Hindutva – Brown Pundits

Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Kabir · February 19, 2026 · No comments

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer and public intellectual best known for her Booker prize winning novel The God of Small Things. In 2017, she published her second novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (which I have previously reviewed).

I eagerly looked forward to reading Roy’s recently published memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me (Scribner 2025). Though it is ostensibly about her contentious relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, the book is really about Roy’s own development as a writer and a thinker. It will particularly appeal to those who are already familiar with Roy’s novels, especially The God of Small Things. Many of the sections describing Roy’s family background and childhood clearly have parallels to that novel.

The memoir also details the evolution of Roy’s political views. Many of these will also be familiar to those who have read her non-fiction (or indeed The Ministry of Utmost Happiness which includes topics such as the Kashmir conflict, rising Hindutva, and Dalit assertion against upper-caste violence).

Some other reviewers have criticized the memoir for focusing too much on politics. In their opinion, the strongest sections are those that revolve around Roy’s relationship with her mother. However, Roy is an intensely political writer and I believe that it is impossible to understand her works without appreciating her political commitments–if not necessarily agreeing with them. Continue reading Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Nehru bashing has become very old but is it ineffective yet ?

GauravL · December 9, 2025 · 44 comments

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra targeted PM Modi over the latter’s repeated Nehru bashing, and i felt a some happiness that someone was voicing what i had felt for 6 odd years now, and done so in a rhetorically effective way (unlike her brother).

“When Done Nehru Bashing, Debate Unemployment”: Priyanka Gandhi’s Top Quotes

You can find the entire speech on YouTube : LIVE: Smt. Priyanka Gandhi ji speaks in Parliament on the 150th anniversary of ‘Vande Mataram’.

Ram Guha has said multiple times that if Rahul and Priyanka were to leave the INC, the charge of dynasty and sins Nehru and Indira (real and alleged) wouldn’t pull the INC back as much as it does. But i think we are at a point where even firm BJP supporters are fed up of BJP’s Nehru bashing and its bound to have diminishing returns.

Its been 12 years and Nehru bashing brings cheers from only the hardcore supporters and none others. Maybe we are at an inflection point, maybe not.

Personally I remain an admirer of Nehru while disagreeing with his decisions profoundly. Maybe i will expand upon my criticisms and praise at some point but i do not think Gandhi erred massively in choosing Nehru over Patel. While i do think Gandhi shouldn’t have gone against democratic nature of congress (which had chosen Patel), I do think Nehru would have been a better PM had Patel remained alive longer into Nehru’s term. A bit cliched but Nehru’s life kind of reminds me of famous lines from Dark knight trilogy.

You die a hero or you stay alive long enough to become a villain.

I am not into fortune telling but i think the path Modi is following is very similar to his great opponent (atleast in his own mind), Jawahar Lal Nehru. I think they’re a bit more alike that their followers think. But all thats for another time.

The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask

X.T.M · November 26, 2025 · 9 comments

A far-right senator, Pauline Hansen, recently walked into the Australian Senate wearing a burqa. Muslim MPs (one of whom wearing a hijab) angrily called it racist, bigoted, Islamophobic. They were right. But they also dodged the underlying question: What does citizenship mean when communities fracture along religious lines?

The same evasion dominates debates about Indian Muslims after 1947. One camp says: “They stayed, they’re citizens, case closed.” The other mutters about loyalty tests and fifth columns. Both positions are intellectually lazy. Neither grapples with what Partition actually did to the social contract.

This isn’t about defending bigotry. It’s about refusing to let bigots monopolize legitimate questions.

I. The Contract That Never Closed Continue reading The Unfinished Contract II: Citizenship, Partition, and the Questions Liberalism Won’t Ask

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

X.T.M · September 15, 2025 · 121 comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

X.T.M · August 19, 2025 · 25 comments

I. Bombay: Between Beauty and Brutality
I’m writing from Bombay, where the monsoon floods are overwhelming; visually and viscerally. The rain hammers the city with a kind of sublime fury. From certain vantage points, it’s breathtaking. But it’s also undeniably brutal for those without scenic surroundings or structural shelter. It’s a reminder that Indian beauty is often doubled with burden.

II. Burden Burst: The Commentariat Awakens
Lately on Brown Pundits, I’ve noticed a revival. Old voices returning, new ones emerging, and many ideas worth engaging. But some themes have worn thin; for instance I’m in broad agreement with Indosaurus & I don’t want to waste too much breath on Audrey Truschke. And frankly, Aurangzeb is not a hill I want to die on. In fact, perhaps one of the key misreadings by Muslims in the subcontinent was turning every ideological disagreement into a hill to die on. Maybe it began with QeA-Jinnah and the Great Allama but it ossified into a pattern. Everything became a matter of principle, rather than pragmatism.

III. Concession Is Not Compromise
Compromise is seen as weakness, but I’m more interested in the capacity to concede especially when history clearly shows you’re wrong. The Mughals installed a two-tier system, subordinating Hindus and even native Muslims. Contrast that with the Suri dynasty, particularly Sher Shah Suri, who in just two decades built the Grand Trunk Road and reshaped governance without the alienation that marked the Mughals. If Hindutva attacked the Suri legacy, I’d call it pure bigotry. Sher Shah ruled with the land, not over it. Continue reading Come Fly with me to Far Bombay

Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

X.T.M · July 25, 2025 · 11 comments

Brown Pundits Must Stay a Broad Church

Reading Kabir’s thoughtful post on the “soft Hindutva” bias at Brown Pundits, I found myself both agreeing with parts of his argument and diverging from its framing. My own journey with BP goes back to its inception. The blog was born in Twixmas December 2010; 10 days after I had met Dr. Lalchand, whose presence has profoundly shaped my civilizational views.

I say this not as a biographical aside but because BP, at its best, is where the personal and civilizational collide. We bring who we are; our marriages, our migrations, our contradictions, into this messy, brilliant conversation.

At the time, like many Pakistanis, I held a deep-seated assumption: that Hindus were fundamentally “other.” It wasn’t overt hatred; just a civilizational distance, internalized from birth. But Dr. V & Brown Pundits challenged that.

A Forum With Bias? Yes. But Which One?

The heart of BP is not neutrality; it’s the willingness to host contradiction. That is its genius, and it must be protected.

Continue reading Brown Pundits: Broad Church or Narrow Canon?

Let Hindus Decide for India

X.T.M · July 7, 2025 · 109 comments

There’s a quiet but persistent coalition, inside and outside India, that seems intent on denying Hindus the right to define their own future. It includes unreformed Islamists who refuse to reckon with modernity, English-speaking liberal elites still shadowboxing for Nehru, minorities with veto power but no stake in cohesion, and a chorus of Western (and increasingly Chinese) voices, eager to manage India’s trajectory from afar. What unites them? A shared discomfort with Hindu political consolidation.

Let’s be clear: Hindu identity is not a new construct. Whether you place its roots 3,000 or 5,000 years ago, it’s one of the world’s oldest living civilizational continuities. That identity has always been plural, regional, and evolving. But it has also always been there; visible in memory, ritual, geography, and language. Today, that identity is waking up to its political form. And it will not be put back to sleep.

Hindutva is not going anywhere. Nor is the Indian Union. Those who hoped Kashmir would stay outside this arc have already seen the direction of travel. Pakistan’s decision to opt out of Hindustan, and then build an identity against it, has led not to strength but to strategic stasis. Bangladesh, too, for all its cultural richness, now stands as a separate civilizational lane. And so we arrive at the core truth: Hinduism and India are coterminous.

This isn’t a call for exclusion. But it is a reminder that those who opted out do not get to dictate terms to those who stayed in. That includes foreign commentators and diasporic gatekeepers alike. There is a difference between pluralism and paralysis. There is a difference between nationalism and denial. And if majoritarianism is the anxiety; perhaps the deeper fear is that Hindus are no longer apologizing for being the majority. Let India decide. Let Hindus decide. Let the world, finally, learn to listen.

South India Makes British India Hindu?

X.T.M · May 21, 2025 · 25 comments

TNT Saved Hinduism; Dravidia preserved Aryavarta?

S. Qureshi: “Muslims are today a majority of the population >50% of North British India. If peninsular south was made into its own country in 1947, India would be a Muslim majority country today. Many Muslims actually wanted South India to be a separate country and North India (including Pakistan/Bengal) to be one unit. To say that Indian Muslims who lived in the historical centre of Muslim power for centuries would just get up and leave for Pakistan is just farcical and delusional. These types of ideas were only proposed by extreme right-wing Hindu organizations after partition, and these ideas seem to become mainstream today with BJP. Historical reality, like always, is very different.”

The demographic map of the subcontinent tells a startling story. If South India had formed a separate state in 1947, the rest of British India — encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the northern Hindi belt — would today constitute a Muslim-majority civilizational bloc. This isn’t conjecture. It’s arithmetic.

The Numbers That Reorder the Narrative

Here’s what the Indo-Gangetic arc looks like today (please fact check me): Continue reading South India Makes British India Hindu?

Podcast: A “Frank” conversation about modern Indian politics

Omar Ali · June 22, 2023 · 1 comment

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode Akshar and I talk to “Frank”, an Indian financial professional with an interest in Indian history and politics. We discuss everything from Nehruvian India to Modinomics, Hindutva and whether a boom is coming…

Frank tweets on twitter as @frankisalegend1

Browncast: Koenrad Elst, Indologist and Hindu Nationalist

Omar Ali · February 25, 2021 · 17 comments

Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher. Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe at one of the links above.

Would appreciate more positive reviews!

In this episode Srikant Kṛṣṇamācārya and I talk to Koenrad Elst, an Indologist who is also a supporter of what can be fairly described as “Right wing Hindutva politics”. We ask him about his understanding of Hinduism, Hindu identity and other topics (including the “Aryan Migration Theory”, which he vigorously opposes, though we did not have the time or inclination to discuss this much further; you can read more of his writings at this link and here to get a clearer idea of where he is coming from and you can read this and this to see the pro-AMT point of view)..