XTM – Brown Pundits

Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum

Sereno Barr-Kumarakulasinghe, the Pundit of Wilpattu, is sadly no more

As with Ruchira, I cannot place when I first knew Sereno. The blog’s records reach further back than my memory. However I’m fairly certain he was with us, at the very beginning of Brown Pundits, in 2010. His first traceable comment is dated 28 February 2014. He quoted Time magazine on Sir John Kotelawala harrying Nehru and Chou En-lai at Bandung. That was Sereno at the start and at the end: a unique and informed Sri Lankan angle.

He left nearly 1,800 comments and 77 posts, the first on polyandry in Ceylon in March 2018, the last on the Iran war and the Gulf this March.

I knew something was wrong before I knew anything. He had gone quiet. A man who commented most weeks does not simply stop. On 5 August I sent him two words, “how r u“. He did not reply. On 8 September the funeral notice reached me. He had died on 4 September, aged 67.

After Ruchira’s passing in July I understood what this blog had become: a repository, a refugium, for people who think hard and do not agree. We never had to agree with each other. The debates got heated, and Sereno’s got very heated. My motto is let ideas procreate, let them battle, and let the best one win. Sereno took that as a standing invitation. He argued on these boards for twelve years from a farm on the edge of a national park, with elephants, monkeys and wild boar raiding the crops.

formerly brown called him a feisty contributor. girmit put it better than I can:

“He shared his personal experiences generously, and by his writing one got the sense of knowing him in some way.”

Most of what follows he told us himself, in comments, in posts, in his author box, and Facebook messages. He said he was not really anonymous, and that a little digging would find him.

Google summarises his life as a fixed-income developer who worked for GE Asset Management, Genworth, MBIA and the Federal Home Loan Banks, of mixed descent, and “a frequent contributor to cultural and community blogs such as Brown Pundits“. Eleven years on Wall Street, sixteen years here, and he is now immortalised as our Sri Lankan pundit.

His Heritage

Continue reading Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum

Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

We were at a beautiful midnight Janmashtami celebration last night. The words that came to me were magical and timeliness.

Nothing in that room was untouched. Popular Hinduism has spent eight centuries trading with Islam, and vice versa. What was interesting was that at midnight, following baby Krishna’s birth (which was beautifully staged), the Mandir decided to have a birthday cake with the kids cutting it and singing happy birthday. It was a clever nod to modernity and a way to keep these young British Asian (Sindhi) kids tied in to their culture.

Can Dharma fight back?

Continue reading Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

my 7,000th comment on Brown Pundits

I believe the number 14 is associated with Lord Ram so this is a fortuitous comment (7, 14, 1,400). I have’t written as much since the Comments have been on fire so it becomes a little difficult to write on new topics but I’m 66 posts (65 after this one) from my 1,000th post on BP.

After the jump Omar’s interesting take on whether the Mughal’s were colonisers.

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The Lutyens Brahmin & the Indian Muslim

Does Brahmin arrive with too much luggage, orthodoxy, superstition, the Bollywood stereotype, for any euphemism to survive it?

Perhaps. But the term has travelled before. In 1860 Oliver Wendell Holmes borrowed it for “the Brahmin caste of New England,” christening what became known as the Boston Brahmin: an untitled Protestant aristocracy, not a sacred thread in sight.

I want to repatriate the word because it illuminates two arguments that at first seem unrelated: who enters India’s apex elite, and who is permitted to belong to India without proving it.

The old metropolitan order administered admission quietly: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The new Hindu order increasingly administers national belonging aloud: Jai Hind, Vande Mataram, the flag, Bharat Mata ki Jai. The first produced the Lutyens Brahmin. This harder question for the Indian Muslim: is the new loyalty test merely explicit where the old one was hidden, or has belonging itself been repriced?

As Agni pointed out, the Brahmin I mean is the Brahmin of Boston: an apex caste defined by class, not gotra. A Shudra can join it. An OBC can. A Muslim can. In India it has its L.A.B. chapters, Lutyens, Academic, Bollywood, each commanding a sector and recruiting on much the same terms: assimilation, presentation, marriage. The furore over nepotism in Bollywood was, in part, a quarrel over precisely this caste; further reading includes The Bollywood caste, Bollywood, Brahmins, Parsis & WASPs, The Rise of the Quarter-breeds in Bollywood.

The Persistence of Elites

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The Brahmin Civil War

(Housekeeping first. Indosaurus is back and in form; “For Gandhiji” and “Liberal college bastions are taking body blows” and k jayas’s “30 seconds please“. Ordinarily I would open with viewer statistics; I’m dispensing with the ritual. The community is flourishing, and I would rather measure biodiversity than traffic.)

In DP’s telling India is down to three varnas: the Baniya, who owns the temple; the Brahmin, who guards it on salary and calls the arrangement dharma; and everyone else, rebranded anti-national upon objection. Stadium budgets flow to a state without medallists while the akharas that win them go hungry; the newsroom is Brahmin-bylined and Baniya-owned, the vegetarian canteen doing the work the salary won’t; ahimsa is reread as a doctrine of bloodless extraction.

Ahimsa Redefined

Take the milk, spare the cow; take the honey, spill nothing; empty an exchequer without cutting a throat and call it business. Nehru the Pandit, he reminds us, was unmade by Pandits while other men did the counting. And the merchant class, expelled from the fold in its Jain and Buddhist centuries, waited out the millennium and has made the priesthood its front office. “The Nagpur bowl is being refilled in Ahmedabad,” he closes.

The sporting structure he describes is not imaginary, India’s medallists come from Manipur to Kerala to Hyderabad, though Haryana’s share is so disproportionate. DP gives us a priesthood in service. But the priesthood that unmade the Pandit prime minister while other men did the counting was not obeying a master. I see a priesthood at war; with its own cousins.

The Sedimentary Elite

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Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

(h/t Archer, who called for this thread in the comments on “Erm”.

Also as fair warning to the Commentariat, Flame Threads will be put down and any violator will have fines ranging from mass comment deletion to revocation of Author Rights. Say what you like but tread carefully in how you say it since I did want to write on White Intellectuals hogging the “South Asian” space after Indosaurus’s excellent piece on the Great Gandhi but this just tumbled out)

Pakistan’s Interior Minister, Mohsin Naqvi, told an Islamabad seminar last week that the country’s 80-year-old governance system has “collapsed” and that Pakistan needs new provinces. A day later the DG ISPR called on the parties to consider an “administrative reset.” This week Naqvi assured the press that Shehbaz Sharif will serve his full five years; while standing by every word about the destroyed system, and reprising, for good measure, his claim to the biggest scam in Pakistan’s history: judges, bureaucrats, politicians and bankers, all implicated, an inventory that conspicuously omits one institution. The scam has an address, One Constitution Avenue, a two-decade property saga Naqvi has been prosecuting in public since May; the individuals remain nameless, naturally.

Naqvi is a Husayni Sayyid, the surname is the pedigree, claimed descent from the Tenth Imam, which makes us cousins by caste, and at present the unluckiest good Shia boy in the Islamic Republic: sent out to fly the Deep State’s kite and left to absorb the fire alone.

The PPP demands his resignation; Khawaja Asif suggests he reset his own ministry first; Raza Rabbani reminds everyone that the disease is constitutional violation, not cartography.

A Coup is surplus to requirements

Continue reading Regency, Not Rupture in Pakistan (Open Thread)

Erm

In Ruchira’s Honour

Ruchira’s daughter Sanjukta shared my tribute on Facebook this week and called it amazing. She does not know me. Her mother did, through nearly two decades of this blog, and that a stranger’s grief could reach her family and land as comfort is the whole case for keeping BP alive. The original post is here, Ruchira’s obituary is here, and her daughter’s own tribute is here.

Rest in peace, dearest Ruchira.

In her honour I have started using “I” again instead of the impersonal “we”. I wanted to emotionally invest in this space the way she did in her interactions online.

Moments like this are what I want to cultivate here, so, two years after I revived the blog here from Chennai.

Continue reading In Ruchira’s Honour

Eliminator, Not Meritocracy

Calvin has argued that NEET’s meritocracy is a fiction: the exam is cleared through coaching that costs lakhs, tests discipline rather than aptitude, and predicts nothing about the doctor a candidate becomes. 0M-3 answered that a single centralised exam is the one gate a poor student can afford to prepare for, and that the state-run alternatives leak worse (Punjab’s teachers exam, Rajasthan’s SI recruitment).

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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.

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