Tag: caste

The invisibility of caste in Pakistan

May 30, 2026 8 Comments filed under Bombay Badshah

I’ll do a larger post sometime later (maybe tomorrow) but a quick rebuttal of some points raised by Kabir in his latest post regarding caste.

Kabir mentioned this about privilege.

All the Pakistanis on BP are privileged given that we are all English-speaking and all of us have foreign citizenship (I assume).

 

All the Indians on BP are also privileged in that they are able to converse in English.

Notice the difference. The Pakistanis had to go abroad to live/study. The Indians didn’t. I don’t know about most Indians here (maybe they would like to enlighten) but I have spent my entire life in India. I have only gone abroad on vacation. There is no Pakistani equivalent here.

And that is telling.

India is better than Pakistan on all socioeconomic metrics. And I can link charts, data etc here but real world examples like this are more telling.

Sujatha Gidla, a Dalit was able to get education in some of India’s best educational institutions and make it to the United States where she could write a book in English. Unlike in Pakistan, one need not be a descendant of “doctors and lawyers” to be able to go down that path.

Again, I am not denying the existence of discrimination against Dalits (or for that matter Muslims) in India.

But the fact that Dalits (and Muslims) have dissenting voices as well as a visible presence in India speaks for India’s relative egalitarianism vis a vis Pakistan.

In fact, I would say caste is even more pervasive in Pakistan than India due to the complete denial by the privileged castes (as we can see here) and the complete invisibility of it. Kabir has multiple times spoken of his Iranian ancestry as well as EK of his Kashmiri Brahmin ancestry so they are very much “Ashrafs” speaking about “Ajlafs” and “Arzals”.

Poetry by Iqbal is fine and dandy but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground.

All those Muslims exist on the Indian side too where they receive affirmative action (as they should). What is called as “biradiri” is basically “caste”.

Kabir did make this comment about “proper Muslims”.

Proper Muslims (Arabs) don’t have caste.

First of all, it is good to see the acceptance by Pakistanis that they are not “proper Muslims”.

Secondly, since they are not “proper Muslims” but “Hindu Muslims” maybe time for them to examine their faults?

 

 

 

Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

May 25, 2026 162 Comments filed under Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

We write this from the chair of those who have just declined, again, to partition their own blog. The exercise concentrates the mind. Brown Pundits has a Saffroniate. It has a Crescentiate. It has an awkward intermediate seat between Viceroy and Prime Minister. We have chosen, repeatedly, to hold the centre.

We have observed that Nehru did not.

1. The Men.

Jinnah was self-made. He was technically brilliant. He was legalistic to the point of pedantry, which is the only kind of legalism that ever wins a constitutional argument. Nehru rode on his father’s coattails, on Gandhi’s affection, on the Mountbattens’ hospitality.

The asymmetry was decisive. One man knew the document. The other man trusted the room.

2. The Cabinet Mission Plan.

The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 already confederated India. Grouping A, Grouping B, Grouping C. The Centre held defence, foreign affairs, communications. Everything else devolved. This was workable. The League accepted it provisionally as the best available route to parity. Nehru wobbled, then in his July Bombay press conference reserved the Congress right to revise the groupings once seated in power. The League withdrew within weeks. The edifice collapsed.

The question the Saffroniate refuses to ask is the simple one. Why was it harder to confederate on linguistic lines than on religious lines? The States Reorganisation that the Republic executed in 1956 was already latent in 1946. Madras Presidency was a Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada tinderbox. Bengal was Bengal. The Indus was the Indus. The Hindi belt was the Hindi belt.

Four groupings could have been negotiated. Continue reading Nehru Lost India, Not Jinnah

The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

May 23, 2026 73 Comments filed under Comment as Canon, Popular, Precedent, X.T.M

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

Who Sees? A Caste Audit of an Anonymous Elite Indian Hospital

May 22, 2026 17 Comments filed under X.T.M

Excerpt:

We pulled the consultant roster of a leading Indian hospital, well-known, charitable, multiple metros, decades old, and ran the surnames against caste. The institution does not publish anything beyond name, sub-specialty and city. We have anonymised the hospital because the point is structural, not gossip. The pattern here is the pattern at twenty others. What we found will not surprise anyone who has sat in an Indian waiting room, but the numbers are worth tabulating.

The Methodology

This is not a census. It is surname sociology. Indian surnames are imperfect caste signals, especially in Tamil Nadu where initials often suppress jati markers altogether, and elsewhere where regional surnames detach from their origin communities through migration and intermarriage. We are not building a genealogical claim about any individual on the list. We are reading the aggregate. Elite institutional patterns in India are often visible precisely through these imperfect signals: when the noise floor is what it is, a strong signal still tells you something. The exercise is probabilistic, not deterministic, and we have tried to keep the language commensurate with that.

The Numbers

Continue reading Who Sees? A Caste Audit of an Anonymous Elite Indian Hospital

The Brahmins behind April’s Traffic

May 7, 2026 1 Comment filed under X.T.M

One post earns sixteen percent of all our organic traffic. Written in February 2019. Titled The Five Great Brahmin Castes and Their Proclivities. Seven years on, still the engine.

That is the centre of the site, whether we planned it or not.

What people are searching for

top 5 caste in india. brahman caste. brahmin last names. aryan indians. pakistani hindu. is hinduism pagan.

People are searching caste, ancestry, and religious lineage. We rank for it. Some readers are working out what they are. Some are arguing with relatives. Some are looking up a surname before a marriage call. We do not need to romanticise them. The search bar tells the truth.

The 2019 post answered a question hundreds of thousands of people have asked since. It still answers it.

What sits below it

Four other posts share the next 22% of organic traffic between them.

Continue reading The Brahmins behind April’s Traffic

Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)

May 1, 2026 42 Comments filed under X.T.M
BB writes, on a recent thread:

But Pakistanis do change their fathers to people who were not their fathers. Indians don’t. The claim their actual fathers. There is no “mirror” here. It would be a mirror if Indians claimed to be British, French, Portuguese etc.

The claim depends on treating South Asian Muslims as a single block. They are not one block. The genetic record is a gradient, and on that gradient several specific populations carry foreign ancestry that exceeds what local conversion alone would produce. Most South Asian Muslims are autosomally close to their Hindu neighbours. That is the modal story. It is not the only story.

The NorthWestern Muslims

Working strongest to softest.

Pashtuns. Y-DNA from Pashtun samples differentiates them from Punjabi and Sindhi neighbours. Elevated R1a-Z93 patterns with Central Asian distributions, alongside meaningful J2 and G. The autosomal work under Reich and Narasimhan places northwest Pakistani populations at a higher Steppe MLBA fraction and closer to Iran-related reference groups than most South Asian samples. The signal is layered, not pure, but it is not reducible to local conversion.

Continue reading Arab Fathers are not fabrications (entirely)

Parsi Nanis Are Gujarati

April 21, 2026 14 Comments filed under X.T.M

Part I of III: Hypergamy, Endogamy, and the Terminal Phase of the Parsi Model

With a nod to the Y. M. Hodiwalla thread on the Parsi Zoroastrians Worldwide Facebook page, 19 April 2026.

“The Parsis are a quarter Gujarati (genetically). Essentially their Nanis are Gujjus and interestingly enough culture is almost always transmitted via the mothers and their mothers.”

I. The Language Is the Mother

On 19 April, Y. M. Hodiwalla published a long lament on the Parsi Zoroastrians Worldwide page. He called the community’s shift from Gujarati to English a “cultural suicide,” a “refined, English-speaking whimper,” the surrender of a thousand-year linguistic inheritance for the “glittering tinsel of modern fashion.” The comments beneath agreed with him almost to a person. One commenter, KCR, asked the most interesting question in the thread, and everyone ignored it:

Did Jadi Rana tell Parsis to change their “mother tongue”? Was the language of Jadi Rana’s era called Gujarati? And no one retains MT after a couple of generations especially if their numbers are small after migration.

That single comment contains the argument Hodiwalla’s essay cannot bring itself to make. The Parsis did not “adopt” Gujarati in some conscious civilisational pact with Jadi Rana. They speak Gujarati because their founding mothers were Gujarati. The Qissa-i Sanjan gives us the romance. The genome gives us the picture.

II. The Parsi Genome

Continue reading Parsi Nanis Are Gujarati

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