August 06, 2025

Syeda Hameed & Harsh Mander on Partition, pluralism and poetry

41 minutes

The educationist, writer and women's rights activist Syeda Hameed had a ringside view on much of what was unfolding in the new India in the years after it became independent. This was a country that had become free, but after Partition when a million Hindus and Muslims had been slaughtered by the other. Yet, Hameed remembers the first decade of free India as one of immense hope.

"My family comes from Panipat," Hameed says. "And Panipat was a symbol of Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb – the mingling of the Hindu-Muslim, the composite culture... There was a beautiful commingling and that is really the India, that was my DNA, you know." Speaking to Harsh Mander, Hameed says she does not feel any of that hope now.

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.

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Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.