Beyond the Taj: The Story of India's Minorities

Many Muslim women have carved out their place in the crowded landscape of Indian history. One of them was Razia Sultan, the only female queen of the Delhi Sultanate, who broke the rules of pardah, who defied the will of an established elite to cater to the people. Another was Nur Jahan, a patron of the arts, a visionary of fashion and architecture, and a talented politician. Who were these women, and what can we learn from their stories?
Journalist and author Tom Verde joins us to talk about the palace intrigue, political rebellion, and powerful legacies of these iconic Muslim queens, drawing on the stories found in his recently published book Queens of Islam.    

For years now, dissent has been treated as a crime rather than a right in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, leading to normalized arrests of activists, students, lawyers, and journalists. But for the most part, the crisis of India’s political prisoners remains obscured to an international community that still, by and large, sees India as the world’s largest democracy.  Activist and former political prisoner Safoora Zargar joins us to share the stories, struggles, and hopes of India's prisoners of conscience.

The sheer amount of hate speech, violent attacks, and systemic abuses that inundate Muslims in India is suffocating. What, then, is it like to grow up in the climate of hate cultivated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist supporters?

Activist Sharjeel Usmani joins us for a heartbreaking and harrowing exploration of life as a Muslim in Modi's India.

The 2002 Gujarat Pogrom is not history. The violence and terror inflicted on thousands of Gujarati Muslims lingers with those who survived it decades after. With both empathy and courage, author Zara Chowdhary speaks about her family's experience in surviving the Gujarat pogrom, the experience of telling the stories of the victims, and the writing of her memoir, The Lucky Ones.

Hindu-Muslim unity isn’t just found in India - it’s a concept that diaspora communities continue to work towards and reimagine abroad. In this special episode of Beyond the Taj, Safa Ahmed of Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC) and Ria Chakrabarty of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR) engage in an honest conversation about their experiences with both division and solidarity in the Indian American diaspora, and discuss how Hindus and Muslims can combat the supremacist forces that seek to drive these communities apart.

In this episode, we sit down with activist and scholar Professor Arjun Singh Sethi to explore the long history of solidarity between Muslim and Sikh communities in the diaspora. From the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when both communities were targeted by state surveillance and bigotry, to more recent coalition-building efforts aimed at opposing Hindu supremacy and transnational repression, this conversation traces how shared vulnerability gives rise to collective resistance.

Today’s India is awash in fiction about the Mughals—imagined atrocities, distorted narratives, and politically weaponized history. In this episode, historian Dr. Audrey Truschke joins us to unpack the biggest myths about the Mughal Empire, and examine why Hindu nationalist groups are so determined to rewrite this history.

In this pilot episode of Beyond the Taj, Safa Ahmed sits down with Indian author and historian Ram Puniyani to explore the evolution of Indian secularism, from its roots in the freedom struggle to its codification after Independence, and how this pluralistic imagining of national identity is currently under attack by the Hindu far right.