Caste system – Brown Pundits

The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?

As I write this I’m listening to Kabir’s link on Noor Jehan; its revving me up for Urdu class. But it also gives voice to conflicting ideas over the last day or so. An iPhone in a Dalit hand is not a panacea for caste. A Turkic sword at the birth of Indo-Islam is not a claim over South Asian Islam.

The iPhone. A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power. That is not nothing; it is also not the end of caste. Capitalism welcomes the customer long before the marriage column or the rental listing does, because selling to someone costs the seller no status. On Monday I wrote about the tragic death of Sahil Wakode at IIT Bombay. I had chosen a picture that cropped in his iPhone 16; unintentional, as I simply try to put a header picture on every post. It did not protect him, and whether caste followed him into that exam hall is now a question for the Crime Branch. Caste did not end with urbanisation; it transformed from the visible to the invisible.

Babur. RNJ shared an interesting tweet by a Pakistani girl who was asked by her Uzbek and Central Asian friends why Pakistanis are so Hinduphobic. The question was sincere. Babur was one of their own, they love him, and they are totally in line with India. Continue reading The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?

IIT Bombay Says It Followed Procedure. A Student Is Dead.

On Friday 18 September, Sahil Wakode, a second-year BTech student in IIT Bombay’s energy science department, was caught with his phone in a midterm; the institute says he had uploaded the question paper to ChatGPT. By evening he was found dead in his hostel room. He was Dalit, from Yavatmal, and the third IIT Bombay student to die by suicide this year.

The accounts split. The institute says the invigilator, Prof Suryanarayana Doolla, followed Senate-approved procedure, that no disciplinary action was begun, and that the instructor and head of department counselled the boy and assured him his career would not suffer. Students and the family say he was threatened with suspension, and the father’s police complaint alleges three months of casteist remarks. An FIR now names Doolla and other senior officials for abetment of suicide and under the SC/ST Act, whose Section 18A lets police register the FIR without a preliminary enquiry. The Faculty Forum has expressed solidarity with him. About 700 students blocked the main gate.

Take IIT Bombay’s own version at face value: procedure was followed, counsel was given, assurance was offered, and hours later the student was dead. That sequence settles nothing about cause; the Crime Branch must establish what was actually said in that hall. Either the assurance was never given, or it was given and did not land.

Not yet a requiem for the Deities of rural India

First let me share my annoyance with cows. Dare I call it a beef?

https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/cows-vs-buffaloes?r=1mp4jc

The scriptural form of hinduism is in little danger of being displaced or disappearing. It also has a lot of elements palatable to monotheists (advaita) & rationalists (the block determinant nature of the universe/ simulation theory)

Whereas the folk form, practiced mainly by lower castes which has less theology and more sacrifice/possession is often considered on par with devil worship by Christians/Muslims. Some of the deities named overtly as Satan/Shaitan.

For instance the buffalo deity of Kerala Vishnumaya Chatan (pictured), is easily corrupted to Satan. Rituals associated are considered black magic.

Adherents of the more rural folk forms are also often targeted for conversion. The political alliances of the Christians aligns strongly with lower castes in South India, exacerbating this process.

As India grows wealthier, urbanisation & social mobility also involves Sanskitisation. Ancient traditions are further eroded as outdated and irrelevant.

Continue reading Not yet a requiem for the Deities of rural India

The Lutyens Brahmin & the Indian Muslim

Does Brahmin arrive with too much luggage, orthodoxy, superstition, the Bollywood stereotype, for any euphemism to survive it?

Perhaps. But the term has travelled before. In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes borrowed it for “the Brahmin caste of New England,” christening what became known as the Boston Brahmin: an untitled Protestant aristocracy, not a sacred thread in sight.

I want to repatriate the word because it illuminates two arguments that at first seem unrelated: who enters India’s apex elite, and who is permitted to belong to India without proving it.

The old metropolitan order administered admission quietly: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The new Hindu order increasingly administers national belonging aloud: Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, the flag, Bharat Mata ki Jai. The first produced the Lutyens Brahmin. This harder question for the Indian Muslim: is the new loyalty test merely explicit where the old one was hidden, or has belonging itself been repriced?

As Agni pointed out, the Brahmin I mean is the Brahmin of Boston: an apex caste defined by class, not gotra. A Shudra can join it. An OBC can. A Muslim can. In India it has its L.A.B. chapters, Lutyens, Academic, Bollywood, each commanding a sector and recruiting on much the same terms: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The furore over nepotism in Bollywood was, in part, a quarrel over precisely this caste; further reading includes The Bollywood caste, Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs, The Rise of the Quarter-breeds in Bollywood.

The Persistence of Elites

Continue reading The Lutyens Brahmin & the Indian Muslim

The Brahmin Civil War

(Housekeeping first. Indosaurus is back and in form; “For Gandhiji” and “Liberal college bastions are taking body blows” and k jayas’s “30 seconds please“. Ordinarily I would open with viewer statistics; I’m dispensing with the ritual. The community is flourishing, and I would rather measure biodiversity than traffic.)

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

Continue reading The Brahmin Civil War

Is Kabir Right?

Kabir’s claim, is that much of the Saffroniate comes to Brown Pundits for one purpose: to litigate Pakistan, and to litigate the Muslim. Take that fixture away and the room goes quiet. The post on Hindustani classical music sinks without a ripple. The translated short story draws three comments and dies. Only the threads that arm the two camps against each other run to hundred+.

Is he right?

Continue reading Is Kabir Right?

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

Bin Qasim’s Thousand-Year Wound

There is one fault line under everything that happens here, and it is old. Pakistan stands, whether it wishes to or not, as the proxy for the Muslims of the subcontinent, and India as the proxy for its non-Muslims. This is not a quarrel of the last election or the last war. It is a wound more than a thousand years old, set running when Muhammad bin Qasim landed in Sindh in 711, and it has been arguing with itself in the subcontinental subconscious ever since. Every thread on this site is a small, late episode of that argument.

There is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada, the cerulean one, where a colour chosen by Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) at the summit of fashion is followed down the seasons, runway to department store to clearance bin, until Andy (Anne Hathaway), who fishes it out is sure her choice owed nothing to any of it.

The subcontinent’s argument works the same way. Bin Qasim’s landing in 711 was a decision taken at the top of history, and it has filtered down through thirteen centuries of conquest, doctrine and memory into a comment thread, where two strangers swapping insults are certain the quarrel is about this week. It is not. It was chosen for them a thousand years ago, and they are wearing it without knowing the name of the colour.

What is new is that the argument is going quiet, and quiet is worse than loud. The subcontinent is partitioning itself a second time, in the mind. Indians increasingly talk only to Indians, Pakistanis only to Pakistanis, each inside a feed built to agree with them. The 1947 line cut the map; the algorithm is cutting the conversation. Against that, the value of Brown Pundits is simple and almost embarrassing to state. It is one of the few open places left where the two sides still argue with each other in public and mean it. That is worth defending even when the argument is ugly, because the alternative is not a calmer argument. It is no argument, and two rooms that never open the door.

Is BP sui generis on the Internet?

Continue reading Bin Qasim’s Thousand-Year Wound

Why Caste Formed In India and how the heck it could have been maintained! – A Structural Model

The following article is the original work of the author – Dr Rajorshi Datta. As such its views should be taken to be the opinion of the author and does not represent the opinion of Brown Pundits. If you find this article controversial the author invites you to post a respectful comment below to voice your arguments and perspectives.

I’ve gone back to 2014 looking at articles and podcasts posted about caste. There is information on the social and religious origins of caste within sacred texts like the Vedas and Dharmasutras. For the astute reader there are accounts from Megasthenes, Fa Hien and Xuanzhang whose writings present oblique perspectives on how caste or varna and jati was viewed by contemporary people living within or visiting the system. There’s a lot been said about the fact it exists strongly in India compared to China and Europe, and the genetic evidence to support this.

But there’s not so much about why this phenomena was so strong and strict in the Indian subcontinent and nowhere else. Here I present my thesis as to why it wasn’t luck but structural predisposition which sent India down its unique path of strict caste endogamy.

A controversial topic – why did the caste system form in India?

Continue reading Why Caste Formed In India and how the heck it could have been maintained! – A Structural Model

Conversion out of Hinduism and Caste

The idea that jAti-varNa – Caste system is the reason why ancient Indians converted to Islam and Christianity in olden times is often presented as a obvious wisdom. Why wouldn’t the oppressed seek new religion the instance it was offered ? But this simplistic notion is often goes against historic evidence.

As BP commentator and genetics nerd ArainGang states here – Areas of subcontinent which today form Pakistan and Bangladesh – were the least conservative regions of the subcontinent – ie – least rigid caste system. These regions also had significantly higher Buddhists than the heartland.

Christian conversions in Goa and Kerala were often but not always elite lead. Even in Maharashtra which is the birth place of Ambekarite Navayana Buddhism, significant % of Dalits remain Hindu (30-40%). Outside Maharashtra even less % of Dalits have embraced Navayana – though most regard Ambedkar as a quasi divinity. Mayawati, the longest serving Dalit CM of India hadn’t officially converted to Navayana as she assumed she would lose the non Jatav Dalit votes if she did.

Simplistic theories about history – which seem obvious to our understand often don’t stand the test of evidence. It means the simplistic models which explained the reality of Caste and mechanisms of conversion can be rejected and even their premise need to be scrutinised.