Language, literature and culture
Languages, literature, film, music, food and sport.
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The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?
A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power, not the end of caste. And a Turkic sword at the birth of Indo-Islam is not a claim over South Asian…
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Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.
X.T.M asks how Pakistan produces so much culture for its income, crediting Lucknow and Aligarh rather than Bollywood. In his account the Urdu-speaking salariat carried that culture west in 1947,…
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Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You
“We Saraiki people make dosa,” my Urdu teacher told me. “We have a name for it: chilla.” A rice batter spread on a tawa and eaten with winter saag, in…
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How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab
As Pakistan prepares to debate new provinces, X.T.M asks what Punjab is. He argues that colonial canals, Partition and the census folded Grierson’s Lahnda continuum into “Punjabi”, while the south…
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3 Graphs of Karnataka
X.T.M observes from three graphs of Karnataka that many South Indian Muslims seem to be “Urdufying”, and wonders whether East Bengal might have followed a linguistic path to Urdu and…
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Qawwali in Chennai
X.T.M notes the launch of the Unruly Bodies Art Exhibition in Chennai, with Tamil, Sanskrit and Hindi heard, and a friend’s correction that the music was Carnatic rather than Hindustani.
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What would Braj Pradesh look like?
In 1961 ten mother tongues were grouped under Hindi. In 1971 the grouping widened to forty-eight, and Hindi’s share of India rose from 30 to 37 per cent in a…
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Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more
Ruchira Paul, founder of Accidental Blogger and one of the most gracious voices of the old Brown blogosphere, is no more. We knew each other for nearly two decades, over…
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From Indus to Exile: Notes from Delhi
The heat has gone out of the tribes, and what remains is argument. From a Delhi breakfast to Amardeep Singh’s talk on the Sindhi Nanak Panthis and the halls of…
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Poison Trees: Mythological Fiction & Hindu Values – 1: Fixing the Bow
Arkacandra Jayasimha, cross-posting a May 2026 series, answers a Centre for Studies in Hindu Conservatism essay on mythological fiction, arguing in part one that its reading of Marx’s ‘opium of…
