Browncast: Trump, Tariffs, Hurt Feelings, and India..

Omar Ali · August 11, 2025 · 4 comments

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode I talk to Kushal Mehra (Host of the Carvaka podcast) and regular Brownpundit Amey Chaugle about the tariff kerfuffle… the public (and on Trump’s side, frequently intemperate) war of words between the USA and India that is partly about India’s protectionist tariff regime but maybe mostly about other things (such as Donald’s ego and his desire to get that Nobel Peace Prize)..
Dig in and add your comments. We too don’t know exactly why this is going on and where it will end..  🙂

Trump Imposes Total 50% Tariff On Indian Goods, India Hits Back

Review: The Music Room by Namita Devidayal

Kabir · August 11, 2025 · 1 comment

From my Substack:

Namita Devidayal’s memoir The Music Room is a chronicle of her relationship with her guru Dhondutai Kulkarni (1927-2014). The book describes Devidayal’s initiation into Hindustani classical music as a reluctant ten-year-old from Bombay’s upper-middle class. Along with describing her growing appreciation for Dhondutai and the music that she imparts to her, the narrative also tells the story of two other important figures in Hindustani music: Ustad Alladiya Khan (1855-1946)–the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana–and Keserbai Kerkar (1892-1977)–one of the most famous khayal singers of the 20th century. Through telling the stories of these individuals, Devidayal elucidates several important themes such as communalism and “Hinduization” of music as well as the place of women in classical music.

Devidayal describes the process through which Hindustani music became communalized and “Hinduized”. Though Dhondutai is extremely proud of the musical legacy passed on to her by Alladiya Khan Sahib’s family, she still expresses some bigoted views about Muslims. When pressed on this by Devidayal, Dhondutai attempts to square the circle by telling her that Ustad Alladiya Khan was not a real Muslim since he was (allegedly) descended from a Brahmin singer who had been forced to convert to Islam by a Muslim king. She also notes that he always wore the caste thread usually worn by Brahmins. This story allows Dhondutai to hold the belief that Hindustani classical music is essentially Hindu despite the fact that many of the most prominent gharanas had Muslim founders. Dhondutai’s prejudices connect back to the broader process through which–during the colonial period– Hindustani music was “Hinduized” by reformers such as Pandit Bhatkhande and Pandit Paluskar. Bhatkhande wanted to create a “national music” and believed that Hindustani music had been degraded by Muslims and dancing girls and needed to be rescued from both. This process has been extensively discussed by Janaki Bakhle in her book Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition. Unfortunately, while most ethnomusicologists agree that Hindustani music is a syncretic tradition, many (on both sides of the India-Pakistan border) persist in claiming it for one or the other religion. Continue reading Review: The Music Room by Namita Devidayal

Ghalib for Gen Z

Furqan Ali · August 10, 2025 · 3 comments
This review was originally published at The Friday Times.

Publisher: Folio Books

Publishing date: 2021

Authors:  Anjum Altaf & Amit Basole

“For Ghalib, life is an unending search. Neither the holy of holies in Mecca nor even the attainment of paradise is the end of it.” ~Ralph Russell

We’ve all heard of that crooked genius, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan Ghalib — whether through our school Urdu courses (unfortunately encountered at an age when our consciousness is still unripe) or through pop culture. Sometimes it’s his well-known fantasy for mangoes; other times it’s when someone shares a couplet whose slightly convoluted vocabulary immediately earns it the label of “a Ghalib shayr”; and other times, his destitution and scrambling for a pension.

As a Gen Z myself, I can say that most of today’s youth are largely alienated from the Urdu language, let alone Persian. And of course, this doesn’t mean we’re reading Byron or Eliot instead; rather, it’s the excess of TikTok. Decoding Ghalib feels like a Herculean task for us. This dilemma not only distances us from a rich poetic tradition but also from the timeless lessons it has nurtured.

Continue reading Ghalib for Gen Z

Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences

X.T.M · August 10, 2025 · 4 comments

If China endured a century of humiliation, India has lived through a thousand years of it. Invasions and exploitation left it poor in wealth but rich in culture; intricate, adaptive, and resilient. That depth shows in Desi English, which often favours long, ornate sentences over plain ones.

This habit echoes Persian’s former role in the subcontinent: a prestige language whose mastery signalled rank. Even Ghalib’s vast Persian verse drew less love than his Urdu. In India, Persian was the colonial language of power; today, English plays that part.

In Iran, Persian changes fast. Slang, borrowed terms, and foreign tones reshape it so quickly that many in their forties struggle with teenage speech. My own Persian, kept alive in Kuwait and India, is closer to Shirazi and Tehrani standards than to the language my ancestors spoke. I’m self-conscious with Iranians, but with diaspora Persians, I speak freely; we share a looser, accented form of speech. Continue reading Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences

Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

Kabir · August 9, 2025 · 16 comments

From my Substack:

Aatish Taseer begins his new essay collection A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult 2025) by recounting the Indian government’s 2019 cancellation of his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). The pretext for this decision was that Taseer had concealed the Pakistani origin of his father (the late Salman Taseer, a former Governor of Punjab who was assassinated by his own bodyguard after calling for Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to be amended). However, Taseer believes that the real reason that his OCI was canceled was that he had written a critical article about Prime Minister Modi entitled “India’s Divider in Chief”. He writes: “In one stroke, Modi’s government cut me off from the country I had written and thought about my whole life, and where all the people I grew up with still lived.”

Later in the “Introduction”, Taseer describes the impact that this decision had on him and how it led to the essays contained in the book under review:

If these essays feel like a return to self, it is because they represent the return of my natural curiosities and, dare I say it, cosmopolitanism, after the long night of cutting away parts of myself in order to better fit back into Indian life. They are a response to the illusion of the idea of home. The strand of elation that runs through them is the simple joy of being out in the world, free of the pressures of belonging. Perhaps there could not have been any other response, given that my country, my material, my world in India,had been snatched from me. I grew up in what felt to me like the crucible of all anxieties related to belonging. Those anxieties run through these essays, but they are also a tribute to the individual. After all the wringing of wrists, the stewing over questions of place, of feeling myself forever betwixt and between, I woke up one day to find the bars of my prison had magically disappeared, and, far from being scared, I felt a new vein of intellectual curiosity had opened for me. With the idea of home gone, I stepped out into the world again.

Continue reading Review: A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile by Aatish Taseer

Quite Hectic Days

Furqan Ali · August 9, 2025 · 11 comments

Recently, I’ve been traveling a lot for my formal project: assessing the governance framework of 46 HEIs (universities) in Pakistan. We’re looking at the de jure autonomy of universities (in governance, finance, staffing, academics, and research) versus the de facto reality. Where, like many other sectors, higher education is overregulated.

We’re struggling a lot. Universities are mushrooming (95 in 2002 to 269 in 2024) without any meaningful output, just producing PhDs like rabbits (177 in 2002 to 3489 in 2024). Result: not a single Pakistani university ranks in the global top 350.

I’ve visited different universities. (inter-alia):

Riphah International University, Islamabad – a private HEI. The I-8 campus is small, but with multiple campuses they cater to around 30,000 students. What’s interesting is how deeply Islamic morality is embedded in their institutional values. It’s the only university (out of the 8–9 I’ve visited so far) whose vision and mission are explicitly integrated with Islamic principles. They even have around 10 credit hours dedicated to teaching morality. Quite remarkable in this era of modernity and expediency. Continue reading Quite Hectic Days

Madhuri is stronger than the Ambanis

X.T.M · August 8, 2025 · 10 comments

In the name of Pakistan, which is a beautiful poetic name, “Land of the Pure”, lies the tragedy of pathological purity. It is an addendum to the desire to stay pure. To remain untainted. But purity, when pursued absolutely, becomes brittle.

Madhuri Mahadevi

The Ambanis recently relocated Elephant Madhuri from Kolhapur’s Jain Math to the Vantara rehab centre, citing health concerns. But the move, though framed as rescue, triggered emotional protests, political pushback, and a national debate over animal welfare vs. sacred tradition.

Why did it explode? Because Madhuri wasn’t just a creature in need of savin; she was a living deity to those who loved her. Her departure wasn’t a routine animal welfare decision. It was a rupture in India’s civilizational relationship to the divine in nature. One of the most remarkable aspects of Hinduism is its seamless veneration of the natural world. The river is a mother. The cow, a guardian. The elephant, divine.

Few religions integrate reverence for nature into daily life with such tenderness and theological consistency. This story, of an elephant, a corporate empire, and a temple, speaks to a larger tension in India today: Who gets to define care? And when does “rescue” become removal? Continue reading Madhuri is stronger than the Ambanis

Review: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple

Kabir · August 7, 2025 · 4 comments

From my Substack:

When South Asians speak of “Partition” they are usually referring to the 1947 partition of British India that created the nation-states of India and Pakistan. This partition involved the division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal on the basis of religious demographics and led to some of the worst ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. It is estimated that between 200,000 to 2 million people were killed and 12 to 20 million people were displaced. The word “partition” may also remind Pakistanis of the 1971 secession of East Pakistan (what Bangladeshis refer to as the “liberation” of Bangladesh). However, as Sam Dalrymple argues in his new book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins 2025), the British Indian Empire actually spanned a much greater geographical extent than today’s India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including areas such as Aden (in today’s Yemen) and Burma. In his “Introduction” he writes:

The collapse of the Indian Empire has remarkably never been told as a single story. With every division archives were scattered across twelve nation states– thirteen if we include Britain. Subsequent divisions between the ‘Middle East’, ‘South Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asia’ crystallised after the Second World War. Each Partition is now studied by a different group of scholars and the ties that once linked a quarter of the world lie forgotten… This book, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches. (Dalrymple 8)

Continue reading Review: Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple

Ghosts of 1947

X.T.M · August 6, 2025 · 40 comments
I’m Sumayya from Pakistan, it’s very nice to meet you all. I need your help, it’s about my Dadi.
I’m attaching a picture of my Dadi a year after Partition. She opened up about Partition 1947. I believe it has been a severe kind of trauma where it took her nearly 70 years to open up completely, and even then she stopped talking after a while. It was a bloody massacre, Kashmir sadly bearing the brunt of it. Her last memories are being deceived to get in a bus which would take them to Pakistan, but then women yelling at the driver that he was taking them somewhere else.
Then men standing outside scaring them with swords, while women ran away from the bus and jumped into a nearby river. My Dadi (fourteen at the time) and her younger sister also ran to jump, but her father held them and said nothing would happen to them, and directed them to hide under a seat. She doesn’t remember much after that, just the fact that she heard her baby sister being taken away, and then herself being dragged out, upon which she tried to clutch onto her mother’s kurta but it tore. At that point, herself and her mother were the last in the bus, everyone else was either killed or taken away.
I am not sure, but she firmly, firmly believes that her sister was the most beautiful of them all and must not have been killed and maybe taken away to get married to someone. During her youth she tried posting about her in newspapers but it never helped. I know it’s probably too late, but maybe if she did get married and had children, she must’ve told her story to her kids, whom I could locate? I’ve registered to many Kashmiri directories and pages, let me know what else I could do to locate her family.
The only information I know is that they lived in Jammu, Kashmir and my Dadi’s name is Mehmooda. Her sister was Kulsoom (Ummul Kulsoom), they had eight more siblings. Their parents were Hakim Din and Amna.This is in no way a religious/political debate. Just want to use the internet to locate my long lost family.
Post Credit: Sumayya T Malick

Continue reading Ghosts of 1947

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