Tag: South Asian diaspora identity

Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more

I had planned to write a nice long post this evening for BP since I felt I had neglected this blog for far too long.

As I was finishing my earlier work, I had to scroll on Facebook, which I rarely do unless it’s for a specific reason. As I scrolled down the feed, my heart shuddered; Sukrita Paul Kumar had posted a notification about her sister-in-law, Ruchira Paul.

I had known Ruchira for so long I cannot place the beginning of our friendship. Many names come to mind when I think of that early period (the late noughties), the Brown Blogging Dynasts. I was always a pretender to that company; Ruchira was among its most gracious members. Sukrita has written a poignant obituary on Facebook, which anyone who wants a proper account of her life should read.

Also worth reading is Namit Arora’s touching note on Ruchira. Judging from the comments on the two Facebook threads; my feelings are shared by hundreds and hundreds of individuals, whose lives Ruchira touched over the years.

This is a smaller thing: an accounting of what she meant to me across nearly two decades of friendship, most of it conducted over email and Facebook, none of it ever in person.

Accidental Blogger was Ruchira’s signature. She started it in 2005 as a solo author. By 2006 she was inviting others in, and by the time she wound it down in early 2013, roughly a dozen writers were contributing under her banner. She told me once, quite matter of fact, that readership had dwindled and she saw no point in continuing an enterprise that took so much of her time and energy. That was Ruchira in miniature. No sentimentality. A thing had run its course. She moved on. I remember leaving a comment on her concluding post in January 2013 to say goodbye. She wrote back a few days later, characteristically, to thank me for taking the trouble.

That was already several years in. We were Facebook friends from April 2011, but we had certainly been in touch before that. Whatever the origin, the friendship settled into a rhythm of quiet, regular contact. She wrote to me on my birthday, year after year. On 16 December 2011, 16 December 2012, 15 December 2013, 15 December 2017. Sometimes she signed with a single line, sometimes only her name. On my 29th she wished me many happy returns and a happy holiday season and added, in her small careful way, Mubarak!

A decade on, she wished me again on my 39th.

Few people ever used Facebook as well as Ruchira did. After a return from a “long” hiatus, I had complained to her that the platform was dull; she was much of the reason it was not always so.

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This past May she posted a cropped photograph of her mother as a student at Dhaka University, standing in the third row behind one of her professors, flanked in the back row by two women who would become lifelong friends, one of them later an aunt by marriage. All graceful, smart and kind women, Ruchira wrote. It was an inheritance that ran through her own life of the mind and runs on today to her daughter, an acclaimed professor.

Some years earlier she had written a piece I have not been able to find yet, about a wedding in her extended family. A cousin brother who had grown up in the same household, though much younger, had put her name on his wedding invitation card, and the gesture moved her so deeply that she couldn’t write about it till the emotion had been processed. She wrote it so well that it moved me deeply too, and I still remember it, years later.

In 2018, when the great Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz died, Omar Ali’s obituary for Brown Pundits carried Ruchira’s English translation of Aqlima, Fahmida’s furious feminist meditation on the forgotten sister of Cain and Abel. A Bengali woman in Houston, translating a Sindhi feminist’s Urdu poem for a South Asian intellectual blog. That was the reach she carried, and the quiet, unfussy way she offered it.

Continue reading Titaness of Brown Blogosphere, Ruchira Paul, is no more

The Pakistani Voice That Isn’t in the Room

BB made a very sharp observation, and we want to put it on the record as a note rather than a finished argument, because it deserves more elaboration than we can give it today.

Who carries the Green Passport

Look at who carries the Pakistani case at BP. Kabir holds a foreign passport. Q and EK write from the diaspora. Every voice that argues the Pakistani perspective here argues it from somewhere else. Not one of them speaks from inside the country: resident, middle or upper-middle class, holding a green passport with everything the green passport actually costs at the visa counter, at the airport, in what can and cannot be said at home. India, by contrast, is argued for in large part by Indians who live in India (BB is one such example). So the table is lopsided in a particular way. One side is represented by people inside the country it speaks for; the other, almost entirely by people outside it.

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The Great Cleft

Diasporas are powerful but deadly

Continue reading The Pakistani Voice That Isn’t in the Room

Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives

What We Did

Brown Pundits was founded as a diaspora project. A handful of Brown people thinking out loud about where they came from, what it meant, and whether the subcontinent could be understood in English without either romanticising it or apologising for it.

What happened instead was stranger and more valuable. The site became a place where the subcontinent argues with itself in public, without editorial supervision, without a line to hold, and without the particular kind of cowardice that afflicts publications which need to keep everybody happy.

Over the past week, we forced the archive into coherence. All 3,987 published posts; every Open thread, Genetics argument, Civilisational essay, Partition debate, BrownCast episode, Film review, Obituary, every Moderation notice, are now part of a single navigable structure. For the first time, the site can be read not as a sequence of posts, but as a narration.

What the Archive Revealed

The Partition of India is not a historical event on this site. It is a living emergency. Every argument we have had about Pakistan’s identity, India’s secularism, the Muslim League, Jinnah that is QeA, the two-nation theory, Bangladesh’s founding, the treatment of minorities across all three successor states; all of it is 1947 refusing to close. The wound keeps producing arguments because it was never properly treated. The British left. The questions they left behind did not. Brown Pundits has been, among other things, one of the few places in the English-speaking world where those questions are fought over by people who have actual stakes in the answers, not just professional opinions about them.

Pax Persica

Continue reading Open Thread; the endless Argument of the Archives

GDP of South Asian countries 1 : nominal vs real

In March 1776, exactly 250 years ago, Scottish economist Adam Smith published his work The Wealth of Nations, widely considered to be one of the most influential books on political economy.  In this book he highlighted the fact that people often confuse the real wealth of a country (the ability to buy goods and services) with  its nominal wealth. The idea is still relevant today, so let us have a closer look. If we rank the major South Asian countries by their per capita nominal GDP (size of the total economy in the local currency divided by the price of a dollar), the list goes as follows :

1. SriLanka : USD 4516 
2. India : USD 3051
3. Bangladesh : USD 2960 
4. Pakistan : USD 1710
5. Nepal : USD 1550
6. Afghanistan : USD 417 

Many people assume that these numbers measure how poor or rich a country is. In particular, the average Sri Lankan is 50 percent wealthier than the average Indian, and the average Bangladeshi is 70 percent wealthier than the average Pakistani. This is not really true. The nominal GDP accurately measures the real wealth of a country only in an utopian world where there are no taxes or other barriers on tradable goods, and transportation costs are completely absent. In reality, Americans can not instantly transport themselves to India to get cheap haircuts, and South Asian countries often impose huge taxes on imported goods. So nominal GDP is a flawed yardstick if we want to compare different countries.

Here’s a simple puzzle based on this idea : What steps should the Indian government take if they want to increase the country’s per capita nominal GDP from USD 3000 to USD 6000 within this year?

At first glance, achieving this may seem unattainable, given that India’s economy is currently growing at a rate of 6-7 percent annually. However, once we realize that nominal GDP also depends on trade policies, it is easy to come up with strategies to make this happen. For instance, the Indian government could implement an extra import duty of Rs 45 per dollar on all imported goods while simultaneously offering a Rs 45 per dollar subsidy (through tax incentives, free land, etc.) for all exported products. This will reduce the price of the dollar from Rs 90 to Rs 45 and double India’s nominal GDP. It’s also easy to see that this will have no impact on the real economy. Since the USD isn’t utilized in local transactions, the domestic market will stay the same. The extra tax imposed on imports will be balanced by the decrease in the dollar’s value. Likewise, the lower dollar rate will be offset by subsidies provided in the export sector.

 

 

Who Is Reading Brown Pundits? (And Why Pakistan Just Became Our Biggest Audience)

We have been running this blog long enough to know that readership numbers are a vanity metric, until they aren’t. February held steady at 41,000 views, which we are quietly proud of. But what genuinely surprised us, and we mean genuinely, not in the performative way, is that Pakistan now constitutes 28% of our readership.

A thousand visits a day, give or take a bit more. The old 1% rule says one in a hundred will actually say something; which means for every BB, RNJ, Kabir or Sbarr in the comments, there are ninety-nine people reading in silence and agreeing with “either camp”. We find that thought rather beautiful.

Prior to February, Pakistan had never cracked the top five. Now it’s sitting at number one.

Bharatstan, indeed.

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Commentariat = Saffroniate? Continue reading Who Is Reading Brown Pundits? (And Why Pakistan Just Became Our Biggest Audience)

The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated

Every few months someone asks whether Brown Pundits is “dying.” I understand the instinct. The internet is littered with abandoned blogs. Attention is fickle. Writers drift. The centre does not hold. And yet, when I actually look at the numbers, the mood often turns out to be wrong.

We had a real dip. In September and October we were running at roughly 55–65k monthly readers. Then we fell hard, to around 33k. This month, we have bounced back to roughly 53k. That is a 60% jump on the trough. A lot of it is mobile. A lot of it is casual readership rather than the old-school desktop cohort. But it is still real people arriving, reading, and sharing.

The geographical pattern is also telling. India and the United States remain the main pillars, as you would expect. But Bangladesh has surged in a way we did not anticipate. That matters because it suggests we are not only a niche diaspora salon. We are also being read inside the region, by people who do not need South Asia explained to them. Continue reading The Demise of Brown Pundits Is Much Exaggerated

15 Years of Brown Pundits: A Platform, a Posture, a Proof

On 28 December 2010, the question was not ideology or politics, but naming.

brownpundit(s). brownguru(s). brownsmarts. brownfolks. brownidiots.

The instinct was already there: reclaim brown without asking permission, and refuse the performance of respectability that so often polices minority intellectual spaces. The reply came quickly and decisively.

Brownpundits.

The first post, Hello World, went live on 30 December 2010. Fifteen years later, what matters is not that a blog survived. Many do. What matters is how it survived: without institutional backing, without funding, without ideological capture, and without deference to credentials masquerading as truth. Brown Pundits was never designed as a platform for prestige. It was designed as an intellectual retreat; a place where arguments stand or fall on substance, not accent; where brownness is neither explained nor apologised for; where disagreement is not heresy. That posture, upright, unbought, unafraid, is why Brown Pundits still exists.

A Discipline, Not a Brand

Brown Pundits began with a simple wager: that the English-language internet still had room for a South Asian intellectual space that did not need permission. No institutional sponsor. No ideology police. No professional incentives. Just writers who believed that brown questions, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, diasporic, could be argued in public with rigor and dignity. Fifteen years on, Brown Pundits remains. That endurance is not luck. It is structure. We lasted because we never built this as a brand. We built it as a discipline.

The point has never been agreement. The point has been posture: stand upright, test claims, correct errors, refuse theatre. Independent platforms fail for predictable reasons. They chase virality. They harden into faction. Or they monetize attention until thought becomes marketing. Brown Pundits avoided those traps by being unusually boring in the right ways: we publish, we argue, we edit, we keep the record. Nobody here is paid to write. That is not moral vanity. It is why we remain unpurchasable.

Five Years of Solidarity

Over the last five years, some of the most important work has not been online at all. It has been the steady, unglamorous work of civic seriousness: reading dense documents, tracking deadlines, understanding procedure, and watching institutions scramble when they assume nobody is paying attention. During this period, there has also been sustained dialogue with a small circle of intellectually serious allies; quiet, exacting minds with a gift for clarity under pressure and an instinct for how power hides behind process. Not public figures. Not brands. Just adults: difficult to gaslight, uninterested in theatrics, precise about the record.

That kind of solidarity resets the baseline. You stop mistaking polish for integrity. You stop confusing titles with truth. You learn to clock everything. You learn that the record is not drama; it is protection. That discipline carries back into Brown Pundits. It shows in how disputes are handled, how errors are named, and how authority is tested rather than absorbed.

The SD Episode as Proof

The recent SD exchange was not, in the end, about architecture. It was about authority: who is allowed to explain, who is expected to absorb, and what happens when the subject speaks back. We engaged the way Brown Pundits always has. We read closely. We identified the errors. We insisted on precision. We treated the exchange as part of the record, not as outrage content. What mattered was not that corrections were made; corrections are normal and welcome.

What mattered was the instinct that surfaced at the start: revise quietly, respond pedagogically, assume the critique will not notice the shift. That instinct is older than any one writer. It is a patterned behaviour in how authority manages challenge in brown-facing spaces. And yet, precisely because Brown Pundits exists, the record held. The language moved. The posture changed. This was not a “victory.” It was proof of concept. The platform did what it is meant to do.

“Brown” Is Not an Ethnicity; It Is a Civilizational Composite

The deeper reason Brown Pundits still matters is that brown is not a neat identity. It is not a single bloodline, doctrine, or grievance. It is a civilizational composite with a long memory and a hard geography. The Indian subcontinent is layering, not essence:

  • ancient coastal and inland populations

  • Dravidian continuities and transformations

  • Aryan synthesis and institutionalisation

  • Islamicate overlays that became native in texture, not merely foreign in rule

  • British power, whose administrative afterlife still structures class and accent

And beyond this lie the East, the Northeast, the mountain corridors, the sea routes. This is why Brown Pundits resists simplification. The subcontinent is not a monoculture, a single trauma, or a single pride. It cannot be narrated by those who treat it as a site for extraction; political, academic, or aesthetic.

What Fifteen Years Means

Fifteen years is long enough to know what this site is for. Not fame. Not power. Not money. Not outrage. Those are cheap forms of relevance. Brown Pundits exists to keep an alternative alive: an intellectual retreat on the open web where brown life can be examined with seriousness; where hierarchy is not mistaken for truth; where criticism is not treated as insolence; where the record matters. We are not untouchable, and we do not aim to be. But we are not easily compromised, because everyone here has a life outside the internet. That is our freedom. Fifteen years on, the mission remains unchanged:

Stand upright | Read closely | Correct what is wrong | Refuse permission structures | Keep the record |

That is why we are still here.

Mamdani and India — A Strategic Moment

The Desi Mayor and the Mirror of India: What Zohran Mamdani’s Victory in New York Means for a 2050 India

by Amb Manav Sachdeva

When Zohran Mamdani — the 34-year-old Indian-heritage, Muslim-American democratic socialist — clinched the victorius count for the mayoralty of New York City, it was more than an American political event. It was a global inflection point. For the first time in history, the world’s most influential city is poised to be led by a man who not only traces his lineage to India but proudly identifies himself as desi — as an inheritor of South Asian pluralism, Muslim humanism, and diasporic imagination.

For India, Mamdani’s win ought not to be filtered merely through the lenses of political affinity or ideological tension. Nor should it be reduced to whether he has praised or criticized Narendra Modi. It must be read as a civilizational opportunity — a chance to reflect on how India sees itself through the mirror of its far-flung children, and how it chooses to relate to a diaspora that has become not just prosperous, but powerful.

From Symbolism to Strategy Continue reading Mamdani and India — A Strategic Moment

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