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Saturday, October 31, 2009

Tribes

As much as we speak of India modernizing, which is true, we shouldn't forget that the public face of India hides a lots of potential unrest in the Indian states:

Chhattisgarh is different. With a population of 22 million, it has the highest proportion (about a third) of tribal peoples of all the states of India. Now most people don't think of tribes in India, but this is a complicated country. With over a billion people, and 19 major languages, India is more complicated, culturally, than Europe (which has half as many people and fewer different cultures, and no tribes left active). While India eliminated most feudalistic practices half a century ago, after the British left, there were still a lot of old customs left that rankled. The tribal peoples survived by staying out of the mainstream. As happens to tribes everywhere, they got screwed, and the Maoists found this fertile ground for their radical ideas about how to make everything better. Actually, the Maoists do not have a large following among the citizens of Chhattisgarh. But it's enough to enable the Maoists to raise several thousand dedicated followers, many of them armed.


Yeah, a country that big is a continent all by itself. We're lucky to be largely a country of immigrants who mostly become American and leave their tribe behind given enough time to assimilate, even if it takes generations.

China too, really, despite the apparent dominance of Han Chinese. Though China has relatively small ethnic minorities, as a continent-sized country even the Han Chinese speak dialects that can be incomprehensible to other Han Chinese in other provinces, notwithstanding the common written language.

I would not trade places with a "rising" China. Or India, for that matter.