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Watch the film. See the maps. Read the documents. Add your name to protect Great Nicobar.

Sign Rahul Gandhi's petition to save the Nicobar Islands

#environment #climate change #nicobar #andaman and nicobar #india #rahul gandhi #world environment day #environmental activism

@dalchini-gola @tiredguyswag @samisobsessed @sweet61@autisticfeministcranberry @chekhovsglock @uppersurper

Please help spread this around guys 🙏🏽

Watch the film. See the maps. Read the documents. Add your name to protect Great Nicobar.

Sign Rahul Gandhi's petition to save the Nicobar Islands

read-marx-and-lenin

should i stop trying to scrape a living off of music and work at a call center instead is that like a bad thing i genuinely dont even understand again /gen

See, I'm not sure how genuine this is, because while I don't know which post or comment of mine this is in response to, I have tried to make it clear multiple times that I don't consider being an indie artist to be "a bad thing".

Not all artists are petit bourgeois or bourgeois. The petit bourgeoisie is not the bourgeoisie. And neither the petit bourgeoisie nor the bourgeoisie are composed of ontologically "bad" or "evil" people.

Communism is a proletarian political movement. This does not mean communists want to kill all non-proletarians or declare anything other than a proletarian existence to be evil or wrong. Communism in fact aims to abolish both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, to abolish class entirely. But in order to do this, we must abolish private ownership, which includes ownership of intellectual property. If communism succeeds, then eventually all creative works will effectively be public domain the moment they are published.

How you make a living under capitalism is of no concern to me. Likewise, you can choose to be in favor of or against communism. I certainly don't have the means to prevent you from doing whatever you like. My only frustration is with the likes of people who insist on calling themselves progressive radical "leftists" who then go on to argue that it's totally leftist and socialist to defend intellectual property rights and the interests of petit bourgeois artists to make a living selling art. Not because I think it's bad to be an artist, but because I think it shows a complete lack of class consciousness and a poor understanding of social conditions.

Just because someone is poor doesn't mean they are part of a revolutionary class or that their class interests are progressive. The petit bourgeoisie are not bourgeois, but they are not proletarian either. You can be a revolutionary without being a proletarian, and you can be a proletarian without being a revolutionary, but only the proletariat are a revolutionary class under capitalism, and only proletarian interests are progressive class interests.

#commieposting

My baby sister is fighting for her life.

She is only a child, yet she has already endured displacement, fear, and serious health challenges.

Our family is doing everything possible to help her receive the care she needs, but we cannot do it alone.

Every donation, share, and kind word means the world to us.

My little sister deserves the chance to grow up healthy and safe.

No child should have to face these circumstances.

Please help us give her hope and access to the treatment she needs.

The costs of medical care, medicine, and daily necessities continue to grow.

Your support can directly help my sister and our family through this difficult time.

If you can't donate, please consider sharing her story.

One share can help us reach someone who is able to help.

Thank you for standing with my little sister.

professionalmushroom

Please donate and share if you are able to!! She is just a child and deserves a fulfilling life like the rest of us!!

Please, don't just share, donate. We haven't received any donations in a long time. We still need your support. Don't ignore us, help us and donate (please 🙏).

professionalmushroom

They still have only received around £180, please donate and share with those you know can!!!

ambafaerie

PLEASE SHARE AND D0NATE!!!

ultrablorfus

This user's bio reveals they are VETTED.

estro-boi

we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason

estro-boi

torrents work like this

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

please learn to torrent

macleod

An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over

always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.

#piracy #resources

captain-price-returns

Zionists:

Actual Israeli history:

#palestine

occidentalist

The way the ukrainian government just exhumed the remains of a literal nazi buried in luxembourg and reburied him with state honours in ukraine and the president knelt at his new grave like it’s the hitler Kaaba and we’re all just supposed to pretend that’s normal😭 we’re just supposed to hate russia and the history of communism so much that we’re willing to pretend that that’s normal

#ukraine #russia

wutheringheightsfilm

every day it just concerns me how little compassion people have. no compassion for those living in the global south. no compassion for immigrants. no compassion for disabled ppl. no compassion for addicts. no compassion for prisoners. no compassion for children. like holy shit ...

wutheringheightsfilm

i made a separate post about this but actually there are plenty of people cough white people who care about animals more than they ever do human people . not what i'm talking about make your own post

nourishedbytime

The only dangerous minority is the rich.

It is strange that the entire Bengal election was framed as a war on immigrants on both sides - against Biharis by TMC and against muslims by BJP. When in reality most of Kolkata's muslim population are hindi-speaking immigrants from UP and Bihar who came to Bengal to escape religious persecution in those states. Just goes to show how extremely removed from reality political parties usually are.

enigma-the-mysterious

Ah yes, poriborton (change)

Suvendu Adhikari: All muslims are jihadi terrorists, their children are jihadi terrorists, muslims should be genocided like Israel is genociding muslims in Gaza !! 👹👹👹👺👺👺👺

Muslims: *doesn't vote for bjp*

Suvendu Adhikari: why didn't muslims vote for me???? 🥺😠 I won't work for them 😤

#india #sanghi bs

unsubconscious

Ceramic cookies by Didi Rojas, photography by Gab Bois

#interiors

“but i think this perspective also ignores the fact that hinduism in its most ancient and pagan forms was shaped by dalit and adivasi communities and later appropriated by savarnas with rules and rituals (caste) created to their advantage”

I would be very interested in reading more about this topic, do you have any recommendations for where to start? thank you in advance

I do!

A Panoramic View of Tribal-Hindu Cultural Interface by Sandhya Jain.

The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger.

These are the most comprehensive books on the subject. However for a deeper understanding I think the best approach is to read the history of ancient India from a neutral perspective, read between the lines to understand the consequent processes of Aryanisation, Sanskritisation and Bramhinisation, and draw your own conclusions from that.

A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century by Upinder Singh - the most detailed and the best.

India's Ancient Past by R.S. Sharma for a compact overview you don't have the time and patience for Upinder Singh.

Early indians: From Origins to AD 1300 by Romila Thapar - great for socioeconomic analysis of ancient India.

Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From by Tony Joseph.

I also recommend reading up on the history of Tantra which is heavily influenced by adivasi practices, kept alive and still largely practiced among oppressed castes: History of the Tantric religion by N.N. Bannerjee.

These should be enough to give you a general idea about how the Aryans appropriated and eventually subsumed older religions and traditions under the broader umbrella of the vedic religion.

For more localised narratives -

The Cult of Jagannath and the Regional Tradition of Orissa by Anncharlott Eschmann, Hermann Kulke and Gaya Charan Tripathi. The writers use the example of the Jagannath cult to deliberate on the transition from tribal culture to Brahmanisation of the deities and focus on some Hindu temples which have been constructed at places where tribal deities were being worshipped since time immemorial. They also discuss deities like Charchika, Bhattarika, Pathalika, Badamba, Maninageswari and Tarini, which were originally tribal deities of Orissa that were gradually incorporated into vedic gods and goddesses.

The appropriation of Murugan into Karthik has been much better documented.

The Rise of Mahasena: The Transformation of Skanda-Karttikeya in North India from the Kusana to Gupta Empires by Richard D. Mann.

The Many Faces of Murukan: The History and Meaning of a South Indian God by Fred Clothey.

The Cult of Skanda-Kartikeya in Ancient India by A.K. Chatterjee.

For Kali:

The Book of Kali by Seema Mohanty.

Revisiting Kali: An Amalgam of Aboriginal Deities and a Symbol of Rebellion by Sumanta Bannerjee.

Banglar Daakat Kali: Myth o Itihash by Pinaki Biswas (this is in Bengali, I couldn't find a translation unfortunately but on the off chance that you can read Bengali I highly recommend this)

In Bengal, Kali is considered a saviour and protector of the downtrodden, and a manifestation of rage and resistance symbolised in blood. The more violent forms of Kali are the ones more similar to the tribal deities she was appropriated from are still primarily worshipped by Dalits.

Shoshan Kali (Shoshan literally translated to burning place) is a form of Kali that is primarily worshipped by the people of the Dom caste - undertakers responsible for disposing of the dead. Shoshan Kali is considered a patron of the space between the living and the dead, which is also why Bhoot Chaturdarshi, another folk festival honoring spirits and ghosts (Bengal's Halloween if you will) is celebrated the day before Kali Puja. It is also worth noting that animal sacrifice, red meat, blood and alcohol is mandatory in the worship of Shoshan Kali; which goes against vedic savarna sensibilities - which is probably why upper castes had always kept their distance from Kali until very recently in the last century.

Kosai Kali is a patron saint of the butcher castes - the Khatiks and Budhiks (who are now classified under SC). In 17th-18th century Bengal, hindus could not eat meat unless they had been offered to a god first and thus purified - which meant that meat was only consumed as prasad after pujas. The butchers initially opened to cater to muslims who could eat meat all year round but they wanted to expand their business, so they came up with a workaround. They installed an icon of Kali in the shop and performed a puja every day before opening shop thus purifying the meat they were about to sell - which meant that hindus could now consume meat all year round, thus forever changing eating habits of Bengal. Even today, butchers in North Kolkata perform a daily puja for Kosai Kali before opening shop.

For Shiva:

The Sacred Bond: Lord Shiva and Aadivasi Folklore in Indian Mythology by Sheetal Kakar

How Tribal India Has Held Onto Shiva by Nabarun Barooah.

Something I have observed is that the further away from the vedas the practices get, the more it seems to belong to Dalit hindus. Most of the non-vedic deities from Bengal are not worshipped by Brahmins. Manasa (bengali folk goddess associated with snakes), Sitala (folk goddess believed to cure smallpox and other diseases), Oladevi (goddess of cholera), and Shashthi (folk goddess of fertility and protecter of children) and mostly worshipped by the women of the household. The mantras are all in Bengali, not Sanskrit, and the rituals can be performed by anyone, it does not require brahmins to complete the absolutions. This can partly be explained by the fact that village economy is dictated by caste and the poorer lower caste people living in mud households are way more likely to be bitten by snakes, or have their children die of smallpox or cholera; compared to upper castes who lived in better protected houses and could afford better healthcare. But also, they are most likely derived from earlier fertility and/or protective goddess from a more pagan past, which has (mostly) escaped Sanskritisation.

Dharmathakur or Dharmaraj is a folk deity from Bengal worshipped mainly by Dalits, especially the Bauris, Bagdis, Dom and Chandala castes. Dharmaraj is considered to be formless, and represented with a sacred stone daubed with sindoor. There have been attempts to link Dharmaraj with various Vedic gods like Shiva, Surya, Yama etc. and bring him under the vedic umbrella but somehow, perhaps because his worship has always remained exclusive to Dalits, he has always resisted appropriation. Over time, Dharmaraj also came to be closely associated with Sufi traditions in Bengal - as most likely Dalit hindus converted to Islam but did not entirely let go of older rituals and worship but rather fused them with each other. Which is why many of Dharmaraj's representative stones double as Pir sthans (which is Bengal's version of Dargahs). Dharmaraj's vahan (carrier) is a horse, which is why you will find clay horses daubed in sindoor in almost all Pir sthans in Bengal - even those that do not have Dharmaraj's stone. Also fun fact, Dharmatala, the central area of Kolkata is named after him.

Charak Puja or Gajan is a folk festival from rural Bengal intended to honor Dharmathakur in some places, Shiva in others. It is mostly considered a festival of lower castes as the rituals are deemed too difficult and undignified for upper castes to perform. They involve rolling in the dirt, self-flagellation and swallowing fire in a display of frenzied devotion. (Off topic trivia but it has been said that Charak Puja's rituals may have been influenced by Muharram processions. Though I personally doubt it considering Shia muslims in Bengal were always a small community who mostly lived in cities and Charak Puja is a rural festival, but it is possible).

Rankini is another non-vedic deity worshipped by many of the adivasi tribes in Jharkhand and Bengal. Her shrines are usually found deep in the forests and like Dharmaraj, she is considered formless and depicted as a stone. There have been attempts to incorporate her as a form of Durga and Kali but, perhaps because the aadivasi tribes in the east have themselves largely succeeded in resisting appropriation and assimilation by the Aryans, Rankini too has escaped Sanskritisation altogether.

Bonbibi, believed to be the guardian spirit of the Sunderbans, is worshipped by both Hindus and Muslims alike in the (dalit) fishing communities of the Sunderbans.

Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal by June McDaniel.

Historical Studies in the Cult of the Goddess Manasa (A Socio-Cultural Study) by Pradyot Kumar Maity

Cult of Goddess Sitala in Bengal: An enquiry into folk culture by Subrata Kumar Mukhopadhyay

The Cult of Bonbibi: A Folk Paradigm in Deltaic Sundarbans by Kakali Chakravarty

Rankini: Devi, Myth, Manabi by Kaushik Dutta. (this is in Bengali)

Rarher Sanskriti O Dharmaraj by Amalendu Mitra (also in Bengali)

If you can read Bengali please do read Banglar Loukik Debota by Gopalkrishna Basu. I can't recommend this book enough because of all the books listed this one goes into the deepest dive into how most of the Vedic gods were most likely appropriated from earlier deities that existed in the land; However, most of Bengal's folk dieties resisted appropriation and were only be included in the vedic milleu either as lesser gods like Manasa, or appropriated as the occasional form of a Vedic god, as happened with Shashthi, Sitala, Dharmaraj and Jagannath. Some, like Rankini, or the Santhal's Bonga pantheon, resisted Sanskritisation altogether.

Again, as I mentioned earlier the best approach to this is to read neutral accounts of history, read between the lines and draw your own interpretations, which is what I did. If you are specifically interested in Bengal then read Banglar Itihas: Adiparba by Niharranjan Dey first. Here is a translation by John W. Wood.

Apologies for a large part of this being specific to Bengal and for the many untranslated books. I do feel that the Dravidians have been a lot more successful in preserving their pre-vedic past, but my knowledge of it is mostly surface level so I'm not going into it.

Tagging @murukanism here in case you want to add anything or have anything to recommend, since I know this to be a topic that interests you too. :)

Breaks my heart that people are reblogging this now because now all of this, everything about Bengal I hold so dear will now be destroyed by hindutva fascism.

Do you have kids?Do you have a family?

My children suffer so badly,Hunger, cold and sickness, you are a compassionate person who loves goodness.do not break my heart and my My kids.

vetted by @gaza-evacuation-fund ✅️

I'm sorry to bother you. If it weren't for our need and hunger, we wouldn't have bothered you.💝

My name is Karina, and I am organizing this fundraiser on behalf of my… Karina Fitzgerald needs your support for Bring Hope to Su’ad Mohamme

What is the meaning of international law at this point when some countries are allowed complete impunity to do whatever they want without consequences

I would like to ask you a question: Can you donate or not? If you can and you don't, you have a very hard heart. You're really not nice. 1 hope anyone can help, I hope he helps

Guys, we need 200 euros to reach 4,000 euros, please, if you can donate. please donate and dc not ignore you are the only hope.

Guys, we need 200 euros to reach 4,000 euros, please, if you can donate, please donate and da not ignore you are the only hope

would like to ask you a question: Can you donate or not? If you can and you don't, you have a very hard heart. You're really not nice. I hope anyone can help, I hope he helps.

would like to ask you a question: Can you donate or not? If you can and you don't, you have a very hard heart. You're really not nice. I hope anyone can help, I hope he helps.

Do you have kids?🫂 Do you have a family? 🫂, please.💔 My children suffer so badly,Hunger, cold and sickness, you are a compassionate person who loves goodness🙏🥹. Please do not break my heart and my My kids.