I’m against all forms of discrimination but it’s inhuman to force someone to change their name. That’s like saying certain unsavory last names need to be changed in the U.S. My last name is Cohen, some people in WWII-era Germany wanted to erase my name.
Indian anti-caste movements have a history of changing surnames to signify abandoning caste enjoying participation from both upper and lower castes. Those people and their children and grandchildren still exist today with their cultural and religious identity intact (and unfortunately even caste most of the time). A lot of people use their father's name as a surname too. It's not genocidal.
> it’s inhuman to force someone to change their name
I have very complicated feeling about black parents in the US giving their kids "black" names. On one hand, they're expressing themselves and honoring their culture. On the other, if society in 2040 looks anything like society in 2020, they're hurting their kid's future.
The parents are doing nothing but naming their child how they want to name them. Discriminatory people reacting badly to the name are the ones hurting the children, not the parents.
I assume your correspondent is referring to the studies in which the same resume, with different names, were sent out to help wanted ads and saw lower response rates for "black" names. Obviously the correct solution is that the people making those decisions shouldn't be, or should be otherwise relieved of their discriminatory behavior. But I think it's reasonable for someone to feel bad about society forcing parents into choosing between identity and financial well-being.
We don't necessarily have to change the name of existing people all at once. The rule can be applied to mostly new borns and figure out the rest from there.
That doesn’t make it any better. Your last name is a part of your identity and heritage. You are advocating for cultural genocide and trust me I know what comes after that.
Are we just talking about men? Most women are basically expected to change their last name upon marriage in many countries.
To me it's just a name. My wife kept her last name and and it seems the past generations simply can't accept that. My extended family still mails her letters using my last name.
That's a very privileged attitude. If your name alone forces your life to be that of a servant, no matter what you want, or do, or how smart you are, or how much potential you might have, maybe your family would not be that bothered giving up what is just some letters on an official document if it meant a way out from a life of systemic oppression.
Honestly India needs a fresh start at the moment. The baggage of caste system has deprived millions of people for centuries. Most people will prefer to live in a society where they are treated equal in favor of giving up their caste identity that have descriminted their community for centuries.
Actually it worked out pretty well for Kerala. It's #1 in India in terms of HDI and all most all human related metrics in India. The state with lowest income inequality. And nobody descriminates you on basis of caste in day to day life. Which I can't say is true for many northern states.
Yes. And Kerala was able to do that among all the castes. I am sure not being able to guess the caste of a person from their name should have defintely helped the cause. The fact that the students wont be descriminated by others students because of their surname. Not having to goto a hospital worrying about getting discriminated on basis of your name. All of these things add up and have a big impact in long term.
They had pretty serious land reform, too. Meaning that large estates were confiscated and given to the people working them. Doesn't always work out, but seems to have been an important part of what other success stories like Japan/Korea also did.
Kerala is a separate case study. Kerala had a feudal society and the Namboothri Brahmins and the warrior Nairs has a special arrangement. Nowhere else were the strict rules of society applied in India other than in Kerala. No where else was life fine and streamlined but also damn bloody unfair. But it functioned well as a monarchy. People were ok with it because with prosperity there was also security. This was necessary because it was the tip of the peninsula and there was also border security because the defense here was to protect the long coastline. Where they also enjoyed tremendous profitable trade.
The Namboothris distinguished themselves from other Brahmins by wearing the hair tuft on the front/side(Purvasikha) as opposed to the way Brahmins elsewhere wore their hair tufts which was at the back of their heads(aparasikhas).
This is why it makes no sense to make any generalities about Hindus or caste or even sub sects of Brahmins in India. They were all different with different habits and practices. Not to mention languages. There were thousands and thousands of small tight knit communities with the freedom to govern themselves socially as long as they adhered to the broader foundational principles. Note that by this time, Mughals and Islam and Buddhism and Jains and Christian missionaries were all gaining foothold. So it was not just a Hindu nation.
The British were fascinated and horrified and overwhelmed by the diversity of faiths and beliefs and cultural practices of this massive country which still operated as little kingdoms under larger kingdoms. No two Hindu groups are alike. Just like no two Brahmin communities are alike. The country had millions of people and get hundred people together in a room, they’d find something common only amongst themselves and form a separate community. And smaller communities were robust communities. It was great and working smoothly before the British came..from a colonist POV, homogenous country as a single profitable blob made more sense. Now instead of a multitude of string robust communities capable of working well by themselves, a very diverse population found themselves together and couldn’t work well as a group anymore. No one got along with each other. It was the diversity of individuals that weakened them. The diversity of different groups was their strength earlier.
(Visualize it like this. India was a basket of bundles of coloured matchsticks. Each bundle was the same colour but there were thousands and thousands of them. The basket was filled with bundles If multiple colours. And then the British came and removed the threads that kept each of the bundles together. As they came apart, all the individual match sticks got mixed and no one knew where to belong. So many different people got along only because they knew that they had the freedom to live and die on their own terms or rather the terms of their chosen group where everyone agreed to the rules. After the British came, no one agreed with anyone because suddenly it’s a blur of colour. What kept them together as neat little bundles was their sub religious beliefs and sub sub caste divisions and sub sub sub cultural beliefs etc. there were progressive Brahmins and orthodox Brahmins. It’s nuts to imagine that they all shared the same core belief system. Hinduism is not a monotheistic religion. The British knew Christianity but Christianity was designed as an evangelical faith and by definition cannot have drastic divisions and sub divisions and sub sub divisions even though they did have their denominations. We have thirty thousand gods vs one monotheistic god. Should have kicked out the British at first sight.)
Management, you see. Colonial MBA types with gunpowder found it easier to strip the country and ship off the resources back to an impoverished Britain. Not to mention the looting. But first, they had to play their hand with Divide and Rule strategy. To this end, shatter small kingdoms..off with the King’s head. And then destroy a rather woke and strangely also libertarian religious arrangement we called Hinduism.
The poor dears so far way from their dull and dreary little northern island. And unlike the Vikings, no one slaughtered them and rolled out the carpet instead. And 400 years to pay for that mistake and an eternity to fix it.
> Your last name is your identity and heritage. You are advocating for cultural genocide and trust me I know what comes after that.
It's okay if you want to speak for yourself, but if you want to apply such a statement globally then I think that's a little ethnocentric. The whole idea of last names and who has to take whose in marriage is steeped in a lot of history that plenty of folks had issue with even back then not to mention today.
Your identity and heritage is more than your name, and your identity is more than your heritage. By advocating for keeping last names for all societies, you may be unintentionally advocating for keeping an oppressive caste stratified authoritarian regime going which has been alive for over three thousand years which affects others even if it doesn't affect you personally. Is that really what you want to do? Why not accept that the cultural utilization of last names varies from society to society?
As a Jew I feel compelled to speak up as say that CyberRabbi does not speak for Jews, and that anti-caste is nothing like Holocaust or cultural genocide, and the insinuation of such is offensive to me.
I speak for myself, Elijah Cohen and I am a Jew whose grandparents survived the Holocaust. Is there a problem? Why are you bringing my religion into this?
Because apparently the use of the word ‘genocide’ cannot be appropriated by non Jewish people.
Bengal famine that was a man made famine by British wiped out 1/3 of the population of one state. That’s 10 million people. And there were many more. We were shipping cotton to England instead of growing grain for our people. Indians understand genocide.
[..] "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill[..]
I am a descendant of holocaust survivors so please read the following with that in mind:
The caste system is part of a culture. It is also (IMHO) thoroughly odious, and it should be eliminated, along with patriarchy, theocracy, and a whole host of other human cultural norms with long and (some would say) venerable histories. There is no moral equivalence between a constructive suggestion for how to eliminate the caste system -- notwithstanding that it is in fact an effort to erase part of a culture -- and actual genocide. So please don't bandy that word about lightly.
When the "culture" is exactly equal to "the cast system"? Then yes for all that is good in the world let's do some "cultural genocide"! Some cultur must die for humans to suffer less.
