The Meltwater Carries No Passport

July 5, 2026 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace” – Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. First of two parts.

(Quotes are drawn from a rough live transcript and lightly edited for clarity; read them as close paraphrase rather than verbatim.)

There was something quietly apt about the calendar. On the Fourth of July, the day one republic celebrates the border it drew for itself, a room in Stockholm spent ten hours mourning a border drawn for someone else. Mela Nordic’s day-long commemoration of the 1947 Partition, Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace, earned its title honestly. The programme ran from Sarah Gilley questioning the manufacture of “normalcy” in Kashmir, through Farooq Sulehria’s provocation “India as Media Subimperialism!”, to the launch of Amrita Ghosh’s India’s Imperial Formations: Race in South Asia, to Shaukat Ali Kashmiri of the United Kashmir Peoples National Party; a man whose politics manage the rare feat of being equally inconvenient to Islamabad and to Delhi. Divergent voices in the strict sense: nobody in that room agreed on everything, and the organisers plainly did not want them to.

The late afternoon saw two back-to-back talks by two of the subcontinent’s most stubborn journalists. Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of the Kashmir Times, joined by video link for “Bridging the Noise: Media and the Art of Solidarity in South Asia.” Hers is the name on the Supreme Court petition that forced the January 2020 ruling that indefinite internet shutdowns are impermissible and that any shutdown must answer to proportionality and be published; a judgment that wrote the rules without lifting the blackout, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terrain she works. She was followed, in person, by Beena Sarwar, journalist, filmmaker, teacher, co-founder of the Southasia Peace Action Network, whose talk is the subject of Part II.

Heard in sequence, the two talks assembled themselves into something neither quite was alone: Bhasin supplied the blueprint, Sarwar the working prototype. This first part takes the blueprint, and holds it up against the graveyard of everyone who has tried to build it before.

The one story

Bhasin’s talk built to a set of concrete proposals, and the sharpest of them was a reframing so simple it is astonishing how rarely one hears it. The single most important story in South Asia right now, she argued, is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers; and it is being covered entirely through national lenses. Pakistan’s floods. India’s heatwaves. Nepal’s vanishing ice. The poisoned politics of the Indus Waters Treaty. Four national stories, four national blame games. “These are not separate stories,” she said. “They are one story“; the story of a shared ecosystem under shared threat. The meltwater, after all, does not stop to have its papers checked at Wagah.

From that reframing flowed her first proposal: well-funded, editorially independent cross-border journalism collaborations; joint investigations, joint reporting on shared rivers and shared climate data, joint coverage of health crises, literacy, and what is actually happening inside each country’s universities and laboratories. Not from the nationalist angle, not from the blame angle, but from the angle of what is actually happening.

Continue reading The Meltwater Carries No Passport

The Imaginarium of Shyam Thandar: Hybrids of Love (Kabir’s Open Thread)

July 4, 2026 3 Comments filed under Kabir

1) The July issue of The Peshawar Review is out now.  BP readers may be interested in this piece by Sourav Roy entitled “The Imaginarium of Shyam Thandar: Hybrids of Love”. 

Shyam Thandar (b. 1972, India) is a self-taught artist who started painting late one October night in 2018 and hasn’t stopped since. Like many self-taught, outsider artists, he works with different media and techniques and works at an astonishing speed. His works have been published in many online and print publications in India and abroad, and collected by patrons across two continents. Shyam has most recently shown in Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India.

Here is an example of one of Shyam’s paintings. This one is entitled “Didimoni”

We also have a poem by Professor Harbans Mukhia entitled “be-kheyaali” (Amnesia) recited by Shan-e-Ahmed.

2) Joe Sacco: Where do religious minorities fit in India?|Southasia Review of Books #39

For more than three decades, Joe Sacco has been at the forefront of graphic journalism, combining rigorous reporting with comics to document conflict, displacement and political violence. His landmark works, including ‘Palestine’ and ‘Footnotes in Gaza’, have helped define an entire genre and inspired generations of cartoonists and journalists. His latest book, ‘The Once and Future Riot’ (2025), turns its attention to India, examining the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh and the political forces that shaped them. In doing so, it asks larger questions about violence, democracy, memory and the stories societies tell about themselves in the aftermath of conflict. The book has also become the subject of a controversy of its own. Earlier this year, Penguin India decided not to distribute it after raising a series of legal and editorial objections, prompting wider debates about censorship and how histories of violence are told.

 

Two House Precedents

July 2, 2026 12 Comments filed under Precedent, X.T.M

We apologise for overriding 0M-3’s excellent post, on Geography is Power, but we are pushing it up and allowing it to breathe.

We also second Kabir’s proposal for a book club, with Midnight’s Children as our inaugural read ahead of India and Pakistan’s Independence anniversaries in mid-August.

One. Online-safety reports go by email. From now, any online-safety violation must reach us by email. That is the investigative channel. If it does not land in the inbox, it is not in front of us, and for our purposes a violation we never see did not happen. Send it to us directly.

Two. What Brown Pundits is about: biodiversity and bio-density. Two aims. Density: a 20 comments per post. Diversity: five voices per thread, not a closed loop of a handful names. A hundred comments from a small circle is a monologue. A hundred from ten is an ecosystem, and the ecosystem is what we are here to keep alive.

A post unlikely to reach either metric may be held in abeyance or returned for reworking.

We have felt the losses. BB stepping back, and Indosaurus before that, cost us more than volume. They were bridges. BB in particular always found the connective tissue to sports and the economy that the rest of us missed. So read this as an open invitation home. We will be reaching out, and if either of you is reading, the room is still yours.

Geography is Power

July 1, 2026 8 Comments filed under Precedent

The goal of this post will be to act as a counter to XTM’s post about geography not being power. It will rely on realism as a doctrine of international relations to de-cypher the significance geography has had on the Indian Subcontinent and how it has affected the trajectories of the nations within it.

Geography initially reared its head in discussions of strategy during the times of Mackinder and Mahan in the early 1900s. Where Mackinder so boldly stated that “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”. However, these words were written in colonial era Britain as a device to fear monger about the Russians as they were the perfect counter to their strategy of controlling the world with sea power through internal lines of transportation through Cold Siberia. With that cold logic Russia which had been the ally of British through the two world wars became a target. Continue reading Geography is Power

Great South Asian Novels in English

July 1, 2026 19 Comments filed under Kabir

In an attempt to change the subject from India/Pakistan sniping (side note: I find it very telling that somehow any post on BP eventually becomes a referendum on Pakistan)  I am offering this list of great South Asian novels written in English.  The restriction to English is partly because English is the main language I read in and partly for simplicity’s sake. India alone has dozens of major languages in which Literature is produced.  In order to make the list manageable,  a restriction to English is necessary.

In no particular order:

1) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth– This is one of my favorite novels not only in the category of South Asian Literature but globally.

2) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie–  Probably one of the greatest Indian novels

3) Shame by Salman Rushdie– one of the best novels written about Pakistan

4) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry–  an amazing description of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency

5) Cracking India/ Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa– A powerful depiction of Partition seen from the perspective of a 10 year old Parsi girl in Lahore. Sidhwa was one of the greatest Pakistani writers in English. She’s particularly important because she was a member of a non-Muslim minority.

6) The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid– one of the best depictions of “War on Terror” Pakistan

7) Haroon And The Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie–  This is supposedly a children’s story but it’s a great allegory about freedom of speech

8) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy– one of the greatest Indian novels in English

9) A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammad Hanif– One of the best Pakistani novels in English.  Explores the death of General Zia in a helicopter crash

10) An Equal Music by Vikram Seth–  This novel has nothing to do with South Asia but it’s on this list because Seth is Indian.  It appealed to me primarily because I’ve been trained in Western music.

11) The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi–  A great novel by a British Pakistani writer. Set in London in 1989, the story deals with the clash between liberalism and fundamentalism and the fallout of the Rushdie affair.

Bonus:  My Temples, Too and River of Fire by Qurratulain Hyder– I’m breaking my own rule here since these were originally written in Urdu but Hyder herself translated them into English.  Essential reading on the experience of Muslims in UP around the time of Partition.

Also see this list from “Brown History” entitled “30 South Asian Novels to Read Before You Die” 

I’d be interested to hear everyone’s thoughts about any novels on this list or any other South Asian novels in English that you all would recommend.

 

 

Pink boots

June 30, 2026 13 Comments filed under Uncategorized

1.oh God!! Germany out.
2. Brazil scrapping through. Japan gave Good fight.
3. Morocco hanging on. Netherlands out. What a game!! 
4. Can’t believe and understand why grown up men should wear pink boots.
5. Kick and run northern European football is out, south European irritating tiki-taka is the normal now.
6. People are commenting on the large number of African-descended individuals in the game.

Continue reading Pink boots

Geography Is Not Power

June 28, 2026 48 Comments filed under X.T.M

The Indus Waters Treaty and the Nile

While the previous thread argues about whether Panini held a Pakistani passport, a more useful quarrel is flowing past us. In April 2025, after the Pahalgam massacre, India held the Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance. It did this the day after the attack, a fortnight before the missiles of Operation Sindoor. The water came first. That order tells us something: New Delhi reached for the river before it reached for the air force, because it believes the river is the better weapon. We think it is wrong about that, and the reason why takes us a long way from the subcontinent, to the Blue Nile.

The instinct underneath India’s move, and underneath most of the commentary on it, is that the country upstream holds the whip. Sit at the top of the river and you control the tap. It is a tidy idea and it is false. Whether the upstream state is master or supplicant depends not on the map but on which side can make the other bleed.

India is running a bluff it cannot yet call. The treaty India suspended was built to survive exactly this. Signed in 1960 under World Bank mediation, it gave Pakistan the three western rivers and India the three eastern ones, and it contains no exit door. A party cannot lawfully walk away or hold it in abeyance; it stays in force until both sides agree to change it. India knows this, which is why, when it asked twice, in 2023 and 2024, to renegotiate, and Pakistan refused to come to the table, India was left with grievance and no remedy. The Court of Arbitration has since ruled, more than once, that the suspension has no standing and that the limits on India’s water control still bind. India calls the court illegal and presses on.

Continue reading Geography Is Not Power

Who did the Brits conquer India from?

June 27, 2026 112 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

We asserted that West crushed and humiliated the Mughals. 0M-3 answered that the humiliation was an inside job: it was the Marathas who broke Mughal power, and when Delhi passed to the Company in 1803 the treaty was signed with the Marathas, the emperor not even a party to it.

Did the British take India from the Muslims or from the Hindus? The empire the British inherited had already fallen apart, and it had fallen apart along lines that almost had nothing to do with faith.

The British conquered successor states, not an empire.

Aurangzeb died in 1707, and within a generation the Mughal map was a fiction. Hyderabad went its own way under the Nizam by the 1720s, Bengal and Awadh became nawabis in all but name, and the Marathas took the centre. The spectacular blows did not come from London. Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor, and left tens of thousands dead in the streets in a single day. The Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani came back to plunder again and again after him. By 1788 the emperor Shah Alam had been blinded by an Afghan adventurer and was living as a pensioner of his Maratha keepers. When General Lake walked into Delhi in 1803 he collected a prisoner the Marathas had been holding, not a throne. The British did not topple the Mughals. They arrived to read the will.

The frontiers were not religious frontiers.

Press the communal map onto the eighteenth century and it tears at once. Tipu Sultan, the Muslim tiger of Mysore, ruled a country that was mostly Hindu and ran his revenue through a Brahmin, Purnaiah. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh lion of Lahore, ruled a Punjab that was mostly Muslim. The Maratha and Nawabi states alike were administered by Hindu clerks and financed by Hindu bankers. There was no Muslim India and no Hindu India waiting to be defeated. There were states, and the faith of the man at the top told you very little about the people beneath him, still less about the men who ran his treasury.

The conquest was paid for and fought by Indians.

Plassey in 1757 is remembered as a battle. It was closer to a purchase. Siraj-ud-Daula lost because his own commander, Mir Jafar, stood aside, and Mir Jafar stood aside because the Jagat Seths, the richest Hindu banking house in Bengal, had decided their Nawab was bad for business and bought his army out from under him. Seven years later at Buxar the Company beat the Nawab of Awadh, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor himself, all three together, and then took the right to tax Bengal to pay for the next war. The armies that did this work were Indian, sepoy and Hindu and Muslim in the great majority, marching on credit raised against Indian land. The Company was paramount because Indians found it paid to make it so.

The disunity is the story.

The faith of each beaten ruler is almost beside the point. The British did not conquer a religion. They completed a hostile takeover of a bankrupt estate, with Indian money, Indian troops, and a long row of victories over rulers who were Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh by turns and who would never combine.

Brown Pundits