Brown Pundits

Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum

X.T.M — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:00:15 +0000

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 He was born on 3 January 1959. His author box on this blog called him “3/4ths Sri Lankan (Jaffna) Tamil, 1/8th Sinhalese and 1/8th Irish; a proper mutt.” His father’s people were Jaffna Tamils who had been Catholic under the Portuguese, Hindu again after them, and Methodist and Anglican from around 1850, when his great-grandfather converted and took the American mission name Barr. They were administrators and translators to the British, and poets and writers in Tamil and English. His grandfather’s sister, he told us, was the first female Tamil novelist of modern times. When Roar Media profiled the Jaffna Tamils with English names in 2023, it called him an eco-tourism entrepreneur and quoted him: “all the Protestant Christian Tamils are related or connected.” His mother’s side was Sinhalese and Irish from the deep south, where his grandfather, a government surveyor, had married in the early 1900s; Anglican, then Assemblies of God in the 1940s, they built the first Evangelical church in the South. His middle name was Anukkranayagam. He admitted he was never sure of the spelling. His Career He was raised Evangelical, with Bible study until he was about 13, then agnostic, then atheist. He was schooled in Sinhala and took a degree in chemistry and physics in Sri Lanka. In 1988 he went to America on a student visa and stayed 25 years, three H1Bs later. He studied oceanography at Stony Brook and did climate research at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1994 to 1998; ResearchGate lists twelve papers, mostly on deep convective clouds over the Tropical Western Pacific. Then Wall Street. From 1998 he was a meteorologist at a weather-derivatives firm on Exchange Place, building the Monte Carlo risk models the rating agencies wanted, and from 2001 to 2009 he built fixed-income and derivatives systems for firms including Genworth, MBIA and the Federal Home Loan Banks. He lived on Staten Island. He wrote up the Harlem of the mid-1990s for us, and Millie Jackson. A former colleague in New Jersey, asked years later on a motor-oil forum for the most interesting name of anyone he had met, gave Sereno’s. Just Sri Lankan In 2012 he went home, and stayed a Sri Lankan citizen, “no dual“, as he put it. He ran Wilpattu House at Eluwamkulam, a small budget guest house on the edge of the national park, and farmed what he could keep from the elephants, monkeys and wild boar. He was a widower and had no children. In November 2025 he wrote “Sri Kumari my Late Partner“; it drew 22 comments, and it was poignant. He told us he had survived alcoholism when many of his friends were dead by 30 or 40, and that he had no regrets about life. He was, in his own words, “5’4″ and a name longer than my height.” He called himself an atheist from his teens, and on 6 September his family buried him under Romans 8:38-39 at Kapuwatte Cemetery, after a service in Kandana.

He argued the way he had worked, from the record. A comment would open with a Time report from Bandung in 1955, a Roar Media piece on the Bohras, a pedigree from ceylontamils.com or an Atlantic article on polyandry, and then he would tell you how it looked from where he sat. His first post came out of a thread. In March 2018 he mentioned in passing that polyandry “was a prevalent custom in the Kandyan kingdom till the 1800’s” and lasted in the deep hinterland into the 1950s, added “Probably do my first post on the societal structure that supported those customs,” and two days later did. He put Sri Lanka’s wars down to education outrunning jobs, and said so to anyone who reached for blood or creed. “Free education for all and raised expectations. Literacy comes with a price.” A population under two million in 1900 was fifteen million by 1970; Sinhala Only in 1956 was the first crack; the JVP risings of 1971 and 1987 to 1989 were educated rural Sinhalese youth with no jobs; Tamil nationalism ran in parallel, and the LTTE “took it many steps further, they kicked out the Muslims (and Sinhalese) from the ‘homelands’.” When a commenter offered ethnocentrism as the answer, he sent him back to the numbers. He did not think it would happen again; Sri Lanka was ageing. His worry for the future was “invasion, economic or otherwise by India.” On caste he was blunt. “There isnt even one Brahmin family of note in Sri Lanka, in politics, business or academics.” Jaffna was Vellala rule, “not just Vellala but middle/upper middle class Vellala. Even now all MPs are Vellala,” and the LTTE, “to give them credit,” had set out to erase caste. On Sinhalese Buddhism he was drier still: they pay homage to the Buddha, “then they go next door and pray to a ‘Hindu‘ god and ask for the Mercedes Benz,” Ganesh, Kali, Mariamman and Aiyanar, never Siva or Vishnu. “I think the Sinhalese draw the line in praying for a Lingam.” On India he spoke for the island. “For the avg Sri Lankan all Indians are the same; 1 billion breathing down our neck of 20 million.” He asked what separated Chinese mercantile imperialism from the Indian kind. When Vikram wrote that Sri Lanka had cut itself off from Gujarati enterprise, Sereno answered that he sounded like “the typical North/Central Indians (and Europeans) who think us black Madarassi Jungle Bunnies cant manage ourselves,” then invited him to visit: “we are friendly peoples and love your money. As the Tamils say, fish spoils after a day or two, so dont over stay your welcome.” On the West he had one long view. “Europe exported its poor (and want to be rich) into the Americas, Africa, Australia and Asia… Now the tide has reversed… Can they stop it. I doubt it. History repeats or rhymes.” His most commented post was on the Philippines, three million dead under the Americans; others were on the loot in the British Museum, on Keenie Meenie and the British mercenaries in Sri Lanka, and, this February, “Israel: Ongoing Genocide now Concentration Camps.” He was anti-colonial with a mission name, an Evangelical childhood, a Western science and an American career, and he never pretended any of it could be scraped off. He was unapologetic about his origins, his life and his choices and he was searingly honest. He once wrote to me on Facebook about the Arya Chakravartis of Jaffna:

The Jaffna Tamil Kings may have self styled themselves as Arya. However, I doubt that they were direct male descendants of Arya. i.e. Having the Y-DNA R1a. Why not Aryan; because I am a direct male descendant of the original line, thru Singai Pararasasegaram’s son Paranirupasingham… Sometime back when I first got my DNA tested had a Y-DNA plus 13 marker match… Turned out we shared a common male ancestor, 6 generations removed… So above establishes it was j2b2 and not R1a at least post 17th Century. But then who knows maybe the original Arya Chakravartis were R1a Aryan. Somewhere along the line a Mahesi/Queen had a yen for black Sudra j2b2. You know the American adage, “Once you go black, you dont go back”… I kind of like Sankili I, he bumped off 600 Catholics of Mannar, killed his father and two brothers.

A royal pedigree, a lab result, an American bar joke and a soft spot for a sixteenth-century fratricide, in one message. He wrote about music too: Marvin Gaye twice, James Brown and Bootsy Collins, Baila and Bi Kidude, papare, Sufi music from Zanzibar and Jordan, Afro-Cuban music in America, the pre-Buddhist drumming of the south. He was well-respected even though his opinions could be very controversial but he will be missed. May his Soul ascend to the Highest Heaven and find solace in the Afterlife. Ya Bahá’u’l-Abhá Sereno (Sbarrkum as I will remember him) would have raised an eyebrow at my religious expression of the Hidden Words but I’ll say it anyway in his honour: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?” Rest in peace, dearest Sereno.

Rest in Peace Dear Sereno

X.T.M — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:00:38 +0000

In Memoriam

Why India will not lose her soul to missionaries

X.T.M — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 04:56:33 +0000

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

https://www.brownpundits.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/WhatsApp-Video-2026-09-04-at-23.57.17.mp4

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?

NDG wrote that Dharma is in recession across Asia because its values cannot cope with the zero-sum ideology of the Abrahamic faiths. Dharma is “an operating system that hasn’t figured out there is a virus“. In his telling, Korean megachurches are eating Fiji, while their missionaries are converting the poor of Nepal, Sikkim and the North East, and Singapore is ever closer to a Christian plurality.

However it feels that the real catalyst in Asia is modernity, not Christianity, and that the young of Singapore and Seoul are leaving churches faster than any missionary can fill them. Indo mentioned that conversion is easy. Every life has a night of anguish, and the missionary is there that night with tea and a tithe. However conversion is never just an individual context but a societal one.

Who makes a society

Headcount alone does not make a society. Money, power, fame and taste make it, and all four sit with a small number of people drawn from the same few strata. The elite is whoever controls the school, the language of advancement, the marriage market and the standard of taste, because those four are how a society reproduces itself in the next generation. In India that band has always been narrow.

Partitioning the Elites

Partition was, at the top, a partition of elites. Punjab was a mass exchange, and its wound belongs to everyone. But Pakistan’s state culture was written by a migrating class: the Urdu-speaking salariat of the United Provinces and Bihar, who owned no land in the new country and gave it Urdu and an ideology instead, until the Punjabi-dominated army and civil service took the state off them, a takeover complete by 1958. The elite that stayed made India, and the country still runs on the tastes of that class, its English, its institutions, its newspapers, its idea of what an educated person looks like.

The Normans

As mentioned in the discussion on Aryan genetics, the Normans ruled England in French for three centuries; the peasants kept English and took the vocabulary. A preprint this April sequenced 78 people from a Surrey churchyard in use from the ninth century to the thirteenth and found no genetic break across 1066: the elite was replaced, the population was not, and the culture changed anyway. The Turks ruled Delhi in Persian for longer; Hindustani absorbed the words and kept its own grammar. The Mongols, who ran the largest land empire ever assembled, ended up praying to the gods of the people they conquered: Allah in Persia, the Buddha of Tibet in Mongolia. The direction of cultural flow is set by whoever holds the standard of what is beautiful and correct, and a warlord on a horse is not that person.

Taste is the hardest currency

Aesthetics track class. What an elite finds beautiful becomes what the society finds beautiful, and beauty is where religion lives day to day: the music, the dress at a wedding, the food at a funeral, the calendar. A convert does not step out of any of it. An Indian baptised on Sunday still eats with his cousins on Diwali, still marries inside his jati more often than not. The conversion is real to him. It is invisible to the society, because the milieu did not convert with him.

Conversion en masse

Conversion changes a society in one of two ways. Either the milieu converts as a block, which is mass conversion and is nowadays rare, or the missionary is the person who builds the elite. Spain did the second in the Philippines. It ran the islands through the friars for three centuries, and the friar’s school was where the native elite was remade. Tagalog survived and Spanish did not, but Catholicism became the society because it had first become the society’s elite. The same mechanism explains the three Indian states where Christianity became the majority, Nagaland, Mizoram and Meghalaya, hill societies where the mission school was the first school and so produced the first modern elite.

Kerala

Kerala is the other case, and it is the domestication case: the Syrian Christians of Malabar were a landed and trading elite of the coast for a thousand years before any Portuguese missionary arrived, and they hold a niche inside Kerala’s caste order rather than standing outside it. Where an elite already stood, the missionary knocked for two centuries and the door stayed shut.

The Census

India’s Christians were 2.3 percent of the population at the 2011 census, and the share has never left the twos in any census since 1951. Seven decades of missionary work, and the line is flat.

Nagaland

Historically masses can convert first and manufacture their own elite later. A movement that converts a district, breeds, builds its own schools and marries its own graduates will produce an elite within a century. That is the Naga story in miniature. But it needs prestige institutions at scale, not baptisms, and India has shown no takeoff anywhere outside the hills. That line has held for seventy years

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka points the other way, to Dharmification. The Portuguese, Dutch and British made a Christian coastal elite, and Christians were 10 percent of the island in 1891. The 2024 census has them at 6.9 percent. What happened in between was an elite changing its badge. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was born into an Anglican family, converted to Buddhism, and rode Sinhala Buddhist nationalism to the premiership in 1956. When the prime minister’s own conversion runs towards the majority religion, the missionaries’ century is over. Empire made a Christian elite; the revival replaced it, and the numbers followed the elite down.

Korea

Christianity grew there because it attached itself to the elite project of the twentieth century: the mission school, the hospital, the Hangul Bible, and above all resistance to Japan. It was the modernising creed of a nationalist elite. Everywhere Christianity has grown fast, it has ridden an elite project or built one.

And now? The 2025 Hankook Research survey has 51 percent of South Koreans with no religion, 20 percent Protestant, 11 percent Catholic and 16 percent Buddhist, and those shares have barely moved since 2018. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 72 percent have no religion. Half of Korean Catholics are over 60. The fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023, the lowest in the world, and stands at 0.80 after two years of small rebound; in Seoul it is 0.63. The Korean missionary in Sikkim is in danger of ageing out.

58 percent of South Korean Christians say they feel close to Confucianism. Korean society infiltrated the church and rendered it Asiatic.

One of my favourite words comes from Korean, nunchi, the art of “reading a room”. Religions must read their societies, or they wither.

The diaspora shows the same law from the other side. Korean Americans are 59 percent Christian against 32 percent in Korea, because Christians were the ones who emigrated to a Christian country. Their American-born children are split, 47 percent Christian to 45 percent unaffiliated. One generation inside the American milieu and the American pattern takes over. North of the DMZ the same people, under a different elite, are atheist by decree. Same blood and the same language, and three religious settlements, each set by the elite that ruled it.

What is religion

Religion is not a fixed thing that a society holds or loses. Religion is a dynamic force. It may be divinely inspired but it is subject to human forces at the same time, and every organisation that wants to survive its century has to fit the mould of that century. Popular Hinduism did that with Sufi Islam, and subsequently Christianity. Korean Christianity is dancing and duelling with Confucianism as we speak.

The virus is modernity, and it is in the missionaries’ bloodstream too. Seven in ten young Koreans have no religion, and the capital that exports the megachurches has a fertility rate of 0.63. A creed that is losing the under-30s at home will not keep anyone’s soul abroad.

The soul of a country is kept by its elite, and India’s elite is not converting. It is doing what it has always done, setting the standard of taste that everyone else, converts included, has to live inside. I went to a devotional and had an eggless cake slice, and halwa, with the whole room singing out Happy Birthday to Lord Krishna’s name. The prevailing musical traditions were shaped as much by Sultanate and Mughal courts as any temple. It felt timeless because the adaptation was complete. That is the soul of Dharma, and it has nunchi.

Open Thread: Zardari in (self-imposed exile). New Provinces to be made

X.T.M — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:39:48 +0000

So the rumours of Bilawal’s marriage was instead a cover for the family to leave Pakistan.

Pakistan apparently to have a referendum on new provinces regardless.

Parsis, DNA and steppe incursions

Indosaurus — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:25:10 +0000

Well, here is the long promised article. I’ve been meaning to write this for a year, with many disparate bits of data floating around from different subjects in a brain soup. Gratitude to Q, while his purposes are very much misaligned and probably in direct opposition to mine, provided both the impetus and coalescing of the arguments. And of course to X.T.M for the site on which it took place. I’m pretty sure if it weren’t for BP, this wouldn’t have gotten penned.

https://indosaurus.substack.com/p/parsis-matrilineal-dna-and-steppe

May the common Agni deva of the Zoroastrians and Hindus enable them to reclaim the name Aryan from the Nazis, the skinheads, the brotherhoods and all the racist degenerates who have tried to corrupt it.

Quick Review: Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam

Omar Ali — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:16:11 +0000

This was an old review I wrote and is now lost in our archive somewhere, so I decided to repost.

Shahab Ahmed tells us up front that he is not going to answer the question “what is Islam?”. And of course, he does not really do so, but the title (misleadingly) suggests that he will, and in the course of the book, he comes perilously close to trying (and failing) to do so without outright saying he is going to do it. In short, Shahab himself seems confused about what he is trying to achieve here. The book is a description of some (but certainly not all) aspects of Islamic culture as it developed and expanded, especially AFTER the initial Arab phase of empire building. And it is a long argument with various seen and unseen opponents who want to define Islam as some ONE thing. In the course of this argument, Shahab wants to show that Islam was very varied, but he also wants to show that it is not infinitely varied. In the course of an overly long book, he manages to show that Islamicate societies (a term he does not really approve of) had a very wide variety of beliefs and practices, though they also remained anchored within a certain tradition and in continuous argument with particular foundational texts. All of this may be a surprise to extreme puritanical Islamists AND to more or less ignorant anti-Islamists, but should be no surprise at all to anyone else. Why wouldn’t there be a lot of variety? Anyway, if you happen to spend your life arguing with people who have a very monochromatic view of Islam, then you can keep this book handy in order to prove otherwise. It is good for that.

Beyond that, it is a rich compendium of anecdotes (he has read VERY widely and quotes extensively from hundreds of sources) and you will learn a lot about the “Balkans to Bengal complex”, a cultural zone that Shahab Ahmed is particularly fond of and regards as archetypically Islamic. Incidentally, you will also be able to prove to your friends that Islamic history is characterized by an official/theocratic prohibition of alcohol AND a simultaneous cultural fascination and widespread use and even praise of alcohol, complete with social practices that incorporate regular use of alcohol (e.g. in poetry recitals and courtesan dance performances… though this also being a work of apologetics, the “courtesan” part is not highlighted). What you will NOT find is any mention of how the Islamic empire was created in the first place. Military force and politics are almost completely absent from this cultural history of Islamdom. Make of that what you will. But it is worth keeping in mind that the geographic region extending from the Balkans to Bengal did not just magically happen to switch religions, it was conquered…Still, the the book is worth reading if you want to know more about the cultural history of the core-Islamicate region. It is more or less useless as a book of history. And it is somewhere in between when it comes to theology and philosophy.

Overall, this is high class and erudite apologetics, and the anecdotes collected herein will stand the test of time; but I suspect that the postmodern arguments and apologetics will not age well. When the current phase of history has passed, readers will wonder why Shahab Ahmed is wasting their time with convoluted and wordy arguments about how legitimate or illegitimate this or that simple-minded view of Islam actually is. Then again, maybe postmodernism will not fade away as completely as I imagine (or wish for) and future generations will continue to be fascinated by the verbiage that just seems like waste of space to me.

Time will tell.

Post Script: A friend commented that “you cannot expect him to say more than that..” and I am adding my answer to this review:
I certainly expect a good historian (even a “cultural historian” ) to say much more than that! I happen to be reading Tomb’s “The English and their history” at the same time and the difference is night and day. With Tomb’s book you actually get an attempt at describing the English and their history and culture and so on, with systematic, rational and evidence-based theorizing and refutation of theories. Whether you agree with his particular view or not, you get what he is saying and you get what he is arguing against. Much of the time, you get something close to a “full picture”. With Shahab Ahmed, you are in much more scattered territory and big aspects of history are skipped entirely; Worth reading, but less for its argument, more for its varied and interesting bits of information.

Online Safety Protocol Activated

Agni — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:10:55 +0000

Kabir has emailed in stating categorically, that the toxicity is beginning to affect his health.

The Admin team *must* take that seriously.

Accordingly the online Safety Protocol has been reactivated.

There will be no interactions between:

OM-3, RNJ, KK-BB, Indo and Kabir.

We request that unnecessary responses are avoided. All replies to each other will be deleted immediately.

Kabir’s ugly comments on the Open Season thread notwithstanding, this is now a matter of health; that is seriously concerning and an overriding factor in reactivating the precedent.

The BP email is maintained by both the admins so any issues (can be reported directly and privately).

Thank you to everyone for understanding.

Indus Water Treaty Arbitration

X.T.M — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 20:19:29 +0000

FlyDie on South India

X.T.M — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 16:18:34 +0000

FlyDie left some excellent comments on the “Tamil” CMs post. I’m reposting them to increase the sabzi and reduce the masala.

The Nayak inheritance. Why does so much of Tamil Nadu’s elite traces to Telugu country? Vijayanagara’s military system let new men rise, and it minted the Nayaks. After Talikota they carved out autonomous states in Tamil lands as “Vadaka-rajahs” and assimilated over generations. The Thanjavur Marathas kept the pattern going. Ethnicity as the three L’s: Land, Lineage, Language.

Against “colonization.” Pre-colonial empires ran on a shared elite culture. Incoming rulers assimilated and left local custom alone. Krishnadevaraya is remembered above all for a Telugu work on the Tamil saint Andal. Telugu in Carnatic music is no stranger than Braj in Hindustani.

The reading list. Heirs of the Vijayanagara, the Nayaka chapter in The Architecture of Sovereignty, Joseph Martin on Telugu Catholic migration in Madras Presidency, and Cynthia Talbot’s Precolonial India in Practice.

India and China. India accepts foreign rulers without demanding assimilation, but never remakes itself for them. China resists outsiders, then lets them rule for centuries once established. The Yuan are a footnote. The Mughals define India’s monuments.

Kerala, the clingy. Onam began in Madurai. Vijayanagara’s caste consolidation passed Kerala by, and Bhakti arrived late. Nestorius was once a revered saint among its Christians, and the Mappilas follow the Shafi school. An ancient land holds on to what everyone else abandoned, communism included.

Are All Postcolonial Nations Brahmanical Constructs?

X.T.M — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:46:14 +0000

Note: Emotional comments are for the Open Season Thread.

Every postcolonial elite preserves the borders it inherited. That is the reason we live in the world we live in: every succeeding elite has been very keen to preserve the boundaries of its state, and it is never the case, under a postcolonial elite, that nations go back to their original topographies. The map, once drawn, becomes sacred. The question in this title is whether the post-colonials are Brahmanical gatekeepers (I’m aware the Commentariat don’t like the nomenclature but it is particularly apt for an Apex Elite).

I. A Brahmanical construct

Maybe India is also a Brahmanical construct. I am not talking Pakistani propaganda here. Politically sovereignty in India was always more socially permeable than a static reading of caste would imply, and again and again the great empires were seized by men from the middle of the order who then rapidly Sanskritised. The Nandas, who raised the first empire out of Magadha, are sneered at in the Puranas as shudras. Two millennia later Shivaji, a Maratha of cultivator-warrior stock, had to import Gagabhatta from Banaras to certify a Rajput Sisodia genealogy before his coronation could proceed. He took power first and purchased pedigree afterwards.

The higher castes, for their part, rarely had political autonomy. Their dominance was over whatever served as the proto-civil service, the elite registers and the rituals of certification. An enterprising mid-caste individual would burst into the ranks, a phenomenon found throughout the world; Napoleon, a minor Corsican noble, ended by marrying a Habsburg, and would rapidly acquire the patina of elite dominance, one way or the other. And because caste markers are patrilineal, one never inherited caste from one’s mother (Kerala’s matrilineal Nairs, as ever, excepted).

The two famous Brahmin dynasties, Pushyamitra Shunga after the Mauryas and the Peshwas after Shivaji’s heirs, both reached the throne through service’ a general in the one case, hereditary ministers in the other. When Brahmins ruled, the road ran through the secretariat.

So let “Brahmin,” is a short-hand for the record-keeping class, which certifies the winners.

II. The Dravidian other

The Aryan-Dravidian divide would be the most salient cleft of them all, and I have been thinking a lot about the Dravidian other (shielded by the Deccan from the vagaries of conquest). The only Aryans who seemed to have settled south of the Deccan were Brahmins who were invited to Sanskritised the region?

The emergence of the “Open season thread” phenomenon means there is a psychosis in the Aryan civil war.

What is the psychosis that consumes the entire subcontinent? Look at the elevation map. It is, ultimately, the Indo-Gangetic plain; that is what has been cleft, and that is also what does the cleaving with the inexorable Hindu-Muslim. The plain presses outward on everything around it and cannot quite accept that anything around it is its equal.

The geography resists the psychosis. The plain’s power has always projected poorly past its own edges; every northern empire ran aground on the Deccan, and Aurangzeb spent his last quarter-century failing to digest it, dying there in 1707. And beyond the plateau stands the counterweight itself: Dravidian India, with its own classicism and its own kingships, the one civilisational pole the plain could neither absorb nor ignore.

III. Watersheds

In a weird way, partition made no sense whatsoever but also made a lot of geographic sense. Consider what it actually did: Punjab means five waters, and a lawyer who had never before set foot in India took a few weeks to draw a line through all five. It then required the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 to re-partition the rivers, because the boundary had refused to follow them.

The sub-partitions made some sense at all, since East Bengal, of course, always had a very strong identity of its own and Majha Punjab (Lahore-Amristar is the line that runs between river-fed and rain fed Punjab).

One could have really created an Indus-watershed state and a Brahmaputra-watershed state, and these would have been very strong geopolitical constructs in whatever Confederation emerged. That is not what I am here to litigate, because ordinarily, more than language and more than ethnicity, geography is the best definition of state power. The point about a watershed is that a state can expand all the way to the very edges of its ridges, to its own side of the mountains. Mountains, like oceans, make some of the best barriers and boundaries there are, for culture and for politics both. That is why Kerala, in a way, is a very distinct identity from its “parent” Tamil Nadu, except for the Palakkad Gap; the one true breach in the Western Ghats, through which the railway and half the loan-words pass. However Kerala looks to the Arabian Sea while Tamil Nadu hugs the Bay of Bengal, which accounts for very different historical realities (one sees South East Asia, the other receives from the Middle East)

The Grand Cholas ignored watershed logic altogether and took to the sea, Rajendra sending his fleet against Srivijaya in 1025. The Oceanic barrier, it turns out, was also a road towards Hindufication and Tamilicisation of “Indo-China”.

IV. Does the Raj live on?

Q made an interesting point: Indians being upset that “their” empire being lost to them. In a strange way, both India and Pakistan are upper-caste constructs, imperial constructs that wanted to keep as much of the empire as possible.

The caste facts are real: the Congress high command was overwhelmingly twice-born, and the Muslim League was an ashraf project. But the mechanism, as in section one, is the proto-civil service. Hamza Alavi called Pakistan’s makers the salariat, the Muslim salaried and secretarial class conjuring a state in which it would be the elite; the Congress lawyers, for their part, inherited the Raj’s steel frame and never dreamed of melting it down. The Brahmanical construct scales.

Bangladesh in 1971 is the great stress test. It was a subaltern revolt against the inherited imperial structure; it was proof that language can defeat territorial preservation, a movement that began with students dying for Bengali in 1952; and it broke the border precisely because the centre had turned extractive, treating the east as revenue and garrison. It was also intellectually led, and the occupying army knew it; in its final week it hunted down Dhaka’s intellectuals. Armies do not waste their last days on irrelevant men. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, ran the same course as the rest: the English-speaking Ceylonese elite inherited the unitary colonial state intact in 1948 and kept it. Everybody wanted to preserve the postcolonial.

V. The Uncolonised

There are very few nations in the world, with the exception of Iran, Thailand, Japan, China, Turkey, and Ethiopia, which were not colonised by the great powers, and their borders are therefore, for better or for worse, very natural constructs. Test even this list and it sharpens rather than blunts. The pure cases are Japan behind its ocean, Iran behind the Zagros and the Elburz. Thailand survived partly as a diplomatic buffer, shaving off provinces to stay whole; China was carved into concessions without ever being swallowed; Ethiopia’s highlands bought it everything except five years under Italy; Turkey’s present borders were drawn at Lausanne in 1923, an empire cut back to its Anatolian redoubt. Geography gave them better terms than history.

The colonised, by contrast, have been very keen to maintain colonial borders; so keen that they wrote the instinct into law. When the newly free African states met at Cairo in 1964, they pledged to respect the frontiers inherited from their colonisers; uti possidetis, as you possess, so may you continue to possess. The coloniser’s map was received the way a shastra is received, as the text that settles the question.

So: are all postcolonial nations Brahmanical constructs? In function, yes. In every one of them a successor class took an empire it could not have built, kept the mythos and certified its own genealogy (Indonesia and the Majapahit Empire), and deemed themselves a nation.

The borders survived because the elites survived. India and Pakistan are only the clearest case, because there the Elite is old enough to have a name (Sayyid and Brahmin are two sides of the same coin). And beneath every inherited line the older map waits, the ridges and the watersheds, indifferent to the postcolonial Elite that administer the borders above them. Partition cut joint peoples; but it also exposed the shared geography underneath.