Himal Southasian Podcast Channel

Episode description:  For more than three decades, Joe Sacco has been at the forefront of graphic journalism, combining rigorous reporting with comics to document conflict, displacement and political violence. His landmark works, including ‘Palestine’ and ‘Footnotes in Gaza’, have helped define an entire genre and inspired generations of cartoonists and journalists. His latest book, ‘The Once and...

Nepal goes to the polls on 5 March 2026. But what do these elections actually mean for a country still navigating the turbulence of its recent past? In this episode, Himal's editor Roman Gautam and associate editor Nayantara Narayanan are joined by law student and intersectional feminist Anjali Sah and writer and journalist Pranaya Rana for a wide-ranging conversation on Nepal's upcoming g...

On 12 February 2026, Bangladesh holds its first election since the July Revolution in 2024 that overthrew the authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina and the Awami League. These polls are among the most critical in the country’s tumultuous history. Hasina’s exile, a ban on the Awami League and a generational change in the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) after Khaleda Zia’s death have transfor...

In this special episode of Saffron Siege: The RSS at 100, Harsh Mander speaks to Felix Pal, a lecturer on political science and international relations at the University of Western Australia, about his six-year long research into the RSS and its affiliates recently published in The Caravan magazine. The research revealed a network of 2500 organisations around the world that are directly or indirec...

Pakistan has been reshaped by its 27th constitutional amendment that was passed in November. The amendment has formalised the military’s so-far unofficial dominance in the country’s governing structure into explicit constitutional supremacy. It was passed by a politically fragile parliament facing questions over its own legitimacy and elevates the army chief Asim Munir to an almost unassailable po...

A conversation with the writer and filmmaker Nirvana Bhandary on her collection of essays exploring feminist thought, lived experience and the generational shifts transforming contemporary Nepali womanhood. Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the writ...

In this episode of Saffron Siege, the writer, historian and social activist Ram Puniyani explains the background of India’s freedom struggle in which the RSS was founded. He says the the founders of the RSS were reacting to the education of Dalits and women and the influx of average people into the national movement. On the other hand, they were influenced by the fascist nationalism growing in Eur...

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru has become a figure of hate and derision for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under the leadership of Narendra Modi and for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its ideological parent. In this episode of Saffron Siege, Harsh Mander and historian Purushottam Agrawal examine the reasons for their particular resentment against Nehru. Agrawal ways...

The Election Commission of India was, for many years, one of the country’s most trusted public institutions lauded around the world for carrying out, every five years, the seemingly impossible task of India’s general elections. The commission was seen as non-partisan that did its work without fear or favour. That reputation has taken a hit in recent years.    Since August this year, it has been fa...

In this episode of Saffron Siege, the anthropologist Thomas Blom Hansen and journalist Qurban Ali join Harsh Mande to examine how the RSS has triggered, enabled and executed riots, targeted communal attacks and other forms of communal violence in India over the 100 years of its existence.  Ali who has reported on many of these incidents on the ground documents how many commissions have found the R...

A conversation with the writer Dur e Aziz Amna about her second novel, ‘A Splintering’, and its exploration of class struggle, female rage, and the challenges of navigating social expectations across rural and urban Pakistan. Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan...

Bhanwar Meghwanshi, who is a writer and a social and political activist, was once a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was a self-described “complete bhakt” with dreams of becoming a pracharak (preacher) till he realised that the RSS was as casteist as the rest of Hindu and Indian society. Meghwanshi who is a Dalit is now a strong opponent of the RSS and its divisive ideology. He descri...

The trajectory of the RSS in south India is very different from its history and progress in the north and northeast of the country. While coastal Karnataka was the landing ground of the Sangh in the south as far back as the 1950s, Hindutva found little traction in large parts of the south till the last decade when Narendra Modi and his BJP have been in national power. The biggest resistance to the...

As the Spring Revolution approaches its fifth year, Ma Thida, one of Myanmar’s foremost activists and intellectuals, reflects on the country’s political trajectory leading up to and beyond the 2021 military coup – and the people’s enduring fight for democracy. Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia....

How has the RSS and Hindutva propaganda worked over a century? Journalists and writers Akshaya Mukul and Kunal Purohit dive into the strategies and successes with Harsh Mander on the this episode of Saffron Siege. Mukul examines the popularity Gita Press, which was founded in 1923 – two years before the RSS itself, and its many publications and how it insinuated itself into the consciousness of mi...

As the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup reaches its final week, veteran sports journalist Sharda Ugra examines the progress that women’s cricket in Southasia has made in recent years – especially since 2017, when the ICC televised the tournament, drawing in a wider audience and greater interest – as well as persistent gaps shaping women’s cricket today. In this episode of State of Southasia, Ugra ref...

Political scientists Tariq Thachil and Kamal Nayan Choubey speak to Harsh Mander about how the RSS and its offshoots have made inroads into and are influencing tribal and Adivasi society. They discuss the role of the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram and Ekal Vidyalayas in co-opting tribal communities into broader Hindu society and their stated goals of countering Christian missionaries and alleged conversion...

The Mumbai based author Amrita Mahale discusses her novel ‘Real Life’ – delving into female friendship, obsession, Artificial Intelligence, and what it means to live freely in a world of control: https://www.himalmag.com/podcast/amrita-mahale-himalaya-literary-mystery-novel Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from acro...

On 18 September, Maldives President Mohamed Muizzu ratified a new media law aimed at streamlining media regulation and seeking to curb disinformation. The law allowed the creation of a new commission with extensive powers, including the ability to block news websites, suspend media outlets’ registrations, issue fines to journalists and criminalise vague offences such as spreading fake news. There...

The feminist historian Tanika Sarkar speaks to Harsh Mander about the role of women in the #RSS, the organisation's view on gender and its reinforcement of patriarchy. Sarkar describes the creation of the RSS's women's wing, the Rashtra Sevika Samiti, and how it evolved over the years. She also speaks about the women leaders have emerged in the Hindutva fold to gain strategic power in...

In this writer Aakar Patel and journalist Rana Ayyub examine with Harsh Mander whether India under Narendra Modi has transformed into a Hindu Rashtra or and to what extent does India’s secular socialist democracy still endures. You can watch this conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/P3mb8QO9uDU This episode is part of Season Two of Partitions of the Heart. In this season, Harsh Mander speaks...

Welcome to the Southasia Review of Books podcast, where we speak to celebrated authors and emerging literary voices from across Southasia. In this episode, Shwetha Srikanthan speaks to the writer Aatish Taseer on history, syncretism and the search for belonging at the heart of his new book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (HarperCollins Fourth Estate India, July 2025). https://www.himalmag.c...

In this episode, Harsh Mander speaks to historians Mridula Mukherjee and Vinay Lal about the origins of the RSS, the ideologies of its founders, the it played (and did not play) in India’s freedom struggle, and its role during the Partition riots. Mukherjee talks about how in pre-independence India, the idea that Hindus must constitute a separate nation that opposed including minorities already ex...

Since June, Pakistan has experienced yet another season of severe monsoon flooding, with particularly heavy impacts across the Punjab region. Flood waters and landslides have claimed many hundreds of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands more. The Pakistan Disaster Management Authority announced that, by 10 September, that 900 people had died and about four million were impacted by the floods....

In this episode of "Saffron Siege: The RSS at 100", Apoorvanand discusses how the Hindu and Hindutva common sense kept the RSS popular even though it was banned after Gandhi's assassination in 1948. He talks to Harsh Mander about how it emerged from the shadows of being a banned organisation, how it grew from strength to strength through the 1960s, 1970s up till 2014 when Narendra Mo...