A few updates from this week:
Sri Lanka is facing severe flooding. Sbarkkum reports major damage to rail and road networks, with Dutch support expected for reconstruction.
Sana Aiyarās āWorld at MITā video touches on her life and work
Sam Dalrymple has a clip on Lahore and Delhiāanother reminder of how closely the two cities mirror each other despite partition.
Pakistanās minority rights bill is worth watching. Continue reading Open Thread: From Floods to LaBal
I received a message from a publicist this week. The name caught my eye because I knew the scholar from Cambridge years ago. The subject of the email was simple: a new book on PÄį¹ini and the old claim that something in his system “doesn’t work.”
For two and a half millennia, scholars have argued that PÄį¹ini’s grammar, the first true computational system for language, contains a flaw. His treatise gives a compact system for generating correct Sanskrit forms. But in cases where two rules seem to apply at the same time, most readers assumed the system breaks. Textbooks describe this as a “conflict problem.” Generations of commentators tried to patch it with exceptions, hierarchies, or interpretive workarounds.
The new book, PÄį¹ini’s Perfect Rule (December 2025), argues that the flaw was never there. The author, Rishi Rajpopat, claims the system already contains a rule for solving the conflict. According to him, PÄį¹ini didn’t leave a hole; modern readers simply looked in the wrong place. If his reading is right, the entire architecture of the grammar becomes visible as a single machine; elegant, compact, and self-consistent.
There are two parts to this story. Continue reading PÄį¹ini, the “Glitch,” and a Note From an Old Cambridge Friend
Dear all,
With everything going on in the last 48 hours, we wanted to send a short note to everyone directly. BP hasĀ sputtered back to lifeĀ in the past year, and with that revival comes all the familiar subcontinental pathologies: everyone believes theyāre right, everyone believes moderation is biased, and everyone believes someone else is being unfair. In that sense, BP is working exactly as it always has.
We want to restate something very clearly:Ā we’re not going to run a hyper-moderated blog.Ā It takes too much time, too much energy, and, crucially, it’s an unfunded mandate. Nothing is more dispiriting than a dead space. Our approach has been simple and consistent:
1. Authors control their own threads.
If things escalate onĀ yourĀ post, you shut it down when and where you see fit. Thatās the cleanest system and the only one we can realistically sustain.
2. No bans, shadow bans, or entrapment games.
Once we go down the path of micro-policing, BP loses its character. Thatās not the direction we want to take.
3. We do not manufacture controversy.
If anything, the only thing we are biased toward is what the audience reads and engages with. Thatās it. Everything else is noise.
Reflections:
Some of you will have seen the recent exchanges where accusations were thrown in both directions, and where intentions were questioned. Without going into details:Ā this is exactly how online political communities melt down;Ā by assuming the worst in each other and by escalating minor provocations into existential battles. Itās the same pattern we saw a couple of years ago at a public talk by Rahul Gandhi in Cambridge: someone asked a loaded, āgotchaā question, the out of context reply went viral, people got outraged, and the whole thing became a cycle of reaction and overreaction. Weāre drifting into the same dynamic.
Letās not.
BP works only when people post, comment, disagree, and move on. If that stops, the blog dies. And as Omarās recent post highlighted, weĀ wantĀ authors to write more, not less.
So our simple request is this:Ā Calm down, carry on, manage your own threads, and do not fall prey to the outrage factory.
If you feel strongly about a situation, reach out; if you want more balance, we’re happy to add an additional admin to offset the load (BPās editorial board already functions with more factions than the Lebanese Parliament); if something crosses a line, handle it on your post. But letās not turn BP into a miniature Whitehall where everything becomes bureaucratised. Weāve done extremely well this past year. Letās keep the energy without burning down the house.
Warmly.
As Dave mentioned, there is a lively WhatsApp group of BP authors and editors, and it inevitably shapes the comment ecosystem. But one comment on the blog stood out:
āThe very foundation of Pakistan is an anti-position. What is not India is Pakistan. So isnāt it obvious?ā
Itās an extraordinarily crisp description of Pakistani identity-building. What is not India is Pakistan. That is not a slur; it is, in many ways, a psychologically accurate frame for how the state narrates itself.
What I increasingly find misplaced on this blog is the recurring assumption that Pakistanis are somehow āIndians-in-waiting,ā or that Punjab is āWest Punjab,ā Pakistan āNorthwest India,ā or Bangladesh āEast Bengal.ā These are irredentist projections that simply do not match lived identities. This is not āNorth Koreaā or āEast Germany,ā where both sides continue to imagine themselves as fragments of one common nation.
Yes, Pakistan consumes Bollywood and Hindi music, which themselves derive from Mughal and Indo-Persian syncretic traditions. Yes, Pakistan is culturally embedded in the greater Indo-Islamic civilizational sphere. But emotionally, Pakistan has severed itself from the Indian Subcontinent as a cohesive landscape. It has constructed a hybrid identity; part Turko-Persian, part Islamic internationalist, part anti-India.
I donāt personally agree with this move, and my own trajectory has been toward a strong Hinducised, Dharmic identification. But my view is irrelevant here. What matters is that Pakistani identity is defined negatively; as the commentator put it, āWhat is not India is Pakistan.ā
Whether that is healthy or sustainable is another matter. But identities can persist in unhealthy configurations for a very long time; the stock market can be irrational longer than your liquidity can survive.
Kabir suggested that I apologise but for what, exactly? Why should Saffroniate be considered offensive? Own it. I donāt see anything inherently wrong with the idea of Akhand Bharat; the concept of a broader Dharmic civilisation makes eminent sense to me.
Likewise, I donāt understand why questioning caste identities provokes such sensitivity. Again, own it because the more caste is repressed, the more likely it is to resurface.
At heart, Iām a reformist, not a revolutionary. I believe in improving and refining what exists, not erasing it. Cultural features should only be abolished when they are truly harmful or deleterious, not simply because they make us uncomfortable.
The November circular was emailed earlier to all various stakeholders of BP. This will be sticky for a short period as unfortunately publishing all the drafts has pushed the current posts much further down.
You may also use this thread as an unmoderated Open Threads. Topics of interest include JD Vance’s comments, the stabbing in the UK by asylum seekers (presumably), and any other interest. I would suggest everyone engage with the email, after the jump; if you have been emailed it privately, I do expect private replies as well.
no one is born a BahĆ”āĆ; even those who are “BahĆ”āĆzadeh” (those born to BahĆ”āĆ homes) must first affirm their belief at fifteen and confirm it at 21
Dawn Posting
Most of my writing these days happens either at the dead of night, bleeding into the Dawn. This is when the world is quiet enough to hear oneās thoughts.
Iāve asked the Editors to lean into their moderation. But Iāve also emphasized that a copy of the moderated comments should be preserved in their original form; so that, if thereās an appeal or a misreading, I can assess it personally. My instinct has always been to under-moderate. I would rather allow something unpleasant to be said than suppress something vital.
That said, miscommunication is inevitable in a forum like ours. I recently had my own moment of misunderstanding with Indosaurus. But in many ways, thatās exactly what makes Brown Pundits an exciting space. We are not a hive mind. Weāre a broad church; Anglican in temperament, not Catholic in control. Communion, not command.
The Commentariat Continue reading Pakistan, a young state but an old nation
Fascinating for me how two very different Indian-Americans are battling it out. There seems to be far less Indian asabiyyah?
If China endured a century of humiliation, India has lived through a thousand years of it. Invasions and exploitation left it poor in wealth but rich in culture; intricate, adaptive, and resilient. That depth shows in Desi English, which often favours long, ornate sentences over plain ones.
This habit echoes Persianās former role in the subcontinent: a prestige language whose mastery signalled rank. Even Ghalibās vast Persian verse drew less love than his Urdu. In India, Persian was the colonial language of power; today, English plays that part.
In Iran, Persian changes fast. Slang, borrowed terms, and foreign tones reshape it so quickly that many in their forties struggle with teenage speech. My own Persian, kept alive in Kuwait and India, is closer to Shirazi and Tehrani standards than to the language my ancestors spoke. Iām self-conscious with Iranians, but with diaspora Persians, I speak freely; we share a looser, accented form of speech. Continue reading Why Indian English Loves Long Sentences
This Sunday, something quietly powerful is taking place: Indian and Pakistani artists will share a virtual stage, and among them is our very own Kabir Altaf, performing as a Hindustani classical vocalist and ethnomusicologist based in Pakistan.
Kabir shared that Sheema ji personally invited him to sing, and heās planning to perform the Kabir bhajan already available on Spotify. A simple act but a potent one. Rooted in shared heritage, offered in public.
Itās easy to be cynical about IndiaāPakistan relations. But these moments matter. When musicians from Sindh and Delhi, translators from Karachi, and filmmakers from Mumbai come together, even on Zoom, they create a space that politics cannot reach. A space where memory, performance, and shared roots do the work diplomacy cannot.
This is the kind of initiative we need more of: not policy, but presence; not diplomacy, but dialogue. These exchanges donāt dilute identity; they deepen it.
Bravo and huzzah to Kabir, and to all involved.
š Event:
IndianāPakistani Artists in Dialogue
š Saturday, 3rd August 2025
ā° 7:30 PM Pakistan time / 8:00 PM India time
š©āš¤ Moderator:
Sheema Kermani ā Bharatanatyam dancer, theatre personality, Karachi
š Featured Speakers & Performers:
Dr. Syeda Saiyidain Hameed ā Writer, former Member of Indiaās Planning Commission
Dr. Ghazala Irfan ā Philosopher and Chair, Department of Humanities, LUMS; affiliated with All Pakistan Music Conference
Anand Patwardhan ā Documentary filmmaker, Mumbai
Saleema J. Khawaja ā Vocalist of Punjabi Kafi and Guru Nanak verses, Lahore
Neela Bhagwat ā Hindustani vocalist (Gwalior Gharana), Mumbai
Azhar Shan ā Folk musician from Sindh
Dhruv Sangari ā Hindustani classical and Sufi vocalist, Delhi
Zainub J. Khawaja ā Musician, member of Harsukhiyaan, Pakistan
Yousuf Saeed ā Documentary filmmaker, known for work on classical music in Pakistan, Delhi
Kabir Altaf ā Hindustani classical vocalist and ethnomusicologist, Pakistan
Nishtha Jain ā Documentary filmmaker, Mumbai
Zahra Sabri ā Lecturer and translator, Karachi
Zulaikha Jabeen ā Independent scholar, India
š Join via Zoom
Meeting ID: 897 8701 6742
