India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Friday, May 06, 2005
We're all Hindú
Vikrum Sequeira writes:
In the rest of his post, "How do you say Brazilian in Hindi?", Sequeira examines how one can gain insights into the cultures of the Latin American countries by how they refer to Indians. A fascinating post. (Link via Dilip.)
You can learn a lot about a culture through an examination of the vernacular. In Latin American Spanish a person from India is called a hindú. Indio, which means Indian, refers to an indigenous person. I have read Spanish-language newspapers that have published sentences like, “Abdul Kalam, el presidente hindú, dijo que…” (trans: “Abdul Kalam, the Hindu President, said that…” ) or “Manmohan Singh, el prime ministerio hindú, declaró que la India...” (trans: “Manmohan Singh, the Hindu Prime Minister, declared that India…”). This is especially ironic considering that Kalam is Muslim and Singh is Sikh!
In the rest of his post, "How do you say Brazilian in Hindi?", Sequeira examines how one can gain insights into the cultures of the Latin American countries by how they refer to Indians. A fascinating post. (Link via Dilip.)
