Society, caste and identity
Caste, ethnicity, gender, family and community.
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Why Can’t South Asia Move On?
Why does South Asia litigate 2,000-year-old events as though they happened yesterday? Because almost nothing is lost between generations. The cure is neither the past nor the future. It is…
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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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Thoughts That Shape Power
In a guest essay shared by Omar Ali, Varun argues that universities and think tanks train a country’s elite, and that lax standards and borrowed Western and Soviet theories, plus…
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Rest in Peace, Jason Arday
X.T.M mourns Jason Arday, who resigned from Cambridge on 5 August and died on 14 August, aged 41. He argues the failure was institutional before individual, pointing to the plagiarism…
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Not yet a requiem for the Deities of rural India
Indosaurus argues that folk Hinduism, practised mainly by lower castes and centred on sacrifice and possession, is more exposed than its scriptural form to conversion, Sanskritisation and urbanisation, and fears…
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The Lutyens Brahmin & the Indian Muslim
X.T.M borrows the Boston Brahmin to describe India’s apex elite, admitted by assimilation, presentation and marriage, and asks whether the new Hindu order’s explicit loyalty tests for Indian Muslims expose…
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The Brahmin Civil War
Pattanaik gives us a priesthood in service — Baniya capital commanding, Brahmin ideology obeying. Look closer at the temple queue: the priesthood is in schism. Hindutva as an upper-caste revolt…
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Eliminator, Not Meritocracy
X.T.M argues NEET is an eliminator, not a meritocracy, a rationing device for 1.3 lakh MBBS seats that measures stamina and family resources, yet should be kept because fragmented state…
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The Self-Confident Hindu
X.T.M asks whether a self-confident Hindu majority is a bad thing, arguing that India is a source rather than an appropriator of culture and that a confident majority held to…
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The Crescent and the Trident clash over their women
X.T.M argues that the Crescent’s seclusion and the Trident’s ‘protection’ of women are unequal in statute, citing Pakistan’s Hudood Ordinances, but equivalent in structure, as the bahu-beti bachao slogan and…
