Tag: Media

Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more

July 17, 2026 3 Comments filed under X.T.M

I had planned to write a nice long post this evening for BP since I felt I had neglected this blog for far too long.

As I was finishing my earlier work, I had to scroll on Facebook, which I rarely do unless it’s for a specific reason. As I scrolled down the feed, my heart shuddered; Sukrita Paul Kumar had posted a notification about her sister-in-law, Ruchira Paul.

I had known Ruchira for so long I cannot place the beginning of our friendship. Many names come to mind when I think of that early period (the late noughties), the Brown Blogging Dynasts. I was always a pretender to that company; Ruchira was among its most gracious members. Sukrita has written a poignant obituary on Facebook, which anyone who wants a proper account of her life should read.

Also worth reading is Namit Arora’s touching note on Ruchira. Judging from the comments on the two Facebook threads; my feelings are shared by hundreds and hundreds of individuals, whose lives Ruchira touched over the years.

This is a smaller thing: an accounting of what she meant to me across nearly two decades of friendship, most of it conducted over email and Facebook, none of it ever in person.

Accidental Blogger was Ruchira’s signature. She started it in 2005 as a solo author. By 2006 she was inviting others in, and by the time she wound it down in early 2013, roughly a dozen writers were contributing under her banner. She told me once, quite matter of fact, that readership had dwindled and she saw no point in continuing an enterprise that took so much of her time and energy. That was Ruchira in miniature. No sentimentality. A thing had run its course. She moved on. I remember leaving a comment on her concluding post in January 2013 to say goodbye. She wrote back a few days later, characteristically, to thank me for taking the trouble.

That was already several years in. We were Facebook friends from April 2011, but we had certainly been in touch before that. Whatever the origin, the friendship settled into a rhythm of quiet, regular contact. She wrote to me on my birthday, year after year. On 16 December 2011, 16 December 2012, 15 December 2013, 15 December 2017. Sometimes she signed with a single line, sometimes only her name. On my 29th she wished me many happy returns and a happy holiday season and added, in her small careful way, Mubarak!

A decade on, she wished me again on my 39th.

Few people ever used Facebook as well as Ruchira did. After a return from a “long” hiatus, I had complained to her that the platform was dull; she was much of the reason it was not always so.

No photo description available.

This past May she posted a cropped photograph of her mother as a student at Dhaka University, standing in the third row behind one of her professors, flanked in the back row by two women who would become lifelong friends, one of them later an aunt by marriage. All graceful, smart and kind women, Ruchira wrote. It was an inheritance that ran through her own life of the mind and runs on today to her daughter, an acclaimed professor.

Some years earlier she had written a piece I have not been able to find yet, about a wedding in her extended family. A cousin brother who had grown up in the same household, though much younger, had put her name on his wedding invitation card, and the gesture moved her so deeply that she couldn’t write about it till the emotion had been processed. She wrote it so well that it moved me deeply too, and I still remember it, years later.

In 2018, when the great Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz died, Omar Ali’s obituary for Brown Pundits carried Ruchira’s English translation of Aqlima, Fahmida’s furious feminist meditation on the forgotten sister of Cain and Abel. A Bengali woman in Houston, translating a Sindhi feminist’s Urdu poem for a South Asian intellectual blog. That was the reach she carried, and the quiet, unfussy way she offered it.

Continue reading Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more

Reading Dawn in Delhi.

July 7, 2026 2 Comments filed under X.T.M

Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace”; Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. Second of two parts.

Part I of this essay took Anuradha Bhasin’s blueprint, cross-border journalism, a shared archive, the arts as empathy machines, and held it against the graveyard of prior attempts: Aman ki Asha, decapitated after 2014; Himal Southasian, strangled in 2016 by withheld paperwork.

As an aside Himal Southasian was re-registered in Colombo and continues to bring out a bold digital publication under its dynamic editor Roman Gautam.

The woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is, conveniently, the field test. Beena Sarwar, Boston-based journalist, documentary filmmaker, journalism teacher, helped run Aman ki Asha from the Jang side through its best years; the campaign’s achievements are credited in large part to her stewardship. She watched it stall. And in March 2021 she co-founded Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network, explicitly on the lessons learned, followed in August 2021 by Sapan News, a syndicated features service. The arc from mega-campaign backed by two media conglomerates to volunteer-driven network is not a decline; it is an adaptation to the kill mechanism. Her talk, “Think like a Journalist, Build Peace,” was the day’s answer to its own hardest question.

The minimum common agenda

Continue reading Reading Dawn in Delhi.

The Meltwater Carries No Passport

July 5, 2026 21 Comments filed under X.T.M

Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace” – Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. First of two parts.

(Quotes are drawn from a rough live transcript and lightly edited for clarity; read them as close paraphrase rather than verbatim.)

There was something quietly apt about the calendar. On the Fourth of July, the day one republic celebrates the border it drew for itself, a room in Stockholm spent ten hours mourning a border drawn for someone else. Mela Nordic’s day-long commemoration of the 1947 Partition, Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace, earned its title honestly. The programme ran from Sarah Gilley questioning the manufacture of “normalcy” in Kashmir, through Farooq Sulehria’s provocation “India as Media Subimperialism!”, to the launch of Amrita Ghosh’s India’s Imperial Formations: Race in South Asia, to Shaukat Ali Kashmiri of the United Kashmir Peoples National Party; a man whose politics manage the rare feat of being equally inconvenient to Islamabad and to Delhi. Divergent voices in the strict sense: nobody in that room agreed on everything, and the organisers plainly did not want them to.

The late afternoon saw two back-to-back talks by two of the subcontinent’s most stubborn journalists. Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of the Kashmir Times, joined by video link for “Bridging the Noise: Media and the Art of Solidarity in South Asia.” Hers is the name on the Supreme Court petition that forced the January 2020 ruling that indefinite internet shutdowns are impermissible and that any shutdown must answer to proportionality and be published; a judgment that wrote the rules without lifting the blackout, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terrain she works. She was followed, in person, by Beena Sarwar, journalist, filmmaker, teacher, co-founder of the Southasia Peace Action Network, whose talk is the subject of Part II.

Heard in sequence, the two talks assembled themselves into something neither quite was alone: Bhasin supplied the blueprint, Sarwar the working prototype. This first part takes the blueprint, and holds it up against the graveyard of everyone who has tried to build it before.

The one story

Bhasin’s talk built to a set of concrete proposals, and the sharpest of them was a reframing so simple it is astonishing how rarely one hears it. The single most important story in South Asia right now, she argued, is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers; and it is being covered entirely through national lenses. Pakistan’s floods. India’s heatwaves. Nepal’s vanishing ice. The poisoned politics of the Indus Waters Treaty. Four national stories, four national blame games. “These are not separate stories,” she said. “They are one story“; the story of a shared ecosystem under shared threat. The meltwater, after all, does not stop to have its papers checked at Wagah.

From that reframing flowed her first proposal: well-funded, editorially independent cross-border journalism collaborations; joint investigations, joint reporting on shared rivers and shared climate data, joint coverage of health crises, literacy, and what is actually happening inside each country’s universities and laboratories. Not from the nationalist angle, not from the blame angle, but from the angle of what is actually happening.

Continue reading The Meltwater Carries No Passport

Open Thread: BP Survey

June 1, 2026 80 Comments filed under Open Thread, Precedent, X.T.M

Our 2026 reader survey is open until 7 June – anonymous, roughly five minutes. Please take a moment.

Update – from the thread: More reading reccys. Furqan flagged Dr Naazir Mahmood’s The assassination that changed India, along with his own book review on Duniya Digital and a related op-ed, Stupidity or strategy, on the political economy of the subcontinent’s borrowed democratic forms. Kabir marked the passing of playback singer Suman Kalyanpur with two recordings: an unreleased Pakeeza song, introduced by Meena Kumari, and a Rafi duet. And from our own pages, the latest BRAHM newsletter: The Sky Above São Paulo.

Update, 1 June 2026 – links from the thread: The Peshawar Review has a new issue out, including Professor Harbans Mukhia’s reminiscences of Kirori Mal College (College Days) and Shan-e-Ahmed reading an Urdu transcreation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Prufrock in Pakistan). On the Tata Sons listing question, Agni flagged a cluster of commentary: the Indian Express “to list or not to list” column, The New Indian Express on the boardroom fight, Soonawala on why an IPO may not appeal to investors, and Business Standard on the 12 June board meeting. Survey responses are at 18 and counting; please add yours if you haven’t.

Editor’s note, 1 June: This Survey thread will sit on the front page through the week, until Sunday the 7th June, while we are travelling Eastbound, so we have made it an Open Thread. What strikes us, watching the comment threads, is that for all the constant bickering, BP is a community, and a recognisably Desi one.

It has the hue of a Hindu joint family (to be of the Indian subcontinent is, almost by definition, to have Hindu ancestors; “Hindu” is simply what the Persians called the people beyond the Indus) that has built a wall down the middle of the house and still cannot get over each other. The wall is real. So is the fact that nobody moves out.

Original Post: Every few years BP runs a reader survey. Razib began the tradition in 2019, and the responses then told us things the comments alone never could.

Seven years on, with a substantially different commentariat, we are running the 2026 edition. The prompt to revive it came from Kabir, whose recent post on what BP is and is not raised exactly the kind of question a survey can help answer, and we are grateful for it.

Nineteen questions, anonymous, roughly five minutes. The core spine is demographic in Razib’s tradition: age, sex, country, mother tongue, ethnic background, religion, caste, education, political ideology, and views on Hindu and Pakistani nationalism. A few behavioural questions follow on how often you visit, how long you have been reading, how you first found BP, and which topics you would like to see more of, with optional fields at the end for handle, newsletter signup, and anything else you would like the editors to know.

Please take the time to fill in this survey. Thank you for your engagement.

On “Press Freedom” and Prejudice.

May 21, 2026 18 Comments filed under RecoveringNewsJunkie

This is what Norway’s leading newspaper chose for its coverage of the Indian Prime Minister’s visit to Norway.

https://x.com/_Tracer_Bullet_/status/2056737017460089173

While the usual suspects on BP chose to focus on an aspiring influencer’s stunts and dramatic heckling, I am not surprised that such blatant bigotry in the ‘mainstream’ newspaper of the supposedly Number one ranked Press has not been discussed on BP. Hilariously, a non-trivial subset of the Indian media and political opposition actually supported a rookie aspiring journalist’s publicity stunt.

Its a time-tested pattern. Rage-baiting and attacking Hindus and India earns notoriety, while the pushback and negative consequences if you push the envelope too far into nakedly racist territory, is minimal if there at all.

For all the cacophony and chaos that the Indian media landscape consistently generates, it has yet to demonstrate ability to even capitalize on such low-hanging fruit. A more capable media ecosystem wouldn’t allow such nonsense unpunished.

This is the overton window that needs to be shifted – the coverage ‘rules’ on India allow for a lot more mainstream ‘phobia’ and assault. And we see that on BP as well, the Pakistani tribal ‘patriot’ squad repeatedly find themselves facing pushback which to them is unexpected. After all, why shouldn’t they be allowed free rein in rage-baiting and plying bigoted stereotypes.

Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives

April 16, 2026 167 Comments filed under Popular, X.T.M

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

On Censorship

April 14, 2026 7 Comments filed under RecoveringNewsJunkie

We need to have a honest discussion about censorship on BP. We have a contributing author who demands and exercises the right to “ban” other contributing authors from commenting on ‘his’ threads. This, while continuing to spout distinctly one-eyed perspectives and cherry-picked regurgitated content.

Do we want BP to be a space with ‘dueling’ threads, or actual discourse? If Indians and Pakistanis can’t even manage a written conversation on a blog post via comments, without arbitrary petty ‘bans’ justified in the name of “I simply don’t like you” – this is the sort of thing that ends up having a disproportionate impact on the nature of what this space is.

Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

April 13, 2026 2 Comments filed under Active Authors, X.T.M

The Dhurandhar effect

Omar Ali’s Dhurandhar review is our highest-traffic page by a distance followed by BB’s Kohrra season 2 review. It ranks 20th on a keyword with 87,000 monthly searches in India alone. A single film review, by one writer, on one streaming title, is pulling 37% of our traffic. Continue reading Brown Pundits: Traffic Report, March 2026

Open Thread + A Note on Standards

April 2, 2026 23 Comments filed under Precedent, X.T.M

Brown Pundits has always been a forum for the kind of thinking that most outlets are too timid or too tribal to publish. We intend to keep it that way. But that standard cuts both ways, and we are raising it.

Effective immediately, the moderation policy is zero tolerance.

This is not a crackdown on opinion. We welcome disagreement; sharp, even uncomfortable disagreement. What we will no longer tolerate is noise dressed up as insight.

What does noise look like? You know it when you read it. It is the rattling of nuclear talking points that have not been updated since 1998. It is the reduction of a civilisation of 220 million people, or of a billion-and-a-half, to a single variable: the Crescent, or the Saffron. It is venom without weight, and venting without argument.

Pakistan is complex. India is complex. Every human society is, at its foundation, irreducibly complex.

Any comment that treats either as otherwise will be moderated; sometimes publicly, sometimes silently. We apply the sniff test: does it smell right, given the context? Given how tight our Editorship and Commentariat is, we will be judicious, as we have always been; for instance the Precedent post on the controversial Dhuruandar sequel remains Gaurav Lele’s.

This applies to both sides of every line we cover; geographical, civilisational, sectarian, or political.

We are not asking for bookishness. We are not asking for academic caution or diplomatic hedging. We are asking for the one thing that separates a pundit from a troll: considered thought. If you are going to cast aspersions, earn them. Make the case. Bring the weight. If you cannot, do not post.

We have a large and growing commentariat. That is something to be proud of. It is also a responsibility; to each other, and to the readers who come here because they expect better than what they can find elsewhere.

We expect better. We will enforce it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

— The Editors, Brown Pundits Continue reading Open Thread + A Note on Standards

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