The advent of Islam in India, and its spread in Southeast Asia, are much bemoaned as end of the “Indosphere”, supposedly breaking these ancient networks. But the opposite is true.
A woman forced to wear a hijab is undoubtedly experiencing coercion. But so is a woman prevented from wearing one. Both situations are the same—the denial of choice.
A woman should be free to wear the hijab. But respecting her agency does not mean declaring the history, politics and patriarchy surrounding the garment beyond scrutiny.
A December 2025 study examining the influence of religion on the internet revealed that belief systems are shaping digital conversations and curiosity.
Many of you might think I got something so wrong in National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree! But some deserve a Mea Culpa. I’d deal with the most recent this week.
In a seminal work, former military officers Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda & Lt. Col. Pavithran Rajan put forth a framework to approach cognitive warfare, called Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace.
India, China and Russia share more contradictions than congruence. Each has a different worldview, as also a different adversary. The rude fact is that BRICS is the most irrelevant of all such groupings.
This public historian’s hallucinations are getting wild. Again, this blog takes well-documented maritime trade history and repackages it with an edgy, clickbait and sensationalist headline designed to provoke cheaply.
He isn’t uncovering history rather he is engaging in deliberate, bad-faith historical revisionism.
Slapping the label “Indians converted Southeast Asia” onto routine maritime trade is complete intellectual trickery. Pre-modern Indian civilizational influence…Sanskrit, statecraft, and architecture…was organically adopted by local rulers over a millennium through civilizational prestige, not an active, evangelical conversion mission.
For crying out loud, if you don’t have anything to say, please remain silent but do not spend time to rewrite, revise and falsify history with cheap forced narratives.
Of course, those, like DB, addicted to forced secularist narratives would welcome this fluff.
Very informative indeed. This proves that the actual spread of Islam in India and in Southeast Asia was by Sufis, preachers, merchants and artisans. No Islamic army invaded any part of southeast asia to occupy and spread religion – it was thanks to Indian and Yemeni seafarers that Islam reached those shores.
This public historian’s hallucinations are getting wild. Again, this blog takes well-documented maritime trade history and repackages it with an edgy, clickbait and sensationalist headline designed to provoke cheaply.
He isn’t uncovering history rather he is engaging in deliberate, bad-faith historical revisionism.
Slapping the label “Indians converted Southeast Asia” onto routine maritime trade is complete intellectual trickery. Pre-modern Indian civilizational influence…Sanskrit, statecraft, and architecture…was organically adopted by local rulers over a millennium through civilizational prestige, not an active, evangelical conversion mission.
For crying out loud, if you don’t have anything to say, please remain silent but do not spend time to rewrite, revise and falsify history with cheap forced narratives.
Of course, those, like DB, addicted to forced secularist narratives would welcome this fluff.
Very informative indeed. This proves that the actual spread of Islam in India and in Southeast Asia was by Sufis, preachers, merchants and artisans. No Islamic army invaded any part of southeast asia to occupy and spread religion – it was thanks to Indian and Yemeni seafarers that Islam reached those shores.