How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

The comments have turned into a meditation over whether Urdu ends up as one more dialect of Hindi. I think the fight is about something bigger. Partition took one Muslim political world and cut it into three. Seventy-nine years on, one of the three sets the culture for all of them, and it is the one that took the language.

By reference Muslims I do not mean the most devout or the richest. I mean the group whose speech, dramas, music and religious manner supply the default picture of a South Asian Muslim outside its own borders.

Three blocs, one language

Pakistan has ~230 million Muslims, India ~200 million, Bangladesh ~150 million. In 1971, when the second partition finished the job, the three stood almost level at about 60 million each. Pakistan has pulled ahead since by having more children. Nobody planned any of it. The Muslim League asked for a homeland for the Muslims of India, got two-thirds of them inside one country, and lost half of those within a generation.

The three blocs were never one culture. A Bengali cultivator, a Punjabi Jat, a Sindhi tenant and a Lucknow ashraf household shared a mosque and not much else. What they shared at the top was one political world and one elite language. That language was Urdu, and Urdu was not Pakistani. It grew up in Delhi and matured in Lucknow. Ghalib is buried in Delhi and Mir in Lucknow. Aligarh taught it. The Punjab, which became Pakistan’s heart, spoke something else entirely, as I argued in my last post.

Pakistan made it the state language anyway. In March 1948 Jinnah stood in Dhaka and told the Bengalis they could keep Bengali for their province, but that the state would speak Urdu and only Urdu. Few in either wing spoke it at home then. The 2023 census puts it at 9.25% of Pakistanis now. The Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch learnt it at school. On 21 February 1952 police shot Bengali students in Dhaka for objecting, and the road to 1971 opened from there. The Bengalis kept their language. They still lost the argument about whose culture the Muslims of the subcontinent would run on.

So the language of the Indian Muslim elite now carries a Pakistani label. When a Hindu in Delhi hears Urdu, he hears Pakistan. When a Pakistani hears Urdu, he hears himself.

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How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab

As promised I wanted to write on the ongoing argument about Provinces of Pakistan. Mohsin Naqvi lit it in July by declaring the system of governance collapsed. On 10 September the parliamentary affairs minister, Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, said Parliament would debate new provinces in October. Two days later Rana Sanaullah said the decision belonged to Parliament, with a referendum to follow if a joint sitting approved one. Sindh’s assembly had already passed a resolution on 3 September rejecting any division of the province, and Saraiki nationalists said in August that their claim to a province is older than any administrative tidy-up.

The argument is framed as administration. Punjab has 127 million people; should it be split? The better question is what Punjab is. The province Pakistan inherited in 1947 had already been remade once. The British had moved Punjabi cultivators, including large numbers of Sikh Jats and Muslim agriculturalists from the crowded central and eastern districts, into its west. Partition moved more. The middle of the old continuum was increasingly counted as Punjabi, while Pakistan put Urdu above it. The latest census suggests that linguistic hierarchy is still reshaping how Punjab identifies itself.

What Grierson found

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Wild Tamil Nadu: An ode to the Tamil Nadus rich biodiversity

I had the pleasure of watching Wild Tamil Nadu over the weekend. This one hour long documentary takes one on a journey throughout Tamil Nadu from the shola grasslands all the way to brackish coastal estuaries, with the different biomes in between. It was produced under the CSR initiative of the TVS group, produced by Nature in Focus and is presently being played  in PVR.

Structure:
The documentary follows the classification found in Sangam texts that divided Tamil nadu between Kurinji( Mountains), Mullai( Forests),Marutham( Croplands),Palai(Arid Zones) and Neithal( Coasts).

In each area along with breathtaking shots of the overall landscape and the different animals that live there, we follow the lives of species, that are not as well known but who play a vital role in maintaining the ecosystems that characterize this part of the country, with many charismatic species while present getting a little lesser focus.

Highlights:

From the majestic hornbill, who for the first time in my recollection have been caught engaging in aerial combat to the egrets that capture insects unsettled by a harvesting of rice paddy to the life and death struggle between ants and the deadly antlion that predates on ants by trying to bury them in a sandpit of its own making to the symbiotic relationship between blind shrimp and guppies.

On the advertisements it promises to show never before seen footage, and it does deliver that.

This documentary is the first to capture the Madras Hedgehog on film as well as capturing the cooperative fishing technique of cormorants that corral fish in one area for all the temporary denizens of Lake Pullicat to feast. For those who have seen the cooperative fishing of underwater creatures and birds on National Geographic you wont be disappointed.

The documentary also managed to capture sperm whales in the gulf of Mannar, as well as get video evidence of Olive ridley turtles nesting on Marina beach of all places.

The film makers undoubtedly succeeded in showing the full panaroma of life within Tamil Nadu, with the time they had.

Criticism:

If there is one criticism of this documentary other than its length which is too short in my opinion, it is that maybe enough focus was not put on the issues facing wildlife in an increasingly urbanizing India, it is good to focus on the symbiotic relationship that some elephants in where they eat weeds that grow in tea plantations on the valparai plateau, during their migration from Annamalai tiger reserve., but focus should be given on the issues that are occurring as habitats are fragmented and animals are forced into areas that they would rather not be in. 

Some of the landscapes shown in this documentary were also shown in documentary on the Nilgiris by the Nilekani foundation where human wildlife conflict was front and center, given that this documentary will in all likelihood be shown in zoos, schools and colleges throughout Tamil Nadu, focusing more on effects urbanization is having and not just instances of coexistence, would have been beneficial.

Conclusion:

Overall, aside from this quibble, everything from the direction to the footage captured( like imagine sperm whales being captured so close to Indian coast) , to the lesser known animals who are the stars of this documentary and carry it effectively without their more charismatic peers this is worth a watch and definitely should be supported. I am confident that many people in both Tamil Nadu and elsewhere will feel even more motivated to learn about and preserve our natural heritage after seeing how diverse and resilient it is.

Two hornbills interlocking in aerial combat

                                                                                   There is a thriving population of dugongs in both the Paki Strait and Gulf Of Mannar who sadly did not make an appearance in this documentary.

Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

Since Sbarrkum (Sereno), RIP, had such passionate views about the post-colonial setup, I thought the first post after his obituary would be on this topic. In Memoriam to all the victims of 9/11 and its aftermath. May they all rest in Peace.

Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

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Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum

Sereno Barr-Kumarakulasinghe, the Pundit of Wilpattu, is sadly no more

As with Ruchira, I cannot place when I first knew Sereno. The blog’s records reach further back than my memory. However I’m fairly certain he was with us, at the very beginning of Brown Pundits, in 2010. His first traceable comment is dated 28 February 2014. He quoted Time magazine on Sir John Kotelawala harrying Nehru and Chou En-lai at Bandung. That was Sereno at the start and at the end: a unique and informed Sri Lankan angle.

He left nearly 1,800 comments and 77 posts, the first on polyandry in Ceylon in March 2018, the last on the Iran war and the Gulf this March.

I knew something was wrong before I knew anything. He had gone quiet. A man who commented most weeks does not simply stop. On 5 August I sent him two words, “how r u“. He did not reply. On 8 September the funeral notice reached me. He had died on 4 September, aged 67.

After Ruchira’s passing in July I understood what this blog had become: a repository, a refugium, for people who think hard and do not agree. We never had to agree with each other. The debates got heated, and Sereno’s got very heated. My motto is let ideas procreate, let them battle, and let the best one win. Sereno took that as a standing invitation. He argued on these boards for twelve years from a farm on the edge of a national park, with elephants, monkeys and wild boar raiding the crops.

formerly brown called him a feisty contributor. girmit put it better than I can:

“He shared his personal experiences generously, and by his writing one got the sense of knowing him in some way.”

Most of what follows he told us himself, in comments, in posts, in his author box, and Facebook messages. He said he was not really anonymous, and that a little digging would find him.

Google summarises his life as a fixed-income developer who worked for GE Asset Management, Genworth, MBIA and the Federal Home Loan Banks, of mixed descent, and “a frequent contributor to cultural and community blogs such as Brown Pundits“. Eleven years on Wall Street, sixteen years here, and he is now immortalised as our Sri Lankan pundit.

His Heritage

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Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

We were at a beautiful midnight Janmashtami celebration last night. The words that came to me were magical and timeliness.

Nothing in that room was untouched. Popular Hinduism has spent eight centuries trading with Islam, and vice versa. What was interesting was that at midnight, following baby Krishna’s birth (which was beautifully staged), the Mandir decided to have a birthday cake with the kids cutting it and singing happy birthday. It was a clever nod to modernity and a way to keep these young British Asian (Sindhi) kids tied in to their culture.

Can Dharma fight back?

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Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions

Well, here is the long promised article. I’ve been meaning to write this for a year, with many disparate bits of data floating around from different subjects in a brain soup. Gratitude to Q, while his purposes are very much misaligned and probably in direct opposition to mine, provided both the impetus and coalescing of the arguments. And of course to X.T.M for the site on which it took place. I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for BP, this wouldn’t have gotten penned.

https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/parsis-matrilineal-dna-and-steppe

May the common Agni deva of the Zoroastrians and Hindus enable them to reclaim the name Aryan from the Nazis, the skinheads, the brotherhoods and all the racist degenerates who have tried to corrupt it.

Brown Pundits