The filmmaker Saeed Akhtar Mirza talks to Harsh Mander about a civilisational slide in india over the past three decades. “The idea of India as in our constitution being slowly eroded in front of our eyes and nothing was done about it,” he says. In this episode Mirza talks about how the Hindu right is rewriting history and scripting one-sided narratives through cinema, about the takeover over film schools by political agenda and more.

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.

This episode is part of the podcast series Partitions of the Heart: Conversations with Harsh Mander, produced in association with Karwan-e-Mohabbat. The inaugural season called Muslim Life – and Death – in Modi's India, focuses on the deepening crisis of Muslims in India.

Mander hosts conversations with a powerful array of Indian Muslim figures both eminent and emerging, young and old. Together, they talk about the lived experiences of Indian Muslims amid the rise of the Hindu Right and escalating Islamophobia, as well as the politics and the history that have brought India to this shocking new reality.

You can watch the full episode on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/5WO0WRYFbls

♦️ Glossary

Scoundrel Times: A term coined by the American playwright Lillian Hellman referring to the McCarthy era which was defined by selfishness, cruelty, corruption, and fear in the US government and society.

Taimur: A 14th century ruler of Turco-Mongol origin and founder of the Timurid Empire situated in an around modern-day Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia

Khiljis: A Turco-Afghan dynasty who ruled large parts of the Subcontinent fron Delhi between 1290 and 1320

Aurangzeb: The sixth Mughal emperor who ruled from 1658 and 1708

Seljuks, Mamluks, Ottomans: Powerful Turkic dynasties with Islamic rulers

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