Indian subcontinent – Brown Pundits

India’s Eastern Face: Where Civilisation Dissolves Instead of Ending

X.T.M · January 15, 2026 · 9 comments

Hard Edges and Soft Ones

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

Continue reading India’s Eastern Face: Where Civilisation Dissolves Instead of Ending

South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

X.T.M · January 15, 2026 · 56 comments

There is something faintly ridiculous about how often educated people insist on using the term South Asia as if it were a neutral, hygienic improvement on an older and supposedly “problematic” word. It is neither neutral nor an improvement. It is a bureaucratic euphemism invented to manage post-Partition discomfort, and it collapses the civilizational reality of the region rather than clarifying it.

The Indian subcontinent has had a name for millennia. It was called India because it lay beyond the Indus. Greeks used it. Persians used it. Arabs used it. Medieval Muslims, early modern Europeans, and the British all used it. The word survived because it described a geographic and civilizational unit, not because it flattered any modern state. The fact that the Republic of India later adopted the name does not retroactively invalidate its older meaning. Belgium did not abolish the word “Europe,” and Serbia’s existence does not make “European” offensive.

South Asia, by contrast, is not an ancient term misused by a nation-state. It is a late–Cold War academic construction, popularised by American area studies departments that were uncomfortable saying “India” once India no longer meant a single polity. It is a word designed to avoid an argument, not to resolve one. Like “Middle East,” it describes nothing from within the region itself. No one historically lived in “South Asia.” No one spoke “South Asian.” No one cooked “South Asian food.” Continue reading South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

15 Years of Brown Pundits: A Platform, a Posture, a Proof

X.T.M · December 28, 2025 · 12 comments

On 28 December 2010, the question was not ideology or politics, but naming.

brownpundit(s). brownguru(s). brownsmarts. brownfolks. brownidiots.

The instinct was already there: reclaim brown without asking permission, and refuse the performance of respectability that so often polices minority intellectual spaces. The reply came quickly and decisively.

Brownpundits.

The first post, Hello World, went live on 30 December 2010. Fifteen years later, what matters is not that a blog survived. Many do. What matters is how it survived: without institutional backing, without funding, without ideological capture, and without deference to credentials masquerading as truth. Brown Pundits was never designed as a platform for prestige. It was designed as an intellectual retreat; a place where arguments stand or fall on substance, not accent; where brownness is neither explained nor apologised for; where disagreement is not heresy. That posture, upright, unbought, unafraid, is why Brown Pundits still exists.

A Discipline, Not a Brand

Brown Pundits began with a simple wager: that the English-language internet still had room for a South Asian intellectual space that did not need permission. No institutional sponsor. No ideology police. No professional incentives. Just writers who believed that brown questions, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, diasporic, could be argued in public with rigor and dignity. Fifteen years on, Brown Pundits remains. That endurance is not luck. It is structure. We lasted because we never built this as a brand. We built it as a discipline.

The point has never been agreement. The point has been posture: stand upright, test claims, correct errors, refuse theatre. Independent platforms fail for predictable reasons. They chase virality. They harden into faction. Or they monetize attention until thought becomes marketing. Brown Pundits avoided those traps by being unusually boring in the right ways: we publish, we argue, we edit, we keep the record. Nobody here is paid to write. That is not moral vanity. It is why we remain unpurchasable.

Five Years of Solidarity

Over the last five years, some of the most important work has not been online at all. It has been the steady, unglamorous work of civic seriousness: reading dense documents, tracking deadlines, understanding procedure, and watching institutions scramble when they assume nobody is paying attention. During this period, there has also been sustained dialogue with a small circle of intellectually serious allies; quiet, exacting minds with a gift for clarity under pressure and an instinct for how power hides behind process. Not public figures. Not brands. Just adults: difficult to gaslight, uninterested in theatrics, precise about the record.

That kind of solidarity resets the baseline. You stop mistaking polish for integrity. You stop confusing titles with truth. You learn to clock everything. You learn that the record is not drama; it is protection. That discipline carries back into Brown Pundits. It shows in how disputes are handled, how errors are named, and how authority is tested rather than absorbed.

The SD Episode as Proof

The recent SD exchange was not, in the end, about architecture. It was about authority: who is allowed to explain, who is expected to absorb, and what happens when the subject speaks back. We engaged the way Brown Pundits always has. We read closely. We identified the errors. We insisted on precision. We treated the exchange as part of the record, not as outrage content. What mattered was not that corrections were made; corrections are normal and welcome.

What mattered was the instinct that surfaced at the start: revise quietly, respond pedagogically, assume the critique will not notice the shift. That instinct is older than any one writer. It is a patterned behaviour in how authority manages challenge in brown-facing spaces. And yet, precisely because Brown Pundits exists, the record held. The language moved. The posture changed. This was not a “victory.” It was proof of concept. The platform did what it is meant to do.

“Brown” Is Not an Ethnicity; It Is a Civilizational Composite

The deeper reason Brown Pundits still matters is that brown is not a neat identity. It is not a single bloodline, doctrine, or grievance. It is a civilizational composite with a long memory and a hard geography. The Indian subcontinent is layering, not essence:

ancient coastal and inland populations
Dravidian continuities and transformations
Aryan synthesis and institutionalisation
Islamicate overlays that became native in texture, not merely foreign in rule
British power, whose administrative afterlife still structures class and accent

And beyond this lie the East, the Northeast, the mountain corridors, the sea routes. This is why Brown Pundits resists simplification. The subcontinent is not a monoculture, a single trauma, or a single pride. It cannot be narrated by those who treat it as a site for extraction; political, academic, or aesthetic.

What Fifteen Years Means

Fifteen years is long enough to know what this site is for. Not fame. Not power. Not money. Not outrage. Those are cheap forms of relevance. Brown Pundits exists to keep an alternative alive: an intellectual retreat on the open web where brown life can be examined with seriousness; where hierarchy is not mistaken for truth; where criticism is not treated as insolence; where the record matters. We are not untouchable, and we do not aim to be. But we are not easily compromised, because everyone here has a life outside the internet. That is our freedom. Fifteen years on, the mission remains unchanged:

That is why we are still here.

Mid-Nov Circular

X.T.M · November 17, 2025 · 2 comments

Dear all,

With everything going on in the last 48 hours, we wanted to send a short note to everyone directly. BP has sputtered back to life in the past year, and with that revival comes all the familiar subcontinental pathologies: everyone believes they’re right, everyone believes moderation is biased, and everyone believes someone else is being unfair. In that sense, BP is working exactly as it always has.

We want to restate something very clearly: we’re not going to run a hyper-moderated blog. It takes too much time, too much energy, and, crucially, it’s an unfunded mandate. Nothing is more dispiriting than a dead space. Our approach has been simple and consistent:

1. Authors control their own threads.

If things escalate on your post, you shut it down when and where you see fit. That’s the cleanest system and the only one we can realistically sustain.

2. No bans, shadow bans, or entrapment games.

Once we go down the path of micro-policing, BP loses its character. That’s not the direction we want to take.

3. We do not manufacture controversy.

If anything, the only thing we are biased toward is what the audience reads and engages with. That’s it. Everything else is noise.

Reflections:

Some of you will have seen the recent exchanges where accusations were thrown in both directions, and where intentions were questioned. Without going into details: this is exactly how online political communities melt down; by assuming the worst in each other and by escalating minor provocations into existential battles. It’s the same pattern we saw a couple of years ago at a public talk by Rahul Gandhi in Cambridge: someone asked a loaded, “gotcha” question, the out of context reply went viral, people got outraged, and the whole thing became a cycle of reaction and overreaction. We’re drifting into the same dynamic.

Let’s not.

BP works only when people post, comment, disagree, and move on. If that stops, the blog dies. And as Omar’s recent post highlighted, we want authors to write more, not less.

So our simple request is this: Calm down, carry on, manage your own threads, and do not fall prey to the outrage factory.

If you feel strongly about a situation, reach out; if you want more balance, we’re happy to add an additional admin to offset the load (BP’s editorial board already functions with more factions than the Lebanese Parliament); if something crosses a line, handle it on your post. But let’s not turn BP into a miniature Whitehall where everything becomes bureaucratised. We’ve done extremely well this past year. Let’s keep the energy without burning down the house.

Warmly.

What Is Not India Is Pakistan

X.T.M · November 17, 2025 · 3 comments

As Dave mentioned, there is a lively WhatsApp group of BP authors and editors, and it inevitably shapes the comment ecosystem. But one comment on the blog stood out:

“The very foundation of Pakistan is an anti-position. What is not India is Pakistan. So isn’t it obvious?”

It’s an extraordinarily crisp description of Pakistani identity-building. What is not India is Pakistan. That is not a slur; it is, in many ways, a psychologically accurate frame for how the state narrates itself.

What I increasingly find misplaced on this blog is the recurring assumption that Pakistanis are somehow “Indians-in-waiting,” or that Punjab is “West Punjab,” Pakistan “Northwest India,” or Bangladesh “East Bengal.” These are irredentist projections that simply do not match lived identities. This is not “North Korea” or “East Germany,” where both sides continue to imagine themselves as fragments of one common nation.

Yes, Pakistan consumes Bollywood and Hindi music, which themselves derive from Mughal and Indo-Persian syncretic traditions. Yes, Pakistan is culturally embedded in the greater Indo-Islamic civilizational sphere. But emotionally, Pakistan has severed itself from the Indian Subcontinent as a cohesive landscape. It has constructed a hybrid identity; part Turko-Persian, part Islamic internationalist, part anti-India.

I don’t personally agree with this move, and my own trajectory has been toward a strong Hinducised, Dharmic identification. But my view is irrelevant here. What matters is that Pakistani identity is defined negatively; as the commentator put it, “What is not India is Pakistan.”

Whether that is healthy or sustainable is another matter. But identities can persist in unhealthy configurations for a very long time; the stock market can be irrational longer than your liquidity can survive.