Pakistan – Brown Pundits

Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.

X.T.M — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 03:19:39 +0000

Many thanks to Kabir for inspiring this piece.

Toor at the Courtauld

Salman Toor was born in Lahore in 1983 and paints in New York. On Thursday TIME put him on its first TIME100 Art list, and he told the magazine “I straddle two cultures“. On 2 October the Courtauld opens his first solo show in Europe, nineteen paintings made since 2019. He describes the work as queer and immigrant lives, caught between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. One of the principal pictures, a bar on East 13th Street, revisits Manet’s bar at the Folies-Bergère, which hangs downstairs in the same building.

Two weeks ago his partner’s Pasoori became the first Pakistan-made music video to pass a billion views, and nine-tenths of those views came from outside Pakistan. I wrote about it. Add Toor. Add that Britain’s Muslim public face is Pakistani. How does Pakistan gets so much of so little that in the end it is the hegemon of “Monsoon” (Sub-altern) Islam, when technically it doesn’t even belong in that category. My candidate is the language, and I am not sure it is enough.

The Indus was the corridor, not the capital

Start with the map. Pakistan is the Indus, and the Indus was where everyone arrived. Alexander crossed it. Mahmud of Ghazni crossed it seventeen times. Babur crossed it and kept going, because the prize lay east. Lahore mattered: fourteen years as Akbar’s capital, Jahangir’s tomb, Shah Jahan’s gardens, Aurangzeb’s mosque. But the high culture that made modern Urdu crystallised farther east and later. Mir and Ghalib wrote in Delhi. Lucknow kept the court after Delhi lost it. Sir Syed built the college at Aligarh that manufactured the class in the next section. Lahore joined the Urdu world in earnest when the colonial state put Urdu above Punjabi in the province’s offices and schools, which is the story of the Lahnda post.

In 1947 Pakistan got the corridor and Lahore. Delhi, Lucknow and Aligarh stayed on the other side. On paper that is a house with a doorway with just about one good room.

Alavi’s salariat

The house may have been tiny but the people came in droves. Hamza Alavi, the Karachi sociologist who died in 2003, broke with the idea that religion made Pakistan. The movement was led, he argued, by the “salary-dependent class of Muslim government servants“, whom he called the salariat: Aligarh-educated, Urdu-speaking, raised for the colonial service, and watching its share of posts shrink against an English-educated Hindu middle class. A new state meant new posts, and the salariat stood to gain most from one. Alavi knew the type because he was one: an economics MA from Aligarh, a research officer at the Bank of India in 1945, back in Karachi in 1947 to help set up the new central bank. He also named what the class built once it arrived: the overdeveloped state, a bureaucracy and an army too large for the society beneath them. His own paradox follows. The salariat was the engine of the Pakistan movement, and the provinces that became Pakistan barely had one. The corridor had to import the court.

Count what crossed. Intizar Husain from Dibai went to Lahore. Jaun Elia and Sadequain, both from Amroha (the Amroha Sayyid, my late grandmama’s lineage, has been around for 800years), went to Karachi: one small town gave Pakistan its most quoted poet and its most famous painter.

Josh Malihabadi followed from Malihabad in 1955. Shaukat Siddiqui came from Lucknow and wrote Karachi’s great novel about its own poor. Behind the famous names came the clerks, who staffed the new state’s civil service out of all proportion to their numbers. Karachi tripled between the 1941 and 1951 censuses, and the newcomers were the majority. They were an accomplished lot, and they had just lost everything but the accomplishment. They were also ashraf, the well-born; the pasmanda majority of Indian Muslims stayed where it was, which is a large part of why Indian Islam transformed as well post-Partition.

Israelistan

Israel in 1948 and Pakistan in 1947 are the two states of that decade built by ingathering. Most of the people who came were not an elite; they were peasants, artisans, shopkeepers and the urban poor. But each migration carried a professional class at its head, pulled out of the cities where it had been a minority and dropped on a strip of land it had to turn into a country. Both had a catastrophe at the founding, and both then bloomed. Hebrew went from liturgy to a living literature in a generation.

Urdu, a court language with no country, got one, and with it a state broadcaster, a film industry, a national curriculum and an army of clerks who wrote their memos in it. Catastrophe does not produce culture. Concentration does. It made neither culture from nothing; it gave two old cultures new institutions and something to prove. Put a displaced elite in one city with nothing to do but rebuild its standing and you get Tel Aviv, and you get Karachi.

Bombay kept Urdu alive

The twist came from my Urdu teacher on Saturday morning. “Urdu got its progress from Bollywood,” he said. “A great deal of progress. I will give you proof.” The proof is due next lesson. Here is mine in advance.

The dialogue of Hindi cinema was written in Urdu, and much of it in the Urdu script. Rajinder Singh Bedi wrote his scripts in Urdu, as did a number of the leading screenwriters of his day. Inder Raj Anand, who wrote Raj Kapoor’s films from Aag to Sangam, was an Urdu writer working in Urdu. Akhtar ul Iman, the poet, wrote the script of Daag. A linguist at Qatar University notes that early filmmakers policed Urdu phonetics, the sounds for which Devanagari has no letters. India took Urdu out of its schools and kept it on its screens.

My teacher’s peak is the 1990s, and he loves the 1990s. Purists will say the 1960s. He is right for his generation, because the 1990s were when Pakistan watched Bollywood in bulk, on pirated tape and dish antennas, while Indian films stayed banned from its cinemas. Sunny Deol’s courtroom speech in Damini, “tarikh par tarikh”, is an Urdu set piece that crossed the border on cassette.

For fifty years the transmitter of Urdu stood in Bombay, not Karachi. The language Pakistan took as its own was mass-produced by the country it left. Bombay has not switched the transmitter off. Hindi cinema still speaks Hindustani, because its audience does. What it stopped doing, from about 2000, was treating Urdu as the prestige register behind the sound. The qaaf went, then the poets, and one Indian writer blames the language’s association with Pakistan. Pakistan took the frequency. Coke Studio Pakistan is now where the Urdu-and-Punjabi hit gets made, and a billion views of Pasoori, nine-tenths of them abroad, is proof in the pudding.

Straddling

So: Urdu, the salariat, or the trauma? The language is a prestige tongue with a film archive attached, and a Pakistani can walk into any room from Dubai to Delhi with it. The salariat gave the country a founding elite whose whole identity was accomplishment. The trauma concentrated that elite in two cities and gave it something to prove. I cannot rank them, and Toor is the reason I no longer need to.

He is not Muhajir. He was born in Lahore, which was never the salariat’s city, and he paints in New York, which is nobody’s. The Muhajir share of Karachi has been falling for forty years, and the culture has not fallen with it. The court that came west in 1947 became Pakistani property: Lahore learned it, then the rest of the country, and now a Lahori paints men who belong nowhere for a museum in London. Pakistan’s advantage is that a minority’s high culture became a majority’s, and the majority kept it after the minority thinned out. The corridor learned the court well enough to do without the courtiers. Toor told TIME he straddles two cultures. So does his country, and it has learned to do it without the people who taught it.

Pakistan Has a Dosa and Nobody Told You

X.T.M — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 02:24:51 +0000

A dosa in wheat country

My Urdu teacher is from Rajanpur, at the bottom of Punjab where the Koh-e-Sulaiman begins and, as he puts it, three provinces meet. On Friday morning, Pakistan time, he told me about a bread I could not picture. “We Saraiki people make dosa,” he said. “We have been making it for centuries. We have a name for it: chilla.”

Then the method. “Rice flour. Make it into a batter, thin as gravy. Spread it on the tawa with any bowl.” That is a dosa. Nobody rolls a chilla. In Delhi a cheela is a gram-flour pancake. His is rice, in a province that eats wheat. His mother makes it every winter and the family eats it with saag. In summer nobody touches it. He sent me a photograph of last winter’s, taken on the tawa.

“What a mixture Punjab is,” he said. “We sit eating a South Indian dosa with saag. Punjab’s authentic food with South India’s.” He does not know where it came from. He thinks there is some connection between South India and South Punjab, a Dravidian one and a roti one.

Is there a Dravidian residue in South Punjab, on the plate and on the tongue?

What Friday looks like

Jumma runs in three parts. The imam’s taqrir comes first, a long speech in Urdu or any language. Then the khutba, the formal teaching. Then the namaz. Khutba and prayer together take twenty minutes. To hear the whole taqrir you go an hour early. Most people go for the namaz and are back in twenty-five minutes. His school closes at half past one on a normal day and at a quarter to one on Fridays, so that pupils and teachers can make it.

Then lunch. In Karachi, Friday means biryani. “Nothing in religion says so,” he said. “It is not written anywhere that you must eat it. It became culture.” Fish on Friday survived in England after the fast did; biryani on Friday somehow became Pakistani Islam. In his house Friday is keema aloo, or rice. Keema of mutton or beef, since Pakistan eats both and, he noted, India does not eat the second at all.

A pound a day

He put numbers on the table, in my currency, for food alone; electricity and transport were not in it. A hundred rupees buys one meal from a stall: a roti and salan, a small plate of biryani, samosas or chanay-naan. A single man can survive on a pound a day, which he put at 350 rupees. That is the floor, and the poor below the line live on it. Above the floor he gave me a ladder. The poor with some earnings spend about £2 a day. The middle class £4 or £5. The upper middle £10 to £15. I offered him the £5 McDonald’s meal as England’s equivalent and he asked whether it was any good. It is not.

In his village, for a household of three, it is now cheaper to bring dinner home from the hotel than to cook it. “We call a restaurant a hotel,” he said; he means the roadside eatery. A plate of salan and rotis for three costs less than the flour and oil to make them, and on 350 rupees you cannot buy both. “This ease is not progress,” he said. “It is not that people have money. No.” Four or five people breakfast on a hundred rupees of chanay and parathas, because eggs for everyone cost more and somebody has to stand at the stove.

He asked an old woman in his village why her household of three never cooked. “I am old now, I cannot cook,” she told him. “And it is cheaper than what is made at home.” He warned her that hotel food is neither clean nor healthy. “Do you think they put in a hundred per cent of what should go in? No. That is why it is cheap.”

The bread map

I asked him to walk me round the country by bread. Wheat roti is common everywhere, he said, but some areas have their own.

Punjab: phulka, chapati, tandoori roti, naan, roghni naan, makki ki roti, puri, kulcha. Soft, with butter. Chanay is the breakfast, and the proper plate hides a boiled egg and a kofta in the chickpeas. Chicken kofte exist and are not very good.

Sindh: bajra roti, and the Sindhi koki, a thick flatbread kneaded with onion and green chilli. He has people in Sindh, and their bread is already different.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: keema naan, Peshawari naan, and the thin Peshawari chapati that he calls patli.

Gilgit-Baltistan: thick rounds, closer to naan.

Balochistan: meat, chutney, tea, and safri roti, a huge bread baked for the road. Safar means journey; people carry it and eat from it all day. He has eaten it once, near Fort Munro, where Punjab meets Balochistan.

Kashmir: sheermal, lavasa, girda. Bakers’ bread with Persian names; sheermal is milk bread and lavasa is lavash.

I confessed that my own favourite is a cheese naan. He told me an American travel vlogger in Islamabad has been crowned by his followers the unofficial master of the cheese paratha, so I am in company.

Wheat reached the Indus from the west, through Mehrgarh, nine thousand years ago. Bajra and jowar are African and arrived about four thousand years ago. Rice was growing on Indus sites by about the same time.

Maize is American, so makki ki roti cannot be older than the Portuguese. Every bread points somewhere. Peshawari naan points at Kabul. Sheermal points at Isfahan. Bajra points at the Thar. Chilla points south, a long way south.

The Elamite-Dravidian hypothesis

The chilla is a dosa in method, not only in looks. His neighbours do not even eat it. Move a few villages and the winter bread is jowar or bajra, the millets of the dry south; even in his own area, he says, chilla is made but rarely, and mostly in his own house. A rice batter in a millet district in a wheat province is the kind of habit that has a history.

He offered more. Some local historians, he says, hold that the people around an old fort near his town are natives who came from nowhere else, in the same sense the south is native. Saraikis bear heat as southerners do. They speak and dress a little apart from the rest of Punjab and from Sindh, and he thinks they look a little apart too, as Tamils do from the rest of India.

Pakistan already has a Dravidian language. Brahui is spoken on the Kalat plateau in Balochistan, 360 km from Rajanpur as the crow flies. Linguists still argue whether it is the survivor of an older Dravidian spread across the Indus or a medieval migrant from central India. In 1956 Murray Emeneau argued that Indo-Aryan picked up its retroflex consonants, the ṭ and ḍ that Avestan and Old Persian never had, from the Dravidian speakers it absorbed.

Asko Parpola and Iravatham Mahadevan read the Indus seals as Dravidian. And the bones: the one Harappan genome we have, a woman from Rakhigarhi published in 2019, mixed an old Iranian-related lineage with the deep South Asian line geneticists call AASI, whose share rises as you travel south today. If you wanted a Dravidian Indus, you could build one from that.

Testing Dravidia on the Indus

Each strand frays when you pull it. Saraiki has implosive consonants, sounds made on an intake of breath. It shares them with Sindhi and with no Dravidian language, so the tongue pulls the belt down the Indus toward Sindh, not across to the Deccan. Emeneau’s retroflexes, if they are Dravidian, sit under all of Indo-Aryan from Peshawar to Patna and say nothing about Rajanpur in particular. Nobody has proved Parpola right or wrong in thirty years. The Brahui are the sharpest warning: genetically they sit with their Baloch neighbours, with no Dravidian signature of their own. Language moves without bodies.

And the bread. Rice bread appears wherever rice is the crop; Karnataka has akki rotti and Malabar has pathiri. A rice roti could be ecology, not ancestry. Except the belt grows cotton, not rice. Pakistan’s rice sits east in the Kalar tract around Gujranwala and south in the Larkana bowl of upper Sindh. Somebody carried rice flour into cotton country and kept the habit through every winter since. If chilla is old, it is older than the Punjab it lives in.

He had read the Lahnda post, where I argued that the census and the canal colonies folded the middle of the old Lahnda belt into “Punjabi” while the south became Saraiki. He raised it himself: somewhere, he said, there has to be a connection. The census flattened the middle.

The plate kept the micro-regions the census cannot see: chilla in one house, jowar in the next village, bajra across the Sindh line, all inside a district the state files under Punjab. Whether any of it is Dravidian is unproven.

In Remembrance of Shaheed Lt. Ashfaqus Samad, Bir Uttam (My Cousin Nishat Bhai):

X.T.M — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:33:29 +0000

by Shawkat

A Tribute to A Family of Freedom Fighters

In 1971, my cousin Ashfaqus Samad (Nishat Bhai) was a student in the Statistics dept. of Dhaka University, having graduated from St. Gregory’s School and Notre Dame College. A talented student, he was considering options of graduate study at MIT and elsewhere. Pakistan Army’s genocidal crackdown started on the night of March 25th; on the 27th, he and his friends Badal, Bodi (Shaheed) and Masud left for Kishoreganj and met with EBR forces there. On April 4th, they returned with a few .303 rifles, some ammunition and 25 grenades, thus becoming the first guerrillas to organize armed resistance in Dhaka. The cache was initially stored at his home, and subsequently moved cross-town at great peril to his friend Towhid Samad’s Dhanmondi residence. Realizing that it was inadequate, he then went to Agartala, India, for further military training.

After seeing sporadic action in the Saldanadi sector, in June he was selected for the First War Course of Bangladesh Army, to be trained by the Indian Army at Camp Murti, near the Indo-Bhutan border. Bearing ID No. S.S. 33, he was one of 61 Commissioned Officers, including Sheikh Kamal (eldest son of Sheikh Mujib), who graduated on October 9th, and one of only two of his batch to be killed in action (KIA) during the war. He was assigned to Sector 6 in Dinajpur and Rangpur, where he helped liberate several areas, notably Bhurungamari, the first upazila (sub-district) to be freed.

So thorough was the rout of the Pakistanis by allied forces that their new battalion commander in nearby Nageshwari, Lt. Col.(later Brig.) M.M. Sarfaraz Khan, reported: “Earlier, on 14th November, the enemy successfully attacked a company of 25 Punjab in Bhurangamari…..All the troops including the Company Commander were in poor state. Many of them were in a state of anguish…..I turned to look at the bleak situation and the demoralized soldiers who had recently faced bitter defeat.”

It is not widely appreciated that mid-November marked Indira Gandhi’s “Eid” gift to Bangladesh – prior to that Indian forces did not routinely cross the international boundary (IB), but thereafter joint Indo-Bangladesh forces launched relentless attacks along the entire border. The strategy was to soften up the Pakistanis and drive them into garrisons, which would later be besieged and bypassed on the road to Dhaka.

Nishat Bhai led a small force against the Pakistani stronghold in Raiganj, but in the course of battle they were unable to find cover against elevated enemy positions on the Fulkumar River bridge and adjacent buildings. He told his men to retreat and regroup, while he stayed back alone with a light machine gun to provide covering fire. He bought precious time for his troops, but he paid for it with his life. The Pakistanis targeted their fire on his gun position until he fell silent.

Moved by the ultimate sacrifice of their young leader, his men were determined to fulfill his mission and to recover his remains. A joint Indo-Bangladesh force launched a fearsome counter-attack, and after several hours of bitter fighting, 25 Punjab was driven all the way back to Nageshwari. Nishat Bhai and some other martyrs were buried near the Joymonirhat bazaar mosque after funeral prayers on free Bangladesh soil. It was Eid Day. The army of the state which had awarded his Fulbright Scholar mother the Tamgha-e-Quaid-e-Azam in 1970, would kill him in 1971. He was only 22.

U.S. Civil War historian Michael Musick wryly observed that “…..while all battles are fearsome things, not all battles are equal, particularly in their historiography.” Nishat Bhai’s younger brother Ishtiaq Aziz wrote that perhaps he died in “just another battle.” But was it? From my perch in faraway Florida, I have access to precious little primary sources which might be available locally. But this much is clear: perhaps because of their disastrous defeat a week earlier in Bhurungamari, the Pakistanis were spoiling for a rematch. Lt. (later Lt. Col.) K.J.S. Bakshi of 1 Field Company Engineers wrote in his book Untold Incidences of Operations 1971 Bangla Front: “Soon the enemy too reorganized itself and put up a very tough battle at Raiganj. They used intensive artillery to bombard our troops with plenty of air burst shells inflicting heavy casualties on our side.”

The Government of India posthumously awarded ‘Vir Chakra’ (VrC) to BSF Deputy Commandant (DC) Inderjit Singh Uppal and Lance Naik Mohini Ranjan Chakravarty for their heroic actions during the Battle of Raiganj. The BSF battle report is as follows: “Two Coys of 78 Bn alongwith Mukti Fauz were asked to capture north bank of Phulkumari river near Raiganj. Both Companies i.e. A/C Coy lead by Sh Indrajeet Singh Uppal, Dy Comdt left their location Andharijhar Khamar at 0001 hrs on night 19/20 November 1971 and took opposition on the bank of Phulkumari river. The Companies fought their way upto the North bank against considerable small arms, 82 mm Mortar and 105 mm artillery fire. A fierce battle ensued between the Pakistan and the Indian forces. The enemy bunkers were very heavily fortified. The BSF, Rajput and the Mukti Fauj had a tough time to dislodge the enemy. It was in this battle that Deputy Commandant Indrajeet Singh Uppal came under enemy fire and breathed his last.” DC Uppal was the only BSF officer KIA in the Eastern Theater in 1971.

In the meantime, my Boro Mama (eldest maternal uncle), whose younger son Ishtiaq Aziz was fighting with Dhaka’s famous “Crack Platoon,” a daring guerrilla unit composed of college students, was picked up by the Pakistanis from his home on the fateful night in August, when many freedom fighters and their family members were arrested. Unable to capture any of his freedom fighter sons, the Pakistanis unleashed their fury on the father. Then a man in his 50’s, he was savagely beaten in the torture chamber at the old MP Hostel. The great Crack Platoon guerrilla, late Masud Sadique (Chullu), who was also arrested, has written that he was shocked one day to find my wounded uncle there, still urging the young fighters not to give up or divulge information about arms caches to the Pakistanis (“অস্ত্র কোথায় আছে তোরা বলিসনা, ওটা আমাদের মুক্তির জন্য লাগবে”).

Dr. Kamal Siddiqui CSP ‘68, then PS to Foreign Minister Khondokar Mushtaq, who later became my brother-in-law, was present in the room at the Bangladesh High Commission when the brief of Nishat Bhai’s martyrdom was presented to my Boro Mama, who had just arrived in Kolkata. Kamal Bhai said that he was frozen with shock, and he just sat there stoically as the tragic news sunk in. After the war, he would recover from his physical wounds – but he never recovered from the premature loss of his beloved first-born son, Nishat (which in Persian denotes the ‘Bringer of Happiness’). The bringer of happiness would bring happiness no more. May they both rest in peace.

How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims

X.T.M — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:22:13 +0000

The comments have turned into a meditation over whether Urdu ends up as one more dialect of Hindi. I think the fight is about something bigger. Partition took one Muslim political world and cut it into three. Seventy-nine years on, one of the three sets the culture for all of them, and it is the one that took the language.

By reference Muslims I do not mean the most devout or the richest. I mean the group whose speech, dramas, music and religious manner supply the default picture of a South Asian Muslim outside its own borders.

Three blocs, one language

Pakistan has ~230 million Muslims, India ~200 million, Bangladesh ~150 million. In 1971, when the second partition finished the job, the three stood almost level at about 60 million each. Pakistan has pulled ahead since by having more children. Nobody planned any of it. The Muslim League asked for a homeland for the Muslims of India, got two-thirds of them inside one country, and lost half of those within a generation.

The three blocs were never one culture. A Bengali cultivator, a Punjabi Jat, a Sindhi tenant and a Lucknow ashraf household shared a mosque and not much else. What they shared at the top was one political world and one elite language. That language was Urdu, and Urdu was not Pakistani. It grew up in Delhi and matured in Lucknow. Ghalib is buried in Delhi and Mir in Lucknow. Aligarh taught it. The Punjab, which became Pakistan’s heart, spoke something else entirely, as I argued in my last post.

Pakistan made it the state language anyway. In March 1948 Jinnah stood in Dhaka and told the Bengalis they could keep Bengali for their province, but that the state would speak Urdu and only Urdu. Few in either wing spoke it at home then. The 2023 census puts it at 9.25% of Pakistanis now. The Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns and Baloch learnt it at school. On 21 February 1952 police shot Bengali students in Dhaka for objecting, and the road to 1971 opened from there. The Bengalis kept their language. They still lost the argument about whose culture the Muslims of the subcontinent would run on.

So the language of the Indian Muslim elite now carries a Pakistani label. When a Hindu in Delhi hears Urdu, he hears Pakistan. When a Pakistani hears Urdu, he hears himself.

Why Urdu does not dissolve

The case for Urdu fading is simple. It is intelligible with Hindi. Bhojpuri is also close enough to Hindi that the boundary between language and dialect has long been politically contested. Yet Bhojpuri never acquired Urdu’s combination of script, literary prestige, religion and state power. On that logic Urdu shrinks into a Hindi dialect with some Persian vocabulary and a script nobody uses.

I don’t buy it, and the reason is religion rather than grammar. A Bhojpuri speaker has no reason to keep a separate script. An Indian Muslim does. Quranic literacy is not Urdu literacy, but it puts the alphabet in every practising child’s hands, and Devanagari cannot do that job. Some Indian Muslims now write Urdu in Devanagari, and it reads as Hindi with a Muslim accent. The Perso-Arabic letters carry a memory that the words alone do not.

Even the Indian Muslim who reads and writes Hindi for work keeps Urdu as the marker. He keeps it because Hindi is the language of the majority and Urdu is the language of being a minority with a past. Bhojpuri has no such job to do.

The mirror moved

Pakistan also lost its comparison group in 1947.

Before Partition the Muslims of the west measured themselves against Hindus and Sikhs, because Hindus and Sikhs ran the towns. Karachi had a Hindu majority in 1941. In Lahore the Hindu and Sikh minority owned most of the commerce. Across Sindh, trade sat with Hindu families. A Muslim in Lahore knew exactly who he was measuring himself against, and the measurement stung.

Within two years the mirror was gone through genocide and ethnic cleansing. A society that had defined itself against the Hindu trader had no Hindu trader to look at, so it found a new comparator, and the new comparator was the Muslim who stayed in India.

This explains a great deal of how Pakistanis talk. Every riot in Gujarat and every mosque turned into a court case is read in Lahore as proof that Partition was right. The Hindu has dropped out of the frame. The Indian Muslim has taken his place as the person the Pakistani needs to be doing better than.

The missing middle

Indian Islam has two poles that the rest of the country can see, and a middle it cannot. One pole is Deoband and the Tablighi Jamaat, both born within a hundred miles of Delhi and between them the two largest conservative movements in Sunni Islam. The other pole is the Bollywood Khans, three men born in 1965 who are among the most famous Muslims alive and whose Islam is mostly a surname.

The middle exists. By most counts Barelvis outnumber Deobandis and the shrines are full. Kerala, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Kashmir each have a Muslim middle class with its own manners. But each of those is regional. None of them is the Indian Muslim way of being modern and observant at once. Between the seminary and the film studio there is no national default, and an Indian Muslim who wants one has no template at home.

Pakistan built the template, almost by accident. Its middle class needed a way to be Muslim that worked with a job and a daughter at university. It settled on an Islam that fasts in Ramadan and watches television the rest of the year. Nobody wrote it down. It is simply how the Pakistani middle class lives, in Karachi and in Bradford. And because the state spoke Urdu and the state was Muslim, the template was national from the start, which is the one thing that eluded Indian Muslims.

The public face

Britain is where this shows. British Islam has several blocs. The Sylhetis of east London and the Gujaratis of Leicester keep their own mosques and their own marriages, and nobody in Tower Hamlets is turning Pakistani. But look at who speaks for British Islam. London elected Sadiq Khan three times. Scotland had Humza Yousaf as First Minister. Sajid Javid ran the Treasury. Shabana Mahmood was the first Muslim Lord Chancellor and now runs the Home Office. All four are Pakistani by descent. Khan’s grandparents left Lucknow for Pakistan at Partition, which makes him a Lucknow Muslim who became a Pakistani who became the face of British Islam. When a British newspaper wants a Muslim voice, it rings a Pakistani.

Culture runs the same way, and the flow is outward. Coke Studio Pakistan started in 2008 and its Indian copy never caught on. This month Pasoori became the first Pakistani music video to pass a billion views on YouTube. Nine in ten of those views came from outside Pakistan, and in 2022 Google ranked it the second most searched song in the world. Bollywood remade it the next year with Arijit Singh, and the copy was panned. In 2014 Zee launched Zindagi to show Pakistani dramas to Indian viewers, and Fawad Khan was a Bollywood lead by the end of the year, until Uri shut the door in 2016. Riz Ahmed became the first Muslim nominated for the Best Actor Oscar. Kumail Nanjiani wrote himself an Oscar nomination with The Big Sick. When the English-speaking world pictures a South Asian Muslim, it pictures a Pakistani.

Spiritual logic

Partition wrecked the economics. India’s income per head is now well above Pakistan’s. Bangladesh has passed Pakistan too, which was not the plan when Dhaka was the junior partner. The Pakistani state has failed at much of what a state is for, and nothing below excuses that.

But Pakistan was never built on an economic logic. Faisal Devji called it Muslim Zion, and the comparison holds. Israel and Pakistan were argued into existence within nine months of each other, both as homelands for a faith, both against the advice of people who had done the sums. A country like that asks to be judged on a second measure as well, and the measure is cultural sovereignty: does the culture of the state belong to the people it was built for, and does it travel?

On that measure Pakistan succeeded early and has never stopped. The Muslims of India spent two centuries perfecting a high culture in Delhi and Lucknow. Pakistan put a flag on it and sold it back to them.

How Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab

X.T.M — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:54:37 +0000

As promised I wanted to write on the ongoing argument about Provinces of Pakistan. Mohsin Naqvi lit it in July by declaring the system of governance collapsed. On 10 September the parliamentary affairs minister, Tariq Fazal Chaudhry, said Parliament would debate new provinces in October. Two days later Rana Sanaullah said the decision belonged to Parliament, with a referendum to follow if a joint sitting approved one. Sindh’s assembly had already passed a resolution on 3 September rejecting any division of the province, and Saraiki nationalists said in August that their claim to a province is older than any administrative tidy-up.

The argument is framed as administration. Punjab has 127 million people; should it be split? The better question is what Punjab is. The province Pakistan inherited in 1947 had already been remade once. The British had moved Punjabi cultivators, including large numbers of Sikh Jats and Muslim agriculturalists from the crowded central and eastern districts, into its west. Partition moved more. The middle of the old continuum was increasingly counted as Punjabi, while Pakistan put Urdu above it. The latest census suggests that linguistic hierarchy is still reshaping how Punjab identifies itself.

What Grierson found

George Grierson gave the western speech forms of Punjab the collective name Lahnda, literally “western”. Nobody called their own language that. They said Multani, Siraiki, Hindki, Jatki, Shahpuri. Grierson admitted it: Punjabis had no general name for the group and might at most say lahnde di boli, the speech of the west.

The 1929 Jhang District Gazetteer says local Jangli and Punjabi are the same language, then lists the differences from the Punjabi of the Majha, including the future and the passive, and sends the reader to grammars of Western Punjabi, Jatki and Multani rather than Lahore. Northern Jhang leaned towards Majhi, southern Jhang towards Multan. That is a continuum. Grierson still mapped the Lahnda of Jhang and Lyallpur, of Shahpur, of Montgomery, and varieties in Gujranwala, apart from Punjabi proper. Later linguists took his taxonomy apart and reassigned those varieties to Western Punjabi, Saraiki, Hindko or Pothohari. The old map highlights that a century ago linguists drew a frontier between central Punjabi and the western speech forms. Today’s census draws none through the middle.

The British moved Punjab west

Geography did that initially. The Majha around Lahore and Amritsar sits on an ecological hinge, with rain, wells and old cultivation to the east and, to the west and south-west, the great uplands between the rivers, the Bars, where dry scrub and limited water supported much lower population densities. Settlement thinned with the rainfall. The speech patterns also shifted from Lahore into the Sandal Bar around Jhang.

Then the canals came. From the late nineteenth century the canal colonies turned the Bars into some of the most productive farmland in Asia, and the colonial state filled them with cultivators from the crowded central and eastern districts. The British did not merely irrigate western Punjab. They moved Punjab into it. By 1901 the Chenab Colony had a net gain of more than half a million people from elsewhere in the province: more than 100,000 from Sialkot, more than 50,000 each from Jullundur, Montgomery and Amritsar, and tens of thousands more from Hoshiarpur, Lahore, Gurdaspur, Gujrat, Ludhiana and Ferozepur. By 1911 Lyallpur district held more than 600,000 immigrants. Migrants from Amritsar, Jullundur, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana in the Chenab Colony alone rose from 221,445 in 1901 to 280,232 in 1911.

Lyallpur, now known as Faisalabad, was a new society built on the Sandal Bar by planned migration. Majhi did not replace Jangli; settlers spoke several Punjabi varieties, local speech survived, and Sialkot was as big a source as any district across the later border. However Western Punjab was being peopled from the east and north at the moment irrigation dissolved an ecological barrier that had helped keep its old speech map in place.

Partition did it again

Western Punjab then absorbed one of the largest forced migrations in modern history. Pippa Virdee’s reading of the 1951 census puts migrants at 46 per cent of Lyallpur district, 39 per cent of Montgomery, 39 per cent of Lahore and 20 per cent of Bahawalpur State. Many who reached Lyallpur came from East Punjab districts that already had family and colony ties to the canal lands. Work on the Lyallpuri variety records the mass settlement after 1947 of Punjabi speakers from India around Lahore, Sahiwal, Faisalabad and Gujranwala.

Faisalabad-Lyallpur captures this story in one city. A Jangli-speaking Bar; a British canal and hundreds of thousands of settlers; the departure of its Hindus and Sikhs in 1947 and the arrival of Muslim refugees from the east; then an industrial boom pulling in still more. Local, migrant and urban speech ran together, the line colonial linguists had drawn between Punjabi and Lahnda became harder still to draw, and the census called the middle Punjabi. The 2023 census returns 67 per cent of Punjab as Punjabi-speaking, 20.64 per cent Saraiki and 7.18 per cent Urdu; in Faisalabad Division 15.3 million of 16.2 million people were counted as Punjabi speakers. Contrast that with Grierson’s Lahnda of Jhang and Lyallpur. He mapped a Lahnda of Shahpur too; Shahpur essentially became Sargodha district in 1960, and in 2023 it returned 3.93 million Punjabi speakers out of 4.33 million. Nobody in Faisalabad or Sargodha swapped Jhangochi or Shahpuri for Majhi overnight. The box changed as much as the speech.

Three fates for Lahnda

If Pakistan had simply Punjabified the Lahnda zone, Saraiki would not exist. In the south-west the opposite happened. Multani, Bahawalpuri, Derawali and their neighbours converged over the twentieth century on one name, Saraiki, and whatever the linguistic line between Saraiki and Punjabi, the political result is beyond argument: the 2023 census counts more than 26 million Saraiki speakers in Punjab, a fifth of the province.

So the old Lahnda country had three fates. Its centre, Jhang, Faisalabad, Sargodha and the country around them, went into the Punjabi box. Its south became Saraiki. Its north-west kept Hindko and Pothohari. Grierson’s Lahnda broke apart, in the classification and in politics. That is why the Saraiki province keeps coming back. The province called Punjab contains regions whose entry into a single Punjabi identity was never completed.

Urdu on top

Pakistan could Punjabify the classification of Jhangochi without making Punjabi the language of the state, because above Punjabi sat Urdu. Colonial Punjab had already put Urdu in the school and the courthouse; Pakistan inherited the hierarchy and made it national. Article 251 makes Urdu the national language and leaves provinces free to promote their own. Punjab’s own cultural-policy documents concede that Urdu and English hold the domains of power, in government, education, media and business, and a British Council study describes the same ladder: Urdu and English at the top of schooling, mother tongues below.

The census measures what people say their mother tongue is. Between 2017 and 2023 the share of Punjab calling Urdu its mother tongue rose from 4.87 per cent to 7.18, nearly half again, while Punjabi fell from 69.67 to 67.00. Whether the households changed their speech or their answer, it speaks to the hierarchy implicit in contemporary Pakistani society.

Razib once used the Rohingya as an example of how a population can remain linguistically close to a larger neighbour while acquiring a separate identity because it sits outside the institutions that created the larger identity. Something similar, though much less dramatic, happened along Punjab’s north-western edge. Hindko remained close to Punjabi while becoming a name people could organise an identity around. Shah Rukh Khan’s paternal family, for example, came from Peshawar’s Hindko-speaking population even though Khan himself has described the family as Pathan (like his co-Khans, Mahira, Fawad and Ayub, he is probably a very distant but completely Urdufied Pathan).

So Punjab has three storeys. On the ground, the actual vernaculars: Majhi, Doabi, Jhangochi, Shahpuri, Pothohari, the Saraiki varieties and dozens more. Above them, Punjabi as the regional identity for most of the province. Above that, Urdu, with English in a narrower room at the top. Pakistan Punjabified Lahnda and Urdufied Punjab at the same time.

The ghost in the provinces debate

October’s debate will be conducted as administration. Saraiki activists answered the latest proposals by pointing to a movement decades old, to earlier parliamentary action and to a distinct identity, and Khawaja Asif invoked the Saraiki province this month while attacking the PPP for inconsistency on the question.

The roots are older than any of them. Pakistan’s provincial map froze what its speech map never did. A century ago the picture was Majhi around Lahore and Amritsar, transitional speech across the Rachna and Chaj doabs, Jatki and Jangli across the Bars, Multani and Bahawalpuri to the south, Hindko and Pothohari to the north. Canals moved people, Partition moved them again, the census changed its boxes, Urdu climbed above all of them, and one fragment of the old western continuum found a name strong enough to ask for a province. The border divided Punjab and then changed what Punjabi means on the side that stayed Pakistan by appealing to both Urdu supremacy and Majha hegemony (in a way being more conservative and true to the colonial era than Indian Punjab).

The border divided Punjab and then changed what Punjabi meant on the side that stayed Pakistan. Indian Punjab put Punjabi in charge of its own province in 1966, as a proxy for Sikhism. Pakistan was the more conservative: it preserved the colonial hierarchy in which Urdu stood above Punjabi, even as the Punjabi label expanded westward over speech forms the colonial linguists had classified separately.

Xi, Putin and Pezeshkian Walk Into Delhi

X.T.M — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:33:34 +0000

Since Sbarrkum (Sereno), RIP, had such passionate views about the post-colonial setup, I thought the first post after his obituary would be on this topic. In Memoriam to all the victims of 9/11 and its aftermath. May they all rest in Peace.

Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian sat in the same hall in Delhi this morning while an American fleet blockaded Iran’s coast.

Narendra Modi opened the 18th BRICS summit at Bharat Mandapam by saying the grouping is “not against anyone“. Xi had landed a few hours earlier, on his first visit to India in seven years. Prabowo Subianto came for Indonesia, the country that hosted Bandung. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi came for Egypt. The UAE was in the room, and so was Iran, which the UAE cut off from trade and finance in August after Iranian missiles landed on Emirati soil.

The New Delhi Declaration went to the wire because Tehran and Abu Dhabi both dug in. It passed on the first day. Pezeshkian said on his way to Delhi that the BRICS bank exists to free countries from the dollar. Modi used his closing remarks to say that outdated institutions cannot steer a changed world. Two men in one building, each alluding to the same hopes from a GS (Goldman Sachs) derived acronym for GS (Global Southern) based organisation (the irony). BRICS is the new non-aligned movement reborn except there is now only one hegemony to be non-aligned against.

The hurried decapitation that failed

On 28 February the United States and Israel struck Iran. Regime change was the stated aim. Ali Khamenei died in the strikes. In January, protests had spread across the country with Washington’s open encouragement. By every Western model the Islamic Republic should have fallen by March. It did not. Mojtaba Khamenei is Supreme Leader. Pezeshkian is in Delhi.

Iranians are suffering greatly. The rial was in free fall before the first bomb. But the state survived a killed leader, an uprising and a naval blockade. The Islamic Republic was never plugged into the global economy the way Dubai or Riyadh is. Sanctions since 1979 had already cut most of what could be cut. Iran came into this war poorer for it, and harder to shock. The sanctions built a fortress by accident, and in 2026 the fortress seems to have held.

The failed ceasefire that was made in Islamabad

Pakistan brokered the first pause on 8 April. JD Vance and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf then sat across a table in Islamabad, the highest direct contact between the two states since 1979. The talks failed, the blockade came, and the talking carried on. On 12 June Shehbaz Sharif announced the final text. On 14 June Vance and Ghalibaf signed it electronically. On 17 June Donald Trump signed it at dinner with Emmanuel Macron at Versailles, Pezeshkian signed in Tehran, and Sharif’s name went on it as well. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt helped in the wings. The document has fourteen points, runs to a page and a half by Vance’s own description, and is called the Islamabad Memorandum. A billboard in Islamabad showed Sharif and Asim Munir under the words “the nation is grateful“. Now Asim Munir wants to spend that dividend on a 28th Amendment that redraws the provinces of Pakistan.

Trump declared it over on 8 July after Iran fired on ships in Hormuz. It lapsed in August. On 3 September Iranian missiles hit bases in Kuwait and the UAE, and Vance told reporters he would not call it a war.

Twenty-five years ago this week Pakistan was told it was with the United States or against it, and it chose the only option on offer. In 2026 the same state wrote the ceasefire between the United States and Iran and signed it as a party. Pakistan was one of the five governments that convened Bandung in 1955. It took seventy-one years to act like one.

On the eve of 9/11 the United States stood at the height of its prestige and its power. Twenty-five years on, misadventures in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran) have cost it both.

The Ummah’s quarrels are its own

The UAE has severed Iran. Iranian missiles have hit Riyadh and the Ras Tanura refinery, and Saudi jets have quietly struck launch sites inside Iran and militias in Iraq. On 8 September the Houthis hit oil facilities in the Saudi south and wounded 73 people.

Hormuz is near shut, so Saudi crude had been leaving through Yanbu on the Red Sea, about five million barrels a day. On Thursday drones launched from Iraq hit the pipeline that feeds Yanbu, and on Friday Riyadh shut it. Regional officials say the Houthis helped plan the strike. The Houthis now hold Yemen’s whole western coast and Mayun island in Bab al-Mandeb, the exit for whatever Yanbu still ships (Asir, Jizan and Najran were Yemen until the Treaty of Taif in 1934).

Pakistan, bound to Riyadh by the defence pact the two signed last September, stands with the Saudis on paper and hosts Tehran’s negotiators in person.

This is what post-coloniality looks like from inside. The old order gave Muslim states two roles, client and target. In 2026 they are choosing their own enemies. The right to fight each other without permission is a poor kind of freedom, and it is the only kind any post-colonial state has ever started with. India and Pakistan can confirm.

The West’s favourite non-Western power

On 17 June, the day Trump signed the Islamabad Memorandum at Versailles, Modi was at the G7 in Evian shaking his hand. India can do that. India can dissent from the West and stay inside the system. Iran cannot. Rajiv Bhatia, a former Indian ambassador, described Delhi’s BRICS posture this week as non-Western rather than anti-Western, and the phrase is exact. India chairs BRICS, thanks Xi for his support, buys Russian oil and stays welcome in the G7. Chietigj Bajpaee at Chatham House reads the last year as Delhi reinvesting in other relationships after strains with Trump. Reinvesting is a banker’s word.

India’s post-coloniality is licensed. It was earned at Bandung. The Ummah’s version is unlicensed, and it is paid for in a Hormuz that nobody controls. The rivalry in that hall was between two kinds of post-colonial, the approved and the unapproved.

Taste follows power

Post-coloniality arrives in stages: foreign policy first, then war, then aspiration, then taste. The elites of the Muslim world remain, in Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s word from 1962, gharbzadeh, westoxicated. I use the Persian because English has nothing as precise. The condition now lives in wardrobes and holiday plans rather than in parliaments. Modernity was sold to the global South as a lifestyle, and the lifestyle was measured by the ability to spend August in Paris.

The condition is most acute in the small Gulflet states the Great Powers dreamt up. The Arab states, which could have been one nation, were splintered instead and taught to take their taste from Western high culture. This may change.

A Saudi family that spends €15,000 in Paris can spend €5,000 in Istanbul and may have a better holiday culturally. Istanbul and Sarajevo already fill with Gulf families every summer. When enough of the South reroutes its August, the West stops being the place you arrive at once you have made it. London luxury houses already depend on Chinese, Gulf and Indian buyers. The hall in Delhi this morning was the political half of that switch. The shopping bag half is coming. Gharbzadegi ends at a till in Istanbul.

Open Thread: Zardari in (self-imposed exile). New Provinces to be made

X.T.M — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:39:48 +0000

So the rumours of Bilawal’s marriage was instead a cover for the family to leave Pakistan.

Pakistan apparently to have a referendum on new provinces regardless.

Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?

X.T.M — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:46:14 +0000

Note: Emotional comments are for the Open Season Thread.

Every postcolonial elite preserves the borders it inherited. That is the reason we live in the world we live in: every succeeding elite has been very keen to preserve the boundaries of its state, and it is never the case, under a postcolonial elite, that nations go back to their original topographies. The map, once drawn, becomes sacred. The question in this title is whether the post-colonials are Brahmanical gatekeepers (I’m aware the Commentariat don’t like the nomenclature but it is particularly apt for an Apex Elite).

I. A Brahmanical construct

Maybe India is also a Brahmanical construct. I am not talking Pakistani propaganda here. Politically sovereignty in India was always more socially permeable than a static reading of caste would imply, and again and again the great empires were seized by men from the middle of the order who then rapidly Sanskritised. The Nandas, who raised the first empire out of Magadha, are sneered at in the Puranas as shudras. Two millennia later Shivaji, a Maratha of cultivator-warrior stock, had to import Gagabhatta from Banaras to certify a Rajput Sisodia genealogy before his coronation could proceed. He took power first and purchased pedigree afterwards.

The higher castes, for their part, rarely had political autonomy. Their dominance was over whatever served as the proto-civil service, the elite registers and the rituals of certification. An enterprising mid-caste individual would burst into the ranks, a phenomenon found throughout the world; Napoleon, a minor Corsican noble, ended by marrying a Habsburg, and would rapidly acquire the patina of elite dominance, one way or the other. And because caste markers are patrilineal, one never inherited caste from one’s mother (Kerala’s matrilineal Nairs, as ever, excepted).

The two famous Brahmin dynasties, Pushyamitra Shunga after the Mauryas and the Peshwas after Shivaji’s heirs, both reached the throne through service’ a general in the one case, hereditary ministers in the other. When Brahmins ruled, the road ran through the secretariat.

So let “Brahmin,” is a short-hand for the record-keeping class, which certifies the winners.

II. The Dravidian other

The Aryan-Dravidian divide would be the most salient cleft of them all, and I have been thinking a lot about the Dravidian other (shielded by the Deccan from the vagaries of conquest). The only Aryans who seemed to have settled south of the Deccan were Brahmins who were invited to Sanskritised the region?

The emergence of the “Open season thread” phenomenon means there is a psychosis in the Aryan civil war.

What is the psychosis that consumes the entire subcontinent? Look at the elevation map. It is, ultimately, the Indo-Gangetic plain; that is what has been cleft, and that is also what does the cleaving with the inexorable Hindu-Muslim. The plain presses outward on everything around it and cannot quite accept that anything around it is its equal.

The geography resists the psychosis. The plain’s power has always projected poorly past its own edges; every northern empire ran aground on the Deccan, and Aurangzeb spent his last quarter-century failing to digest it, dying there in 1707. And beyond the plateau stands the counterweight itself: Dravidian India, with its own classicism and its own kingships, the one civilisational pole the plain could neither absorb nor ignore.

III. Watersheds

In a weird way, partition made no sense whatsoever but also made a lot of geographic sense. Consider what it actually did: Punjab means five waters, and a lawyer who had never before set foot in India took a few weeks to draw a line through all five. It then required the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 to re-partition the rivers, because the boundary had refused to follow them.

The sub-partitions made some sense at all, since East Bengal, of course, always had a very strong identity of its own and Majha Punjab (Lahore-Amristar is the line that runs between river-fed and rain fed Punjab).

One could have really created an Indus-watershed state and a Brahmaputra-watershed state, and these would have been very strong geopolitical constructs in whatever Confederation emerged. That is not what I am here to litigate, because ordinarily, more than language and more than ethnicity, geography is the best definition of state power. The point about a watershed is that a state can expand all the way to the very edges of its ridges, to its own side of the mountains. Mountains, like oceans, make some of the best barriers and boundaries there are, for culture and for politics both. That is why Kerala, in a way, is a very distinct identity from its “parent” Tamil Nadu, except for the Palakkad Gap; the one true breach in the Western Ghats, through which the railway and half the loan-words pass. However Kerala looks to the Arabian Sea while Tamil Nadu hugs the Bay of Bengal, which accounts for very different historical realities (one sees South East Asia, the other receives from the Middle East)

The Grand Cholas ignored watershed logic altogether and took to the sea, Rajendra sending his fleet against Srivijaya in 1025. The Oceanic barrier, it turns out, was also a road towards Hindufication and Tamilicisation of “Indo-China”.

IV. Does the Raj live on?

Q made an interesting point: Indians being upset that “their” empire being lost to them. In a strange way, both India and Pakistan are upper-caste constructs, imperial constructs that wanted to keep as much of the empire as possible.

The caste facts are real: the Congress high command was overwhelmingly twice-born, and the Muslim League was an ashraf project. But the mechanism, as in section one, is the proto-civil service. Hamza Alavi called Pakistan’s makers the salariat, the Muslim salaried and secretarial class conjuring a state in which it would be the elite; the Congress lawyers, for their part, inherited the Raj’s steel frame and never dreamed of melting it down. The Brahmanical construct scales.

Bangladesh in 1971 is the great stress test. It was a subaltern revolt against the inherited imperial structure; it was proof that language can defeat territorial preservation, a movement that began with students dying for Bengali in 1952; and it broke the border precisely because the centre had turned extractive, treating the east as revenue and garrison. It was also intellectually led, and the occupying army knew it; in its final week it hunted down Dhaka’s intellectuals. Armies do not waste their last days on irrelevant men. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, ran the same course as the rest: the English-speaking Ceylonese elite inherited the unitary colonial state intact in 1948 and kept it. Everybody wanted to preserve the postcolonial.

V. The Uncolonised

There are very few nations in the world, with the exception of Iran, Thailand, Japan, China, Turkey, and Ethiopia, which were not colonised by the great powers, and their borders are therefore, for better or for worse, very natural constructs. Test even this list and it sharpens rather than blunts. The pure cases are Japan behind its ocean, Iran behind the Zagros and the Elburz. Thailand survived partly as a diplomatic buffer, shaving off provinces to stay whole; China was carved into concessions without ever being swallowed; Ethiopia’s highlands bought it everything except five years under Italy; Turkey’s present borders were drawn at Lausanne in 1923, an empire cut back to its Anatolian redoubt. Geography gave them better terms than history.

The colonised, by contrast, have been very keen to maintain colonial borders; so keen that they wrote the instinct into law. When the newly free African states met at Cairo in 1964, they pledged to respect the frontiers inherited from their colonisers; uti possidetis, as you possess, so may you continue to possess. The coloniser’s map was received the way a shastra is received, as the text that settles the question.

So: are all postcolonial nations Brahmanical constructs? In function, yes. In every one of them a successor class took an empire it could not have built, kept the mythos and certified its own genealogy (Indonesia and the Majapahit Empire), and deemed themselves a nation.

The borders survived because the elites survived. India and Pakistan are only the clearest case, because there the Elite is old enough to have a name (Sayyid and Brahmin are two sides of the same coin). And beneath every inherited line the older map waits, the ridges and the watersheds, indifferent to the postcolonial Elite that administer the borders above them. Partition cut joint peoples; but it also exposed the shared geography underneath.

Open Thread: Pakistani song goes viral in India..

X.T.M — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 23:59:45 +0000

I’ll expand on this but enjoy the beautiful song in the meantime.

Did the British Divide India?

Omar Ali — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:30:29 +0000

This comes up all the time, and i happened to write a long tweet about this today> As usual, no time to fix into a real article, but I am posting the whole thing here for discussion.

My version is that Pakistan was ultimately the creation of the Muslim league (and therefore of Islamism) but at crucial points this wud not have been possible without SOME British rulers promoting it for their own purposes.. so:

1. British imperial officials were very conscious of the need to divide and rule (they were all trained on the Roman empire, they understood these things, they were not dumb), so they relentlessly promoted local divisions (Muslim vs Hindu, Sikh vs Hindu, Upper caste vs Lower caste etc), that does not mean they CREATED those divisions, but they definitely had an interest in promoting them and did so.. That contributed to the rise of the Muslim league.

2. In 1939, INC failed to support them in an existential war. This led the viceroy to promote a relatively small party (the muslim league) to counter them. The viceroy’s favorite (sir zafrullah) wrote the Pakistan resolution. Then gandhi doubled down on his errors with the Quit India movement and that gave loyal Muslims another leg up. Pakistan propaganda operated unhindered while INC had 1000s in jail. Advantage Muslim league.

3. After the war it was American pressure, naval mutiny, British bankruptcy etc that made independence inevitable. As @Frankisalegend1 pointed out, even mountbatten’s extraordinary haste to get out was driven more by British imperial needs and less by his arbitrary and abrupt decision making. At that point most of the British official in India were likely ready to forgive the INC and keep India in one piece (the jewel in the crown) at independence, but many of them also had favorable views of the loyal muslims who had fully supported the war effort (and in any case, were looked upon as fellow manly men, not “hindoos”) and felt “we cannot abandon our loyal mussalmans to their fate”, and MORE important, some geostrategic types were thinking ahead to the world after the empire and assumed that the anglo alliance with them as junior partners to the Americans, would still run the world. In that world they were afraid of “soviet penetration” in India and wanted a loyal musalman state in the NW who may also be available for imperial duty in the Middle east… so they supported the Pakistan plan (churchill was in both groups, liked the loyal muslims AND thought ahead to the soviet threat) and their influence was important in getting the govt to accept Jinnah’s demand.. (see for example “verdict on India” type books to see how much that faction was a fan of Jinnahism). They did not give a damn about east pakistan one way or the other, but west pakistan as a buffer between fabian socialist india and communist soviets was a definite factor..

Postscript: A few tweets that followed add some (slight?) clarity to my line of thought..

“All true, but I am not saying it was the first reason, or the correct reason.. Just that it was A reason and that given the relative power and ability of the people involved, no Muslim idea could get to first base without a faction of the brits liking it or actively supporting”

“By the end, yes.. But I am saying at every step they had some role and (maybe mostly due to gandhi’s quit India error) between 1940 and 46, when the whole communal clash was set up, Muslim league benefited from British sympathy and ignited this millenarian islamist excitement”

“Obviously the islamists themselves bear primary responsibility. I think having seen them and their descendants up close, I just refuse to believe this lot cud have done it AGAINST the British”

Frank: They wouldn’t have attacked the British but simply ignited violence and chaos across India (not just the partitioned provinces of Punjab and Bengal). Imagine riots all over the Deccan, UP, Bihar, MP etc.

“Yes, by the end.. They would fold like a house of in 1940 though.. And even in 45.. After direct action they were more confident..”

jinnah