Brown Pundits – Page 15 – A discussion of all things Brown..

Biggest takeaway of Assembly elections

I was listening to this interview of pollster Pradeep Gupta with Barkha Dutt and this line stuck out. {Copied at relevant point}

Last few assembly elections including the Maharashtra landslide were suggesting that direct cash transfers to women 1 year prior to elections was turning elections sharply in favor of incumbent. Notable examples being BJP in MP in 2023, JMM in Jharkhand 2025, BJP in MH 2025 etc.

All 5 states went into handout mode in late 2025-2026 for this election, but incumbents have only one in 2 small states out of the 5 states. Most notably – DMK which has spend significant amount from state funds last year {apart from usual vote for Cash campaign} has lost big. My contacts in TN tell me that both DMK and AIADMK had spend their significant party coffers on cash for votes – whereas T Vijay had not – only giving away flags and whistles. {not sure if this is 100% true but seemed to be the sentiment}.

If true this truly is the biggest positive of these election results.

Also appending Shekhar Gupta’s post
Key takeaways from West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala elections

Matuas – Dalits mostly from Bangladesh – who are one of the communities specifically touched by SIR had backed BJP despite that – owling to increased violence against them in Bangladesh :

Why Bangladesh played a big role in BJP’s West Bengal win

Ayan Guha, British Academy International Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, told ThePrint that while it is a fact that a substantial section of the Matuas has suffered exclusion from electoral rolls due to SIR, it seems they have chosen to stay with the BJP this election. The reason, Guha believes, is Bangladesh.

“While this exclusion has created anxiety and frustration, it is quite evident that the BJP still remains their preferred choice. It clearly appears that widespread violence and atrocities committed on the Hindus in post-Hasina Bangladesh have made them vote as Hindu refugees,” Guha said.

The Hindification of East India

The Saffron Block

The map of East India has changed colour. Bihar fell to the NDA in November 2025 with 202 of 243 seats, and Samrat Choudhary now sits as the first BJP Chief Minister Bihar has ever had. Odisha went saffron in 2024 under Mohan Charan Majhi. On 4 May 2026 Mamata Banerjee lost Bengal after fifteen years; the BJP took 206 seats and will form its first government in Kolkata. Himanta Biswa Sarma returned in Assam with 82 seats, a two-thirds majority and a third consecutive term. The old Bengal Presidency, once the largest province of British India, is now a single saffron block.

This is the completion, by ballot, of a partition the British attempted by map.

1905

In 1905 Curzon split Bengal. The eastern half was to be Muslim and centred on Dhaka; the western half was to be joined to Bihar and Orissa, which made the Bengalis a linguistic minority in their own province. The Bengali Hindu elite, the bhadralok who ran Bengal’s commerce and letters, fought it bitterly. They did not want to be drowned by Bihari and Oriya numbers. In 1911 the British relented and reunited Bengal.

The Biharis, for their part, had spent two decades campaigning to escape Bengali domination. The 1912 reorganisation that gave them their own province, jointly with Orissa, was their reward.

Linguistic identity then was the prime axis. Hindu and Muslim mattered, but not as much as Bengali, Bihari, Oriya.

The Historical Axis Flipped

A century on, that axis has flipped. The Bengali, the Bihari, the Oriya and the Assamese are voting as Hindus, and they are voting for the same party. The two-nation theory, which Bengal once threw off, is doing its work the long way round.

Hindi,, Hindu, Hindustan

Continue reading The Hindification of East India

the Shah and the Saint

A month ago the Shah wrote to the Saint:

Naah it is a good film… I will make you say Bharat Mata ki Jai by infiltrating into Pakistan and pointing a gun at your head.

The threat to Kabir, however jocularly framed, is the trigger. BB has a habit of strict adherence to the Letter of the Law while frantically attempting to violate its Spirit, and BP’s continued tolerance is contingent on Kabir’s goodwill. If Kabir lodges a reasonable complaint, the sanction escalates.

The next rung is a 40-comment fine and a one-week revocation of authorial and commentator privileges. This applies to BB under any handle or avatar as a lasting Precedent.

We are not heavy-handed and Authorial Autonomy deeply matters to us, but the issue is what the transgression actually was. We want genuine contrition, not a mea culpa followed by the old tricks in slightly more sophisticated form.

The “Prakrisation” of Hindi

FlyeDie, presumably not one of BB’s handles, has left an excellent high-signal comment on the Hindification of East India. It posits Prakrit as a Latin analogue that spurred the development of the various Indic languages, and reads modern Hindi as walking the same path.

A wider blog admin note. We have been encouraging the Saint and the Shah to litigate their ongoing duel through the mechanism of high-signal posts, and this is the spirit in which we offer FlyeDie’s theory.

As an aside, there is also a very good comment by Calvin on the segregated political nature of the Indian Muslim community, which we may return to separately.

Brown Pundits exists to advance the bounds of niche knowledge on the Subcontinent. Our specific role is to stimulate excellent conversations, or guftugū as nos ancêtres les Mughalois would have punned it, and the comment below is one such endeavour, the more valuable because so much of our past has been lost or distorted. We reproduce it unedited.

Okay, I think I am going on a weird comment streak and losing my mind. So, I have a weird tin foil theory; it is going to be long, and it is going to sound like bullshit, but please bear with me. Here is my tin foil hat theory: Hindi is the Prakrit of the modern age, and it is destined to follow the same path as Prakrit. To explain what I am trying to say, I am going to talk about my favorite book about Prakrit: “Language of the Snakes Prakrit, Sanskrit, and the Language Order of Premodern India” by Andrew Olett.

Continue reading The “Prakrisation” of Hindi

You cannot be a leftist if you support fundamentally illiberal positions

There is a lot of recurring debate in the comments repeatedly about who is a leftist, especially pertaining to subcontinental politics.

Rather than aim this post at a specific country or an individual, I would like to give some general thoughts regarding this.

Firstly, what is a leftist? This is the Wikipedia definition.

Left-wing politics or leftism is the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole

So you can say that democracy is a very leftist idea as it achieves a semblance of “social equality”. No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter your gender/race/caste/creed, you get one vote which counts the same as everyone else’s.

Similarly equal rights for all is also a very leftist idea as it aims for “social equality”. Of course, in real life it is not so clear cut because certain groups do have advantages over other groups due to historical reasons. But having equal rights “on paper” is at least a start towards leftist utopia. If you don’t have that at all, then equality is a non starter.

Continue reading You cannot be a leftist if you support fundamentally illiberal positions

The god of small comments

Fly Die:

Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that in Kerala. Christians are deeply divided into multiple sectarian groups that started with schism in the Pre-colonial period and increased greatly moving into the colonial period. Historically, the original pre-colonial Christian communities that existed in the state were heavily interrelated with Levantine Christian groups such as the Assyrians, and mainly centered their religious activity around their center of operation in Iraq specifically.

After the initial migration to India happened around the same time as the Gondhpharid Kardamaka dynasty ruling over Gujarat, as seen in the traditional literature, there were a few other waves. In one of these migrations, a set of Jewish-Christians from southern Mesopotamia led by Thomas of Cana, who settled and gradually developed into the modern sub-Nazarene group called the “Knanaya”. These new groups of Christians conflicted with the old Christians, leading to the North-South Divide between the old and new groups. Eventually, more divisions kept on happening as theological disagreements continued over time.

Continue reading The god of small comments

The Shijrah and the Y-Chromosome

A sequel to “Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)“

The previous post answered BB. The comment thread produced an objection from Q, who concedes the cultural point and grants that Sayyid status mattered, then argues that Y-DNA is unreliable because Central Asian Sufism accepted matrilineal Sayyid descent and that South Asian Sayyids are 95 per cent autosomally local in any case. BB and Q essentially reach the same conclusion by different routes.

The mother’s status

Hinduism and Christianity both carry the mother’s status as load-bearing. Varna purity is bilineal, and the maternal line is policed: pratiloma unions, where a lower-status man fathers a child on a higher-status woman, are catastrophic in Manusmriti. The Christian veneration on the Virgin runs the same logic by inversion. A story of “foreign father, local mother” collapses status in both systems, so it gets erased. Brahmin origin narratives almost never claim foreign paternity.

Islam does not police the maternal line the same way. The line is the father’s, and a slave concubine’s son inherits paternal status undiluted. The eleventh Imam was the son of a Nubian concubine. The Abbasid caliphs from the mid-period onward were almost all sons of Turkic, Greek, Berber, or Slavic mothers. Classical fiqh weighs maternal lineage in kafa’ah and in some legitimacy disputes, but that is stratification, not pollution metaphysics.

The same asymmetry produced two radically different slavery histories. In the Atlantic system, partus sequitur ventrem fixed the child to the mother’s status; the descendants of African slaves remained enslaved and congealed into a marked descendant class. In the Islamic system, the child of an African concubine inherited his father’s status as a free Muslim; the descendants assimilated into the general population over generations. The genetics ratify the divergence: Sub-Saharan ancestry is diffused across Arabian, Iranian, and Turkish populations rather than concentrated in a separated descendant community.

Hence the asymmetric record. Mappilas, the Hadhrami diaspora, the Swahili coast all preserve foreign paternal lineage, and the Y-DNA converges with the claim. Arab nasab tradition demands at least ten generations of fathers in living recall.

Shia and Sunni Sayyids

Continue reading The Shijrah and the Y-Chromosome

Open Thread – Assembly Elections 2026

Results for Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Assam are more or less a given. West Bengal is the big one.

Opened it a day in advance for discussions.

India is the successor state of British India – it got independence, Bangladesh and Pakistan were formed

Admin Note: we have brought this picture to the top of BB’s excellent post, which is a Precedent Post, because it deeply move us. Haifa has huge spiritual and sacral significance for us. The Spectacular Shrine of the Báb, the Divine Forerunner of the Bahá’í Faith (and the Symbolic Return of the 12th Imam), overlooks the City.

Modi at Haifa, Israel paying tribute to the Indian soldiers who died during the Battle of Haifa

Bharat Mata Ki Ja and the Holy Land join together to shine light on the World. Hurrah.. Both Israel & India house extensive Bahá’í buildings, apparently the most visited Monument in New Delhi is the Lotus Temple. Nowhere else in the Muslim world does the Bahá’í Faith have Sites of Worship (Pakistan has been very good to Bahá’ís but terrible to the Ahmadis).

Apologies for the Hijacking but back to the Badshah of Balochistan, our very own Humza.

In my previous post about India being the successor state to the Mughal Empire, I mentioned how India was also the successor state to hundreds of other polities which existed across many millennia. British India is one such polity which I will discuss today.

Note: As before, when I use India below I mean the current day Republic of India, not the region of “India” which also encompasses some territories of the modern day states of Bangladesh and Pakistan

The Inheritance

Unlike the previous post, I won’t give as detailed a picture because in the modern age the definition of “successor state” is very well defined.

Some examples of succession in the modern period are the Russian Federation taking over from the USSR in 1991 and the French Fifth Republic taking over from the French Fourth Republic in 1958. Both of them got their predecessor’s UN seats as well as the permanent Security Council spot.

The United Nations

Since we are talking of the United Nations, let us begin with that.

India is a founding member of the United Nations, signing the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, and formally joining on October 30, 1945.

Sir Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar led the Indian delegation and signed the United Nations Charter on June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, United States

Continue reading India is the successor state of British India – it got independence, Bangladesh and Pakistan were formed

Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)

BB writes, on a recent thread:

But Pakistanis do change their fathers to people who were not their fathers. Indians don’t. The claim their actual fathers. There is no “mirror” here. It would be a mirror if Indians claimed to be British, French, Portuguese etc.

The claim depends on treating South Asian Muslims as a single block. They are not one block. The genetic record is a gradient, and on that gradient several specific populations carry foreign ancestry that exceeds what local conversion alone would produce. Most South Asian Muslims are autosomally close to their Hindu neighbours. That is the modal story. It is not the only story.

The NorthWestern Muslims

Working strongest to softest.

Pashtuns. Y-DNA from Pashtun samples differentiates them from Punjabi and Sindhi neighbours. Elevated R1a-Z93 patterns with Central Asian distributions, alongside meaningful J2 and G. The autosomal work under Reich and Narasimhan places northwest Pakistani populations at a higher Steppe MLBA fraction and closer to Iran-related reference groups than most South Asian samples. The signal is layered, not pure, but it is not reducible to local conversion.

Continue reading Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)