London Observer
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The Middle Path: Towards a Liberal Conservatism in India (Part 2)
In the second of three posts, the author proposes ‘liberal conservatism’ to protect India’s civilisational heritage within a liberal democracy, arguing that Fukuyama’s end of history failed while Huntington’s civilisational…
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On Ahmadiyyas and Jains
The author argues that Hindu treatment of Jains and Muslim treatment of Ahmadiyyas show why Hindus and Muslims differ: for Hindus culture almost always trumps religion, while hostility to Ahmadiyyas…
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Book Review: Islamic Empires- Fifteen Cities that Define a Civilization
Reviewing Justin Marozzi’s Islamic Empires, the reviewer argues that Indic and Islamic civilisations contrast in how they value the urban: Dharmic thought favours solitude and the forest, while Islam has…
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Jaswant Singh: The Last Liberal Conservative
An obituary of Jaswant Singh (1938-2020), former Indian army officer and minister, credited with handling foreign policy after the 1998 nuclear tests, built around Shekhar Gupta’s description of him as…
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The (Original Brown) Pundits: Spies, Explorers and Scholars during the Great Game
Prompted by India-China frontier friction, the author revisits the nineteenth-century Great Game between British India and Russia and its spies and explorers, arguing that the Indian ‘Pundits’ who surveyed these…
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The Middle Path: Towards a Liberal Conservatism in India (Part 3)
In the third of three posts, the author sets out an ‘Anglo-Dharmic’ liberal conservative framework for India, assessing the Nehruvian state’s treatment of Indian Muslims and then domestic and foreign…
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The Parsis of Bombay
Prompted by Michael Axworthy’s Iran: Empire of the Mind, the author reposts a decade-old personal account of the Parsis of Mumbai, descendants of Zoroastrians who fled Persia for Gujarat after…
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Musings of a Shinto Rishi
Struck by an interview with Florian Wiltschko, an Austrian Shinto priest in Japan, the author sees parallels between Shinto’s nature-centred outlook and a Dharmic sensibility, and reflects on how both…
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Forgotten Masters: Indian artists during the Raj
The author reports on an online lecture by William Dalrymple and Xavier Bray about the Wallace Collection’s Forgotten Masters exhibition of Indian artists under the Raj, whose themes are everyday…
