Partition – Brown Pundits

Excerpted from A Man For All Seasons: The Life of KM Pannikar, Narayani Basu, Context/Westland

Some excerpts:

Panikkar’s political thoughts in the early 1940s are interesting, if deeply fatalistic. The archival correspondence of the national movement suggests that, in general, nobody was in favour of Partition before 1946. Even then, it was always seen as a decision born from having been left with no choice. Yet, as early as 1941, Panikkar appears to have not only accepted that Pakistan would be a reality but also that it was the only reality worth considering.

In a letter to his old friend Syed Mahmud from his Aligarh days, Panikkar wrote, “I have for a long time now, been a Pakistanist. Without the separation of Pakistan, a central government will not be possible in India. The fear of Hindu majority at the centre, whatever safeguards you may create and wherever pacts you may work out, will drive the Muslims to unreasonable madness.” He continued, “I have no terrors about even the exchange of population. But the ‘two eyes theory’ and a central government cannot work together. So let us, dear Mahmud, foreswear our past. Consider ourselves failures for having dreamed of a united India.”

Continue reading ‘Failures for having dreamed of a united India’: Diplomat KM Pannikar anticipated Partition in 1941

Did the Muslim League and RSS Want the Same Thing?

July 2, 2025X.T.MComparative Nationalism, History, Ideology, Partition & Postcolonialism, Politics, PostcolonialismBrown Pundits, Comparative Nationalism, Congress, history, Ideology, India, Jinnah, Muslim League, Pakistan, Partition, Partition & Postcolonialism, Politics, RSS, Savarkar, secularism, South Asia24 Comments

Let’s just ask it plainly: if the Muslim League got what it wanted—a Muslim-majority Pakistan—then what, exactly, is the problem with the RSS wanting a Hindu-majority India? This isn’t a provocation. It’s a genuine question.

The Muslim League, by the end, wasn’t fighting for shared rule. It wanted partition. It wanted sovereignty. It wanted to exit the Hindu-majority consensus that the Congress represented. And it succeeded—through law, politics, and eventually blood.

The RSS, for its part, never pretended to want pluralism. It’s been consistent for nearly a century: it wants India to have a Hindu character, spine, and center. If the League could ask for a state that reflects Muslim political interests, why is it unthinkable for the RSS to want the same, flipped?

This is where I struggle with a certain kind of liberal-istan logic—found across both India and Pakistan. You’ll hear:

“India must stay secular! Modi is destroying Nehru’s dream!”

But what was Q.E.A-Jinnah’s dream? Was Pakistan built as a pluralist utopia? Or was it built—openly, unapologetically—as a Muslim homeland?

If Pakistan’s existence is predicated on Muslim majoritarianism, then India’s tilt toward Hindu majoritarianism isn’t an anomaly. It’s symmetry. Maybe even inevitability.

So either we all agree that majoritarianism won in the subcontinent—and everyone adjusts accordingly. Or we all agree that the Congress secular ideal was the better one—and try, equally, to hold both India and Pakistan to it.

But it can’t be:

Muslim nationalism is liberation
Hindu nationalism is fascism

That math doesn’t work. And yes, the Muslim League had more polish. Jinnah smoked, drank, defended pork eaters in court. The RSS wore khaki and read Manu Smriti. But don’t be fooled by aesthetics. At the core, both movements rejected the idea of a shared national project. They just took different exits off the same imperial highway.

So pick one: Either Nehru and Gandhi were right—and so was Maulana Azad. Or everyone else was right—and we all now live in our chosen majorities. But don’t demand secularism from Delhi while praying for Muslim unity in Lahore. That’s not secularism. That’s selective memory.

Resistance, Realignment, and the Roads Not Taken

July 1, 2025July 1, 2025X.T.MAshura, British Empire, Brown Pundits, Civilisation, Civilizational Identity, Civilizational Politics, Comment Thread, Digital Culture, Elite Continuity, Gaza, Iran, Market Minorities, Muslim World, Palestine, Parsis, Partition, Resistance, Saudi Arabia, WindsorsAshura, British Empire, Brown Pundits, civilizational politics, Comment Thread, Digital Culture, Digital Fatigue, Elite Continuity, Gaza, Geopolitics, Iran, Islamic world, Kabir, Market Minorities, Muslim World, Palestine, Parsees, Parsis, Partition, PetroPolitics, resistance, Saudi Arabia, South Asia, Windsors6 Comments

First, a brief acknowledgment: Kabir remains one of the pillars of this blog. His consistency, depth, and willingness to engage with the hardest questions are invaluable. I don’t always agree with him—but the conversation would be much poorer without his voice. The post is a series of reflections—stitched together from the comment threads.

I. Gaza: Beyond the Pale of Language

The death of a 19-year-old TikToker, Medo Halimy, in South Gaza this week caught my eye—not because it was the most horrific (foetuses are sliced in two in Gaza as Dr. Feroze Sidwa* attests). But because having seen his video, it just made the death so immediate (yes that is a cognitive bias).

At this point, to debate whether what is happening is a genocide feels grotesque. It clearly is. The scale, the intent, the targeting of civilians and children—it’s all there. The legal frame collapses under the moral weight. We are witnessing something darker than war: ethnocultural suffocation & demographic extinction, broadcast live and met with diplomatic shrugs. But the world is watching inspired by the very brave Bob Vylan duo (UK punk-rap duo opposing imperialism, recently denied US visas):

Something stirs and pricks beneath the rubble.

II. The Huma Moment: A Civilizational Reversal? Continue reading Resistance, Realignment, and the Roads Not Taken

Fireflies in the Mist: An Exploration of Bengali Identity

June 30, 2025KabirBook ReviewsBangladesh, Communalism, Firefiles in the Mist, Pakistan, Partition, Qurratulain Hyder6 Comments

This book review was originally published on The South Asian Idea in July 2012

Fireflies in the Mist, Qurratulain Hyder’s own translation of her Urdu novel Aakhir-e-Shab ke Hamsafar, spans the history of East Bengal from the time of the nationalist movement against the British, to the creation of East Pakistan, and finally to Bangladeshi independence. The novel centers around Deepali Sarkar, “a young middle-class Hindu who becomes drawn into the extreme left wing of the nationalist movement, and Rehan Ahmed, a Muslim radical with Marxist inclinations who introduces her to the life of the rural deprived. Their common political engagement draws them into a quietly doomed love affair. Through their relationship, Hyder explores the growth of tensions between Bengal’s Hindus and Muslims, who had once shared a culture and a history.”

In his introduction to the novel, Pakistani writer Aamer Hussain notes that Fireflies can be seen as another chapter in Hyder’s epic history of the Muslim presence in the subcontinent, and particularly in the era of the Raj. My Temples Too (Mere Bhi Sanam Khanay) chronicles Awadh; River of Fire (Aag ka Darya) takes us to newfound Pakistan; Fireflies adds the saga of East Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet Hussain notes that the Muslim narrative of Fireflies is merely one among many. He writes: “Never bound to a single ideology or perspective, Hyder articulates one viewpoint only to contradict it in another voice. Colonial officers, native Christians, feminists, fishermen, artists, the victor, the vanquished, the exiled, and the dispossessed, all take the platform to recount their stories, or to be represented, in a collage composed of omniscient third-person narration, letters, diary entries, extended exchanges of dialogue, dream sequences, interior monologue, bone-spare chronicle, and oral history” (xviii-xix). Continue reading Fireflies in the Mist: An Exploration of Bengali Identity

Lucknow’s Composite Culture and its Destruction in Qurratulain Hyder’s Novels

June 23, 2025KabirHistory, IndiaCommunalism, Lucknow, My Temples Too, Partition, Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire, Two Nation Theory15 Comments

This essay was originally written in 2012 as a term paper for a South Asian History class at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)

I was tuning my tanpura for riaz in the morning to sing Khayal Jaunpuri, and one string snapped. Gautam, there’s symbolism for you. Hussain Shah’s tanpura broken into two,’ said Talat ruefully.

— Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire, pg. 273

In the passage quoted above–from Qurratulain Hyder’s novel River of Fire (her own translation of her Urdu magnum opus Aag Ka Dariya)—the speaker, Talat, is a member of Lucknow’s Muslim elite. She is speaking to a group of friends—both Muslim and Hindu—after the Partition of 1947. Two new nation-states–“India” and “Pakistan”– have been created and the group of friends is splitting up in different directions: Talat’s cousin Amir Reza has already left for Karachi, Talat herself is imminently departing for further studies in England, and Gautam is soon to leave for America. The broken tanpura symbolizes the death of the composite culture, which could not survive the politics of religion and the force of the Two Nation Theory. This theme—the destruction of the Lucknawi way of life—runs through many of Hyder’s novels, particularly through My Temples, Too (Hyder’s translation of her debut novel Mere Bhi Sanam Khane) and the later sections of River of Fire.

In this paper I will examine Hyder’s novels and use them to discuss some arguments about the formation of the composite culture of Lucknow (and of UP generally) and the failure of this culture to prevent the Partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. By focusing on Muslim elites who, despite all the odds, chose to retain their belief in a united India, Hyder problematizes the prevailing discourse that sees Hindus and Muslims as inherently opposed and Partition as the inevitable outcome of Independence. Continue reading Lucknow’s Composite Culture and its Destruction in Qurratulain Hyder’s Novels

Belated Podcast: Operation Sindoor (and Bunyan al Marsoos)

June 9, 2025June 9, 2025Omar AliGeopolitics, History, India, Military History, Pakistan, Podcast, PoliticsAmey, BrownCast, Geopolitics, Historical Misunderstandings, history, India, India–Pakistan Relations, Indo-pak conflict, Military history, Omar Ali, Operation Bunyan Al Marsoos, Operation Sindoor, Pakistan, Partition, Podcast, Podcasts, Politics, Poulasta, South Asia, Subcontinental Politics3 Comments

Another Browncast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above!

In this episode Amey hosts myself (omar) and Poulasta (our resident Bengali expert) to talk about the recent India-Pakistan kerfuffle. Amey was ready for war, but we found common ground 😉 (as usual with India and Pakistan, a lot of the discussion is about partition and related misunderstandings)

South India Makes British India Hindu?

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

TNT Saved Hinduism; Dravidia preserved Aryavarta?

S. Qureshi: “Muslims are today a majority of the population >50% of North British India. If peninsular south was made into its own country in 1947, India would be a Muslim majority country today. Many Muslims actually wanted South India to be a separate country and North India (including Pakistan/Bengal) to be one unit. To say that Indian Muslims who lived in the historical centre of Muslim power for centuries would just get up and leave for Pakistan is just farcical and delusional. These types of ideas were only proposed by extreme right-wing Hindu organizations after partition, and these ideas seem to become mainstream today with BJP. Historical reality, like always, is very different.”

The demographic map of the subcontinent tells a startling story. If South India had formed a separate state in 1947, the rest of British India — encompassing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the northern Hindi belt — would today constitute a Muslim-majority civilizational bloc. This isn’t conjecture. It’s arithmetic.

The Numbers That Reorder the Narrative

Here’s what the Indo-Gangetic arc looks like today (please fact check me): Continue reading South India Makes British India Hindu?

Southasia Is One Word

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

Reflections on Pervez Hoodbhoy at MIT

Zachary L. Zavidé | Brown Pundits | May 2025

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

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

The Logic of Annihilation

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

Sunny Narang in Conversation with Dr. Omar Ali.

February 12, 2023February 12, 2023Maneesh TanejaPodcast, Uncategorized#India #History #Punjabis, Delhi, Partition, Punjabi Century1 Comment

Sunny Narang, a Punjabi born and brought up in Delhi with ancestral roots in Pakistan, speaks with Dr. Ali on post partition Punjabis in Delhi; they also talk about culture and people who have and continue to shape the history of the sub-continent, from Jain bankers in Mughal India to the business clans of modern India.

Some of the books talked about on the episode.

Indiraji Through my Eyes: Usha Bhagat

The City of Hope The Faridabad Story L.C. Jain

The South Asian Papers” , a collection of 16 papers by Stephen Philip Cohen

All These Years: A Memoir by Raj Thapar

Civilization and Capitalism: 15th-18th Century by Fernand Braudel

Punjabi Century by Prakash Tandon

Pakistan and India: Why Did They Diverge?

September 21, 2020September 21, 2020Omar AliUncategorizedPakistan, Partition, TNT54 Comments

@FrankBullit67 is a well-read Rajput from India, and an active presence on Twitter. He composed a thread on partition and his view of why India and Pakistan have diverged in many ways since independence. I tweeted it with the comment that it was interesting, but I may not agree with all of it. Which led to several people asking me “what do you disagree with?”. I had not really thought it through, but here is what I came up with; Frank’s tweets are combined into paragraphs and any comment I may have is under the tweet in red. (1. that India and Pakistan have not diverged as advertised here is another possible argument, I skipped that for now, and 2. everybody forgets Bangladesh, which fact was nicely summarized by @shivamsethi01 and i have attached a screenshot at the end of this post).

Frank: I was going to do a thread on Partition in the form of a historical chronology – I think that can wait. I’ve decided to do a thread which is more “philosophical” and on “principles” about Partition. So here goes. As we know, “partition” carved two countries out of one in 1947. One with a Hindu majority (~85% Hindu in 1947 but now 79%). The other with a Muslim majority (over 90% Muslim in 1947 – even more skewed now).

The process was extremely bloody resulting in over a million deaths (some think the figure could be two million).

For those who are unfamiliar with the scale of the carnage, it is worth Googling Margaret Burke-White’s pictures of partition for LIFE Magazine (see here).

Indians, Pakistanis and Brits can keep arguing for centuries about who was responsible for what but that’s another subject. The purpose of this thread is to concentrate on what I think is the key philosophical divergence between Hinduism and Islam which made violent conflict or a “partition” unavoidable. Although one can write an encyclopaedia on the theological differences between the two Faiths, the key difference to me is on the question of “Blasphemy”. Broadly, Hinduism has had atheists in the mix for millennia (or those with a weak adherence to faith or those who have created new sects). This was never punished. As a result, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and later Sikhism lived next to each other for millennia or centuries despite enormous theological differences. Continue reading Pakistan and India: Why Did They Diverge?