Traffic
We published 76 posts and 1 podcast (Bangladesh) this month.
Traffic fell from ~55â65k (SeptâOct) to ~33k in November.
However, comment activity remained strong at 819 comments (~27/day).
Tag: Brown Pundits
Why Hasnât Pakistan Collapsed Yet?
A cultural explanation, not an institutional one.
The comments on the last post revealed something important: there is a difference between learning about a culture and living inside it. The Indo-Muslim legacy sits precisely in that gap. It is not owned by a census or a successor state. It survives in people whose habits, tastes and instincts are shaped by it, even if they no longer identify with the religion that produced it.
Most arguments in the thread reduced the issue to arithmetic. âIndia owns the legacy because most Muslims stayed.â âPakistan canât own it because Delhi and Lucknow are in India.â These claims are tidy, but they miss the point. Culture does not follow borders. It follows continuity.
My own shift in identity made this clear. As I Hinducised through marriage, I also Persianised. The Islamicate part of me did not vanish; it was absorbed into a BahĂĄâĂ frame where contradictions resolved themselves in a Dharmic canvas. It taught me something simple: civilisations are not inherited by territory; they are inherited by people who keep caring.
1. Rushdie and the Islamicate Without Islam
On the Question of Who âOwnsâ the Indo-Muslim Legacy
Reading Sophia Khanâs superb piece on the lost Muslim cities of Hindustan, and then watching the BP comment-thread unfold, a few thoughts crystallised for me; less about âownership,â and more about the intellectual pattern that keeps resurfacing whenever Indo-Muslim history is discussed.
First: I genuinely did not know that Khan was originally pronounced with a silent n, nor that paan had such a deep Islamicate turn in its social history. Much like music, I had long assumed paan to be a largely Hindu-coded practice. The article forces a re-examination of how intertwined everything actually was. The same goes for Hindustani music: I once thought of it as essentially a Hindu, temple-rooted tradition. Then you realise how much of the courtly synthesis, Persian, Hindavi, Turko-Central Asian, was shaped by Muslims, even if the Vedic lattice underneath remained foundational.
This is partly why I found Bombay Badshahâs objection (âPakistan cannot claim any of thisâ) an odd line to draw. One can, of course, make the territorial argument; but it collapses immediately once you observe what India itself is doing: aggressively appropriating the Indo-Muslim aesthetic while deracinating its historical context. If Bollywood, tourism, cuisine, and the Indian cultural machine can freely claim Delhi, Lucknow, Agra, and Hyderabad as national inheritances, then Pakistanis whose families actually come from those cities are hardly crossing an intellectual red line by acknowledging lineage, memory, or loss. Continue reading On the Question of Who âOwnsâ the Indo-Muslim Legacy
Notes From the Backend
Traffic has slowed a bit, and instead of trying to force momentum, Iâve gone into backend mode. When the front-end quiets, the only sensible response is to strengthen the foundations. Thatâs where all my energy has gone this week.
1. The theme is fighting me.
Iâve been stuck on a simple problem: author name, date, and comment count are not appearing under the post title.This is basic metadata. It should be visible. Instead, itâs buried at the bottom of every post. I mentioned this on WhatsApp; Furqan said the alternative theme I was looking at âlooks archaic.â Fair. And yet the current setup is forcing my hand. To fix this I may need to build a child theme, which is technically more involved, but necessary if we want BP to look and function like a proper archive rather than a hobby blog. These are small details, but they shape usability.
2. Categories finally make sense. Continue reading Notes From the Backend
Nehru, Privilege, and the Missed Settlement of 1947
Kabir’s defence of Nehru as the moral compass of the Indian republic reveals something deeper than nostalgia for secularism. It exposes how much of India’s founding moment was shaped by a single man whose class background insulated him from the material and psychological stakes of Partition; stakes that Gandhi, Jinnah, Bose, Ambedkar, and even Savarkar understood far more viscerally.
Nehru was unique among the major players of his era. He was the only one born into national leadership, the only one who inherited a political position, and the only one whose life had been marked not by struggle but by access. While others were shaped by jail, exile, poverty, or ideological intensity, Nehru was shaped by privilege, and privilege has its own blind spots.
This matters because 1947 was not a moment for abstract idealism. It was a moment for negotiation between communities whose elites no longer trusted one another. On that task, Nehru was the least prepared of the principal actors.
I. Nehru’s Privilege Was a Constraint, Not a Qualification
Continue reading Nehru, Privilege, and the Missed Settlement of 1947
The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask
A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?
The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.
This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.
I. The Contract That Never Closed Continue reading The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask
The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947
I was speaking recently with a cousin who grew up in India. Their family has been BahĂĄ’Ă for generations, but their older relatives once lived as Sunni merchants in Old Delhi. When they visited their grandparents as a child, they noticed something striking: in many lanes of Old Delhi, long after Independence, the sentiment was not Indian nationalism but Pakistan-leaning nostalgia. This was not hidden. It was ambient.
That single observation exposes something almost no one in Indian liberal discourse wants to say aloud: post-Partition India inherited a large Muslim population whose political loyalties were, at best, ambivalent. That is not a moral judgement. It is a historical one.
And once you notice this, a second truth becomes obvious: Kabir’s secularist vision of an emotionally unified India makes sense only in a world where 1947 never happened.
Continue reading The Partition of Elites: India, Pakistan, and the Unfinished Trauma of 1947
Mid-Nov Circular
Dear all,
With everything going on in the last 48 hours, we wanted to send a short note to everyone directly. BP has sputtered back to life in the past year, and with that revival comes all the familiar subcontinental pathologies: everyone believes theyâre right, everyone believes moderation is biased, and everyone believes someone else is being unfair. In that sense, BP is working exactly as it always has.
We want to restate something very clearly: we’re not going to run a hyper-moderated blog. It takes too much time, too much energy, and, crucially, it’s an unfunded mandate. Nothing is more dispiriting than a dead space. Our approach has been simple and consistent:
1. Authors control their own threads.
If things escalate on your post, you shut it down when and where you see fit. Thatâs the cleanest system and the only one we can realistically sustain.
2. No bans, shadow bans, or entrapment games.
Once we go down the path of micro-policing, BP loses its character. Thatâs not the direction we want to take.
3. We do not manufacture controversy.
If anything, the only thing we are biased toward is what the audience reads and engages with. Thatâs it. Everything else is noise.
Reflections:
Some of you will have seen the recent exchanges where accusations were thrown in both directions, and where intentions were questioned. Without going into details:Â this is exactly how online political communities melt down;Â by assuming the worst in each other and by escalating minor provocations into existential battles. Itâs the same pattern we saw a couple of years ago at a public talk by Rahul Gandhi in Cambridge: someone asked a loaded, âgotchaâ question, the out of context reply went viral, people got outraged, and the whole thing became a cycle of reaction and overreaction. Weâre drifting into the same dynamic.
Letâs not.
BP works only when people post, comment, disagree, and move on. If that stops, the blog dies. And as Omarâs recent post highlighted, we want authors to write more, not less.
So our simple request is this:Â Calm down, carry on, manage your own threads, and do not fall prey to the outrage factory.
If you feel strongly about a situation, reach out; if you want more balance, we’re happy to add an additional admin to offset the load (BPâs editorial board already functions with more factions than the Lebanese Parliament); if something crosses a line, handle it on your post. But letâs not turn BP into a miniature Whitehall where everything becomes bureaucratised. Weâve done extremely well this past year. Letâs keep the energy without burning down the house.
Warmly.
What Is Not India Is Pakistan
As Dave mentioned, there is a lively WhatsApp group of BP authors and editors, and it inevitably shapes the comment ecosystem. But one comment on the blog stood out:
âThe very foundation of Pakistan is an anti-position. What is not India is Pakistan. So isnât it obvious?â
Itâs an extraordinarily crisp description of Pakistani identity-building. What is not India is Pakistan. That is not a slur; it is, in many ways, a psychologically accurate frame for how the state narrates itself.
What I increasingly find misplaced on this blog is the recurring assumption that Pakistanis are somehow âIndians-in-waiting,â or that Punjab is âWest Punjab,â Pakistan âNorthwest India,â or Bangladesh âEast Bengal.â These are irredentist projections that simply do not match lived identities. This is not âNorth Koreaâ or âEast Germany,â where both sides continue to imagine themselves as fragments of one common nation.
Yes, Pakistan consumes Bollywood and Hindi music, which themselves derive from Mughal and Indo-Persian syncretic traditions. Yes, Pakistan is culturally embedded in the greater Indo-Islamic civilizational sphere. But emotionally, Pakistan has severed itself from the Indian Subcontinent as a cohesive landscape. It has constructed a hybrid identity; part Turko-Persian, part Islamic internationalist, part anti-India.
I donât personally agree with this move, and my own trajectory has been toward a strong Hinducised, Dharmic identification. But my view is irrelevant here. What matters is that Pakistani identity is defined negatively; as the commentator put it, âWhat is not India is Pakistan.â
Whether that is healthy or sustainable is another matter. But identities can persist in unhealthy configurations for a very long time; the stock market can be irrational longer than your liquidity can survive.
Why we must talk about caste
Every few months (years?), Brown Pundits goes through its own small earthquake. A post lands wrong, a comment thread ignites, and the whole Commentariat erupts.
The latest rupture began with a mild jibe on caste. I pointed out, in passing, that caste shapes political instincts far more than many admit. The backlash was instant. A section of the readers declared a quiet boycott. The threads went cold. No one wanted to break ranks. The more one claims to have transcended caste, the clearer its caste blind-spots become. Silence itself becomes a shibboleth.
And when the silence hit, the blog froze. Continue reading Why we must talk about caste