Tag: Hindu philosophy

nos ancêtres les Hindous

X.T.M · March 29, 2026 · 103 comments

A pattern has emerged in these comment threads that deserves naming directly. When the Hindu hammer retreats, the space does not become neutral; it becomes anti-Hindu. The two are not the same thing, and conflating them is itself a form of intellectual dishonesty.

Hinduism is one of the most theologically complex systems humanity has produced. It is the root of Dharmic civilisation, the origin point of concepts, reincarnation foremost among them, that have radiated as far as East Asia, Southeast Asia, and arguably into the mystical strands of Abrahamic tradition. The sages, the philosophers, the vast literature: none of this coheres with the dismissal now fashionable in certain quarters, that Hinduism is simply a colonial administrative category, a British label slapped onto undifferentiated paganism.

This is the Pakistani foundational ideology speaking. It must deny Hindu civilisational continuity, because acknowledging it makes Temple destruction look like what it was: a pattern, not a series of unrelated incidents. It must deny that India had a civilisation, because if India had one, then the last pre-British colonisers of South Asia were Muslim; and that sits uncomfortably with postcolonial victimhood framing. The logic is circular and self-serving, but it is internally consistent. One cannot claim the mantle of the oppressed while being the penultimate oppressor.

The Dravidian Continue reading nos ancêtres les Hindous

Sexual Pleasure as Thought: Erotics in Pre-modern South Asia

Kabir · March 19, 2026 · 2 comments

As a change from war and geopolitics, I came across this presentation by Shubham Arora, a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia and a Harold Coward India Research Fellow at the University of Victoria.

In this talk, Shubham Arora introduces a long and often misunderstood intellectual tradition from South Asia devoted to thinking about pleasure. Beginning with the world-renowned Kāmasūtra and continuing into the modern period, this tradition did far more than describe sexual practices. It treated pleasure as a subject worthy of reflection, analysis, and debate. Like other fields of knowledge in premodern South Asia—such as law, medicine, or aesthetics—these works developed ways of classifying desire, discussing relationships, and reflecting on how pleasure fits into a well-lived life. The authors of these texts were asking questions about intimacy, emotion, social roles, and human fulfillment. Yet in modern times, these texts, especially the Kāmasūtra, have often been reduced to exotic curiosities. Shaped by colonial fantasies and later commercial reinventions, they have been marketed globally as manuals of sexual practices, while at the same time facing censorship and controversy within South Asia itself. By revisiting these works in their historical context, this talk offers an as-yet unexplored perspective: understanding erotics as a thoughtful and evolving tradition concerned with how principles, possibilities, and practices of pleasure changed.

Brown Pundits