Urdu
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The iPhone, Babur & are sons sold in shops?
A Dalit with an iPhone 16 has purchasing power, not the end of caste. And a Turkic sword at the birth of Indo-Islam is not a claim over South Asian…
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Pakistan Punches Above Its Weight. Blame Aligarh.
X.T.M asks how Pakistan produces so much culture for its income, crediting Lucknow and Aligarh rather than Bollywood. In his account the Urdu-speaking salariat carried that culture west in 1947,…
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How Pakistan Became South Asia’s Reference Muslims
X.T.M argues that Partition cut one Muslim political world into three, and that Pakistan, having taken Urdu, now supplies the default picture of a South Asian Muslim. He calls this…
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3 Graphs of Karnataka
X.T.M observes from three graphs of Karnataka that many South Indian Muslims seem to be “Urdufying”, and wonders whether East Bengal might have followed a linguistic path to Urdu and…
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The Hindufication of the Indian Bahá’í Community
X.T.M notes that a Bahá’í prayer performed in Mumbai for the 2017 bicentenary was in Shuddh Hindi, and wonders whether that translation came from Urdu, Perso-Arabic sources or English, since…
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On Safety and Hinduphobia
Announcing a ten-day suspension of a commenter who posted another commenter’s personal details, the authors affirm privacy as a house standard. They then argue Hinduphobia is real, theological in form…
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Gurdaspur and Siliguri: The Two Necks That Held
The post argues that Pakistan opted out of the subcontinent, and that India kept both strategic ‘necks’, Gurdaspur and Siliguri, in 1947 and 1971, so claims that India is a…
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India and Pakistan Are Playing Chicken; simply to hurt themselves
Two nuclear states with shared languages, shared music, and shared families are accelerating away from each other, each waiting for the other to swerve. Neither is. Both are losing. A…
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Pakistan Is Not About to Break Apart
X.T.M argues predictions of Pakistan’s imminent break-up are confirmation bias, since Pashtuns are integrated into the state and economy and states collapse only when elites defect, borders become porous and…
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Should Babri Masjid have been moved to Pakistan?
In a deliberately provocative piece, X.T.M proposes a rules-based doctrine for sacred-site disputes (excavation, relocation, compensation) given unequal sacred weight, and argues that standardising Hindi on Khari Boli rather than…
