Muslim identity – Brown Pundits

Threads, Carpets, and PM Modi’s 75th

Happy Birthday Pradhan Mantri:

I watched several videos — four or five, maybe more — of public figures sending their wishes. Among them: Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Mohammed Siraj, and Mukesh Ambani.

Mukesh Ambani, of course, remains closely aligned with the establishment, and Aamir Khan seemed to lean heavily into his Hindu heritage — adorned with Rakhis on his wrist, even a Bindi. He’s presenting himself now in a distinctly Hindu cultural idiom, though he comes from a very prominent Indian Muslim family.

By contrast, Shah Rukh Khan stood out. His message was subtly sardonic — he remarked that the recipient was “outrunning young people like me.” It was light, but just subversive enough to feel intentional. Interestingly, both Shah Rukh and Aamir spoke in shuddh Hindi, which added a certain performative weight to their gestures.

Hindu Art

I’ve been fairly busy the past few days, mostly focused on BRAHM Collections; writing about carpets, curating Trimurti sculptures, and exploring Ardhanarishvara iconography. It’s been a deep dive into the civilizational grammar of India and by extension, the porous boundary between sacred art and civil religion.

In the background, I’ve also been chipping away at longer-form reflections; trying to crack the formula for my newsletter (believe it or not the readership is neck to neck with BP but different demographics). It’s all a bit scattered, but the writing has become its own brown paper trail.

On the Commentariat (and Why I’m Stepping Back)

I still follow the commentariat but I’m slowly easing off. There’s a rhythm to it, sure, but too often it turns into exhaustion. I’ve removed all of Honey Singh’s abusive posts. Abuse is now a hard red line for me, but beyond that, I’m stepping back from constant moderation or sparring. Continue reading Threads, Carpets, and PM Modi’s 75th

The Honey Trap of the Ummah:

🕌 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:

The Pakistani Inferiority Complex

These excellent tweets exhibit a painful pattern that many of us see but few want to name.

Pakistanis, particularly its establishment and elite classes, exhibit a deep inferiority complex towards white (light) Muslims; Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Afghans. These groups are valorized, romanticized, and used as benchmarks for identity and belonging. Meanwhile, other Asian groups, especially within South Asia and Southeast Asia, are seen as lesser. This manifests not only in foreign policy but in pop culture, education, and internalized social hierarchies.

This is why, even if Partition had to happen (and it was undeniably disastrous), Pakistan still could have been something else. It could’ve been a GCC meets Pahlavi Iran construct—a sleek, semi-modernist, high-income Asian Muslim republic with cultural gravitas and economic depth.

Instead, as others have rightly pointed out, Pakistan today has one of the lowest HDIs in its region. Karachi didn’t become Dubai. Lahore didn’t become Paris. Islamabad remains a ghost town of beautiful boulevards and hollow institutions. The promise wasn’t just broken; it was never even understood.

In some ways, Pakistan inherited the worst of both its imagined lineages: neither the intellectual cosmopolitanism of Persianate high culture, nor the industrious civic ambition of Indian civilizational continuity.

This is why tweets like those from @MrFreeFighter land so hard. They expose the psychic dissonance at the heart of the Pakistani state’s anxieties; its hatred of Pashtuns, its paranoia about “Afghanism,” and its inability to deal with its own peripheral ethnic groups as anything but threats.

Meanwhile, Indian Muslims like bombaybadshah, though deeply patriotic to India, often voice critiques of Pakistan with a clarity born of disappointment. They represent what Pakistan could have cultivated: a civic Islam, grounded in identity but untethered to ethnic obsession.

The final irony? South East Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, even Bali, retains more civilizational Dharma than most of Pakistan. Religion is irrespective of that elusive civilisational quality of Dharma, thus the true borders of Bharat lie eastward, not northwest.

Pakistan is not the enemy of India. It is the shattered mirror. And what it reflects, feudalism, insecurity, bigotry, and colonial hangover, is what the entire subcontinent must transcend. Again anyone who reads this can see I’m not saying this from a place of hate but love.

Was Partition Good for Muslims?

Kabir:I will remind you of the Sachar Committee Report which stated that the condition of Indian Muslims was worse than that of Dalits. This was a report commissioned by the Congress government not by Pakistanis. India has never had a Muslim Prime Minister. I would be willing to bet that this is not going to happen in my lifetime. The Muslim League succeeded in getting the Muslim majority provinces a country of our own. This is a huge achievement.

Partition was sold as deliverance. In hindsight, it may have been the most sophisticated act of self-disinheritance in modern Muslim history. A century ago, Muslims on the subcontinent were a political force — deeply embedded, numerically significant, and intellectually diverse. Today, they are divided, disenfranchised, and disoriented. Three nations. No unity. No power. No clear path forward. Let’s take stock:

1. Divided into Three

Pakistan. Bangladesh. India. Three fractured expressions of one civilizational legacy — none of which fully represents or protects the totality of South Asia’s Muslims.

2. No Electorate Leverage

In India, Muslims lost their negotiating bloc overnight. From being a decisive vote in undivided India, they became a permanent minority — politically cautious, rhetorically silenced, and often viewed with suspicion. In Pakistan, Muslim identity became so hegemonic it erased internal plurality. In Bangladesh, it became suspect altogether.

3. Psychological Cleft

Two-thirds of Muslims had to unlearn India. Partition forced them to disown their history. The other third had to choose between being Muslim or becoming more Indian. This psychic wound — of being here, but not quite belonging — has never healed.

4. Urdu: From Bridge to Burden

Urdu, once the cultural glue of the Muslim elite, is now:

Enforced in Pakistan (to the resentment of Sindhis, Baloch, and Pashtuns)
Marginalized in India
Extinct in Bangladesh

A shared language was replaced by suspicion and statecraft.

5. Islam as a Spent Force

Partition Islam was meant to be political. It became performative. There is no robust Muslim political expression in the subcontinent today — only tokenism, sectarianism, or silence. It resembles post-revolution Iran: Islam was not discredited by the West, but by what its stewards did in its name. Partition didn’t solve the “Muslim Question.” It just made it unspeakable — in three different politicised idioms.