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Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali led a government-in-exile that met Lenin; Maulana Asim Bihari built a newspaper for people who couldn't read. Neither name survived in India's textbooks, and one is now being erased from a university that bore it.
Before Jawaharlal Nehru, a provisional Indian government-in-exile already had a prime minister — Maulana Barkatullah Bhopali. His story, and that of the beedi worker turned newspaper-on-a-wall organiser Asim Bihari, has all but vanished from how India remembers 1947.
Long before Nehru, a Bhopal-born scholar served as prime minister of India's first government-in-exile, while a Bihar bidi worker built one of the country's earliest movements for weavers and the poor — and both men are being quietly erased from public memory even as India marks another Independence Day.
Professor Irfan Ahmad argues that terrorism has no agreed definition anywhere in the world, yet the claim that terrorism is uniquely Islamic has somehow become common sense across four continents — and traces why that particular story, rather than any other, is the one the modern nation-state needs told.
Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad argues that the word "terrorism" was never meant to be defined — it was built to be deployed, first against communism, then against Islam, while state violence that dwarfs it goes unnamed.
Anthropologist Irfan Ahmad argues that "terrorism" was never a neutral description of violence — it was built, definition by definition, to mean Islam.
As protests reshape Indian politics after twelve years of BJP dominance, commentator Raju Parulekar tells Nous that Muslims are only just beginning to shed a fear built up over a decade — and argues the blame for it extends far beyond the BJP.
In conversation with Nous Podcast, the Mumbai commentator argues that anti-Muslim hatred in India predates the BJP and implicates Congress and the socialist parties too, even as he insists the tide is turning.
In a wide-ranging conversation, the author of The Making of Majoritarian India argues that India chose unconstrained majority rule over guaranteed minority representation at its founding — and that everything since, from Partition to today's delimitation debate, follows from that choice.
In a wide-ranging Nous conversation, the writer Javed Gaya argues that India's Muslim question was not born in 2014 but engineered into the republic's founding choice of liberty over equality — and nowhere more decisively than in the politics of Uttar Pradesh.
The author argues that India's constitutional framers privileged an unguarded liberty over hard-wired equality, and that a section of the Hindu elite quietly welcomed Partition as its byproduct.
Mumbai commentator Raju Parulekar argues that a youth-led uprising over the NEET paper leak was hijacked by Arvind Kejriwal's camp before it could win anything more than a junior minister's resignation — and weighs what, if anything, it changed for India's Muslims.
Months after a paper-leak scandal sent thousands of students into the streets and into police lathis, a Mumbai commentator argues the protest's legacy is being fought over as fiercely as the government that provoked it.
Weeks after student-led protests forced a minister's resignation, the commentator returns to Nous Podcast to argue the movement was quietly negotiated away from within, even as he insists its underlying gains can't be undone.
A ruby-red syrup invented in 1907 to fight heatstroke in Old Delhi became a charitable trust, then three national brands split by Partition — and is still bottled by the hundreds of thousands every day.
A Delhi physician's 1907 remedy for the summer heat became a century-old waqf whose profits still fund hospitals and schools in three countries.
A herbal tonic mixed in an Old Delhi dispensary in 1907 survived its founder's early death, Partition, and the birth of three nations to become the subcontinent's enduring taste of summer.
In the debut episode of Nous's First Principles series, Ali Javed argues that Hindutva no longer needs the RSS to survive it has fused with the Indian state's own institutions, and traces what that fusion does to Muslims, Dalits and the Constitution alike.
