review of Dhurandhar 2 has now been posted. Read it if you haven’t. The comment thread on the Ikkis post, which ran in parallel, illustrated the review’s central argument more vividly than any film still could.
A film that educates audiences to hate will eventually produce hateful audiences.
We have been moderating this site long enough to know that comment threads are a pressure gauge, not a debating society. What happened over the last 48 hours was not debate. It was escalation; predictable, cyclical, and ultimately ending where it always ends when people get sufficiently worked up: in the language of violence.
BB was on a Dhurandhar high. We understand this. There is something in the film’s rhythm, the josh of it, as he put it himself, that makes a certain kind of Punjabi Muslim-hating Bollywood patriot feel ten feet tall. We are not without understanding. He had just watched a four-hour film designed specifically to produce this effect. But understanding the cause does not excuse the consequence.
The line was crossed when he repeated, almost verbatim, dialogue from the film, the “ghar mein ghusega bhi, marega bhi” register, and directed it as a personal threat at Kair. Saying one will infiltrate Pakistan and hold a gun to someone’s head to make them chant a slogan is not josh. It is a threat. That it is practically unenforceable is beside the point. The language normalises exactly what we argued Dhurandhar 2 normalises: the idea that the other must be humiliated into submission, not merely defeated.
BB’s commentating rights are suspended until Thursday, 2nd April. Every comment he attempts in that period will be deleted. When the suspension ends, reinstatement of authorship will depend on whether the Saffroniate faction of our commentariat, can reason with him collectively that certain red lines exist even in the heat of subcontinental rivalry. Those lines are not about Pakistan. They are about the difference between argument and menace.
Kabir and Sbarrkum retain their authorship. Kabir was asked to stop and did not, and we say so plainly. But nothing in his conduct approached the violent register BB eventually reached. We are also honest about the asymmetry here: Brown Pundits tilts toward Bharat, that is India; everyone who reads this site regularly knows this. That soft tilt means Kabir, Sbarrkum and Qureshi operate in a forum that is structurally not neutral. The least we owe them is consistent application of the rules.
We want to say something about the Punjabi dimension behind all of this, because it is analytically interesting and not merely polemical.
The specific psychosis on display was not generically South Asian. It was Punjabi Muslim. Sindhis, for reasons rooted in their extraordinarily deep relationship with their language and soil, do not typically present this way. The Urdu-speaking Muhajir community has its own compound psychology; one that is genuinely rooted in a Persianate-subcontinental synthesis, an organic cultural memory with its own coherence. One can understand the Urdu speaker’s claim to a syncretic civilisational elsewhere.
But the Punjabi Muslim who denies his Hindu heritage, who treats Partition as a founding rather than a fracture, has bought into a psychosis that makes him a stranger to his own soil. Punjab is not merely an Islamic land. It is a land of Jats, Rajputs, Gujjars, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims who share the same genes, the same rivers, the same agricultural calendar, and the same emotional register. The denial of this, the insistence that one is Arab by faith and therefore by civilisation, is a psychological dissonance.
We are all, in some atavistic sense, Hindu. Not Hindu in the BJP sense. Hindu in the original sense: people of the Indus, rooted in a particular soil, shaped by a particular civilisation that precedes all the conversions and all the partitions. Kabir could, if he chose, say “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” and mean something true by it; not a Hindu supremacist slogan but an acknowledgment of the soil that made him. That is not the egregious part of BB’s comment. The egregious part was the gun.
We restored the full comment thread and will keep it visible until Thursday. We did this deliberately. The thread is the evidence. Anyone who wants to understand why we moderated the way we did; firmly on both sides, without ideological favouritism, need only read it.
Brown Pundits exists because the subcontinent deserves analysis that is neither exclusively Saffron nor Crescent. That standard is not always met. But it remains the standard. Fairness, balanced by wisdom. That is all.
You have completely missed the mark about Punjabi Muslims.
I am not Punjabi Muslim and I don’t think Kabir is either.
Taking pot shots at Punjabis seem to be a very Indian repsonse, it projects envy due to Punjabi cultural dominance on both sides of the border post 1947.
There was no Hindu religion before the British grouped all the pagan traditions together under a geographical moniker and named it Hinduism, so nobody is denying ”Hindu roots” here. We celebrate our native cultures with much fanfare, to the shock and horror of a neighbouring country.
We had pagan ancestors, so did the Arabs, Persians and Turks.. and all converetd to Islam over the centuries and contributed to it. We don’t have any qualms about accepting our pagan history, infact it sometimes is more fascinating. However as an Indian or Pakistani Muslim, you cannot own it openly because our pagan traditions havent gone extinct like those other places, and these pagan followers see it as an opportunity to try to label us as traitors to the land.
This is why Indian Muslims felt the need to create Pakistan, as Shuddhi movement amongst the pagans, fed by false British narratives, tried to rid itself of Islam and Islamic influences in the region.
The best thing that can be hoped for is an uneasy co-existence, but that appears to not be possible because our pagans want revenge for turning 1/3rd of the land to Islam.
Movies that promote hate, are promoted there, and thsoe that shun hate -even if true – are labelled propaganda. Dehumanizing the other is in full force via media, which is just a leadup to war. With the weapons we now have, we are hurtling towards ruin.
There’s also something generational happening here. The 4chan, “bakchodi”, “edgelord” gamer culture is a big part of the indian youth lacking civility. Brainrot is a real independent variable to structural political differences between Indian nationalists and Pakistan counterparts. Actual kinetic military confrontation is more rare now that in the 1948-1971 period. Despite the past having actual risks, the borders were much more open. Now, Pakistan, excluding nuclear blackmail, has never been less threatening, but the urban middle class is peaking in its mania. I would be cautious to extrapolate too much from this cultural moment we are living in.