What happened to the Manchus?

In reality there are 10 million Manchus in China ("Genomic Insight Into the Population Admixture History of Tungusic-Speaking Manchu People in Northeast China), and form the fifth largest ethnic group in China. Manchus are Tungusic people and so closer to Mongolian, and they have a writing system of their own which is an adaptation of Mongolian. They are most certainly NOT Han even though those who had migrated to Han areas absorbed many cultural features of the Hans.(What are the differences and similarities between Manchu and Mongol people?)

In my nearly forty years of college teaching in the US, I have had boats load of Chinese students, many of them Manchus. Whenever I ask them their ethnicity they arlways say Chinese first, and when prodded say Han. But whenever my office door happened to be closed and asked for their ethnicity, they are more honest and admit Manchu as if it would be a crime to confess it in public. Then they breakdown and tell me about how the Hans have destroyed their identity, culture, language, and everything that make them Manchu. They are not allowed to study the Manchu language is schools and universities that today there are only 20 or so Manchu language native speakers left (Saving the Manchu language: 9 critically endangered languages from around the world). There are a few thousands who can speak it as a second language many of whom are probably linguistics scholars. Manchu is an endangered language (Saving the Manchu language: 9 critically endangered languages from around the world), and is being Killed, very sadly.

When there are no fundamental rights one’s ethnic heritage is always a sure casualty. Instead of celebrating ethnic diversity and enabling openness and free speech, tragically we have a situation where it is not safe to even admit one’s ethnicity.

On my learning English

English is my third language, and I learnt English (Latin really) alphabets in the First Form (now sixth standard/grade). I had a hard time. Then I asked a paternal uncle of mine for help; he was an English professor and a Shakespeare scholar. He had a wonderful theory about language learning. He told me, initially just ignore grammar in the classes (that is, just do enough work to pass), but be a voracious reader of GOOD English literature. He cautioned me that it would be a tough row to hoe and frustrating, but would pay off in the long run. The most complex human task ever done by a baby is learning a language, and every child learns language with virtually no help from anybody. He said It matters that whatever I read is high class (otherwise this answer would contain expletives and other bad language). Then he gave me his copy of AJ Cronin’s “The Citadel” to start reading; imagine reading a novel when all you know are just the alphabets and a few words. The dictionary became my best friend and has remained so till now. And he threw his personal library at my disposal. It was the most fascinating experience spending time discussing English with him. In fact I got into trouble with my parents because I was spending more time at his home than at mine.

I learnt the language by repeating patterns of great phrases, clauses, sentences from whatever I had read. I sailed through school, college, graduate school, published quite a bit in my domains of interest. I came back to English grammar after my PhD when I did some work on statistical linguistics. Now a dozen or so books on English grammar are permanently on my desk.

On Goa, Portugal, and India

  As a person with Goan ancestry I have no issues with 1961. All our original temples are in Goa and my family had been thrown out during the inquisition. Around 1956 my grandmother was almost on her death bed and expressed her wish that my thread ceremony be performed at the temple in Goa. But we were not allowed to even enter Goa for a short visit. Her last wish was not to be. My thread ceremony was performed in 1958 in north Kerala, she died six months before India took over Goa.

But I do have a pet peeve about the way the government of India behaved towards Goan INDIANS with regard to language. Since Portuguese had ruled India for over 400 years, most education was in that language which had permeated through the local culture. You only have to look at pictures of Hindu temples in Goa to realise that they ar different. Once India took over, immediately Portuguese ceased to be the official language and stopped teaching it in schools. I remember as a graduate student in Calcutta where a Goan student had to use an English-Portuguese dictionary in the classes. In the meantime Konkani and Marathi could be used only in subordinate courts. India lost a golden opportunity to use Portuguese language as its window to Europe at the same time it was shoving English, no less an alien tongue, on the population fed on Portuguese for centuries.

Goan Indians born before 1961 takeover were offered Portuguese citizenship, and today even the Prime minister of Portugal is a Goan. On the other hand, there were 40,000 Goan Indians born in Portugal with Portuguese citizenship who were still in a purgatory when it came to Indian citizenship after 54 years. Compare that with the British who did not even accept Anglo-Indians but left for the Indian taxpayer the bill for the upkeep of cemeteries where tens of thousand British citizens are buried in India.

The Escola Médico- Cirúrgica de Goa was established in 1842, just a few years after the establishment of Calcutta Medical College in 1835 by William Bentinck. In 1822, Bernardo Peres da Silva and Constancio Roque da Costa became the first two Goans to sit in the Portuguese Parliament in Lisbon. Show me the first Indian who sat in the British parliament (Dadabhoy Naoroji SEVENTY years later in 1892).

It is only after the Carnation revolution in 1974 that the relations between India and Portugal started improving. When I came to US for studies the year before, my passport was NOT endorsed for Portugal (and Israel and South Africa).

In mathematics it is possible to write a great PhD dissertation in a very short time. Here are some examples: George Dantzig was a doctoral student of the great statistician Jerzy Neyman at Berkeley. In one of his classes, Neyman wrote two problems on the board. Dantzig arrived late to the class that day, and thought they were the homework for the week. He solved and submitted them. Then he was told that they were two of the unsolved problems in mathematics. Later, when Dantzig met Neyman to discuss possible dissertation topics, Neyman told him he could submit the “homework” he had done as dissertation. Later, the two were published. Very brief. In dissertation work what counts in posterity is the quality of work and not the bulk. Some of the greatest dissertations i history are ridiculously short. Alan Turing (father of Computer Science) dissertation at Princeton was only 28 typed pages long. The dissertation of John Nash (one of the greatest Game Theorists, also at Princeton, was only 27 typed pages long. The shortest PhD dissertation is supposed to be one in mathematics at MIT that is only 9 pages long. 

 Tragically, the average length of dissertations is 133 pages. See: https://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/researcher-determines-average-length-theses-dissertations-quebec/#%3A~%3Atext%3D%E2%80%9CThe%20world%20record%20for%20the%2Chave%20become%20longer%20over%20time.

The length of dissertation titles seems to be getting longer. A grotesque example is the one in Psychology:

“Stress maternel prénatal et développement précoce : données de naissance, attention et sécrétion cortisolaire à trois mois. Association entre le stress maternel prénatal, l’âge gestationnel et le poids de naissance du bébé : une analyse d’études prospectives. Association entre le stress maternel prénatal, l’attention/éveil et la sécrétion cortisolaire de l’enfant à trois mois.”

That probably deserves an IgNobel prize.

For those interested, here are the two papers by Dantzig:

Dantzig, G.B., 1940. On the non-existence of tests of" Student's" hypothesis having power functions independent of σ. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 11(2), pp.186-192.

Dantzig, G.B. and Wald, A., 1951. On the fundamental lemma of Neyman and Pearson. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 22(1), pp.87-93.

Altogether they are only 12 pages long. Incredible. At first I thought it was a tall tale, but then found it had been vetted by snopes:

The Legend of the 'Unsolvable Math Problem' A student mistook examples of unsolved math problems for a homework assignment and solved them.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-unsolvable-math-problem/ The Dantzig story is supposed to be the inspiration for the popular movie “Goodwill hunting”.

Why is it easier to understand English spoken by German, Scandinavian and Dutch English speakers than Indian English speakers? 

I m not a linguist but have dabbled as a CS and statistics person have dabbled in statistical NLP and CL.

 Indian languages, unlike most European languages, have more phonemes, more characters, more consonants, less diphthongs. For example, English has 13 diphthongs while Hindustani (Hndi, Urdu) has just 4. See forr example, <\p>

Low occurrence of Diphthongs seem to enable Indians speak their languages fast. And we speak any language, including English, fast. Secondly most Indian languages have many retroflex consonants that do not exist in English. I would also add a whole bunch of factors that make Indian spoken English difficult. I had already written about speed and diphthongs. I c1. an add four more, and they are entirely the result of lack of emphasis on them in Indian education. They are,

1. Pauses: It becomes difficult to understand Indian English because pauses between phrases, clauses, as well as punctuations such as commas, semicolons. It also makes spoken Indian English sentences runny.<\li>
2. Pronunciations of English letters. They are different for US and UK English; Indians are taught British English most of the time.<\li>
3. Aspiration of first sound in words. Indians pronounce the p sound in pick or paint with no aspiration.<\li>
4. English sounds that don’t exist in Indian languages. For example, the a vowel sound in bank, when written in Indian languages are pronounced as either ‘byank’ (ಬ್ಯಾಂಕ್ in Kannada) or ‘byink’ (बैंक in Hindi.<\li><\ol><\p>

What motivated Tagore to compose the Indian National Anthem?

On India's national anthem.

Most national anthems try to sow FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) as the French anthem does, extoll glory of war and condemn traitors who kept people in chains (in the south) as US anthem does, or an appeal to God to save the sovereign as the British anthem does. Here is Exhibit A:

France:

"Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!"

USA:

"O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;"

When the American Civil War started, in indignation the noted jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. added a stanza that included:

"Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchained who our birthright have gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave."

UK:

"God save our gracious Queen
Long live our noble Queen
God save The Queen!
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
God save The Queen!"

The Indian anthem is definitely of the third kind, I suppose a vestige of British imperialism. However, more interesting question is what motivated Tagore to use the British model. Apparently it was not the British anthem, but the anthem of one of the Indian sates, in fact the state from which I come: Mysore. It should not be surprising. The objective of this post is to describe how Tagore was motivated by the Mysore anthem to compose the Indian national anthem.

About Mysore

Mysore is a state that has been peaceful through most of its history. It has neither fought to gain territory nor has it fought to keep others out of its territory. In all it has fought four wars in all. ALL of them against the British which desperately tried to colonise it. All four were fought during the rather unsavoury period in its history when it was ruled by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. While they were trying to protect their realm against the British intruders, their reign was quite unlike the rest of Mysore history in that they tried to colonise parts of southern India that no other dynasty of Mysore did.

Ultimately, in 1799, in the fourth Anglo-Mysore war the British killed Tipu. The Nizam and the Marathas had connived with the British in this. Then the British had the Kingdom of Mysore on its hands, but probably did not know what to do with it. (Like Jinnah who fought like hell to get his Pakistan, and when he got it did not know what to do with it. Soon after he died.) But the Britannica had wider ambitions, and being a nation of shopkeepers and traders wanted to control but not bother with one more state to handle. So, after the Nizam and the Marathas had got their booty, the British gave what was left of the state to the King of Mysore, but kept a "resident" just to make sure they had a toehold in the kingdom. In 1831 the British got the opportunity to do their mischief. Claiming misrule, they deposed Maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar and brought the Kingdom directly under the rule of the East India Company. 

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed in Britain and the Privy Council there ordered the East India Company to reverse the annexation of Mysore. Under the rendition of 1881, the state of Mysore was given back to the Wodeyar dynasty. So, Mysore history has four periods: The Wodeyar period, the Islamic period, the British period, and finally basic to the Wodeyars.

On the Mysore Anthem and Tagore

The Mysore anthem (Kayo Sri Gowri) was commissioned by  Maharaja Chamaraja Wodeyar to commemorate the rendition of 1881. In 1919, the Vice Chancelloe of Mysore University, a Bristol born alumnus of Balliol College (Oxford) and son of Brahmo parents who were social reformers, Sir Albion Rajkumar Banerjee, invited Tagore to visit Mysore. It was then that Tagore heard the Kayo Sri Gowri for the first time. As the article cited below says, "Tagore was impressed. He had already heard of the anthem several years before and realised that the lyrics are based on Raga- Dheerashankarābharanam. This raga is known as Bilawal in the Hindustani  and the Western equivalent is the C major scale, Ionian mode." Then Tagore went on the compose the Indian National anthem "Jana gana Mana".

Reference:

http://samharshbangalore.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-anthem-that-inspired-jana-gana-mana.html

On Churchill and India, US & Indian independence, and the Second World War.

For the past few weeks there has been a debate raging about Churchill & India, the role of United States in Indian Independence, and the second world war. Here are excerpts from my posts.

POST: Churchill was a very talented and dynamic individual ,although definitely a flawed one.He was an imperialist but that cannot alone be allowed to overshadow his tremendous other qualities.I have no defence for his callous disregard of the great Bengal famine but he had very many other sterling qualities and achievements to his credit .
First and foremost he did the right thing when he defied Hitler in world war 2 and united the nation behind him.He saved European civilisation from a dark age due to his timely resistance.He spoke out against Hitler when everybody INCLUDING the Labour Party was for giving the Germans a chance to rehabilitate themselves after the Versailles treaty which gave most informed people a guilt complex.
The support of King Edward should be commended as a liberal support of the right to marry irrespective of rank.At that time the Nazis had nothing to do with it .
Churchill was a daring and shrewd military strategist .He should be credited for building up the Royal Navy prior to World War I with the Queen Elizabeth class battleships which beat back the German surge and which Navy was able to blockade Germany to desperation in that war.It was correctly said that the C in C of the Royal Navy Sir Jellicoe was one man who could lose the war in an afternoon .As far as Gallipoli was concerned the initial concept ,which was Churchill's , was brilliant and everybody at that time felt the British would take Istanbul easily.Then Kitchener and the British cabinet changed the concept of the operation,made it a prolonged land battle and as Churchill was identified with the proposal he had to pay a political price.
Another of Churchill's brilliant ideas resulted in the battle tank.
In world war 2,Churchill's management of the war resulted in much less casualties than in the First World War and I admire the way the various campaigns and chiefly DDay assault was conducted .Obviously Churchill was not the only architect of those victories but undoubtedly he had a major role.
By his crafty declaration of war against the Japanese immediately after Pearl Harbour he got Hitler to declare war against the USA and made it easier for FDR to enter the war in Europe.
I found in his books a very shrewd military analyst as well.As they are very engrossing ,makes for good reading as well.
Let us therefore not indulge in what many in India are doing presently ,label a person by one event or occurrence ,and ignore his other facets.

MY RESPONSE: You grotesquely overstate the virtues of churchill. 

First churchill did what any self-respecting Englishman, and in fact any human being would have done. To call it the right thing to do is superfluous. 

To say that churchill "saved European civilization" is obscene. Britain would to this day be a Nazi colony if it did not get the full support of United States. Do you realise that the supreme commander of Allied forces was NOT a Briton but an American? This in spite of conniving by Field Marshal Montgomery.

Yes, one can call churchill shrewd. Many would call him cunning, fully exploiting the fact that his mother was American in begging thwe Americans to save them. As an American taxpayer I would have liked my government to send churchill the bill.

POST: Dear Mr Ganguly will reply in more detail after reading the links you have given.

In the meanwhile please consider that Hitler had offered enticingly peace proposals through various neutral countries in May 1940 as soon as the France fall became certain which Churchill rejected but others were still considering and I am not sure but Lord Halifax was one of them.So by no means "any self-respecting Englishman" would obviously do the right thing in a situation which everybody was saying was hopeless.Self-respecting Englishmen had nevertheless appeased Hitler and promised peace for our time ; they had fought a phoney war from September 1939 to May 1940;why was not the right thing obvious then ?
If Britain had not defied Germany in 1940 it would have become a. Colony of the Nazis that year ; if Germany had not fought Russia and had chipped away at the British Empire at the edges and weakened it and if USA had not come into the war ,it is possible that by 1944 Britain may have been weakened enough to succumb.But these are hypothetical scenarios against the certain one that in 1940 Churchill saved Britain for which he is rightly honoured.
As for the begging bowl bit let us also not forget that it was in USA's interest geopolitically to retain free and potentially friendly economies in Europe and not for Nazi Germany to dominate solely .Roosevelt realised this -he just did not intervene altruistically.
In 1940 Roosevelt did not have the political capital and support to declare war on Germany and if Britain had gone under he could have done nothing about it even though it was not in his long term interest .

Please further note that I always said that Churchill was not alone in the direction of the war.Due to the preponderance of American aid he had no choice but to be second fiddle .But whatever reading I have done has led me to the conclusion that he contributed a lot to the planning and execution.It was always politically decided that the commander for operation Overlord would be an American.
When the Americans ignored Churchill's pleas and did not take more areas in Germany as they very well could have in 1945 before the Russians got there the free world was the loser till 1989.

MY RESPONSE: I find it amazing that an empire over which sun did not set had to go down on knees before FDR. Like a cat with a large brood that hisses when encountering a larger animal, Britain (along with France) DECLARED war on Germany in 1939, knowing fully well that its enslaved colonies had no choice but to kowtow, and the fully independent dominions would follow suit. This bit of bravado (or bluff) was called out by Germany by soon extending the war over the Atlantic trade (the life blood of the merchant nation Britain).

You have the facts wrong. Hitler's overtures were rejected by Chamberlain, not churchill. In fact, Chamberlain observed then, "Past experience has shown that no reliance can be placed upon the promises of the present German Government." (see Wikipedia). It was upon this rejection that Hitler ordered war on France. Then Germany occupied Norway. The discontent in May 1940 over Norway forced Chamberlain out and churchill was in. The importance of the loss of Norway probably also had to do with the fact that Norway was probably the only country that then had the capability of producing heavy water. German scientists headed by Werner Heisenberg were then probably ahead of every one else in the development of nuclear weapons. (If you are interested, there is a very good movie on this, "The Heavy Water War") Heavy water is required for nuclear weapons.

Up to 1940 Britain was not fighting Germans; they were just hissing and puffing their cheeks. The scenarios you describe as hypothetical were not lost on the shrewd churchill. I wouldn't be surprised if they were just the scenarios that drove Churchill to beg FDR for help. But then the Americans were just becoming familiar with the Indian independence movement, and had received Gandhi's famous letter toi FDR asking for help.

Gandhi's letter to FDR hand delivered by Louis Fischer unequivocally concluded:

“The full acceptance of my proposal and that alone can put the Allied cause on an unassailable basis. I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain and America has the Negro problem in her own home. But in order to avoid all complications, in my proposal I have confined myself only to India. If India becomes free;, the rest must follow, if it does not happen simultaneously. In order to make my proposal foolproof I have suggested that, if the Allies think it necessary, they may keep their troops, at their own expense in India, not for keeping internal order but for preventing Japanese aggression and defending China. So far as India is concerned, we must become free even as America and Great Britain are. The Allied troops will remain in India during the war under treaty with the free Indian Government that may be formed by the people of India without any outside interference, direct or indirect.”

He went on to say:

"I have profited greatly by the writings of Thoreau and Emerson. I say this to tell you how much I am connected with your country. Of Great Britain I need say nothing beyond mentioning that in spite of my intense dislike of British rule, I have numerous personal friends in England whom I love as dearly as my own people. I had my legal education there. I have therefore nothing but good wishes for your country and Great Britain. You will therefore accept my word that my present proposal, that the British should unreservedly and without reference to the wishes of the people of India immediately with- draw their rule, is prompted by the friendliest intention. I would like to turn into goodwill the ill will which, whatever may be said to the contrary, exists in India towards Great Britain and thus enable the millions of India to play their part in the present war. My personal position is clear. I hate all war. If, therefore, I could persuade my countrymen, they would make a most effective and decisive contribution in favour of an honourable peace. But I know that all of us have not a living faith in non-violence, Under foreign rule however we can make no effective contribution of any 'kind in this war, except as helots." You can see the whole letter at https://research.archives.gov/id/7065056

As to hissing and puffing,

"The 3rd Infantry Division was deployed to Belgium as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Realizing that the British and the French had little intention to invade Germany, Montgomery predicted a defeat should Germany decide to invade France, and trained his troops for tactical retreat, which paid off when the men of the 3rd Infantry Division effectively fell back toward the French coast. During Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of British and French troops to the United Kingdom, he assumed command of the II Corps as Alan Brooke, the previous commanding officer, became the acting commander of the British Expeditionary Force. Upon his return to the United Kingdom in Jun 1940, he openly criticized the British Expeditionary Force leadership for the defeat, and was briefly relegated to divisional command, but was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath." (http://ww2db.com/person_bio.php?person_id=7)

"In the next month [September 1942], Montgomery started to receive great quantities of supplies from the United States, including large numbers of tanks. In Oct 1942, Montgomery decided that he was ready to launch Operation Lightfoot. On 23 Oct, the two forces engaged at the Battle of El Alamein, and 12 days later Montgomery achieved his decisive victory, capturing 30,000 Axis prisoners."

Montgomery convinced Eisenhower about Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands which was an utter failure. In fact after that Eisenhower removed Montgomery from the front and made him in charge of British Occupation Forces. I suppose his experience in India prepared him for that position.