I just want to briefly share this recording of Gauhar Jaan singing “Mere Huzraat ne Madeene mein manayi Holi” (My Prophet played Holi in Medina).  This is an example of the syncretic culture of Hindustani music.  A Muslim artist (born Armenian Christian) singing a composition that references the Prophet of God celebrating a Hindu festival.  This is the syncretic culture that has sadly been lost on both sides of the Radcliffe Line.

There is an excellent book on Gauhar Jaan titled My Name is Gauhar Jaan! (2010) by Vikram Sampath.

After the jump, there is another beautiful composition sung by Venkatesh Kumar. This is a thumri in Raga Mishra Kafi entitled “Aaj Khelo Shyam Sang Hori” (Let’s Play  Holi with Shayam (Krishna) today”

Link 1: The Iranian regime account is using the Sun & the Lion Flag.

In this context, Shashi Tharoor’s essay “Civilization States Are Profoundly Illiberal” is well-worth reading in full.  Tharoor is a centrist Indian and can be said to articulate the Congress Party’s position on this topic. 

Civilizational State vs. Nation-State

Google defines “Civilizational state” as one that “defines itself and its identity based on a unique and encompassing civilization, rather than solely on shared ethnicity, language or governance”. Google goes on to note that “ the differing worldviews and values associated with civilizational states could potentially lead to tensions and conflicts with other nations or blocs”. In India’s case, defining itself as a “civilizational state” certainly leads to tensions with Pakistan (and perhaps to a growing extent with Bangladesh).

I believe that this “civilizational state” conception is a belief of the Hindu Right. I agree with the Indian left that the Republic of India is a nation-state that was created on August 15, 1947–exactly at the same moment that Pakistan was created. British India was not a nation-state but a colony. Upon decolonization, parts of the colony went their own way.

Shashi Tharoor– an Indian politician belonging to the Congress party and someone who I would argue is a centrist– argues that the “civilization state” is inherently illiberal. Tharoor writes:

The very concept of a civilization state is profoundly illiberal. It implies that any attempt to introduce “imported” ideas like democracy or human rights must be resisted because they are “foreign” to the civilization in whose name the state is being constructed. The rejection of values (like democracy, civil liberties, minority rights, freedom of the press and so on) that liberalism trumpets as universally desirable is justified on the grounds that a civilization needs political institutions that reflect its own traditions, history and culture. A civilization state is inhospitable territory to religious and ethnic minorities, dissidents and challengers because they are seen as intruders into a civilization to which they do not essentially belong — and which regards what matters to them as alien, and therefore illegitimate.1

A little later in the essay, he goes on:

It is possible to be proud of one’s civilization and honor one’s traditions while striving to ensure that one’s nation upholds the principles and values one deems desirable for oneself and one’s fellow citizens. While do so, the reason I resist the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s attempts to reconstitute India as a civilization state is precisely because such a notion has no place for non-Hindus (some 20% of the country’s population) except as second-class citizens confined to subordinate roles. My idea of an “inclusive India” embraces different languages, religions, regions and ethnicities on an equal basis and emerges from classical liberalism. I can justify it in terms of my civilizational heritage too, but resist the notion of a “civilization state” because its advocates have a narrow and exclusionary idea of what such a state implies.

As Tharoor so eloquently argues, the assumption behind calling India a “civilizational state” is that India belongs to the “Hindu” civilization. This notion is obviously very off-putting for Indian Muslims, Christians and other minority groups. It is not really an issue for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis since we have nation-states of our own. In Pakistan, the general consensus is that our country was created as the homeland of the Muslims of British India. Post the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, this argument also became problematic since the independence of that country (whose population formed the majority of “united” Pakistan) clearly proves that Islam alone was not enough to define national identity. However, while Bangladesh chose to become independent from (West) Pakistan, they didn’t show any desire to merge their country with West Bengal. Thus, one could argue that Bangladeshis see themselves as Bengali Muslims and not simply as Bengalis. The country’s constitution initially declared it to be a secular state but later Islam was introduced as the state religion. Thus, this debate remains a live one in Bangladesh.

Insane.

Great music again.

Honsla Eendhan Badla.

Look at what Mohenjo-daro actually gives us: the Pashupati Seal; three-faced, ithyphallic, seated in yogic posture, surrounded by elephant, tiger, buffalo, rhinoceros. Proto-Shiva. The Mother Goddess figurines. Linga and yoni stones. Pipal veneration. The sacred bull. Every single religious thread runs forward into the living Hindu tradition.

Lord Shiva is still being worshipped. The pipal is still sacred. The ritual logic of the Great Bath still lives in the sacred tank. That is not assertion; that is continuity you can touch.

Pakistan is welcome to construct an “Indus National” identity. But that project requires explaining how a civilisation whose core deity was Proto-Shiva bequeaths itself to a state whose foundational theology requires the repudiation of exactly that. Geography is not continuity. Practice is.

India doesn’t claim Harappa because of lines on a map. She claims it because she never stopped. Four thousand years of unbroken thread; from the Pashupati Seal to the nearest functioning Shiva temple. Pure and simple stratigraphy.

War has no victors.

Interesting screenshots after the jump.

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

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

Bharatstan, indeed.

Commentariat = Saffroniate?

We have been having conversations in the comments recently about the make-up of this blog, who reads it, who comments, what the signal-to-noise ratio looks like, and where we want to take it. These are good conversations to have in the open, so we are having them here.

The honest answer is that Brown Pundits has always been in waves. There are peaks and troughs, surges and dips. We had a significant dip last Fall when the commentariat fractured in a way that took time to recover from. The Saffroniate split, certain voices departed, certain energies dissipated. It happens. Weblogs are living things.

As good as Girmit

What we can say now is that we feel the recovery is real. The commentariat is repopulating. The quality of engagement, when it is good, is as good as it has ever been. Voices like Girmit remind us why we bother. The long-timers who read without commenting remind us that the lurkers are often the most thoughtful of all.

On the question of editorial standards: we have tightened up. We have issued to the commentariat about what we expect. We are not trying to kill the golden goose. Free speech is the oxygen of this place. But there is a difference between free speech and low-signal rage-bait, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The goal is the high-signal phase. We think (hope) we are in it, or entering it.

The Royal “We”

We have also moved from “I” to “we“, not because we have suddenly become a committee, but because the amount of work that goes into running BP deserves that acknowledgement. The editing, the moderating, the writing, the managing of a commentariat that ranges from world-class to occasionally maddening, it is a collective effort even when it does not look like one. The “we” is an honest accounting.

Back to Pakistan.

The Pakistan readership spike almost certainly reflects the post-Pahalgam moment and what followed, Operation Sindoor, the ceasefire, the diplomatic reshuffling. Pakistani readers came to BP, we suspect, because they wanted analysis that was neither Indian nationalist cheerleading nor Pakistani state media spin. Whether we delivered on that is for them to judge.

What it tells us about BP’s position is interesting. We are read across the Subcontinent, across the diaspora, and clearly across the divides that are supposed to make that impossible. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, rather the whole point. The waves will keep coming. We intend to keep surfing them.

One of the interesting things about the Asian countries as they got rich was that they followed a pattern.

0.65-0.75 HDI – Building public infrastructure (metros/bullet trains etc), systems.

0.75-0.85 HDI – Companies becoming global players. Japanese companies in the 80s. Korean in the late 90s-early 2000s. Chinese from the mid 2010s onward.

0.85 HDI+ – Pop culture becomes mainstream. Soft power. Anime/video games in the 90s for Japan. Hallyu in the 2000s for Korea. Chinese video games and C-dramas are also picking up pace now internationally (Will be a deluge by the early 2030s).

India is currently in the first phase (alongside Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines etc).

China is in the second (alongside Malaysia, Thailand).

Japan, South Korea in the third (alongside Taiwan, Hong Kong etc).

Judging by current timelines India enters phase 2 around 2030 and phase 3 around 2050.

But it doesn’t have to be exact and some green shoots can happen before.

Rajamouli’s RRR was very well received globally (Japan as well as the west) and audiences loved the over the top earnest action in a time of crossover saturated mainstream Hollywood movies. It even won an Oscar.

His next project is the one of the most expensive Indian films ever and is getting a lot of traction from international media as well as movie tech companies(Dolby, IMAX).

Here is the official IMAX channel launching the trailer.

Interview with Collider.

The movie seems to have a very interesting premise with a Indiana Jones style globe trotting adventure with time travel shenanigans. I assume judging from the trailer the adventure will take them through the Ramayana as well.

Can be a game changer for Indian cinema and what takes India to the next level. India is already the third biggest box office in the world (behind USA+Canada and China) and the only one who will be capable beside these two to make big budget VFX-heavy epics.

A lot of VFX work is already done in India so this will hold India in good stead in the future (DNEG which does VFX for lots of Hollywood movies like Dune etc is an Indian owned company and is handling the Ramayana movie as well which is another movie getting a big international push).

MILAN at Vyzag

The IRIS Dena had just left Visakhapatnam. It had been India’s guest. Formally invited to MILAN 2026, the International Fleet Review hosted by the Indian Navy, attended by 86 ships from 74 nations. The Eastern Naval Command had tweeted a welcome photograph two weeks earlier: “reflecting long-standing cultural links between the two nations.”

Two weeks later, that ship is on the ocean floor. And from New Delhi, silence. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said it plainly: Frigate Dena, a guest of India’s Navy, was struck in international waters without warning. That line will not be forgotten in Tehran. It should not be forgotten in New Delhi either; because it is the most precise summary available of what Modi’s diplomatic positioning has actually cost India.

When guests are murdered

Say what you want about Pakistan’s post-colonial elite; and there is plenty to say. But since Pahalgam they have been reading the room better than New Delhi has. Not because Islamabad became richer or more competent. Neither of those things happened. What happened is simpler: when the bombs fell on Iran, Pakistan said nothing loud, and that silence was itself a signal. Across the Muslim world that signal was heard. Loyalty travels farther than power. Whether that loyalty is strategic or genuine is a separate question. The effect is the same.

Pakistan Post-Pahalgam

Since Pahalgam, Pakistan has been on a quiet diplomatic winning streak. China is an all-weather relationship that was never going anywhere. More surprisingly, Islamabad has cultivated a real working line to Trump; useful, manageable, a partner worth keeping. India, watching this, seems to have concluded that the way to hack into that relationship is through the Israeli back door: be Netanyahu’s most enthusiastic friend, signal civilisational alignment with the US-Israel axis, hope Washington notices. It reads less like strategy and more like a bid for attention. And it has been an expensive one, because the cost was Iran.

Indo-Iranian Allies

India and Iran have been genuine strategic partners for decades. Afghanistan, Central Asian connectivity, energy, Chabahar, the entire Persian-Indic corridor that predates modern geopolitics by centuries. That relationship had depth. Depth is rare in international relations. And it was casually discarded for a press conference; while the ship India had just welcomed home was being hunted by an American submarine in international waters.

If Iran survives this war, and it is showing every sign of doing so, New Delhi will eventually reckon with what that cost them.

What is the point of Wealth?

There is a deeper question underneath all of this that the current moment keeps raising and nobody in power seems to want to answer: what is the prosperity actually for?

BB argued this week that India is getting rich, that the Global South is merely a waiting room, and that once India joins the wealthy world these debates will fade away. The mechanics are probably right. The conclusion deserves harder scrutiny.

Because what the West is currently offering the world is not capitalism in any classical sense. It is a very specific, very late, very degraded version of it; one where markets calmly price in geopolitical catastrophe, where you can assassinate a head of state and live-tweet the memes, where Pete Hegseth brags about “quiet death” at a Pentagon podium while over a hundred sailors are missing in the Indian Ocean. Mammon in its terminal phase. Accumulation without purpose. Power without wisdom.

The Epstein System

India’s temptation, visible in every choice this week, is entry into that system without questioning its premises. Get rich, align with the winners, the values will sort themselves out. Pakistan’s failure runs the other direction: feel everything too intensely, substitute solidarity for strategy, emotion for policy. One risks having no principles. The other risks having nothing but principles and no power to defend them.

The harder position is less glamorous. Prosperity is a precondition, not a destination. You build wealth to build something worth living in; not to join a club where the membership fee is your moral independence.

The Conviction of a Supreme Leader

The missiles keep coming out of Iran because forty-seven years of ideological preparation cannot be decapitated. You can kill a Supreme Leader. You cannot kill what he spent four decades distributing into every cell of a system built precisely for this scenario. The Pahlavists in the room with Netanyahu and Trump believed their own diaspora’s map of Iran more than Iran believed it. An old colonial error; made, this time, by people who look like the colonised.

The Global South doesn’t need a new Global North. It needs a different organising principle, one serious enough to say that the purpose of civilisation is to produce human beings, not billionaires; that independence is worth more than alignment with the powerful; that prosperity without wisdom is just a better-appointed ruin. India used to understand that instinctively. The question now is whether it still does.