hair's colour in Sanskrit
zydenbos at flevoland.xs4all.nl
zydenbos at flevoland.xs4all.nl
Sat May 10 01:59:18 UTC 1997
Replies to msg 08 May 97: indology at liverpool.ac.uk (vidya at cco.caltech.edu)
vce> From: Vidyasankar Sundaresan <vidya at cco.caltech.edu>
> >konkaNastha brAhmaNa classmates with an allegation of some unknown
> >European (particularly Portuguese) ancestry.
>
> Really - i hav never come across that one - and I should know. i am from
> Bambay, and a konkaNastha brAhmaNa too !!!!
vce> This might be a recent development, but at a place like the
vce> IIT Bombay
vce> campus, such teasing normally targeted those konkaNasthas
vce> who sincerely
vce> believed in their superior Aryan descent, or towards those
vce> who regretted
vce> that they did not have the distinctive gAre DoLe - gore pAn
vce> characteristics. The south Indians often resorted to this,
vce> as an answer to
vce> a remark about their darker skin color. One standard
vce> retort: "At least,
vce> I'm a pure Dravidian, the only Aryan in you is of European
vce> descent". If
vce> you were a south Indian brahmin yourself, you just hoped
vce> that the Marathi
vce> guy did not know enough of southern politics to catch you
vce> on that one!
Among Smarta Brahmins in Karnataka there is a belief that the fair skin colour
of many Ayyangars is proof that they are not good, pure Brahmins. In this case,
the former French settlement of Pondicherry is pointed to as the source of the
fairness.
There are SC/ST groups in northwestern coastal Karnataka who are quite
fair-skinned, and in this case too there is a wide-spread belief that the
Portuguese had something to do with it.
- Robert Zydenbos
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