Dhurandhar Part 1 is releasing in Japan on 10th July.
A few thoughts:
The Japanese make kick ass posters.
In cinephile circles, Japanese movie posters are very renowned. Here are a few more, both Indian and Hollywood.
India has global ambitions with its movies Continue reading Dhurandhar releasing in Japan
A precedent post on Pakistan’s self-exile from the subcontinent, and the geography that outlasted it
This is not anti-Pakistan polemic. Pakistan can flourish in the role she has chosen, and may continue to do so (Pakistan’s pivotal role in the US-Iran war is, on any honest reading, a legitimisation win for the current hybrid government)). The point being made here is structural, not personal.
Pakistanis are a subset of the British Raj’s Muslim population. As Punjabis, as inheritors of the Mughal cultural complex (alas one cannot destroy his Masjid and simultaneously claim to be his heir), as native carriers of the Hindustani register that becomes Urdu under one stylisation and Hindi under another, they began with a favoured position inside the subcontinent. They have traded it for a subordinate position inside the wider Muslim world. The internal hierarchies of the Islamicate, where Pakistanis rank against Arabs, Turks, and Persians, are dense and unflattering and deserve their own treatment another day.
The cause of the trade, in the end, is theological. The subcontinent runs on iconographic generosity, painted shrines, sung saints, plural deities, devotional excess. Strict iconophobia cannot live inside that civilization without breaking it. Pakistan chose the stricter line in 1947 and has progressively tightened it since. The Urdu denial, the recent insistence in some Pakistani quarters that Urdu is not really an Indian language, is the cleanest evidence of the opt-out.
Irreducibly Indo-Persian
Continue reading Gurdaspur and Siliguri: The Two Necks That Held
Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.
N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“
The cost of distance
The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.
Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.
He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.
Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.
N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.
Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.
Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves
girmit, high signal as ever as the Comment threads threaten to get engulfed in flames (the Crescentiate are being more provocative than usual). Will return to this properly in a separate post. as an aside when we see girmit, we think Kermit. Probably one of our wises voices in BP.
Indians and their gratitude for Partition
You will be hard pressed to find a normal person in India who doesn’t accept this. If you listen to young people talk they would treat the fact that India-Pakistan were once part of the same polity as some kind of surprising trivia. My point is that, while TNT was used to litigate for partition , and the results of that have been accepted by all parties, the *further* application of TNT will find no takers among liberals. An example would be a statement like “Kashmir should have gone to Pakistan because of having a muslim majority”. There are excellent reasons why one can argue for Kashmir as an independent state in 1947 or even part of Pakistan, that don’t depend on TNT. The foremost being the idea that the process of accession was corrupted somehow. J&K had the same exact right to self-determinaton as Travancore for instance. But the underlying principal is self-determination in the Wilsonian sense i suppose, not TNT. (This goes both ways, as Indians use an imperial logic of their own that a fully intact successor state to the british raj was their entitlement, which is quite outageousely grandiose to be fair).
BJP is a broad tent
A Precedent note
The most important thing to understand about the Pakistani voices on this site is that they are centrists, not extremists. Kabir, El Khawaja, S Qureishi: none of them is a fringe figure in Pakistani society. They are roughly where a literate, urban, employed Pakistani sits, and that fact deserves attention.
It deserves attention because India, over the last decade, has stopped engaging with Pakistanis altogether. Visas have collapsed. Cricket is gone. Cinema is gone. Academic exchange is gone. The everyday oxidation of one society against another, the slow correction by which extreme positions get rounded down through exposure to people who hold different ones, has been switched off. What is left is each side talking to itself about the other.
Brown Pundits is one of the few places where that has not happened.
The thread that prompted this note will illustrate. A week ago, S Qureishi observed that the only downside of the Islamic Revolution was that “there is no OnlyFans.” We were deeply offended by this line seriously enough to write the next piece on counterfactual analysis of Iranian society. Q then returned, under another post, with a fuller thesis: female sexuality must be controlled to sustain a civilisation. Pressed on enforcement, he listed disownment, violence, lawsuits, vandalism. Finally when pressed on honour killing, he admitted it was “horrible” and “immoral.”
Three voices took shape on the thread. The most salient asked that the comment be deleted as misogynist.
We are not deleting it.
We disagree with Q on almost every line he wrote. The thesis that female autonomy is the load-bearing crack in civilisation is one we reject in full. The post on Virginity Policing that triggered this thread was our own. But Q is not a Taliban spokesman. He is a Pakistani who, when challenged in writing by other commenters, was forced to articulate his position, defend it under hostile examination, and concede that violence is wrong. That is not platforming. That is engagement. It is the slow work India has decided it no longer needs to do.
Check BB’s personal anecdote on the Northeast.
As mentioned, the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal has removed 9.1 million names, 2.7 million of them under contested adjudication. The argument has compressed itself into two bad positions. Either every deletion is disenfranchisement, or every deletion is a Bangladeshi caught. Neither is true, and the census of the last hundred years tells a more specific story than either side wants.
The received wisdom on Northeast India collapses into one sentence: Bangladeshi Muslims are flooding across the border. The received wisdom is partly wrong and mostly incomplete. A narrower reading of the census, focused on the actual border districts, tells a stranger story. There are two demographic colonisations in eastern India, not one. They run in opposite religious directions, and Indian statecraft has treated them as opposites: one ratified, one criminalised.
Tripura: the Hindu Bengali takeover
Tripura*: 1951: 71% Hindu, 7% Muslim (with ~21% still counted under tribal religions separately).
Today: 83% Hindu, 9% Muslim.
In 1941, tribals were 50% of Tripura. By 2011, 32%. Partition and the 1971 war did the rest.
The population that replaced the Kokborok, Reang, and Jamatia is Bengali Hindu, not Muslim. Tripura’s Muslim share today is 9%, below the all-India average. The Northeast state most transformed by Partition and 1971 is the one that became a Hindu Bengali colony.
South Tripura district is the cleanest data point. The ST share there is 17%. The Bengali Hindu majority there is overwhelmingly composed of descendants of refugees who crossed between 1947 and 1971.
*Note on Tripura: the Hindu figure jumped partly because tribals were reclassified as Hindu between 1951 and 1971 in the census. Real Hindu Bengali influx adds on top of that statistical shift.
Assam border districts: the Muslim Bengali case
Assam: 1951: 72% Hindu, 25% Muslim.
Today: 61% Hindu, 34% Muslim. Continue reading Two Colonisations, One Border: What the Data Actually Says About Bengal’s Post-1971 Demographic Story
We published on the virginity economy yesterday. In the thread, we remembered a very line to us we could not leave alone. Honour killing is what Pakistan took from Indus culture. Acid throwing is what the Indian side took. The data is messier than the line. The line is still broadly right.
The Honour Killing Skew
Between 2018 and 2022, Punjab alone booked 841 incidents with 1,058 victims, 799 of them women. UNFPA’s working estimate is up to 5,000 deaths per year once karo-kari, siyahkari, and “natural cause” burials are folded back in.
India’s NCRB figures for honour killing sit in the low tens per year. This is an undercount so severe it is a category error. Most Indian cases are filed under IPC Section 302 as ordinary murder. The same is true in Pakistan. The difference is that Pakistan’s press, HRCP, and Dawn keep the score. India’s hotspots are Haryana, western UP, and Tamil Nadu (caste-coded).
Adjusted for population, Pakistan’s honour killing intensity is roughly an order of magnitude higher than India’s.
The Acid Attack Skew Continue reading Honour and Acid: The Great Indus Split
We were at our favourite Persian restaurant. A young woman two tables away, not Persian herself, was telling her Persian father about her female friend in continental Europe.
The friend was Pakistani-origin. She had started dating a Latino man. The Pakistani friend’s mother, somehow, had a dream. In the dream, her daughter had lost her virginity.
The dream was the trigger.
The mother went into a spiral. The father, it was said, lost his job. The mother had a nervous breakdown. A trip back to the Muslim homeland was arranged. The daughter refused to board until she saw the return flight in her hand. Only then did she get on the plane. When she returned to the Muslim country, they told her she wasn’t going back to Europe.
We lost the rest of the story, and, over the rest of the meal, we thought about Sana Cheema.
What Sana Cheema Saw
Sana Cheema was a twenty-six-year-old Italian-Pakistani who had lived in Brescia since 2002. She wanted to marry a second-generation Italian-Pakistani man of her own choosing. Her father took her back to Gujrat, in Punjab, under the pretext of a visit.
She was strangled the day before her return flight to Italy. Her neck was broken. Her hyoid bone dislocated. Her father, her brother, and her uncle were charged. They had buried her quickly, without autopsy, and told relatives she had died of natural causes. The body had to be exhumed on a magistrate’s order after Italian media forced the case into daylight.
Qandeel Baloch, in the Same Line Continue reading Why is Pakistani Culture obsessed with Policing Female Virginity?
Dissent Must Have a Home
The parent post set out why the house speaks in the plural and why pruning widens the room. This post sets out the harder discipline. A plural voice that cannot bind itself is not a voice. It is a whip. And a forum that cannot bind its Founders is not a forum. It is their salon.
The Crescent anchor.
When Brown Pundits was revived, two commentators returned before anyone else. Kabir was one of them. sbarrkum was the other. That mattered more than any traffic number. A forum lives by the return of people willing to argue in public, under their own names or their settled masks, on a schedule that does not flinch.
Kabir matters for a second reason. The Centre gathers quietly and often overlaps with the Saffron bench in instinct or historical frame. The Crescent bloc on this site is essentially held together by Kabir. Remove him and the others do not regroup under a new flag. They drift.
Without Kabir, Brown Pundits will become a site where Muslims are written about more than they are written by.
And Why We Use the Word “We”. A BP Precedent Post (our 40th one).
We begin with the constitutional question. Why is BP’s editorial voice plural?
“We” depersonalises the view. A plural voice separates the ruling from the individual. When a comment is moderated, a post is Precedented, or a thread is steered, the call is not a private preference dressed up as authority. It is the house speaking, on the record, under rules that must survive this case and govern the next.
200 a Day
Daily comment volume has risen sharply and is now nudging 200. Active commentators have expanded from a handful to around twenty. Removal rates are running at an estimated ten to twenty percent of all comments. The more we prune, the faster the diversity of commentators grows.
The BP Factions Continue reading We Are Now Hitting 200 Comments a Day
