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FisheyStix posted:God dang it Bhabi That will be 10 rupees, please.
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Dec 21, 2017 20:04
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OXBALLS DOT COM posted:Good to know that, despite the gaps in time and culture, some things remain the same. lovely customer service is a key part of many of these proverbs: -- "The goldsmith's acid and the tailor's tag." This highly-condensed saying requires explanation ; it is a proverb of delay, the suggestion being that the Sonar tells you that your ornament is ready, all but the final cleaning with acid ; while the Darzi says that your coat is ready and only the tags for fastening it have to be sewn on.
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Dec 25, 2017 15:48
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Man I always thought the Hindu caste system was like a basic social strata, I didn't realize it was also like a forced guild system Like you always hear about the untouchables and such, this is honestly the first time I've seen that "carpenter" and "goldsmith" were castes too. Pretty interesting!
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Dec 25, 2017 16:14
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Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:Man I always thought the Hindu caste system was like a basic social strata, I didn't realize it was also like a forced guild system they make the untouchable caste do all the really gross jobs, which is convenient. that way you can be racist and also avoid the smelly garbageman at the same time
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Dec 25, 2017 16:32
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Yeah, but I was under the impression it was like untouchables, then manual laborers, etc. until you hit the elite upper class. Didn't realize they had castes for individual professions and such.
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Dec 25, 2017 16:36
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Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:Yeah, but I was under the impression it was like untouchables, then manual laborers, etc. until you hit the elite upper class. Didn't realize they had castes for individual professions and such. You're conflating "caste" and "varna". Varna is the four-fold division of society: Brahmins (clergy, intellectuals) Kshatriya (warriors) Vaishya (merchants) Shudra (peasants) Within each varna are various castes, and there's all kinds of complex interplay with how caste can mean profession in some ways, but mean family clan in others, or have an ethnic component (or not at all), or apply to non-Hindu people who don't believe the gods made the system, etc. Way too much to get into here, but if you read up on it it's pretty trippy how the system was much more flexible then it seems at first (castes could get re-assigned to a different varna, change professions, etc. depending on the rise and fall of different powerbrokers), but when the British showed up and colonized the place they got all spergy and thought the caste system was the be-all/end-all. So basically the Brits entrenched the caste system in their own weird way, and by picking and choosing winners they made caste affiliation even more important, and the impacts of that resonate until today. The Untouchables/Outcastes/Dalits are outside even this system (like the name says), and garbageman would be a cushy job by Dalit standards. I'll post some Outcaste examples in a couple days, but the absolute shittiness of how Dalits were (and even still are) treated as a marginalized social group is horrifying.
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Dec 25, 2017 17:40
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:You're conflating "caste" and "varna". Varna is the four-fold division of society: Jesus, that's complicated but interesting. Got any links or book recommendations?
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Dec 25, 2017 17:43
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I was reading this article about Trump making harder for Indians to get work visas and every single comment was an Indian from a certain region blaming Indians from other regions, saying that they were ruining it for everyone really feels like these proverbs here
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Dec 25, 2017 18:08
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nerdz posted:I was reading this article about Trump making harder for Indians to get work visas and every single comment was an Indian from a certain region blaming Indians from other regions, saying that they were ruining it for everyone it’s the world’s biggest democracy and the world’s biggest multicultural state, so like all of the US’ problems ratcheted up to the scale of a billion people plus decolonization is still within living memory plus 10,000 years of hereditary social stratification its a fuckin miracle india gets anything done + hasn’t nuked itself out of sheer exhaustion
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Dec 25, 2017 18:16
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"Beware Contracts, for he shall give jobs to the Aussies, though the Indian works harder."
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Dec 25, 2017 18:30
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steinrokkan posted:"Beware Contracts, for he shall give jobs to the Aussies, though the Indian works harder." That thread rules I wish I got hilarious spam, all we get is like SEO solicitations from random Indians
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Dec 25, 2017 18:32
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Rutibex posted:they make the untouchable caste do all the really gross jobs, which is convenient. that way you can be racist and also avoid the smelly garbageman at the same time Yeah, so much so that people out in the country with no plumbing would rather poo poo in the grass (which seeps into the ground water or something and raises infant mortality) than deal with a chamber pot because it means they're https://youtu.be/V35Vw29tay0 At least in America, our rurals save their defecation for the polling booth AY-O
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Dec 25, 2017 19:19
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Awesome thread OP, I would like to learn more about the caste system, if you’re willing to do a write up. I think I once heard of a caste of itinerant female bricklayers (the men stay at home). It would be great to find out how did that happen.
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Dec 25, 2017 20:17
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Awesome thread OP, I would like to learn more about the caste system, if you’re willing to do a write up. I think I once heard of a caste of itinerant female bricklayers (the men stay at home). It would be great to find out how did that happen. BRICKLAYER?? I BURLY KNEW’ER
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Dec 25, 2017 20:36
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DACK FAYDEN posted:are Brahmins the ones that used a thread to literally clean out their sinuses by threading it up one nostril and out the other, I know some group did (and still does?) that but I have no idea where in the world or who I would think that'd be more fakirs, sadhus, and other such itinerant holy men that do gimmicky stuff to get donations from an audience. But I'd be happy to be corrected. The "sacred thread" referred to you can see in the photo of a Brahmin on page 1, it's the loop of string that goes over his shoulder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanayana
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Dec 25, 2017 23:05
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I had a job interview at an office with mostly Indian people, and the boss gave me a printed chain email of Sardarji jokes to amuse me while she took a call. They were standard Polack/whatever jokes but with Sardar instead. I set it down when I was done, and some guy came in and laughed til he cried reading it. He tried to explain what a Sardar is, but I couldn't understand him. Something about a hat?
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Dec 26, 2017 00:15
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Disco Godfather posted:I had a job interview at an office with mostly Indian people, and the boss gave me a printed chain email of Sardarji jokes to amuse me while she took a call. They were standard Polack/whatever jokes but with Sardar instead. I set it down when I was done, and some guy came in and laughed til he cried reading it. He tried to explain what a Sardar is, but I couldn't understand him. Something about a hat? If you google it means a leader or a prince you lazy piece of doodoo This is not meant to be a racist indian impression but it kinda came out that way a bit Private Speech fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Dec 26, 2017 |
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Dec 26, 2017 17:22
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Disco Godfather posted:He tried to explain what a Sardar is, but I couldn't understand him. Something about a hat? Sardarji jokes are about members of the Sikh religion, so kind of like having jokes about Mormons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sardarji_joke Mormon is actually a decent parallel for Sikhs, since both are basically Extended Universe versions of earlier religions, and are opposed to tobacco and alcohol. As a minor sidenote, all Sikh groups are against *smoking* weed, but a subset of Sikhs are down with cannabis edibles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_and_Sikhism
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Dec 27, 2017 06:18
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Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:Jesus, that's complicated but interesting. Got any links or book recommendations? Hmm, I'm a weird guy to ask since disproportionately I read a lot of obscure stuff, either modernish ethnological works, or old Raj-era British colonial sources like the one I posted (which I emphasize are historiographically useful, but not academically authoritative). Honestly, for a 101 your best bet would be to check out Wikipedia's overview articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India For specific castes, the general rule of thumb is the larger articles (Rajput, Nair, Ahir, etc) that have a lot of non-Indian oversight and high viewership tend to be relatively decent, but the smaller the caste, the more prominent a role "caste partisans" play in the article. So if you get some article about a relatively small caste you have a higher chance of getting huge screeds with no proper footnotes and a ton of "...are the most prominentist caste of Uttar Pradesh and widely respected and are historically Heroes and Warriors and were never-ever-ever flower sellers despite Evil Propaganda against them and they have the largest penises and get all of the women especially from the stupid XYZ caste who are all dirty peasants." I exaggerate but little, and "flower sellers" comes to mind because there literally was a caste of flower sellers who somehow got the British colonial government to sign off on some proclamation that they were descended from an ancient warrior caste. Despite the Indian government having passed various anti-caste-discrimination laws, these categories are still taken deathly seriously by a chunk of the population. Some years ago, before I got into covering cannabis politics for Wikipedia, I helped referee disputes on caste articles, and you would not believe how hopping mad people would get if you cut out their propaganda blurbs and inserted actual footnoted texts. Plenty of legal threats, "I dare you to come to Mumbai and say that bullshit", etc. Dalits (Untouchables) are still getting routinely murdered across India, and taken about as seriously as killing a black person was in Mississippi in the 1920s, so this poo poo has direct serious impacts to this day.
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Dec 27, 2017 08:00
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWVFEVWJMz8
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Dec 27, 2017 08:40
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Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:Man I always thought the Hindu caste system was like a basic social strata, I didn't realize it was also like a forced guild system He swam in sewage, like his father before him, like his father before him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gRwdDfxVL8
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Dec 27, 2017 10:15
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Appropriate username for the thread: another example of ancient beliefs having dire consequences is that there's an increasing trend in India for Hindu mobs to beat or even kill people suspected of harming cows. There's an entire Wikipedia page with the trippy title "Cow vigilante violence in India since 2014". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_vigilante_violence_in_India_since_2014 Generally this crops up as a reason to put the whomp on Muslims, who are generally suspected of killing and eating cows, or transporting cows from provinces where cow slaughter is banned to provinces that allow it. Though interestingly the main non-Muslims attacked are Dalits (untouchables). There could be a variety of reasons for this (including "there's never a reason *not* to kill a Dalit"), but part of it is that among the many, many lovely jobs Dalits do is (legally) skinning dead cows to make leather. Indians allow using leather, but nobody wants to pollute themselves touching a dead animal or disgracing a cow, so it's left to Dalits. And because you can't actually slaughter the cow in an organized way, it ends up being "hey you Dalit, one of my cows keeled over dead in the pasture and started rotting, so get on that poo poo, and make me some sandals while you're at it." And unsurprisingly, this exact issue appears in our 1915 guidebook, re the Chamar (leather-working) caste: -- The Chamar said to the village headman : " How is that buffalo of yours ? " (The skins of dead cattle are the perquisite of the village Chamar, who is supposed to resort to poison to secure his rights.) quote:The hides and bones of dead cattle are the perquisite of the Chamar, and in some of the great grazing districts he is credibly suspected of assisting nature by means of a bolus of arsenic, craftily wrapped in a leaf or a petal of the mahua flower, and dropped where the cattle are feeding. A humorous allusion to this practice, which is exceedingly difficult to detect, may be traced in the proverb which repre- sents the Chamar as enquiring after the health of the village headman's buffalo. Worthy of note from this same book is that a Chamar has a radius of ritual pollution of 24 feet, so nobody from any respectable caste will go anywhere near them, and they're not allowed into decent neighborhoods. And they are by no means the lowest of the Dalit castes, so it gets worse from there. TapTheForwardAssist fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Dec 27, 2017 |
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Dec 27, 2017 15:38
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I like this thread.
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Dec 27, 2017 15:58
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Pretty humorous now to read about outrage over a low caste being allowed to drink from the gangrene river.
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Dec 27, 2017 16:35
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Turning to proverbs of Dalits, here are some examples of burns on classes of people basically treated as sub-human: In the walled villages of the Maratha country the Mahar is the scavenger, watchman and gate-keeper. His presence pollutes ; he is not allowed to live in the village ; and his miserable shanty is huddled up against the wall outside. But he challenges the stranger who comes to the gate, and for this and other services he is allowed various perquisites, among them that of begging for broken victuals from house to house. -- He offers old blankets to his god, and his child's playthings are bones. The Dhed's status is equally low. If he looks at a water jar he pollutes its contents ; -- if you run up against him by accident, you must go off and bathe. -- If you annoy a Dhed he sweeps up the dust in your face. --When he dies, the world is so much the cleaner. -- If you go to the Dheds' quarter you find there nothing but a heap of bones.
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Dec 31, 2017 06:29
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yeah this is a healthy culture
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Jan 1, 2018 05:01
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Worthy of note from this same book is that a Chamar has a radius of ritual pollution of 24 feet, so nobody from any respectable caste will go anywhere near them, and they're not allowed into decent neighborhoods. And they are by no means the lowest of the Dalit castes, so it gets worse from there. What are some other Dalit castes? What is the shittiest shitsville human rights abuse?
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Jan 1, 2018 05:29
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yeah indian caste is loving insane lmao i know this one girl who's a first gen indian immigrant, she's young, and she's the typical "#wokefeminist #resistdrumpf" and all that bullshit but when you bring up either pakistanis or someone who's a lower caste she gets all mad lmao
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Jan 1, 2018 05:55
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Thread was funnier when it was close to similar-status castes flinging disses at each other, untouchable disses are just kind of depressing. Makes me want to donate to a charity that emigrates them to a country where sanitation workers aren't exiled from the city
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Jan 1, 2018 17:01
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chinese hair cave posted:yeah indian caste is loving insane lmao yeah it’s so deeply ingrained that it’s reflexive for a lot of people and really difficult and uncomfortable to unpack and confront, this is the perfect example of that its like how white minnesotans will get into a wild-eyed rage at the mention of reservations or their residents except instead of four hundred years of ingrained, socialized and systemic racism corrupting otherwise pleasant people, it’s ten thousand
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Jan 2, 2018 10:13
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maybe if they stopped drinking from the doodoo river and trying to fack sexy bhabis they could work on some social change
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Jan 2, 2018 10:24
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A lot of the trash talking about various trades people kind of reminds me of the trash talk between different branches of the US military. Every 'other' branch is inevitably a bunch of smooth brained chair hugging window lickers.
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Jan 2, 2018 10:57
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A lot of the indians i see have little monkey hands (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 2, 2018 12:22
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Arrhythmia posted:What are some other Dalit castes? What is the shittiest shitsville human rights abuse? So far as all the jatis (individual/profession sub-castes), my understanding is that a lot of Dalits identify as "Dalit" now rather than sub-community, so I mainly know the old names from reading old books. A few of them that stand out in memory for having terrible jobs -- Chandala: disposes of human corpses -- Mang: "historically associated with low-status or ritually impure professions such as village musicians, cattle castraters, leather curers, midwives, hangmen, undertakers, and criminals" -- Musahar: used to be rat-catchers, and famed for being so poo poo-poor that they ate every rat they caught -- Chamars: as mentioned before, recycling animal corpses into leather -- Dom: arranges cremation pyres, gets to keep the clothes from the body Those are some of the colorful ones, though a lot of Dalit have the less-exotic poo poo job of being landless farmers, but classified below the Shudra varna. I'm not really clear on how some peasant farmers are Shudra and at least have a place in the Hindu system, while others are Dalit/Outcast. I did find out though, refereeing Wikipedia disputes, that people loving *hate* any implication that Caste XYZ is Shudra. I cannot imagine how furious they would be if you claimed that Are Caste was Dalit. quote:A lot of the trash talking about various trades people kind of reminds me of the trash talk between different branches of the US military. Every 'other' branch is inevitably a bunch of smooth brained chair hugging window lickers. That, or you can draw pretty good parallels to Dungeons and Dragons. The spergy grouping of people into categories, the careful tabling of exactly how far away they need to keep from you, etc. has a lot of parallels. "Dhobis (laundry caste): +2 to saving throws involving cleaning, speak Common and Orc, 30' infravision." quote:Thread was funnier when it was close to similar-status castes flinging disses at each other, untouchable disses are just kind of depressing. I'm here to please, let's have some punching-up. Kayastha (clerk caste)  -- A Kayasth's son should be either learned or dead : an ignorant Kayasth is as an oil-presser's bullock. -- Wherever three Kayasths are gathered together a thunderbolt is sure to fall. When honest men fall out the Kayasth gets his chance. --A Kayasth who can pay cash is the devil ; he is an angel when deep in debt. And for a little double-discrimination: -- A young Kayasth is as cunning as an old gipsy. And the most  -- In a Kayasth's house even the cat learns two letters and a half. Then there's one I don't quite get: -- Where there are no tigers the Kayasth will become a shikari [hunter] My best guess is that it means the Kayastha will claim to be brave and ready to save the village from tigers, so long as there aren't actually any tigers around.
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Jan 2, 2018 20:26
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Sick burns, bro
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Jan 2, 2018 20:30
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Yeah seems to be a "false sense of bravado/heroicness"
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Jan 2, 2018 20:36
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chinese hair cave posted:yeah indian caste is loving insane lmao lmao
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Jan 2, 2018 20:42
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Aesop Poprock posted:Yeah seems to be a "false sense of bravado/heroicness" I think there's a possible alternative interpretation of that one- in the absence of immediate existential dangers the people doing the accounting, record keeping and administration may be significantly more dangerous (and/or a necessary/desirable guide)
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Jan 2, 2018 20:47
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False bravado seems like kind of a reach for a clerk, sounds more like that old joke about the tiger-repelling rock (bureaucrats are good at finding important-sounding jobs where they don't actually have to do anything)
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Jan 2, 2018 20:51
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how are dabbawalas classed
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Jan 2, 2018 20:55
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