Himal Interviews: The decades-long erosion of the idea of India

In June 2025, Himal Southasian launched a podcast series titled Partitions of the Heart in collaboration with Karwan-e-Mohabbat, hosted by the peace activist Harsh Mander. The inaugural season, called ‘Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi’s India’,  focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in the country. Since 2017, Mander and Karwan-e-Mohabbat have done the extraordinary and difficult work of documenting a rising wave of hate and crimes against India’s Muslims, and of lending support and solidarity to victims of communal atrocities. In Mander’s words, “We live in deeply troubled times of visceral, everyday hate, violence, fear and division. The first step towards healing our growing fractures is to talk and listen to each other.”

This series is part of the effort to bring forward meaningful conversations on the increasing marginalisation and vilification of Muslims in India. In this conversation with Harsh Mander, the filmmaker Saeed Akhtar Mirza recalls his immense despair in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, followed by communal riots and bomb blasts in his home city of Mumbai. At the time he made a film called Naseem in which he wrote the epitaph of India. But Mirza believes that India’s current troubles will pass as everything before it has. After making Naseem, he travelled across the country meeting ordinary people who restored his faith in its pluralism.