Society, caste and identity
Caste, ethnicity, gender, family and community.
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Dravidian Progressivism is a Scam
Nachiketa answers X.T.M on Chennai, arguing that the city’s welfare and cleanliness cannot simply be credited to Dravidian progressivism, pointing to Tamil Nadu’s 97 percent caste endogamy rate and describing…
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Chennai Is Not an Accident
X.T.M observes that Chennai retains a non-transactional social reflex, with strangers helping unasked, and attributes it to Tamil language, Dravidian suspicion of centralisation, unstaged religious pluralism and weak chain retail,…
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The evolving understanding of varNa in Indian history
Nachiketa, writing as a self-described informed layperson, traces how varna evolved from the Rigvedic priest and warrior elites through the Vaishya and Shudra categories to the modern understanding shaped under…
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What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste
X.T.M summarises a WhatsApp exchange between two contributors over what ancestry data can show about caste, noting that no group maps cleanly onto caste or purity, and that the real…
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Why Pakistani Liberals Remain a Colonised Intellectual Class
X.T.M argues that a dispute over a factual correction showed how Pakistani liberals defer to credentials such as an Oxford degree, a habit he traces to colonisation, and calls on…
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Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart
X.T.M argues predictions of Pakistan’s imminent break-up are confirmation bias, since Pashtuns are integrated into the state and economy and states collapse only when elites defect, borders become porous and…
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A Republic Cannot Deport, Humiliate or “Outbreed” Its Own People
X.T.M argues that the reported deportation of an Indian family to Bangladesh without due process shows a state confusing language with nationality and religion with foreignness, and that citizenship is…
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India Is No Longer Legible to Pakistani Liberals
X.T.M argues that Pakistani liberals, especially those of Muhajir or North Indian lineage, project a pre-1947 India that no longer exists, using India as a stage for their liberalism while…
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Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation
X.T.M rebuts the claim that criticising Macaulay and English harms Dalit, Shudra and Adivasi mobility, arguing that adapting to a colonial system is not vindication of it and that Macaulay…
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Where Do Brahmins Come From?
X.T.M argues that the claim ‘all Brahmins come from Kannauj’ is wrong, since Kannauj was one medieval centre among many, and that Brahmins have several regional origins but share paternal…
