This podcast is part of Season 2 of “Partitions of the Heart”. “Saffron Siege” runs from 17 September to 3 December 2025, with a new episode releasing every Wednesday.
In this episode, musician and political commentator T M Krishna speaks to Harsh Mander about Tamil Nadu’s long history of social movements that has led to this resistance. They examine how the state’s linguistic and language-based faith traditions have stood as a bulwark against the RSS’s attempts at homogenisation under a Hindutva umbrella. Krishna points out the multiple streams of religious influence on arts in India, especially in music, and how the RSS has tried to deny this past in service of the ideological project. “Carnatic music is symbolic of something for the RSS. It is symbolic of that puritanical and cultural superiority… Homogenisation, or rather a linearisation, of that is convenient for them.”