Tag: South Asia

Why Can’t South Asia Move On?

South Asia, for the most part, makes the young old. The West keeps the old young.

In the East, life is fairly intergenerational. A boy grows up at the same table as his grandfather, so he inherits the old man’s quarrels whole. In the West, people live in age cohorts. The old are left to be old, and everyone else tries to stay young. Hyper-individualism has its costs, but it does one thing well. It lets the past rest.

I had forgotten this. My own context is selectively Western. My motto ordinarily is let ideas procreate, let them battle and let the best one win. This is what I try to apply in my daily life. Then I look at Brown Pundits and watch our conversations litigate events from 200 years ago as though they happened yesterday. Why can’t South Asia move on? Because almost nothing is lost between generations. The old wound arrives in each new mind at full strength.

It does not follow that the future-facing West wins. Forever young is the vanity of youth, furthermore weaker emotional health is a by-product of the intense loneliness prevalent in the West. One side cannot let go of the past and the other cannot remember it. Each is certain it is right, and that certainty is what makes these conflicts intractable. Nobody allows for the possibility of being wrong.

Jordan Peterson says that when you realise mid-argument that you are wrong, you dissolve in tears, because “the tears are grief for the part of you that has to die.” Tears reset the brain. For a moment it is plastic again, a child’s brain, and a child can still learn. You accept that some of what you believed was wrong.

That is the skill, and it belongs to no single culture. The values can stay eternal, rooted in divine law if you like. Everything else must stay nimble, soft enough to be rebuilt. The old ways are welcome to stay. They only have to be willing to weep every now and then.

Bangladesh-India Open Thread

Bangladesh has lashed out at India for allowing the ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina to address journalists in New Delhi, plunging already strained bilateral relations to a fresh low.

Dhaka accused India of giving a platform to a fugitive it labelled a “convicted genocider” and of undermining efforts to repair ties, after Hasina vowed to return to Bangladesh in December despite facing a death sentence on charges of “crimes against humanity”.

The angry response late on Wednesday came hours after Hasina, speaking on the second anniversary of the massive student-led uprising that led to her flight to India, declared: “Whatever fate awaits me, I will return to my people.”

India-Bangladesh relations hit new low over exiled PM’s speech to press in Delhi

Dharms are Natural Democrats

On what Britain bequeathed, and what Delhi chose

  1. What did Britain actually leave in 1947, institutions or a franchise?
  2. Whose precedent was universal suffrage in 1950?
  3. Why did the wardrobe never decolonise?
  4. Are all South Asians natural democrats?

The Colonial Bequest

The parliamentary system across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is Westminster’s. The founders, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, were British-trained lawyers. Liberal democracy arrived in the West through revolutions and arrived in South Asia from the top down. Before the British, the subcontinent was ruled by monarchies, and the political parties are still run by royal houses in all but name, the Bhuttos, the Sharifs, the Gandhis. South Asians, on this account, are not natural democrats.

The chamber, the party system, the common law, the drafting language, the Inns of Court on the founders’ CVs are Albion’s gift. The Indian precedents, Chandragupta and Akbar are kings at scale, and pointing at them concedes the monarchy claim rather than rebutting it. The answer sits in the smaller polities.

The Dharmic republics

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Why Sri Lanka keeps missing its maritime moment

COLOMBO: Situated at the cusp of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, barely a degree north of the equator, Sri Lanka has a geographical location that port planners pay fortunes for. 

Yet for all the strategic plans drawn up over the past three decades, the island has progressed little beyond its role as a transshipment port –more than 80% of the cargo on ships docked in Sri Lanka is never unloaded here, but transshipped onward. 

Most of this cargo is bound for Indian ports, through terminals run by Sri Lanka’s state-owned Ports Authority, the China Merchants-backed Colombo International Container Terminals, and India’s Adani Group-linked Colombo West International Terminal.

Why Sri Lanka keeps missing its maritime moment

From Indus to Exile: Notes from Delhi

Breakfast in Delhi

There are a lot of things we would say. We are in Delhi, over a good South Indian breakfast, and the first thing we notice is our own silence. We have not been very active on Brown Pundits of late. However we do not have the option of a break or a hiatus; since we have to keep the blog foundationally alive.

We had not been in Asia since January. Six months, and a long six months at that. Ordinarily we would have broken it up with a visit in April, but the gap has made us appreciate India all the more.

One thing we realise in life is that everything is continuity: showing up, and how much work you put into a thing.

The Post-Factional Turn

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Reading Dawn in Delhi.

Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace”; Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. Second of two parts.

Part I of this essay took Anuradha Bhasin’s blueprint, cross-border journalism, a shared archive, the arts as empathy machines, and held it against the graveyard of prior attempts: Aman ki Asha, decapitated after 2014; Himal Southasian, strangled in 2016 by withheld paperwork.

As an aside Himal Southasian was re-registered in Colombo and continues to bring out a bold digital publication under its dynamic editor Roman Gautam.

The woman who followed Bhasin to the podium is, conveniently, the field test. Beena Sarwar, Boston-based journalist, documentary filmmaker, journalism teacher, helped run Aman ki Asha from the Jang side through its best years; the campaign’s achievements are credited in large part to her stewardship. She watched it stall. And in March 2021 she co-founded Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network, explicitly on the lessons learned, followed in August 2021 by Sapan News, a syndicated features service. The arc from mega-campaign backed by two media conglomerates to volunteer-driven network is not a decline; it is an adaptation to the kill mechanism. Her talk, “Think like a Journalist, Build Peace,” was the day’s answer to its own hardest question.

The minimum common agenda

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The Meltwater Carries No Passport

Notes on the closing talks of “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace” – Mela Nordic, Filmcentrum Riks, Stockholm, 4 July 2026. First of two parts.

(Quotes are drawn from a rough live transcript and lightly edited for clarity; read them as close paraphrase rather than verbatim.)

There was something quietly apt about the calendar. On the Fourth of July, the day one republic celebrates the border it drew for itself, a room in Stockholm spent ten hours mourning a border drawn for someone else. Mela Nordic’s day-long commemoration of the 1947 Partition, Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace, earned its title honestly. The programme ran from Sarah Gilley questioning the manufacture of “normalcy” in Kashmir, through Farooq Sulehria’s provocation “India as Media Subimperialism!”, to the launch of Amrita Ghosh’s India’s Imperial Formations: Race in South Asia, to Shaukat Ali Kashmiri of the United Kashmir Peoples National Party; a man whose politics manage the rare feat of being equally inconvenient to Islamabad and to Delhi. Divergent voices in the strict sense: nobody in that room agreed on everything, and the organisers plainly did not want them to.

The late afternoon saw two back-to-back talks by two of the subcontinent’s most stubborn journalists. Anuradha Bhasin, executive editor of the Kashmir Times, joined by video link for “Bridging the Noise: Media and the Art of Solidarity in South Asia.” Hers is the name on the Supreme Court petition that forced the January 2020 ruling that indefinite internet shutdowns are impermissible and that any shutdown must answer to proportionality and be published; a judgment that wrote the rules without lifting the blackout, which tells you most of what you need to know about the terrain she works. She was followed, in person, by Beena Sarwar, journalist, filmmaker, teacher, co-founder of the Southasia Peace Action Network, whose talk is the subject of Part II.

Heard in sequence, the two talks assembled themselves into something neither quite was alone: Bhasin supplied the blueprint, Sarwar the working prototype. This first part takes the blueprint, and holds it up against the graveyard of everyone who has tried to build it before.

The one story

Bhasin’s talk built to a set of concrete proposals, and the sharpest of them was a reframing so simple it is astonishing how rarely one hears it. The single most important story in South Asia right now, she argued, is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers; and it is being covered entirely through national lenses. Pakistan’s floods. India’s heatwaves. Nepal’s vanishing ice. The poisoned politics of the Indus Waters Treaty. Four national stories, four national blame games. “These are not separate stories,” she said. “They are one story“; the story of a shared ecosystem under shared threat. The meltwater, after all, does not stop to have its papers checked at Wagah.

From that reframing flowed her first proposal: well-funded, editorially independent cross-border journalism collaborations; joint investigations, joint reporting on shared rivers and shared climate data, joint coverage of health crises, literacy, and what is actually happening inside each country’s universities and laboratories. Not from the nationalist angle, not from the blame angle, but from the angle of what is actually happening.

Continue reading The Meltwater Carries No Passport

South Asian Peace in Stockholm

The Long Dark Night for India’s Muslims

Our own Hindufication

We write this not as outsiders pretending to diagnose India, but as people who have undergone a gentler version of the same process. Over fifteen years of family and work on the subcontinent, our own Islamicate inheritance has been quietly sifted. The Persianate was retained. The Arabic was allowed to fall away. The qawwali, the food, the manners, the ghazal, the Mughal grammar of taste. All survived. The devotional Islamicate self did not. We arrived as something close to a Anglo-Islamicate hybrid. We are leaving, slowly, as a Hindu-Persianate one. We did not plan this. We watched it happen to ourselves.

The Persian survives. The Arabic does not. The poetry survives. The prayer does not. This is the formula. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

We made this passage with privilege, with distance, with choice, and with somewhere else to be if we changed our minds. The Indian Muslim, the one with no other passport and no other country, is being asked to make the same passage on terms set by people who never had to make it themselves. That asymmetry is this post.

The morning song

The news this week was Memo No. 470-ME, dated 19 May 2026, signed by the Director of Madrasah Education, Government of West Bengal. The order makes the singing of Vande Mataram mandatory at morning assembly in every state-recognised madrasa: government, aided, unaided, all of them. Immediate effect. Approval of competent authority.

Note the date. Suvendu Adhikari was sworn in as the first BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal on 9 May, ten days earlier, on a 207-seat mandate that ended Mamata Banerjee’s fifteen-year run. The order is ten days into the new government. Of all the actions available to a freshly-installed state administration, this is the gesture chosen. The first major item on the agenda was the Muslim schoolchild’s morning. The signal is the signal.

The Pakistani faction of our commentariat is aghast, and not unreasonably. The song is a hymn to the Great goddess Durga, drawn from a novel that called for war on Muslims, and forcing a Muslim child to recite it is a small humiliation that announces a large arrangement. One of our Pakistani commenters compared it to forcing a vegetarian Hindu to eat beef. The comparison overstates and understates at the same time. It overstates because nobody is forcing food into anyone’s mouth. It understates because food is forgotten by the afternoon, and a song sung daily for ten years writes itself into the spine.

The row is the symptom. The disease is older. Bengal is the latest frontier, not the first.

The Persianate without the Muslim

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The High Signal Mandate

Brown Pundits is not in the news business. We are not in the takes business. We are not in the engagement business. We are in the signal business. This is our creed.

Signal is the mandate. Noise is the enemy. Every piece (like the Prussia of the Ummah) on the blog must clear that bar or it gets rapidly down-posted. We owe the reader nothing less.

The signal compounds.

What does signal mean here? Three things, in order of weight.

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