Essay and commentary
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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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Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi
X.T.M reads the BRICS summit in Delhi, with Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian present during a US blockade of Iran, as the West’s non-Western partners rerouting around it. He sees BRICS…
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Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum
Sereno Barr-Kumarakulasinghe, sbarrkum to this blog for twelve years, died on 4 September, aged 67. 1,735 comments, 77 posts, a guest house on the edge of Wilpattu, and a life…
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Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries
X.T.M argues that India will not lose its Hindu soul to missionaries, because societies are shaped by elites, not headcount, and India’s elite is not converting. He starts from a…
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FlyDie on South India
X.T.M reposts FlyDie’s comments on South India. FlyDie argues that Tamil Nadu’s elite traces to Telugu country through the Vijayanagara Nayaks, that pre-colonial empires ran on a shared elite culture,…
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Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?
X.T.M asks whether postcolonial states are Brahmanical constructs, arguing that every successor elite preserves the borders it inherits. He draws on caste mobility, Sanskritisation and Radcliffe’s line, and notes the…
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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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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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Did the British Divide India?
Omar Ali argues that Pakistan was ultimately the Muslim League’s creation, but that some British rulers promoted it for their own ends: divide and rule, the Congress stance in 1939,…
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India vs. Pakistan in one graph
X.T.M argues that GDP per capita, not total GDP, is the right India–Pakistan comparison. India overtook Pakistan after 2009, he says, because Pakistan’s higher fertility grew its population faster, while…
