The exchange (which has now been removed after mutual agreement) that just unfolded was not about architecture. It was about authority.
SD made factual errors, quietly corrected them, and apologised in private. That should have ended the matter. Instead, the loudest resistance came from Kabir: a reflex insistence that disagreement was illegitimate because the author was “credentialed,” “Oxford,” and therefore beyond challenge.
This is the residue of colonisation. Pakistanis were not only carved out of British India; they were produced by the collapse of a Muslim ruling class already broken by the British after the destruction of Mughal power. What followed was not confidence but deference. The habit of looking upward, to Western institutions, American accents, British titles, for permission to speak. That habit persists.
It explains why a factual correction becomes a question of rank. Why a published author must be deferred to, even after he concedes error. Why the presence or absence of a PhD is treated as decisive, while the substance of an argument is ignored. This is not respect for scholarship. It is obedience to hierarchy. Colonisation does not end when the flag comes down. It ends when people stop confusing authority with truth.
Pakistan inherited a culture trained to admire credentials more than evidence. That is why an Albion apology can be discounted while an Oxbridge pedigree is still treated as sacred. It is why disagreement is framed as “vendetta,” and critique as “disrespect,” even when it is correct. This is not about personalities. It is about posture.
Brown intellectual spaces do not exist to launder Western authority. They exist to test claims, name errors, and stand upright without asking who went to Oxford. The moment we refuse to do that, because someone sounds impressive, we have accepted our place in a hierarchy that was designed for us. The SD exchange mattered because it showed Brown Pundits working as it should: a claim about the Mauryan Barabar caves challenged, an error corrected, an apology extracted. Kabir’s backlash mattered because it showed something still broken: the instinct to bow anyway.
Pakistanis will remain colonised until it is understood: credentials do not outrank facts.
Accordingly, I have reclassified Kabir from author to contributor. Despite my prior support for him in October and November, his conduct in this exchange crossed from substantive disagreement into unproductive trolling. This appears to be the concern, Naam De Guerre was also pointing toward.
Thank you. Ever since I joined the commentariat here, it has been hard to ignore the ragebait that Kabir puts up both in posts and in comments on an hourly basis. I believe what sets BP apart is the quality of discourse from the contributors who don’t just parrot what they see on their favourite ideological loudspeaker on the internet.
I personally feel a lot of Kabir’s posts and comments are in bad faith but I also see the value that having a Pakistani Nationalist brings to the discourse here. I just feel his daily posting of India far-left propaganda in not in good faith and intellectually lazy. We know he can write but that takes time and effort. You cannot then just carpet bomb the forum with daily Youtube videos from the Wire or Scroll. We can all access that material on our own.
I hope both you and Kabir take this comment positively. It is not intended to target him but rather to save this forum from becoming another Twitter or Reddit where people are only in to ideological point scoring.
Hey XTM – What happened to your post on Sam Dalrymple? Why did it get taken down?
SD & us came to an understanding, we didn’t see if productive to pursue the matter.
I think the new post on Pakistani liberals shows how dangerous it is to have a divided Subcontinental elite
Please ignore my previous comment. I had been thinking about a response to SD and WD’s scholarship in general and was writing it offline to post under your now removed post. If acceptable, I think we should still keep it up to encourage good faith criticisms of SD and WD’s writings without getting in to personal or ad hominems.
Of course you can write about it. We can use initials but it would be excellent to hear your thoughts; you seem a highly intelligent and interrogative individual
To clarify: I am not deferring to Sam because he is White. I am deferring to him because he is a trained historian. My default position is that one must defer to academics when it comes to their field of expertise. What else is the point of going to university and obtaining those credentials? When I write about Hindustani music, I expect to be deferred to as an Ethnomusicologist. It’s absolutely fine if someone wants to disagree with me, but then they must cite their sources. I don’t pretend to know more than an engineer when the topic is engineering. The race of the particular academic has nothing to do with it.
As I commented yesterday on the post that has now been deleted, Sam is perhaps not as rigorous on his Substack as he is in his book (which does contain footnotes and a bibliography). If he made inaccurate claims and retracted them, then that’s how academia works and I have no issues with that. I took issue with your implication that Sam is a “colonizer”.
@Naam De Guerre:
I have my political preferences and I have the right to express them. I have no issues with other authors posting things that reflect their own political preferences.
As for “ragebait”, it would be nice if you also apply this standard to people like Bombay Badshah who come on this forum only to troll Pakistan (and/or me personally). If people weren’t regularly posting anti Pakistan comments, there would be no need for me to defend Pakistan.
I share your concern about this forum becoming Twitter or Reddit but this should apply equally to all.
Nonsense Kabir; you have deeply discredited yourself with very off the cuff views.
Even SD made a public retraction on the article itself and immediately understood the errors.
Again this inspired about the Pakistani liberals
Like I commented on the original post, I have no opinions on the subject of this particular essay itself. SD may have made an uncited claim and he’s retracted and that’s fine. But I do stand by my position that the opinion of an academic in their field of specialty is worth more than that of a non-academic.
I resent the implication that I am particularly deferential to SD because he’s British or White. I have a general attitude of deference towards experts in their field. SD could be from Timbuktu for all I care. If he has the appropriate degrees from a reputable university I will defer to him on his area of expertise.
In your original post, you seemed to make a link between SD and “colonization”. I don’t think that’s a fair link.
Also I don’t think my opinions stand in for those of “Pakistani liberals”. I am just one person.
but as we have discussed many times; you are a pretty good proxy for that swathe of society, who have no real solidarity across the border
I mean that can be seen with Kabir’s brandishing of his “American”/”British” credentials even though he is a Pakistani living in Pakistan.
I mean, it is a natural mindset considering Pakistan’s state in the world.
Even Indians had that which is disappearing as India is growing richer and becoming more powerful. Expect it to be stamped out mid century when Indians become the largest English speaking population in the world (as well as rich) and their narrative becomes THE narrative about the Indian subcontinent.
You can see it in other fields like cricket too where Pakistan is constantly crying to England and Australia about how India is bullying them lol.
Beta, apne aap bhi kuch kar lo.
They have mentally relegated themselves to eternal servitude.
I don’t necessarily agree with this comment but I will allow it.
I am beginning to understand why Kabir crawls under your skin..
It’s the intellectual dishonesty that a lot of Pakistanis use in their arguments where they use Western viewpoints to critique India while their own country fares worse on every conceivable metric.
“he is a Pakistani living in Pakistan”– I am Pakistani-American. I grew up entirely in the United States. You don’t seem to understand what dual citizenship is or the fact that American citizens can live wherever they please and retain their citizenship.
I would advise you not to get personal with me. Especially since your entire agenda on this forum is to troll Pakistan and me specifically.
Not that there is anything wrong with being a “Pakistani living in Pakistan”. But I’m stating facts. I lived in the US from the age of 6 onwards. My education was in the US. My degrees are not Pakistani degrees.
I have realized what irks you is treating you like what you actually are – a Pakistani and not what you pretend to be – an American.
So I will treat you like a Pakistani from now.
Chal beta, salwar pehen aur 70cc bike chalake cutting chai leke aa
Pakistanis were okay with being a poor powerless country begging to the players on the high table for scraps as long as Indians were the same.
But India’s economic growth post 92 and Pakistan’s stagnation threatens to change that equation and a lot of Pakistanis are not taking this well.
Already happened in things like cricket and threatens to happen to everything else.
As long as both deferred to Australia/England, everything was kosher. But a world where India is actually more powerful than Australia/England and Pakistan has to defer to India as well is not tolerable to them.
Now think the same in geopolitics.