Talk:Bengalis

Political Indian Nationalism

What is this and why the capitals? Poweroid 13:50, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Add people from other pages?

Should we add people mentioned in the pages on People from West Bengal and People from Bangladesh? --SameerKhan 09:58, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

"Physically diverse"

Is this comment really necessary? It seems to assume that other countries have physically homogeneous people. --SameerKhan 09:11, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Image

The image, a composite of Tagore, Amartya Sen, Mujib, and an actress is formed from 4 images. At least 3 of them (except the one of Tagore) are not under a free license, and under fair use. Even if someone created it himself, that doesn't fall under fair use of the images.

Next, choice of particular indivduals is also questionable, and subject to POV questions. Personally, I think grouping the actress with the other 3 is highly objectionable. But in any case, there is no need to have a particular subset of people chosen as representative of Bengalis. --Ragib 15:40, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Until the copyright issues are settled, and the copyvio removed, the image should be removed. I have edited it 3 times, so won't do it again today, but I urge the removal of the image pending copyright questions, and also POV. Thanks. --Ragib 16:00, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

I have cited the sources in the image page and am ready to change the licensing mode. Besides I do not understand what is wrong with having an actress of Bengali ancestry who is extremely famous in India. This will bring some diversity in the profession of people. Besides I did not realise that you were removing the pictures all the time. I thought i had made some mistake with the code, so sorry about it. I am from West Bengal and my Bangladeshi freind studying with me here looks happy with my choice of personalities. ---Chen007

I do not get it. What is wrong with the choice of these subset of people in representing Bengalis. Why is it different from this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans? And why is an actress a poor choice for representing a particular ethnic group? ---Chen007

• The problem of using a specific group of people is that personal choices often bring a POV. Why choose Mujib over Ziaur Rahman? Why choose Ria Sen over Suchitra Sen, or Shabana? Why choose Amartya Sen over Muhammad Yunus? See the point? It might often be better to have a nameless anonymous person being representative of an ethnic group, than having a particular set of people.
• About licensing, no, you can't take a few non-free licensed images, and merge them together to release it in public domain. The images of Sheikh Mujib, Amartya Sen, Ria Sen are all under copyrights (The Mujib image is under Fair use license). You cannot take these images to create a new image under public domain. --Ragib 16:19, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

Putting pictures of people of one's own choice in this manner is quite a POV, no doubt. Now, discussion is the only way open, when disputed. I propose to start from the beginning. Here are my proposals.

• No compromise about copyright matters. There is absolutely no dispute about it (despite the admiration of many others) & it is a resolved case. So, 1st step should be on the basis of this by the admins & continued violation should be taken as an offense.
• We are now left with public domain & fair use licensed pictures. Among them, & other names that came forward are-

• Rabindranath
• Amartya Sen and/or why not Muhammad Yunus
• Sheikh Mujib and/or why not Ziaur Rahman
• The actress and/or why not (as I add) Bipasha, Rani, Bobita, Shuchitra, Kabari.

Keeping a picture of an actress is also disputed. So, without discussing about each individual, we can run a general discussion on -

• What should be the proper (and fairly NPOV) basis of choosing a symbol-personality of an ethnicity?

My comments-

• There was a BBC survey on the similar topic and Sheikh Mujib & Rabindranath got 1st & 2nd most votes. It can be taken as a major basis. Rabindranath seems to have zero dispute till now. 1st four of the list from different field can be given here.
• Or like a historian, we can keep our fingers crossed about a personality until 50 years have passed since eir death, despite eir popularity at present.

Picture of the actress gets no place under both considerations. Take it another way, as this being an encyclopedia, which is supposed to remain unchanged except factual additions, can one claim now that the actress in the picture or similar other recent media-performers have such great impact or contribution on its people that eir glory remain the same even after 50 or 100 years? Perhaps not, or too tough to tell now, so leave it.

Thanks.

--Amr 16:24, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

I cannot see the POV point Ragib is pushing? In the case of the German page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans) , why put Mozart over Beethovan or Gothe over Schiller. It is because it is not possible to put all the famous people in that space. Besides it seems to be a bit of a Bengali Vs Bangladeshi problem here. I think many Bangladeshis do not like Amartya Sen's choice here as he is a Indian Bengali. He has been chosen by the author randomly I believe (I hope). It might as well have been Yunus but it is Sen. Just like it might have been Ludwig Van instead of Herr Amadeus. or in the case of the English page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people) why put Queen Elizabeth instead of King Charles I. or in the case of the Punjabis an actress has been shown as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabis). I am sure there are other Punjabi actresses but I believe she has been chosen by random. In the case of the Russians why not show Mendeleiev or Tchaikovsky(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians) instead of Tolstoy. In the case of the Chinese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese) why not show Mao or Confucius instead of the selection they have there. They all have POV issues then but they look good without the interference of the likes of Ragib. ----A — Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.133.7.37 (talk • contribs)

Excuse me!! What POV did you find in my point above? Also, please don't try to introduce imaginary things here. I take a great exception to the comment "Bengali vs. Bangladeshi" ... it seems to imply Bangladeshis are not Bengalis??? Where above did I introduce anything about "Indian" vs "Bangaldeshi" Bengalis?

Also

I think many Bangladeshis do not like Amartya Sen's choice here as he is a Indian Bengali.

This is a very ignorant comment. Please don't put your imaginary words in people's mouths. There have been only two people who commented on this thread, including myself, so I infer that you are referring to me. Please DO NOT use your own imagination to extract "meanings" from comments. Where above have I referred to Amartya Sen's home region? And For your kind information, Amartya Sen is very much considered from "East Bengal" ... his ancestral home is in Dhaka. You are free to think about anything, but claiming such ridiculous things about other editors is a very very bad faith behavior.

My point is NOT that Amartya Sen is a bad choice, but that a choosing a particular person as representative of a people is POV of the person who chose it. Even if the creator of the image chose a photo of Yunus, my point would have been the same. So, please refrain from such backhanded comments.

Also, all but 1 of the images are NOT FREE in terms of copyrights. Only the tagore image is freely usable. "Fair use" doesn't apply here, so we can't really use the other 3 images in the composite.

Finally, please don't launch personal attacks ... reply on the issue rather than your imaginations on my "ulterior" motives. Please respond to my comments on copyright, and on the POV of choosing particular persons. To make things clear for your understanding, my point here is that choosing particular persons is a POV (no matter who the person is). --Ragib 09:42, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

It seems like everyone is missing Ragib's actual points:

• We can't use the three copyrighted images currently posted
  
• We should stay away from using (only) famous people to represent a culture, since choosing one particular famous person over another would bring up the issue of the chooser's POV
  

Now, for my own opinion, I totally agree with Ragib on the first point for sure, but I'm not so sure of the second one - only because after I went through and checked out other articles on races/ethnicities/nationalities, it seems like all the faces chosen to represent the group were of famous people. Granted, I don't think that that's very representative of the group as a whole, but if that's the tradition on Wikipedia, I'm fine with that.

On another point, I absolutely don't see any hint of POV or of any sort of strange biases or prejudices in Ragib's text that some people seemed to find. The people mentioned by Ragib represent Bengalis of different nationalities, so it's really quite strange to think that anyone could interpret this as bias. And where did that Amartya Sen comment come from? That seems quite uncalled for. I honestly don't think we should be trying to find things to argue or make false accusations about. --SameerKhan 12:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

I strongly disagree with Ragib. If you look at many of the pages on ethnicities in wikipedia, like Tamils, German, British, Pashtun, will see there are pictures like this. And I'm appauled by the question "why Mujib over Ziaur Rahman?" My god, its not Mujib, his full name is Sheikh Mujibur Rahman u idiot, hes the father of the nation. Ofcourse he is over Ziaur Rahman, and how can u even ask this question unless you are seriously biased towards the BNP? And where did you get 3 actresses, there are two. And those two are some of the leading figures of South Asia's film industry.

Given that you already tried to restrict my edits, by blocking my IP address simply because i put up an image of Sajeeb Wazed Joy on his profile, I seriously question whether you are at all neutral. Its better if wikipedia get rid of people like Ragib.

Sub-ethnicities??

. As a result, Bengalis are a heterogeneous and considerably diverse ethnic group, with 198 sub-ethnicities.Bengali. Joshua Project.

Having taken a look into the data presented at that page, it looks ridiculous. It lists people with certain occupations as a "sub-ethnicity". I'd like to see more support from academic papers to back this statement. The data looks extremely ridiculous, as it lists people with certain last names as a sub-ethnicity!! --Ragib 16:12, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree. That page lists so many subethnicities in Bangladesh, yet the majority of Bengalis are apparently the same subethnicity as much of the entire subcontinent (Shaikh)! The link seems to be non-scientific and we shouldn't be citing it. --SameerKhan 18:58, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

True, on a closer look, I find that it has listed "Bishwas" as a "sub-ethnicity"!! For God's sake, that's a family name, and by that standard, the English should have thousands of sub-ethnicities. All the names listed in the page are family names, which has nothing to do with any "sub-ethnicities". One of them, "Munshi", is actually a (religious academic) title given to persons with certain religious education!! I therefore have to say that this so called project is simply pure crap, or the project people (the missionaries) have been pranked by someone. Otherwise, the data wouldn't have been so ridiculous. --Ragib 19:17, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

"related groups" info removed from infobox

For dedicated editors of this page: The "Related Groups" info was removed from all {{Infobox Ethnic group}} infoboxes. Comments may be left here. Ling.Nut 23:03, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

Religion stats

The religion section is misleading as it terms Bengalis to have a huge majority of Muslims. It seems that User:Scythian1 is confusing (and so are his "references") between stats on Bangladesh and that on Bengalis as a whole.

To show the fallacy, we can look into the stats for Bangladesh and West Bengal -- the two Bengali majority areas of the world. Bangladesh has a 83-88% Muslim population. Hindus constitute about 11-13%. So, that means, out of 150 million, there are 132 million Muslims and 18 million Hindus. In West Bengal, Hinduism is the principal religion - 72.5% of the population are Hindus. Muslims comprise 25%. With a population of 80 million, this means 58 million Hindus and around 20 million Muslims. So the total is (150+80 = 230 million) population, among which (132+20 = 152 million) Muslims, and (18+58 = 76 million) Hindus. In other words, 66% Muslims, and 33% Hindus.

So, instead of adding dubious statistics and terming its removal as "vandalism", please get your facts right. Thanks. --Ragib 23:27, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

So you basically conceded that Muslims are the majority. This should further clear your confusion. In 1996, Michael Sullivan wrote a book called, Comparing State Polities. In it, he stated, that "the 183 million Bengalis are divided into about 112 million Bengali Muslims in Bangladesh and about 71 million Bengali Hindus" in India. Thus, again, as consistently shown - Bengalis are predominately Muslim. "Predominately", Ragib, does not mean an absolute huge majority as you erroneously accused me of noting. So stop asserting that my stats are dubious when they clearly aren't. Moreoever, stop deleting the links that specify the same information. Scythian1 23:46, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

I have provided recent official census data. If anything contradicts this, it just shows those sources are mistaken. Two-third majority is not an "overwhelming" or "Predominant" majority. In any case, official census information triumphs any information Michael Sullivan or any other author has. If some link is shown to be mistaken (just look into the number of Bengalis cited by Sullivan!!), that ought to be removed per WP:RS. Thank you. --Ragib 23:50, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

Sigh, okay, as per the theories of standard logic, I have now, instead of using "predominately" used the word "mostly" (most) which refers to a body of 51% or more. Scythian1 23:54, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

What gives you that definition? According to this, mostly is "(in large part; mainly or chiefly)". According to Merriam Webster, "Most" means " to the greatest or highest degree -- often used with an adjective or adverb to form the superlative". I don't see how a two-third majority can be termed as "mostly Muslim". --Ragib 00:03, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

TheFreeDictionary, [1] specifies, "the greatest amount." Also look at the definition of Mostly. [2] Hence, Islam has the greatest amount of adherents amongst Bengalis. Scythian1 00:12, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

TheFreeDictionary, [3] specifies "greatest" as "Very large in size". 66% is not "very large" compared with 33%. --Ragib 00:17, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

How about this: instead of applying various adjectives, just give the numbers. That's npov. --Ragib 00:20, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I am going to change the word from Mostly to Majority (which you used in this discussion) as it is NPOV. See the definition in thefreedictionary at [4] which specifies a number more than half the total. I am not going to quibble with you. Thank You. Scythian1 00:24, 11 June 2007 (UTC)