Nothing in that room was untouched. Popular Hinduism has spent eight centuries trading with Islam, and vice versa. What was interesting was that at midnight, following baby Krishna’s birth (which was beautifully staged), the Mandir decided to have a birthday cake with the kids cutting it and singing happy birthday. It was a clever nod to modernity and a way to keep these young British Asian (Sindhi) kids tied in to their culture.

Can Dharma fight back?

NDG wrote that Dharma is in recession across Asia because its values cannot cope with the zero-sum ideology of the Abrahamic faiths. Dharma is “an operating system that hasn’t figured out there is a virus“. In his telling, Korean megachurches are eating Fiji, while their missionaries are converting the poor of Nepal, Sikkim and the North East, and Singapore is ever closer to a Christian plurality.

However it feels that the real catalyst in Asia is modernity, not Christianity, and that the young of Singapore and Seoul are leaving churches faster than any missionary can fill them. Indo mentioned that conversion is easy. Every life has a night of anguish, and the missionary is there that night with tea and a tithe. However conversion is never just an individual context but a societal one.

Who makes a society

Headcount alone does not make a society. Money, power, fame and taste make it, and all four sit with a small number of people drawn from the same few strata. The elite is whoever controls the school, the language of advancement, the marriage market and the standard of taste, because those four are how a society reproduces itself in the next generation. In India that band has always been narrow.

Partitioning the Elites

Partition was, at the top, a partition of elites. Punjab was a mass exchange, and its wound belongs to everyone. But Pakistan’s state culture was written by a migrating class: the Urdu-speaking salariat of the United Provinces and Bihar, who owned no land in the new country and gave it Urdu and an ideology instead, until the Punjabi-dominated army and civil service took the state off them, a takeover complete by 1958. The elite that stayed made India, and the country still runs on the tastes of that class, its English, its institutions, its newspapers, its idea of what an educated person looks like.

The Normans

As mentioned in the discussion on Aryan genetics, the Normans ruled England in French for three centuries; the peasants kept English and took the vocabulary. A preprint this April sequenced 78 people from a Surrey churchyard in use from the ninth century to the thirteenth and found no genetic break across 1066: the elite was replaced, the population was not, and the culture changed anyway. The Turks ruled Delhi in Persian for longer; Hindustani absorbed the words and kept its own grammar. The Mongols, who ran the largest land empire ever assembled, ended up praying to the gods of the people they conquered: Allah in Persia, the Buddha of Tibet in Mongolia. The direction of cultural flow is set by whoever holds the standard of what is beautiful and correct, and a warlord on a horse is not that person.

Taste is the hardest currency

Aesthetics track class. What an elite finds beautiful becomes what the society finds beautiful, and beauty is where religion lives day to day: the music, the dress at a wedding, the food at a funeral, the calendar. A convert does not step out of any of it. An Indian baptised on Sunday still eats with his cousins on Diwali, still marries inside his jati more often than not. The conversion is real to him. It is invisible to the society, because the milieu did not convert with him.

Conversion en masse

Conversion changes a society in one of two ways. Either the milieu converts as a block, which is mass conversion and is nowadays rare, or the missionary is the person who builds the elite. Spain did the second in the Philippines. It ran the islands through the friars for three centuries, and the friar’s school was where the native elite was remade. Tagalog survived and Spanish did not, but Catholicism became the society because it had first become the society’s elite. The same mechanism explains the three Indian states where Christianity became the majority, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, hill societies where the mission school was the first school and so produced the first modern elite.

Kerala

Kerala is the other case, and it is the domestication case: the Syrian Christians of Malabar were a landed and trading elite of the coast for a thousand years before any Portuguese missionary arrived, and they hold a niche inside Kerala’s caste order rather than standing outside it. Where an elite already stood, the missionary knocked for two centuries and the door stayed shut.

The Census

India’s Christians were 2.3 percent of the population at the 2011 census, and the share has never left the twos in any census since 1951. Seven decades of missionary work, and the line is flat.

Nagaland

Historically masses can convert first and manufacture their own elite later. A movement that converts a district, breeds, builds its own schools and marries its own graduates will produce an elite within a century. That is the Naga story in miniature. But it needs prestige institutions at scale, not baptisms, and India has shown no takeoff anywhere outside the hills. That line has held for seventy years

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka points the other way, to Dharmification. The Portuguese, Dutch and British made a Christian coastal elite, and Christians were 10 percent of the island in 1891. The 2024 census has them at 6.9 percent. What happened in between was an elite changing its badge. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was born into an Anglican family, converted to Buddhism, and rode Sinhala Buddhist nationalism to the premiership in 1956. When the prime minister’s own conversion runs towards the majority religion, the missionaries’ century is over. Empire made a Christian elite; the revival replaced it, and the numbers followed the elite down.

Korea

Christianity grew there because it attached itself to the elite project of the twentieth century: the mission school, the hospital, the Hangul Bible, and above all resistance to Japan. It was the modernising creed of a nationalist elite. Everywhere Christianity has grown fast, it has ridden an elite project or built one.

And now? The 2025 Hankook Research survey has 51 percent of South Koreans with no religion, 20 percent Protestant, 11 percent Catholic and 16 percent Buddhist, and those shares have barely moved since 2018. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 72 percent have no religion. Half of Korean Catholics are over 60. The fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023, the lowest in the world, and stands at 0.80 after two years of small rebound; in Seoul it is 0.63. The Korean missionary in Sikkim is in danger of ageing out.

58 percent of South Korean Christians say they feel close to Confucianism. Korean society infiltrated the church and rendered it Asiatic.

One of my favourite words comes from Korean, nunchi, the art of “reading a room”. Religions must read their societies, or they wither.

The diaspora shows the same law from the other side. Korean Americans are 59 percent Christian against 32 percent in Korea, because Christians were the ones who emigrated to a Christian country. Their American-born children are split, 47 percent Christian to 45 percent unaffiliated. One generation inside the American milieu and the American pattern takes over. North of the DMZ the same people, under a different elite, are atheist by decree. Same blood and the same language, and three religious settlements, each set by the elite that ruled it.

What is religion

Religion is not a fixed thing that a society holds or loses. Religion is a dynamic force. It may be divinely inspired but it is subject to human forces at the same time, and every organisation that wants to survive its century has to fit the mould of that century. Popular Hinduism did that with Sufi Islam, and subsequently Christianity. Korean Christianity is dancing and duelling with Confucianism as we speak.

The virus is modernity, and it is in the missionaries’ bloodstream too. Seven in ten young Koreans have no religion, and the capital that exports the megachurches has a fertility rate of 0.63. A creed that is losing the under-30s at home will not keep anyone’s soul abroad.

The soul of a country is kept by its elite, and India’s elite is not converting. It is doing what it has always done, setting the standard of taste that everyone else, converts included, has to live inside. I went to a devotional and had an eggless cake slice, and halwa, with the whole room singing out Happy Birthday to Lord Krishna’s name. The prevailing musical traditions were shaped as much by Sultanate and Mughal courts as any temple. It felt timeless because the adaptation was complete. That is the soul of Dharma, and it has nunchi.

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.

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.

Gaurav’s excellent piece on “progressive Dravidianism” pushed me to re-examine a related elite anxiety: the melodrama around intermarriage.  I am happy to be corrected on any of the specifics below, especially where a claim could be tightened with better data.

The standard story goes like this. Elites marry out. Boundaries dissolve. The group dies. This story is intuitively appealing because it treats identity as if it were a biological substance. But elites are not reproduced primarily by blood. They are reproduced by property, institutions, credentials, and networks. In that world, intermarriage is rarely a solvent. It is more often a merger.

The English aristocracy understood this early, and acted accordingly. When the old landed families were cash-poor but title-rich, they did not preserve themselves by sealing the gates. They did the opposite. They married in money. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a whole genre of “dollar princesses,” wealthy American heiresses who married British aristocrats, trading capital for rank. By one commonly cited compilation, between 1870 and 1914, over a hundred British aristocrats, including multiple dukes, married American women; and in the broader European set, hundreds of such transatlantic matches were recorded.  This was not cultural dilution. It was institutional self-preservation by acquisition. The class survived because it treated marriage as capital strategy.

Parsis, the old elites of Bombay, sit inside a similar logic even as they face a genuinely severe demographic problem. India’s Parsi population is widely reported to have fallen from about 114,000 in 1941 to roughly 57,000 by the 2011 census.  That decline is real, and it is grim. But the habit of blaming it mainly on intermarriage misses the more basic driver: family formation itself. A group cannot reproduce if it marries late, marries less, and has few or no children even within endogamous marriages. In that situation, railing against exogamy is like blaming the weather when the engine is missing. Meanwhile, when Parsis do intermarry within the same urban professional class and property ecology, the household that results often remains socially Parsi-coded in Mumbai’s elite landscape: same neighbourhoods, same schools, same institutional circuits, often the same trusteeships and philanthropic boards. The boundary may soften; the elite position usually does not.

Upper-caste Hindus offer an even clearer case, because the scale is larger and the story is less sentimental. Caste endogamy is still strong in India overall, but in urban professional strata it is weakening. Yet upper-caste advantage does not weaken in parallel. The reason is straightforward. The elite is not defined only by who marries whom; it is defined by who inherits what, who gets credentialed where, who has the English fluency, who has the networks that turn education into employment, and who converts employment into assets. In that sense, an intercaste marriage between two elite families is not a breach. It is a consolidation of elite capital into a larger, more socially legible unit. The ritual story changes; the asset story continues.

No one in Bollywood marries within their ‘caste’ anymore, and yet no one disputes that Bollywood itself is a caste.

In the American context, the point becomes harder to avoid because the data is blunt. Among non-Orthodox American Jews who married recently, intermarriage is now the majority pattern; one major survey reports that among non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010, roughly six in ten have non-Jewish spouses.  If marriage boundaries were the decisive determinant of elite continuity, this would imply rapid elite collapse. But what has actually happened is closer to amalgamation with the older mainstream establishment. In practice, a great deal of intermarriage is not “down and out.” It is lateral and upward, into the professional-managerial class and, at the top, into the older American elites who used to be described as WASP. The household becomes less tribally bounded, but it does not become less elite. Titles are swapped for endowments; ethnoreligious boundary maintenance gives way to institutional positioning. The elite remains.

This is why I find “intermarriage panic” so often miscalibrated among property-owning groups. It treats identity as the primary scarce asset. For elites, identity is often a secondary asset, and sometimes a negotiable one. The scarce assets are housing in the right places, access to the right schools, entrée into the right professions, and the family structures that transmit these smoothly. Elites are “small” only demographically. They are not small institutionally. They are overrepresented where leverage is. That overrepresentation is not erased by a mixed marriage; in many cases it is stabilised by it.

“If elite intermarriage were truly eroding elite power, we would expect to see declining elite overrepresentation in property ownership, elite education, and institutional leadership; we do not.”

There is one more point that matters, and it links back to Gaurav’s frame on Dravidian progressivism (and whether it is grounded in truth). When a movement or community insists it is egalitarian while its leadership class quietly reproduces itself, you get a politics of symbolism and an economics of continuity.  The same thing happens in the marriage discourse. Elites talk as if intermarriage is existential because it sounds like moral seriousness. But their actual life choices often reveal a calmer truth: they will police boundaries when it is convenient, relax them when it is profitable, and, above all, continue accumulating power and property in either scenario. The boundary talk is theology. The marriage pattern is strategy.

Unlike property-owning elites, many Urdu-speaking Muslim identities in South Asia are linguistic and cultural rather than asset-anchored, which makes elite reproduction less stable even where group identity feels strong.

If any of this is wrong, I would rather correct it than defend it. The core claim, though, seems hard to escape: for elites, intermarriage is frequently exaggerated as a threat because the real engine of continuity is not endogamy. It is the machinery of inheritance, material and institutional, and elites remain unusually good at keeping that machinery running.

Despite rising intercaste marriage in urban India, upper castes remain massively overrepresented in the judiciary, elite universities, English-language media, and corporate leadership. This is a neutral statement; all elites remain disproportionately represented in elite sectors as a rule of thumb (Norman descendants in Britain come to mind).

Muhajirs (native Urdu-speakers) in Pakistan are already heavily intermarried and will be even more so within the next two generations, much like many Indus ethnolinguistic groups in India (Ranveer–Deepika being the pop-cultural shorthand). Yet no one seriously doubts that they will continue to exercise profound socio-cultural influence for the foreseeable future. They trade genetics for memetics; as refugee elites, Indus Hindus and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs alike, blend into their adopted lands and render a unnatural Partition into a settled historical fact.

To begin with, most people discussing Pakistan do not understand its internal sociology. They begin with a conclusion, “Pakistan is artificial and unstable”, and then select facts to confirm it. This is confirmation bias dressed up as analysis.

Consider the Pashtuns. The claim that they are natural irredentists misunderstands who they are and how they live. Pashtuns in Pakistan are not a marginal population looking across the border for salvation. They are deeply integrated into the Pakistani state, economy, and military. They dominate transport, logistics, security, and large parts of urban informal commerce. Large numbers have moved permanently into Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. Assimilation is not failing; it is proceeding at scale.

The comparison with Azerbaijanis in Iran is instructive. Iranian Azeris are not secretly waiting to defect to Azerbaijan. They are embedded in Iranian society, power structures, and culture. Shared ethnicity does not automatically produce separatism. Politics, incentives, and lived realities matter more than maps.

In both cases, Azeris in Iran and Pashtuns in Pakistan, often noted for features regarded as more “European” in local racial taxonomies, have, through extensive intermarriage, materially reshaped the ethnic, racial, and aesthetic presentation of Persian and Pakistani elites, further binding these groups into the core of state society rather than marking them as outsiders.

Language matters as well. Afghanistan is, in practice, a Dari-speaking state. Pakistan is an Urdu-speaking one. This difference is not cosmetic. Language shapes elite formation, bureaucracy, media, and identity. Cultural continuity does not imply political unity across borders.

Balochistan is also routinely misunderstood. It is not a coherent, homogenous block waiting to secede. It is ethnically mixed, tribally fragmented, and geopolitically boxed in. Any serious analysis must ask a basic question: who would support an independent Balochistan? Iran would not. Nor would any regional power interested in stability. Secession does not occur in a vacuum. It requires sustained external backing. That backing does not exist.

The analogy to Bangladesh is especially careless. Bangladesh was not a normal separatist case. It was a geographically bifurcated state, split into two wings separated by an enemy country, under wartime conditions, with massive external intervention. There is no comparable case where a contiguous state with a unified military and elite structure simply dissolved under internal pressure alone. Timor-Leste and South Sudan required extraordinary external force. Pakistan faces nothing of the kind.

Pakistan is also not a purely democratic state in the liberal sense. It is a feudal-elite system with a strong military core. That is not a moral defense, but it is a structural fact. Such systems are often more stable than outsiders expect because elite buy-in is coordinated across ethnic lines. Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Seraikis, and Kashmiris are not operating as separate political projects. They are invested in a shared state.

This does not mean Pakistan is healthy. Balochistan is not a paradise. Economic management has been poor. The state has paid a long-term price for being a Prussia-lite security system. But weakness is not the same as fragmentation. Economic distress does not automatically translate into territorial collapse.

In fact, in certain respects Pakistan has been unusually consolidated in recent years. The state has reasserted control over demagogues, for better or worse. It has stabilized its foreign policy posture. It has retained internal coherence despite severe pressure. These are not signs of a state on the verge of dissolution.

Much of the current commentary also suffers from a failure of humanization. Entire populations are reduced to abstractions: “Baloch,” “Pashtuns,” “Muslims,” “demographics.” People become pieces in a speculative board game. This is not analysis; it is moral laziness. When real events occur, whether in the case of Sunila Khatun, Kashmir or elsewhere, they are filtered through ideology rather than law, fact, or human reality.

The claim that Pakistan survives only because of external patrons is also overstated. External support matters, as it does for many states. But Pakistan’s cohesion is not borrowed. It is internally generated through institutions, elites, and social integration.

States do not usually collapse because analysts expect them to. They collapse when elites defect en masse, when borders become porous with sustained external backing, and when legitimacy evaporates simultaneously at the center and the periphery. None of those conditions currently apply.

Pakistan is evolving, not dissolving. Those who keep predicting its breakup are not reading reality. They are reading their own assumptions back into it.

There is only one historical analogy worth using when discussing Pakistan “rejoining” India: the Act of Union of 1707 between Scotland and England. Not Rome and Greece. Not Yugoslavia. Not German reunification. And certainly not civilizational nostalgia. The reason is simple. The 1707 Union was not about love, memory, or reconciliation. It was about bankruptcy, security, elite survival, and managed loss of sovereignty without humiliation. That is the only way such a union could ever happen.

Union Is an Elite Exit, Not a Popular Dream

Scotland did not join England because it felt British. It joined because it was broke. The Darien Scheme collapsed. The Scottish state was insolvent. The elite faced personal ruin. England controlled capital, markets, and trade. The Act of Union absorbed Scottish debt, protected elite property, preserved law and church, dissolved sovereignty while preserving status. The public opposed it. It passed anyway. Unions are not plebiscites. They are elite exits under pressure.

Pakistan’s Position Is Structurally Similar

Pakistan today is not Scotland in 1707. But the resemblance is close enough to matter. Pakistan is chronically indebted, permanently IMF-dependent, over-militarised by design, economically capped by scale and FX limits. It is run by elites whose lives are already offshore, Like Scotland, the state is failing faster than rents can be extracted, sovereignty has become expensive, security dominates fiscal policy and there is no credible independent growth path. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

Why India Is England in This Analogy

England did not seek union out of affection. It wanted security, alignment, and control of risk. India faces a permanent western security distraction, diplomatic and military overhang and a neighbour whose instability spills outward. A union would benefit India too, but only if India behaves like England did: confident, restrained, and transactional. England demanded alignment. It did not demand cultural victory.

The Military Is Pakistan’s Darien Scheme

Pakistan’s real failure is not economic. It is institutional. The permanent security state crowds out development, weakens civilian rule, replaces productivity with rent-seeking and cannot withdraw without humiliation. A union offers something no treaty can: a face-saving off-ramp. The military would not be defeated. It would be absorbed, reduced, and redeployed, as Scottish regiments once were. Loss of autonomy. Not loss of honour. That difference matters.

Islam Without Existential Burden

Pakistan must constantly perform its reason for being. It must justify its existence, prove Islamic legitimacy and defend borders as theology. Whereas inside a union, Islam stops being existential, Muslim identity becomes social, not geopolitical and Faith survives better without state dependency. Scotland did not stop being Presbyterian in 1707. It stopped needing Presbyterianism to justify sovereignty. That release is power.

Kashmir Is Only Solvable Inside a Union

Outside a union, Kashmir is zero-sum where compromise is betrayal, militarisation is permanent. Inside a union, borders soften, autonomy becomes real and identity detaches from sovereignty. England and Scotland fought for centuries. Union did not erase difference. It made it manageable. Kashmir cannot be won. It can only be domesticated.

Why This Is Not German Reunification

German reunification is a bad analogy because it assumes symmetry. East and West Germany were one nation, one language, one identity and one legitimacy claim (like the Koreas or China\Taiwan). East Germany collapsed. Its population demanded absorption. West Germany replaced its institutions wholesale. Pakistan is not a collapsed twin of India. It is a rival nation built on non-India. It is militarily intact. It is ideologically self-justifying. There is no Leipzig 1989 in Pakistan. German reunification was popular. An India–Pakistan union would be elite-driven and deeply unpopular. Germany absorbed losers anyway, and still carries resentment decades later. Pakistan’s losers would revolt immediately. Scotland negotiated. East Germany surrendered. Pakistan would do neither.

The Absolute Red Lines

Pakistan alas would never join a Hindu civilizational state, a centralized Delhi empire and an “Akhand Bharat” narrative. The Act of Union worked because England avoided humiliation, preserved asymmetry, protected institutions and did not perform victory. Union requires confidence. Not chest-thumping.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Pakistan would not join India because “Partition was a mistake“, shared cultures or that somehow history was misunderstood. It would join because sovereignty is unaffordable, decline costs more than dignity loss and Elites survive better inside than outside. As capital and security lie east, not west, it may be that the Indian Subcontinent assess with an integrated political infrastructure would look and feel like. The Act of Union was not a romance. It was an accounting exercise with swords still warm. If such a union ever happens, it will look the same: cold, negotiated, elite-driven, unpopular, and decisive. That is not a fantasy. It is the only form a union like this has ever taken.

Lately I’ve wondered whether I over-curated the threads. Things feel quieter. Maybe too quiet. But perhaps that’s the cost of raising the bar—of asking for dialogue instead of dopamine. Still, this lull has me reflecting not just on moderation but on why some arguments no longer move me.

Take the Indo-Pak conflict: once electric, now strangely inert. That shift reflects my own evolution over two decades. I no longer inhabit that binary. I carry a layered identity—a South Asian Bahá’í sensibility shaped by Persian aesthetics, grounded in British institutions, and fluently navigated through English. That complexity is my compass. It’s why I care less about flags and more about forces.

And the real force that shapes our lives? The elite. Not as a pejorative, but as a structural reality. I see it as nested tiers:

• The top basis point (1 in 10,000)

• The 1%, who shape norms

• The 10%, who enforce them

If Earth has ~8B people, then 800,000 are in the top basis point. But who are the 1,000 who actually sit in the room where things happen? That’s the real question. The rest of us, in varying degrees, serve that structure or resist it. Race, class, gender—these are not irrelevant, but they are expressions of a deeper truth: power seeks hierarchy. And society is a cathedral built on that obsession.

So yes, India and Pakistan can still threaten the world with existential chaos. That possibility always deserves attention. But my deeper inquiry is elsewhere: Who gets to make meaning? Who gets to belong? Who sits in the room? That’s the conversation I want Brown Pundits to host. Not for noise, but for nuance.

Addendum

Thanks to Kabir for the links—his work on Hindustani classical music (in SAMAJ and EPW) is a great reminder of the kind of thoughtful content we want to spotlight more often on Brown Pundits.

That said, let’s be honest: posts like these rarely get the same traction as a fiery Indo-Pak thread. It’s the old problem—if we over-curate, things go quiet; if we under-curate, it becomes a feeding frenzy. Somewhere between spam and silence lies the balance we’re aiming for: a space that educates and entertains, where masala doesn’t overwhelm substance.

We’re still calibrating that. Your comments, posts, and tone help shape the direction. Appreciate everyone who’s engaging in good faith.

—X.T.M

I pulled down my last piece owing to a a streak of bad luck. I was on verge of being denied boarding owing to the airline’s administrative error. At any rate once I got over that hurdle, the experience made me reflective again. Transiting through Cairo, an even harder metaphor hit me:

The world isn’t a battleground, a marketplace, or even a village. It’s a plane. A giant 300-seater Airbus. Maybe even a cruise ship in the sky (imagine a sky ship of sorts). Always moving. Never arriving.

The Cabin Configuration

The layout is brutally simple—and mostly inherited:

Economy (Global South): Mostly Black and Brown passengers. Cramped. Surveilled. Blamed for turbulence.

Premium Economy (Second World): Mostly Asians and Whites. Comfortably squeezed. Quietly aspirational.

Business Class (The West): Predominantly White. Distance is the product.

First Class (The Elite): Silent, insulated. Oligarchs, dynasts, technocrats.

Private Cabins (The Powers that Be): Unseen.

This is where the Captain lives. He owns the plane. He doesn’t fly it. The pilots—Westernised, credentialed, precise—steer the aircraft. But they don’t own it. They are glorified staff. The Captain never appears. But the course is his.

Money Buys Comfort. Power Is Untouchable.

Officially, your seat is determined by money—a proxy for merit. Work hard. Behave. Move up. Fly better. That’s the myth. The truth? Power isn’t earned. It’s inherited. Embedded. Insulated. It lives in private cabins behind bulkheads and NDAs. It steers the direction but never takes responsibility for the crash.

And when one passenger upgrades, they usually leave their family behind.

Advancement is lonely by design.

The Stewards: Smiles, Schedules, Surveillance

The stewards are overlooked by design.

They aren’t just servers—they’re regulators.

• They carry messages between classes.
• They enforce tone and emotional regulation.
• They alone have weaponised tools of enforcement, silent but real.

They know who to be naughty, nice, or nasty with.

Almost always correlated to class—and seditious behavior.

They alone have access to the pilots.

Sometimes, to the Captain.

Always at his pleasure.

Without them, the illusion of order would collapse before the next meal service.

Entertainment as Sedation

Each class gets a different drug:

Economy: Distraction and budget meals.

Premium Economy: Hope and quiet ambition.

Business: Entitlement and distance.

First Class: Seamless luxury, ideology-free.

Every screen shows you something.

None show you how the plane actually works.

Solidarity—families sharing meals, distracting themselves together—makes the journey bearable.

But solidarity is discouraged. Especially empathy.

In Premium Economy, you are trained to ignore the newborns crying in Economy—and instead feel annoyed.

Empathy hurts revenue.

It breaks the illusion of status.

Different Modes, Different Worlds

Each cabin lives in a different psychological mode:

Economy: Survival.

Premium Economy: Endurance.

Business: Management.

First Class: Hedony (they are the only class outside of the Captain, who don’t need the toilets to join the Mile High Club)—and hazy consultations with the Captain.

The passengers vote for the pilot every few years.

The loser becomes co-pilot.

The Captain remains untouched.

The structure is permanent.

Only the uniforms change.

Meaningful conversation is banned.

Constant chatter is encouraged to detect dissent.

Silence is suspicious.

The system isn’t scared of anger.

It’s terrified of solidarity.

The Forbidden Question

Nobody asks:

Why is the plane structured like this?

Even worse:

What would it take to land it?

When those questions arise, the stewards act.

The smiles vanish.

The enforcement appears.

You realise:

You were never meant to ask.

Only to fly, consume, and dream of sitting closer to the nose.

Why Revolt Never Happens

Passengers don’t talk across rows.

Economy envies Premium.

Premium mimics Business.

Business performs for First.

First tries to find the Captain.

The walls are thin.

The silence is engineered.

If they ever spoke across class lines, they would realise:

They outnumber the pilots, the stewards, and the Captain 100 to 1.

They could restructure the plane.

Change its destination.

Redesign its purpose.

But they don’t.

Because hope is stronger than anger.

And upgrades feel safer than uprisings.

Final Reflection

Everyone feels the turbulence.

Almost no one questions the altitude.

Everyone talks about comfort.

No one talks about destination.

Everyone is told the plane is the best that has ever flown.

Everyone is warned that previous planes—revolutions—always crashed.

No one knows if the oxygen masks are real.

Or if the life rafts even exist.

The world isn’t broken.

It was built to fly like this.

And the Captain is counting on you never asking why.

What is the difference between introspection and self-hatred? Introspection brings reflection, intention, and evolution. Self-hatred brings rumination, doubt, and rot. One is essential, the other is extinction.

Engagement of either shift one’s fate. From the roots of mentality grow branches of thought, blooming into flowers of action and eventually the fruits of result. Nowhere is this more clear than the night and day of the Indian elite.

The ancient elites of India wrote eternal tomes of meditation that built the bedrock of a civilization that has seen the best and worst of humanity, outlasting every peer and power. Their art and literature emanated confidence, beauty, and advancement. While sure of themselves, they had no qualms integrating new ideas from abroad or from home. Diversity was strength, and challenge was opportunity.

Their descendants today are devolution incarnate – Kali Yuga realized. An unending anguish for the approval of outsiders, self-flagellating of even the most innocent of traditions, and an obsessive compulsion for mediocrity are the trickle-down that these elites have given Indians since independence.

While trivial bashing of them is enjoyable, I want to get to the meat of their minds as well as what these minds have yielded.

What causes the exceptional self-loathing of these elites? The mania of knee-bending and the need to constantly look outwards for validation? The ability to be stupendously arrogant towards their birthright to rule yet despise their roots?

The Sahib and Sepoy

There is no conspiracy; it’s basic human nature.

We have to go back to the colonial era where the initial incubation occurred. A few million men from an island several continents and seas away subdued a subcontinent of hundreds of millions. The exploitation of internal strife, technological superiority, and efficient use of coin and corps sealed the deal as Indian kingdoms fell piece by piece like dominos. The British had won the game just as a much-awaited saffron remontada had begun but was tragically cut short.

Now it’s only fair to give context to collaboration. For a number of centuries in the past millennia, significant parts of India were ruled by people who had an intense disdain for the indigenous way of life. On their left hand were the foreign ideologues who justified the rape of a civilization, on their right hand were Indians themselves. Collaborators and allies who can search for every ounce of excuse for their cooperation, but does this outweigh the oppression of ages that many Indians faced? We have to zoom out a bit to give a fair shake.

India as a civilization is ancient; as a nation-state, less so. Additionally, many of the people of Bhārat held a strong attachment to their caste or regional identity over an overarching Indian identity. When push came to shove, it was the people of their local identity that pushed back for them. Furthermore, many leaders simply lacked leverage after defeat. “Never surrender” is picture-perfect in movies, but rarely makes the film reel of reality.

However, there is a flip side to this. Because many times, the local group which turncoats claimed to represent did eventually suffer under the fist of foreign rule. Another factor is that collaborators benefited by wealth, status, or getting rid of a pesky rival after colluding with a foreign power. And something a bit more bothersome – there seemed to be very little backlash once the rule of “outsiders” was abolished. No upending of elites but instead a transition of these same elites into the new regime. It makes sense as these elites offered a confectionery of knowledge and resources, but it leaves a sour taste seeing Indians’ (or whatever primary identity observed) nonchalant attitude towards this “betrayal.” On the other hand, maybe this is more a feature of humanity rather than just Indians.

That all considered, the current crop of Indian elites derives itself from the initial collaboration with the British Raj and eventual rebellion against it. This is the crucible where their ideology was concocted. Strands of thought they hold as sacrosanct. Their code. Their way. And in a sense, their Dharma.

Colonial Adharma

A concept of eons and earth, Dharma penetrates the Indian psyche. An idea rooted in upholding one’s tradition and way. An endurance of culture.

And this is what we must explore – what is Dharma of the Indian elites?

Is it the welfare of the Indian people? To build a strong Indian state? To honor India’s civilization? Or is it to impress their bedfellows in the cities of the West? To siphon wealth and power from the commoner? To uphold their “Dharma” handed down generations ago by their colonial epitomes?

Their Dharma is a self-hating prophecy. A mantra of ideas they repeat to themselves and proselytize to other Indians. These ideas form that pivotal mentality as well as the environment we discussed earlier deciding the destiny of Indians for decades. Three pillars uphold this prophecy:

1. Preserving feudal and colonial power structures via government laws and economics to exploit the masses.
2. The constant need for the mimicry of and approval from the West with an equally constant need to exercise self-loathing by putting down local traditions as primitive and barbaric.
3. Utilize legal structures and cultural exertion to spread these ideas causing the downward spiral of India and Indians.

Status and power – again, basic human nature. The self-hating aspect is essential though in that it strengthens both. Vilification of India and Indians gets them in the good books with mainstream Western intellectuals and makes great cocktail hour conversation. Less so deliberately, it also gives the common populace discomfort when looking in a mirror. They see inherent failure and inferiority, and now want to emulate the successful elites who emulate the successful West. Indian elites seek to incinerate their past leaving themselves bereft of any cultural or even aesthetic sense, something easily seen in the dismal and uninspiring art and architecture they leave in their trail. The Indian elite’s material misrule can be excused as a failure of policy, but this mentality that the elites have passed down provides another deep handicap to Indians. For the common Indian, the Dharma of the colonized elites was an Adharma, the unrighteous twin of Dharma.

But this brings us to another point – why does the West buy this out of touch elite discourse so wholeheartedly?

The Indian elite brings the credentials of brown skin but also communicates with familiarity, which naturally brings fondness. They confirm every prior. They speak in an Indian but not so Indian accent – akin to a Starbucks chai tea latte versus chai from a small town alley, perhaps even given by that chaiwallah himself who is the personification of everything they despise. His speech, his unabashedly proud Hindu faith, his usurping of the poor as his electoral vanguard; the subaltern who rebelled. First they ignored him, then they laughed at him, then they fought him, and then he won – twice. The most visceral defeat of their lifetimes. Their breaking point. A god damn chaiwallah.

But I digress.

The Cloak

The transaction truly occurs because the Indian elite cloaks their policy in recognizable rhetoric. Vapid hot air discourse that sings to the out of touch tune blowing out of Brooklyn boroughs, it sounds like Beethoven rather than Bhimsen Joshi; pleasing in a familiar way rather than exotic. The elites drape their actions and ideology in a cloak of Western buzzwords like “liberalism,” “secularism,” “social justice,” etc… to cover for any policy or political rhetoric, no matter how illiberal, unsecular, or unjust they actually are.

No matter that the Indian actuality doesn’t match the Western figment. No matter that many Indians are done with minority appeasement and profoundly unsecular laws, which the BJP wants to replace with a comprehensively simple, secular universal civil code. No matter the scars of the millennia-old history of the subcontinent that is thrown at Indian faces every day as common institutions and monuments bring name and memory of the oppression of its past with roads named after the fanatic genocidaire Aurangzeb and universities after the Inquisitor-in-Chief, Francis Xavier, who turned crucifixion and forced conversions into a Goan pastime. The commoner is covered and smothered by the cloak just as Indian politics itself is.

The cloak can look like colonial attire when the savagery of British colonial law is thrown about by the Indian government terrorizing its populace. With many of the worst abuses occurring under the forever “liberal’ Indian National Congress Party over the decades, though the BJP and other parties haven’t hesitated to indulge in these laws as well. The cloak can look like a brave student protest against the forever fashionable phrase of “fascist forces” but actually is protesting against giving refuge to some of the most oppressed people in the world simply because it shines the light of truth on India’s neighboring theocracies, as we saw with the anti-CAA protests. They lament at the apocalypse facing “secularism” in India while enflaming caste divisions for political calculus and ignore the litany of laws that favor citizens simply because of their religion – as long as they are the right religion (not Hinduism). The chameleon-like cloak dons stars and stripes as the Indian elite cheers on Confederate monuments being smashed and names erased, but fights with fury as the crimes of the Mughals and other imperialists are corrected.

And the integral fabric of this cloak is the common thread of self-hatred. At every turn, Indian tradition and culture must be put down. The brown savage must be saved and civilized. Now that the colonial masters have left, their choicest disciples have taken the mantle of baptizing the 1 billion heathens of the subcontinent. A tall task, which is why the Indian elite won’t hesitate to seek foreign intervention and commentary on Indian affairs, even going so far as to request kinetic interference from other nation-states, spitting in the face of Indian sovereignty.

Animal Farm

This brings us to the most apt metaphor for the Indian Elite, which we will find in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

A story of a group of farm animals rebelling against the tyranny of oppressive humans, we watch as a set of these animals (the pigs) promise equality and prosperity but twist the narrative over time into a callous hierarchy and persecution. Along the way in this story, we watch as the animals suffer and begin to see themselves as inherently inferior not only to the humans but also the pigs who dominate by hook and crook, secretly collaborating more with humans as time passes. They encode their advantages into laws that suppress and condition the other animals into destitution. Sounding familiar?

Hypocrisy is abundant in the pigs’ rise as the other animals fall into squalor, while the pigs resemble their former human masters more and more as time goes on. Dissent from other animals is destroyed as eventually the memory of old ideals and revolutions is erased and replaced with sanitized fantasies and falsehoods. Eventually striking a deal and dinner with their human masters as the pigs dress like them, walk like them, eat and drink like them, and most significantly, exploit and abuse their fellow animals like them.

The Indian Elite are simply the pigs from Animal Farm.

As their fellow Indians peer at them through the digital window, they see that the differences between colonizer and colonized are only skin deep at a certain point. Even that hue fades as it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between the two. Their melanin cannot hide the malice that they have embraced. Their Dharma cannot fulfill their desperation. The cycle of self-hatred wheels around a civilization, but increasingly, this prophecy is now being seen as blasphemy. And while the Indian elite seethes feeling their old followers slip away forever, they will have no choice but to come to terms with India’s reincarnation.

This is a repost from The Emissary. Please visit the blog for more content!