Not All Our Ancestors Were “Just Hindu”

Pakistanis never HinduIslam destroyed everything? |Pakistanis were Hindu

Aslan Pahari’s videos are linked to the top where he essentially argues that the Indus region, before Islam, was a seamless Hindu civilisational block. It makes for neat storytelling. It is also historically careless.

Sun Temple of Multan

The subcontinent before the 8th century was not a flat religious plain. It was layered, regional, and politically fragmented. Yes, there was a broad Brahmanical tradition stretching across north India. Yes, temples like the great Sun temple at Multan testify to the strength of that religious order in what is now South Punjab. But to move from that to “all ancestors were Hindu” is to mistake dominance for uniformity.

Sindh

Take Sindh. When Muhammad bin Qasim entered the region in the early 8th century, he did not conquer a purely Brahmanical kingdom. The ruling Brahmin elite he defeated, had previously overthrown a Buddhist polity, and the religious landscape of Sindh included Buddhists, various Hindu sects, and local traditions. The frontier between Indic religions was not rigid. It was porous, competitive, and regionally specific.

It goes without saying that Buddhists emerged from a broader Brahmanical milieu, but I am referring specifically to the religious landscape immediately preceding the arrival of Islam.

Punjab Continue reading Not All Our Ancestors Were “Just Hindu”

Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality

 

A Pakistani Sindhi song, Paiso Aa, has crossed the border and gone viral among Indian Sindhis. It is light, playful, and unselfconscious. And it exposes something we repeatedly forget.

Sindh has been Muslim for over thirteen centuries.

The region was conquered in 711 CE by Muhammad bin Qasim, the teenage governor of Fars—thirteen when he entered Sindh, dead by nineteen. Almost an Alexander figure in miniature. Since then, Sindh and Multan have known uninterrupted Muslim rule longer than many parts of the Islamic world itself.

That matters, because it complicates a habit of thought that treats Islam in the Indian Subcontinent as permanently “foreign.”

In Sindh, it is not. Continue reading Pan-Sindhi Cross-Border Virality

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Image

The stupas raises a deeper question:

How central was Buddhism to the Indian subcontinent — and how total was its erasure? In the heartlands, Brahmanism absorbed and displaced it; in the frontier zones, Islam swept away what remained. What we see today are ruins — but once, this was the dominant civilizational framework of the region.

Was its disappearance a slow assimilation, or a deliberate effacement?

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