Tag: Bharat

Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

  • BP’s two Factions in light of its “Bharat” underpinning?
  • What defines the “Majority”?
  • What does Courtesy Mean in an online forum?

The majority, described

Now that we are Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits, all of us who are the majority share things in common. Five come to mind, and they should be front and centre:

  1. Hindu by birth or Hindu by marriage (broadly Upper Caste social milieu).
  2. India’s borders can never be reduced. Some, myself included, are very much in the Akhand Bharat camp; I see Iran to Indonesia as one vast Indic, Hindu Continental sphere.
  3. Hinduism was oppressed under the Anglo-Islamicate legacy, which has been a mixed blessing at best (that is a most charitable view). The LeLi Brahmin view that we should have been grateful to be chattel under Despots, who professed Islam, is odd.
  4. Dharma has space for all, and that more Hinduism does not mean less secularism; as well as an inclination for more Hindu-Indic symbology in the national discourse.
  5. Broadly supportive of the current government of India and sceptical towards RaGa.
  6. Partition was a mistake and the two-nation theory was not a good idea. Pakistan has not succeeded.

That defines the majority to a very strong extent, and the minority is defined by being against these positions, in whatever combination. We have such a strong majority that all of us agree with it, including the full admin team.

It just so happens that even if I’m not Hindu by birth, I’m definitely Hindu by marriage. My entire social reality, where I engage with Brown people, is Hindu, so I have become an acculturated Hindu. A fortnight ago I said the divide here was ideological, not sectarian; the last week taught me the map is older than the ideology. It’s not Saffron or Crescent, left liberals or right wing. It is the majority versus the minority, and in a weird way we are converging towards what is modern-day India, and really mapping that.

The minority Continue reading Open Thread: The Courtesy Guidance & the Two Factions (Majority vs. Minority)

Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits

The Constitution of Brown Pundits

see: Bharat Needs No Validation

Ever since Brown Pundits was resurrected over the last two years, one thing has been missing: a written constitution. We never had one (fifteen years as the British of the blogosphere, running on an unwritten constitution).

The landscape has changed since the founding. The diaspora is not so interesting anymore. Pakistan and the other regions are not so interesting anymore. Modi came to power, and the economic divergence between India and her neighbours is now just immense; she is one of the largest economies in the world. A blog that does not register that is not describing the “Hindu Continent”, it is describing 2011.

Alias

I am not officially changing the name from Brown Pundits. But BP also stands, very much, for Bharat Pundits. We are not trying to make claims of equality. The focus of this house is India, that is Bharat, and how she claims her destiny in the world, with a nod to our origins, which were diasporic and Indo-Islamicate. Bharat Pundits began as a reframe in a wry comment reply to Kabir earlier afternoon. It has evolved into a Precedent.

“Writing” Continue reading Brown, that is Bharat, Pundits

Best of Bharat

My final event at Delhi was attending the Para Athletes and off.

Team India

It’s quite interesting all the flags of the Commonwealth were there including the Star & Crescent.

Everything about this trip has shown to me what an Indian Superpower looks like.

A soft, but strong, Superpower.

As I walked into the room; the Minister was chant Bharat Mata ki Jha and encourage the room to chant it with him.

And why not; if Divine Blessing can help India, that is Bharat, win as many Gold Medals as possible, then best to holler out Bharat Mata ki Jha.

I’ll end with yesterday’s trip to the Lotus Temple.

Yá Bahá’u’l Abhá

Bharat Mata ki Jha

She carried an entire civilization in her hands

We have just landed back in the United States, and since we have been writing about gender all week, we wanted to share this sweet Mother’s Day note from the Hindu American Foundation here on BP.

She didn’t pack much. Maybe a small murti of Ganesha wrapped carefully in the folds of a sari. A handwritten copy of the Hanuman Chalisa. A few photos of her parents and siblings. And yet, she carried everything.

The full note is below but we wanted to share a few short thoughts as well. Q posted a tweet on the parallel thread arguing that Islam is the last holdout against total Westernisation. It is a serious claim and worth answering. Superficially he is right. The visible global resistance to Western moral universalism is largely Muslim, and the Manosphere is paying heed.

But the deeper claim is more complex, and the Hindu American Foundation’s letter illustrates why.

Continue reading She carried an entire civilization in her hands

You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture

A precedent post on hybridity, custodial duty, and the elites who want it both ways

The argument running through the recent threads is sharper than the usual India versus Pakistan braggadocio. It is a claim about high culture itself. A civilisation cannot demolish a man’s mosque and claim his high culture in the same breath. The two moves cancel. The elites on both sides of the 1947 line have been performing both moves for eighty years, and the contradiction is now visible.

What high culture is

High culture is the foundational settlement of values, ordinarily anchored in religion, that a civilisation runs on. It can be syncretic in formation. Plural ownership is harder to sustain, and most attempts eventually close into a single settlement or fracture into rival ones; some imperial frames (Ottoman, Mughal, the Republic of India itself) did hold the tension for longer than the simple model would predict. The point is not that plurality is impossible. The point is that plurality is unstable, and the instability is what generates events like 1992.

England is the cleanest worked example of closure. The English high culture is a hybridisation of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and an absorbed Celtic remainder. Scotland and Wales sit inside the matrix without breaking it. The hybridisation closed; one settlement emerged.

Ireland is the test case in the negative. The same Anglophone substrate produced a different high culture in the Catholic south, and in the Catholic pockets of the north, because religion did the foundational work and religion would not blend. Two islands, one language family, two high cultures. Language is the medium. Religion is the substrate.

Ludwig von Mises, in Nation, State, and Economy, argued the related half. The nation is a speech community, but the speech community is shaped by what the school teaches and what the church says. Plattdeutsch villages on the Dutch border could have gone either way two centuries ago; the descendants would now be just as good Hollanders or just as good Germans, depending only on where the school and the church sat. Language carries national consciousness. The religious settlement decides which language wins.

Notre Dame: The custodial bargain Continue reading You Cannot Demolish His Mosque and Claim His High Culture

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