Satire or history

“Who funded” and “this needs investigation” are phrases used online to question activists and protests. Pattanaik applied them to Brahmin diet and ended: “So it cannot be Baniya funded.” The post can be read as satire of that method. Whether or not it was meant as satire, its historical claims can be checked.

Two claims that hold

Brahmin diet varies by region

Members of several Brahmin communities eat fish, and some eat meat: Bengali, Odia, Maithil, Kashmiri, Saraswat and Konkani traditions all include fish-eating groups. Vedic ritual included animal sacrifice. Vegetarian norms are prominent among Brahmin communities in Gujarat, Rajasthan, the Tamil and Kannada regions and parts of the Hindi belt. Current practice shows variation; it does not by itself show how old any of these diets are.

Jain accounts describe a royal ban on killing in Gujarat

Jain accounts record that in the twelfth century the Chaulukya king Kumarapala, advised by the Jain scholar Hemachandra, proclaimed amari, a ban on killing animals, across his kingdom. The accounts come from the Jain side. How far the ban was enforced is not known.

Arguments against eating meat long before 1000 AD

Pattanaik’s dating concerns texts that promote a fully vegetarian life. The sources below are of different kinds. None shows all Brahmins changing diet at one moment. Together they show that the argument for abstaining from meat is far older than medieval Gujarat.

The disputed Jain passage

Pattanaik’s reading that early Jain texts allowed meat rests in part on the Bhagavati Sutra (Viyahapannatti 15), in the account of Mahavira’s illness. Revati prepares food described with words that can mean pigeon and rooster. The Indologist Ludwig Alsdorf defended the literal meat reading. Jain commentators since the medieval period have read the words as plant names, a gourd and a citron. The passage is disputed and has been for more than a century. It does not settle Mahavira’s diet, and it does not date the origin of Brahmin vegetarianism either way.

Purity rules and the lion before Islam

Dharmashastra texts classified substances, animals and people as pure or impure centuries before Islam reached Gujarat. Lions are native to Gujarat, where the Gir forest and the surrounding Saurashtra landscape hold the surviving wild Asiatic lions, and the lion is Mahavira’s emblem in Jain iconography. None of this rules out later borrowing in particular cases. It does mean that a Muslim import is not needed to explain the purity rules or the lion.

What the evidence explains, and what it does not

Sanskritisation explains spread, not origin

M. N. Srinivas described Sanskritisation in the 1950s: castes seeking higher status adopt the practices of higher castes, often including vegetarianism. This explains how a prestigious diet spreads, and why diet still marks caste boundaries in everyday life. It does not explain why Brahmins in some regions adopted it first.

Competition with Buddhism and Jainism

Brahmanical traditions competed with Buddhism and Jainism for royal and merchant patronage over many centuries, and both of those religions made non-violence central. That is a plausible pressure on Brahmin practice. The sources used here do not establish whether it explains the regional pattern, and the ancient texts above do not measure it.

What the sources establish

Diet is now argued over as a marker of national identity: meat called foreign by one side, vegetarianism called an import by the other. Indian arguments for abstaining from meat predate Islam and Hemachandra. The sources do not identify one moment when all Brahmins changed diet, or one sponsor. Regional practice, religious teaching, patronage and status imitation are separate mechanisms, and each needs its own evidence.

Since then: the goddess and the flies

Pattanaik has stayed on the subject. Three posts since the one I answered above:

The goddess column makes the same argument as the Brahmin post, with the goddess in place of the priest. In Konkan, Gauri comes home after Ganesh and is fed fish or mutton by Koli, Agari and Maratha households. In Bengal, Uma comes home for four days, goats were once killed before her in the old houses, and on Dashami she is sent off with fish and rice. A daughter eats what the house eats. Against this he sets Vaishno Devi of the Trikuta hills, a maiden who hates meat and liquor; both belong to her enemy Bhairon Nath, the disciple of Gorakhnath. He then gives two Jain stories: in Jinasena’s Harivamsa Purana of 783 CE, Durga’s blood cult begins when hunters find a tiger has eaten a Jain nun and conclude that the goddess wants blood; at Osian in Rajasthan, the monk Ratnaprabhasuri gives Chamunda a heap of sweets, she gives up the buffalo and becomes Sachiya Mata, the vegetarian clan goddess of the Oswal Jains. His explanation is the purse. Marwari and Gujarati families, Jain and Vaishnava, paid for the marble, the feeding halls and the trusts; “once the purse comes into their hands, the goat is taken away.” His text is the Devi Bhagavata Purana, 3.26, where verses 30 and 31 prescribe fruit for Navaratri and verses 32 to 34 open a second path: animals offered to the goddess go to heaven, and the killing counts as non-violence. A popular modern Hindi translation, he says, folds those verses into one line about fruit.

I checked what I could. Swami Vijnanananda’s translation of 3.26 reads as he says: “Those who eat meat, they can sacrifice animals in this worship of the Devi; and, for this purpose, goat and wild boars are the best”, the animals “attain to unending heavens”, and “in all the Sastras … this killing of animals in a sacrifice is considered as non-killing.” Chapter 27 adds that “payasa and fresh fish are to be specially offered”. Two menus, both lawful, as he says. One correction: the chapter names goat and wild boar; the buffalo is his addition. The Harivamsa story, the Osian story and the 956 CE inscription at Osian are as he gives them, though I read the Harivamsa in summary, not in the original. The Shrine Board’s own account of the Vaishno Devi legend names Bhairon as “a disciple of Guru Gorakhnath”, so that outline is the shrine’s own. The fish sent off with Durga on Dashami is well attested in Bengal; for Konkan his source is his own 2015 column on the Kolis of Mumbai.

The flies post holds too. All six verses he cites read as he says in Griffith’s translation: the fly that eats the raw flesh of the sacrificed horse, whose share goes to the gods (1.162.9); the men who wait for their portion of the cooked horse (1.162.12); the honey-bee that sang to the Ashvins (1.119.9); worshippers “like flies on honey” around Indra (7.32.2); the fifteen or twenty bullocks cooked for Indra (10.86.14); the horses, bulls, oxen and rams offered to Agni (10.91.14).

What is not shown is the same as before: a date and a sponsor. He dates the spread of the Vaishno Devi story to the twentieth century, through the Arya Samaj, BAPS, calendar art and cassettes, and gives no source; he concedes that the age of the written legend is unknown. The Hindi translation that drops the three verses is not named, so I could not check it. The purse mechanism is documented at Osian and plausible elsewhere, but he gives no second case with dates and accounts. The texts show two traditions side by side for a very long time, and the richer one setting the menu wherever it paid for the temple. That is the finding of the Brahmin post as well.

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.

The claim that Arabs, Turks, or whoever can read Persian may speak for Indo-Muslim culture dies on one fact: Babur’s descendants are not in the old world. They are in South Asia. The centre of that civilisation is Lahore and Lucknow, not Ferghana.

As the Commentariat know, I’m in my own hyper-Hindufication stage, but I can clearly see that I have swapped the Islamicate for the Persianate.

The Indo-Persian Twinning. The Indo-Islamic experience was not built by the Turkic invasions alone; it is also the synthesis of native converts. Urdu is the proof: not Turkish or Arabic parked on Indian soil, but converts taking Hindi and making it their own, Perso-Arabic ornament on an Indian frame. What Noor Jehan shows is the same machinery in music: the gharana, synthesis organised into a family line. And Bhakti would not stay on one side of the line. Kabir the weaver was claimed by Hindus and Muslims at his death, and his namesake in our comments keeps the musical habit alive.

Omar’s caveat. Omar put it plainly in his Shahab Ahmed review: the zone from the Balkans to Bengal did not change religion by magic; it was conquered. There is a settler-colonial strand in the Indo-Muslim experience, and I understand why he names it. But conquest is the first chapter, not the book. The rest is synthesis, and conquerors cannot do synthesis alone; only converts who buy in wholeheartedly can (as Shawkat mentions, even his grandpapa, who was a Haji, essentially ran the town).

English, in real time. The same process is running now, in the open, between English and every South Asian language. The difference between the post-colonial and the neo-colonial is that the hegemon still radiates its culture, asymmetrically.

I have not been following the Middle East, but Indo has written a clever piece, Dune or Doom, on the Saudis. Every time I go to write about it here, I think of Sereno, who had very strong opinions of the Middle East. It is just one of those things.

memento mori

Addendum

Sons Are Not Sold in Shops

My Urdu teacher turned this week’s class into a Noor Jehan seminar, and the seminar kept turning into caste.

Two voices carry Pakistan abroad, he said: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Noor Jehan. People like that are born once in a long while. But to understand where the second one came from, he took me to a Punjabi community called the Mirasi, from miras, inheritance. Their old work was to be other families’ memory. They kept your genealogy when you yourself had forgotten it, your father’s name, his father’s, his father’s, and they entertained: song, dance, recitation, comic verse. After the British, the other functions withered and the singing stayed, because weddings had spread to every town and every house in Punjab, and weddings need singers. Every city and village had its Mirasis.

Naseebo Lal comes from a Mirasi family; Noor Jehan rose out of that world, though her life ran its own course. The gossip that still trails her came caste-flavoured, he said: such people are not khandani, show them money and they will do anything. The caste that kept everyone else’s lineage was told it had none.

And yet all Punjab carries her songs, young and old alike; remixed, resung, a world-record songbook nobody has managed to forget.

Then 1965. The fighting was on the border and Radio Pakistan needed morale. The story as he told it: word went about that India would simply buy Pakistan’s soldiers; the country was new, and some wanted to go back. Sufi Tabassum wrote her the answer and she sang it. Ae puttar hattan te nahin vikde: sons are not sold in shops; you are searching the wrong bazaar.

Sufi and Noor asked theirs sons and soldiers if they did not give our lives for Pakistan then, then when? The despised rememberers ended up holding a nation’s memory. Miras, doing its work.

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.

FlyDie on South India

The three pillars of caste. Privilege never converged on one varna. Brahmins hold the social pillar, Vaishyas the economic, Shudras the political, and a jati’s rank follows its proximity to each: close to all three makes a Kshatriya, far from all three a Dalit. The Kshatriya is the mediator everyone wants and nobody needs; the Mughals played that part best, and the empire came apart when they stopped.

Varna was always negotiable. The lawbooks rejected one direction of mixed marriage and tolerated the other. Bengal’s Kulin Brahmins wrote jati origin myths to secure their own land grants, and “pure” Kshatriya lineages were invented as needed. The grey areas, he argues, are why caste survived 3,000 years.

Manchus are to China what Mughals are to India. A follow-up to his India-and-China comment. “Han” was a set of practices before it became an ethnicity; Sun Yat-sen, arch Han nationalist, was Hakka. The Yuan never assimilated and lasted barely a century, while the Qing sinicized and endured.

The Deccan blunder. Urban Muslim nobles could be killed and replaced; rural Maratha sardars could not. Aurangzeb’s destruction of the sultanates left the vacuum the Marathas filled. In his verdict, a great general and a bad politician.

What the Mughals took from the land. North India is Vaishnav, he argues, largely through Mughal patronage; even Adityanath’s Nath sect spread on Mughal-era networks. Mughal architecture began at Bayana in Rajasthan, where the chhatri was born from the Nagara mandapa and the Persian canopy.

The environment, not the man. Akbar’s tolerance was no outlier; Ibrahim II of Bijapur ran the same experiment. The conservative turn began in mid-Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb rode the wave rather than made it. Dara was always going to lose.

Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam

Against apologetics. Defending a faith from the outsider’s picture accepts the outsider’s frame; the prior question is whether culture reflects religion or religion reflects culture. Sarmad Kashani, an Armenian-descent Jewish convert who became a fakir, then a yogi, then nothing at all, fits no category the book allows. A Balkans-to-Bengal “Islamic world” cuts non-Muslims off from their own past while making Muslims the foreign other at home.

Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions

How the Rig Veda got written. A king named Sudas, a head priest swapped mid-composition (Vishwamitra out, Vasistha in), and a Battle of Ten Kings won by breaking a dyke; the victory, in his telling, forged the Kuru super-tribe. The fire Agni absorbs from a lake may preserve the memory of a burning Central Asian gas leak.

The Sarasvati was still flowing. The Haryana stretch of the Ghaggar-Hakra kept its Sutlej connection until about 1500 BCE (his source: River and Goddess Worship in India), so the Vedic poets watched a living river decay rather than recalling a dead one. The Indus-side channel had failed a thousand years earlier.

Failing to reject the null. On an Indus-Vedic connection, the evidence keeps failing to reject the null hypothesis. He wanted the link and, as he puts it, learned the hard way that there is little to work with.

Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

Christianity’s expired advantages. The school-and-hospital edge died when the post-90s economy built better ones, the tribal frontier has closed, and the cult market now belongs to the biggest cult of all, ethnoreligious nationalism. His verdict: a marginal community, useful as a boogeyman.

Mappila means son-in-law. The name once covered Muslim, Jewish and Christian trading communities alike, born of merchants marrying in. The Jewish grandee Joseph Rabban received palaces and a Nair wife from the Chera king.

Kerala’s three-cornered trade. Muslim, Jewish and Christian Mappilas ran the ports of Malabar, Kochi and Travancore while Hindu castes held the politics. Today’s Muslim-Christian friction is Malabar money moving south into Christian territory, class and caste rather than communalism, and he expects migration to break the stalemate as Kerala’s fertility falls.

Religions built for feudalism. The major faiths were designed for a feudal agrarian world, and modern states no longer need to compromise with them. Disillusionment now sorts believers into atheists, the vaguely spiritual, and traditionalists who care more about how religion is practiced than what it believes.

Hinduism was never mostly Brahmanical. Naga cults grew out of monsoon ecology, and Skanda began as a child-devouring Graha. Tantra spread as far as Japan. Bhakti, when it came, was a mercantile movement: merchants financed the sects, and warrior ascetics cleared the highways for them.

How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

Sanskrit as Medieval Latin. Proto-Indo-Aryan is archaic Latin, Vedic Sanskrit is Classical Latin, Classical Sanskrit is Medieval Latin, and Prakrit is the Vulgar Latin people actually spoke. Classical Sanskrit owed its rise to the Indo-Saka Western Satraps; the Satavahanas preferred Prakrit. His family’s own Ayurvedic lineage ended when a grandaunt fell into a well and his great-grandfather read it as a curse.

Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

Appearance is not piety. A third of Indian Muslims told Pew they keep no meat restrictions at all, and Urdu is mother tongue to 4 percent of the country against a 14 percent Muslim share. What reads as rising religiosity is urbanization dissolving caste communities, with religious institutions filling the gap.

Bollywood is Sanskrit theatre. Hindi cinema keeps the Natya Shastra plot shape, tragic middle and dance numbers included: Sanskrit drama in vernacular speech, European camera technique, Indo-Persian costume. Its troubles are inherited forms without the theory behind them, and a Hindi belt too plural to give it a core region.

The hijab as a compromise. Purdah once meant a woman could not sit on the veranda or ride a bicycle; the veil was the conservatives’ bargain that let women out of the house without surrendering authority over them. Banning it turned a fading practice into a symbol of resistance.

Every postcolonial elite preserves the borders it inherited. That is the reason we live in the world we live in: every succeeding elite has been very keen to preserve the boundaries of its state, and it is never the case, under a postcolonial elite, that nations go back to their original topographies. The map, once drawn, becomes sacred. The question in this title is whether the post-colonials are Brahmanical gatekeepers (I’m aware the Commentariat don’t like the nomenclature but it is particularly apt for an Apex Elite).

I. A Brahmanical construct

Maybe India is also a Brahmanical construct. I am not talking Pakistani propaganda here. Politically sovereignty in India was always more socially permeable than a static reading of caste would imply, and again and again the great empires were seized by men from the middle of the order who then rapidly Sanskritised. The Nandas, who raised the first empire out of Magadha, are sneered at in the Puranas as shudras. Two millennia later Shivaji, a Maratha of cultivator-warrior stock, had to import Gagabhatta from Banaras to certify a Rajput Sisodia genealogy before his coronation could proceed. He took power first and purchased pedigree afterwards.

The higher castes, for their part, rarely had political autonomy. Their dominance was over whatever served as the proto-civil service, the elite registers and the rituals of certification. An enterprising mid-caste individual would burst into the ranks, a phenomenon found throughout the world; Napoleon, a minor Corsican noble, ended by marrying a Habsburg, and would rapidly acquire the patina of elite dominance, one way or the other. And because caste markers are patrilineal, one never inherited caste from one’s mother (Kerala’s matrilineal Nairs, as ever, excepted).

The two famous Brahmin dynasties, Pushyamitra Shunga after the Mauryas and the Peshwas after Shivaji’s heirs, both reached the throne through service’ a general in the one case, hereditary ministers in the other. When Brahmins ruled, the road ran through the secretariat.

So let “Brahmin,” is a short-hand for the record-keeping class, which certifies the winners.

II. The Dravidian other

The Aryan-Dravidian divide would be the most salient cleft of them all, and I have been thinking a lot about the Dravidian other (shielded by the Deccan from the vagaries of conquest). The only Aryans who seemed to have settled south of the Deccan were Brahmins who were invited to Sanskritised the region?

The emergence of the “Open season thread” phenomenon means there is a psychosis in the Aryan civil war.

What is the psychosis that consumes the entire subcontinent? Look at the elevation map. It is, ultimately, the Indo-Gangetic plain; that is what has been cleft, and that is also what does the cleaving with the inexorable Hindu-Muslim. The plain presses outward on everything around it and cannot quite accept that anything around it is its equal.

The geography resists the psychosis. The plain’s power has always projected poorly past its own edges; every northern empire ran aground on the Deccan, and Aurangzeb spent his last quarter-century failing to digest it, dying there in 1707. And beyond the plateau stands the counterweight itself: Dravidian India, with its own classicism and its own kingships, the one civilisational pole the plain could neither absorb nor ignore.

III. Watersheds

In a weird way, partition made no sense whatsoever but also made a lot of geographic sense. Consider what it actually did: Punjab means five waters, and a lawyer who had never before set foot in India took a few weeks to draw a line through all five. It then required the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 to re-partition the rivers, because the boundary had refused to follow them.

The sub-partitions made some sense at all, since East Bengal, of course, always had a very strong identity of its own and Majha Punjab (Lahore-Amristar is the line that runs between river-fed and rain fed Punjab).

One could have really created an Indus-watershed state and a Brahmaputra-watershed state, and these would have been very strong geopolitical constructs in whatever Confederation emerged. That is not what I am here to litigate, because ordinarily, more than language and more than ethnicity, geography is the best definition of state power. The point about a watershed is that a state can expand all the way to the very edges of its ridges, to its own side of the mountains. Mountains, like oceans, make some of the best barriers and boundaries there are, for culture and for politics both. That is why Kerala, in a way, is a very distinct identity from its “parent” Tamil Nadu, except for the Palakkad Gap; the one true breach in the Western Ghats, through which the railway and half the loan-words pass. However Kerala looks to the Arabian Sea while Tamil Nadu hugs the Bay of Bengal, which accounts for very different historical realities (one sees South East Asia, the other receives from the Middle East)

The Grand Cholas ignored watershed logic altogether and took to the sea, Rajendra sending his fleet against Srivijaya in 1025. The Oceanic barrier, it turns out, was also a road towards Hindufication and Tamilicisation of “Indo-China”.

IV. Does the Raj live on?

Q made an interesting point: Indians being upset that “their” empire being lost to them. In a strange way, both India and Pakistan are upper-caste constructs, imperial constructs that wanted to keep as much of the empire as possible.

The caste facts are real: the Congress high command was overwhelmingly twice-born, and the Muslim League was an ashraf project. But the mechanism, as in section one, is the proto-civil service. Hamza Alavi called Pakistan’s makers the salariat, the Muslim salaried and secretarial class conjuring a state in which it would be the elite; the Congress lawyers, for their part, inherited the Raj’s steel frame and never dreamed of melting it down. The Brahmanical construct scales.

Bangladesh in 1971 is the great stress test. It was a subaltern revolt against the inherited imperial structure; it was proof that language can defeat territorial preservation, a movement that began with students dying for Bengali in 1952; and it broke the border precisely because the centre had turned extractive, treating the east as revenue and garrison. It was also intellectually led, and the occupying army knew it; in its final week it hunted down Dhaka’s intellectuals. Armies do not waste their last days on irrelevant men. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, ran the same course as the rest: the English-speaking Ceylonese elite inherited the unitary colonial state intact in 1948 and kept it. Everybody wanted to preserve the postcolonial.

V. The Uncolonised

There are very few nations in the world, with the exception of Iran, Thailand, Japan, China, Turkey, and Ethiopia, which were not colonised by the great powers, and their borders are therefore, for better or for worse, very natural constructs. Test even this list and it sharpens rather than blunts. The pure cases are Japan behind its ocean, Iran behind the Zagros and the Elburz. Thailand survived partly as a diplomatic buffer, shaving off provinces to stay whole; China was carved into concessions without ever being swallowed; Ethiopia’s highlands bought it everything except five years under Italy; Turkey’s present borders were drawn at Lausanne in 1923, an empire cut back to its Anatolian redoubt. Geography gave them better terms than history.

The colonised, by contrast, have been very keen to maintain colonial borders; so keen that they wrote the instinct into law. When the newly free African states met at Cairo in 1964, they pledged to respect the frontiers inherited from their colonisers; uti possidetis, as you possess, so may you continue to possess. The coloniser’s map was received the way a shastra is received, as the text that settles the question.

So: are all postcolonial nations Brahmanical constructs? In function, yes. In every one of them a successor class took an empire it could not have built, kept the mythos and certified its own genealogy (Indonesia and the Majapahit Empire), and deemed themselves a nation.

The borders survived because the elites survived. India and Pakistan are only the clearest case, because there the Elite is old enough to have a name (Sayyid and Brahmin are two sides of the same coin). And beneath every inherited line the older map waits, the ridges and the watersheds, indifferent to the postcolonial Elite that administer the borders above them. Partition cut joint peoples; but it also exposed the shared geography underneath.

It is interesting to understand how class, colour, creed, caste, genetics and community all coincide. I may expand on this as it goes on but it doesn’t seem that the Commentariat are as interested in discussing Nepal, Syria and/or South India?

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.

All is not lost though. Kantara was a shot in the arm. Other film makers sat up and took note of the spectacular nature of rural worship.

I updated the first article I had published on BP to acknowledge this development

https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/the-eyes-have-it?r=1mp4jc

I fear it is only a short reprieve. Eventually a lot of these traditions will slowly fall by the wayside, recreated only for entertainment. They have survived for millennia and are the oldest forms of worship in the subcontinent. The world is a duller place without them.

* I have no idea if ‘lower’ caste is the politically correct term anymore, forgive the  plain speak. I desperately avoid talking about caste in general, unfortunately these articles all end up incomplete without 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

Marriage is the pump of elite reproduction. Talent and beauty marry up, status marries status, and caste reproduces itself as class while insisting it no longer exists.

Gregory Clark measured the persistence. In The Son Also Rises he followed surnames as a geologist follows isotopes: Norman names such as Darcy, Percy and Mandeville remaining disproportionately represented at Oxford and Cambridge centuries after Hastings; samurai surnames persisting in Japan’s professions after the stipends disappeared; and, nearest to home, Kulin Brahmin surnames, Mukherjee, Banerjee, Chatterjee, remaining disproportionately represented among Calcutta’s physicians through Permanent Settlement, Partition and the Left Front.

Clark’s persistence coefficient is around 0.75 per generation, and the scandal is how little institutions seem to move it. Sweden, with free universities and the Folkhemmet, produces surprisingly similar persistence. Regimes redistribute income. They barely dent descent.

Democracy, it turns out, demands hierarchy much as a republic demands an aristocracy; the constitutional question is only ever whether the aristocracy is named. I made the case last week for restoring it.

The Rivalry of Cousins

The suave metropolitan and the provincial forward caste are therefore related, but they do not occupy the same position.

Reservations are not a conspiracy; they are part of the settlement by which a dominant order keeps the wider society invested in the system. But the price is not paid evenly. The metropolitan elite possesses exit options, foreign education, private institutions, lateral re-entry, that can route its richest children around the most contested bottlenecks. The provincial cousin more often meets the system at the counter. What stabilises the bargain below can therefore radicalise the near-rival beside.

That is why kith and kin matters. Wars between strangers are merely wars; it takes cousins to make one civil. And it suggests an answer to the question the earlier piece left hanging: why might the drawing room admit the socially distant aspirant more readily than the provincial cousin?

Because distance is the safety. The Shudra or Muslim son-in-law stands, call it three or four generations of intermarriage, from the full elite vector; he is a client for a generation, grateful, dependent, an ornament to the letterhead. The Kanyakubja cousin with the right surname and the right presentation could complete the journey in a single season, which makes him not a recruit but a rival. The distant recruit can be assimilated. The near-rival must be displaced.

The drawing room welcomes grateful converts more easily than clunky cousins.

The Scribes

DP is apparently a Karana, a scribal caste (h/t formerly brown), and the quarrel between scribes and priests over the pen is old. In the Gangetic plain the Kayasthas supplied one great scribal tradition; in much of the south Brahmins themselves filled administrative and clerical roles.

The Raj accelerated a merger. As English displaced Persian at the commanding heights of administration, those who mastered the new language of rule, Brahmin, Kayastha, Karana, bhadralok of whatever thread, were increasingly compounded into an apex caste of the pen. The Indian Boston Brahmin is an heir to that merger.

The Complexion of the Elite

This is why counting literal Brahmins misses the point. Indosaurus’s numbers are all presumably correct, three Brahmin chief ministers in thirty-one, Parsi houses atop the business tables, the country’s most powerful politician an OBC, and every one of them is central to the argument rather than fatal to it.

The Boston Brahmin need not stand for election. He may be the other man doing the counting.

Nor are the great Parsi houses counterexamples. Nothing in India is more Boston than a Tata: institutions, philanthropy, English, club, permanence. And Modi’s rise is the civil war’s scoreboard: the provincial revolt captured the ballot while much of the old apex caste retained the drawing room.

The Price of Entry

The private sector matters because it is one of the great remaining mechanisms of elite reproduction. For a country aspiring to sustained double-digit growth, the question is not simply how wealth is divided but whether wealth compounds outward, into productivity, health, capability and prosperity, or pools behind barriers to entry.

Monopoly is capitalism after competition has been switched off. In a genuinely contested market, the Ambanis might be worth less and India more. The fortune and the moat are not the same asset; it is the moat that imposes the social cost. The aristocracy question and the antitrust question are therefore versions of the same question: who may enter, and at what price?

The Muslims of India

The provincial revolt that challenged the old drawing room did not abolish admissions. It opened another admissions office. The Lutyens Brahmin tracked entry silently: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The shakha increasingly determines who actually belongs out loud.

The old Muslim loyalty test was Partition; hereditary, silent and impossible to discharge. It asked what your grandfather’s community chose in 1947, a question no living citizen can answer for himself. No patriotic recitation cleared it; no conduct fully amortised it. That was the Grundnorm in the strict sense: beneath the formal rules and therefore difficult even to contest.

The new exam differs in one important respect. It is spoken. And because it is spoken, it can be passed. or failed.

How to Pass

Jai Hind. Vande Mataram. Respect for the flag. Bharat Mata ki Jai. For better or worse, and I mean both halves,  these increasingly function as tests of national belonging. The old test asked whether you left or stayed circa 1947 and could never be satisfied. The new one asks what you will say today, in public, on your feet. That distinction is not trivial.

The Two-Stanza Compromise

Vande Mataram itself records an earlier attempt to price the test fairly. In 1937 the Congress Working Committee, after consultation including Tagore, restricted official use to the first two stanzas; retaining the land, waters and orchards while avoiding the later identification of the Mother with the goddess. The point was precisely to make a national song singable by a Muslim citizen without requiring idolatry.

At the height of the national movement, the movement adjusted the test to fit the citizen. The present dispensation risks reversing the polarity. Bharat Mata ki Jai restores the personified Mother that the earlier compromise had deliberately bracketed. The old question therefore returns: does the citizen stretch to fit the test, or does the Republic adjust the test so that theological conscience and national loyalty need not collide?

The Map of Exemptions

Every loyalty test has exemptions, and the exemptions reveal where power lies. The Sikh case is the clearest. The Jat Sikh defines his Indianness with a confidence furnished by land, Khalsa, military history and Punjab itself. The farmers’ agitation demonstrated the practical limits of a hegemon confronting a mobilised regional identity on terrain it cannot easily dominate. The litmus test is not administered in Amritsar.

Tamil Nadu supplies the other great counterexample. Dravidianism is a rival grammar of belonging old enough to print its own papers. Vijay took power while explicitly naming the BJP as an ideological opponent and invoking Anna and Periyar. Where the regional grammar is strong enough, the national litmus test simply fails to become the dominant currency; it is not administered in Madurai either.

The Bengal Demonstration

Bengal is the opposite case. The BJP took 207 of the state’s 294 seats this May, ending fifteen years of Trinamool rule amid turnout above ninety-three per cent, with Suvendu Adhikari taking Bhabanipur; Mamata Banerjee’s own seat.

The significance exceeds one election. Hindutva has demonstrated to enormous numbers of Hindus that religious identity can be politically consolidated and, once consolidated, can govern. That may prove one of the era’s largest legacies. The loyalty tests are its civic liturgy.

Filing for Antecedents

The result produces a stranger prediction: minorities may increasingly discover that Hindu antecedence carries value not merely as social genealogy but as collateral against anti-nationalism.

The genealogy itself is old. Syrian Christians have long preserved traditions of Namboodiri descent; Muslim Rajputs retained Rajput identities after conversion. Those claims historically purchased lineage, locality or status.

The new value is political. A Hindu antecedent can increasingly function as evidence that conversion did not constitute civilizational departure.

Christians are well positioned for this almost without trying: Hindu names, local forms of shrine and devotion, deep vernacular embedding, and a religious affiliation tied to the same Western world with which the Indian state itself seeks strategic intimacy.

Neo-Buddhists possess a different but adjacent case. Ambedkar’s conversion was an intra-Indian revolt carried out in constitutional language. Nobody can plausibly mistake Navayana for foreign civilizational allegiance.

Citizens or Converts

And then comes the community for whom the price is highest. Indian Muslims stand apart, proudly, in theology and self-understanding. Tawhid does not sing naturally to a personified Mother, and a community with any dignity cannot be expected to manufacture antecedents or devotional gestures on command.

The supposedly passable audit is therefore not equally priced: what it prices at a shrug for the Christian and a footnote for the Buddhist, it prices at a theological negotiation for the Muslim. It is the negotiation of 1937 reopened, except that the Saffron side now holds the gavel.

Whether the new dispensation accepts something analogous to the two-stanza compromise, or instead demands the whole hymn, is therefore one of the most revealing questions in Indian public life.

I do not claim that the spoken test is fair. I claim that it is spoken and I reflexively follow it (Calvin is given free hand because he is Calvin not Kaleem; DP is a Kayasth not a Sayyid). And what is spoken can be answered, contested, repriced; and, as 1937 demonstrated, amended.

It may even become the Republic’s next constitution of manners: drafted not in Delhi alone, but in the arguments Indians, who form the dominant core of the Indian Subcontinent (with its constituent 7-10 nations), have about who belongs and what belonging requires.

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

Every durable country is governed by a sediment. India’s old elite predates the Raj: strata deposited through the Sultanates and the Mughal centuries (the Rajputs kept rank by cavalry and accommodation), compacted under the Company, glazed by the ICS, lacquered by the licence Raj. Let’s call the true elite a basis point of its society, one in ten thousand, and give each member a network of a hundred: that is how a rounding error becomes a ruling class. The visible one per cent is essentially the network of the one-in-ten-thousand.

And that old Left-Liberal Nehruvian elite is post-caste in a very particular sense. It behaves like Bollywood: class first, everything else negotiable. It will happily admit the educated aspirant, Shudra, Muslim, anyone, who marries in and learns the table manners; long before it seats the pious, industrious twice-born up from the provinces, whom it privately files under country buffoon and hem them in with Reservations.

The Reservation Cleft

The snub is the point, and the snub is the recruiting sergeant. Reservations don’t block the children of the Old Elite, who anyway train in the West, but blocks their parvenu cousins. For the rural Uppers, the shakha supplies what the drawing room withholds: fraternity, status, vocabulary and eventually power. Hindutva is best read not as the lower orders storming the gates but as an upper-caste revolt of the provinces against a post-caste metropolis; a metropolis whose own bone structure is nonetheless upper-caste.

The Old Left-Liberal Elite looks on their rural Upper-Caste kin in a way a WASP may despise a Southerner but would never daresay to a minority for performing the exact same action.

Rahul Gandhi, a Brahmin whatever the exotic ancestry, personifies the drawing room; Modi, an OBC, commands a movement built and propelled by upper-caste cadre. The founders, cadre and intellectual infrastructure are provincial upper-caste, while the electoral coalition the movement later assembled reaches deep into OBC and Dalit India. Brahmins man both barricades. Hence the title of this piece.

The Elite Civil war

Nations inherit the pathologies of their founding elites, and the civil wars attending them. English liberty was less a gift from below than the residue of prolonged civil war within the ruling class; America is still litigating the quarrels of its founding stock. India’s peculiarity is the refusal to name its Left-Liberal elite at all. There is a half-serious case for titles: an aristocracy with letterhead can be balanced, taxed, mocked. It is the unnamed aristocracy that proves immortal.

(A Pakistan aside, since Kabir’s linked piece on provinces is still ringing in my ears. The provinces were not drawn for the parties, but they function as if they had been; redoubts where a movement beaten in Islamabad can govern, recruit and wait: the PPP in Sindh, the Sharifs in Punjab, PTI in KP. PTI are the proto-Pakistanis: the first cohort to buy the middle-class Pakistani identity whole – consolidation, not secession; the new Medina on layaway. Their war is generational: children formed by Pakistaniat against elders steeped in a shrine Islam that spent centuries absorbing local idiom alongside Hindu devotion.)

Which brings us to who actually needs religion. At the summit, tradition tends to ossify into heritage. No elite lives the orthodoxy: the Khans of Bombay are half-Hindu by blood or marriage, marinated in a Hindu environment whatever the surname. Tamil Nadu, Dravidianism’s own fortress, is so Hindu that the state emblem carries a temple gopuram even Periyar never troubled to contest; T.M. Krishna’s We, the People of India (a very good book and he is the Carnatic Singer of last night’s excellent performance) sits with that fact at length.

The Middle

Orthodoxy turns out to be a middle-class necessity: religion as portable code, standardised, legible, compatible with school, office and the nuclear family, lived exam to exam and paycheck to paycheck. The poor drift to the shrine and the syncretic edge because they have nothing to lose; the elite drift there because they have nothing to prove. The middle holds the line because the line is all it holds.

So yes: Nagpur’s bowl may well be filling in Ahmedabad. But look closer at the temple queue. The priesthood is not merely in service; it is in schism; metropolis against province, drawing room against shakha, cousin against cousin. Pattanaik sees a Brahmin who rented out his voice. I see two Brahmins fighting over what the voice should say. Civil wars are hardest to see when both sides wear the same thread.

Is he right?

The Excuse for Failure

A people that can place the source of its troubles outside itself has bought something precious: a permanent excuse. The bribe demanded at the land-registration counter, the canal water that never reaches the tail-end farmer, the girl child wanted less than her brother, the stunted toddler in a country that exports grain, the sanitation worker still going down into the drain by hand in 2026. All of it can be referred outward, to a hostile neighbour and a treacherous minority, and so none of it need be referred inward. This is not an Indian disease alone. It is a human one.

So let us put the question to the only test that settles it, the counterfactual. Suppose Pakistan had never been cut out of the map in 1947. Suppose, harder, that there had never been a single Muslim in the subcontinent. Would caste dissolve? It would not. Caste predates Islam in India by more than a thousand years; it is ours, structural, home-grown, and it would outlive the disappearance of every mosque. Would the clerk return the bribe? Would the water reach the field? Would the daughter be wanted? Not one of these turns on the existence of a Muslim. To say otherwise is not analysis. It is an alibi dressed as an argument.

The Mythologisation against the Other

Here is the harder point, and Kabir’s critics will like it least. The unified Hindu identity that now speaks with such confidence is not as old as it believes itself to be. The civilisation is ancient, certainly: the temples, the Sanskrit and Tamil canons, the philosophical schools, the unbroken liturgies are the inheritance of millennia, and no one sensible disputes it. What is recent is something narrower and more political: the welding of a thousand jatis, sampradayas, languages and regions into a single bloc that votes as one, takes offence as one, and calls itself Hindu in the singular. That bloc is barely more than a century old, and it was assembled, in large part, against a foil.

A Bengali, a Tamil and a Marwari did not wake one morning feeling themselves one political people. They were made into one, and the making needed an other against whom the new self could be drawn. Precisely because the religion is old, people mistake the bloc for something equally old. The conflation is not an accident. It is the trick. Remove the foil and the construction sways. This is why the enemy can never be permitted to vanish. The enemy is not an obstacle to the project. The enemy is the essence of the project.

The Israel Parable

The exemplar is usually Israel: small, encircled, and rich. Asked to look inward, the nationalist looks outward yet again, this time for a model rather than a culprit. And even the model will not hold the weight he puts on it. Israel’s rise rested on a stack of external inputs no honest account omits: American underwriting on a scale extended to no other state, German reparations, a diaspora that arrived with capital and credentials already in hand, and successive waves of highly skilled immigration. Strip those away and the parable thins to very little. A nation may grow while defining itself against its neighbours. Whether it grows because of that stance, or in spite of it and on the back of other people’s money, is exactly the question the comparison is built to avoid. The dream, like the blame, has been outsourced.

The Saffron Liberal

We have never spared the Crescentiate here, and we will not start now: the regressive strain in that quarter is real, it is not a Western fabrication, and it has earned every word of criticism sent its way. But the Saffroniate liberal is a particular specimen, because his liberalism runs on a switch. It is summoned only when a Muslim is in the frame. The veil, the triple talaq, the treatment of women become matters of scalding principle. The same principle falls silent before the khap panchayat, the honour killing, the dowry death, the temple that still bars the menstruating woman at the door. A liberalism that activates only against the other is not liberalism. It is a stick that has been told it is a value.

The recent thread showed the mechanism with unusual clarity. A provocation was dangled, the bait was taken, and the comments filled. But watch what the inquiry then became. It became, entirely, an interrogation of how Islam treats its women.

Casting Stones

One does not expiate one’s own sins by casting stones at another’s. For a while it can feel like absolution: the stone is thrown and the crowd roars. But the sin sits exactly where it was, untouched, because nothing has been examined. A culture reforms only when it turns the interrogative eye inward, and inward is the one direction the externalising habit forbids.

Empire Comes for All

The Saffroniate, in its current form, has staked itself on Empire. It treats alignment with the great Western power as a kind of insurance, on the assumption that to stand beside the strong is to be kept safe by the strong. By a sharp irony, it is the traditionalist Muslim, the very figure paraded as the face of backwardness, who remains one of the last genuinely anti-imperial constituencies left standing, wary of the order the modern Hindu nationalist has chosen to embrace.

The arrangement is not new, and the historical rhyme is worth hearing. When George V came to India in 1911, the literary forms of the subcontinent were bent to receive him. A George-nameh was composed, the imperial monarch fitted into the mould of the Persian Book of Kings, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, as though he were a late heir to Jamshid and to Bahram Gur the hunter. The Persianate epic had long lent kings a borrowed grandeur, from the Qajars’ Shahanshah-nameh onward; now it lent the loan to an Englishman. And the single ancient royal tradition this particular heir can be said to have honoured is recorded, with admirable economy, by the archive itself.

A George-nameh was written for George V’s visit to India in 1911. The king honoured the ancient traditions of Persian rulers in at least one way: in several weeks his passion for hunting decimated the tiger population of Nepal.

Cambridge University Library, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, QM/21/67

The panegyric did its work, and the slaughter passed quietly beneath it. That is what glossing means in practice. The violence is not denied; it is dressed. A century on, tsubmission to the strong is presented as prudence, even as protection.

And then the order reminds everyone what it is. This week, enforcing its blockade of Iran, the United States put munitions into the engine room of a tanker in the Gulf of Oman. Three of the dead were Indians. Not soldiers, not combatants: merchant seamen, working men, killed by the very Empire whose favour the nationalist courts as a shield. India lodged its sharpest protest of the war and summoned the Americans. It will change nothing. The lesson, for anyone willing to take it, is plain. Empire does not pause to check the religion of the men in the engine room. Empire comes for us all, and it never asks whose side you imagined you were on.

The Beginning of the Cure

So Kabir is right, that the fixation is real. But it is not a bad habit to be scolded out of existence. It is a function, and it does real work. It supplies an enemy so that we need never supply an explanation, and it lends a young, assembled identity the solidity it cannot yet find from within.

The day this Commentariat can carry hundreds of comments on caste, or on water, or on the daughter who is not wanted, with not one of them reaching for Pakistan or Islam, is the day the patient has started to mend. We are not there. We are nowhere near. But to name the disease, as Kabir has done, is where every cure begins.

We take up the Shahnameh and its long afterlife, the George-nameh among its odder descendants, at greater length in a forthcoming BRAHM Newsletter.