February 2021
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Open Thread – 02/27/2021 – Brown Pundits
Open thread for 27 February 2021, pointing readers to a Substack piece asking whether it matters who writes history if no one reads it, and urging them to learn more…
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Steppe lineages in northern Pakisan
The author flags a mitogenome paper on northern Pakistani Indo-Iranian speakers, reproducing its abstract: about 8.4 per cent of their maternal gene pool traces to Steppe-rooted lineages dated to roughly…
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Hazaras, and Divide and Rule in the British Empire
Major Amin argues the Hazaras were victims of British divide-and-rule, citing a family account that Hazara soldiers’ defection in Iran ended their recruitment to the British Indian Army, and says…
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Browncast: Koenrad Elst, Indologist and Hindu Nationalist
In a BP podcast, two hosts talk to Indologist Koenraad Elst, described as a supporter of right-wing Hindutva politics, about his understanding of Hinduism and Hindu identity, touching on the…
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On the historicity of the Vedas
The author says he now accepts that people resembling ‘white’ Europeans expanded into the subcontinent 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, reading Vedic descriptions of dark natives as literal rather than…
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The Parsis of Bombay
Prompted by Michael Axworthy’s Iran: Empire of the Mind, the author reposts a decade-old personal account of the Parsis of Mumbai, descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia for Gujarat after…
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Open Thread – 2/20/2021 – Brown Pundits
What’s going on?
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Major Amin’s Summing up of the 3 Major Indo-Pak Wars
Major Amin, in an extract from his history of the Pakistan army, sums up the three Indo-Pak wars, arguing that Gilgit was won in 1947 by British and Gilgit Scouts…
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Looking back at COVID-19
A pathology trainee in Texas, writing on policy rather than clinical medicine, looks back at the Covid-19 response, drawing on two New Yorker pieces and recalling early complacency about outbreaks…
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Capsule Review: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
A capsule review of Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies. The reviewer admires the writing but finds the semi-autobiographical narrator stuck in ‘inside the bubble wokeness’, thinks its appeal is narrow beyond…
