The Pandits who read Brown Pundits

In May, Brown Pundits drew around sixty-one thousand visits, roughly two thousand a day and up about a third on the month. Thirty of those readers answered our survey, and while they agree on almost nothing, they are held together anyway by what they find interesting.

They are, on the same evidence, almost entirely male, forward-caste nearly to a person, and tilted in their politics. 

The survey can only make sense against the size of our readership. In May, Brown Pundits drew about sixty-one thousand visits, close to two thousand a day, up roughly a third on April. Nearly half of that traffic came direct, readers typing the address or returning by habit rather than arriving from a search or a feed, and the average visit ran about a minute and a half across a little over two pages. The largest national audiences were in Canada, India and the United States.

Brown Pundits, May 2026
Visits ~61,000, up about a third on April
Per day ~2,000
Direct traffic 49%
Average visit ~1m 27s, 2.2 pages
Largest audiences Canada, India, United States

Against those sixty thousand, thirty people answered our survey before we closed the form. This is the devoted few who filled in a form asking their caste and their politics, not a census of the many who pass through.

The comments show who shouts; the survey shows who is here.

Of the thirty who answered
Men 25+
Aged 30 to 49 18
Hold a Master’s or doctorate 21
Reading from outside South Asia 17
Hindu (five observant) 18
Muslim 4

The one thing everyone wants

Continue reading The Pandits who read Brown Pundits

Open Thread: BP Survey

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


Update – from the thread: More reading reccys. Furqan flagged Dr Naazir Mahmood’s The assassination that changed India, along with his own book review on Duniya Digital and a related op-ed, Stupidity or strategy, on the political economy of the subcontinent’s borrowed democratic forms. Kabir marked the passing of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur with two recordings: an unreleased Pakeeza song, introduced by Meena Kumari, and a Rafi duet. And from our own pages, the latest BRAHM newsletter: The Sky Above São Paulo.


Update, 1 June 2026 – links from the thread: The Peshawar Review has a new issue out, including Professor Harbans Mukhia’s reminiscences of Kirori Mal College (College Days) and Shan-e-Ahmed reading an Urdu transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Prufrock in Pakistan). On the Tata Sons listing question, Agni flagged a cluster of commentary: the Indian Express “to list or not to list” column, The New Indian Express on the boardroom fight, Soonawala on why an IPO may not appeal to investors, and Business Standard on the 12 June board meeting. Survey responses are at 18 and counting; please add yours if you haven’t.


Editor’s note, 1 June: This Survey thread will sit on the front page through the week, until Sunday the 7th June, while we are travelling Eastbound, so we have made it an Open Thread. What strikes us, watching the comment threads, is that for all the constant bickering, BP is a community, and a recognisably Desi one.

It has the hue of a Hindu joint family (to be of the Indian subcontinent is, almost by definition, to have Hindu ancestors; “Hindu” is simply what the Persians called the people beyond the Indus) that has built a wall down the middle of the house and still cannot get over each other. The wall is real. So is the fact that nobody moves out.


Original Post: Every few years BP runs a reader survey. Razib began the tradition in 2019, and the responses then told us things the comments alone never could.

Seven years on, with a substantially different commentariat, we are running the 2026 edition. The prompt to revive it came from Kabir, whose recent post on what BP is and is not raised exactly the kind of question a survey can help answer, and we are grateful for it.

Nineteen questions, anonymous, roughly five minutes. The core spine is demographic in Razib’s tradition: age, sex, country, mother tongue, ethnic background, religion, caste, education, political ideology, and views on Hindu and Pakistani nationalism. A few behavioural questions follow on how often you visit, how long you have been reading, how you first found BP, and which topics you would like to see more of, with optional fields at the end for handle, newsletter signup, and anything else you would like the editors to know.

Please take the time to fill in this survey. Thank you for your engagement.

On BP: A Diagnosis

First of all, I want to thank X.T.M for enforcing a “ceasefire” between myself, BB and RNJ.  I really do think it is better for the mental health of everyone concerned to not indulge in these “low-signal” exchanges which are mostly just personal acrimony.  Insulting someone’s career as “grift” for example or posting a picture of the Netanyahus at the Taj are not adding anything to the discussion and only serve to trigger the other party.

I would be open to revisiting this “ceasefire” after a certain period (a few weeks or months) provided the people concerned learn how to debate without being disagreeable.  However, for now, it is best to limit interaction.

With that preamble out of the way, I want to turn to the main topic of this post: A diagnosis of what BP is or isn’t.    I am including the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) song “A Diagnosis” from the TV Show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to illustrate the importance of obtaining a correct diagnosis.  Before one can prescribe a cure, one has to first understand what the problem is.  This post is my attempt to do so.  It is inherently subjective and of course there is room for respectful disagreement.

Continue reading On BP: A Diagnosis

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