The government of India has set in place now very overt moves to drastically enhance the ‘Indic’ – which is India, minus anything that spells its Muslim people and heritage. There are no elected Muslim representatives in the ruling party or ministers in government, school and college textbooks stand purged, there is an attack on Urdu/Persian words in courts and police stations, and vicious demonisation when it comes to films like Chhaava, Article 370, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story. After nearly eleven and a half years of a concerted plan to render India a monolith, how is our cultural fabric doing?

Unlike AQI, it is hard to have a government-verified measure of the state of its wear and tear. But what does anecdotal evidence, based on some events in December, say about what is ‘Indian’ these days?

The recent Hindi film Dhurandhar, which has supposedly worked at the box office in the first few days, is the latest to build a narrative of a ‘new India’ where to be Indian is being Hindu, and all others are either murderous killers or just contemptible. Pakistan is a useful proxy stand-in for ‘the other culture’. Yet the film’s own success exposes this contradiction.

Dhurandhar, in large part, has made it thanks to the power of its soundtrack, the song FA9LA, going viral. The character played by Akshaya Khanna, Rehman Dakait, enters the set to this Bahraini rap track, sung by Bahraini-Moroccan rap artist Flipperachi aka Hussam Aseem. FA9LA was already a big hit in West Asia since 2024, and has now been adapted by music composer Shashwat Sachdev for Dhurandhar. This raging hit apart, the entire soundtrack of the film is, for the want of a better word, just India – and not ‘Indic’. It synthesises not just Arabic rap, but mixes together some retro hits, qawwali, Punjabi rap, and strains of pop. The titles of the tracks are also using words which would otherwise be deemed not ‘Indic’ enough for purified ‘Indic’ conversations in 2025. The tracks are called Ishq Jalakar, Gehra Hua, Shararat, Hawa Hawa, and Ez-Ez.

What is the whole vibe of this soundtrack? Fully transgressive of borders. The need to introduce cultural markers that would be popular and make the film a hit, has ensured that the mixed, the syncretic and not just a one-culture motif colour the canvas. This tilting at a specific culture, which is otherwise shown as seriously evil, is diabolical – and it sits uneasily with the film’s poison-laced narrative. Dhruandhar is to social ties what Animal was to gender ties, point out critics. The hate is not just on the screens but off-screen too. Film critics who dared point out to the elephant in the room have been hounded. Former MPs, those associated with the production, and prominent actors, have poured vitriol against critics and commentators who called out the film for its intentions and storyline.

Jashn-e-Rekhta (Rekhta, meaning “mixed”), the Urdu festival organised since 2015 on an industrial scale) was the biggest open-air event in the capital between December 5 and 7. Approximately 120,000 people came and inhaled Delhi’s noxious air to be a part of the live vibe. Audiences were visibly transfixed by the sounds and draw they felt towards Urdu. Jashn-e-Rekhta gets panned in some circles for not being political enough or focussing on just the foods, lyricism and ‘beauty’ surrounding a great Indian language, currently in an existential crisis. But we have come to a point when howsoever unintended, even signalling surviving and thriving is a political act.

Scholar and public intellectual Alok Rai – also Premchand’s grandson – was in the capital speaking on Urdu’s future. He spoke on how despite mounting government pressure to keep Urdu out of the room, it is unable to make it go away. Its popularity, in his view, stems from two important places; first, it having developed from an engagement with several languages and territories in India, and being spoken in India over centuries, meant the sounds and tones have been sandpapered and polished, rendered almost mellifluous to the human ear. Second, Bombay Hindi cinema music serves as the basic emotional landscape of those parts of India familiar with Hindi. That sensibility has almost intravenously fed Hindustani and Urdu into our psyche.

History suggests such purification drives backfire. Could we be seeing a replay of how misplaced ideas of India’s first I&B minister B.V. Keskar for a ‘pure’ All India Radio (AIR), banning them from playing impure Hindi film songs (in Hindustani) served as rocket-fuel for the popularity of both Hindi film music and the derided harmonium? It eventually forced AIR to acquiesce and start a station, Vividh Bharti, that would play Hindi film music. This is a point very effectively made by Isabel Huacuja Alonso in Radio for the Millions, Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders.

At Alok Rai’s public lecture on Sunday, former Culture Secretary Ashok Vajpayee recounted that in Ujjain during Mahakal this year, he was visiting after it was no longer Shahi Sawari, but Rajsi Sawari, as de-Urdufication was on. He addressed the locals in a gathering and told them he was very puzzled, “bhai, sawari bhi to Urdu hai (even sawaari is an Urdu word)”.

A drive towards ‘One-Culture’, being about only ‘one’ imagined, Brahminical Hindutva-laden variety, is unable to really get around the multiple strands of what makes the Indian weave. Arabic rap, qawwali beats, the dots, dashes and accents that make for a happy “mixed” and mixed-up confluence remain the top notes of all that is Indian.

The irony is complete. A film trafficking in hatred succeeds only by embracing the very syncretism it seeks to demonise. India’s plural sounds refuse to be silenced, even when amplified through speakers meant to broadcast their erasure.

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