The Lutyens Brahmin & the Indian Muslim

August 9, 2026 No Comments filed under X.T.M

Does Brahmin arrive with too much luggage, orthodoxy, superstition, the Bollywood stereotype, for any euphemism to survive it?

Perhaps. But the term has travelled before. In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes borrowed it for “the Brahmin caste of New England,” christening what became known as the Boston Brahmin: an untitled Protestant aristocracy, not a sacred thread in sight.

I want to repatriate the word because it illuminates two arguments that at first seem unrelated: who enters India’s apex elite, and who is permitted to belong to India without proving it.

The old metropolitan order administered admission quietly: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The new Hindu order increasingly administers national belonging aloud: Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, the flag, Bharat Mata ki Jai. The first produced the Lutyens Brahmin. This harder question for the Indian Muslim: is the new loyalty test merely explicit where the old one was hidden, or has belonging itself been repriced?

As Agni pointed out, the Brahmin I mean is the Brahmin of Boston: an apex caste defined by class, not gotra. A Shudra can join it. An OBC can. A Muslim can. In India it has its L.A.B. chapters, Lutyens, Academic, Bollywood, each commanding a sector and recruiting on much the same terms: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The furore over nepotism in Bollywood was, in part, a quarrel over precisely this caste; further reading includes The Bollywood caste, Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs, The Rise of the Quarter-breeds in Bollywood.

The Persistence of Elites

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The Brahmin Civil War

August 8, 2026 25 Comments filed under X.T.M

(Housekeeping first. Indosaurus is back and in form; “For Gandhiji” and “Liberal college bastions are taking body blows” and k jayas’s “30 seconds please“. Ordinarily I would open with viewer statistics; I’m dispensing with the ritual. The community is flourishing, and I would rather measure biodiversity than traffic.)

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

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Bangladesh-India Open Thread

August 8, 2026 16 Comments filed under X.T.M

Bangladesh has lashed out at India for allowing the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina to address journalists in New Delhi, plunging already strained bilateral relations to a fresh low.

Dhaka accused India of giving a platform to a fugitive it labelled a “convicted genocider” and of undermining efforts to repair ties, after Hasina vowed to return to Bangladesh in December despite facing a death sentence on charges of “crimes against humanity”.

The angry response late on Wednesday came hours after Hasina, speaking on the second anniversary of the massive student-led uprising that led to her flight to India, declared: “Whatever fate awaits me, I will return to my people.”

India-Bangladesh relations hit new low over exiled PM’s speech to press in Delhi

Liberal college bastions are taking body blows

August 7, 2026 25 Comments filed under Indosaurus

In a nutshell it involves a Cambridge professor called Jason Arday.

He was the youngest full prof @ 37 ever for the university. A meteoric career rise through 4-5 other prestigious universities. Hired for his dissertation on critical race theory. According to his backstory – non verbal till 11, illiterate @ 18, phd @ 31. Ran 600 miles in 6 days through will power. There is also the epilepsy due to a race attack & magnanimity in forgiving his attackers.

These are just the highlights, there is so much more. Sounds too good to be true? It really is a crazy story and most parts are quite unverifiable or inconsistent.

What was provable was his rampant plagiarism in his papers and dissertation. The people who pointed it out (on substack) – Nathan Cofnas, got fired from Cambridge. David Harris, the original whistle blower, got dropped from his college in plymouth. A journalist who reported it, got investigated by the met police on a complaint by Arday.

Arday has now resigned, the met police has apologised, Cofnas is crowing on substack and David Harris has been reinstated.

Questions are now being asked as to why Arday’s ludicrous claims were never challenged by the various universities, he was given uk govt work, for race related curriculum matters, a book deal (claimed million $ + advances).

This scandal, though far more explosive, mirrors the ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism.

Are people progressive abroad and conservative at home? Do Indians and Pakistanis identify with progressive movements abroad, to make common causes amongst people of colour, then make a hard right turn on the plane back home? Statistically I would say, this seems to be the case. Indians being to the Right of Pakistanis abroad (due to higher income & religion?). But is this sensible, internally consistent, and should people abide by it?

Where do brown people feature in critical race theory?

Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

August 6, 2026 113 Comments filed under Open Thread, Popular, X.T.M

(h/t Archer, who called for this thread in the comments on “Erm”.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

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For Gandhiji

August 5, 2026 22 Comments filed under Indosaurus

I never thought I would be writing in defence of Gandhi. For a long time in college I viewed him as Indiana Jones in The Raiders of the Lost Ark – we were shown a great story and he was the main character, but the end result would have been exactly the same without him. India would have gained independence as the Empire divested itself.

Except of course, he decided who was in charge, set the tone for independent India, inspired various other freedom/rights struggles and maybe the British would not have released the rest of the empire without India going first. They didn’t let go of Malaysia till 57, Rhodesia till 64, HK until the lease was up, and they still cling on to the Falkland islands. Not forgetting the resulting apartheid regimes in Zimbabwe & SA.

The Hindu right wing has always been upset with Gandhi, this is unsurprising and the political drift has worsened over time with the Congress squatting squarely on Gandhi’s legacy. Yet, happily, no harsh moves have been made over the BJP decade to degrade his stature, or any public space erasure.

Instead what is new, is the attacks from the liberal left. Cancel culture loves skewering cultural heroes out of time and context. They are constantly rewarded on social media for it.

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30 seconds please

August 1, 2026 42 Comments filed under k jayas, Open Thread

1. Anand rangarajan, a biochemistry professor from jnu , has popularized this 30 second interjection on prime TV debates. He is fearless in questioning beliefs of abrahamanic religions.

2. Shahazad poonawalla a popular spokesperson for BJP has resigned and is hinting a sabbatical from politics. Seems bit fishy.

3. Modi comming on instagram is increasing looking like an all advising ‘ society uncle’. He should expose himself less and concentrate on legislation.

4. Sadly rahul Gandhi is not taking much advantage and is acting in ajit prop style street plays in front of parliament. Crazy.

Admin Note: I’m adding this to sort of demonstrate the direction of travel where BP is going. We are building Community now and if it means a decline of traffic so be it.

Restore the Princes?

August 1, 2026 11 Comments filed under X.T.M

On Pakistan’s thirteen princely states, and what was abolished with them

  1. Why did Swat work and Dir fail under the same institution?
  2. What filled Swat’s courts after 1969?
  3. Can privilege be given function without giving it rule?
  4. Should Pakistan restore its princes?

The abolitions

Thirteen states by the standard count came to Pakistan at Partition, and the republic dissolved them in stages. One Unit swallowed Bahawalpur, Khairpur and the Balochistan states in October 1955. The Dir, Chitral and Swat Regulation ended the frontier states in July 1969. Bhutto merged Hunza and Nagar in 1974, and in March 1972, watching Indira abolish India’s privy purses by constitutional amendment, he issued the Rulers of Acceding States (Abolition of Privy Purses and Privileges) Order, P.O. 15 of 1972.

The Friday Times records the scene at the rulers’ meeting with Bhutto. Someone gestured at the Nawab of Bahawalpur and said, Mulk chalaney kai liye paisa bhi is ne diya tha. He gave the money to run this country. It was true; Sadiq Muhammad Khan V had lent the newborn state its working capital. Bhutto conceded lifetime pensions and the ruling houses passed into private life.

So Pakistan ran the same experiment as India, a few months behind.

Swat against Dir

Swat State was founded in 1915 by a jirga that had thrown off the Nawab of Dir; the state’s very existence was a verdict on its neighbour’s rule. Under Miangul Jahanzeb, Wali from 1949, the state built three colleges, thirty-six high schools, thirty middle schools and over two hundred and seventy primary schools in twenty years. On the independent record, literacy ran higher in Swat, for girls as well as boys, than elsewhere in the country, and its qazi courts settled cases in days. Next door, the Nawabs of Dir kept schools and roads out of the state on the standard account, education being the one import a ruler of that mind could not survive, and Ayub deposed the Nawab in 1960.

Same institution, same paramountcy, same decade, opposite outcomes.

The Royal vacuum & Kalat

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Brown Pundits