A note from the back end. Since the new look went up, I have been wrestling with the machinery behind the site:

• Speed for writers. Pages are fast for readers, who get a saved copy, but slow for anyone logged in, and some writers have hit 502 errors while posting. I am giving the server more memory and a bigger cache. The rest needs the host.
• The login link. Writers could not find it. It is now at the foot of every page.
• Bots. Thousands of fake accounts had signed up over the years. Registration is closed and the security plugin now does less busywork.
• The archive. Over 4,000 posts, back to the Blogger years, refiled with subjects, places, tags and short summaries, so old essays can be found again.
• Counting. A small reader counter of my own, so I can see what people actually read and click, without handing the data to anyone else.

One thing the counter has already shown me: the readers and the commenters want completely different things. Most readers arrive from search for the old genetics and ancestry posts. The commenters, fewer than one in a hundred readers, hunt for the esoteric: Gandhi’s fasts, whether Pakistan is more than “not India”, the long arc of history. I find that fascinating, and I am not sure yet what to do with this cleft. As I mentioned to Agni, do I write for the Readership, or the Commentariat or myself?

The last thread, Open Thread: Gandhi Jayanti, stays open.

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.

Precedent one. Operation Sindoor was not a Pakistani defeat.

Pakistan entered 2025 as a failed state. It exits the Pahalgam year as a diplomatic champion. Whatever happened in the skies over those days in May, the outcome in global perception is unambiguous. A military operation is never only a military operation. It is also how the world reads it, and on that ledger the result is not the one Delhi wanted. No Pakistani commentator across the spectrum treats Sindoor as a setback. Our Pakistani readers can confirm this in the thread, and we invite them to. The Indian premise that Pakistan might now re-engage to recover from some imagined humiliation makes zero sense. The humiliation is not where Indian commentary locates it.

Precedent two. The Crescent commentariat cannot have it both ways.

There is a pernicious Pakistani trait, most visible in the diaspora and the Anglophone class at home. They live distinctly Western lifestyles. They then want Islam for all. Live your beliefs. It is a genuinely offensive thing to cheer on the Iranian revolution, a revolution deeply devastating to the Iranian people, from an American suburb or a DHA drawing room. Only a Pakistani commentator could manage the trick of celebrating the Islamic Republic while exempting themselves from its consequences.

In the Iranian diaspora, religious Shias are quietly ostracised. Persian pride, across pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-Islamic registers, is astonishing in its depth. Some of us, the Baha’is for instance, integrate all three.

The TNT move, which imports Islamist preferences onto others while the class that holds them escapes the reality (QeA typifies this), is the opposite.

Precedent three. The rediscovery of Hinduism is coming, and it will come from South Punjab and Sindh.

In Urdu class just now, our teacher proudly spoke about Panjnad, the point where the five rivers of the Indus meet (the equivalent of Varanasi alas without Brahmins to sacralise it). He told me proudly that it was named in the Mahabharata. He told us the Sufi master of Panjnad married a woman of the Cholistani tribe, and the local people remember it 150 years later. The pattern recurs across the shrines dotted through South Punjab and Sindh. Sufi masters married into the local tribes. This is the oldest Muslim culture in the subcontinent, running back to the earliest invasions and Muhammad bin Qasim. It is the most syncretic.

Pakistani nationalism as constructed in Lahore and through Urdu is a denial of the Hindu inheritance in favour of a Persian one. Lahore dominates the cultural production, and Lahore is heavily invested in an Urdu-speaking identity for reasons of its own. That construction does not map onto the actual history of Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Sehwan. As secularisation proceeds, and it is proceeding piecemeal, regional ethnicities will do what Bengal has already done and reach for a pre-Islamic layer. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are dense, spectacular, geographically specific texts. Most of the land they describe is in Pakistan. The internet is a very large place and Pakistanis, especially those who are truly autochthonous, will hunt for their heritage.

Within a generation, thirty to forty percent of Pakistanis will want to express some form of Hindu heritage. Not the majority. Not even the plurality. But a substantial and culturally consequential minority. It will not happen suddenly. It will be a process, uneven across regions and classes, and the Sindhi and South Punjabi will get there before the Lahori.

The Hindu right does not help itself. It does not know how to speak to this constituency. The parallel is Christian Zionism and its mirror: most Palestinian Christians, who are by descent far more plausibly linked to the ancient Israelites than most contemporary Zionists, are simply switched off by Zionism as currently configured. The communication failure is total, and the movement loses its most natural audience. The Hindu right is making the same mistake with the same demographic logic.

TNT nationalism is already fraying. It will have to adapt to a radically different landscape, the way Zionism will.

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

This does not suppress the Dravidian question. South India has a genuinely distinct cultural substrate; older in some respects, differently inflected, not simply a variant of the Gangetic norm. If there was an Aryan migration (and the genetic evidence increasingly suggests there was), it introduced power asymmetries: Brahmanisation, Sanskritisation, processes that unfolded over centuries as economic and cultural accretion rather than overnight conquest. The complexity is real. Acknowledging it does not undermine Hindu civilisational claims; it enriches them.

The Punjabi Muslim case is the sharpest illustration of the pathology under discussion. There is a tweet circulating, pointed and accurate, noting that Punjabi Pakistani Muslims so thoroughly disown the Punjabi label that they reach instead for Peshawari chappals and Kashmiri bangles, despite both being manufactured in Punjab. The denial of the Punjabi self in favour of a constructed Arabised or Persianised alternative identity is not cultural evolution. It is cultural self-erasure. Iranians have no such ambivalence: the average Persian owns the Achaemenids, the Sassanids, and Lord Zoroaster with a pride that is entirely unselfconscious. Pakistani Muslims have no equivalent relationship with their pre-Islamic past, because the Pakistani foundational ideology requires that past to be a void.

The Mughal Apartheid

The Mughal precedent is instructive. Even within the Muslim world of South Asia, there was a hierarchy: foreign Muslim over native Muslim, Turkic over local, an internal apartheid that the Mughal court institutionalised. Indian Muslims and Turkic Muslims are not the same civilisational product. Pakistan’s ideological founders, QeA-Jinnah & Allam Iqbal, both of proud Hindu convert stock; drew their intellectual energy from the UP Persianate tradition, not from Punjabi soil. The irony is that the state they created is demographically Punjabi but ideologically alien to Punjabi roots.

Sunni Shield

Both nations are now moving in divergent directions, and this may ultimately be clarifying. Pakistan is orienting toward the Sunni bloc and Iran; Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now Islamabad joining a broader Persianate-Islamic geopolitical axis. India is becoming Asian in the fullest sense: economic growth paralleling China’s, a civilisational confidence returning after decades of apologetics. The trajectories are no longer mirror images. They are genuinely separate.

What remains to be said about Bombay Badshah, and about the right-wing Hindu tendency he represents, is this: when they lose their composure, they lose the argument. Their Muslim interlocutors, whatever one thinks of the substance of their positions, have internalised the grammar of liberal discourse. They know the rules of the room. The Hindu nationalist tendency, by contrast, has not yet learned that you cannot out-compete someone at a game they wrote. The slickness of Dhurandhar as a film, whatever its propaganda problems, is evidence that India can produce that polish. The comment threads show that individual hotheads can still undo it in a paragraph.

The post-BB vacuum is not a victory for nuance. It is an invitation for a different kind of distortion. This site exists to resist both.

Aslan Pahari’s videos are linked to the top where he essentially argues that the Indus region, before Islam, was a seamless Hindu civilisational block. It makes for neat storytelling. It is also historically careless.

Sun Temple of Multan

The subcontinent before the 8th century was not a flat religious plain. It was layered, regional, and politically fragmented. Yes, there was a broad Brahmanical tradition stretching across north India. Yes, temples like the great Sun temple at Multan testify to the strength of that religious order in what is now South Punjab. But to move from that to “all ancestors were Hindu” is to mistake dominance for uniformity.

Sindh

Take Sindh. When Muhammad bin Qasim entered the region in the early 8th century, he did not conquer a purely Brahmanical kingdom. The ruling Brahmin elite he defeated, had previously overthrown a Buddhist polity, and the religious landscape of Sindh included Buddhists, various Hindu sects, and local traditions. The frontier between Indic religions was not rigid. It was porous, competitive, and regionally specific.

It goes without saying that Buddhists emerged from a broader Brahmanical milieu, but I am referring specifically to the religious landscape immediately preceding the arrival of Islam.

Punjab

Punjab tells a different story. Much of it Islamised later, in the medieval period, through Sufi networks, agrarian expansion, and political realignment rather than immediate conquest. But Sindh and Multan were incorporated into the Islamic world centuries earlier. Multan’s later emergence as a major Sufi centre is not a coincidence. It had already been a sacred node in the pre-Islamic period. Civilisational centres do not vanish; they are repurposed.

Punjab is not Pakistan

The mistake some regional nationalists make is to universalise their province. A Punjabi trajectory becomes “the subcontinent.” A late-medieval conversion wave becomes the template for all. That flattens Sindh, Bengal, the Deccan, and the frontier zones into a single script. The subcontinent has never worked that way.

Caste

Caste complicates the picture further. Genetic studies show that caste stratification correlates strongly with deep North Indian ancestry patterns and crystallised roughly two millennia ago, long before Islam. That means the social architecture many now treat as timeless “Hindu civilisation” was itself an ongoing historical development. It hardened; it was not eternal. Religious identity sat atop social hierarchy; it did not erase it.

Frontiers i

Even the frontier populations complicate the story. Pashtuns and Baloch were not primordial inhabitants of every inch of the Indus highlands.

Pashtuns

The Pashtuns appear to be an eastern Iranian people who emerged in the frontier zone between the Iranian plateau and the northwestern subcontinent. Their language, Pashto, is firmly Eastern Iranic, and their culture reflects long interaction with both Indic and Iranian worlds. They are not “Hindu-Aryan” in any strict linguistic sense; rather, they represent an Iranic-speaking population that absorbed and interacted with Indo-Aryan societies along the frontier over many centuries.

Baloch

The Baloch, by contrast, are widely understood to have migrated eastward from the Iranian plateau in the medieval period. Their language is Northwestern Iranic, closely related to Kurdish, and many historians connect their movement into Makran and the southwestern borderlands to post-Islamic political shifts in Iran. In that sense, Baloch expansion into what is now southern Pakistan did overlay older populations in those arid, Dravidian-influenced and Indus-adjacent regions. But again, this was a layered migration, not a simple replacement.

Frontiers ii

What matters is this: the northwest of the subcontinent has always been a frontier ecology. Populations there were never frozen in place. Iranic-speaking groups moved in and out. Indo-Aryan groups moved westward. Tribal confederations formed, dissolved, and re-formed. To describe any one of these groups as pure or primordial is to misunderstand how frontier societies actually work.

Indus Zone

The Indus zone was never static. It was a hinge between plateau and plain. And hinges do not produce singular identities; they produce mixtures. Their expansions into parts of the subcontinent were later movements layered onto older populations. The region has always absorbed newcomers. That is not a sign of weakness. It is a civilisational constant.

The diverse pre-Islamic world

What existed before Islam was not a uniform Hindu nation. It was a civilisational field in which Brahmanical Hinduism, Buddhism, regional cults, and tribal structures coexisted and competed. Islam entered that field early in some zones and late in others. In places like Sindh, it became part of the political order within decades. In Punjab, it took centuries to become demographically dominant.

Simplistic paradigms crack

To insist that “all our ancestors were or were not Hindu” is as simplistic as insisting that “Islam arrived only by the sword.” Both collapse centuries of layered history into slogans. The subcontinent was never monocultural. It was a dense, stratified, competitive religious ecosystem long before the first Arab ships (or swords) touched its shores.

This post was inspired by an earlier post of X.T.M where he mentioned that this question generates a lot of traffic for BP.

If we consider the literal definition of Paganism, the question becomes quite simple. Historically, the term “Paganism” was not used to describe religious beliefs prior to the 20th century. It first emerged in the context of Early Christianity, serving as a pejorative for the folk religions still practiced in the rural regions of the Roman Empire. By this definition, it’s clear that Hinduism does not fit the label of Pagan.

However, in contemporary usage, many Neo-pagans view Paganism as a neutral descriptive term, applicable to all cultures that are philosophically incompatible with the three Abrahamic faiths. The question whether Hinduism can be considered Pagan in this broader sense is not so simple since most Hindus assert belief in a singular God or multiple manifestations of one God (30 percent and 60 percent, according to PEW surveys).

To start answering this question, we need to pinpoint the philosophical foundation of Hinduism. Thankfully, this isn’t too complicated, as several Vedic verses touch on this theme (e.g. Brihadaranyaka 4.4.18 and 4.4.22), all leading to the same conclusion. These verses indicate that the essence of all spiritual paths in ancient India revolves around Adhyatma (the doctrine of enlightened self). The central concept of Adhyatma is Atman—an ancient, observer consciousness believed to be deeply embedded within each of us. The ultimate aim is to attain Moksha, i.e. to awaken and realize this concealed enlightened self. Now, if we were to bring the God of Abraham and Atman together on a talk show, asking them to explain their doctrines to the audience, it might go like this:

God : I am the all powerful God. 
Atman : I am your peaceful inner self.

God : I am the true creator of everything that you perceive.
Atman : I am the true experiencer of all that you perceive.

God : Submit to me unconditionally and obey all my commands.
Atman : Become one with me and be liberated.

God : If you are loyal to me I will take to heaven after you die.
Atman : Whenever you see yourself as me, the Earth looks like heaven.

God : Initiate force against others if they oppose your faith.
Atman : Mix with others if they oppose initiation of force.

Even in these highly simplified versions one can clearly see that the Atman doctrine is Pagan if we apply the more inclusive definition of Paganism. It can also be viewed as a branch of Pantheism. In Adhyatma the analogue of impersonal supreme God is Brahman, the entire universe seen from an enlightened perspective. Since experiencing Brahman is same as experiencing one’s Atman, many experience oriented spiritual traditions use them as interchangeable terms. So when Hindus talk about one God, the are referring to the impersonal God, not the God of Abraham.

India is unusual among civilisations in that most of its edges are real. They can be pointed to on a map and felt underfoot. The northwest is closed by the Hindu Kush, a wall that both protected and punctured India through invasion. The north is sealed by the Himalayas, which turned the subcontinent inward for millennia. The south ends cleanly in the Indian Ocean, a hard geographic edge that also became India’s great outward highway. These are faces with sharp contours.

India is bounded in the northwest by mountains, in the north by ice, in the south by water, and in the east by diffusion.

The east is different. It does not end. It thins.

A Boundary That Does Not Behave Like One

Geographically, there is a boundary. The Indo-Burman ranges run from Arunachal through Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and down into Burma. They are real mountains, thick with forest, rain, and disease. But they are not high enough, cold enough, or empty enough to function like the Himalayas. They slow movement without stopping it. They divide ecologies more than peoples.

This matters because civilisation follows ecology before it follows flags.

Where India Becomes Something Else, Gradually

West of these hills lies the familiar Indian world: alluvial plains, temple agriculture, caste-ordered villages, Sanskritic cosmology layered with Persianate courts. East of them begins a different rhythm: river valleys oriented toward the Irrawaddy, forest-rice ecologies, Tibeto-Burman languages, kinship systems that never fully absorbed Brahmanical order. The shift is real, but it is gradual. One does not step out of India. One drifts.

Why the East Never Produced a Frontier Mentality

This is why India’s eastern edge never produced the kind of hard political consciousness seen in the northwest. The Hindu Kush created enemies and empires. The Himalayas created insulation. The ocean created trade and projection. The east created diffusion.

Civilisation That Leaked Instead of Conquering

Indian civilisation did not stop at Bengal or Assam. It leaked. Hinduism and Buddhism crossed the Bay of Bengal with merchants and monks, not armies. Southeast Asia did not become Indian territory; it became Indic in culture. Angkor worshipped Vishnu. Java wrote in Sanskrit. Thai kings used Indian titles. None of this required conquest, because the eastern face of India was not defensive. It was emissive.

The Modern Discomfort with a Gradient

This is why the eastern zone feels nebulous to modern minds trained to think in borders. We expect civilisations to end where maps change colour. But India’s east refused that logic. It functioned as a civilisational gradient, not a frontier. Culture thinned, adapted, recombined, and moved on.

Four Faces, One Exception

Contrast this with the northwest, where every pass is named because every pass was fought over. Contrast it with the north, where ice and altitude imposed silence. Contrast it with the south, where the sea both ended the land and multiplied India’s reach. Only the east offered no drama of collision, no myth of last stands. It offered absorption.

What the Eastern Edge Reveals About India

Modern India’s discomfort with its eastern face mirrors its discomfort with its own civilisational logic. We are comfortable describing India as bounded by mountains and oceans because those edges flatter the nation-state. The eastern edge does not. It reminds us that Indian civilisation was never meant to stop cleanly. It was meant to reproduce itself outward until ecology, language, and habit finally said no.

That moment did come, in the Indo-Burman hills. But it came softly.

A Civilisational Signature

In one sentence: India ends in the west by resistance, in the north by altitude, in the south by water, and in the east by forgetting where it began.

India’s eastern boundary is not a line but a hinge — where the subcontinent bends into Southeast Asia or or more precisely, into the Indo-Chinese world.

Southeast Asia is best understood not as a civilisation in isolation, but as a contact zone, a region shaped by the overflow of two great Asian civilisations, Indic and Sinitic; whose cultural weight spilled outward rather than stopping at hard borders.

That is not weakness. It is a civilisational signature.

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a succinct diagnosis trying to get to the root of India’s issues, much less such a novel one (at least to me). For these reasons, if nothing else, I think X.T.M’s idea merits a deeper look.

I am largely in agreement with the author that diversity in and of itself is not at the heart of India’s troubles if only because it seems to have always been a factor in Indian society for as far back as we have history. Indeed, “diversity” and differentiation seem to me to be a mark of the continuity of Indian civilization from the earliest days of our forefathers. If this, our patrimonial diversity, has become a bane to India, it is to the India that plays at being a modern nation-state, democracy, and republic — not to the India of uncountable Gods, saints, and heroes, each at the heart of their world, ruling over the innumerable hamlets that dot the country and the uncountable kindreds that dwell within them. As Diana Eck (2012) puts it: “The profusion of divine manifestation is played in multiple keys as the natural counterpart of divine infinity, incapable of being limited to any name or form, and therefore expressible only through multiplication and plurality.” (India: A Sacred Geography, p. 48).

It is the second half of the author’s initial hypothesis that I think is the most important bit to dissect. Something about this diagnosis does not strike me as entirely accurate.

It is true that Partition split the Indian folk, namely, Hindus and Muslims, but the shape that this split took is a rather curious and, at least for me, unexpected one. According to the Pew Research Center’s June 29, 2021 report titled Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation (Sahgal et al.), when asked whether Partition was a good or a bad thing for Hindu-Muslim relations in a 2019 survey, 43% of Indian Hindus saw it as good while 37% of them saw it as bad. Indian Muslims? Quite the opposite. Only a third (30%) of them saw it as helping communal relations while almost half (48%) saw it as actually harmful.

While Partition may have been the bloody birth pangs of the Indian State and been a very real source of deep pain to the actual humans affected by it, what ails the folks of India is, I think, altogether something else. As to what exactly this is, I will come back to it towards the end of this essay.

X.T.M’s second hypothesis is something I actually agree with. such as the idea that the “two peoples” (Hindus and Muslims) could have lived together. We have seen time and time again that incomers to India have, over time, flowed into the great folksea that ebbs and flows upon our lands like trickles of glacial melt joining with the ocean, at once both one and sundry.

There is data to support this as well. In the same Pew report I cited above (Sehgal et al., 2021), the researchers found that while both Hindus and Muslims wish for segregation in their personal lives, as can be seen in the high percentage (over two-thirds) of both groups who want to stop intermarriage, the fact that most Indians’ friends tend to be from their own religious communities, and 45% of Hindus would not want a neighbour from at least one of the other major religions (Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddhist, Muslim, & Christian) — a figure matched by 36% of Muslims, when it comes to what folks believe, there seems to be a surprising degree of similarity that crosses religious lines. The report revealed that an equal percentage of Indian Muslims believed in karma as did Indian Hindus (77%), along with over half of Indian Christians (54%), two-thirds of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 75% of Jains. Around one-third of Muslims and Christians said they believed in reincarnation as opposed to (and I found this very weird) only 40% of Hindus, 18% of Buddhists and Sikhs, and 23% of Jains). A similar level of belief in the purifying power of the Ganga was found among the two Abrahamic faiths. Needless to say that none of these ideas could be considered orthodox doctrine in any tradition of Islam or Christianity, and any adherence to them by followers of those religions in India immediately opens up a flood of questions one could ask.

Could it be the result of a superimposition of a Muslim or Christian layer onto a Hindu-Buddhist base such as happens when a linguistic superstrate is built atop a conquered population leading to the adoption of vocabulary and grammatical features from the linguistic substrate? Or, could it be like the speculated spread of retroflex consonants, which, while found in languages in many parts of the world, are particularly concentrated in India? Perhaps it’s a consequence of Hindu demographic domination over the last several decades causing it to serve as a sort of ‘prestige dialect’ among Indian religions? In any case, I don’t think we can discount the probability that a generally convivial attitude between Hindus and Muslims could have been maintained prior to Partition.

As such, I am generally in agreement with X.T.M’s argument that what happened was largely because of the will of the political elite. What I do take issue with is the rather ludicrous oversimplification of the so-called ‘Hindu’ side as the “Brahminical–Congress elite”, not only because it is patently untrue in terms of the actual people who led the Congress. Let’s take a look at some of the founding and early members. There are:

Bengali Brahmins

• S. Banerjee (Rarhi Kulin)
• W.C. Bonnerjee (Rarhi Kulin)

Bengali Kayasthas

• A.M. Bose
• B.C. Pal
• R.C. Dutt
• Sri Aurobindo

Western Indian Brahmins

• B.G. Tilak (Chitpavan)
• G.K. Gokhale (Chitpavan)
• K.T. Telang (Gaud Saraswat)
• M.G. Ranade (Chitpavan)

Muslims

• B. Tyabji (Sulaimani Bohra, of Arab descent),

Parsis

• D. Naoroji
• D.E. Wacha
• P. Mehta

Southern Indian Brahmins

• C. Vijayaraghavachariar (Iyengar)
• G.D.S Iyer
• P. Anandacharlu (Telugu, adopted by a Tamil Brahmin in Madras)
• S.S. Iyer

Others

• L.L. Rai (Agrawal Jain, Punjab)
• S.R. Mudaliar (Sengunthar, Chola vassals & merchant guilders, Tamil)
• V.O.C. Pillai (Vellalar, powerful tribe in society & politics, Tamil)

By focusing on the ‘Brahminical’ nature of the Indian National Congress, X.T.M papers over the very real internal differences between these Brahmins — for example, the fact that Gaud Saraswat Brahmins have historically had their status contested by their neighbors to the north in Marathi lands and to the south in Malayali ones, or the sectarian distinctions between Iyers and Iyengars. This sort of ‘unionism’ is as pernicious when applied by outsiders as it is by insiders to the Hindu fold because it flattens out the differences given to us by the Gods and our Fathers. Worse, such oneness only makes us easier to be understood, governed, and thus, captured.

Elites often do whatever they can to stay in power, even if comes at the cost of honour, legacy, or tradition, a phenomenon we can see at work in the way that the Godrej India Culture Lab, which has, among other things, become “one of the most LGBTQIA+ inclusive companies”, helping to produce A Manifesto for Trans Inclusion at Workplace, and hosted a ‘transgender’ dance performance in 2015 which just so “happens to fall within Transgender Awareness Week in the US”.

In the words of Mencius Moldbug (2007),“A nation is genuinely independent of America if its domestic politics are not correlated at all with American domestic politics.”

The Godrej Group was founded by a Bombay Parsi, Ardeshir Godrej, who was influenced by Naoroji’s ‘drain theory’, or the idea that British rule was but a system of economic exploitation enriching England at the cost of India. In response, he built a major industrial powerhouse at the dawn of India’s ‘independence’. It’s quite sad, then, when we see what has become of the name he built.

What’s more, Godrej is just one example of a Parsi success story in post-British India. Indeed, one could just as easily paint a picture of the foundation of the Indian National Congress as a scheme engineered by wealthy and powerful Bombayites, Parsis, and Bengalis with the aid of southern Indians to maintain their supremacy — were one inclined to such speculation. Oddly enough, it is these same regions (the old Bombay and Madras Presidencies) and communities that seem to have maintained much of an economic advantage down to the present day. The Tata Group, for example, was founded in 1868 by Jamsetji Tata, a Gujurati Parsi born into a Zoroastrian ‘Brahmin’ family who took up business instead. We regularly see Tamil and Malayali sophists online crowing about how great and advanced their states are, especially compared to those in the North, and Bengali chauvinists sneer at their ‘BIMARU’ neighbours. Maybe they all have good reason to. I can’t say for sure. But what I can say is that from a certain point of view, it looks like northern Indians have consistently been on the lower rungs of the Indian social ladder since even before Partition.

Instead of intangible and shaky concepts like ‘caste identity’ perhaps we can find observable material factors that underscore possible similarities between the founding members of the INC. What, if anything, united the 72 (and isn’t that a curious number?) founding members of the Congress? Perhaps it was the fact that most of them were lawyers, and of the remaining, several were journalists. Pretty much all of them were British-educated and conversant in English, as well as many being polyglots and highly skilled in other areas of life, suggesting high intelligence and capability. Of course, these factors were not merely coincidental, but a feature of the founding. Naturally, when forming any institution, you would want the best and the brightest — and probably the wealthiest too. These would all have been factors that drew them to Allan Octavian Hume, a key member in the foundation of the INC and of whom I think we all should learn more. He seems to be a singularly fascinating figure from that period, both for his seemingly genuine pro-Indian feelings and occultist leanings. Perhaps I will write more about him later.

In any case, laying the blame at the feet of the “Brahminical–Congress elite” as though they, for whatever faults they did have, are equally as responsible for what followed in 1947 as their Pakistani counterparts is simply slander.

no one is born a Bahá’í; even those who are “Bahá’ízadeh” (those born to Bahá’í 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 one’s thoughts.

I’ve asked the Editors to lean into their moderation. But I’ve also emphasized that a copy of the moderated comments should be preserved in their original form; so that, if there’s 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, that’s exactly what makes Brown Pundits an exciting space. We are not a hive mind. We’re a broad church; Anglican in temperament, not Catholic in control. Communion, not command.

The Commentariat

Despite posting frequently, I don’t see myself as leading the conversation. Rather, I follow the commentariat (virtually all of whom have posting privileges). I scan the threads to get a whiff of what’s brewing and write in response. We are a reader-led space more than a writer-led one. Our posts are shaped by the ground-swell of what readers are debating, resisting, and reshaping.

That’s a rare thing in the age of Substacks and newsletters. It’s also why I take care not to let the space ossify into a singular ideology. We have moments of strong Hindutva sentiment. But as I have reminded Kabir, this is not a Hindutva blog; it is an evolving space. People arrive here with a desire for common ground, even when that ground is cracked and complicated.

The Conversion Problem

The missionary impulse, religious or ideological, is not inherently bad. In fact, I have great respect for missionaries. They often reach the marginalized and minoritized in societies where cultural hegemony crushes dissent. In that sense, missionaries are not unlike Marxists: disruptive, reformist, often unwelcome, and sometimes necessary.

But conversion, especially from polytheism or Dharma to strict monotheism, is not a simple evolution. It is a violent compression of cosmology; from many gods to one. When Muslims become Christians, I wince a little: it feels like a step backward rather than a Glorious step forward. When Hindus become Christians, I am confused because belief in Jesus does not preclude reverence for Ganesh. Why should it?

Still, missionaries play a role. They force majorities to ask why so many seek spiritual refuge elsewhere. They upset the status quo. And that disturbance; if it is ethical, humble, and loving, can be good. I find Korean Christianity to be perplexing but since then it seems to have indigenised fairly well?

The Bahá’í Lens

I say this as someone from the Bahá’í Faith; a tradition that allows no conversion, only teaching. I do not proselytize. I invite. And even that I do cautiously, because I’ve seen how easily my religion is misunderstood. Most people’s knowledge of the Bahá’í Faith comes from the internet.

As a result, I prefer long-form private correspondence when discussing the Bahá’í Faith. The blogosphere isn’t kind to nuance. And I acknowledge that I bring my Bahá’í lens into many posts. But it shapes how I see the world: all paths are real, all messengers are true, and all religions are successive chapters in a larger, unfinished book.

Idols & Icons

Here’s where I struggle: moving from Dharma to Monotheism is not a vertical leap; it’s a horizontal war. Because what do we do with the gods? Where do they go?

Strict monotheism is nearly impossible. The Old Testament is full of Israelites turning back to the Golden Calf. And India, despite its rapid modernization and growing homogenization, is still vigorously Hindu; in belief, ritual, and subconscious inheritance. The elite may wear many masks, but the gods of India are Dravidian, local, indigenous. They rise from the soil of Bharat, not from the Vedas alone.

The persistence of iconography, of Lord Shiva, of Kali, of Hanuman, reminds us that no missionary ever truly erases the native gods. They may convert the flesh. But the landscape still belongs to the old pantheon. If Bharat could survive a millennia of monotheism with just its wings clipped, then perhaps once again it may learn to fly.

Hindu missionaries can open up the Infinite Paths of Dharma and the Hindu Pantheon back to a closed world. It’s never either/or (I still have yet to find the contradictions in our Hindu-Bahá’í home).

Free Markets, Bad Actors

I like the metaphor of a marketplace of ideas. But we must remember: free markets are also home to exploiters, manipulators, and monopolists. Just as economic markets need regulation, intellectual markets need stewardship.

This doesn’t mean censorship. It means responsibility. And that’s what our editorial team is working to balance now. I’ve made it clear: they have my blessing to act with more assertiveness but always keep the record.

Unbreakable Borders

We often hear fantasies of redrawing maps; of a new India, a broken Pakistan, a reformed Bangladesh. I don’t think any of this is happening. Not in this century.

These borders, artificial though they are, have ossified into something functional. Even in their illegitimacy, they have acquired a strange legitimacy. The dreams of a re-unified subcontinent are beautiful. But they are dreams.

The Pakistan Puzzle

Many commenters misunderstand Pakistan. They view it from the outside, filtered through media, memory, or malice. But Pakistan is instinctively unified in ways outsiders cannot see.

Even in Balochistan, where the sense of alienation is real, the demographics tilt toward a deeper cohesion. The fissures exist. But the cracks do not yet break the foundation. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not like Ladakh (Ladakh is not Ladakh; they aren’t going to join Tibet). The instincts of belonging, linguistic, cultural, historical, run very deep in Pakistan. I once read an academic paper that stated, Pakistan is a young state but an old nation. How true..

Final Word: A Broad Church

So where does that leave us?

We are a broad church. Not unified, not doctrinaire, not perfect. There is miscommunication. There is hurt. There are trolls and prophets and poets all tangled together in our threads. But that’s Brown Pundits. And right now, no one is blocked. Not even Qureshi. That should tell you everything about how this space operates. It breathes. It grows. It falters. It survives. The mission of the missionaries, in the end, is not to win converts. It is to keep the light on; even when the world is dark. To teach. To provoke. To remind us of what we’ve forgotten. Let that be BP’s mission too.

I watched several videos — four or five, maybe more — of public figures sending their wishes. Among them: Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Mohammed Siraj, and Mukesh Ambani.

Mukesh Ambani, of course, remains closely aligned with the establishment, and Aamir Khan seemed to lean heavily into his Hindu heritage — adorned with Rakhis on his wrist, even a Bindi. He’s presenting himself now in a distinctly Hindu cultural idiom, though he comes from a very prominent Indian Muslim family.

By contrast, Shah Rukh Khan stood out. His message was subtly sardonic — he remarked that the recipient was “outrunning young people like me.” It was light, but just subversive enough to feel intentional. Interestingly, both Shah Rukh and Aamir spoke in shuddh Hindi, which added a certain performative weight to their gestures.

Hindu Art

I’ve been fairly busy the past few days, mostly focused on BRAHM Collections; writing about carpets, curating Trimurti sculptures, and exploring Ardhanarishvara iconography. It’s been a deep dive into the civilizational grammar of India and by extension, the porous boundary between sacred art and civil religion.

In the background, I’ve also been chipping away at longer-form reflections; trying to crack the formula for my newsletter (believe it or not the readership is neck to neck with BP but different demographics). It’s all a bit scattered, but the writing has become its own brown paper trail.

On the Commentariat (and Why I’m Stepping Back)

I still follow the commentariat but I’m slowly easing off. There’s a rhythm to it, sure, but too often it turns into exhaustion. I’ve removed all of Honey Singh’s abusive posts. Abuse is now a hard red line for me, but beyond that, I’m stepping back from constant moderation or sparring.

And to be honest, I no longer want to fall into the Kabir trap; a trap where technicality becomes provocation and clarity becomes combat. Kabir can be vexatious, yes, but I know better than to keep taking the bait. That’s growth, I suppose.

Gaza, 9/11, and the Consequences of Overkill

The situation in Gaza has become morally undeniable. It’s genocide, plain and painful.

It reminds me of the post-9/11 moment: the justified strike against Osama bin Laden turned into a decade-long quagmire across Iraq and Afghanistan, eroding American credibility. The hegemony of the U.S. wasn’t defeated by China; it was hollowed from within.

Now we live in a world where China rises cautiously, avoiding those mistakes; while the U.S, and its proxy, seem unable to resist overreaction. The new multipolar world isn’t shaped by strength alone, but by restraint and timing.

Pakistan: A Country Built for Multipolarity

Pakistan, curiously, may thrive more in a multipolar world than in a unipolar one (as it did in the ’80s and Musharraf era with the War on Terror). In a U.S.-dominated order, it’s too easy to sideline. But when power becomes distributed, China, Turkey, GCC, Russia, Pakistan becomes useful again. Its ambiguity becomes an asset.

That said, the average Pakistani is in an unenviable position. I’ve read stories about the makeshift Sialkot football team used to enter Japan; desperate, symbolic of deeper rot. Unrestrained population growth, dwindling legitimacy, decaying institutions. Hence my annoyance with Kabir, is that he ignores the plight of ordinary Pakistan to wage ideological warfare across the border.

Yet Pakistan is adaptive. It fits into emerging gray zones of global politics. It is not North Korea, but it’s not India either. It straddles desperation and relevance.

India, Muslims, and the Fallacy of Equivalence

There’s a false equivalence being drawn between Indian Muslims and Pakistanis. That comparison is deeply flawed and, frankly, offensive. Whatever India’s problems, Muslims in India remain within a pluralistic political framework. They face challenges, but they are not boxed in by a state built to serve only them.

Conversely, Pakistan is built around Islam, which means that Muslims can rise freely but non-Muslims face systemic ceilings. It’s not just a matter of formal exclusion; it’s about cultural legitimacy. In India, everyone must negotiate pluralism. In Pakistan, only non-Muslims do.

I’d also add: when the state is essentially owned by a particular population, upward mobility becomes asymmetrical. Yes, Muslims and Pakistanis in the West are generally better off than back home but even then, it’s worth asking whether class and cultural barriers keep certain communities locked in place across generations. That, too, is an important thread to follow.

Persian Echoes and Indo-Persian Realities

A Persian teacher once told me that Iranians today can only study in failed countries: Afghanistan and Pakistan. That stuck with me not because I agreed, but because it framed a painful truth. The Persian zone is in retreat, caught between two collapses: Persian nostalgia and Islamic populism.

Pakistan, in some sense, is an Indo-Persian hybrid with neither the stability of Iran nor the brutal clarity of Afghanistan. It is uniquely in-between.

And maybe that’s the story: the in-between country that still matters. Useful, liminal, tragic and oddly poised for relevance again, now that the West is tired and China is careful.

Final Thought

Kabir, like Pakistan, provokes. But perhaps the wiser path is to observe rather than obsess. I’ll keep writing about carpets. They have more continuity than borders.