Indian Subcontinent – Brown Pundits

The Broken Compact

November 9, 2025November 9, 2025X.T.MCivilisation, DiasporaDiaspora, generational change, Hindu capitalism, meritocracy, socialism, South Asia, Zoran Mamdani12 Comments

Why the India, and American, Dream No Longer Holds

It was Dr V’s birthday this weekend, and we found ourselves in the Great English countryside; those great undulating fields and hedgerows that still whisper of an older order. There’s something about England’s pastoral stillness that throws modern anxiety into relief. The calm of inherited hierarchy, the sense that everything has already been decided, makes you think of those of us who were told that nothing was fixed, that we could climb forever if we just kept studying, working and performing.

The Dreams Continue reading The Broken Compact

Open Thread

November 4, 2025November 4, 2025X.T.MAdmin, Brown Pundits, Colonialism, Geopolitics, Indian Subcontinent, X.T.MBrown Pundits, future, Multipolar World, postcolonial, reflection57 Comments

The boycott has made Brown Pundits quieter, almost peaceful. I don’t mind it. Every few years the site reaches this point; it grows, gains noise, and starts to feel less like a hobby and more like an obligation. Then it falls back to something smaller and saner.

I’ve also realised that the Indo-Pak frame doesn’t really fit my life anymore. It was useful once because that’s where the conversation was; it gave the blog an audience. But most of that talk is stale now; the same arguments, just louder.

What interests me instead are the wider patterns: how post-colonial societies move in a world that is no longer unipolar. The Gulf’s rise, Africa’s experiments, China’s reach, India’s own breadth. How old hierarchies break down, and new ones form.

I don’t like following the news. So perhaps BP will drift in that direction. Fewer posts, less noise, more reflection. A space for thinking about what comes after the post-colonial age, when the world starts to finally balance itself again.

Caste, Civilisation, and the Courage to Own It

November 2, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, Hinduism, India, Indian Subcontinent, X.T.MAkhand Bharat, Brown Pundits, caste, Civilisation, cultural debate, Culture, dharmic civilisation, Hinduism, Identity, India, introspection, Modernity, philosophy, reformism, Saffroniate, social reform, South Asia, tradition8 Comments

Kabir suggested that I apologise but for what, exactly? Why should Saffroniate be considered offensive? Own it. I don’t see anything inherently wrong with the idea of Akhand Bharat; the concept of a broader Dharmic civilisation makes eminent sense to me.

Likewise, I don’t understand why questioning caste identities provokes such sensitivity. Again, own it because the more caste is repressed, the more likely it is to resurface.

At heart, I’m a reformist, not a revolutionary. I believe in improving and refining what exists, not erasing it. Cultural features should only be abolished when they are truly harmful or deleterious, not simply because they make us uncomfortable.

What is Akhand Bharat ?

November 2, 2025November 2, 2025GauravLAncient India, Civilisation, Hinduism, Hindutva, History, Indian Subcontinent2 Comments

Anyone who is aware of the Hindutva project would have seen this picture (Commentators from outside India might not have seen this).

RSS and other Hindutvavadi organizations use this image or similar images for conveying the message of Akhand Bharat. As the extend of this image appear ludicrous, I would like to pose the question here – What would be the fair boundaries of “Akhand” Bharat from history?

What were the boundaries of Indian civilization? Where the Muslim kingdoms of medieval times part of this civilization? What qualifies a kingdom or area to be part of the Indian/Hindu civilization? or any other civilization for that matter.

@500 CE / 1000CE & 1500CE respectively?

Or to put it more correctively –

The post I am thinking of writing in the month of November will have a lot to do with this.

The issue i have with this thought is that due to its extravagant claim is that it can be refuted without much thought or effort like done here :

From Hindu Ocean to Sindhu Sea: Here’s what RSS-backed schools are teaching children about history

Review–Social and Political Concerns in Pakistan and India:Critical Conversations for College Students

November 2, 2025KabirBook Reviews, Indian Subcontinent, KabirHumanities, Social and Political Concerns in India and Pakistan, South Asian Idea2 Comments

Sharing this review of Dr. Anjum Altaf’s book Social and Political Concerns in Pakistan and India: Critical Conversations for College Students. The book is a collection of essays originally published as blog posts on The South Asian Idea. The mission of the blog was:

The South Asian Idea is a resource for learning, not a source of expert opinion. The posts on the blog are intended as starting points for classroom discussions and the position at the end of the discussion could be completely at odds with the starting point. Thus the blog simulates a learning process and does not offer a final product. The reader is invited to join the process to help improve our understanding of important contemporary issues.

The heyday of the blog was from around 2008- 2018. It hosts hundreds of essays about issues relevant to South Asians–many of them about Partition, Hindutva, Pakistan etc. At a time when Indians and Pakistanis are barely able to interact in a civilized manner (as we have seen on this blog), it is a record of an earlier time when the hope for better relations still seemed possible. It is also an example of the work that goes into running and moderating a blog aimed at teaching people how to argue well about humanities subjects.

Here are an excerpt from the review in DAWN:

All in all, Altaf’s tome deserves praise for courageously, convincingly and argumentatively questioning the dictatorship of mainstream discourses. Fanaticism has reduced the Indian Subcontinent to an Absurdistan. Altaf’s book shows that a patient argumentation in the tradition of Enlightenment is the only way to reverse the course.

Here’s a link to the post mentioned in the review (entitled “The Road to Partition”)

Currently, the book is only available in Pakistan. However, it is available on Kindle for those in India.

Was Kabir Right?

October 20, 2025October 20, 2025X.T.MAdmin, Brown Pundits, Indian Subcontinent, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, X.T.MBrown Pundits, civilizational dialogue, commentariat, community engagement, Content Moderation, Dharmic Harmony, Digital Community Building, forum culture, free speech, Hindu Muslim dialogue, India, Indo-Pak discourse, interdiction, Internet Commentary, Internet Culture, izzat, Kabir, online civility, Online Moderation, Pakistan, Platform Governance, Respectful Disagreement, RSS, South Asia, South Asian identity, Substack, Tablighi Jamaat26 Comments

A week ago, I imposed an interdiction on Kabir ; a move I felt was necessary at the time, not because of his views, but because of the manner in which they were expressed. His tone, his dismissal of this platform, and his tendency to escalate rather than de-escalate all contributed to that decision. But now, I find myself wondering: was Kabir right about Brown Pundits?

Since his departure, the commentariat has gone unusually quiet. Threads that once sparked with disagreement, energy, and engagement have gone still. There is a strange calm but it feels like the calm of a museum, not a marketplace of ideas. And what’s become increasingly clear is that the “peace” has come at a cost. That cost is vibrancy. That cost is friction. That cost is participation. Kabir, for all his faults, drew fire, and fire draws people.

This raises a more fundamental question: am I overestimating the commentariat’s interest in the core mission of Brown Pundits? Were people here for civilizational dialogue, or were they here for the masala of Indo-Pak antagonism? It’s disheartening to admit, but the numbers speak for themselves. Kabir had been blocked years before (not by me), and when I released Loki from his cage, well on his return, so did the attention. Continue reading Was Kabir Right?

Pakistan’s Diplomatic Triumph (Trump?)

October 15, 2025October 15, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, India, Indian Subcontinent, Pakistan, X.T.Madaptation, Asim Munir, begging bowl, Diplomacy, Gaza, Geopolitics, India, Indian foreign policy, Lalchand, Middle East peace, Pahalgam, Pakistan, Pakistani politics, post-Pahalgam, regional strategy, Satire, Shehbaz Sharif, South Asia, Trump, Trump foreign policy8 Comments

United States President Donald Trump especially thanked Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and “my favourite” Field Marshal Asim Munir on Monday for their efforts in achieving peace in Gaza, among many other world leaders.

Trump thanks PM Shehbaz and ‘my favourite’ Field Marshal Asim Munir for Gaza peace efforts

I might expand on this tomorrow, but it’s telling that Dr. Lalchand finds all this quite amusing—Pakistan back again with a begging bowl. I, on the other hand, see it as something closer to a post-Pahalgam pivot. Perhaps India is underestimating Pakistan’s deep instinct for adaptation, especially as the region continues to drift in unpredictable directions.

Pakistan’s Inner Logic

October 11, 2025October 11, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, Caste, Civilisation, Colonialism, Economics, Gender, India, Indian Subcontinent, Pakistan, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, X.T.MAitchison College, Baloch identity, Bangladesh, caste, Christians in Pakistan, class structure, elite schooling, Ethnicity, feudalism, Hinduphobia, identity politics, Imran Khan, invented nations, Islam, Israel comparison, Kabir, language politics, Modernity, Nationalism, Pakistan, Pakistan history, Pakistani modernisation, Pakistani psyche, post-1971 Pakistan, Postcolonial State, regional languages, Religion, rural Pakistan, Sindhi nationalism, Social Media, South Asia, TNT ideology, Urdu speakers24 Comments

On Nivedita & Archer’s joint request (Mamnoon/Tashakor/Merci for the kind words); I’m going to expand on my comment:

“Kabir is definitely right. Ethnicity in Pakistan is complex; there are three tiers of society. The English speaking elite (Imran is part of that so is Kabir), who are “Pakistanis” and ethnicity isn’t really reflected on…”

This comment, which the BP archives have tons of similar posts on (BP was venerable even in 2014), sketches the bones of Pakistan’s sociological map. But what lies beneath the skin?

Pakistan is feudal; India is not.

That one statement alone explains much. Landholding elites dominate politics, rural economies still function on patronage, and class mobility is rare. Caste, though “denied,” is real and sharper, in some ways, than it could ever be in India (the reservation system does not really exist in Pakistan except for religious minorities but not for socio-economic castes). Pakistanis can sniff out class in one another with a dexterity that’s probably only matched in the United Kingdom, which is the home of class stratification (I remember reading Dorian Gray in Karachi in the early millennium and shocked how similar late Victorian early Edwardian England was).

The postcolonial state froze itself in amber. There has never been a serious leftist rupture, excepting 1971’s successful Bengali revolution. Even Imran Khan, who styled himself a reformist, is a product of elite schools, Aitchison College, Oxford, and aristocratic lineage. His “Islamic socialism” was only ever viable because Pakistanis still believe in myths of the benevolent landlord.

And yet, Pakistanis sometimes seem happier than their Indian counterparts, even if not remotely successful. Why? Continue reading Pakistan’s Inner Logic

Ladakh: From Promise to Protest

October 10, 2025October 10, 2025X.T.MCivilisation, Geopolitics, Indian Subcontinent, Iran, Islam & the Middle East, Kashmir, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, Politics, X.T.MArticle 370, BJP, civil rights, environmental protection, India-China border, Indian Constitution, Kargil, Ladakh, Leh, mining, Modi government, NSA, protests, Sixth Schedule, Sonam Wangchuk, UT governance1 Comment

A Factual Account of Recent Developments

Overview:
The region of Ladakh has seen a sharp escalation in political tension and civil unrest over the past 10 days. On September 24, 2025, four civilians were killed in Leh in police firing following public protests. This marks a significant turn in the trajectory of Ladakh’s relationship with the Union government of India, which had previously promised administrative empowerment and constitutional safeguards following the region’s bifurcation from Jammu & Kashmir in 2019.

Timeline of Key Events: Continue reading Ladakh: From Promise to Protest

Caste in America

October 9, 2025October 10, 2025X.T.MBrown Pundits, Caste, Civilisation, Culture, Diaspora, Hinduism, History, India, Indian Subcontinent, Mughals, Music, Partition, Postcolonialism & the Global South, Politics, Society, X.T.MAmir Khusrao, Bharat Mata, Bhatkhande, Biryani, Brahmin culture, Brahminism, Brown Pundits, civilizational debate, cultural erasure, Dalit rights, Hindu genocide, Hindu-Muslim synthesis, Hinduism, Hindustani Classical Music, identity politics, India activism, Indian diaspora politics, Indian left, Indo-Aryan, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Islamic culture, Kabir comment, Kashmir Pandits, Kathak, Mughal India, Persian civilization, Sadarang, South Asian high culture, Taj Mahal, Urdu culture, Vedic continuity37 Comments

I’ve found myself drifting further left than I expected this year. Much of that is circumstantial, being involved in local activism in the United States naturally places one within progressive coalitions. Yet even in this frame, my ideological compass is firmly rooted in some admiration for Brahminical continuity and Bharat Mata as civilizational anchor.

At times I speculate on where Bharat truly ends. Is it the Hindu Kush? The Iranian plateau? The Persian world has always seemed to me about 20–30% Indianise; its mythology, musicality, and memory bear the imprint of the Indo-Aryan stream more than the Indo-European one, no matter how insistently modern Iranians lean toward a Westward identification.

This brings me to a provocative thesis I’ve often floated: that Brahmins are the civilisational custodians of the Indian subcontinent, and that their displacement often signals a broader cultural erasure. The tragedy of the Kashmiri Panditsis not merely a community’s trauma, but a warning. Without Brahminical continuity, Vedic frameworks falter. Hinduism in Pakistan and Bangladesh remains vulnerable precisely because it lacks the embedded authority and supervisory function of Brahmin elites to anchor Vedic traditions and calibrate resistance to incessant Islamisation. Continue reading Caste in America