Indians
Article
Indians is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 24, 2021 and March 08, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans”; “almost a billion Indians”. It most often appears alongside Abbasid Caliphate, Achilles, Afghan.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 24, 2021
- Last seen: March 08, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Abbasid Caliphate (1 shared issues)
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- Achilles (1 shared issues)
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- Afghan (1 shared issues)
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- Allah (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- American conservatives (1 shared issues)
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- American liberals (1 shared issues)
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- Arabian Nights (1 shared issues)
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- Arabian Nights (1 shared issues)
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- Arabs (1 shared issues)
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- Azov Battalion (1 shared issues)
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- Belarus (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Diversity: Including Greeks, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Moroccans (always sorcerers), suspiciously Arabic-seeming Chinese, and blacks. This last group is mostly found as slaves, which felt anachronistic until I looked it up and learned more about the massive slave trade between East Africa and the medieval Middle East. In one story, when a prince is declaring his love to a princess, he says "I am your slave, your black slave", as a hyperbolic declaration of servitude. Of course, the author is very concerned about the excessive masculinity of black slaves, especially the fact that your wife is probably cheating on you with one. When one adulterer is late to a meeting with her slave beau, he swears "an oath by the valor and honor of blackamoor men (and don't think that our manliness is like the poor manliness of white men)" to ignore her from then on unless she is more timely. I have no idea how much of this is filtered through the layers of translators, or what he meant by "white men" in that sentence. Elsewhere in diversity: Jews are usually doctors or merchants, but everyone's a merchant so this isn't so remarkable. The one time a Christian appears in the stories I read, he's a drunkard - which wasn't the stereotype I was expecting, but which I guess makes sense under the circumstances.
Your other option for powered flight in the Idealized Middle East is some demon-men who live on an island in the Indian Ocean. They sometimes turn into birds and go flying, and if you ask them very nicely, they'll take you along. Unfortunately, once you get too high, you'll hear the angels in Heaven praising Allah, and it will sound so beautiful that you'll be compelled to join in. This will wound the birds, who are demons and allergic to Allah's name, and they'll get angry and drop you. So far nobody in the Idealized Middle East has come up with a good solution to this, and the FAA currently recommends avoiding demon-bird-men and sticking with mechanical flying horses instead. Also, don't try to tie yourself to the foot of a roc. This almost never helps.
But the vast majority of people reading this have probably never been personally affected by a war and might not even know anyone who has been. And a billion Chinese, and almost a billion Indians, and almost everyone in South America, and a lot of other people, can say the same.