Is Kabir Right?

Kabir’s claim, is that much of the Saffroniate comes to Brown Pundits for one purpose: to litigate Pakistan, and to litigate the Muslim. Take that fixture away and the room goes quiet. The post on Hindustani classical music sinks without a ripple. The translated short story draws three comments and dies. Only the threads that arm the two camps against each other run to hundred+.

Is he right?

The Excuse for Failure

A people that can place the source of its troubles outside itself has bought something precious: a permanent excuse. The bribe demanded at the land-registration counter, the canal water that never reaches the tail-end farmer, the girl child wanted less than her brother, the stunted toddler in a country that exports grain, the sanitation worker still going down into the drain by hand in 2026. All of it can be referred outward, to a hostile neighbour and a treacherous minority, and so none of it need be referred inward. This is not an Indian disease alone. It is a human one.

So let us put the question to the only test that settles it, the counterfactual. Suppose Pakistan had never been cut out of the map in 1947. Suppose, harder, that there had never been a single Muslim in the subcontinent. Would caste dissolve? It would not. Caste predates Islam in India by more than a thousand years; it is ours, structural, home-grown, and it would outlive the disappearance of every mosque. Would the clerk return the bribe? Would the water reach the field? Would the daughter be wanted? Not one of these turns on the existence of a Muslim. To say otherwise is not analysis. It is an alibi dressed as an argument.

The Mythologisation against the Other

Here is the harder point, and Kabir’s critics will like it least. The unified Hindu identity that now speaks with such confidence is not as old as it believes itself to be. The civilisation is ancient, certainly: the temples, the Sanskrit and Tamil canons, the philosophical schools, the unbroken liturgies are the inheritance of millennia, and no one sensible disputes it. What is recent is something narrower and more political: the welding of a thousand jatis, sampradayas, languages and regions into a single bloc that votes as one, takes offence as one, and calls itself Hindu in the singular. That bloc is barely more than a century old, and it was assembled, in large part, against a foil.

A Bengali, a Tamil and a Marwari did not wake one morning feeling themselves one political people. They were made into one, and the making needed an other against whom the new self could be drawn. Precisely because the religion is old, people mistake the bloc for something equally old. The conflation is not an accident. It is the trick. Remove the foil and the construction sways. This is why the enemy can never be permitted to vanish. The enemy is not an obstacle to the project. The enemy is the essence of the project.

The Israel Parable

The exemplar is usually Israel: small, encircled, and rich. Asked to look inward, the nationalist looks outward yet again, this time for a model rather than a culprit. And even the model will not hold the weight he puts on it. Israel’s rise rested on a stack of external inputs no honest account omits: American underwriting on a scale extended to no other state, German reparations, a diaspora that arrived with capital and credentials already in hand, and successive waves of highly skilled immigration. Strip those away and the parable thins to very little. A nation may grow while defining itself against its neighbours. Whether it grows because of that stance, or in spite of it and on the back of other people’s money, is exactly the question the comparison is built to avoid. The dream, like the blame, has been outsourced.

The Saffron Liberal

We have never spared the Crescentiate here, and we will not start now: the regressive strain in that quarter is real, it is not a Western fabrication, and it has earned every word of criticism sent its way. But the Saffroniate liberal is a particular specimen, because his liberalism runs on a switch. It is summoned only when a Muslim is in the frame. The veil, the triple talaq, the treatment of women become matters of scalding principle. The same principle falls silent before the khap panchayat, the honour killing, the dowry death, the temple that still bars the menstruating woman at the door. A liberalism that activates only against the other is not liberalism. It is a stick that has been told it is a value.

The recent thread showed the mechanism with unusual clarity. A provocation was dangled, the bait was taken, and the comments filled. But watch what the inquiry then became. It became, entirely, an interrogation of how Islam treats its women.

Casting Stones

One does not expiate one’s own sins by casting stones at another’s. For a while it can feel like absolution: the stone is thrown and the crowd roars. But the sin sits exactly where it was, untouched, because nothing has been examined. A culture reforms only when it turns the interrogative eye inward, and inward is the one direction the externalising habit forbids.

Empire Comes for All

The Saffroniate, in its current form, has staked itself on Empire. It treats alignment with the great Western power as a kind of insurance, on the assumption that to stand beside the strong is to be kept safe by the strong. By a sharp irony, it is the traditionalist Muslim, the very figure paraded as the face of backwardness, who remains one of the last genuinely anti-imperial constituencies left standing, wary of the order the modern Hindu nationalist has chosen to embrace.

The arrangement is not new, and the historical rhyme is worth hearing. When George V came to India in 1911, the literary forms of the subcontinent were bent to receive him. A George-nameh was composed, the imperial monarch fitted into the mould of the Persian Book of Kings, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, as though he were a late heir to Jamshid and to Bahram Gur the hunter. The Persianate epic had long lent kings a borrowed grandeur, from the Qajars’ Shahanshah-nameh onward; now it lent the loan to an Englishman. And the single ancient royal tradition this particular heir can be said to have honoured is recorded, with admirable economy, by the archive itself.

A George-nameh was written for George V’s visit to India in 1911. The king honoured the ancient traditions of Persian rulers in at least one way: in several weeks his passion for hunting decimated the tiger population of Nepal.

Cambridge University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, QM/21/67

The panegyric did its work, and the slaughter passed quietly beneath it. That is what glossing means in practice. The violence is not denied; it is dressed. A century on, tsubmission to the strong is presented as prudence, even as protection.

And then the order reminds everyone what it is. This week, enforcing its blockade of Iran, the United States put munitions into the engine room of a tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Three of the dead were Indians. Not soldiers, not combatants: merchant seamen, working men, killed by the very Empire whose favour the nationalist courts as a shield. India lodged its sharpest protest of the war and summoned the Americans. It will change nothing. The lesson, for anyone willing to take it, is plain. Empire does not pause to check the religion of the men in the engine room. Empire comes for us all, and it never asks whose side you imagined you were on.

The Beginning of the Cure

So Kabir is right, that the fixation is real. But it is not a bad habit to be scolded out of existence. It is a function, and it does real work. It supplies an enemy so that we need never supply an explanation, and it lends a young, assembled identity the solidity it cannot yet find from within.

The day this Commentariat can carry hundreds of comments on caste, or on water, or on the daughter who is not wanted, with not one of them reaching for Pakistan or Islam, is the day the patient has started to mend. We are not there. We are nowhere near. But to name the disease, as Kabir has done, is where every cure begins.

We take up the Shahnameh and its long afterlife, the George-nameh among its odder descendants, at greater length in a forthcoming BRAHM Newsletter.