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Lord Zoroaster’s Fire Still Burns
X.T.M uses a Molla Nasreddin cartoon of Zoroaster to argue that Persian customs survived Islamisation. He holds that Iran is a civilisation-state, not a regime problem, so Western pressure is…
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A Pakistani Wedding That Refused Not to Be Indian
X.T.M reads the wedding of Nawaz Sharif’s grandson, with Indian designers and Indic styling, as evidence of Indic soft power. He argues that Pakistani weddings show continuity of a subcontinental…
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How will the Iranian Regime Survive? By Becoming Persian & Crowning a Pahlavi Queen
X.T.M argues that the Iranian regime can survive only by de-ideologising: Islam should become a civilisational substrate with Persian features. He cites the English Restoration as a model, and says…
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India’s Eastern Face: Where Civilisation Dissolves Instead of Ending
X.T.M argues that India’s eastern edge differs from its hard northwest, northern and southern boundaries: it thins instead of ending. He says Indic culture spread to Southeast Asia through merchants…
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South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism
X.T.M argues that South Asia is a bureaucratic euphemism from American area studies, not a neutral term. He holds that India is the old name for the whole subcontinent and…
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Greenland, Trump, and the Comfort of White Intermediaries
X.T.M argues the Greenland debate is really about a pattern across settler-colonial societies, where Indigenous political power is mediated by white-presenting figures who are legible and safe to Western capitals,…
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New DNA research paper sheds light on proto-Dravidian and Indus Valley Civilization genetics.
A self-described non-specialist reads a new European Journal of Human Genetics paper on the Koraga, which proposes a distinct ‘Proto-Dravidian’ ancestry from around 2400 BCE, and asks what it implies…
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Between Arab Conquest and Persian Conversion: The Sasanian Inheritance
X.T.M uses Hugh Kennedy and Ira Lapidus to argue that conquest and conversion were different processes in Iran, rejecting both the viral claim of mass forced conversion and the opposite…
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The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated
X.T.M says reports of the site’s decline are exaggerated: monthly readers fell from roughly 55-65k to 33k, then recovered to about 53k, with Bangladesh a surprise growth market, and he…
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Empire of Incorporation versus Empire of Extraction
X.T.M distinguishes empires of incorporation, such as the Chinese, Ottoman and Mughal, from commercial empires of extraction such as the French, English and Dutch, citing the contrast between Mughal-era scarcity…
The Indian Subcontinent Argues with Itself
Sunday, 8 November 2026Since December 2010 · 4,170 posts · 93,920 comments
