Mughal History – Brown Pundits

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?

I’ve updated this post (Brown Pundits is not an echo chamber) after realising something important.

What began as a spirited disagreement veered into something darker. It turns out that bombay_badshah, a voice I initially assumed to be new, may not be who he claims to be (I had a hunch but so did Kabir, that BB was HS reincarnated). The posting style, the fixations, the timing; all too familiar. My suspicion is that BB may be a derivative or proxy of HS, previously banned. If true, this was not a genuine disagreement; it was entrapment, bait-and-switch.

In that light, I owe Kabir an apology. He was provoked in bad faith by someone who may be operating behind a mask. And that matters, because here on Brown Pundits, identity isn’t incidental; it shapes perspective, and we respect that. We excavate worldviews, not just opinions.

While I cannot definitively prove that BB is HS, the circumstantial evidence is strong. I will allow BB to remain but if the commentary returns obsessively to Kabir or Pakistan, I will intervene. Everyone is welcome to engage on substance. But this space will not be hijacked.

The original post remains below the jump, unedited but its context has now changed.

Continue reading When the Commentariat lies