Indian nationalism – Brown Pundits

Dhurandhar showcases Bollywood’s New Obsession: The Sexy Pakistani Villain

X.T.M · December 12, 2025 · 9 comments

We watched Dhurandhar last night at Apple Cinemas (the last time we went to see Ishaan Khatter’s Homebound). It is the best mass-market Bollywood film I’ve seen since Animal, and far more immersive. What struck me most was not the action, nor the plot, but Bollywood’s new formula: a full-scale fetishisation of Pakistan.

Kabir keeps claiming that Bollywood casts Pakistanis as villains. This misses the point. The villain is always the sexiest figure in any film. Bollywood has finally realised this. Raazi hinted at it. Animal stumbled on it with Bobby Deol’s star stealing turn. Dhurandhar perfects it.

For the first time, Hindu actors are not performing cartoon versions of Pakistan. They are cosplaying Pakistanis with forensic precision; the clothes, the diction, the swagger, the social codes. In earlier decades the attempt was clumsy. Now the calibration is exact. Pakistan, in these films, becomes the Wild West of the subcontinent: familiar enough to feel intimate, distant enough to feel dangerous. Continue reading Dhurandhar showcases Bollywood’s New Obsession: The Sexy Pakistani Villain

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:

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.