India
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Open Thread: Navarātri and Durgā Pūjā
The Open Thread for Navarātri and Durgā Pūjā, with a note on fixing the site’s back end, and why Brown Pundits readers and commenters want such different things.
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Open Thread: Gandhi Jayanti
The Open Thread for Gandhi Jayanti, and a new rhythm: from now on a fresh Open Thread opens on each major festival of the subcontinent, 18 a year.
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Izzat Maxing
X.T.M answers Q’s claim that India–Pakistan wars will stay short, arguing that allies matter only for the fifth day. He tests this against 1971, Kargil, Operation Sindoor and the Gulf…
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The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?
A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power, not the end of caste. And a Turkic sword at the birth of Indo-Islam is not a claim over South Asian…
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IIT Bombay Says It Followed Procedure. A Student Is Dead.
Sahil Wakode was caught with his phone in a midterm at IIT Bombay and was dead by evening. The institute says he was counselled and reassured; the family alleges threats…
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FlyDie, Volume Two
Nineteen more FlyDie comments across six threads: the three pillars of caste, what the Mughals took from the land, how the Rig Veda got written, Kerala’s three-cornered trade, and Bollywood…
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Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.
X.T.M asks how Pakistan produces so much culture for its income, crediting Lucknow and Aligarh rather than Bollywood. In his account the Urdu-speaking salariat carried that culture west in 1947,…
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Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You
“We Saraiki people make dosa,” my Urdu teacher told me. “We have a name for it: chilla.” A rice batter spread on a tawa and eaten with winter saag, in…
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In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):
A tribute, headed “by Shawkat”, to Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, a Dhaka University student who became one of the first guerrillas in Dhaka and was killed in action in the 1971…
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How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims
X.T.M argues that Partition cut one Muslim political world into three, and that Pakistan, having taken Urdu, now supplies the default picture of a South Asian Muslim. He calls this…
