cultural nationalism – Brown Pundits

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. “India owns the legacy because most Muslims stayed.” “Pakistan can’t own it because Delhi and Lucknow are in India.” 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 Bahá’í 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

Continue reading Why Hasn’t Pakistan Collapsed Yet?

🕌 Reflections on Kabir, Afridi, and the Compact of Coexistence

The recent incident involving Kabir / Bombay Badshah / Honey Singh, and the orchestrated drama around his entrapment has, quite unexpectedly, become a catalyst for deeper discussion on Brown Pundits. While none have chosen to focus on analytics (“2,000 daily visitors”—thank you very much:-), the real story lies in how this drama has exposed, yet again, the deep ideological fissures within South Asian identity; especially in the India-Pakistan-Muslim triad.

Let’s begin by being honest: Brown Pundits, for all its digressions into Sri Lanka, Nepal, or Bangladesh, is still primarily a blog about India and Pakistan, and more crucially, about Indian and Pakistani Muslims. This is a feature, not a bug. The origins of the blog lie in the Sepia Mutiny, a scattered band of intellectually independent thinkers questioning dogma from every direction (which started in 2004 and if we are a “daughter blog” that we means have 20+yrs of intellectual antecedents on the Brownet), and it has now matured into one of the few platforms willing to wrestle with the ideological ambiguities at the heart of the subcontinent.

🧕 Kabir’s Point: Brotherhood, Boundaries, and the Big Choice

Kabir made an astute, if difficult, observation: that he views Indian Muslims as “brothers”, but does not feel the same about Pakistani non-Muslims.

This sounds contradictory until one understands the emotional exhaustion of watching Muslims oscillate between claiming ummah-hood when convenient, and weaponizing liberal values when needed. It’s a cognitive dissonance that creates what I can only call the moral coexistence trap: the idea that Muslims, especially in India, demand maximum accommodation, of their food (their nauseating right to murder Gau Mata on Bharat’s sacred soil itself), Faith, festivals, and foreign affiliations, while rarely extending the same pluralistic courtesy in return.

And then there’s that infamous Shahid Afridi clip, the one where he smashed his television after watching an Aarti, being performed. To many of us, that wasn’t just a cringe-inducing moment of bigotry; it begged a real question: Why do Indian cricketers continue to shake hands with Hinduphobes Hindu-hating men like Afridi and his ilk (the Pakistan cricket team)? At what point does tolerance become indulgence?

🚩 The Compact of Indian Minorities: Understand It or Leave It

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah: