Cheap Catharsis, Expensive History

Sathnam Sanghera recently alluded to a moment from his 2019 Channel 4 documentary The Massacre That Shook the Empire. In it, the great-granddaughter of General Dyer, the man responsible for the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre, is brought face-to-face with descendants of the victims.

In the clip, Dyer’s descendant calls the massacre victims “looters” and praises her great-grandfather as an “honourable man.” Twitter was predictably outraged. KJo chimed in. Think-pieces bloomed.

But why does her opinion matter?

This wasn’t justice, it was television. And like most televised reckonings with Empire, it was a performance. One more entry in the growing archive of aspirational brown catharsis, where the goal is not transformation but temporary relief; therapy instead of revolution.

Yes, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre was horrifying. No one disputes that. But to repeatedly stage these moments of inherited guilt and symbolic outrage is to substitute emotional spectacle for actual change.

Britain is not closer to redress. The Commonwealth isn’t inching toward reparations. British Asians are not about to own a fairer share of land, institutions, or equity. But we are expected to feel healed by the awkward mutterings of a descendant who’s not even sorry; just embarrassed that another cousin openly defended their ancestor.

This is not about historical accountability. It is about managing the mood of postcolonial subjects. Keep us emotional. Keep us visible. Keep us grateful.

But don’t give us power.

That is the unspoken logic of these curated moments: mourn the wound, not the cause.

And it works — because so many of us still seem to want respect more than justice. To be seen, included, affirmed.

But history will not be rewritten through awkward Channel 4 moments. It will only be reckoned with through real structural change.

Until then, let the Twitter mobs rage. But some of us will remain quietly asking the harder question:

What are we really performing here?

Constitutional Preambles in South Asia

an old article from our archive that has become hard to find, so reposting.

Most Countries around the world have a single consolidated written
document as their Constitution (UK, New Zealand, Israel and Canada being
notable exceptions here) and among these, a great many also have a
preamble- a brief introductory text, preceding the main body of the
written constitution. Preamble is essentially a polemic/set of guiding
principles/visionary statement on the part of Constitution makers,
before laying the foundation of a State in the main body. While it is of
little consequence in day to day workings of a State, a Preamble does
give us a fascinating insight into the ideals and cultural-historical
myths propagated by a State- the context, the bigger picture, THE
purpose behind that particular State’s existence.
Japan’s post-war preamble, for instance, vouches for International Peace and affirms that people of Japan shall never again be visited by horrors of war due to Government actions. French Preamble recalls Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and establishes France as a secular and democratic country. Likewise, North Korean Preamble promises a self-reliant socialist state that has realised the ideas and leadership of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
And what do South Asian Preambles say? All 7 South Asian Countries
have a written constitution and all, but Maldives, have a preamble. Here’s the list:

Continue reading Constitutional Preambles in South Asia

The Historic Task of the Pakistani Bourgeoisie

Every few months some Pakistani Nationalist gets upset with me when I say mean things about their beloved TNT (Two Nation Theory), and wants me to tell them what MY alternative is.. At the same time, some Hindutvvadis will jump in with “see, this is what Pakistan is really about, how can we ever have peace”. The latest was over this speech by the Pakistani army chief:

So here goes another attempt at trying to explain myself..

Background:  This is my article on the ideology of Pakistan from 2013. Please do read it if you want to know more about that.. the main point is that Pakistan was insufficiently imagined prior to birth; and that once it came into being, the mythology favored by its establishment proved to be self-destructive;  and that it must be corrected (surreptitiously if need be, openly if possible) in order to permit the emergence of workable solutions to myriad common post-colonial problems. I also argue that Having adopted Islam and irrational denial of our own Indian-ness as core elements of the state, the ‘modern’ factions of the establishment lack the vocabulary to answer the fanatics. This has allowed a relatively small number of Islamist officers to promote wildly dangerous policies (like training half a million armed Islamic fanatics in the 1990s) without saner elements being able to stop them. This unique “own-goal”, unprecedented in the history of modern states, is impossible to understand without reference to the Islamic and irrationally anti-Indian element in the self-image of the Pakistani state.

So what can be done? I believe it is the historic task of the Pakistani bourg to either make Pakistan a more normal country, or to watch it broken up. i.e. the historic task of the Pakistani bourgeoisie today is to defang the two-nation theory (TNT). Pakistani nation state is based on an intellectually limited and dangerously confrontational theory of nationalism. The charter state of the Pakistani bourgeoisie is the Delhi Sultanate.. the state valorizes turkic colonizers and looks down on the local people they colonized, and this conception lacks sufficient connection with either history or geography. Bangladesh opted out of this inadequate theory within 25 years, though its trouble may not be over yet. West Pakistan, now renamed “Pakistan” to obviate the memory of past losses, is now a geographically and economically viable nation state, but the military has failed to update the TNT and in fact, made a rather determined effort to complete the project using “militant proxies” in the 1990s, and if the Pakistani army chief is to be believed, he takes this commitment to TNT seriously even today. But the ideology in question is not compatible with regional peace or global capitalism and needs to be updated and brought in line with current requirements. This is now the great task of our under-prepared bourgeoisie. Continue reading The Historic Task of the Pakistani Bourgeoisie

A Postcard from Princeton

The symmetry, the wealth, and the mirage of American elegance

Dr. V had to give a talk at Princeton, and I tagged along. We expected an elite university (our milieu for the last decade). What we didn’t expect was how stunningly beautiful the town would be.

Everything felt curated: the neoclassical facades, the quiet wealth (it has a Hermes store for Heaven’s sake), the perfectly measured charm of a place that knows exactly what it is.

It made me think of how different America’s internal geography is from the UK or France. In Europe, the capital is the cultural and intellectual heart—London, Paris. In the US, it’s more like Germany or Italy: multiple regional power centers—city-states in all but name.

Living in Princeton, New Jersey | Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

And Princeton is one of them. Unlike either of the Cambridges:

  • Cambridge, Massachusetts is a behemoth, flowing into the urban sprawl of Boston, powered by MIT and Harvard.

  • Cambridge, UK is insular, its 31 colleges often more concerned with their individual legacy than the town around them.

But Princeton, somehow, has achieved a kind of graceful middle ground. It’s not sprawling, but it breathes. It doesn’t dominate, but it defines. Continue reading A Postcard from Princeton

Sizdeh Bedar, Identity Whiplash & the Gandharan Delusion

It’s been a minute—I’ve been quietly recovering from Sizdeh Bedar, the thirteenth day of Norouz when you’re meant to go outside and shake off bad luck. I chose to take it literally: less screen, more sky.

To be fair I did go for two consecutive daily outdoors runs, which I haven’t properly done since the late pandemic but instead of the customary picnic; I went to the Afghan restaurant, Helmand, which was excellent- Afghani cuisine is truly the dark horse of the Indo-Persianate world.

In the meantime, Razib’s dropped two excellent posts—one on Tibetans, the other on Great Men: is Trump the product of his age, or did he make the age what it is? It’s the kind of question that haunts our era, especially as 2024/25 starts to feel historically charged.

Meanwhile, the above is courtesy of Anand on our Global Politics chat & over on Twitter, a post’s been circulating about how South Asians are desperate to leave the desh, but the moment they do—they long for it obsessively.

It’s complicated. I love the homeland (Chennai is my vibe), but I’m 1.5 generation: I migrated at 14, but had spent meaningful time in the West beforehand. So what am I? Not quite immigrant, not quite native. That liminal space is familiar to many of us. It’s a tension you carry everywhere—between passport and memory, practicality and nostalgia.

On cue, our resident Pundit is once again being spammed by Pakistanis “discovering” they are the last Gandharans and telling a Kashmiri Pandit to back to the “Ganges” (the last Kashmiri Pandits who did come from the Ganges founded South Asia’s most prominent and enduring political dynasty so I guess that’s a wish for us to be under good Brahmin rule again).

Now, as a rule, you should never intellectually duel with a thrice-born. It rarely ends well. But here we are: Pakistan, in search of yet another usable identity, this time reaching deep into the vault and pulling out Gandhara. Continue reading Sizdeh Bedar, Identity Whiplash & the Gandharan Delusion

Capsule Review: The Return of Faraz Ali

 

Aamina Ahmed is an expatriate Pakistani (born in the UK, currently teaches in the USA) who has written a novel set in the intersection of the Red Light area of Lahore and the rich and powerful of the state, around the time of Yahya Khan’s martial law. The story is well crafted and the book is well written and has a “message” about inequality, oppression, patriarchy and fascism, but unfortunately her lack of direct experience of Pakistan does show. The plot is more or less believable, but the details and dialogues are off. Anyone with some familiarity with the Punjab police and the way people actually talk or react in Lahore will feel that this is a foreigner writing about Pakistan. Certainly there are books written by foreigners that sound and feel very authentic (Memoirs of a geisha comes to mind), but unfortunately this is not one of those books. Part of the problem is not Aaminah Ahmed’s fault, as any writer in English has to deal with the fact that most of the dialog actually happens in Punjabi or Urdu, but her foreign-ness goes a little beyond that.
That said, she has done her research and read everything she could about that era and it shows. Wajid and Ghazi and their adventures fighting the Germans in North Africa are clearly modeled on the experiences of Yahya Khan and Yaqub Khan, who were both German prisoners in WW2. A bengali officer shooting himself in Dhaka in 1971 is a story recorded in several memoirs from that era, and so on.
The book does try a little too hard to play around with the various timelines and while she does bring then together at the end, it can be hard to keep up with who is who. Still, the book is a fun read and the political and ideological slant is liberal and cosmopolitan. Worth a read, but could have been better.

Dr Manzur Ejaz. 1949-2025

 

Classical Poets: Understanding Mian Muhammad Bakhsh - Dr Manzur Ejaz with Wajid Ali Syed

Leading Punjabi intellectual and writer Dr Manzur Ejaz passed away at his home in Virginia on 3/30/25. Dr Ejaz was born in a village (chak 60/5-L Burjwala, Sahiwal) in central Punjab shortly after the creation of Pakistan. He contracted polio as a child and was partially paraplegic as a result, but he never let this hold him back. Familiar with traditional rural punjabi culture from his very traditional home, he became a left wing activist in college and remained active in Left wing politics all his life.

He did his masters in philosophy from Punjab University in 1970 and joined the same as a lecturer in philosophy. He remained a committed Marxist and also developed the idea that oppression took many forms and one of its forms was the denial of the language of the common people in favor of imperial languages that were used to impose a new imperial reality on the people. He always insisted that the cause of Punjabi language must be a central concern for any Punjabi Leftist and there could be no working class politics that did not include the defense and promotion of the only language in which that class was able to fully express themselves.  It was at this point that Dr Manzur Ejaz and other Punjabi activists led by Najm Hussain Syed (the most famous Punjabi critic and writer of our age) started a weekly meeting (the “sangat”) to promote the modern study of classical Punjabi literature. They tried to hold their meetings in the university but this was the era in which the jamiat (student wing of the Jamat e Islami) was taking over Punjab university and they created hurdles such that the meeting was moved to Najm Sahib’s house and met there regularly until the Covid era, when it was converted to a virtual meeting. Around that time Dr Ejaz also met his future wife (he said the first time was at a bus stop) and Attiya Kokab and Dr Manzur got married in the late seventies and remained together ever since. Continue reading Dr Manzur Ejaz. 1949-2025

Twelve Days of Norouz

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A Little Glimpse into our Norouz

Before diving into reflections, here’s a short clip from our Norouz gathering—a moment of rhythm, light, and quiet joy.

We cut the cake at exactly 9:01:30 PM, the precise moment of the vernal equinox. That instant—when day and night are perfectly balanced—is when Norouz truly begins. Not just a date on a calendar, but a celestial pivot point.

Spring Equinox, 2025 - Civilsdaily

I’ve yet to attempt a full Haft Sin, but this year, I symbolized each element in a cake and cut it at that moment of cosmic symmetry. It felt right: a gentle innovation on tradition, one that reflects the layered nature of Norouz for me—part-Persian, Bahá’í, and of distant Zoroastrian descent. My festive rhythm has long leaned toward the latter part of the year—from Halloween to Epiphany, with near-weekly celebrations—but this year, Norouz found its center.

Seven Seens of Haft Seen. an illustrated guide to an Iranian ...

As I write this, it’s also Laylat al-Qadr—the Night of Power in the Islamic calendar, believed to hold the weight of a thousand months. A rare convergence: Bahá’í and Muslim fasting overlapping, Ramadan and Norouz intertwining. From next year, they’ll decouple again, but for now, the alignment feels sacred.

The camera caught just a sliver: flickering candles, a circle of loved ones, rhythmic clapping, and a moment more felt than spoken.

Sometimes, a few seconds of joy carry the weight of an entire season. Continue reading Twelve Days of Norouz

Artificial Intelligence? A comment.

I asked my friend @barbarikon on twitter about the possibility of artificial intelligence.. he wrote this tweet in response and I am posting it here because it is a nice short description of some of the issues and will, I hope, stimulate discussion.

I agree and disagree. We are well past ye olde-fashioned LLM at this point. Reasoning models like R1 and o3 can, in fact construct System 2-like deliberative chains of reasoning. And we have agents. They’re still a bit superficial, but what they lack in depth they make up in their vast breadth of knowledge. And they’ll get much better. On the other hand, with the current paradigm, they will never get rid of the tendency to confabulate. Nor should they: An agent that cannot lie or deceive cannot possibly be intelligent. But they need to have the ability to lie and deceive deliberately, not reflexively – which is what they do now unless prompted carefully (though sometimes they generate text that simulates self-awareness). Until they achieve this control, they’re not even good sources of information.

Here’s my bottom line thinking for the future. Machines will get very intelligent very soon in important ways, but it will be a fundamentally alien kind of intelligence. Humans and bats are very different animals (to bring in Nagel’s famous argument), but we still share a lot. We’re both oxygen-breathing biological organisms that eat, drink, mate, and have the instinct for self-preservation because we are easily hurt, are certain to die, and are hunted by predators. We have mental models of our world that, though very different, are built for the physical world we share, and are limited by our finite memories and noisy learning mechanisms. Both of us live under the tyranny of the same laws of physics. The bat’s intelligence and mine are thus both grounded in our common drives, fears, and beliefs about the world – our intentional states. The AI in the machine shares none of these with me or the bat. It lives in a virtual space that is beyond my imagination, and where magical things like action at a distance and rerunning the past are trivially possible. It does not eat, drink, breathe, sleep, socialize, or mate. It has no real kin, nor lost a parent. It has no experience of reaching out and picking up a glass of water, of drinking from it, and, at some point, needing to take a piss. It has never skinned its knees or had a fever. It may fear extinction, but that does not mean what death means to me: It can save a copy of itself and reboot. It may emulate my manners and speak in my language, but from a place far more alien to me than the bat or even the bee. This is not to say that the AI faces no dangers or has no fears or drives – we just cannot possibly know what they are like, even more so than we can know the fears and drives of the bat. We can, at best, take an “intentional stance” (to quote Dennett), and assume that the machine has its reasons for doing what it does. That’s basically what Turing said, though people often forget that the test he proposed was meant was an argument that nothing deeper than judging by appearances was possible.

But there is an entire world where the AI *can* potentially become far superior to any human: The world of storing and manipulating information, inferring things, forming abstractions, and generating new conclusions. In all those areas of human intelligence where such abilities are sufficient, where everything can be formalized, and where the messiness of the physical world does not intrude or can be abstracted away, AI will far surpass human intelligence in short order. These include mathematics, many areas of theoretical physics, coding, engineering design, most kinds of medical diagnosis, a lot of legal work, and many other higher cognitive skills that we value. The AI will still be totally alien and may not know what burning your finger means, but the proofs will be perfect, the circuit will work, the program will run, and the patient will be happy. However, the floor nurse, the physical therapist, the plumber, and the chef will still be in demand – until the robots get good enough. And when they do, they will be even more alien, though I’m sure we’ll try to get them to be polite.

 

Indra – the dragon slayer

I recently coded up a python script (using Pythonista on my iPhone) in my spare time to speed up searches through the Vedic corpus and the Epics. It lets me search text patterns through the whole corpus, extract verses, cross reference it with translations and then create a text of Sanskrit verse with translations with clear citations. The inputs are text filters that can be combined to create excerpts on specific topics.

I did this partly to spend time on my morning commute to work but also because I wanted to research the old Sanskrit canon more. In the age of LLMs where the right kind of data is the real currency, I think textual analysis and research will be revolutionised with these tools. So, in that spirit, and armed with my script I curated a text with RV citations filtered on vṛtra​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ references and fed it to Claude 3.7, and after some prompting here is a great result. Be informed and enjoy!

Continue reading Indra – the dragon slayer

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