Two Colonisations, One Border: What the Data Actually Says About Bengal’s Post-1971 Demographic Story

April 24, 2026 X.T.M 32 Comments filed under X.T.M

Check BB’s personal anecdote on the Northeast.

As mentioned, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal has removed 9.1 million names, 2.7 million of them under contested adjudication. The argument has compressed itself into two bad positions. Either every deletion is disenfranchisement, or every deletion is a Bangladeshi caught. Neither is true, and the census of the last hundred years tells a more specific story than either side wants.

The received wisdom on Northeast India collapses into one sentence: Bangladeshi Muslims are flooding across the border. The received wisdom is partly wrong and mostly incomplete. A narrower reading of the census, focused on the actual border districts, tells a stranger story. There are two demographic colonisations in eastern India, not one. They run in opposite religious directions, and Indian statecraft has treated them as opposites: one ratified, one criminalised.

Tripura: the Hindu Bengali takeover

Tripura*: 1951: 71% Hindu, 7% Muslim (with ~21% still counted under tribal religions separately).

Today: 83% Hindu, 9% Muslim.

In 1941, tribals were 50% of Tripura. By 2011, 32%. Partition and the 1971 war did the rest.

The population that replaced the Kokborok, Reang, and Jamatia is Bengali Hindu, not Muslim. Tripura’s Muslim share today is 9%, below the all-India average. The Northeast state most transformed by Partition and 1971 is the one that became a Hindu Bengali colony.

South Tripura district is the cleanest data point. The ST share there is 17%. The Bengali Hindu majority there is overwhelmingly composed of descendants of refugees who crossed between 1947 and 1971.

*Note on Tripura: the Hindu figure jumped partly because tribals were reclassified as Hindu between 1951 and 1971 in the census. Real Hindu Bengali influx adds on top of that statistical shift.

Assam border districts: the Muslim Bengali case

Assam: 1951: 72% Hindu, 25% Muslim.

Today: 61% Hindu, 34% Muslim. Continue reading Two Colonisations, One Border: What the Data Actually Says About Bengal’s Post-1971 Demographic Story

Honour and Acid: The Great Indus Split

April 24, 2026 X.T.M 2 Comments filed under Precedent, X.T.M

We published on the virginity economy yesterday. In the thread, we remembered a very line to us we could not leave alone. Honour killing is what Pakistan took from Indus culture. Acid throwing is what the Indian side took. The data is messier than the line. The line is still broadly right.

The Honour Killing Skew

Between 2018 and 2022, Punjab alone booked 841 incidents with 1,058 victims, 799 of them women. UNFPA’s working estimate is up to 5,000 deaths per year once karo-kari, siyahkari, and “natural cause” burials are folded back in.

India’s NCRB figures for honour killing sit in the low tens per year. This is an undercount so severe it is a category error. Most Indian cases are filed under IPC Section 302 as ordinary murder. The same is true in Pakistan. The difference is that Pakistan’s press, HRCP, and Dawn keep the score. India’s hotspots are Haryana, western UP, and Tamil Nadu (caste-coded).

Adjusted for population, Pakistan’s honour killing intensity is roughly an order of magnitude higher than India’s.

The Acid Attack Skew Continue reading Honour and Acid: The Great Indus Split

Why is Pakistani Culture obsessed with Policing Female Virginity?

April 24, 2026 X.T.M 167 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

We were at our favourite Persian restaurant. A young woman two tables away, not Persian herself, was telling her Persian father about her female friend in continental Europe.

The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.

The dream was the trigger.

The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.

We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.

What Sana Cheema Saw

Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.

She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.

Qandeel Baloch, in the Same Line Continue reading Why is Pakistani Culture obsessed with Policing Female Virginity?

A Brief History of Hindustani Music

April 24, 2026 Kabir 5 Comments filed under Kabir

As a follow up to some comments on the thread on Afghan musicians, I am sharing this brief history of Hindustani music.

Hindustani (North Indian) Classical Music is one of the most beautiful products of the Indo-Islamic culture of North India (including today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh). It would not exist in its current form without the Muslim influence, having evolved in the Mughal courts after it left the precincts of the temples, which is where Hindu music was originally based. I do not know much about Carnatic Music or South India in general so I will restrict my observations to the North Indian system only.

It is my aim in this post to briefly outline the history of Hindustani music. If there is interest, I can then go back and fill in the details as and when I get time.

Like all Indian Music, Hindustani Classical originated during the Vedic period. It was at this time that the distinction between “Gandharva” (ritual music) and “gana” (incidental music) became clear. One of the most ancient treatises on the performing arts in India is the “Natya Shastra”, attributed to the sage Bharata Muni and dated to between 200 BCE and 200 CE. The text consists of 36 chapters with a cumulative total of 6000 poetic verses describing performance arts. The subjects covered by the treatise include dramatic composition, structure of a play, and the construction of a stage to host it, genres of acting, body movements, make up and costumes, role and goals of an art director, the musical scales, musical instruments and the integration of music with art performance. The treatise is also notable for its aesthetic “Rasa” theory. It is in this text that the seven basic notes (the saptak) are named: Sadja (Sa), Rsabha (Re), Gandhara (Ga), Madhyama (Ma), Panchama (Pa), Dhaivata (Dha), and Nishad (Ni). These note names are still used today, equivalent to the Western Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti.

With the arrival of the Muslim rulers of North India, music emerged from the temples and became part of the entertainment of the royal courts. While for Hindus, music was preeminently religious in subject matter and spirit, for the Muslims it was a purely secular art. Hazrat Amir Khusrow (1253-1325) was a Sufi musician, poet and scholar. He was a mystic and a spiritual disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi (1238-1325). Born near Etah in modern day Uttar Pradesh, he was the son of Amir Saif ud Din Mahmud, a man of Turkic extraction and his Indian Rajput wife, Bibi Daulatnaz. Khusrow grew up in the house of his maternal grandfather, Rawat Arz (known by his title as Imad-ul-Mulk). He grew up very close to the traditions and culture of Indian society and was not alienated from it in the way that the ruling Turkic classes may have been. Continue reading A Brief History of Hindustani Music