go as far as to attribute monotheism to the Orphic hymns as well (a well known henotheistic document). He says:

And I think it necessary also to consider the times in which your philosophers lived, that you may see that the time which produced them for you is very recent, and also short. For thus you will be able easily to recognise also the antiquity of Moses. But Plato, though he accepted, as is likely, the doctrine of Moses and the other prophets regarding one only God, which he learned while in Egypt.

Martyr would go on to say that Plato knew about the one true god but feared he would be executed like Socrates if he told his to the Greeks so he concealed his teaching in an esoteric manner. This doctrine becomes a beating-stick that would be used to claim that either all pagan philosophers who lived good lives in accordance with the logos were christians who were hiding their knowledge of the one true unbegotten god for fear of persecution or they were “unconscious christians” who had been inspired by the divine logos in their writing without even realizing it. This idea could be used by all christian platonists or aristotelians to anachronistically label Plato or Aristotle as “christians” or “monotheists”

In fact, Justin Martyr expresses this belief a bit brashly. He says in Apology:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the logos of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others

The same line of argumentation is of course taken up by Eusebius, who systematically goes quotation by quotation of the Bible and the Timaeus of Plato to try and show how they are both concordantly reflecting one unbegotten creator god with creation ex nihilo. Eusebius would go on to of course quote Numenius and say:

What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?

An important thing to note here is that while there were many Hellenists who responded to this christian apologetics (Celsus, Porphyry) they are out of the scope of this post. The stage was now set, the church fathers had developed their arguments as to why it was justifiable to study pagan philosophy at the same time exalting and justifying the position of christianity in the religious potluck of the mediterranean.

Let us summarize their key arguments.

1. Moses predates all the Greek thinkers. Hellenistic philosophy hence owes itself to the biblical tradition.

2. All the famous Greek philosophers or mystics were monotheists, their theology is in line with & is prescient of Christianity

3. The Greek philosophers were either Christians in hiding or they were all “unconscious christians” and their intellect impelled by the divine logos. Hence it is suitable to use their works in Christology.

The culmination of this entire belief-system cum apologetics is best seen in the works of Augustine of Hippo, whom we mentioned first as an example of someone who loved borrowing from pagan philosophy. Augustine was a smart and self-aware scholar, he hated any anti-intellectual quackery (such as literal readings of Genesis that conflict with the best of pagan science of the time) coming from Christians because he felt that it embarassed their whole religion in front of the pagans who were well-versed in science. He says in his literal commentary on genesis:

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe our books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call on Holy Scripture, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."

Augustine was utilitarian enough to understand that talking nonsense about scientific matters as a Christian was a sure sort way to discredit the Bible in matters of theology as well. This being the reason why he did not believe in always having literal interpretations.

Now that we understand the self-aware character of Augustine as a sort of pragmatist looking to augment the chances of his own religion as much as possible, we can understand why he was so keen to use Greek philosophy to justify his own theology. - As to why Augustine relied on Plato specifically, this is a separate conversation and not in the scope of this post - suffice to say he felt the idea of the Gods being wholly good for Plato was most easily reconcilable with Christian belief. It might be interesting to note that Augustine did not actually claim Plato was a monotheist; he said that he was a polytheist who believed one god had created the heavens and the earth. (c.f - Demiurge of Timaeus). Naturally, his reading of Timaeus as being compatible with Genesis is far-from accurate as modern secular scholarship on this confirms. Regardless, he says in The City of God:

Ex quibus sunt valde nobilitati Graeci Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyrius; in utraque autem lingua, id est et Graeca et Latina, Apuleius Afer extitit Platonicus nobilis. Sed hi omnes et ceteri eius modi et ipse Plato diis plurimis esse sacra facienda putaverunt.

The best known of them are Plotinus, Iamblichus and Porphyry, who were Greeks; moreover, writing in both languages, Greek and Latin, the African Apuleius gained fame as a Platonist. But all these and others of the same persuasion, as well as Plato himself, believed in polytheistic worship.

We must now look at what Augustine felt about the usage of Greek philosophy by Christians and why he felt so, with all the above discussed context (keeping in mind the church fathers who hated greek philosophy). He says in The Christian Doctrine:

Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves, were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also, -- that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life, -- we must take and turn to a Christian use.

A fairly harsh passage. Here, Augustine says that the intellect and knowledge of the pagans are like nuggets of gold and silver dug out of the mines of God’s providence and just like the Israelis stole the gold & silver of the Egyptians (who were using it for idolatry amongst other means) and put it to better use, so must the Christians appropriate the intellectual knowledge that the heathens have which might be useful to a Christian field of learning or which can be turned to a Christian use.

The Israeli & Egyptian claim refers to the Bible here, where Yahweh asks the Israelites to plunder the Egyptians of their wealth.

Exodus 3:19-22 (NIV)

19 But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him. 20 So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them. After that, he will let you go.

21 “And I will make the Egyptians favorably disposed toward this people, so that when you leave you will not go empty-handed. 22 Every woman is to ask her neighbor and any woman living in her house for articles of silver and gold and for clothing, which you will put on your sons and daughters. And so you will plunder the Egyptians.”

Henceforth, Augustine gives a direct imperative to plunder whatever can be used from the pagans (appropriate as he says) and discard the rest, making sure to leave aside their miserable company. The crux of the argument is that the although the pagan philosophers produced intellectual works beyond anyone’s imagination, the works are contaminated with the sin of polytheism and idolatry amongst other forms of non-Christian depravity and hence are “unlawfully” resting in the hands of the pagans. This of course is part of the Augustinian synthesis which the Christian faith has tried to follow meticulously, indeed building upon both Plato and Aristotle. These arguments would be resurrected in the Renaissance with a similar essence but different external coating. That is however not in the scope of this post.

I conclude this post now with the hope the reader has learned insightful things about the interactions of the patristic tradition with greek philosophy. In a follow-up to this post, I will look at another important question (one almost not asked at all): What does Pataliputra have to do with Athens? What does Ancient India have to do with Ancient Greece?

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Fig 1. Surya, the Sun God. The Maga Brahmins have a long history of being associated with saura worship.

The origin story of the Maga alias Shakadviipiya brAhmaNas is discussed in some detail in the saura saamba upapurANa, the bhaviShya purANa, bhUmi parva of the Mbh, brahma purANa & the viShNu purANa. The bR^ihat saMhita of Varahamihira (likely a Maga Brahmin himself) also mentions that the Maga Brahmins are the solar priests premier, who install the idol of the sun (मगांश् च सवितुः). This statement from the 6th century work makes it certain the Magas were well established by end of classical anqituity in India. As for Varahamihira’s origins; a few things make it clear. He opens the bR^ihatsamhita with an invocation to the sun & closes it by stating his family are sun-worshippers (his father is called Adityadasa). If any other confirmation of this is needed, we find the commentator bhaTTa upala call Varahamihira as a “magadha-dvIja” (in the bhaviShya purANa the term magadha is used interchangebly with maga brAhmaNa). Having established this, we now jump 500 years into the future and find historical era corroboration of the presence of Maga Brahmins in the Govindapura inscription (Shaka Era 1059, 1137 AD) found in the Gaya district of vA~Nga desha.

Before we look at the inscription & samba purANa account, a prefatory note is necessary. It is without a doubt certain the Magas were Iranic solar priests (c.f Maga > Magi) who were assimilated into Hindu culture & even varNAshrama dharma, rising to the rank of brAhmaNas-s. Both purANa-s mention they used to wear an avyanga thread on their waist. This is nothing else except the Mazdayasna equivalent of the yaj~Nopavita (sacred thread). It is known as kushti in Pahlavi and aiwyAonghana in Avestan (lit. girded around. Notice the first prefix “aiwi” cognate with abhi of Skt). Interestingly, the Zoro have their own term for upavIta (with the thread) called hadha-aiwyanghanem (lit. with the girdle) and the negative in anaiwyasto (lit. ungirded) corresponding to Sanskrit anupavIta. It has 72 threads (representing 72 chapters of the yasna and is tied around 3 times representing the Mazdayasna concept of good thought, word & deed).

The saamba purANa story goes that saamba gets sick (kuShTharoga or leprosy) due to a curse given by his father kR^iShNa and is told to do sUryopAsana (sun worship) to get healed. He goes to chandrabhAgA river (modern day Chenab in Punjab) & does tapasyA. Now, sUrya cures him & tells him to install an idol of him on the Chenab. He also gives him a boon that this city will be renowned as sAmbapura.

ज्ञात्वा संतारयामास चन्द्रभागां महानदीम् ।। ततो मित्रवनं गत्वा तीर्थं त्रैलोक्य विश्रुतम् । उपवासकृशः साम्बः शुष्को धमनि सन्ततः ।आराधनार्थ सूर्यस्य गुह्यं स्तोत्रमिदं जगौ । तन्मुमोच मलं शाम्बो देहात्वचमिवोरगः । ततो लब्धवरः शाम्बो रूपवांश्चाभवत्पुनः ।। स्थापयस्व च मामास्मिंश्चन्द्रभागातटे शुभे । त्वत्समानमिंद चापि पुरं शाम्ब ! भविष्यति ।।

Not sure about the identity of mitravana here ( ततो मित्रवनं गत्वा), could be Multan? or some other place. Another clue lies here, leprosy was a disease the Persians thought to be a curse of the sun. So as to not get cursed, solar worship was necessary. We see Herodotus make a mention of this:

ὃς ἂν δὲ τῶν ἀστῶν λέπρην ἢ λεύκην ἔχῃ, ἐς πόλιν οὗτος οὐ κατέρχεται οὐδὲ συμμίσγεται τοῖσι ἄλλοισι Πέρσῃσι: φασὶ δέ μιν ἐς τὸν ἥλιον ἁμαρτόντα τι ταῦτα ἔχειν (Histories 1.138)

Regardless, The Mbh (vulgate text) reference to them and says that in the island of Shakadvipa, (likely Sistan in Iran or Sakastan – land of the Scythians) one of the four classes are Magas who are Brahmins.

तत्र पुण्या जनपदाश चत्वारॊ लॊकसंमताः
मगाश च मशकाश चैव मानसा मन्दगास तथा
मगा बराह्मणभूयिष्ठाः सवकर्मनिरता नृप

Interestingly enough, a nearly identical account exists in the brahma purANa (Chapter 18). The account tells us varNAshrama is well established in shakadvipa and also that the people live in peace, worship viShNu as the sun & are dharmic.

The sAmba purANa account now mentions that one day, an idol of sUrya turns up on the banks of the river that sAmba notices, picks up and installs it in mitravana. Then we are told vishwakarma made the mUrti from the wood of the kalpavR^ikSha. Finally, sUrya commands sAmba to bring his worshippers (magas) from shakadvipa & sAmba brings 18 families of magas.

सतु गृह्य ततस्तानि दश चाष्टौ कुलानि च । मम पूजाकश ह्येते प्रजानां शान्तिकारकाः । मम पूजाविधानोक्तां करिष्यन्ति मनोऽनुगाम ।। प्राप्य शाकद्वीपमनु संप्रहृष्टतनूरूहः । तत्रापश्यद्यथो द्दिष्टान् साम्बस्तेजस्विनोमगान् ।।

Finally, we take a look at the Govindapur inscription. The text is a bit broken but general meaning can be understood. Attached below will be an English translation from Epigraphica Indica.

देवो जोयात्रिलोकीमणिरयमरणो यन्निवासेन पुण्यः शाकद्वीप दुग्धाम्बु निधिवलयितो यत्र विग्रे मगाख्या । वंशस्तव ” द्विजानां भ्रमिलिखिततनो (र्ब्भा )स्वतः स्वाङ्ग

“Hail to that gem of the thre worlds, the divine Aruņa,” whose presence sanctifies the milk-ocean-encircled Shakadvipa where the Brahmans are named Magas! There a race of twice-born [sprang] from the sun’s own body, grazed by the lathe,“ whom Sâmba himself brought bither. Glorious are they, honoured in the world ! The first of them was an abode of all vedic lore and of the knowledge of the supreme soul, and wholly occupied in thoughts” familiar with every sacrificial rite, that sage Bharadvaja whose penance could both deliver and destroy the world, and in , like a garland of the great race of the Maga twice-born“

The author goes on to trace his descent from Bharadwaja (who he considers the first Maga Brahmin), thus confirming the author of the inscription himself was a Maga Brahmin living in Bengal at the time. Indeed, in modern times the descendants of these Maga Brahmins are found chiefly in Magadha only. They call themselves Shakadvipiya or Maga Brahmins & outwardly (ritually, physiognomically) resemble the local Brahmins of the region. Hence, we realize the Magi priests of the Medians had an incredibly successful capacity to assimilate into related cultures, all the while maintaining their status as priests in the new culture too. The Magis, who were initially likely Median priests first managed to assimilate into the Mazdayasna Persian hierarchy, becoming the chief priesthood of the Achaemenid & Sassanid Empires and then they managed to even convince the insular Hindu Brahmins to accept them as one of their own. No doubt, the close similarities of the Iranians and Indo-Aryans played a long role in this. The Magas seem to have served the specific function of teaching sUrya-pratimA construction to the Hindus. The sAmba purANa has an account of this:

न पुरा प्रतिमा ह्यासीत् पूज्यते मण्डले रविः
यथैतान् मण्डलं व्योम्नि स्थीयते सवितुस्तदा
एवमेव पुरा भक्तैः पूज्यते मण्डलाकृतिः
यतः प्रभृति चप्येषा निर्मिता विश्वकर्मणा
सर्वलोकहितार्थाय सूर्यस्य पुरुषाकृतिः

In the past, there was no pratimA (idol/statue) of sUrya. Instead, his devotees worshipped him by drawing maNDala-s on the ground. This adds up and probably hints at the non-idolatrous nature of sun worship of vedic times where sUrya was worshipped in maNDala form, as an orb or discus. Then, vishwakarma constructed a pratimA for the usage of all sun-worshippers. Likely, this hints to the usage of the Maga forms of sUrya iconography in clothes as well anthropomorphy.

Studies on Y-haplogroups of the Maga might prove to be very illuminating here.

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