History – Brown Pundits

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I’m sharing this review that was originally published in 2020. After the victorious Taliban takeover of Kabul on August 15, 2021 and President Ghani’s flight from the country, Dalrymple’s prediction that the American Occupation would end up handing power to the same regime they set out to destroy seems eerily prescient. This type of book would make a good possibility for BP Book Club.

Early in Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury 2013), William Dalrymple quotes Mehrab Khan’s (the Khan of Kalat) remark to the British diplomat and adventurer Alexander Burnes: “You have brought an army into [Afghanistan] but how do you propose to take it out again?” (Dalrymple 161). As the British and subsequent foreign powers would find out, it is extremely difficult to successfully withdraw from Afghanistan. It has now been nearly two decades since the current US-led invasion began in 2001 and President Trump is promising to extensively draw down the presence of US troops, after having signed a deal with the Taliban–the regime that the US went to war to remove. In such a context, Dalrymple’s account of the First Anglo-Afghan War remains extremely relevant.

Return of a King takes its title from the attempt of the British to put Shah Shuja—the grandson of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the founder of modern Afghanistan — back on the throne after an exile of over thirty years in British India. This attempt took place in the context of the Great Game–the British-Russian rivalry for control over Central Asia. The British feared that Dost Mohammad Khan, who had usurped power from Shah Shuja, was pro-Russian and hence decided that he needed to be replaced with Shuja, whom they would use as a puppet leader. While they succeeded in removing Dost Mohammad and giving the crown to Shuja, they could not have anticipated the resistance that they would face. Continue reading Review: William Dalrymple’s Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan

What We Did

Brown Pundits was founded as a diaspora project. A handful of Brown people thinking out loud about where they came from, what it meant, and whether the subcontinent could be understood in English without either romanticising it or apologising for it.

What happened instead was stranger and more valuable. The site became a place where the subcontinent argues with itself in public, without editorial supervision, without a line to hold, and without the particular kind of cowardice that afflicts publications which need to keep everybody happy.

Over the past week, we forced the archive into coherence. All 3,987 published posts; every Open thread, Genetics argument, Civilisational essay, Partition debate, BrownCast episode, Film review, Obituary, every Moderation notice, are now part of a single navigable structure. For the first time, the site can be read not as a sequence of posts, but as a narration.

What the Archive Revealed

The Partition of India is not a historical event on this site. It is a living emergency. Every argument we have had about Pakistan’s identity, India’s secularism, the Muslim League, Jinnah that is QeA, the two-nation theory, Bangladesh’s founding, the treatment of minorities across all three successor states; all of it is 1947 refusing to close. The wound keeps producing arguments because it was never properly treated. The British left. The questions they left behind did not. Brown Pundits has been, among other things, one of the few places in the English-speaking world where those questions are fought over by people who have actual stakes in the answers, not just professional opinions about them.

Pax Persica

Continue reading Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives