This is a Brown Pundits Precedent Post.
We have been asked, repeatedly and in good faith, why Brown Pundits appears to handle criticism of India with more care than it handles criticism of Pakistan. The charge is that we hold a double standard. It deserves a direct answer.
The answer is that we do hold a distinction, and we are not embarrassed by it, but it is not the distinction the charge assumes.
The Distinction
Pakistan is roughly seventy-nine years old as a sovereign state. India as a sovereign state is roughly seventy-nine years old as well. As nation-states under international law, as signatories to the United Nations, as entities with currencies and armies and foreign ministries, the two are pari passu. We treat them that way and we will continue to treat them that way. On every question that applies to nation-states as nation-states, the two sit at the same table and get the same scrutiny.
But India is not only a nation-state. India is also a civilisation, and the civilisation is not seventy-nine years old. The civilisation is, give or take the archaeological argument one prefers to have, somewhere around five thousand years old. It stretches from the Indus Valley through the Dravidian-Aryan synthesis, through the Vedic period, through the great classical flowering, through the medieval syntheses, through the colonial rupture, and into the present. One can argue the exact nature of the continuity. One cannot plausibly argue that the continuity is not there. It is there in the same way it is there for China. It is there in the same way it is there for Egypt. It is there.
This is not a claim about superiority. It is a claim about category. Pakistan is a sovereign state. India is a sovereign state and a civilisation. The two facts do not cancel. They coexist.
The Civilisational Peer Group Is Short
How short is short. At the level of a nation-state that is co-terminus with a multi-millennial civilisation, the peer group is essentially India and China. Two entries. Iran and Egypt have the civilisational depth but have been transformed by the Greco-Arab conquest, in an unalterable fashion. Greece has the civilisational depth but the modern Greek state is a nineteenth-century construction with limited political continuity to the ancient polis; the Ottoman interlude was equally determinative. Israel is a unique case and we will come to it.
That leaves India and China. Two countries on the planet where the nation-state is also the civilisation, where the sovereign political entity today is a recognisable continuation of the same cultural-linguistic-religious matrix that produced its earliest texts, and where the ordinary citizen, with some education, can read something written two or three thousand years ago in a language that is still a living vehicle of the culture.
That is not a small claim. It is also not a nationalist claim. It is simply a descriptive one.
The Indian Exception
Here is where India diverges from China, and where the argument becomes specific.
China’s continuity is primarily civilisational and administrative. It is a continuity of state, of bureaucracy, of script, of Confucian ordering. It is spectacular and it is real. But it is not, in the contemporary state’s own self-understanding, a sacred continuity. The People’s Republic explicitly detaches itself from religious authority. The mandate of heaven is a metaphor. The civilisation is venerated. The civilisation is not worshipped.
India’s continuity is both. It carries the ancient-state-and-administration weight that China carries. It also carries a spiritual sacralisation of the land, the rivers, the mountains, the sites, the epics, that has no parallel in the Chinese case. The Ganga is not the Yangtze. The Ganga is a goddess. That is not a metaphor and it is not decoration. It is the structural fact of what India is, civilisationally, to most of Her people.
The country that comes closest to this spiritual sacralisation of the land is Israel. Israel is small, it is young as a modern state, it is geopolitically fragile, and yet it carries a civilisational-spiritual weight that far exceeds its size or age, for exactly this reason. The Land is sacred. The People and the Land are, in the self-understanding of classical Biblical civilisation, one.
India that is Bharat is the only country in the world that carries both. The Chinese scale of ancient-state-and-administration continuity, and the Israeli density of spiritual sacralisation of the land. No other nation-civilisation on the planet combines these two registers. Not China alone, not Israel alone, not Iran, not Greece, not Egypt. Only India that is Bharat.
This is what the name itself encodes. India is the nation-state. Bharat is the civilisation, the Punyabhumi, the sacred geography. The constitutional formula, India, that is Bharat, is not redundancy. It is the acknowledgement of a dual identity that no other state on earth carries in quite the same combination.
What This Does and Does Not Mean
It does not mean that India-the-state gets a free pass. The current Indian state is seventy-nine years old, it is run by a government that can be criticised, it contains the same ordinary pathologies that every modern state contains, and we have criticised it on this blog many times and will continue to. Everything we have written about Operation Sindoor, about PM Modi, about Hindutva as a contemporary political movement rather than a civilisational commitment, stands.
It does mean that when the criticism slips from India-the-state to India-the-civilisation, we treat the latter with the reverence that any five-thousand-year-old civilisation is owed, and that we would similarly extend to Chinese, Persian, Egyptian, or Jewish civilisation in their respective registers. That reverence is not nationalism. It is the baseline respect due to any deep human inheritance.
The Third Register
But there is a further register still, and this is the one that is often missed. India is not only a nation-state and not only a civilisation. India is also, for roughly a billion people, a religious construct, a sacred geography that is worshipped as such. That third register is the one we would extend to Judaism, to Islam, to Christianity, to Buddhism, to any religion whose adherents hold its symbols and sites as sacred. It is not a claim unique to Hindus and it is not asking for special treatment. It is simply asking for the same respect that any religion receives when its sacred objects are discussed. The Ganga, the Gita, the murtis, the temples, the tirthas, are to Hindus what the Torah is to Jews, what the Quran and the Ka’aba are to Muslims, what the Gospels and Jerusalem are to Christians. Casual contempt for them reads, to the people who hold them sacred, exactly as casual contempt for the equivalents would read to those other communities. That is the third layer.
The Wings of India are Mid-Flight
The wings of India, to use the image from Brown Pandas, chose at Partition to civilisationally secede into another very venerable civilisation, the Islamic. Pakistan more explicitly, Bangladesh in a more qualified way because it kept Bengali language and literature as its sacred core and took the Muslim identity as its communal one. Every nation and every sovereign people has the right to choose what they want to be. We have no complaint about the choice. We observe it.
The Indus Is Also Ancient
A brief but important qualification. Pakistan as a nation-state in its 1947 form was an act of political construction, as Quaid-e-Azam himself effectively conceded. But Pakistan as a land, as a geography with civilisational depth, is not new at all. The Indus Valley civilisation, one of the four original cradles of human urban life, sits largely inside modern Pakistan. The Achaemenians conquered it. Alexander stopped at its eastern edge. Lahnda, Western Punjabi, covers roughly the whole of greater Punjab west of Lahore and defines a coherent linguistic-cultural space. The Indus itself has a natural geographic expression that drains the whole region, and Kashmir’s economic and physical logic runs down the Indus rather than over the hills.
Pakistan: Ancient Land, Young Name
The new Pakistan, post-1971, post-Bangladesh, is a far more coherent nation than the 1947 version ever was. Arguably it is an unbreakable one. The point is not that Pakistan lacks roots. The point is that Pakistan as a name, as a conscious identity, as an articulated civilisational self-understanding, did not exist before the twentieth century. The land is ancient. The self-conception is young. Those are different things, and the distinction matters.
But the observation has a consequence. When commenters on this blog invoke civilisational arguments to critique India, the civilisation they are critiquing is one of the two oldest continuous nation-civilisations on the planet, carrying a combination of ancient continuity and spiritual sacralisation that is unique.
A Note on Pakistan’s Depth
When they invoke civilisational arguments to critique Pakistan, the civilisation being critiqued is an Islamic one that is deeply venerable in its own right, but whose sovereign expression in the form of the Pakistani state is seventy-nine years old and whose relationship to the land it occupies is a question that the Pakistani intellectual tradition has, honourably, continued to wrestle with.
It is, frankly, a little farcical to read on the comment threads about how much Pakistanis love their Army Chief. The point of the Karachi living room, of the Lahore intellectual salon, of the Islamabad drawing room at two in the morning, is that Pakistanis are eviscerating about their own state in a way that has no parallel on the Indian side and very few parallels anywhere in the world.
They will question Partition. They will question the Two-Nation Theory. They will question the army, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the clerisy, their own founding myths, sometimes Jinnah that is QeA himself. Islam remains, broadly, a sacred cow, no pun intended, but almost nothing else does. That intellectual suppleness is the flipside of the structural confusion. A state that has to keep inventing itself produces a citizenry that is constantly interrogating itself. The result is a diversity of internal opinion that is genuinely unmatched in the region. It is also the reason Pakistan, which began as an imagined construct, has adapted and survived into a very real and now globally critical nation.
These are different kinds of critique. They require different calibrations. That is not a double standard. That is epistemic hygiene.
The Practical Upshot
What this means for the comment boards is simple. Criticise the Indian state, the Modi government, the BJP, the RSS, Hindutva as a political programme, specific laws, specific actions, specific communal incidents. All of that is on the table. We will criticise them ourselves. We have.
But criticism of the five-thousand-year-old civilisation, of Bharat, of the Sanskrit and Tamil inheritances, of the Dharmic traditions, of the sacred geography, of the continuity itself, is a different register of claim, and will be met with the weight that such a claim deserves. Not defensiveness. Weight. The same weight we would give to comparable claims made against Chinese civilisation, against Islamic civilisation, against Judeo-Christian civilisation, against any deep human inheritance that has shaped hundreds of millions of lives across millennia.
India that is Bharat is exceptional and it is unique. Those two words are not synonyms. Exceptional because the combination of registers is not found elsewhere. Unique because, even within the small peer group of nation-civilisations, India’s specific form of the combination stands alone.
The Baseline is the Same but How High can One Go
Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Gulf, Iran, Israel, every country we write about on this blog is treated with the respect due to a sovereign people. That floor is unconditional. But the ceiling is calibrated by the specific civilisational weight the country carries, and India’s ceiling is, by this particular measure, tied only with China’s, if not far greater.
We are not embarrassed by this. We are also not apologising for it. It is simply what is true. It is at the core of Brownness, in the Desi sense, since Latinos are arguably brown too, that our centre of gravity remains Bharat Mata ki Jai.
Just as a data point:
Markets in Pakistan have been told to close by 8 PM. My gym went from closing at 11 PM to closing at 10 and then to 8.
This is being done to conserve electricity.
Insane
An interesting point I found on X by someone –
The reason India does not have the energy insecurity of Pakistan is due to the massive coal reserves in the Eastern part of the country (Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, WB, Odisha).
India does around 70-75% from coal and 3-5% from LNG.
Pakistan is around 20-25% coal and 30-35% LNG.
Hence you are not seeing similar load shedding/blackouts in India due to the war.
Interestingly enough, the thorium reserves India plan on gaining full energy independence with are also located in the Eastern half of the country.
India Pakistan comparisons grow tiresome after a while..
Thought this was high signal enough about why India hasn’t been impacted electricity wise.
India of course uses imported fuel for transportation, cooking etc but electricity is fully self-reliant.
“High signal” comments do not mask intent.
Your comment wasn’t about why India didn’t suffer from load shedding in comparison to other GS countries but specifically to Pakistan.
It was a mutual obsessive antipathy that has drowned the Indian Subcontinent in dire poverty.
Iran Launches Shahab-3 at Haifa — Israel’s Port and Arsenal Turned to Ash Scott Ritter
https://web.facebook.com/reel/1533793921648155
In china the bureaucracy is supposed to be an analogue to the bureaucracy of old and the Chinese communist party dominance is framed as a continuation of mandate of heaven where as long as things are going well you can have complete authority.
I can understand the cultural inheritance that India may share with the civilizations in the past but what administrative institutions do we share with the past?
Those are good questions; presumably the Brits built on the Mughal-Muslims who built on the Hindu Guptas?
The thing is lack of subcontinent spanning empires means that a lot of rulers built their own infrastructure. Hence why Delhi has like seven histories.
And the Brits kind of destroyed everything tbh. Under the mughals and presumably before then there was a lot of trade within India between peninsular cities. The Brita destroyed this and rerouted all trade towards the coast. And india has still not yet revered that.
I dont know enough about the zamindari system to know how far back it goes but I have my doubts given the slow spread of agriculture in most of the subcontinent outside river valleys.
I think Indias history being one of multiplicity and similar arguments like in china of administrative continuity dont really work. Cultural continuity is there as sanskritic Culture moved along the different trade routes throughout the subcontinent creating a common-ish language we can all speak in while having our own difference and quirks.
Well said.
I am going to try and be brief because a serious rebuttal would easily run in to a few thousand words and I don’t have the patience for a show and tell.
A cursory glance at history would have informed you that we have had at least 4 almost pan-subcontinental empires in history. The British didn’t conquer India from the Mughals but from the Marathas (the last such empire) who at their peak controlled territory from Tanjore to Lahore latitudinally and from Gujarat to Bengal in longitude. It is one of Indian history’s great tragedies that we could not complete a Reconquista ala Spain and modernize on our terms like Japan because the Brits arrived at precisely the worst possible time because the Marathas didn’t get the luxury of enough time to consolidate.
As regards civilizational institutions not surviving like the bureaucracy in China, that’s at best a quibble with XTM’s argument. Different civilizational states indexed on different building blocks. China has always been a legalistic state where the letter of the law and bureaucratic enforcement have been prioritized to ensure stability as that’s what Chinese culture craves. Like with any consequential decision, this led to its own issues – epitomized by the Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising where 2 generals realized they were late to report for battle. This tardiness being punishable by death, led them to rebel against the Qin ruler. This story repeats itself every few hundred years where despite being a much more homogenous culture/society than India, regional leaders prefer to strike out on their own.
In India’s case, I’d argue the underlying institution that has survived and ensures cultural continuity is Sanskritic/Hindu/Dharmic culture. Indian society’s faults and merits are mostly attributable to Hindu/Indian philosophy. For some reason, this causes anxiety to Abrahamic peoples in India who consider it an attack on their identity but then again, Indian secularism is held to an impossibly high standard anyway so there’s not much that can be done about that. There is a lot more to be said but I suspect you will still not change your mind so I am going to put my position as this – if there are any civilizational states then even the truncated and mutilated modern Indian republic has a claim to being one. If you deny the existence of civlizational states altogether then your view is based on the same White/Western framework that you were so eager to criticize elsewhere on this blog i.e. the Westphalian system.
I am.not denying India has cultural continuity, or thst it can be seen as a civilizational state. I myself mentioned thst the cultural continuity is evident, ad seen below:
//Cultural continuity is there as sanskritic Culture moved along the different trade routes throughout the subcontinent creating a common-ish language we can all speak in while having our own difference and quirks.//
//I can understand the cultural inheritance that India may share with the civilizations in the past but what administrative institutions do we share with the past?//
What I wondered is what example are there of administrative continuity ala Chinese bureaucracy that, confucian ethics or mandate heaven. Not denying cultural continuity here.
I am.not denying India has cultural continuity, or thst it can be seen as a civilizational state.
May be I misunderstood. Anyway, in that case we are aligned.
What I wondered is what example are there of administrative continuity ala Chinese bureaucracy that, confucian ethics or mandate heaven. Not denying cultural continuity here.
Unfortunately I think the answer to this largely none (unless someone knows better). The Brits destroyed most existing structures. Getting colonised was truly the worst moment in Indian history (and there are many in the list).
Probably merits a longer discussion, but the land revenue systems of the colonial period were iterated from the previous Mughal or other systems. The building blocks of India’s administrative geography , the taluka/tehsil/mandal —> district/zilla has been quite stable from the early modern period to present as well, even when larger units of territory like linguistics states have been novel.
Yeah we can see continuities between british and to a certain extent the mughals but was the british colonization too intrusive that wait ruptured all administrative continuity just like how it destroyed the trade routes within India
Hindus had their own personal law based on manusmruti till the adoption of the Indian constitution.
My understanding has been that manu smruti was enshrined by Warren Hastings, as they were looking for an analogous primary text to the Bible in relation to common law. The great jurispudential framework for pre-colonial and non-islamicate India was the Mitakshara authored by the great scholar and jurist Vijnaneshwara of the Kalyan Chalukyas. He built on previous works, but this became the late medieval standard pan India ( but not Bengal) , with subvariations. At any rate, the manusmruti was only obliquely relevant to it, as the Vajnavalkya was the more relevant ancient shastra I guess. Even muslim qazis in the tughluq and bahamani and Adil Shahi eras referred to it for judgements in matters of Hindu personal law.
I think this is still the basis for Hindu succession law etc. Will have to check.
It is. There are 2 main schools followed for succession among Hindus – Mitakshara being the most common one and Dayabhaga which is followed primarily among the Bengalis and Assamese. Every law student in India is still taught this in Family Law.
This post is basically “soft Hindutva”. This is exactly the bias that I’ve been deploring. You’ve made my argument for me.
No non-Hindu is obliged to consider the Ganges sacred. No non-Muslim is obliged to consider the Kaaba or the Quran sacred. This is not an intellectually tenable claim.
It is obvious to all that when I criticize India I am criticizing the sovereign state.
I have no qualms with Indian “civilization”. Pakistan belongs to this same civilization. All the history you mention is our history too. I have been consistent on that point for years.
You are obviously emotional about India. That’s fine. But by that same token, I am emotional about Pakistan.
For me, nothing and no one is above the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. I’m entitled to that view point.
Is it?
Yes. This is how I define “soft Hindutva”.
No non-Hindu considers the Ganges sacred. No non-Hindu considers India’s borders sacred.
You may not like this but the academic consensus is that was the British that created the idea of the unitary Indian state. This whole idea that Pakistan was the “vivisection of Bharat Mata” is very problematic. First of all “Bharat Mata” is a Hindu goddess. No non-Hindu needs to take that concept seriously.
Secondly, the Muslim majority parts of the colony had the right to self-determination. That’s not up for dispute.
We keep having this same argument every few months. I really can’t say it any better than I said it in this post:
https://kabiraltaf.substack.com/p/on-civilization-states-vs-nation
This is a Precedent Post- unless you can rebut the points of this in an article systematically this becomes the Stated position of BP.
So in future threads this won’t be up for discussion; you are well aware of the position of Precedent Posts.
You have not rebutted anythign in a serious or systematic way.
“You have not rebutted anything is a serious or systematic way”–
I wrote an entire essay on why the “civilizational state” is a right-wing concept. I’m not inclined to rehash it at length here.
I’m fine with whatever your stated position is. I don’t have to agree with it. In this case, it’s not at all intellectually tenable.
regressive religion based secession is not at all intellectually ‘tenable’ either.
You just can’t resist can you?
This is a “low signal comment”.
One cannot “secede” from a colony only from a nation-state. Words have meanings.
The Muslim majority parts of the colony had the right to opt out from being included in a Hindu-majority nation-state.
We don’t need to constantly rehash this.
Of course TNT argues that it wasn’t just religion based.
The two “nations” were explictly defined as religious ones.
“Nothing and no one is above the Islamic Republic of Pakistan” yet you endlessly opine on what is best for India, a country (by your statements) is its existential enemy.
To thine own self be true.
So what? I’m a nationalist.
There are many Indian nationalists who would say “nothing and no one is above the Republic of India”.
This “endlessly opining” charge is not fair and must be rebutted. It is not done to tell intellectuals what they can and cannot “opine” about.
In any case, this applies equally to those on this site who have a clear obsession with Pakistan.
I’m happy to lay off India if the Indians here don’t say one word about Pakistan.
@X.T.M – I may be the Hamza of BP but you are the Ajay Sanyal. 🫡
And speaking of UN memberships – India is a founding signatory nearly 2 years before the creation of Pakistan.
Hi BB – can you, for the avoidance of doubt, state that you sincerely and truthfully regret making those comments to Kabir and are sincerely apologetic for it.
Kabir cannot be made to feel unsafe in this space (nor can anyone for that matter).
We want to be very clear that, under no circumstance; does BP advocate or accept statements of violence towards anyone or any of its members.
Thank you.
I apologize and regret making those comments.
Like agreed upon, I will no longer interact with either his comments or posts.
Correct me if I am wrong but I think the reason X.T.M and Omar are so pro India is because India is the only way for desis to become an “upper caste” race so to speak.
I know it might be politically incorrect but thing is White people are one of the “upper caste” races and the East Asians via their rapid economic growth have joined them.
Whites and East Asians exist in a world where their pop culture is globally dominant, their companies are global players, people aspire to visit those countries, they have strong passports which are welcome around the world etc.
India is the only one with its economy and population and civilization history which can hit those levels eventually (at least two-three decades off).
That also does provide a halo effect to other non Indian desis.
An example would be all of the “Indian” restaurants around the world simply because of it being a more famous cuisine compared to the other South Asian ones.
A non-desi example would be due to the rich GCC countries, Arabs are seen in a positivish light by many across the world even though most Arabs live in non GCC countries and are kind of poor (they have social indicators close to South India).
The Anglo white countries have a halo effect from the USA (by partaking in their movies/music). Don’t think the Beatles or Margot Robbie or Justin Bieber etc would have the careers without being white English speakers having access to America.
Of course India becoming richer means the other South Asian countries getting richer too via integration with such a large economy. Nepal and Bangladesh in particular were quite poor and economic integration with India has led to a parallel economic boom for them too tied with India’s.
At the end of the day, none of the non-Indian South Asian countries are even neighbours or share a common ethnicity/language. They are as alien to each other as some other non South Asian country. It is India which is the commonality between them all (as a common neighbour and having common languages/ethnicities).
Not particularly – many Pakistanis opt out of Desiness altogether.
But what happens when Indianess becomes part of the global language. “Global cool” that is.
When Pakistanis opt out of desiness, they appropriate whiteness I assume, not blackness or Hispanicness?
A lot of Asian Americans used to hate Asian culture back in the day because it would alienate them from their white peers but once anime, k-pop, video games found cachet among their white peers they are more than happy to embrace it.
It would be far easier for Pakistanis to appropriate Indianess (when it becomes part of the global lingua franca in whatever form) than whiteness.
I remember this Om Puri movie West is West about a British Pakistani family. One of the sons pretends to be an Indian to gain catchet amongst the hippie crowd using Hindu symbolism.
I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in the NYC metro area, but I have run across a surprisingly large number of Pakistanis (and Bangladeshis) who not only embrace their ‘desiness’, culturally and socially, but will present themselves to the ‘others’ as Indian.
I dont think we should see the world in terms of hierarchy and this white glorification is something that should be fought against not glorified.
Agreed.
That is the politically correct way but reality is not that way.
Thing is the “white” west does have more cultural catchet and only now East Asians have reached that level.
A lot of desis like to flaunt their Western (aka white) citizenship and education as a point of pride for example.
I am not speaking from politically correction.
This craving for white validation has real psychological consequences that are just not worth it.
Many Indians see themselves and their culture as ugly because of this craving for white validation.
Furthermore some of the cultural.values g white values especially in terms of blind devotion to ideology and beleif in capitalism, and the spreading of the manosphere to India are net negative in my opinion.
At no point has BB sought or glorified Western or White ideals in this post. He has only made a statement of fact – that WASP culture dominates the world today and many desis try to position themselves as White adjacent.
“White validation” is not important.
But gaining actual soft power has tangible real world benefits.
People are more willing to travel to your countries, buy your goods etc which provides actual material benefits to your people.
Example – Due to the power of Hollywood, even mediocre MCU movies make money globally contributing to Americans getting richer.
Similarly, foreign students flocking to the west for degrees fills their coffers.
I am not advocating for adopting “white values/culture” but rather get “Indian values/culture” to such a point that it starts accruing material benefits for Indians.
RRR is an example of a “very Indian” movie doing well globally just refining the masala aesthetic.
+1
using short-hand of joining the ‘new white’ or ‘global upper caste’ isn’t really glorification. Attempting to cast it in those terms is an attempt at undermining the sociological point that’s being made.
The pattern is familiar – if you can’t contradict the logic of your opponent’s argument, slander it by conflating it with an indefensible one, howsoever tangential.
And now you are attacking the left-wing Indian!
Some folks (intentionally or otherwise) do not differentiate between an ‘attack’ on the argument, and the individual. Its …quite immature.
Jeez cant a guy misunderstand? I have seen enough Indians in India and elsewhere try to ingratiate themselves with white elites, sometimes by stepping on those less fortunate and disadvantages than them like african Americans.
Given the obsession with white skin in India and how Indians queue up to take photos with white women, is it strange thst someone will interpret the below lines as wanting to be considered as one of them.
The mention of upper caste immediately brings to mind the process of sanskritization as well.
//Correct me if I am wrong but I think the reason X.T.M and Omar are so pro India is because India is the only way for desis to become an “upper caste” race so to speak.
I know it might be politically incorrect but thing is White people are one of the “upper caste” races and the East Asians via their rapid economic growth have joined them.
Whites and East Asians exist in a world where their pop culture is globally dominant, their companies are global players, people aspire to visit those countries, they have strong passports which are welcome around the world etc.//
I mean, not everyone is out to get you or put you down.
I understand what BB meant when he clarified, did not see the need to take this conversation further so did not respond.
Its a particularly …..old-school desi trait to flaunt status in a variety of forms – ranging from caste/ethnic origins, to financial status, academia and so on.
Its not just ‘desi’ of course, its one of the oldest and strongest human tendencies, globally.
An observation of a social trend is not necessarily ‘glorification’ though.
So savarkar was not very wide off the mark. If only he had the guile of a gangetic Brahmin…..
Aryan-dravidian synthesis !! Oh! Periar!!
Ayyo Shiva, this is new.
Hope this catches,
We have come a long way from aryan invasion to migration to synthesis.
One more thing – India is literally creating a new “economical and physical” logic by building tunnels through mountains and building rail lines over the world’s highest railway bridge.
Next up – Srinagar-Kargil-Leh railway
India’s overpopulation just breaks my heart though, leading to high emigration levels. Making the world Anti-Indian.
And on that population note, I would really like to know just how much migrations into the subcontinent during ancient times contributed to it, if at all?
They love using Russian Steppe ancestry to claim the religion & culture, but not their slice of the 2 billion.
Am I being silly? Sorry if I am off-topic. 🙏🏻🌷
India’s fertility is below replacement.
And Indian immigration will wean off in a couple of decades as India becomes richer/older, like it happened for the East Asians.
The new bogeyman will be the Africans.
@XTM – my response to Calvin seems to have gone to spam.
An interesting post.
On an aside, I don’t agree with that map in the header that shows Pakistani parts of AJK and GB under India. I know it’s the most circulated map you can find with a cursory google search so was likely used out of convenience and not bad faith but I wish the actual official UN recognized maps were used more often. I see a lot of western content creators do that when they show a map of south asia they got off google image search but they obviously don’t know better.
One more little thing that pricks hehe
Are you surprised that the Indian map was used?
Doesn’t change the reality that India will never get AJK and GB.
Pakistan is not Mexico and India is not the US.
Pakistan is a nuclear power.
Not surprised that particular map was posted as it’s whats commonly used online as its been circulated a lot more by our neighbors. Slightly annoyed but I do think more Pakistanis need to call it out and/or educate non south Asians when they post that map. We’re not even asking to use the Pakistani nationalist map which would include all of Greater J&K. Just to keep AJK and GB out, afterall any foreigner would need to transit through Pakistan to visit Skardu, Neelam valley, K2, or even Mirpur.
With you on this one. Denying the reality helps no one, including Indians.
I agree with India with the thesis of India as a civilization.
Here is what Allama Iqbal wrote in Tarana Hindi in 1904.
hindī haiñ ham vatan hai hindostāñ hamārā
yūnān o misr o ruumā sab miT ga.e jahāñ se
ab tak magar hai baaqī nām-o-nishāñ hamārā
kuchh baat hai ki hastī miTtī nahīñ hamārī
sadiyoñ rahā hai dushman daur-e-zamāñ hamārā
So it is not only just a Hindutvawadi idea
Is this from “Saray jahan say acha hay Hindustan hamara”?
I think the concept of “civilizational states” in general is a right-wing concept.
This is what Shashi Tharoor argues.
Yes. It’s from Sarey Jahan say accha
[…] centre of gravity is Indic. Bharat Mata ki Jai (the very same slogan BB threatened Kabir with). We said so in the parent post and we will not […]
[…] Subcontinent (Jambudvīpa) must centre Bharat Mata ki Jai and Vande Mataram. The unspeakably ancient & sacred Hindu civilisation kept its mothers as gods. The land is feminine, the river is feminine, the nation is feminine. […]