Year in review: Ten great podcast episodes on Southasia of 2025
This year, listeners tuned in to Himal Southasian’s podcasts to think through Southasia’s shifting political landscape and its literary worlds. Across State of Southasia – where the region’s leading minds unpack essential news and events – and the Southasia Review of Books – the place for conversations on all things literary – we brought scholars, writers and journalists into dialogue on the forces shaping Southasia and the ideas that help us make sense of them.
We also introduced two special podcast series hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander. “Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India” featured conversations on Indian Muslim history and experience amid a crisis of Islamophobia and anti-minority hatred fuelled by the rise of the Hindu Right. In “Saffron Siege: The RSS at 100” Mander examined the noxious legacy of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh in India’s public and political life, examining its roots and core principles, its Hindutva agenda across a century.
In no particular order, here are some of Himal’s most-listened-to podcast episodes of 2025:
The political commentator Apoorvanand discusses how Hindu and Hindutva common sense kept the RSS popular even though it was banned after Gandhi's assassination in 1948. He talks to Harsh Mander about how it emerged from the shadows of being a banned organisation, how it grew from strength to strength through the 1960s, 1970s up till 2014 when Narendra Modi became prime minister, and the leaders who legitimised it along the way.
The trajectory of the RSS in south India is very different from its history and progress in the north and northeast of the country. While coastal Karnataka was the landing ground of the Sangh in the south as far back as the 1950s, Hindutva found little traction in large parts of the south till the last decade when Narendra Modi and his BJP have been in national power. The biggest resistance to the RSS and Hindutva has been in Tamil Nadu.
In this episode, musician and political commentator T M Krishna speaks to Harsh Mander about Tamil Nadu’s long history of social movements that has led to this resistance. They examine how the state’s linguistic and language-based faith traditions have stood as a bulwark against the RSS’s attempts at homogenisation under a Hindutva umbrella. Krishna points out the multiple streams of religious influence on arts in India, especially in music, and how the RSS has tried to deny this past in service of the ideological project.
Irfan Habib, who is regarded as one of India’s best historians, tells Harsh Mander that, encouraged by the Narendra Modi and BJP leadership, The Hindu right is attempting not just to rewrite India's history to erase Muslim presence and contribution but to manufacture it entirely. Now 94, Habib looks back to when India got independence when he was a young man, and at the inclusiveness and spirit of service of national leaders at the time. He also looks critically at the divisive politics of the present but believes that “ultimately I think India is a large country with varied languages and I think a pure Hindu religious philosophy can't unite the country.”
In this episode, the researcher and activist Afreen Fatima speaks to Harsh Mander about what it means to be Muslim in India today. Afreen experienced first-hand punitive demolitions by the state. In June 2022, authorities in Prayagraj, formerly called Allahabad, bulldozed her house, on the pretext that her father had orchestrated protests against anti-Islamic comments made by members of India’s ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party.
Afreen speaks about the loss of her home, the anguish when her father was arrested for 22 months and the risks that Muslims take everyday when they leave their houses facing attacks, lynchings and more. Afreen talks about the lack of true solidarity with Muslims even in liberal circles borne of an inability to listen to Muslim voices and the expectation of those voices: “It should always be very docile. It should not be furious. It should not be angry.” While Muslims bear the burden of always having to prove their nationalism and secularism, there is no respect from others for their faith, she says.
On 25 June this year, India marked 50 years since former prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency in India. This was the third time that the emergency had been declared in India, but unlike the first two times which were in case of external threats due to wars with India’s neighbours, the 1975 Emergency was due to internal threats and resulted in the suspension of many constitutional rights and a crackdown on freedom of the press.
Gandhi’s government imprisoned hundreds of thousands of politicians and activists from the opposition during the Emergency. The press was severely censored. Power was centralised almost entirely in the hands of Gandhi and her son Sanjay. Sanjay’s more infamous programmes in that period were mass forced sterilisations and forced rehabilitation of slum dwellers.
In his comprehensive history and analysis of the Emergency, political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot calls the Emergency “India’s first experiment with authoritarianism”. In this episode of State of Southasia with Nayantara Narayanan, Jaffrelot delves into the complexity and contradictions of the Emergency, examines its legacy – how it changed the Congress party and India’s politics – and draws out the parallels and differences with India under Narendra Modi.
Pakistan has been reshaped by its 27th constitutional amendment that was passed in November. The amendment has formalised the military’s so-far unofficial dominance in the country’s governing structure into explicit constitutional supremacy. It was passed by a politically fragile parliament facing questions over its own legitimacy and elevates the army chief Asim Munir to an almost unassailable position as the Chief of Defence Forces. What had long operated as an informal military veto over civilian politics is now written into the basic law of the state, transforming Pakistan’s power structure for years to come.
Around this constitutional redesign is a broader ecosystem of shrinking political space and constrained dissent – from earlier amendments curbing the courts’ suo motu powers to new digital laws targeting “false information” that human-rights groups say will be used against journalists, activists and opposition supporters.
In this episode of State of Southasia, Ayesha Jalal, the Mary Richardson professor of history, arts and sciences at the Fletcher graduate school in Tufts University, speaks to Ayesha Jalal about Pakistan after the 27th amendment – what has changed and what has not, and what political players and civil society must do to reclaim democratic spaces in the country.
All eyes were on Nepal this year when a large but loosely organised protest by young people in Kathmandu turned into a revolution that brought down the government. In September, many groups of young college and school goers took out a peaceful protest march in Kathmandu. There had been rising anger about systemic corruption and nepotism among the political class that was the foundation for these protests.
In this episode, we look at what Nepal’s GenZ and others hope for in the coming years, and what about Nepal’s politics, economy and society they see as needing fixing. Nayantara Narayanan speaks to the Ujjawala Maharjan, a poet and educator from Kathmandu, Anjali Sah, a law student in Kathmandu originally from Madhesh, and Tashi Lhozam, a climate activist and social scientists from the Humla district in the highlands of Nepal.
In 2019, the Indian government under Narendra Modi revoked the writer Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship, exiling him from the country where he had grown up and lived for thirty years. This loss prompted a journey revisiting the places that shaped his identity, exploring broader questions of the ties that bind us to home.
Spanning Istanbul to Uzbekistan, the high Andes to Mongolia, Taseer’s new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile traces a life shaped by displacement and curiosities. He examines how overlapping pasts of culture, migration, and faith shapes both people and places, and what it means to exist in societies scarred by prejudice, exclusion and a contempt of history.
How do we reconcile our ideals with the way we live our lives in practice? And what happens when you revere the art but loathe its artist?
Theory & Practice, a new novel by the two-time Miles Franklin award winner Michelle de Kretser, is an account of truth and shame, taking up this exploration through the intersections between private and public, personal and political. In pushing the boundaries of what a novel can be, and also asking questions of the act of reading itself, de Kretser shows without telling the messy gap and the breakdowns between theory and practice.
In The Cave of Echoes, the distinguished Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions Wendy Doniger writes that, “it is impossible to define myth, but it is cowardly not to try.” For her, the best way to approach myth is not by defining it, but to look at it in action, which is precisely what she has set out to do throughout this book: to explore what myth does, rather than what myth is.
She shows how myth not only allows cultures to define themselves, but also how the myths of others can reflect back truths often overlooked in our own. Along the way, Doniger raises critical questions about how we interpret mythic stories, and how different communities across Southasia and beyond engage with these foundational texts and traditions.