Tag: South Asia

Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

X.T.M · February 2, 2026 · 33 comments

The argument over Balochistan exposed something deeper than maps or borders. It revealed a confusion about what Pakistan is supposed to belong to.

Formally, Pakistan is one of the most nationalistic states on earth. Its red lines are absolute. Its territorial language is uncompromising. Its founding trauma has hardened into doctrine. And yet, beneath this rigidity sits a quieter truth: Pakistan’s elite does not actually live inside a closed nation-state imagination. They live in English.

They think in Western legal categories, read Western literature, speak the language of international institutions, and send their children into global circuits of education and finance. At the same time, their social world remains unmistakably South Asian; family-centred, hierarchical, ritualised, and deeply embedded in subcontinental habit. They are neither fully Western nor comfortably Indic. This produces a tension that Pakistan has never resolved.

The Nation-State After 1945: A Container That No Longer Holds

Continue reading Pakistan’s Civilisational Orphanhood

Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

X.T.M · January 29, 2026 · 34 comments

Iran cannot be analysed using the same political categories as Pakistan or most modern states. The difference is not whether a regime is monarchical, clerical, or military. It is the age of the civilisation being governed. Pakistan is a young state. Its borders, institutions, and political language were assembled in the twentieth century. In such states, power fills a vacuum directly.

Power in Young States, Authority in Old Ones

A military dictatorship governs by force, hierarchy, and command. Its legitimacy is procedural and immediate: order, security, survival. This form works where political memory is thin and inherited meaning is limited. Pakistan’s army did not overthrow an old order. It stepped into an empty one. Iran is structured differently. It is a civilisational state that has existed in recognisable form for roughly three thousand years. Power there has never been exercised through force alone. Authority has always been tied to ideas that predate any single regime.

Monarchy as Civilisation, Not Administration Continue reading Iran and Pakistan Are Not the Same Kind of State

South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

X.T.M · January 15, 2026 · 56 comments

There is something faintly ridiculous about how often educated people insist on using the term South Asia as if it were a neutral, hygienic improvement on an older and supposedly “problematic” word. It is neither neutral nor an improvement. It is a bureaucratic euphemism invented to manage post-Partition discomfort, and it collapses the civilizational reality of the region rather than clarifying it.

The Indian subcontinent has had a name for millennia. It was called India because it lay beyond the Indus. Greeks used it. Persians used it. Arabs used it. Medieval Muslims, early modern Europeans, and the British all used it. The word survived because it described a geographic and civilizational unit, not because it flattered any modern state. The fact that the Republic of India later adopted the name does not retroactively invalidate its older meaning. Belgium did not abolish the word “Europe,” and Serbia’s existence does not make “European” offensive.

South Asia, by contrast, is not an ancient term misused by a nation-state. It is a late–Cold War academic construction, popularised by American area studies departments that were uncomfortable saying “India” once India no longer meant a single polity. It is a word designed to avoid an argument, not to resolve one. Like “Middle East,” it describes nothing from within the region itself. No one historically lived in “South Asia.” No one spoke “South Asian.” No one cooked “South Asian food.” Continue reading South Asia Is an Ugly Postcolonial Euphemism

Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs:

X.T.M · January 5, 2026 · 16 comments

Endogamy Is Optional When You Own the Institutions

Gaurav’s excellent piece on “progressive Dravidianism” pushed me to re-examine a related elite anxiety: the melodrama around intermarriage.  I am happy to be corrected on any of the specifics below, especially where a claim could be tightened with better data.

The standard story goes like this. Elites marry out. Boundaries dissolve. The group dies. This story is intuitively appealing because it treats identity as if it were a biological substance. But elites are not reproduced primarily by blood. They are reproduced by property, institutions, credentials, and networks. In that world, intermarriage is rarely a solvent. It is more often a merger.

The English aristocracy understood this early, and acted accordingly. When the old landed families were cash-poor but title-rich, they did not preserve themselves by sealing the gates. They did the opposite. They married in money. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a whole genre of “dollar princesses,” wealthy American heiresses who married British aristocrats, trading capital for rank. By one commonly cited compilation, between 1870 and 1914, over a hundred British aristocrats, including multiple dukes, married American women; and in the broader European set, hundreds of such transatlantic matches were recorded.  This was not cultural dilution. It was institutional self-preservation by acquisition. The class survived because it treated marriage as capital strategy. Continue reading Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs:

What Genetics Can, and Cannot, Explain About Caste

X.T.M · December 29, 2025 · 11 comments

A recent WhatsApp exchange between GL and Sbarr captures a recurring Brown Pundits problem: how genetic data, textual tradition, and social history get collapsed into a single argument and then talk past one another. The immediate trigger was a table circulating online, showing ancestry proportions across South Asian groups; Indus Valley–related, Steppe, AASI, and East Asian components. The numbers vary by region and language group. None support purity. None map cleanly onto caste. That much is uncontroversial. What followed was not a dispute about the data itself, but about what kind of claims the data can bear.

GL’s Position (Summarised)

GL’s argument operates at three levels: historical, linguistic, and genetic.

  1. Caste as fluid history

    GL argues that the four-fold varna system hardened late. Terms like Vaishya did not always mean “merchant” but originally derived from viś—“the people.” In this reading, Vaishya once referred broadly to non-priestly, non-warrior populations, including farmers and artisans.

  2. Elite religion thesis

    Early Śramaṇa movements, Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, are framed as elite projects. Renunciation, non-violence, and philosophical inquiry required surplus. Most people, GL argues, worshipped local deities and lived outside these doctrinal systems.

  3. Genes as complexity, not identity

    GL points out that Steppe ancestry and Y-DNA lineages are unevenly distributed. Some peasant groups show higher Steppe ancestry than some Brahmin groups. Maternal lines are largely local. The conclusion is not reclassification, but complication: caste cannot be reverse-engineered from genes. GL’s underlying claim is modest: simple caste narratives do not survive contact with deep history.

Sbarr’s Position (Summarised)

Sbarr’s objections are structural and definitional.

  1. Varna as stable social fact

    In lived Hindu society, Vaishya has meant merchant since at least the Dharmashastra period. Etymology does not override usage. Peasants were not Vaishyas. Shudras worked the land. Dalits lay outside the system.

  2. South Indian specificity

    Sbarr stresses that the North Indian varna model does not transplant cleanly into the Tamil world, where Brahmins, non-Brahmin literati, Jain monks, and Buddhist authors all contributed to classical literature. Claims of universal Brahmin authorship are rejected.

  3. Genes do not make caste

    Even if some peasant or tribal groups show Steppe Y-DNA, this does not make them Brahmins or twice-born. Genetic percentages are low, overlapping, and socially meaningless without institutions.

Sbarr’s core concern is different from GL’s: the danger of dissolving concrete social history into abstract theory.

Where the Debate Breaks Down

The argument falters because the two sides are answering different questions.

  • GL is asking: How did these categories emerge over millennia?

  • Sbarr is asking: How did people actually live, identify, and reproduce hierarchy?

Genes describe populations. Texts describe ideals. Caste describes power. None substitute for the others.

The Takeaway (Without a Verdict)

The ancestry table does not refute caste. The Manusmriti does not explain population genetics. Etymology does not override social practice. What the exchange shows, usefully, is the limit of WhatsApp as a medium for longue-durée history. Complex systems resist compression. When they are forced into slogans, everyone ends up defending a position they did not fully intend. That, more than Steppe percentages or varna theory, is the real lesson here.

A Republic Cannot Deport, Humiliate or “Outbreed” Its Own People

X.T.M · December 20, 2025 · 6 comments

“We are not from Bangladesh. We are Indian. Why did they do this to us?”

That question should shame the Indian state. On the facts as currently established, Sunali Khatun, a pregnant Indian woman, her husband, and their child were detained in Delhi, deported across an international border without due process, imprisoned in a foreign country, separated, and left to survive on charity and court orders. Their crime was not illegal entry. It was speaking Bengali, being Muslim, and being poor. This was not a mistake or overreach. It was state violence carried out through paperwork and silence.

India has procedures for suspected illegal migrants

They exist to prevent this outcome. They were ignored. There was no verification with the home state, no due process, no public record, and no accountability. A family was pushed across a border, reportedly beaten when they tried to return, and abandoned. That is not law enforcement. It is expulsion by force. When a state confuses language with nationality and religion with foreignness, it stops governing and starts hunting.

Citizenship is not a favour

It is a legal fact. India is not meant to be a blood, language, or religious state. Citizenship is defined by law, not accent or poverty. When the weakest are forced to prove citizenship under duress while the powerful are never asked, law collapses into power. This is how republics rot: not through coups, but through habits.

This is not an isolated lapse of manners towards the Muslim minority

It is the same logic in a smaller, more public form. When a Chief Minister can pull down a Muslim woman’s veil at a government appointment ceremony, and senior ministers can defend it as “show your face” patriotism, the message is clear: Muslim dignity is conditional, and visibility is enforced, not consented to. The argument is always the same. It is dressed up as procedure, security, or “rule of law,” but it operates as dominance.

Muslim Identity is seen as a National Threat

Today it is a veil tugged down in a room of officials. Yesterday it was a Bengali-speaking family pushed across a border. In both cases, the state treats Muslim identity as an offence to be corrected in public, and citizenship as something that can be suspended by suspicion. This is how discrimination becomes policy: first through humiliation, then through paperwork, then through expulsion.

Bengal, like Kashmir, is not a border zone to be cleansed Continue reading A Republic Cannot Deport, Humiliate or “Outbreed” Its Own People

Pakistan and the Act of Union

X.T.M · December 19, 2025 · 51 comments

A Cold Comparison, Not a Romantic One

There is only one historical analogy worth using when discussing Pakistan “rejoining” India: the Act of Union of 1707 between Scotland and England. Not Rome and Greece. Not Yugoslavia. Not German reunification. And certainly not civilizational nostalgia. The reason is simple. The 1707 Union was not about love, memory, or reconciliation. It was about bankruptcy, security, elite survival, and managed loss of sovereignty without humiliation. That is the only way such a union could ever happen.

Union Is an Elite Exit, Not a Popular Dream

Scotland did not join England because it felt British. It joined because it was broke. The Darien Scheme collapsed. The Scottish state was insolvent. The elite faced personal ruin. England controlled capital, markets, and trade. The Act of Union absorbed Scottish debt, protected elite property, preserved law and church, dissolved sovereignty while preserving status. The public opposed it. It passed anyway. Unions are not plebiscites. They are elite exits under pressure.

Pakistan’s Position Is Structurally Similar

Pakistan today is not Scotland in 1707. But the resemblance is close enough to matter. Pakistan is chronically indebted, permanently IMF-dependent, over-militarised by design, economically capped by scale and FX limits. It is run by elites whose lives are already offshore, Like Scotland, the state is failing faster than rents can be extracted, sovereignty has become expensive, security dominates fiscal policy and there is no credible independent growth path. This is not ideology. It is arithmetic.

Why India Is England in This Analogy Continue reading Pakistan and the Act of Union

Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation

X.T.M · December 18, 2025 · 13 comments

Rebuttal to When RSS-Modi Attack Macaulay and English, They Attack Upward Mobility of Dalits, Shudras, Adivasis

Follow-Up to Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

A new orthodoxy has taken hold. It claims that criticising Macaulay or colonial education is an attack on Dalit, Shudra, and Adivasi mobility. English, we are told, was not a colonial instrument but a liberatory gift. Macaulay is recast as an unintended ally of social justice. This view is wrong. More than that, it is historically careless and civilisationally corrosive.

The Core Error

The mistake is simple: confusing survival within a system with vindication of that system. No serious person denies that English became a tool of mobility in modern India. No serious person denies Ambedkar’s mastery of English or its role in courts and constitutional politics. But to leap from this fact to the claim that Macaulay was therefore justified is a category error. People adapt to power structures to survive them. That does not sanctify those structures. To argue otherwise is like saying famine roads liberated peasants because some learned masonry while starving. Adaptation is not endorsement.

Macaulay Was Explicit

There is no need to guess Macaulay’s intentions. He stated them plainly. He dismissed Indian knowledge as inferior. He wanted to create a small class: Continue reading Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation

November Update (Traffic & Activity)

X.T.M · December 9, 2025 · 1 comment

Traffic

We published 76 posts and 1 podcast (Bangladesh) this month.

Traffic fell from ~55–65k (Sept–Oct) to ~33k in November.

However, comment activity remained strong at 819 comments (~27/day).

Continue reading November Update (Traffic & Activity)

Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

Omar Ali · December 4, 2025 · 19 comments

We had some discussion about Macaulay on X and I wanted to write a piece about it, but I also know I probably wont get the time soon, so I am going to just copy and paste the discussion here, I am sure people can follow what is going on and offer their comments.. (Modi’s speech link at end, macaulay minute text link as well)

It started with this tweet from Wall Street Journal columnist Sadanand Dhume:

In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. Link to article. 

I replied: 

I have to disagree a bit with sadanand here bcz I think while cartoonish propaganda can indeed be cartoonish and juvenile, there is a real case to be made against the impact of Macaulay on India.. Education in local languages with hindustami or even English (or for that matter, sanskrit or Persian, as they had been in the past during pre islamicate-colonization India and islamicate India respectively) as lingua franca would have been far superior, and the man really did have extremely dismissive and prejudiced views, the fact that they were common views in his world explains it but does not excuse it. The very fact that many liberal, intelligent and erudite Indians of today think he was “overall a good thing” is itself an indication that his work has done harm.. BTW, there were englishmen in India then who argued against Macaulay on exactly these lines..

Akshay Saseendran (@Island_Thought) replied: Continue reading Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

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