Hinduism has been resisting imperial advancement since before Islam. It absorbed a thousand years of conquest, colonisation, conversion pressure, missionary infrastructure, and Macaulay’s curriculum, and it emerged at the other end with the faithfulness of its population intact and the integrity of her sacred landmass undivided. Her wings, Pakistan and Bangladesh, snapped off but Bharat held on and now India soars to unimagined heights of greatness.

Islam resists by hardening. Hinduism resists by evolving. Those are different operations and they produce different kinds of civilisations.

The Hindu mother in the suburb of New Jersey, lighting a diya in a kitchen, is doing the work that has kept her civilisation alive during a thousand years of darkness. The diya goes on the granite counter next to the espresso machine and neither object loses anything by sitting beside the other.

This is also why the divine feminine matters and why we keep returning to it. A civilisation that imagines its goddesses as sovereign does in fact produce women who carry sovereignty in ordinary life. The first female prime ministers in South Asia came from the Dharmic traditions, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka in 1960 and Indira Gandhi in India in 1966, decades before the Indo-Islamicate states of the region could produce theirs. That is not coincidence. A civilisation that lets women be goddesses also lets them be heads of state.

The Hindu woman has been a resistance fighter for a thousand years inside her own family unit, holding the dharma together within an intensely patriarchal household while ensuring that household survived hostile forces outside. She is feminist and traditional simultaneously, modern and ancient simultaneously, mother and matriarch and scientist and leader simultaneously, because the cosmology permits it. The goddess sits at the centre of the room and the woman in the room takes her seat from her.

She didn’t pack much.

Maybe a small murti of Ganesha wrapped carefully in the folds of a sari. A handwritten copy of the Hanuman Chalisa. A few photos of her parents and siblings.

And yet — she carried everything.

She carried the festivals, prayers, stories, and values. She carried the smell of incense and the sound of bhajans through an apartment in a new city, and Diwali into suburban houses that had never known the glow of a diya. And she carried the faith that her children would one day know their roots.

For many of us, that woman was our mother. For others, it was a grandmother, a great-grandmother, or an ancestor whose name we speak with reverence. And for others still, it is a woman who came to Hindu Dharma not through birth, but through calling — who chose this path and carried it forward with just as much love and devotion.

They made sure we knew every word of the aarti. They cooked prasad in kitchens far from the land where the recipes were born.

They taught us that being Hindu and American were never in conflict.

We could be both, fully and proudly. Our ancient traditions were NOT a burden to hide, but a gift to share. And the values passed down through thousands of years — dharma, seva, ahimsa — are very much needed today.

This Mother’s Day, the Hindu American Foundation pauses to say:

Thank you to every Hindu American mother who carried a civilization in her heart. Who held her culture close when it would have been easier to let it go. Who made sure the next generation could stand in their faith with confidence and pride.

You are the original builders of our community. The first teachers. The quiet architects of everything we are.

Today, we celebrate you — with the full depth of gratitude you have always deserved.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Precedent one. Operation Sindoor was not a Pakistani defeat.

Pakistan entered 2025 as a failed state. It exits the Pahalgam year as a diplomatic champion. Whatever happened in the skies over those days in May, the outcome in global perception is unambiguous. A military operation is never only a military operation. It is also how the world reads it, and on that ledger the result is not the one Delhi wanted. No Pakistani commentator across the spectrum treats Sindoor as a setback. Our Pakistani readers can confirm this in the thread, and we invite them to. The Indian premise that Pakistan might now re-engage to recover from some imagined humiliation makes zero sense. The humiliation is not where Indian commentary locates it.

Precedent two. The Crescent commentariat cannot have it both ways.

There is a pernicious Pakistani trait, most visible in the diaspora and the Anglophone class at home. They live distinctly Western lifestyles. They then want Islam for all. Live your beliefs. It is a genuinely offensive thing to cheer on the Iranian revolution, a revolution deeply devastating to the Iranian people, from an American suburb or a DHA drawing room. Only a Pakistani commentator could manage the trick of celebrating the Islamic Republic while exempting themselves from its consequences.

In the Iranian diaspora, religious Shias are quietly ostracised. Persian pride, across pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-Islamic registers, is astonishing in its depth. Some of us, the Baha’is for instance, integrate all three.

The TNT move, which imports Islamist preferences onto others while the class that holds them escapes the reality (QeA typifies this), is the opposite.

Precedent three. The rediscovery of Hinduism is coming, and it will come from South Punjab and Sindh.

In Urdu class just now, our teacher proudly spoke about Panjnad, the point where the five rivers of the Indus meet (the equivalent of Varanasi alas without Brahmins to sacralise it). He told me proudly that it was named in the Mahabharata. He told us the Sufi master of Panjnad married a woman of the Cholistani tribe, and the local people remember it 150 years later. The pattern recurs across the shrines dotted through South Punjab and Sindh. Sufi masters married into the local tribes. This is the oldest Muslim culture in the subcontinent, running back to the earliest invasions and Muhammad bin Qasim. It is the most syncretic.

Pakistani nationalism as constructed in Lahore and through Urdu is a denial of the Hindu inheritance in favour of a Persian one. Lahore dominates the cultural production, and Lahore is heavily invested in an Urdu-speaking identity for reasons of its own. That construction does not map onto the actual history of Multan, Bahawalpur, Sukkur, Sehwan. As secularisation proceeds, and it is proceeding piecemeal, regional ethnicities will do what Bengal has already done and reach for a pre-Islamic layer. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are dense, spectacular, geographically specific texts. Most of the land they describe is in Pakistan. The internet is a very large place and Pakistanis, especially those who are truly autochthonous, will hunt for their heritage.

Within a generation, thirty to forty percent of Pakistanis will want to express some form of Hindu heritage. Not the majority. Not even the plurality. But a substantial and culturally consequential minority. It will not happen suddenly. It will be a process, uneven across regions and classes, and the Sindhi and South Punjabi will get there before the Lahori.

The Hindu right does not help itself. It does not know how to speak to this constituency. The parallel is Christian Zionism and its mirror: most Palestinian Christians, who are by descent far more plausibly linked to the ancient Israelites than most contemporary Zionists, are simply switched off by Zionism as currently configured. The communication failure is total, and the movement loses its most natural audience. The Hindu right is making the same mistake with the same demographic logic.

TNT nationalism is already fraying. It will have to adapt to a radically different landscape, the way Zionism will.