Brown Pundits

I’ve been watching Royals—Netflix’s palace drama starring Bhumi Pednekar, Ishaan Khatter and featuring Nora Fatehi—and it struck a familiar chord with where our comment threads, concerning Pakistaniat, have been going post-conflict.

It all began with grace.

Years ago, a Sinhala pop hit — Manike Mage Hithe — went viral as an IndiGo air hostess danced mid-flight. Simple. Elegant. Subcontinental. Un-Bollywood.

Two years later, it reappears: Nora Fatehi and Sidharth Malhotra, glammed up in Mughal court-wear, gyrating under chandeliers, mouthing Urdu couplets. Same song, different universe. Bollywood hadn’t remixed it. It had annexed it.

That’s the pattern: Bollywood doesn’t just Hindi-fy — it Mughalizes. Every regional input is re-rendered through a Ganga-Jamuni lens. The vibe is Ganges. The look is Indus. And the aesthetic is unmistakably Mughal. This is the real Indo-Pak cultural divergence: Continue reading From Yohani to Nora: How Bollywood Mughalizes Everything

Kabir: Lastly, KGS and other schools like it are never going to replace English with anything else. English is the way to get ahead in Pakistan (as it is in India to a large extent). The real divide in Pakistan is between those who are Urdu-educated vs. those who are English-educated.

As Kabir states, correctly, that Pakistan’s real divide is between those educated in English and those in Urdu. But what’s startling is that the English-educated class who should, in theory, be intellectually equipped to think critically often recycles the same tired tropes, increasingly unmoored from history or reflection.

The irony is sharp: those schooled in Pakistan’s vernacular languages, closer to the soil, are often more grounded in the idea that Pakistan should not be an alien implant, but a natural outgrowth of the subcontinent. It’s the Anglo-Urdu elite, disconnected from both India and the Ummah, that has imposed a post-colonial ideology designed to obscure origin and suppress complexity.

Let’s call this what it is: a mimic elite with settler instincts. Like Israel’s Ashkenazi founders or apartheid South Africa’s Anglo-Afrikaner elite, Pakistan’s ruling class sought to distance itself from the land it governed while claiming divine or ideological legitimacy to rule it. The mass displacement of Pashtun nationalism, the long war against Baloch identity, the obsession with Kashmir, the suppression of Bengali, the toppling of Afghan regimes—these were not accidents. They were acts of statecraft designed to fracture any natural civilizational or ethnic continuity that could threaten the state’s ideological foundations.

By contrast, Indian nationalism, especially that of the Congress, was pluralistic, even if patronizing. Its flaws were real: Brahminical bias, Hindu cultural dominance, an elitist bent. But it emerged organically from within the civilizational matrix. Nehru and Gandhi, despite their faults, belonged to the land in ways Quaid-e-Azam never did or, rather more tellingly, never wanted to. A fifth generation Hindu convert, QeA cosplayed as a brilliant British barrister with Muslim sympathies (the Pakistani elite are so proud of his pork-eating proclivities). QeA’s creation was brilliant—possibly a poker bluff played to perfection. But it came at enormous cost.

Partition wasn’t merely territorial—it was a civilizational rupture, most violently felt in Punjab, the Urland of South Asia: once serene and syncretic, peaceful and prosperous, suddenly shattered. Continue reading “Mimicstan”: the burden of Purity from Pagan origins