L’Opéra, Iran, and the Post-Hindu Condition

A Meditation on Revolution, Secularism, and South Asia’s Futures

Inspiration arrives in the strangest of places.

Recently, I found myself deep in yoga, settling deeper roots in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s not clear whether this will be our long-term home yet but even so time to lay down the contours of a life (our main life of course still remains Cambridge, UK while Chennai, India is a must thrice yearly ensconcement).

In the midst of this personal flux, a video Nivedita just shared with cut through the noise: a YouTube interview about Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution, told through the eyes of a Baha’i couple who fled Iran and went on to create a French patisserie empire in India, L’Opéra.

A Persian Baha’i family, forced to leave their homeland during one of the most cataclysmic revolutions of the 20th century, finds refuge in Europe, and then serendipitously establishes one of the most successful French bakery brands in India. L’Opéra is more than a culinary achievement; it is a civilizational echo. It carries with it the scent of saffron (زعفران; who knew Zac Efron’s name, said quickly, sounds like Saffron in Farsi) and the soul of exile.

The story centers around Christine Samandari-Hakim and Kazem Samandari, whose son married and settled in India. During a 2009 visit to meet their grandchildren, the seeds of L’Opéra were planted. Christine’s father was a pioneering Baha’i physician who trained generations of Iranian doctors, and her brother was executed in Iran—a grim reminder of the theocratic regime’s war on Baha’is. The couple’s story is a layered one, folding exile, faith, lineage, and entrepreneurship into one.

The Baha’i Faith, for those unfamiliar, is systematically persecuted in the Islamic Republic. University education is closed off to Baha’is unless they renounce their faith—a condition that goes against the most basic rights of personhood. The Islamic Republic claims divine legitimacy, yet its actions reflect a deep fragility: any system that demands the renunciation of identity as a precondition for participation is, by nature, insecure.

And yet, revolutions do not appear ex nihilo. They are a result of the system’s own implosions. The Shah’s regime had many faults—its heavy-handedness, its disconnect from the grassroots, its entanglement with foreign powers. But the Islamic Revolution replaced a flawed monarchy with an autocracy of ideology. Many Iranian Baha’is, Jews, secularists, and even moderate Muslims found themselves on the wrong side of history overnight.

Iran is unique in that it secularized rapidly since the Revolution—even aggressively so in the case of elite society (north Tehran is party central). Within a generation, many Iranians became more Parisian than Persian. But today, post-revolutionary Iran hosts a strange paradox: the government has had to cede to the obsession with pre-Islamic grandeur simmers. A yearning for Cyrus, for Zoroaster, for Aryan myths and ancient glories. The revolution buried the Shah, but in doing so, resurrected Darius.

The Mirror of Pakistan

From a South Asian lens, Iran poses a haunting counterpoint.

Why hasn’t Pakistan followed the Iranian path toward secularism? Why do even Pakistan’s atheists often carry an Islamic cultural sensibility? Unlike Iran, which rapidly flirted with European modernity, Pakistan was born into an identity crisis. Its ideological foundation was neither language nor ethnicity, but an abstraction: “Islam in danger.” That ethos doesn’t lend itself easily to secularism.

Moreover, while elite Iranian society went from mosques to miniskirts, Pakistan’s elite often goes from the mosque to English medium schools and back to the mosque (while trying to squeeze into the tightest jeans as possible). There has been no genuine cultural rupture, no sustained rebellion against tradition, only an oscillation.

The great irony is that many Pakistani liberals or seculars are still arguing within a framework whose grammar is religious. They are the children of maulanas, just dressed in jeans. There has not yet emerged a post-Islamic identity in Pakistan akin to what Iran is beginning to foster underground: a secular nationalism that embraces pre-Islamic heritage. Even the Karachi and Lahori elite (one of whose scions tread our boards) are reluctant to transcend “Islamicate.”

Hindus, Post-Hindus, and the Shattered Mirror

This brings me to the post-Hindu condition.

I recently attended an Eid-Diwali event that felt deeply intimate. But what struck me was how different the new Hindus are from those of the 1970s or 1980s. These are not Gandhians or Nehruvians. These are not the ahimsa-seeking spiritual pluralists of yesteryear. These are post-traditionalists, assertive, cosmopolitan, and unapologetic. The Eid-Diwali I went to was inter communal and free; Upper Caste Hindus want to pay $250 a ticket and buy the latest jewellery (they are only conservative in their food choices; Indian food always reigns supreme).

In some ways, they are closer to secular Iranians than they are to their own elders. They live with one foot in Palo Alto and the other in Ayodhya, navigating modernity and memory with surprising ease. In fact, I would argue that the upper-caste, globalized Hindu joins Iranian secularists, Ashkenazi Jews, and Lebanese Christians in being deracinated, to some extent, but being able to glower at backward kinsmen who are “letting the side down.”

Yet the real mystery remains: why have many Muslim populations in the Global South not followed suit? Why has the acid bath of modernity failed to dissolve traditionalist worldviews in places like Pakistan, Egypt, or Indonesia the way it has in Iran, India, or Lebanon?

One theory is that Hindus, despite their internal contradictions, were never dogmatically expansionist. Hinduism never sought to convert the world, so it developed an inner elasticity. Islam, especially in its post-colonial iteration, became defensive and fortress-like (especially after the loss of the north Mediterranean, Iberia, Southern Italy and the Balkans; as the Arabs eroded in their grandeur, it was the Turks, elevated to Islam by the Persians, who advanced the cause). Modernity was seen not as an invitation but an invasion.

Peace, Possibility, and Punditry

Original thought has given way to factional bickering. Mudslinging is replacing meditation. I don’t wish to keep moderating endlessly. Instead, I appeal to everyone: elevate your contributions. Bring in original provocations, surprising syntheses, ideas that crackle.

This piece itself emerged from a drought. I hadn’t written for a while. Then, like lightning, a documentary about a Baha’i patisserie unlocked something. That is the nature of inspiration: unpredictable, luminous, often humble.

As a final note, I’m in touch with Dr. Ankur Barua, a remarkable scholar of Hindu thought. His work explores theological universes, the interplay between particularity and universality, and the philosophical grammar of reincarnation. If readers have questions for him, please do reach out. The email is open, the forum is alive.

The Questions that Indosaurus & Nivedita had for Dr. Ankur are below (I’ll collate an email a few days):