Category: Popular

Who did the Brits conquer India from?

We asserted that West crushed and humiliated the Mughals. 0M-3 answered that the humiliation was an inside job: it was the Marathas who broke Mughal power, and when Delhi passed to the Company in 1803 the treaty was signed with the Marathas, the emperor not even a party to it.

Did the British take India from the Muslims or from the Hindus? The empire the British inherited had already fallen apart, and it had fallen apart along lines that almost had nothing to do with faith.

The British conquered successor states, not an empire.

Aurangzeb died in 1707, and within a generation the Mughal map was a fiction. Hyderabad went its own way under the Nizam by the 1720s, Bengal and Awadh became nawabis in all but name, and the Marathas took the centre. The spectacular blows did not come from London. Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739, carried off the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor, and left tens of thousands dead in the streets in a single day. The Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani came back to plunder again and again after him. By 1788 the emperor Shah Alam had been blinded by an Afghan adventurer and was living as a pensioner of his Maratha keepers. When General Lake walked into Delhi in 1803 he collected a prisoner the Marathas had been holding, not a throne. The British did not topple the Mughals. They arrived to read the will.

The frontiers were not religious frontiers.

Press the communal map onto the eighteenth century and it tears at once. Tipu Sultan, the Muslim tiger of Mysore, ruled a country that was mostly Hindu and ran his revenue through a Brahmin, Purnaiah. Ranjit Singh, the Sikh lion of Lahore, ruled a Punjab that was mostly Muslim. The Maratha and Nawabi states alike were administered by Hindu clerks and financed by Hindu bankers. There was no Muslim India and no Hindu India waiting to be defeated. There were states, and the faith of the man at the top told you very little about the people beneath him, still less about the men who ran his treasury.

The conquest was paid for and fought by Indians.

Plassey in 1757 is remembered as a battle. It was closer to a purchase. Siraj-ud-Daula lost because his own commander, Mir Jafar, stood aside, and Mir Jafar stood aside because the Jagat Seths, the richest Hindu banking house in Bengal, had decided their Nawab was bad for business and bought his army out from under him. Seven years later at Buxar the Company beat the Nawab of Awadh, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, and the Mughal emperor himself, all three together, and then took the right to tax Bengal to pay for the next war. The armies that did this work were Indian, sepoy and Hindu and Muslim in the great majority, marching on credit raised against Indian land. The Company was paramount because Indians found it paid to make it so.

The disunity is the story.

The faith of each beaten ruler is almost beside the point. The British did not conquer a religion. They completed a hostile takeover of a bankrupt estate, with Indian money, Indian troops, and a long row of victories over rulers who were Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh by turns and who would never combine.

Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

The settled view of Pakistan, is that it is the most ideologically Islamic state the world has ever produced, and that each decade carries it further into theocracy. We think the settled view is wrong.

The Pakistani elite has quietly secularised. And far from hollowing the state out, this is precisely how Pakistan became what it was always designed to be: the successor state to British India’s Muslims. Islam was the vehicle. Pakistan is the destination.

Islam remains the public language of legitimacy.

Privately, among the stakeholders who actually run the place, the operating priorities are entirely secular. The society on the ground is conservative and devout. The class at the top, the one that keeps the state alive, believes in Pakistan far more than it believes in Islam.

It helps to separate three things that we mean by Islam. There is Islam as faith, the private conviction of the believer. There is Islam as identity, the badge of who one is and whom one stands with. And there is Islam as state language, in which Pakistan explains itself to itself and to the world.

The elite has not surrendered the third, and it has not wholly shed the second. What it has let go of is the first as a terminal value: the notion that the purpose of the state is to realise Islam, rather than to deploy it.

Faith has gone from ultimate to instrumental.

This migration is what we mean by secularisation. This is not the familiar story of liberalisation. We are not saying Pakistan grew tolerant, or irreligious, or fond of gin. We are saying something narrower and stranger. Pakistan’s elite secularised the priorities of the state without secularising its language. Strip away the Islamic vocabulary and look at what the stakeholder class optimises for, and the list is unmistakable: state survival, strategic depth, military capability, sovereignty, national prestige, and the reproduction of the elite itself.

Continue reading Pakistan, the Successor State to Islamistan

Is Pakistan primitive?

By new Precedent, ceasefires are lifted by default, and maintained only where a commenter requests one on Online Safety grounds, as K has (BB – RNJ – 0M).

We argued in “The Patriarchy Survives Everything” that has no religion.

Over the last month, in order not to be Islamophobic, a line was surreptiously moved. The proposition that women should be confined to the home and kept out of higher education stopped being an outrage to be dismantled in public and became a “perspective” to be weighed.

Silence on the right of a woman to leave her own house, and called the silence respect. A space loud for one liberty and mute on another has not been even-handed; it has been captured. That is the moment the emperor lost his clothes and the courtiers agreed not to mention it.

How a country starts eating halal

RNJ consistently brings up Nassim Taleb’s seminal piece on “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.” Continue reading Is Pakistan primitive?

Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

We write this from the chair of those who have just declined, again, to partition their own blog. The exercise concentrates the mind. Brown Pundits has a Saffroniate. It has a Crescentiate. It has an awkward intermediate seat between Viceroy and Prime Minister. We have chosen, repeatedly, to hold the centre.

We have observed that Nehru did not.

1. The Men.

Jinnah was self-made. He was technically brilliant. He was legalistic to the point of pedantry, which is the only kind of legalism that ever wins a constitutional argument. Nehru rode on his father’s coattails, on Gandhi’s affection, on the Mountbattens’ hospitality.

The asymmetry was decisive. One man knew the document. The other man trusted the room.

2. The Cabinet Mission Plan.

The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 already confederated India. Grouping A, Grouping B, Grouping C. The Centre held defence, foreign affairs, communications. Everything else devolved. This was workable. The League accepted it provisionally as the best available route to parity. Nehru wobbled, then in his July Bombay press conference reserved the Congress right to revise the groupings once seated in power. The League withdrew within weeks. The edifice collapsed.

The question the Saffroniate refuses to ask is the simple one. Why was it harder to confederate on linguistic lines than on religious lines? The States Reorganisation that the Republic executed in 1956 was already latent in 1946. Madras Presidency was a Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada tinderbox. Bengal was Bengal. The Indus was the Indus. The Hindi belt was the Hindi belt.

Four groupings could have been negotiated. Continue reading Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

The Commentariat on the “Long Night” has been busy. The Saffroniate counts Hindu babies, the Crescentiate counts Muslim babies, both sides argue with conviction over a future neither seems to have read the Weather Report for.

A heatwave advisory graphic maps much of Pakistan’s plains into extreme-risk zones for the final week of May 2026. Jacobabad, Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, D.G. Khan and Sargodha sit in an extreme zone marked 47 to 50°C. Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Islamabad sit in a high zone at 42 to 45°C. Karachi, sea-cooled, stays at a relatively merciful 35 to 38.

The Indus does not read Radcliffe. The Punjab that cooks at 45°C on the Lahore side is the same alluvial plain that sears the Amritsar side. The Thar runs through both Sindh and Rajasthan. The Gangetic plain inherits the same dome of heat a fortnight later. The cradle of Desidom that the Commentariat are fighting over, will soon turn into a Heat Dome. Conversations on who fills it faster, who outbreeds whom, ultimately elide that Radcliffe drew a paper line. The thermometer does not pause at Wagah.

What It's Like Living in One of the Hottest Cities on Earth—Where It May Soon Be Uninhabitable

Continue reading Open Thread: Mother Indus is on Fire

The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

Continue reading The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Open thread Indian scenes

1) Vijay’s secularism :

TVK ‘s Vijay and his secularism: A commentator had argued that whilst,  other Hindu secularists need to criticize and some need to bad mouth (udayanidhi)Hinduism to be called progressive and secular, Vijay with his ‘Joseph ‘ name can be a secular just by being himself. If he goes the Dravidian way critizing hinduism, all hell will break loose. 
 
Ironically non Hindu leaders, go all the way out by going to temples, wearing kumkum, vibhiti. So does Vijay , and yet claim to be secular. 
 
So he does whatever he knows  best, going to places of worship, do token good things in jayalalitha fashion. 

2) Tata’s events: A naukar should be one and too much power to him in a closely held family enterprise appears to be the main essence of the tata problem.  I feel that the family should regroup and take voting rights of non family members.

 

Brown Pundits