Navid Sinaki’s debut novel Medusa of the Roses (Grove Atlantic 2024) falls into quite a rare genre: Queer Iranian Noir. Noir fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and has been characterized by author and academic Megan Abbott as follows: “In noir, everyone is fallen, and right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable” (Literary Hub 2018). James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice is usually identified as a classic example of the genre.  Sinaki directly references this novel and even borrows some plot elements from it. In Cain’s novel, the protagonist and her lover scheme to murder her husband so they can be together.  Similarly, Sinaki’s queer protagonists scheme to murder the wife of one of them.

Sinaki’s novel focuses on the relationship between Anjir and Zal, two men who have been lovers since they were teenagers.  At the beginning of the story, Zal has been injured in a gaybashing incident–he was with someone other than Anjir. Shortly afterwards, he disappears and much of the novel concerns Anjir trying to locate him. Anjir also plans to get gender reassignment surgery and live as a woman–not because he has gender dysphoria but because while Iranian law punishes homosexuality with death, the government allows people to surgically transition to another gender.  Before Zal’s accident, the two men came up with a plan to murder Zal’s wife. After Anjir’s gender reassignment, the two would be able to marry.

I will not go into too many plot specifics but suffice it to say that the novel falls squarely within the noir tradition: full of sex and violence and extremely bleak in tone. There are also some plot twists that I definitely didn’t see coming.

An interesting feature of the novel is the inclusion of elements of Greek and Persian mythology, particularly the allusions to Tiresias, the Greek seer who lived some years as a woman due to a curse from the goddess Hera.  There are also allusions to Medusa (most obviously in the title).

Though it can be overly melodramatic at times (as is true of much noir fiction), Medusa of the Roses does an excellent job of portraying what it is like to be queer in an oppressive society such as Iran’s.  I would recommend it to those interested in queer stories from parts of the world that are not usually represented in the mainstream.

Historical context

During the late 1400’s to early 1500’s, a new figure appeared in the philosophical tradition under the name of Raghunatha Siromani. He was a brahmin of ordinary origin with a point of interest, except for the fact that his grandfather, Sulapani, wrote a minor commentary about a Sanskrit Smriti. He studied at a university in Mithila that was the centre for Brahmanical learning, and he even went on to be a chancellor at the institution; however, he found it to be too conservative and chose to return to his original home in what is modern-day Nadia in West Bengal. This hometown was part of the Bengal sultanate that was presently ruled by the liberal minded Hussain Shah, who multiplied institutions in Brahmanical ones. In this open environment, Raghunatha would go on to rewrite the entire field of logic and indirectly begin what can be considered the earliest forms of Modernity within South Asia. 

Before we go any further, we need to understand what Raghunatha’s works were and conduct a broader examination of their social implications for the time. Also, I will be abbreviating Raghunatha Shiromani with the initials RS for the rest of this discussion to make it easier to write.

Skepticism and Reason in the School of New Logic

Basically, RS was a part of the Navya Nyaya school of philosophy that was originally founded by Gangesa in the first half of the 14th century, when he unified the traditional school of Nyaya (logic) and Vaisheshika (metaphysics) together in his magnum opus, the “Tattvachinatmani” (Jewel of thought on the Nature of things). RS, during his lifetime, wrote multiple commentaries or Bhasya on multiple historical texts such as the Nyaya sutra, Nyayakusumanjali, and Gangesa works as well. Traditionally, the Bhasya is supposed to provide clarification about grey areas and expand on the pre-existing literature, but there was always a degree of deference to these ancient works, and one couldn’t understand the precepts that were presented.  

RS on the other hand extensively challenged a lot of these assumptions as he did a thing that the author Janardan Ganeri calls “being in a discussion with tradition”, where activity challenges some of the pre-existing states made in the work using logic and reason to ensure the arguments being presented isn’t simply considered as true due to traditional rather there is a logical basis for the points being made. What RS was doing here is shifting the onus of inquiry into the hands of the individuals and challenging the traditional norms that were previously set in place. He doesn’t reject tradition completely, but he emphasizes the need for skepticism and examination of ideas through a lens of neutrality. I am just doing a direct quote from his works, which can explain his point:

“The demonstration of these matters, which I have carefully explained, is contrary to the conclusions reached by all the other disciplines. These matters spoken of should not be cast aside without reflection just because they are contrary to accepted opinion; scholars should consider them carefully. Bowing to those who know the truth concerning matters of all the sciences, bowing to people like you [the reader], I pray you consider my sayings with sympathy. This method, though less honoured, has been employed by wise men of the past; namely that one asks other people of learning to consider one’s own words (Inquiry into the True Nature of Things 1915: 79,1-80,3; trans. Potter 1957: 89-90).”

Another notable quote of note is:

“How does it come about that, from (hearing) the word “Dasaratha,” people now, who never saw Dasaratha [the father of the legendary king Rama] come to know of him? Likewise, how, from the words [for fictional entities like] “hobgoblin”, do others come to know of them? I leave this for attentive scholars to meditate upon. I shall not expand further here. (1915: 60,4-61,4; trans. Potter 1957: 76).”

 Here he is talking about an idea that comes to mind, but instead of simply explicating this concept fully. There is an expectation that readers of the text actively engage with the idea being that they aim to inquire about these ideas themselves instead of merely taking the idea via rote memorization. The onus of inquiry is shifted into the hands of the reader, where you are actively expected to partake in a discussion with the text and the ideas being presented here. 

Furthermore, you see a similar trend in Europe, where they developed such ideas, and it led to the formation of the scientific revolution and broader advances in society. Think of how, before the enlightenment, people used to follow the Galen theory of Anatomy and Humoral theory in explaining disease, which often resulted in leeches and bloodletting. The ideas were taken as the norm for a long time, since any further investigation, such as the examination of dead corpses, but the enlightenment and the reformation shifted this dynamic. These theories gradually emerged with figures like Andreas Vesalius questioning these concepts and providing scientific proofs about how these ideas were false; most of which involved breaking deference to tradition and the norms of the time. All of this may seem mundane to us today, but it was unique in that time, and it paved the way for the scientific revolution.

 Another aspect of RS’s writing is his close connection to realist philosophy, as was common among the logicians, and his emphasis on individuality, best seen in the following quotes: 

“Among entities, space and time are nothing but God, since there is no proof [that they are distinct from God]. For wherever particular effects arise, these arise simply from God by his being combined with particular causes (1915: 1,3-3,1; trans. Potter 1957: 23).”

“The universal selfhood, insofar as it is the limitor of the inherence- causality of pleasure etc., is not in god (1915: 44,2-45,1; trans. Potter 1957: 55).”  

His argument is quite similar to the ideas presented by the European philosopher Spinoza, a type of religious deism. Basically, he argues that space and time itself is God itself and that the individual self is distinct from this god. In the traditional Vedantic view, the distinction between the atman (self) and the Ishavara-Brahaman (God/Absolute) is an illusion, indirectly saying that individuality is a product of ignorance (avidya), i.e., created by the environment you live in. RS, on the other hand, holds that not only is individuality not an illusion stemming from ignorance, but that the self and the other aspects of individuality, such as feelings, emotions, and experience, are real. Individuality is an important part of his philosophy about logic and inquiry. 

The Environment and other figures of pre-colonial Modernity 

You see the things that are commonly the basis of modernity today: individuality, questioning of tradition, openness to newer ideas, and skepticism about once-reality. What makes this form of pre-colonial modernity fascinating is the fact that it wasn’t just limited to one philosophical tradition, caste, or religion; in fact, it was quite common during the Early modern Mughal empire. Yashovijaya Gani, a logician and orthodox Jain monk, came to the same conclusions that Raghunatha came to, despite criticizing his work extensively. In fact, Yashovijaya even had a form of a prototypical science method as seen in the following quote:

“No body of ‘theory’ (śāstra), whether Jaina or non-Jaina, is to be accepted merely based on sectarian interest. Instead, the theory should be subject to testing, just as the purity of a sample of gold is determined by tests involving rubbing, cutting, and heating (1.17). There is testing a theory or idea through a continuous process, like purifying gold. 

This wasn’t even limited to the Dharmic religions, since you see a similar trend in the Islamic tradition, specifically in the figure of Dara. Even though today Dara Shikoh’s main work, the “Majhma-ul-Bahrain” (meeting of two oceans), is remembered as a text that was supposed to “unify” Islamic and Vedantic traditions, that was never a goal of the work. Dara was re-examining the traditional Islamic texts in the same way that Raghunatha Siromani was engaging with Navya Nyaya works; he was engaging in a discussion with the Islamic tradition and trying to use reason in a manner that refined pre-existing notions present in the doctrine. He himself stated that he was examining subjects not extensively discussed in traditional Islamic works and learning about how another religious tradition that confronted these ideas resolved them. Learning from them, looking at how the Islamic tradition may deal with those issues, like how RS looked at grey areas in the Metaphysics established by Gangesa, and trying to resolve them. There might be some overlap as well since Dara talked with Banaras Brahmin trained in Nyaya, Yashovijaya studied Nyaya in Ujjain and wrote commentaries on RS, as well as indirectly commented on Dara’s works sometime after his execution. 

These ideas further permeated into broader society in many ways. Like there was a style of rhetoric used by the Nyaya school called the Nyaya rhetoric, which, according to recent studies, suggests this style is used across all religious, caste, and ethnic groups in India. The emphasis on skepticism and inquiry was very common in the Mughal empire, as even European travellers noted how many administrators in the Mughal bureaucracy showed complex analytical tendencies. Even the emperors got in on this tendency, as they often default to a deeper emphasis on logic and reason as a pathway for the dispensation of legal judgments. I remember this story about how a few Rajput nobles argued with the ritualistic purity of deer meat and whether they could consume such objects, which was overheard by Shah Jahan. The emperor proceeded to give a complex explanation analytically by reconstructing a discussion using the concept of Halal. Outside of the imperial courts, you had multiple figures (religious and non-religious) actively questioning traditional norms and even the development of a sophisticated popular politics that actively challenged traditional power structures. 

The Decline of the pre-colonial alongside the rise of colonial 

Now, you might be wondering how any of this relates to modern political discussions. Well, see how pre-colonial, so it’s all going to go downhill from here. Many of RS’s writings had continued to develop after his time, as many philosophers, including European figures such as traveller Francis Bernier, translated these works into European languages. However, all of this came to a screeching halt once the Mughal empire fragments and many of these writers lost their patronage as the Sultans and Rajas lost control as political authority decayed, leading to a state of chaos and banditry. 

The British filled in the gap created by the fragmentation and went on to form a colonial state in South Asia, starting the British Raj. During the colonial period, many writers in Europe started to directly engage with the works of RS and the other philosophers; however, many of these new writers gradually started to dismiss these writings as inferior in contrast to the works of European scholars. RS and the Nyaya schools were largely dismissed as irrelevant, and the Brahmanical scholars were gradually absorbed into the colonial apparatus. The multiple famines caused by British oversight, specifically the ones in Bengal, the centre of Nyaya, naturally killed many people, including the Nyaya scholars, hence weakening their education centre and school of thought.

On the other hand, Dara’s works and his contribution didn’t do any better. For one, the works he wrote naturally got him killed by his brother for being a heretic as part of a succession dispute that was going on. Furthermore, it seems that discussing his work was somewhat limited during the period after his death, since Yashovijaya, who wrote his commentaries around the same time, didn’t mention Dara’s work explicitly but only discussed the main point of the discussion indirectly. At the same time, Yashovajaya himself is referred to as the last great philosopher of the Jain tradition.

A lot of colonial-era historiography emphasized the “fallen” nature of South Asian civilization, often beginning around the 12th century, and this shaped how many discussions about the region were conducted well into the modern era. If you open any modern book on Indian philosophy, they always stop around the 12th century and barely mention any writer that came afterwards, like Vallabha Acharya and his Suddhadvaita, or any South Asian Islamic writers. Another negative impact was how historiography greatly emphasized the “spiritual” nature of South Asia, presenting an orientalist interpretation of the land, usually through the lens of Mysticism and an overemphasis on the religious nature of society. Even today, many Western academics dispute whether South Asia had philosophy and often tie South Asian philosophy with the theology department. The last major influence was the concept of the White man’s burden of bringing (or rather “reviving” a stagnant) “civilization” to South Asia that centred Eurocentric philosophy, law, social norms, and broader practices.

The Post-Colonial Reality

The inevitable product of the colonial era is seen in the post-colonial period. Philosophy today is by default assumed to be associated with Western canonical works such as Plato or Socrates, not Raghunatha, Yashovijaya, or Dara, for that matter. This has an impact on political theory as a significant portion relies on philosophy as a base for understanding society, which resulted in a lot of the founding fathers using a lot of Eurocentric notions to create the political theory that served as the basis of most South Asian countries. What this created is a society whose ruling classes conceive of modern politics within a Western framework that centres Eurocentric cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the ground-level societal reality. Like a platinum statue with a head of bronze. The inevitable product is multiple blind spots in discussions that I vaguely discussed in another comment about paranoia and Indian left-wing politics that I will paste below:

“I understand the paranoia that you are talking about here, but I don’t think it’s exclusive to Hindus at all; rather, it seems to be an Indian thing. Like I have been in many online spaces with a wide variety of people ranging from Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Atheists, in addition to people from both the Left and Right. Almost a significant portion of people in these areas are oddly paranoid a lot of the time, to the extent that some of them have just started making conspiracy theories about the other groups. I wouldn’t say this is a phenomenon limited to South Asia, since the same things have happened in Western spaces as well. It’s not just a you thing, rather it is a lot more common than you can imagine. 

In terms of your college experiences, well, I can explain why you feel the same way by sharing a particular experience from my own college years. So, I studied at a Canadian university, and I happened to take a class on Afrofuturism in my 3rd year. It was an entire class that explicitly discussed racial politics in the context of science fiction with close references to Marxism, Feminism, Post Modernism, Intersectionality, and your generic progressive frameworks for analysis. Through that entire course, I got to experience how these theories were originally interpreted and used within the original Western cultural setting as their original author intended. A lot of these ideas, while useful in understanding society, are often discussed and written by authors who lived in European settings. There is always this underlying assumption of universality to a lot of concepts that are heavily Europe-centric in some sense. Like a lot of class discussions in Marxism centred quite heavily on how class works in the context of Early Modern Europe. 

India has completely different cultural structures that separate it from Europe, which means that a significant portion of those frameworks has to be changed in order to avoid making Eurocentric assumptions about a society that is non-European. For example, caste creates a situation where social, economic, and political capital aren’t shared by the same group, like how race in the West causes a singular group (Caucasian) to control all those capitals. In India, Vaishyas or Mercantile Jatis like Jains, Zoroastrians, Baniya, etc., control commerce, but that doesn’t translate to direct political power that agriculturalists like Yadav yield via electoral processes due to numerical superiority. 

Caste isn’t consistent either, since a Jaati dominant in one state might be marginalized in another state, hence there are a lot of contextual differences that you need to account for. However, most Indian left-leaning individuals fail at this since they take this framework whole without meaningful consideration of cultural differences. It’s kind of the basic reason why caste discussion purely centres around Brahmin vs Dalit, but doesn’t account as much about every other group in between, since these two varnas are the only consistent ones from one region to another. Like I have read Indian feminist blogs where the writer tries to transplant Western feminist ideas wholesale into an Indian context, and there is a visible mismatch since the West is a post-industrialized state, while India is still in the early stages of Industrialization. There is a very clear social and political reality that is different. 

Additionally, this creates another problem as well, since most of these authors do not use a cultural language that is comprehensible to ordinary Indians, as they wholesale transplanted these ideas without considering the audience’s background. Like India has a specific style of rhetoric called the Nyaya method that is quite commonly used here, but also extensively in a Western background. If you don’t consciously pay attention to rhetoric, it affects how audiences feel about the subject matter.

Another factor I should mention here would be the fact that Western academia is still somewhat haunted by the legacy of oriental historiography. Many of the early studies done about India were often done by British Orientalists who presented a notion of India being a static, unchanging society steeped in spiritualism. Even Karl Marx had a concept called “Asiatic mode of production”, which is a stupid concept that is steeped in orientalism. The only person who seemed to argue extensively against this tide was Max “one of the founders of sociology” Weber, who argued that things like caste were a product of material conditions rather than religion, which didn’t get popular until much later on. 

Even post-colonial historians who tried to decolonize Indian history ended up kind of being in the shadow of oriental scholarship since they rejected a lot of aspects (many that were bad) from orientalist scholars, but that involved rejecting the pre-colonial elements in these works. Think of how Hinduism is a name given by the colonial officials to the present-day religion. Many post-colonial scholars reject this identification since it was an orientalist category placed on a complex tradition. However, Hinduism was already crystallizing into a clear religion before the British, and by rejecting the label wholesale, you end up rejecting the pre-colonial aspect. None of this includes the underlying assumption that the non-Hindu groups were any different. There was a lot of fluidity between religious identities and grey areas that often got missed.

Now, Western academia has definitely improved a lot in more recent times, and academics have attempted to overcome these assumptions. However, most lay left or right leaning person has access to any of these works, and they mainly rely on older, trashier works that are deeply outdated. When I was at university, I was told that work that is more than 5-10 years old is outdated, and you have people referencing works from the 1800’s. God, this shit annoys me so much. The result is very obvious: you have a bunch of people referencing outdated material that isn’t relevant in academia today, and the legacy of colonial historiography has created a lot of questionable assumptions about Indian society.

This leads to an entirely missing perspective, which creates a social grey that makes an information desert. For example, Orientalist assumptions make it seem as if Hindus are the only ones who have caste in India, and other groups like Muslims lack or have a weakened form of caste. If you look at caste from a material rather than an orientalist perspective, this wouldn’t exist. This makes a blind spot for cross-religious caste tensions that implode in everyone’s face, and we don’t understand anything, leading to a lot of missing information and paranoia with things like “would so and so community cause this violence, what happens if they gain power, etc.” The paranoia comes from things not fully adding up or clear explanations.

Honestly, everything I said isn’t unique or new to me. I literally use intersectionality and other leftist ideas, but I accounted for orientalism, cultural differences, and used Indian philosophical ideas to explain it in a manner you can understand culturally. I explain things poorly, but I am presenting a new idea or giving nuance; rather, I am trying to bring a clearer picture hidden underneath the exterior appearance. Also, the new political polarization has only made so many of these problems worse, and even I am having a hard time keeping up with these discussions these days.”

Another impact that colonial era practice has on South Asia is the manner in which modernity as a concept is understood by people today. There is a strong association of modernity as being something that is representative of “Western” civilization in contrast to the traditional “Eastern” civilization, to the extent that people consider concepts such as queerness and gender equality as “Western” concepts that are being imported into and to an extent “ruining” the East. Even the notion of challenging traditional institutions is something that is an extension of westernization to such an extent that people use Western symbols and terminology to explain these ideas, like how people use the term LGBT instead of expanding and further developing pre-existing ideas or terms like Hijra to express those ideas in a culturally comprehensible manner to the lay population. Modernity is something that is imported from external land and forced onto the people, rather than being seen that has an organic historical basis in the land and was something that developed internally rather than externally. Like Yashovijay, RS, and Dara were working within their own orthodox, often conflicting, frameworks, yet organically came to similar ideas before European influence arrived. 

The result of all these practices is a political elite that tries to force a form of Eurocentric modernity that requires the ground-level population to change their entire outlook on life to obtain any form of advancement. This inevitability will lead to a backlash as people double down on their pre-existing hierarchical and discriminatory practices out of fear of losing their sense of identity and self. On the opposite end, people who can adopt an Eurocentric system of modernity find themselves losing their traditional ideas and being forced to navigate society using Western cultural assumptions that don’t line up with the social reality of the society they live within. They naturally feel isolated, suffering social loneliness, and attempt to return to a now weakening traditional identity, which puts them on a trajectory leading to ethnoreligious nationalism. 

A good example is the issue with open defecation in India. The main issue with defecation practices in India was often affected by two aspects: a material issue and a social issue. Materially, people didn’t have access to latrines to conduct their business, so the government compensated and decided to build latrines for people, which resulted in a reduction. However, this didn’t completely translate over since India still had a somewhat open defecation and even relapses into such practices, which was driven by social practices that had been embedded in the land over time, and one that didn’t account for. For the political class (both left and right), they mainly saw the latrine issue more from a material perspective and didn’t really understand the fact that there was an entire culture around this practice due to a normal cultural disconnect. People literally had actual toilets built into their homes, yet they still did open defecation because they weren’t provided a clear explanation that would work within their cultural framework.

The second example stems from this study (I have been trying to find for a long time on JSTOR, but I haven’t yet), which talked about the rise of Hindutva and urban practices. The author noted that a rise in urbanization led to a breakdown of traditional caste identities, which weakened over time, resulting in a loss of community, so everyone gradually turned to religious institutions. This strengthening of religious communities led to a gradual revivalism and the broader expansion of ethnoreligious nationalism that came alongside. The sense of identity loss and community that was foundational identity led them to other entities (I believe temples with connections to Hindutva groups like the RSS), closely affiliated with ethnoreligious nationalism, to fill in that void. 

The end of the organic form of pre-colonial modernity in South Asia and its replacement by a forced form of post-colonial modernity across the political spectrum has hindered the forward process, resulting in the region being very backwards. Compare this to East Asia, which was able to transition organically from the pre-modern to the post-modern since they weren’t as extensively ruled by colonial powers, and it mostly adapted aspects of the European Enlightenment alongside the aesthetic appearance without losing its sense of identity. Like Japan, “Westernized” during the Meiji reformation, but maintained a lot of their practices to the extent that modern scholars question the westernization narrative. Even though China had things like the cultural revolution still retains a lot of aspects from the pre-modern era, since communism was embedded within the pre-existing cultural landscape without fully displacing it to the extent that neo-Confucianism is seeing a revival there. Hence, the adage: Communism with Chinese characteristics. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to ignore a clear power dynamic between East Asia and the West that forced Eurocentric notions onto the region, but it didn’t elicit the same backlash as it had in South Asia, since a pre-existing form of modernity to guide it. Nonetheless, South Asia was never able to make that transition organically without the negative impact of colonialism and lost its own prototypical modernity on the way.

Bibliography:

Ganeri, Jonardon. “Raghunātha Śiromaṇi and the Origins of Modernity in India.” Nagoya Studies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Sambhaea , 2013. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18999/SAMBH.30.55. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. “The Cosmopolitan Vision of Yaśovijaya Gaṇi.” International Journal of Jaina Studies 4, no. 1 (2008): 1–11. 

Ganeri, Jonardon. The lost age of reason: Philosophy in early modern india 1450-1700. New York, New York : Oxford University Press, 2011. 

Takhelchangbam, Nilima D., Deepanshi Saxena, Divyata Sachan, Pankaj K. Jain, Sushil K. Shukla, Dhiraj K. Srivastava, and Prashant K. Bajpai. “Barriers of Household Toilet Utilization among Toilet Owners in a Rural Area of Northern India: An Analytical Cross-Sectional Study.” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 12, no. 9 (2023): 1984–90. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_515_23. 

Over the past few days, the portion of J&K that came under Pakistani suzerainty after the ‘tribal’ invasion of 1948, has seen massive political protests that have led to violence and deaths of civilians. This isn’t the first time for such incidents in what Pakistani refers to as “Azaad” (free) Kashmir. The old Pakistani playbook of deploying military force, banning political organizations, and media blackout has been deployed once again. This time however, ‘feels different’ somehow. It has become increasingly difficult for totalitarian states to execute media clampdowns in the social media age, and videos and information are steadily streaming out of Rawalkot, Muzaffarabad and elsewhere.

I would hope that this open thread stays away from the always contentious circular ‘debates’ on whether India/Pakistan are the ‘rightful owners’ of Kashmir, and focuses on the specifics of the ongoing protests instead.

Why is that over the last decade or so, such repeated outbreaks of protests show up repeatedly, often swiftly followed with brutal state clampdowns. I think its reasonably fair to say that a strong majority of the residents of Pak-administered Kashmir were and continue to be, willing subjects of Pakistan. What then, is triggering such unrest, repeatedly?

Farhat Auntie was pleased when the car arrived. That very day, she suggested they go out for some shopping, but Fizzu Uncle flatly refused. He said he wouldn’t leave the house except in case of dire need and she could go shopping in a rickshaw the way she always had. He said he had retired so early so he could give his full attention to study and reflection. Auntie didn’t reply because for many years she had been following Ammi’s advice to retreat whenever she heard the words ‘study’ and ‘reflect.’

But now a new problem had arisen. She had sold her jewelry to buy the car and there was no one to drive it. She couldn’t figure out what to do with it. She couldn’t even sell a car with Hala tiles. After a while she asked Fizzu Uncle why he had bought the car in the first place?

“I didn’t buy it,” he said. “You did.”

Auntie was shocked at this response but at that very moment she decided, if I am the one who bought the car then, inshallah, I will be the one to drive it. And then, you, Fazeelat Bajwa, when you find yourself paralyzed, that thing you have been saving all your money for, you will have to go to the hospital in a rickshaw.

The same day, Auntie spotted a car from a driving school parked in front of the bakery. Interpreting that as a sign from the unknown, she jotted down the number of the “Fee-Male” Driving School.

The driving school was owned by Farzana Malik. She had two cars. She taught in one while a woman she had employed gave lessons in the other. When Auntie phoned the next morning, Farzana Malik herself answered. Auntie said she wanted to learn to drive and hoped the school was open to women.

“Ha ha ha!” Farzana Malik laughed happily. “We teach both — women and men. Ha ha ha! But only I teach males. I’m afraid if I let my assistant, Rozina, do that, she might run away with one. Then where would I look for a new assistant? Ha ha ha!”

“Oh, I see,” Auntie said. “I had taken your school’s name to mean it was only for women.”

“Ha ha ha! No. We have the two ‘e’s and a dash in the middle of “Fee-Male” to indicate that we take fees from males and teach them to drive. Isn’t that funny? “Fee-Male.” Ha ha ha!”

Auntie’s heart leapt with joy at the thought that perhaps they taught women for free but that lasted only a couple of moments because, almost immediately, Farzana continued:

“But this doesn’t mean we don’t take money from women. We have just kept this funny name. Ha Ha Ha!”

Auntie was highly motivated as well as intelligent. Farzana Malik was perhaps super intelligent. So Auntie began learning rapidly and also developed a friendship with Farzana Malik.

“Your husband must be quite enlightened to let you teach driving to men,” Auntie said one day after her lesson, drinking tea in Farzana Malik’s office.

“Husband? Ha ha ha! I got rid of him.”

“Got rid of him?” Auntie said, taken aback. “I don’t understand.”

“He was vile!” Farzana said. “He pretended to marry me for love and soon began loving everyone else. Also, he barely worked. I ran the house with the income from this driving school. And look how despicable he was, telling me not to teach men. Ha ha ha! Wasn’t he despicable? I thrashed him and kicked him out.”

Auntie asked in surprise “Did you really thrash your husband or is that just a figure of speech? How could a petite woman like you beat a man?”

“I beat him well and good. With a stick. I gave my servant Barkat five hundred rupees and told him to find an occasion to put a sack on my husband’s head and tie his hands and feet. Barkat asked for a thousand rupees in case my husband complained to the police. I said he would never complain to the police that his skinny wife had thrashed him. And if he does I will give you another five hundred rupees. Ha ha ha!”

“Oh, OK,” Farhat Auntie said in shock. “So then your name, Malik, is your father’s name?”

“No, no,” she said. “Malik is that vile fellow’s name. After the divorce, I thought why go through the bother of changing names? Just let it be. What difference does it make? Wasn’t I right? Ha ha ha!”

Farzana had also been running a small restaurant for a while. It didn’t have seating but one could take away food and there was delivery as well. At the time, there were perhaps three or four restaurants of the kind in Lahore. It’s name was “Bell and Tell.” When Auntie expressed surprise at the name. Farzana said:

“It’s a unique name. Don’t you agree? Ha ha ha! That’s how I am. I surprise people. Oh, don’t be too surprised. It’s simple. You call and the bell rings, then you tell us your order. So it’s simple, right? Bell and Tell. Ha ha ha! At first, I thought of naming it “Tell and Sell,” meaning you tell the order and I sell you food. But then I thought, no, that would make me seem cheap and commercial. The truth is I am cheap and commercial. I am, am I not? Ha ha ha!”

As Auntie’s friendship with Farzana Malik blossomed, she confided the details of her relationship with Fizzu Uncle. After hearing the entire story, Farzana agreed Fizzu Uncle was vile but more than his nonsense about religion, she was angry, very angry, at how he first made Auntie sell her jewelry and then told her to go shop in a rickshaw because he wouldn’t drive her. She was angry, but also said it was just as well because that made Auntie learn driving and become friends with her. Auntie agreed that the rickshaw episode was deplorable– that was why she had decided that if Fizzu Uncle became paralyzed she wouldn’t drive him to the hospital. But for years she had been suffering the torment of not knowing what the man’s real religion was and now she was fed up of being afraid that he might someday declare his religion to be something other than Islam. It would be even more devastating if he said he had been a non-Muslim from such and such a time because that would mean she had been living in sin with a non-Muslim.

“So then, leave this Fizzu-Shizzu. Get rid of him. What’s the compulsion? Rent a room in my house and teach driving at my school. You have a car with tiles.” Farzana Malik suddenly said all this.

Auntie didn’t reply but she liked the idea and its appeal grew over time. One day she spoke of it to Ammi and said she hadn’t left Fizzu earlier because her son was young but there was no reason she shouldn’t go along with Farzana’s suggestion now. She was only fifty and if she were going to do it, she had to do it now. Another few years and it would be too late. She also said she could work at the driving school for now but Farzana was a very nice woman so it was possible she could become a partner in the restaurant or they might open another, perhaps in Model Town itself. Ammi didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t figure out what advice to offer. Not going ahead with this plan seemed to be the right advice, but why not? She couldn’t decide.

“Whatever makes you happy, Farhat,” she said finally. Then, after some thought, she added, “You’ve led one life for so many years and you’re not even happy. Your husband is selfish and vile. That apprehension about his being a non-Muslim is perpetually hanging over you, so go ahead and try this out with your new friend. But won’t your son say anything?”

“He doesn’t care much about his father. Even when he calls, he speaks only to me. And it’s not like I’m divorcing Fizzu.”

“Alright, then try it out,” Ammi said.

“It’s just that I’ll have to leave Model Town,” Auntie Farhat said sadly. “Farzana’s house is in New Muslim Town.”

Ammi nodded her head in regret. In order to reassure Auntie Farhat, she said that New Muslim Town was not all that far away and if she opened a “Bell and Tell” branch in Model Town the relationship with the neighborhood would be restored.

It meant a lot to Auntie Farhat that Ammi hadn’t opposed her taking this big step. She packed her things the very next week and left Fizzu Uncle’s house. But although she was satisfied and happy with her decision, she told Ammi it rankled that Fizzu Uncle hadn’t expressed even the slightest sadness at her leaving the house like that.

“Let him continue his search, Farhat. Damn him. Even if he had said anything, what would you have done?” Ammi said.

When Auntie moved to Farzana Malik’s house and began working at the “Fee-Male” Driving School, Farzana said they should celebrate Auntie’s taking such a courageous step. She would invite a few of her friends and Rozina from the office and Auntie could invite a couple of hers too.

The party was held the following week at Farzana Malik’s house which was now Farhat Auntie’s house too. When Ammi returned from the party, she was very pleased.

“What did you have to eat?” I asked.

“All sorts of things,” Ammi said. “Everything came from Farzana’s restaurant. Farhat seemed very happy. I think she did the right thing.”

“Did you have kebabs?” I asked.

“Yes, there were kebabs too.”

“How were they? ” I asked. “Were they better than the ones you make with onion and ginger?”

“No, they couldn’t be better than those,” Ammi said, “but they weren’t bad.”

Then Ammi told me Farhat Auntie had again whispered to her that she and Farzana might open a “Bell and Tell” branch here in Model Town one day. “If that happens,” Ammi said thoughtfully, “I think I will ask them to let me be a partner as well. I should also do something. I will sell some jewelry and buy a share.” Ammi seemed very content with Farhat Auntie’s new life and quite impressed by the prospect of her opening a restaurant. This didn’t seem right to me.

All evening, I thought about the plans Ammi had mentioned. Before going to sleep, I decided that Abba had to be told.

The next morning, Ammi was in the kitchen when I was about to leave for school, and it seemed an opportune moment.

“Abba,” I said.

“Hunh?” Abba said.

“There’s something I have found out,” I said.

“What?” he asked indifferently, glancing at the newspaper.

“About Ammi,” I said.

“What’s that?” Now he turned his face to me.

“I think Ammi has made a plan. She is about to run away from home like Farhat Auntie.”

When a look of surprise spread over Abba’s face, I was satisfied. By drawing his attention to this apprehension, I had achieved something of great significance.

They are, on the same evidence, almost entirely male, forward-caste nearly to a person, and tilted in their politics. 

The survey can only make sense against the size of our readership. In May, Brown Pundits drew about sixty-one thousand visits, close to two thousand a day, up roughly a third on April. Nearly half of that traffic came direct, readers typing the address or returning by habit rather than arriving from a search or a feed, and the average visit ran about a minute and a half across a little over two pages. The largest national audiences were in Canada, India and the United States.

Against those sixty thousand, thirty people answered our survey before we closed the form. This is the devoted few who filled in a form asking their caste and their politics, not a census of the many who pass through.

The comments show who shouts; the survey shows who is here.

The one thing everyone wants

Begin with what unites a readership that unites on almost nothing else. Asked which subjects they want more of, twenty-six of thirty chose the history of the subcontinent. It appears on nearly every form, across every caste, faith, region and point of entry, the single universal in the data. Demography and genetics follow, then religion and civilisation, then geopolitics.

Everything else divides the room. History does not.

Plural in politics

On the questions that usually split South Asians, our readers split. Politically they cluster in four roughly equal blocks, centre-right, centre, centre-left and libertarian, with no dominant tribe among them. And yet a Brahmin doctorate in North America, an Ashraf Muslim, an Assamese atheist, a South Indian Christian, an Adivasi academic, and a non-South Asian who wandered in for the history, people who agree on almost nothing political, all reached for the same handful of subjects. The readership is not held together by what it concludes. It is held together by what it finds interesting.

Narrow in the body

It is also only half the picture, and we said we would give the other half plainly. The plurality is of opinion, not of person. More than twenty-five of the thirty respondents are men. On caste the room is narrower still: nineteen named a forward community, ten of them Brahmin, and not one respondent is OBC, Dalit or Scheduled Caste. Two are Adivasi. So the forum argues caste, fiercely and from every ideological corner, while being composed almost entirely of people from the top of the order it is arguing about. That does not make any single argument wrong. It does mean the room has an Elite-Patriarchical blind spot it cannot see from inside, and we would rather say so.

Caste predicts the line

The blind spot has a measurable shape. Score the views on Hindu nationalism from minus two, strongly opposed, to plus three, the lone extreme, and the averages sort cleanly by background.

Forward-caste Hindu identity, Brahmin most of all, is the cleanest predictor of sympathy; Muslim and Christian identity the cleanest predictor of opposition. The averages hide one exception worth naming, because it cuts against the lazy story. The single most extreme respondent, the one self-described “Extreme Hindutva,” is not a Brahmin but an Adivasi with a doctorate. Caste predicts the trend. It never predicts the person.

Two nationalisms, two shapes

The sharpest finding is the asymmetry between the two nationalisms, and it conclusively settles Kabir’s Law; BP runs on a soft-Hindutva default.

Sympathy for Hindu nationalism is broad and diffuse, spread thinly across much of the readership: fourteen sympathetic against eleven critical. Support for the Pakistani case is narrow and concentrated: only four sympathetic, and the three who call themselves Pakistani nationalists are all Muslim, while opposition to the Two-Nation Theory comes from Hindus, Christians, atheists and agnostics alike. One side is a wide shallow pool, the other a small loud spring.

The marker is the degree, not the caste

Brahmins are the largest single named community, just under half of those who named one, and we will not pretend that is not an overrepresentation. But the stronger signal is educational. Twenty-one of thirty hold a Master’s or a doctorate, four in five a postgraduate or professional qualification, and that marker runs across every faith and caste where the caste marker does not. The readership looks less like a caste than like a faculty common room.

And one comfortable assumption dies here: the educated are not the moderate. Schooling and intensity of view correlate at essentially zero, and the most extreme respondent in the survey holds a doctorate. Here the degree buys depth of engagement, not coolness of temper.

A diaspora-led publication about the subcontinent

More than half of you, fifty-seven percent, read us from outside South Asia, with North America the largest single bloc. The May traffic agrees: the biggest national audiences sit in Canada, India and the United States, in that order.

The two halves ask for strikingly similar things, with one steady difference: those reading from inside the subcontinent lean harder toward geopolitics and the news of the day. On the deeper subjects, history and demography and civilisation, home and abroad want the same. If anything, the homeland reads a little more of the news; everyone reads the history.

What holds them

This is a readership that stays. More than three-quarters read at least weekly, ten of thirty daily. More than half have read for five years or more, several since the very beginning in 2014, and only three arrived in the last six months. One wrote to say he read BP from India until 2022, moved to Canada, and simply carried it with him. Retention like that is rare for an unpaid blog, and it is the strongest single signal in the survey.

The May traffic says the same from the outside: with nearly half of all visits arriving direct rather than from a search or a feed, this is a readership that comes back by habit, exactly what the tenure and frequency figures describe.

The tastes have a lineage, too. Most readers arrived years ago through Razib or Omar, and the two did not seed the same palate.

The geneticist’s readers still index toward demography and deep history; the Pakistan-and-affairs writer’s toward geopolitics. The cells are small, thirteen against six, so read the split as a strong hint rather than a proof. However they came, the point that matters is that they stayed.

The objection we keep

One reader, a doctorate-holder in Europe, used his comment box to call the flame wars tiresome and, more pointedly, to say that reading them leaves a person more polarised rather than closer to any middle ground.

We have argued the opposite: that the bridge, however ugly, beats the sealed room. We will not pretend this lands softly. It is the strongest objection to our whole case for why BP matters, and it comes from exactly the reader we most want to keep.

The survey cannot settle whether the contact here heals or hardens. It records only that one of our most engaged readers believes it hardens, and that we owe the possibility a hearing.

What the numbers say we are

So this is the portrait, both halves of it. The room is bound by temperament and not by tribe: a shared appetite for the subcontinent, for its history and its deep structures, held in common by people who agree on nothing else.

The room is also narrow and tilted: male, forward-caste, postgraduate, and leaning one way on the question it argues about most. Both are true, and the second does not cancel the first. The work that follows is plain enough.

We need the voices that did not answer because they are barely here to answer: women, resident Pakistanis, Indian Muslims, anyone from below the forward castes. A bridge with traffic in one direction is half a bridge. We have spent the season defending the bridge, and we still do. The survey only tells us, without flattery, who is standing on it, and who is not.

Traffic figures are third-party estimates for May 2026 and are approximate. Survey figures are drawn from thirty responses.

Hey folks, this will be my first article on Brown Pundits. Hope you guys enjoy it! Any recommendations regarding future topics, books, or just critique on the article itself will be greatly appreciated!

Tilak Devasher is a former Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat Government of India. He is now known as a prolifically researcher on Pakistan in India. 10 years ago he began his scholarly journey with Pakistan: Courting the Abyss. As I was going through the book I wished there was a 10 year retrospective on his work which would help us determine how well his work has held with time. So, I’ve decided to undertake that task myself.

I will largely stray away from the sections involving historiography as that is not where my expertise lies. I will instead look to compare the numbers provided in the literature in order to determine the accuracy of the trajectories being prescribed in the book. Therefore, I will not be looking into the Ideology of Pakistan (Nazaria-i-Pakistan), The Muslim League or the Pakistan Movement. Due to this reason I will also not be commenting the origins of the Balochistan insurgency, or other provincial issues based on history.

The Army

The most stark feature of the army is the overrepresentation of Punjabis in the rank of its officers while its underrepresentation in the ranks of its troops. Along with the rising radicalism seen within not just the troops but among the officers as well. It would be unthinkable for the army chief of the nation to have prided himself on memorizing the quran just a few decades ago.

Shuja Nawaz notes a decline in the percentage of representation of soldiers from Punjab, between 1990 and 2005, from 63.86 per cent to 43.33 per cent, but that of the officers rising from 66.46 to 66.93 per cent. Within Punjab there was a shift to the more populous and emerging urban centres of central and even southern Punjab. These bigger cities and towns were also the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism, associated with the petit bourgeoisie. [1]

The Rise of Radicalism

An aspect of Pakistani radicalism on display is the differences between the Shia, and the Sunni (Deobandi). There has been spate of attacks on Shias by Sunnis in Pakistan most recent of which can be considered the bombing of a Mosque in Islamabad which killed at least 30 people an injured more than 169. These sentiments seem to be encouraged by a plurality of Muslims who believe that Shia are non-Muslims.

Ominously, a 2012 Pew Global Survey showed that 41 per cent of the respondents in Pakistan believed that Shias were non-Muslim. As sectarianism takes deeper roots, the question of what is true Islam has taken on greater salience. Since Shias are seen as diverging from mainstream (Sunni) Islam, their killing seems to attract less sympathy, adding to the impunity of the killers.

Madrasas

Madrasas pose several challenges. First, according to Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, ‘90 per cent of madrasas had no connection to terrorism, based on intelligence reports received’.[3] On another occasion he was at pains to point out that his government was not painting all seminaries with the same brush; he said that ‘around 10 per cent of madaris were involved in terror activities’.[4] This would imply that 10 per cent of the madrasas, where anywhere between 150,000 and 300,000 students study (estimates vary hugely about the total number of students studying in madrasas) could be potential terrorists. Even if 1 per cent of them were to become suicide bombers, there could well be around 3,000 potential suicide bombers waiting to blow themselves up. Even if they do not blow themselves up, the limited education they have received would make them dysfunctional members of society, prone to being incited to violence.

Madrasas are a direct consequence of a state lacking capacity to educate all its youth. Because of which many will flock to madrasas which are unqualified, often unregistered and incapable of handling a modern curriculum. The reality also is that due to radical madrasas going out of their way to avoid any kind of registration we have no idea how many madrasas are operating in Pakistan. According to estimates from a decade ago there are at least 35,000 Madrasas in total operating in Pakistan with around 26000 being registered serving around 2-3 million children.

In 2014, according to the interior ministry, there were at least 22,052 registered madrasas in Pakistan, but there was no record of the unregistered ones. According to a July 2015 report titled ‘The Madrassa Conundrum — The state of religious education in Pakistan’, the number of madrasas in Pakistan had crossed 35,000.[5]

However, the only contestation to the awfulness of the Madrasa system is that vast majority of violent terrorists come out of the public schooling system with little to no exposure to the Madrasa system. However, that would ignore the fact that less than 10% of Pakistan’s children are enrolled in Madrasas. Meaning there is a 4 times overrepresentation of Madrasa graduates in terrorism according to Christine Fair.

Christine Fair, for example, noted that while madrasas proved to be a hotbed for disseminating ideology, they were not a major source of militant recruitment. Of the 141 cases studied by her, less than a quarter, thirty-three of 141 ever attended theological schools. Of those thirty-three madrasa products, twenty-seven attended a madrasa for four or fewer years, and most also attended public schools. In contrast, the remaining eighty-two were well educated by Pakistani standards, at least a matriculate.6 Another survey of ten major jihadi groups revealed that of the over 15,000 people from Punjab who died in Afghanistan and Kashmir only 40 per cent had actually studied in madrasas.

Terrorism

Pakistan would do well to refer to the 2008 study of the Rand Corporation of 648 terrorist groups existing between 1968 and 2006. The study found that military operations resulted in the elimination of terrorist groups only in seven cases whereas 40 per cent of the groups were crushed through police and intelligence work and 43 per cent renounced militancy by joining political parties. Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups. While it acknowledged the importance of hard force, especially against large and well-organized groups, it also stressed a range of policy instruments including policing and intelligence networks.7 This element is largely absent in Pakistan.

The rise of Terrorism in Pakistan has been its most apparent feature in the recent past. The book correctly identifies the TTP as being a large issue in terrorism in the KPK. However, the book could’ve never expected the quantum of increases now visible across Pakistan because of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Regardless the end to terrorism doesn’t seem to be in the cards in short-term as there has been no acknowledgement of the detriments of using non-state actors as state policy in Pakistan.

However, stopping the use of such elements as instruments of state policy will only be the start. It will have to be followed up by dismantling the infrastructure of jihad – the madrasa network, the training camps – and provision of jobs, after a period of re-educating the madrasa graduates and changing the mindset in government schools. This would mean massive investment in industry and agriculture to create jobs and in education to provide modern education. Pakistan would have to build a counter-narrative to join the battle against the Islamic hardliners and present a viable alternative. Unfortunately, Pakistan has yet to acknowledge, let alone deal with, the ideology of hatred and militancy that has been cultivated as state policy for over four decades. Given that for decades the Pakistan has viewed jihadis as an instrument of state policy against India, it will be extremely difficult to change that policy in the immediate future, or even medium term. With terrorism continuing to fester internally, Pakistan’s slide on the slippery road towards the abyss will hasten in the years to come.

WEEP Analysis

Water:

The availability of water is changing due to climate change, change in rainfall pattern, melting of glaciers, etc., as borne out by the trends of water availability. A statistical comparison of surface water availability between the last thirty and ten years points towards declining water flows. While average flows for the years 1978 to 2008 equal 140 MAF, the same for 1998–2008 is 128.52 MAF. In years without super floods (four out of five years), average flows have declined from 135.6 MAF during 1978–2008 to 123 MAF during 1998–2008. The highest river inflow in the last three decades was 172.10 MAF in 1977–78; the highest inflow since 1998 has been 152.69 MAF in 2006–07.8

The book doesn’t go into any details regarding the Indus Waters Treaty which has now been put into abeyance. I tend to agree with it on that fact, IWT remains only a minor issue for Pakistan. The real problem lies on the rapidly rising population which will inevitably mean water scarcity for most of its citizenry. My views on the IWT and the water situation in Pakistan is that it will be another drain on the foreign exchange reserves of the nation as imported grain, and produce will work to substitute the lack of water in the nation by importing it through goods which Pakistan will no longer be able to be self-sufficient on in the future. These ideas are better detailed in a substack article on virtual water.

However, this will inevitably mean a shift away from crops like sugarcane, rice, and a shift towards cash crops which demand a greater value in the international market which can be used to subsidize the inevitable grain imports. It would unironically mean Pakistan having to move away from a halal diet to a satvik diet for the sake of maintaining their foreign exchange reserves.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) measures the pressure on national water resources by calculating water withdrawal as a percentage of total renewable water resources (TRWR). Stresses are considered high if the TRWR value is above 25 per cent. Pakistan’s water pressure amounts to a staggering 74 per cent. This pressure is exorbitant even compared with neighbouring high-pressured countries, including India at 34 per cent and Afghanistan at 31 per cent.[9]

Education:

In absolute terms, half of the country’s out-of-school children – about 52 per cent – live in Punjab, 25 per cent in Sindh, 10 per cent in KPK, 7 per cent in Balochistan, and six per cent in other parts. In terms of proportion, Balochistan and Sindh are home to the highest proportion of out-of-school children. As many as 66 per cent of children in Balochistan and 51 per cent in Sindh are out of school, followed by Punjab and KPK with 47 per cent and 34 per cent out-of-school children respectively. Speaking in Quetta recently, the adviser to the Balochistan chief minister Sardar Raza Barrech said that 1.6 million children were out of school in the province, two-thirds of whom were girls.10

The Education situation in Pakistan is so grim that outside of Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa it has no competition in youth literacy numbers. When the next generations of India, Bangladesh and Nepal will have almost 95% literacy rates, Pakistani Punjab doesn’t even reach 90%. Meaning even regional backwaters like Sylhet in Bangladesh are more literate than Pakistan’s most literate province.

Economy:

There are many grim statistics regarding Pakistan however, I want to remind everyone that even fundamentalist militaristic juntas in other parts of the world have better track records of economic management than Pakistan. The issues Pakistan faces are uniquely awful in that regard. In an already lengthy review if I could bring your attention to a specific set of paragraphs it would be the impact that being a security state has brought to Pakistan and the horrid future that holds for it if it remains determined on the trajectory towards becoming a ‘hard state’.

During its first three decades, Pakistan was a ‘development state’, wherein the state agenda pursued by all governments – civilian and military – was economic development. This period was marked by large-scale asset creation (dams, irrigation systems, highways, power plants, industrial complexes, factories, etc.). The ‘security state’ replaced the ‘development state’ in 1977 as a result of which economic development ceased to be the primary agenda of the state. The period was marked by a failure to invest in additional capital formation as well as lack of replacement investment in economic assets created earlier. Brief attempts to revive the ‘development state’ it in 1990s proved futile.11

This is proved statistically by the fact that during the 1970s, the real rate of growth of development expenditure was 21 per cent per annum and the rate of growth of defence expenditure was 2 per cent. During the 1980s, the rate of growth of development expenditure crashed sevenfold to 3 per cent and the rate of growth of defence expenditure escalated almost fivefold to 9 per cent. As a percentage of GDP, development expenditure has been falling from 9 per cent in the 1970s to 7.3 per cent in the 1980s to 4.7 per cent in the 1990s and to 3.5 per cent in the first decade of the millennium. Currently it is 3.2 per cent.

Population:

During the period, 1971–2015, around 8.77 million Pakistanis proceeded abroad for employment through the Bureau of Emigration. The main concentration of overseas Pakistanis was in the Middle East (49 per cent), Europe (28.2 per cent) and the United States of America (16 per cent). Manpower export continues to show an upward trend from 0.622 million in 2013 to 0.752 million in 2014 and 0.946 million in 2015. However, around half of the migrant workers are illiterate and unskilled workers and only 1.76 per cent workers are doing white-collar jobs. Among the skilled workers, drivers are in the highest number, followed by masons, carpenters and tailors.12

Many Pakistanis seem to talk about the ‘extinction-level birth rates’ of many Indian states in this forum. However, they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the demographic dividend. The demographic dividend only arises as a result of decline in birth rates which allows for the population to be able to afford higher impact consumption goods like a better car, air conditioning, etc which simulate the local economy. Pakistan hasn’t even gotten started with its demographic dividend as its birth rates remain sky high meaning most of its population will be unable to afford the rates of consumption necessary to stimulate the economy. It is likely that Pakistan won’t enter its demographic dividend until 2050 alongside most of Africa. India itself has only entered the demographic dividend after 2013.13

The other problem with an unrealized demographic dividend is that an unproductive population would pose huge pressures on resources like food, water and energy. A country that was near to being self-sufficient in food in the early 1980s has a food security issue today largely due to increased population. As noted earlier, agriculture accounts for about 20 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP and employs 60 per cent of its labour while 70 per cent of export revenue stems from agriculture. A decline in water availability would impact on food production at a time when the population is increasing, creating multiple crises. And the availability of water is declining and is below the 1,000 m³ /year per capita benchmark.

Conclusion:

Pakistan: Courting the Abyss remains a great read to gain some amount of background on the various elements of the multi-crisis Pakistan finds itself in. Most of the issues detailed in the book have either exacerbated or maintain their significance. The only issue with the book is that it is rather lengthy and goes into excessive detail regarding each topic which may be too much for many casual readers. Even I had to plumb through the depths of many articles to fairly evaluate this book according to present sources.

TL;DR If you wish to understand the basic history, ideology, economy, water management, education, foreign policy, and future of Pakistan in a single book then this is the book for you.

P.S. Thanks for reading the article. If you’ve had the chance to read all my commentary on this book please recommend me some other books on similar topics. I would welcome any opposing perspectives on the matter.

Sources:

[1] Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, Karachi: OUP, 2008, pp. 570–71.

[2] Pervez Hoodbhoy, ‘Healing our sectarian divide’, Dawn, 21 February 2015.

[3] Nisar Ali, ‘Sympathisers, Supporters of Terrorists Live Among Us’, Dawn, 21 December 2014.

[4] ‘Madressah project: From reform to a registration drive’, Dawn, 29 December 2015.

[5] ‘Report says over 35,000 madrassas operating in Pakistan’, Pakistan Today, 31 July 2015.

[6] Cited in Hasan Mansoor, ‘Report on state of madressahs in Pakistan launched’, Dawn, 31 July 2015.

[7] Cited in Umar Cheema, ‘Not military but police-agencies cooperation needed to fix terrorists’, The News, 10 January 2015.

[8] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Water Management under Constraints: The Need for a Paradigm Shift’, in Michael Kugelman and Robert M. Hathaway (eds), op. cit., p. 48.

[9] FAO, AQUASTAT database, 2013, cited in Daanish Mustafa, Majed Akhter, and Natalie Nasrallah (eds), op. cit, p. 6.

[10] ‘Education crisis’, editorial, , 19 December 2015.

[11] Kaiser Bengali, ‘Proposed Agenda for Sustained Economic Revival’, Karachi: Social Policy and Development Centre, September 2013.

[12] Economic Survey 2015–16. Ministry of Finance, Government of Pakistan.

[13]Steven Brakman & Tristan Kohl & Charles van Marrewijk, 2024. “Demography and Income in the 21st Century: A Long-Run Perspective,” CESifo Working Paper Series 11108, CESifo.

One of my guilty pleasures is that I read police procedurals to relax. Though they are certainly not high art, these novels are paradoxically comforting– despite the violence they contain– since the reader knows that the mystery will be solved in the end. This perhaps explains why detective stories–of which police procedurals are a subgenre– continue to be one of the most popular literary genres. Agatha Christie, for example, is one of the world’s bestselling authors.

Sometime during the pandemic, I discovered Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano mysteries. At a time when we were all stuck at home, these novels allowed me to travel vicariously to Sicily. The books are full of local color. In particular–since Inspector Montalbano is a gourmand– they are full of descriptions of local cuisine.

The series often covers the connections between crime and politics–the Mafia is often involved in the plots. In a 2012 interview with The Guardian, Camilleri spoke about how he combined the detective novel with social commentary. He said: “In many crime novels, the events seem completely detached from the economic, political and social context in which they occur… In my books, I deliberately decided to smuggle into a detective novel a critical commentary on my times. This also allowed me to show the progression and evolution in the character of Montalbano”.

The books do have some weaknesses. While recently re-reading them, I was struck by the relative lack of female characters. Montalbano doesn’t have any female colleagues who assist him with his investigations. This is a major difference between these books and Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti novels for example–though even in the Brunetti books the main female colleague is a secretary. Many of the female characters who do appear are depicted in a sexualized manner. The most prominent female character is Montalbano’s longtime girlfriend Livia who mostly fights with him and serves as a love interest. This lack of female characters perhaps reflects the male bias of the police procedural genre.

Another weakness of the books is that the endings sometimes seem abrupt. Unlike Agatha Christie’s novels where the clues are left in a meticulous manner and the reader can often go back after finishing the novel and see how the solution was obvious, the Montalbano novels often turn on things suddenly falling in place for Montalbano. At least I couldn’t often see how he came to the particular conclusion he did.

I must also credit Stephen Sartarelli who has translated all the novels into English. The novels are very readable in English. Sartarelli particularly does an excellent job at helping the reader distinguish between those characters speaking in standard Italian and those speaking in Sicilian dialect.

In conclusion, I would highly recommend the Inspector Montalbano mysteries to those seeking an entertaining read which will also help them to learn about the social and political background of Sicily. These novels do for Sicily what the Guido Brunetti novels do for Venice.

We are travelling, but South Indians, Tamilians?, are crushing it at chess. Praggnanandhaa took Norway Chess in Oslo this week with four straight classical wins to close, past Wesley So and over Gukesh on the way.

Which confirms the theory we have been quipping all trip: India, that is Bharat, owns the letter C. Chess, plainly. Cricket, obviously. Cuisine, beyond dispute. Culture, increasingly. Conversation, certainly (Desis are loud and loquacious). Caste, come to think of it..

However there is one C that has curdled: Cinema.

We caught the otherwise excellent Vadh 2 on the road. One scene was so gratuitously disturbing that we can’t shake it out of our minds.

Since Sacred Games, the sex and gore on Netflix India have not been there to serve a story. They are there to stimulate, and the audience being titillated are India’s masses. A young, idle, frustrated population is easiest to hold with sensation, so that is what is fed. This is not film-making. It is sedation at scale, and a restless country kept watching is silenced from increasing inequity (the largess of the Oligarchics) but perhaps deepening in rage (the constant ire at minorities)?

Ps: The Commentariat may also enjoy our newsletter piece on Mission Chandrayaan (Aug’23) witten prior to our re-engagement with BP, which we essentially inaugurated with Telugu being the Italian of the East (Sep’24).

The Newsletter and BP both started to kick off at roughly the same time; we decided to focus on BP since Substack is full of individual Auteurs but BP has a very venerable community, which we wanted to honour. The survey results are trickling through but what is astonishing is how sticky readers have been over this long decade and a half (BP will be 16 years in December; probably the oldest continuing Brown Blog on the internet).

Pps: Last call on the survey before it closes tomorrow.

Look closely and you may “see” what we have done throughout this post 🙂

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Budget season is here. Everyone is presenting their two cents on the way out of the IMF’s vicious trap (with the latest iteration imposing 105 compliance requirements, including 75 ‘structural conditionalities’), solutions to kill all tax ills, a panacea for the power sector miscarriages, a lethal shovel for the trade deficit serpent, development-centric economic prescriptions to counter pro-cyclical meandering and whatnot.

And thanks to ChatGPT and Google NotebookLM, Facebook and LinkedIn are brimming with macroeconomic commentaries and infographics. Resplendent seminars are being organised, with the same slides but for the new fiscal year, to gauge the impending behemoth. Newspapers, especially oped sections, are the sweet spot for policymakers and even ex-ministers. One may wonder where the magical healing potion was when they were orchestrating the national financial (mis)management. Maybe it is only after defenestration that one gets hold of the knowledge that the job required in the first place.

The typical approach in the prevailing discourse is to perform horizontal and vertical analyses. The former is a trend analysis; for instance, since 2007-08, current and development expenditures of our governments have increased by 1007 per cent and 937 per cent, respectively. The latter works by dividing a certain expenditure, let’s say military expense, by the total budget; this works as a classifier, with an ideological baggage, either accepting or rejecting the line item. And then, the cliche sermon ends with ‘the way forward’, presenting obvious things: cut tax rates, grow the tax base, cut current expenditure, boost development expenditure, rationalise subsidies, produce more, import less, and so on.

At the moment, I am sick and tired of these mantras. And it’s not that I am a sadist who wants Pakistan to fail economically. Rather, what irks is simple: if we know the deliverance already, why are we not implementing it? Either those in power don’t read newspapers or the roadmaps, which are often presented by think tanks to incumbent ministers by hand, or don’t scroll through social media, which of course is almost impossible in this day and age – or they are well versed in all this, but they don’t want to follow it due to the absence of incentives for such tiring endeavours.

Then, what we should focus on, rather than debating constantly sans dialogue, is to, somehow, cure the infamous phenomena of elite capture, which, according to PIDE, works both as a situation in which the elites shape development processes according to their own priorities and as a process in which the powerful elites skim resources intended for the bottom and define policies in a way that protects their own interests. This translates into the financial morass reflected in our budgets and reports, and a development deficit that is borne with excruciating pain by paupers.

Our economy revolves around rents and rent-seekers; this is a colonial way of governance, institutionalised through bureaucratic controls, legal frameworks and economic policies designed to serve colonial interests. Unfortunately, even today, this remains the modus operandi of our governments. Some features of the prevailing economic edifice include: regulatory capture and political control: policy configured by powerful groups who sustain discretionary influence over institutions and economic rules; rent-seeking and distorted incentives: access-based gains dominate, making lobbying and connections more rewarding than productivity; selective taxation: offering exemptions, evasions, and ineffective rates; trade protection and favourable prices: subsidies that do not promote efficiency and instead sustain protected sectors through repeated support.

This involves, on the one hand, favourable pricing formulas, strong protective barriers and conditions that allow cartels and monopolies to operate easily, and, on the other hand, convenient access to cheaper inputs; and debt dependence and property-led accumulation: external financing smooths the BOP crises while domestic wealth concentrates in land and low-productivity assets rather than productive investment.

Now, one may assess exactly how the hackneyed roadmaps fix this, ad capite ad calcem. In the short run, because of lender-imposed fiscal austerity, numbers may improve, but the very economic structure – the incentive structure that promotes the capture of capital (economic, political, cultural) by those in positions of authority – remains the same. And so, this status quo will inevitably lead to social inequity, laggard governance, widespread corruption, the proliferation of patronage networks and the limitation of mobility of the marginalised, again and again.

Lastly, considering the foregoing, some reflections are indispensable: what exactly is the point of fudging the figures, visualising infographics, commencing dazzling seminars and writing all these commentaries, opeds and reports without questioning the very fundamental axis of the political economy? Is there any foundational rethinking of economics year on year, apart from the updated numbers? Does it make sense to exude analyses to those who have permanent employees, graduated from top economic schools, and who, unequivocally, don’t care?

Are we really that stupid to assume that a leopard will change its spots while we continue to feed it?

Since there has been some recent discussion of Hyderabad Deccan here, I am sharing this book review from DAWN of Arslan Athar’s debut novel Forty Days of Mourning. 

Note: Like everyone else these days, Arslan also has a Substack.   He is a Lahore-based writer. 

Hyderabad Deccan is not merely a setting in this novel. It is a living, breathing presence that shapes the people who inhabit it and the events that unfold. Once a princely state rich in terms of material wealth and cultural plurality, Hyderabad carried a distinct identity that rarely finds adequate representation in narratives of colonial India. Discussions around the British Raj and Partition often reduce history to binaries, and Hyderabad’s nuanced past is frequently overlooked. Athar’s novel resists this erasure with care and precision.

And:

As pressure from the newly formed Indian state increases, Hyderabad’s fragile independence begins to crack. The story follows this slow unravelling, moving from hope and denial to violence, loss and reckoning, ending with the state’s forced integration and the collective grief of a world that disappears almost overnight.

As the wife of a high-ranking army officer, Saleema moves through the city’s elite circles, aware of every whisper of political tension, every shifting alliance. But as the Nizam’s Hyderabad faces the inevitability of annexation, Saleema realises that neither status nor cunning can fully shield her, and the choices she makes ripple through both her personal life and the crumbling world around her.

In an interview with newinbooks.com, Athar notes:

My father’s family is originally from Hyderabad Deccan. However, at the time of the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent and the subsequent annexation of the Princely State of Hyderabad, the family moved. In their new home, Pakistan, they never really talked about that time of turmoil. I only found out about it because of an assignment, and learning about the annexation became the impetus for this novel. From all the research about the time, the character of Saleema was born, and the story blossomed from there!