Izzat

Kiwifarms

Izzat has no direct translation into English. We only have terms that can broach the same concept such as 'honour' or 'reputation' or 'face'. Izzat is so much more than that. It's a zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people, all of whom take it very, very seriously. A system like this isn't just foreign to Enlightenment values, but I'd argue it's antithetical to every sensible form of governance on the planet. It will destroy any system that assumes good faith.

Izzat conflicts are not about who is right and who is wrong. It's about who wins and who loses. This means it's a zero-sum game where just about any action is justified (including murder) to restore the lost Izzat. Izzat is a limited social currency and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else. Winning is righteous in Izzat. Losing is unrighteous. This means that if someone plays the game of izzat well enough, they can get away with just about anything (murder, rape, scamming, cheating, stealing). The only morality in Izzat is the protection of your group's collective ego. The only appropriate response when your Izzat is attacked is the complete destruction of whoever insulted it.

Two people get into an argument. They might escalate, but chances are it won't be that bad. i.e. 'Sorry I broke your garden gnome.' With two Indians in an argument, the stakes are always deadly thanks to Izzat. Neither of them can back down, nor can they admit fault. Admitting fault is seen as deliberately humiliating yourself. Not only that, but because Izzat is shared, you are shaming everyone who shares your Izzat. So, admitting fault or taking responsibility for a problem is a form of social suicide. This means even if the dispute was over something completely fucking stupid or trivial (like a broken garden gnome), it could spiral into a decades long honour feud.

Izzat is also the reason why police are reluctant to get involved in disputes. Because Izzat is a zero-sum game, all participants are involved in the game. If a policeman sides with one family over another in an Izzat dispute, this means that he's deliberately taking the side of that family and dishonouring the other. This marks him for retribution by the offending party. Without parties being able to be impartial, then centralized authority cannot effectively function.

Let's say someone in India complains about a broken water pipe. Instead of the problem being addressed, the official responsible for the water pipe denies it's a problem and counterattacks him instead, because daring to question his efficacy in his role was challenging his Izzat. So the official destroys the person who brought the problem up. The water pipe never gets fixed.

Izzat is also the reason why Indian managers are so infamous for hiring more Indians. It's because from the manager's perspective, he's using his position to gain an invisible social currency. Merit and actual qualifications come second to that idea. If he hired a westerner, he would not gain or even lose Izzat by doing so. He has a very strong cultural incentive not to be impartial. Meanwhile, if he can strong-arm dozens of Indians into a company, he is gaining huge quantities of Izzat and conspirators who owe an absolute debt to him.

It's not uncommon to see Indians gloat about their success in the west. And yes, izzat is very much a system that enables short term success. But the fundamental reality is the prosperity that these Indians find so attractive in the first place wouldn't exist if the west practiced something similar to Izzat. Our systems can only exist on the assumption of good faith, and not a majority of people exploiting them for destructive short term gain. On top of that, if an Indian causes the systems and companies he comes into contact with to collapse, then he can just go back to India with his plunder. He has no stakes in the long-term prosperity, functionality or stability of these systems. The stakes are completely asymmetrical in the Indian's favour.

You all know about that infamous video of that Indian scamming a food bank. Once again, winning is righteous. Losing is not. By employing 'clever' means (jugaad), he successfully extracted more resources for himself and his family. From the perspective of jugaad, a rule is not something to respect, but merely an obstacle to the Indian's own gain. Since he cheated the system and wasn't caught, he is seen as a righteous and dignified man in the Izzat framework.

I read a story in India about a man offering to pay another man to use a public toilet instead of defecating openly. The latter left and came back with several friends and beat the former to death. The problem was not that he was defecating openly, but that he was criticised for doing so. And with Izzat, it's not an eye-for-an-eye. Izzat is often an eye-for-a-whole-head. Disproportionately and brutally annihilating your enemies is the correct move to make because you take back your lost Izzat and then some. This kind of vindictiveness would be rightly seen as horrifying and disgusting in most of the world.

There was a greentext from 4chan (I don't have it so bear with me). Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn't believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.

So, without Izzat, this looks like an utterly insane and pointless sequence of events. But with Izzat? The Indian's actions suddenly make sense. He was boasting to increase his Izzat, and when Anon simply stated his disbelief, it was seen as a vicious attack on his Izzat. The Indian escalated the situation to restore the lost Izzat. When the police got involved, the dispute had become public, so the Indian's shame had increased to unbearable levels. He committed suicide in order to save his remaining Izzat. Anon had no idea what Izzat was, or if he did, he didn't mention it, yet the Indian's actions perfectly align with this framework. This is what makes me believe the green text was genuine.

The western idea of merit is competence in a role. Merit in Izzat is determined by what lengths you will go to to achieve a goal, with competence merely being one path. It often becomes a secondary path, as printing a degree that says you're qualified to be a jet pilot is just as good as being able to actually fly a jet in the eyes of Izzat. In other words, Izzat selects for appearance over authentic merit or morality.

Now, a counterargument an Indian might make is 'Izzat is a dated word' or 'We don't use that word.' I like to compare it to the word vendetta. Vendetta in Italian has a very specific meaning (a familial blood feud where revenge must be taken to restore honour etc). This word would not exist if this didn't reflect a specific facet of Italian life. Izzat is no different. Hell, I've had to write several paragraphs just to explain what the hell Izzat is. Izzat isn't an archaic term either. It's well and truly alive in the modern Indian lexicon.

If izzat were regularly discussed openly, this would be considered one of the greatest possible insults in the Izzat framework. Izzat is why Indians do mass reports, death threats, false flags and various other underhanded tactics when a westerner exposes something they don't want people to see (such as the poop throwing festival). If I knew something like that existed in the west, I would say 'wow that's disgusting, we should stop this'. But in India, the problem is not the point. The point is the problem being exposed and the perceived insult to izzat from exposing the problem. The water pipe never gets fixed.

The one saving grace is Izzat performs awfully in the long term. Once Indians displace you, they will go back to playing this insane game among themselves. It's what happened to companies that got hit by Izzat. This is also why there aren't any homegrown Indian companies that have the same influence as Microsoft or Google. Whenever they start getting ahead, their companies implode from infighting, nobody doing their jobs, everybody trying to cheat each other and nobody addressing critical issues. Systems that delegate authority and work on good faith eventually win out over zero-sum honour feuding. Izzat cannot maintain complex systems because its players are only concerned with short term gain.

With the west, the issue is that it often fails to live up to its own ideals. It's not a perfect system, but we can course correct and address problems pragmatically. With Izzat, Indians live up to those ideals very, very often. When you see the dysfunctionality of India, remember that it's a feature of Izzat, not a bug.

Jugaad as a term also warrants more explanation, but my post is long enough as it is.

Grok

Is Izzat a concept that appeared in India after the Islamic invasion, or is it existed in India from prehistoric times?

The concept of ‘izzat’ (عزت / इज़्ज़त) in the sense that is most commonly used in North India today — personal and family honour, especially tied to the sexual purity and modesty of women, and defended violently if necessary — is predominantly a cultural complex that became widespread in the Indian subcontinent during and after the early medieval Islamic period (roughly 8th–13th centuries onward). It did not exist in that specific form in prehistoric or ancient Vedic/Brahmanical India.Here is the evidence and historical layering:1. Pre-Islamic India (Vedic, Epic, Classical periods)Ancient Indian texts (Rigveda, Upanishads, Dharmashastras, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Arthashastra, Kamasutra) are deeply concerned with social honour, status, prestige, and shame, but the vocabulary and the precise social mechanism are different. The main honour-related concepts were:Māryāda (boundaries of proper conduct, dignity) Gaurava / Satkarma (respect, prestige earned through righteousness or caste status) Lajjā (shame, modesty — especially feminine) Abhimāna (pride, self-respect)

Protecting family or caste honour existed, but violent retaliation for perceived sexual dishonour of women by the wider kinship group was not a systematised cultural norm. Widow remarriage, forms of divorce, and relatively free interaction between upper-class men and women (ganaika, courtesans, etc.) were socially accepted in many periods and regions. There is no Sanskrit equivalent of the Persian-Arabic word ‘izzat’ used in pre-1000 CE Indian literature in the modern North-Indian sense.

2. Arrival and indigenisation of ‘izzat’ (8th–16th centuries)The word ‘izzat’ is directly borrowed from Arabic ‘izza (glory, honour) via Persian, and entered Indo-Aryan languages with the arrival of Turkic, Persianate Muslim rulers and settlers (Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Delhi Sultanate, Mughals). Persianate Islamic courts and Central Asian tribal societies placed enormous emphasis on sharaf / ‘izzat, particularly the control of female sexuality by male kin (father, brother, husband, son). Loss of a woman’s “purdah” or sexual purity was seen as collective dishonour demanding revenge (blood feud or honour killing). North Indian Hindu agrarian and pastoral castes (especially Jats, Gujars, Rajputs, Ahirs, Yadavs, etc.) who converted to Islam or lived under Muslim rule adopted and adapted this Perso-Islamic honour code while retaining or readapting their own traditions. By the 16th–18th centuries, the ‘izzat complex’ (woman = family honour, sexual affront = collective shame, violent revenge obligatory) became the dominant code among the landholding “martial” castes of Punjab, Haryana, western UP, Rajasthan, and later spread eastward and southward.

3. Rajputisation and further Hinduisation (14th–19th centuries)Many Rajput lineages themselves adopted stricter purdah and honour practices after coming into sustained contact with Delhi Sultanate and Mughal courts (e.g., the Kachwaha rulers of Amber after alliance with Akbar). Practices such as jauhar (mass self-immolation to avoid capture and rape) and very strict purdah among Rajputs intensified precisely during the Sultanate and Mughal periods, partly as a response to the new honour-shame culture introduced by Turko-Persian rulers.

4. Colonial and modern periodBritish colonial ethnographers (Crooke, Ibbetson, Tod, etc.) documented ‘izzat’ as the central social value among the very same North Indian peasant and landlord castes in the 19th–early 20th century. The Khap panchayat system that enforces honour killings today is a relatively recent (medieval–late medieval) phenomenon, not an “ancient Vedic” institution.

SummaryPre-1000 CE India: Concepts of honour, shame, prestige, and female modesty existed, but not the specific ‘izzat’ complex centred on violent collective defence of female sexual purity. Post-1000 CE (Islamic period onward): The Arabic-Persian term ‘izzat’ and the associated honour-shame culture were imported, indigenised, and eventually became the dominant code among many North Indian Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim castes, especially the landholding/peasant-warrior groups.

Therefore, in its modern North-Indian form, ‘izzat’ is largely a cultural import and adaptation from the Islamic/Persianate world, not a concept that existed in India from prehistoric or Vedic times.