I'd argue that the basic concept of Izzat is a very fundamentally North Indian one. It's not really a thing in the Dravidian-speaking parts of the region.
North India and Pakistan are regions that have spent the better part of the past two thousand years or so being convulsed by repeated, pointless petty wars between local maharajas and clans and castes and jatis and the odd soulless steppechimp coming in to scourge the earth for no particular reason. The soil and farms aren't even especially good, pretty much every single essential resource in the region has been drained by five thousand years of high-intensity agriculture. In places like this, you
need to bind yourself to people with the same clan/jati/caste/race/religion/ethnicity, because there's so much at stake. On account of this, essentially every single human grouping category you could feasibly imagine existing in the real world exists in India, simply because North Indians are the people for whom these categories serve the greatest utility.
Southern India, meanwhile, is in general either much more cosmopolitan or so underdeveloped that this kind of system of clan-honor doesn't really have any use. Places like the southern Deccan and Gondwana are dominated by tropical forest, and so the people there just rely on a basic tribal schema of societal organization. Places like Tamil Nadu and Kerala, meanwhile, though they always had large populations of subsistence farmers, also always had an enormous population of merchants and traders and such. This goes back thousands of years. It permitted them to have remarkable wealth and stability in the face of spergy Northoid chimping. In a way they're like swarthier, less neurotic, more gooner Jews. It also means they don't have need for something like Izzat, because society could be organized along the lines of wealth instead of some kind of abstract notion of familial honor.
Didn't a Dalit man get beaten to death for wearing sunglasses?
Yeah. I will never understand why pseuds on the internet shit on Dalits of all people. The guys swarming into places like Canada aren't impoverished tanners guarding their daughters from rapist higher castemen, they're mid-caste Kshatriyas and Shudra and even Brahmins who have the means to fuck off to the West. Dalits are literally bondslaves, and many of them are to Christianity and Islam and Buddhism. The people shitting on you (heh) on Xwitter threads and on 4chan or whatever aren't Dalits, they're mid-Castes. Dalits, on account of the fact that they suffer the most on account of Indian society's incredibly retarded social system are often the ones who fight back against it the hardest. I really doubt any of you have ever heard of B. R. Ambedkar, but he was a Dalit politican whose entire ideological conceit was the ruthless extermination of caste and Izzat as concepts. He wanted to do this through Marxism, which I think is retarded, but then against look what communism did for China's system of inept social organization. Point being that Dalits get a bad rap around here for literally no reason.
This is just a personal belief, but I think one of the reasons a lot of Indians are so dysgenic is because any good, strong, eugenic individuals from untouchable or Shudra backgrounds were prevented by societal custom from ever actually being able to propagate in any meaningful way.
What about the Izzat of the dregs and mutants of indian society, such as Aghoris? Do they brutally enforce anything truly bizarre?
Aghoris and radical Tantric Hindus have their own endogamous system of Izzat. Their whole thing is being so utterly repulsive and outside the bonds of human dignity that they loop back around to the divine perfection of Brahma, which is the universal divine consciousness that Hindus worship. It's weird and pointless but endlessly striving to become filthier isn't really any dumber than endlessly striving to become purer, like mainline Hindus.
The author made a really good point that so many people think of culture as being just the superficial stuff like food and holidays and table manners, and assume that beyond that, everyone kind of thinks and feels the same way about life.
Very salient. Middle Eastern Islamic societies also have a system of Izzat, but it's much more gendered and not so reliant on caste dynamics the way South Asian Izzat is.
Arabs and Muslims treat women as a whole as a kind of internal enemy. This is why Muslim guys in the west are allowed to fuck local women and still get married, whereas if a woman fucks Timmy from down the street you might need to open her throat.
Muslim-European cultural dynamics are more interesting than Jeet-Eurangutan ones tbh
It's poverty + low-trust + cousin-marriage brain, not some mystical desi superpower. Urban Indians under 40 don't give a flying fuck about "izzat" unless gramps is still swinging his lathi in the village.
The original post has a lot of sub-100 IQ /pol/ orientalism ("muh brownpipo have this secret concept underlying their society read this poast to know") but It'd argue that Izzat still has some kind of staying power in Indian society even if it's not really being consciously enforced. It's like how people in Finland or Norway are still in every meaningful cultural way Lutherans, even when they don't have strong opinions about the Papacy.
