Indo-Gangetic Plain – Brown Pundits

South India Makes British India Hindu?

May 21, 2025May 22, 2025X.T.MHistory, India, X.T.MBritish India, Demographic Engineering, Demographics of South Asia, Dravidian Identity, Federation vs Fragmentation, Hindu Majoritarianism, Hindu-Muslim Divide, Hinduism, Hindutva, Hyderabad 1948, Identity, India, Indian Muslims, Indo-Gangetic Plain, Islam, Muslim Majority Regions in India, Muslim Political Power, Nationalism, Partition, Partition of India, South India and Partition, TNT, Two Nation Theory, Why India is Hindu-Majority25 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?

Southasia Is One Word

May 21, 2025May 22, 2025X.T.MGeopolitics, India, Pakistan, X.T.MAsia, Beena Sarwar, Blog, Cross-border Dialogue, Culture, Diaspora Politics, East India Company, India, India–Pakistan Relations, Indo-Gangetic Plain, jihad, Kashmir, Kashmir Conflict, Nationalism, Nuclear Doctrine, Pakistan, Pakistan army, Partition, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Politics, Postcolonial Legacies, Religion, Sapan Network, Southasia, Two Nation Theory104 Comments

Reflections on Pervez Hoodbhoy at MIT

Zachary L. Zavidé | Brown Pundits | May 2025

Pervez Hoodbhoy needs no introduction. As one of Pakistan’s leading physicists and public intellectuals, he has long stood at the uneasy crossroads of science, nationalism, and conscience. He spoke this week at MIT’s Graduate Tower — the final stop on a grueling five-city U.S. tour, a new city every two days — in support of The Black Hole Initiative, a cultural and intellectual space he’s building in Pakistan. Despite its ominous name, the initiative is a wormhole, not a void: a cross-disciplinary bridge connecting physics, literature, art, and civic life.

What followed was less a lecture, more an exposition — sober, lucid, and grounded in decades of hard-won clarity.

The Logic of Annihilation

Dr. Hoodbhoy walked us through Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine: under long-standing military assumptions, if the north–south arterial route is severed, a tactical nuclear strike becomes viable. But the calculus is disturbingly abstract. Hiroshima’s 20-kiloton bomb killed 200,000. India and Pakistan each possess an estimated 200 warheads. One general once told him that, by crude arithmetic — obscene as it sounds — “only” 80 million would die in the event of a full exchange. Continue reading Southasia Is One Word