India is the successor state of the Mughal Empire (and the various Sultanates)

April 29, 2026 Bombay Badshah 117 Comments filed under Bombay Badshah, Precedent

A precedent post on who is the successor state of the Mughal Empire (as specified by X.T.M in a comment)

There has been a lot of back-and-forth in the comments section about who gets to “claim” the Mughals.

The Republic of India is the successor state of the Mughal Empire as I explain below.

Note: When I use India below I mean the current day Republic of India, not the region of “India” which also encompasses some territories of the modern day states of Bangladesh and Pakistan

The Land

The Republic of India encompasses around 70 percent of the Mughal Empire at its greatest extent.

Again, possession of majority of the land is not a necessary condition. The UK is the successor state of the British Empire, Turkey is the successor state of the Ottoman Empire and so on. But having possession of the majority of the land makes the case stronger.

The reason that the UK, Turkey, France etc are the successor states of various empires is because they house the “core” – the capital, the ruling elite, the major monuments etc.

The Capital

The Mughal Empire lasted for around 300 odd years.

It’s capitals were:
Agra for 61 years
Delhi for 228 years
Fatehpur Sikri for 14 years
Lahore for 12 years

The first and last capitals were in India and for 96% of the existence of the empire, the capital was in India.

These capitals still exist in India and are UNESCO World Heritage Sites as well as Monument of National Importance by the Archaeological Survey of India.

The last capital is still used by India in official functions but more on that below.

Agra Fort, Agra

Continue reading India is the successor state of the Mughal Empire (and the various Sultanates)

Pakistani Diversity

April 29, 2026 X.T.M 1 Comment filed under X.T.M

Q’s comment, on Kabir’s excellent post, deserves to be reproduced in full.

Several points are wrong here:

I have never actually met a Pakistani who thinks they are Arab or Turk ethnically. Claiming lineage is not ethnicity, not even the Syeds identify with Arabs although they will try to flex their Syed status occassionally. Many Syeds in the family, never heard anyone claim they were ethnically Arab.

Ergutral did not make people in Pakistan think they were Turks, what they identified with was the Islamic history and mannerisms being portrayed. A pasthun guy told me that it portrayed ‘our history’ and while I completely understdood the ‘our’ part because he was using it in an Islamic context (because he is a proud Pasthun, not Arab or Turk), but I did correct him that it was mostly fiction. Continue reading Pakistani Diversity

You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture

April 29, 2026 X.T.M 22 Comments filed under Precedent, X.T.M

A precedent post on hybridity, custodial duty, and the elites who want it both ways

The argument running through the recent threads is sharper than the usual India versus Pakistan braggadocio. It is a claim about high culture itself. A civilisation cannot demolish a man’s mosque and claim his high culture in the same breath. The two moves cancel. The elites on both sides of the 1947 line have been performing both moves for eighty years, and the contradiction is now visible.

What high culture is

High culture is the foundational settlement of values, ordinarily anchored in religion, that a civilisation runs on. It can be syncretic in formation. Plural ownership is harder to sustain, and most attempts eventually close into a single settlement or fracture into rival ones; some imperial frames (Ottoman, Mughal, the Republic of India itself) did hold the tension for longer than the simple model would predict. The point is not that plurality is impossible. The point is that plurality is unstable, and the instability is what generates events like 1992.

England is the cleanest worked example of closure. The English high culture is a hybridisation of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and an absorbed Celtic remainder. Scotland and Wales sit inside the matrix without breaking it. The hybridisation closed; one settlement emerged.

Ireland is the test case in the negative. The same Anglophone substrate produced a different high culture in the Catholic south, and in the Catholic pockets of the north, because religion did the foundational work and religion would not blend. Two islands, one language family, two high cultures. Language is the medium. Religion is the substrate.

Ludwig von Mises, in Nation, State, and Economy, argued the related half. The nation is a speech community, but the speech community is shaped by what the school teaches and what the church says. Plattdeutsch villages on the Dutch border could have gone either way two centuries ago; the descendants would now be just as good Hollanders or just as good Germans, depending only on where the school and the church sat. Language carries national consciousness. The religious settlement decides which language wins.

Notre Dame: The custodial bargain Continue reading You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture