Indian History – Brown Pundits

What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste

X.T.M · December 29, 2025 · 11 comments

A recent WhatsApp exchange between GL and Sbarr captures a recurring Brown Pundits problem: how genetic data, textual tradition, and social history get collapsed into a single argument and then talk past one another. The immediate trigger was a table circulating online, showing ancestry proportions across South Asian groups; Indus Valley–related, Steppe, AASI, and East Asian components. The numbers vary by region and language group. None support purity. None map cleanly onto caste. That much is uncontroversial. What followed was not a dispute about the data itself, but about what kind of claims the data can bear.

GL’s Position (Summarised)

GL’s argument operates at three levels: historical, linguistic, and genetic.

Caste as fluid history

GL argues that the four-fold varna system hardened late. Terms like Vaishya did not always mean “merchant” but originally derived from viś—“the people.” In this reading, Vaishya once referred broadly to non-priestly, non-warrior populations, including farmers and artisans.
Elite religion thesis

Early Śramaṇa movements, Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, are framed as elite projects. Renunciation, non-violence, and philosophical inquiry required surplus. Most people, GL argues, worshipped local deities and lived outside these doctrinal systems.
Genes as complexity, not identity

GL points out that Steppe ancestry and Y-DNA lineages are unevenly distributed. Some peasant groups show higher Steppe ancestry than some Brahmin groups. Maternal lines are largely local. The conclusion is not reclassification, but complication: caste cannot be reverse-engineered from genes. GL’s underlying claim is modest: simple caste narratives do not survive contact with deep history.

Sbarr’s Position (Summarised)

Sbarr’s objections are structural and definitional.

Varna as stable social fact

In lived Hindu society, Vaishya has meant merchant since at least the Dharmashastra period. Etymology does not override usage. Peasants were not Vaishyas. Shudras worked the land. Dalits lay outside the system.
South Indian specificity

Sbarr stresses that the North Indian varna model does not transplant cleanly into the Tamil world, where Brahmins, non-Brahmin literati, Jain monks, and Buddhist authors all contributed to classical literature. Claims of universal Brahmin authorship are rejected.
Genes do not make caste

Even if some peasant or tribal groups show Steppe Y-DNA, this does not make them Brahmins or twice-born. Genetic percentages are low, overlapping, and socially meaningless without institutions.

Sbarr’s core concern is different from GL’s: the danger of dissolving concrete social history into abstract theory.

Where the Debate Breaks Down

The argument falters because the two sides are answering different questions.

GL is asking: How did these categories emerge over millennia?
Sbarr is asking: How did people actually live, identify, and reproduce hierarchy?

Genes describe populations. Texts describe ideals. Caste describes power. None substitute for the others.

The Takeaway (Without a Verdict)

The ancestry table does not refute caste. The Manusmriti does not explain population genetics. Etymology does not override social practice. What the exchange shows, usefully, is the limit of WhatsApp as a medium for longue-durée history. Complex systems resist compression. When they are forced into slogans, everyone ends up defending a position they did not fully intend. That, more than Steppe percentages or varna theory, is the real lesson here.

Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation

X.T.M · December 18, 2025 · 13 comments

Rebuttal to When RSS-Modi Attack Macaulay and English, They Attack Upward Mobility of Dalits, Shudras, Adivasis

Follow-Up to Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

A new orthodoxy has taken hold. It claims that criticising Macaulay or colonial education is an attack on Dalit, Shudra, and Adivasi mobility. English, we are told, was not a colonial instrument but a liberatory gift. Macaulay is recast as an unintended ally of social justice. This view is wrong. More than that, it is historically careless and civilisationally corrosive.

The Core Error

The mistake is simple: confusing survival within a system with vindication of that system. No serious person denies that English became a tool of mobility in modern India. No serious person denies Ambedkar’s mastery of English or its role in courts and constitutional politics. But to leap from this fact to the claim that Macaulay was therefore justified is a category error. People adapt to power structures to survive them. That does not sanctify those structures. To argue otherwise is like saying famine roads liberated peasants because some learned masonry while starving. Adaptation is not endorsement.

Macaulay Was Explicit

There is no need to guess Macaulay’s intentions. He stated them plainly. He dismissed Indian knowledge as inferior. He wanted to create a small class: Continue reading Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation

When was India’s Golden Age?

X.T.M · December 11, 2025 · 91 comments

When people claim that India and Pakistan are “equally artificial,” they erase the long, uneven civilisational trajectories that produced both. Kabir, who is generally more courteous than the average Saffroniate imagines, still falls into this conceptual trap. But the question this raises is larger than contemporary geopolitics:

When was India’s Golden Age, and for whom?

A Golden Age can be political, cultural, philosophical, or civilisational. The answer depends on what we measure: scale, radiance, confidence, or continuity. Asking it forces us to examine whether India is a recent invention or a very old organism repeatedly broken and reconstituted.

Pakistan complicates this picture. As the Indus zone, it has deep civilisational roots of its own; older than Islam, perhaps as a geographic expression even older than the Vedic world. This is why, despite its ideological volatility, Pakistan will likely persist: it sits on a basin that has generated coherent cultures for five millennia. Its anti-India posture gives it political definition, but its underlying geography gives it durability. Continue reading When was India’s Golden Age?

Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?

X.T.M · December 10, 2025 · 15 comments

Public debates on Indian Muslims often make one basic mistake: they collapse all minorities into a single category and then declare that “everyone is thriving because a few individuals have done well”. This flattens history, erases structure, and turns civilisational questions into census arithmetic.

1. Minorities Are Not Interchangeable

Jains, Sikhs, and Buddhists offer no meaningful analogy to Indian Muslims.

Jains were never politically central to the subcontinent.
Sikhs built a regional power, not a pan-subcontinental order.
Buddhists have been demographically marginal for a thousand years.

Indian Muslims were different. For centuries they formed the civilisational elite of North India; shaping courts, languages, music, etiquette, food, architecture, and the ways Indian states understood power. Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad were not enclaves. They were the centre of the political and aesthetic world of the Indo-Gangetic plain. A fall from centrality is not comparable to never having been central at all.

2. Individual Success Is Not Structural Health Continue reading Who can speak for the “Muslim minority” of India?

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.

Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

Omar Ali · December 4, 2025 · 19 comments

We had some discussion about Macaulay on X and I wanted to write a piece about it, but I also know I probably wont get the time soon, so I am going to just copy and paste the discussion here, I am sure people can follow what is going on and offer their comments.. (Modi’s speech link at end, macaulay minute text link as well)

It started with this tweet from Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume:

In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. Link to article.

I replied:

I have to disagree a bit with sadanand here bcz I think while cartoonish propaganda can indeed be cartoonish and juvenile, there is a real case to be made against the impact of Macaulay on India.. Education in local languages with hindustami or even English (or for that matter, sanskrit or Persian, as they had been in the past during pre islamicate-colonization India and islamicate India respectively) as lingua franca would have been far superior, and the man really did have extremely dismissive and prejudiced views, the fact that they were common views in his world explains it but does not excuse it. The very fact that many liberal, intelligent and erudite Indians of today think he was “overall a good thing” is itself an indication that his work has done harm.. BTW, there were englishmen in India then who argued against Macaulay on exactly these lines..

Akshay Saseendran (@Island_Thought) replied: Continue reading Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

The Mughals Were Not an Indian Dynasty — They Were a Dynasty in India

X.T.M · June 29, 2025 · 67 comments

The Mughals were not an Indian dynasty in the civilizational sense. They were a dynasty in India — rooted in the Persianate ecumene that stretched from Anatolia to Bengal, but distinct from the indigenous Indic civilizational framework.

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age captures this well. The Mughal elite, like other Turko-Mongol polities across the Islamic world, operated through a tri-layered framework: Arabic religion, Persianate high culture, and Turko-Mongolian kingship. This pattern held from Egypt to Samarkand — and India was no exception.

But here’s the distinction: while in places like Iran, Central Asia, and even parts of Anatolia, the ruling elite and the subject populations often shared linguistic, religious, or cultural proximity, in India the Mughal court sat atop a society whose foundational worldview — Dharma, Sanskritic cosmology, ritual plurality — was wholly different.

Yes, the Mughals were cosmopolitan. Yes, Akbar attempted synthesis. But at their core, the Mughal dynasty retained its sense of separateness — not just politically, but civilizationally. Persian remained the language of court and culture, their aesthetics leaned West, and their ethos remained imperially aloof. Their legitimacy was not drawn from Indian sacred geography but from Turanic, Persian, and Islamic claims of kingship.

Contrast this with the Suri dynasty, which, despite being devoutly Muslim, left a remarkably grounded imprint. Sher Shah Suri ruled in Hindavi. His administrative and infrastructural legacy felt local, even national. In some ways, paradoxically, he felt more Indian than the Mughals did.

This isn’t about Islam being foreign to India. Islam has deep roots in the subcontinent — from Kerala to Bengal to Kashmir. It has been deeply indigenized across regions. But when Islam arrives twinned with Persianate high culture, it becomes something else: a hybrid elite formation, distinct both from Sanskritic Hinduism and from vernacular Islam.

The British Raj, too, was alien — but ironically, its later administrators localized many elements of their rule. The Mughals, by contrast, represented a more refined foreignness: imperial, hybrid, and between worlds.

It’s telling that the most influential women of the Mughal court—Noor Jahan, Mumtaz Mahal, and Hamida Banu Begum—were all of Persian origin. They wielded real power: issuing firmans, shaping court politics, commissioning architecture. In contrast, the Hindu-indigenous consorts—Jodha Bai, Anarkali, even Aurangzeb’s Hindu Rajput lover—were celebrated in romance, not governance. They were symbols, not strategists. Influence, in the Mughal world, came not with local integration but with Persian pedigree. That, in itself, says a great deal.

So no — the Mughals were not an Indian dynasty. They were a dynasty in India. That distinction matters.