Tag: Bollywood

FlyDie, Volume Two

A sequel to FlyDie on South India. 19 comments, across 6 threads, in this second batch.

FlyDie on South India

The three pillars of caste. Privilege never converged on one varna. Brahmins hold the social pillar, Vaishyas the economic, Shudras the political, and a jati’s rank follows its proximity to each: close to all three makes a Kshatriya, far from all three a Dalit. The Kshatriya is the mediator everyone wants and nobody needs; the Mughals played that part best, and the empire came apart when they stopped.

Varna was always negotiable. The lawbooks rejected one direction of mixed marriage and tolerated the other. Bengal’s Kulin Brahmins wrote jati origin myths to secure their own land grants, and “pure” Kshatriya lineages were invented as needed. The grey areas, he argues, are why caste survived 3,000 years.

Manchus are to China what Mughals are to India. A follow-up to his India-and-China comment. “Han” was a set of practices before it became an ethnicity; Sun Yat-sen, arch Han nationalist, was Hakka. The Yuan never assimilated and lasted barely a century, while the Qing sinicized and endured.

The Deccan blunder. Urban Muslim nobles could be killed and replaced; rural Maratha sardars could not. Aurangzeb’s destruction of the sultanates left the vacuum the Marathas filled. In his verdict, a great general and a bad politician.

What the Mughals took from the land. North India is Vaishnav, he argues, largely through Mughal patronage; even Adityanath’s Nath sect spread on Mughal-era networks. Mughal architecture began at Bayana in Rajasthan, where the chhatri was born from the Nagara mandapa and the Persian canopy.

The environment, not the man. Akbar’s tolerance was no outlier; Ibrahim II of Bijapur ran the same experiment. The conservative turn began in mid-Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb rode the wave rather than made it. Dara was always going to lose.

Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam

Against apologetics. Defending a faith from the outsider’s picture accepts the outsider’s frame; the prior question is whether culture reflects religion or religion reflects culture. Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian-descent Jewish convert who became a fakir, then a yogi, then nothing at all, fits no category the book allows. A Balkans-to-Bengal “Islamic world” cuts non-Muslims off from their own past while making Muslims the foreign other at home.

Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions

Continue reading FlyDie, Volume Two

Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Many thanks to Kabir for inspiring this piece.

Toor at the Courtauld

Salman Toor was born in Lahore in 1983 and paints in New York. On Thursday TIME put him on its first TIME100 Art list, and he told the magazine “I straddle two cultures“. On 2 October the Courtauld opens his first solo show in Europe, nineteen paintings made since 2019. He describes the work as queer and immigrant lives, caught between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. One of the principal pictures, a bar on East 13th Street, revisits Manet’s bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs downstairs in the same building.

Two weeks ago his partner’s Pasoori became the first Pakistan-made music video to pass a billion views, and nine-tenths of those views came from outside Pakistan. I wrote about it. Add Toor. Add that Britain’s Muslim public face is Pakistani. How does Pakistan gets so much of so little that in the end it is the hegemon of “Monsoon” (Sub-altern) Islam, when technically it doesn’t even belong in that category. My candidate is the language, and I am not sure it is enough.

The Indus was the corridor, not the capital

Start with the map. Pakistan is the Indus, and the Indus was where everyone arrived. Alexander crossed it. Mahmud of Ghazni crossed it seventeen times. Babur crossed it and kept going, because the prize lay east. Lahore mattered: fourteen years as Akbar’s capital, Jahangir’s tomb, Shah Jahan’s gardens, Aurangzeb’s mosque. But the high culture that made modern Urdu crystallised farther east and later. Mir and Ghalib wrote in Delhi. Lucknow kept the court after Delhi lost it. Sir Syed built the college at Aligarh that manufactured the class in the next section. Lahore joined the Urdu world in earnest when the colonial state put Urdu above Punjabi in the province’s offices and schools, which is the story of the Lahnda post.

In 1947 Pakistan got the corridor and Lahore. Delhi, Lucknow and Aligarh stayed on the other side. On paper that is a house with a doorway with just about one good room.

Alavi’s salariat Continue reading Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

The comments have turned into a meditation over whether Urdu ends up as one more dialect of Hindi. I think the fight is about something bigger. Partition took one Muslim political world and cut it into three. Seventy-nine years on, one of the three sets the culture for all of them, and it is the one that took the language.

By reference Muslims I do not mean the most devout or the richest. I mean the group whose speech, dramas, music and religious manner supply the default picture of a South Asian Muslim outside its own borders.

Three blocs, one language

Pakistan has ~230 million Muslims, India ~200 million, Bangladesh ~150 million. In 1971, when the second partition finished the job, the three stood almost level at about 60 million each. Pakistan has pulled ahead since by having more children. Nobody planned any of it. The Muslim League asked for a homeland for the Muslims of India, got two-thirds of them inside one country, and lost half of those within a generation.

The three blocs were never one culture. A Bengali cultivator, a Punjabi Jat, a Sindhi tenant and a Lucknow ashraf household shared a mosque and not much else. What they shared at the top was one political world and one elite language. That language was Urdu, and Urdu was not Pakistani. It grew up in Delhi and matured in Lucknow. Ghalib is buried in Delhi and Mir in Lucknow. Aligarh taught it. The Punjab, which became Pakistan’s heart, spoke something else entirely, as I argued in my last post.

Pakistan made it the state language anyway. In March 1948 Jinnah stood in Dhaka and told the Bengalis they could keep Bengali for their province, but that the state would speak Urdu and only Urdu. Few in either wing spoke it at home then. The 2023 census puts it at 9.25% of Pakistanis now. The Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch learnt it at school. On 21 February 1952 police shot Bengali students in Dhaka for objecting, and the road to 1971 opened from there. The Bengalis kept their language. They still lost the argument about whose culture the Muslims of the subcontinent would run on.

So the language of the Indian Muslim elite now carries a Pakistani label. When a Hindu in Delhi hears Urdu, he hears Pakistan. When a Pakistani hears Urdu, he hears himself.

Why Urdu does not dissolve Continue reading How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

Open Thread: Bharat wins at Norway Chess, but something is off with Bollywood

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

We are travelling, but South Indians, Tamilians?, are crushing it at chess. Praggnanandhaa took Norway Chess in Oslo this week with four straight classical wins to close, past Wesley So and over Gukesh on the way.

Which confirms the theory we have been quipping all trip: India, that is Bharat, owns the letter C. Chess, plainly. Cricket, obviously. Cuisine, beyond dispute. Culture, increasingly. Conversation, certainly (Desis are loud and loquacious). Caste, come to think of it..

However there is one C that has curdled: Cinema.

We caught the otherwise excellent Vadh 2 on the road. One scene was so gratuitously disturbing that we can’t shake it out of our minds.

Since Sacred Games, the sex and gore on Netflix India have not been there to serve a story. They are there to stimulate, and the audience being titillated are India’s masses. A young, idle, frustrated population is easiest to hold with sensation, so that is what is fed. This is not film-making. It is sedation at scale, and a restless country kept watching is silenced from increasing inequity (the largess of the Oligarchics) but perhaps deepening in rage (the constant ire at minorities)?

Ps: The Commentariat may also enjoy our newsletter piece on Mission Chandrayaan (Aug’23) witten prior to our re-engagement with BP, which we essentially inaugurated with Telugu being the Italian of the East (Sep’24).

The Newsletter and BP both started to kick off at roughly the same time; we decided to focus on BP since Substack is full of individual Auteurs but BP has a very venerable community, which we wanted to honour. The survey results are trickling through but what is astonishing is how sticky readers have been over this long decade and a half (BP will be 16 years in December; probably the oldest continuing Brown Blog on the internet).

Pps: Last call on the survey before it closes tomorrow.

Look closely and you may “see” what we have done throughout this post 🙂

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The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

Continue reading The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Dhurandhar, Netflix and the India-Pakistan Asymmetry

Netflix’s analytics for last week are out, including Pakistan. Dhurandhar: The Revenge is at the top of the Pakistan charts. The OG Dhurandhar is at 7th, completing 16 weeks in the top 10.

Even the main Netflix handle (not Netflix India, but the one based in the US) has been openly promoting the release.

Continue reading Dhurandhar, Netflix and the India-Pakistan Asymmetry

India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

Two comments are worth picking up on, and one claim worth interrogating.

N disagrees that contact ameliorates ties. EK suggests the only Islamicate voices the Indian RW respects are those who have “debased their own civilizational integrity.” We do not know who he is shadow-tweeting. It could be us, the Founders of this blog, who are Islamicate by heritage and recognisably friendly to Hindu right-wing readings. Either way, the framing is off. And then there is Q, on the thread as we write, claiming Pakistanis “will eventually take over the Islamicate world.“

The cost of distance

The dominant idea of the last decade is that less contact means more security. Fewer visas. Less trade. No cricket. No artistic exchange. Reduced diplomatic warmth. This is sold as realism. It is, in large part, self-harm.

Distance does not produce clarity. It produces mythology. When people stop meeting one another, they begin imagining one another. The imagined neighbour is always simpler, darker, and easier to hate than the real one.

He is also, as Dhurandhar showed, sexier. Hatred and desire run on the same current. The more villainous the Pakistani on screen, the more the Indian audience leans in.

Civility is built by proximity. Not sainthood. Habituation. When people share space, study, trade, marriage, and culture, the room for fantasy narrows. One can still dislike the other side. But one dislikes actual people, not cartoons.

N’s response to this is that contact theory is “akin to blaming a victim for not engaging with the perpetrator.” That feels like the Israeli security story applied to the Indian Sub-continent. It assumes Pakistanis are a permanent terror-source requiring permanent counter-violence.

Pakistan obliges the narrative by behaving badly enough often enough to keep it alive. India obliges the frame by treating every bad actor as the median Pakistani. Both governments are now invested in the loop.

Pakistanis no longer defend hybrid Islamicate culture Continue reading India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves

Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

The Dhurandhar effect

Omar Ali’s Dhurandhar review is our highest-traffic page by a distance followed by BB’s Kohrra season 2 review. It ranks 20th on a keyword with 87,000 monthly searches in India alone. A single film review, by one writer, on one streaming title, is pulling 37% of our traffic. Continue reading Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

The Game We Can Smell

Asha Bhosle Deserved the Lead

Asha Bhosle passed away this week.

She was one of the most recorded artists in human history. She worked with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan on Hindustani classical music late in her career. She was, by any measure, a civilisational figure. She deserved the lead.

The Disguise

The language of the liberal left has become the preferred disguise for Hinduphobia and Indophobia. This is not a new observation, but it bears repeating because it keeps working. You dress the hostility in the vocabulary of literacy rates, developmental failure, civilisational backwardness. It sounds like concern. It is not concern. If it were concern, one would ask the same questions about Pakistan. One would not, because the point was never the question. The point was the target.

The Playbook

This is what a significant segment of Muslim liberal discourse does. It has learned the language. The vocabulary is progressive. The instinct beneath it is not. It hides deeply illiberal commitments behind the cover of global left credentials. The irony is that this playbook, run long enough, galvanises exactly the forces it claims to oppose. Jews, Hindus, and other minorities watch institutional Islam operate under liberal cover and draw their own conclusions. They are not wrong to do so.

The Mughal Test

In the discourse of the Western, Muslim & Indian liberal left, a Hindu is only a good human being if they love the Mughals, especially Aurangzeb. Not merely acknowledge them, love them. Never mind that the Mughal period was, for large parts of the subcontinent, a period of genuine civilisational injury. You are not permitted to say that. You are not permitted to have a complex relationship with your own history. You must perform gratitude or be dismissed as a chauvinist.

We say this as people who have integrated Zoroastrian and Islamic history into our own civilisational understanding, not because we were required to, but because our tradition demands synthesis. That is our path. It is not everyone’s path, and Hindus are not obligated to take it. Partition, on QeA & Allama Iqbal’s insistence, largely ended the experiment in synthesised civilisation on the subcontinent anyway. That wound is real and it is not healed by demanding that Hindus perform affection for the dynasty that inflicted much of it.

What Is Changing

Hindus before were easy-going. The hardcore commitment to civilisational identity belonged elsewhere. That is changing, and the people somewhat responsible for that change are the ones who spent two decades weaponising liberal language against a civilisation that mostly wanted to be left alone.

We can smell the game.

We do not like it.

Brown Pundits