A few updates from this week:
Sri Lanka is facing severe flooding. Sbarkkum reports major damage to rail and road networks, with Dutch support expected for reconstruction.
Sana Aiyarās āWorld at MITā video touches on her life and work
Sam Dalrymple has a clip on Lahore and Delhiāanother reminder of how closely the two cities mirror each other despite partition.
Pakistanās minority rights bill is worth watching. Continue reading Open Thread: From Floods to LaBal
Something in a recent thread caught my attention. A commenter praised several khayal singers, almost all Hindu, while omitting equally eminent Muslim vocalists. Kabir pointed this out, but the exchange exposed a larger pattern: the slow Hindification of Muslim cultural inheritances in India.
This is not new. It has happened before in the Balkans, Spain, North Africa, and now South Asia. When Muslim political power retreats but its aesthetic legacy endures, successor communities begin absorbing, domesticating, and rebranding the cultural capital that Muslim rule left behind.
Hindustani music is a prime example. The foundational grammar, khayal, thumri, tarana, bandish, ragaāriyaz discipline, gharana boundaries, was shaped by Persian, Turkic, and Indo-Muslim lineages. Yet today, the most visible custodians of this tradition are overwhelmingly Hindu: Bengali virtuosos, Maharashtrian stalwarts, the great Dharwad families, plus a handful of Muslim houses that continue against the grain. A few dozen performers make a strong living; a select few have global reputations. But the overall demographic shift is unmistakable. Continue reading The Hindification of Muslim Culture
If the Pakistani military have assassinated IK in his jail cell; well there are no words.
IK would be a martyr to eclipse the likes of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DRVLqaFESpt/
Indiaās national holidays should reflect its civilisation. They do not. Five Abrahamic festivals sit at the centre of the calendar, while most indigenous ones sit on an āoptionalā list. This is a distortion, not pluralism.
National holidays are public signals. They show what a country holds to be central. When non-indigenous festivals are guaranteed space and indigenous ones are not, the state sends a clear message: it is unsure of its own foundations.
This was a mistake made at independence. India had full freedom to shape its symbols. Instead of anchoring the calendar in its own tradition, the new state tried to avoid offence. That caution hardened into policy, even though no society builds confidence by sidelining itself. Continue reading Why Indiaās National Calendar Needs Urgent Correction
The heirs of Jinnah are not liberal Pakistani nationalists or English-speaking Karachi elites.
His true heirs are:
This is not provocation. It is structural observation.
I. Jinnah Created a Logic That Outlived His Liberal Aesthetics Continue reading Why Zia, Munir, Ayub, and Even Modi, Are Jinnah’s Children
Kabir’s defence of Nehru as the moral compass of the Indian republic reveals something deeper than nostalgia for secularism. It exposes how much of India’s founding moment was shaped by a single man whose class background insulated him from the material and psychological stakes of Partition; stakes that Gandhi, Jinnah, Bose, Ambedkar, and even Savarkar understood far more viscerally.
Nehru was unique among the major players of his era. He was the only one born into national leadership, the only one who inherited a political position, and the only one whose life had been marked not by struggle but by access. While others were shaped by jail, exile, poverty, or ideological intensity, Nehru was shaped by privilege, and privilege has its own blind spots.
This matters because 1947 was not a moment for abstract idealism. It was a moment for negotiation between communities whose elites no longer trusted one another. On that task, Nehru was the least prepared of the principal actors.
I. Nehru’s Privilege Was a Constraint, Not a Qualification
Continue reading Nehru, Privilege, and the Missed Settlement of 1947
A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?
The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.
This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.
I. The Contract That Never Closed Continue reading The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask
I was speaking recently with a cousin who grew up in India. Their family has been BahĆ”’Ć for generations, but their older relatives once lived as Sunni merchants in Old Delhi. When they visited their grandparents as a child, they noticed something striking: in many lanes of Old Delhi, long after Independence, the sentiment was not Indian nationalism but Pakistan-leaning nostalgia. This was not hidden. It was ambient.
That single observation exposes something almost no one in Indian liberal discourse wants to say aloud: post-Partition India inherited a large Muslim population whose political loyalties were, at best, ambivalent. That is not a moral judgement. It is a historical one.
And once you notice this, a second truth becomes obvious: Kabir’s secularist vision of an emotionally unified India makes sense only in a world where 1947 never happened.
Continue reading The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947
I received a message from a publicist this week. The name caught my eye because I knew the scholar from Cambridge years ago. The subject of the email was simple: a new book on PÄį¹ini and the old claim that something in his system “doesn’t work.”
For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that PÄį¹ini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.
The new book, PÄį¹ini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, PÄį¹ini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.
There are two parts to this story. Continue reading PÄį¹ini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend
