Why Zohran Mamdani is the Archetypal South Asian

Guest Post by Samyak Dixit

Read the Previous Part in the South Asia Series Here

On November 4, 2025, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a Uganda-born princeling of “South Asian” extraction, who had only become a citizen of the United States in 2018, was elected as the Mayor of New York City. It was a truly extraordinary news story, with narrative threads worth pulling at in all sorts of directions.

In the realm of objective political analysis, it is incredibly obvious that Zohran is a bit of a political unicorn. If you take away his ideology and focus on his strengths purely as a retail politician, he is one of the most compelling talents to emerge in the last ten years in the U.S. In his first six months in office, Zohran has proven to be a very popular figure among his electorate – which is the peculiar and diverse electorate of New York City. But given the fact that he is the Mayor of the most famous city in the world, he has also acquired a second life as an internet personality and a hero of the broader Democratic Party electorate in the U.S., and also among similarly-minded people across the world. He is a “Yookay” figure and Arsenal fan to some, while being a cricket nerd and “typical South Asian boy” to others.

Politically, he is clearly malleable. He knows what to say to different groups to make them happy. He also has a likeable personality, helped by what I consider to be the gold-standard smile in the field of retail politics. If you pay attention to the media about him, Zohran is nearly always smiling in nearly every image or video that is produced of him. He passes a crucial test of retail politics that my old professor Larry J. Sabato taught us at UVA: “If you want to understand how a politician is perceived subconsciously by the public, focus on their body language when they are giving a speech, with the volume of the video turned off”. 

Increasingly, it is also looking like he was the Patient Zero for a new brand of social media politics taking over the minds of the youngest voters across the world: this is a world of Instagram reel algorithms, of creative and punchy “edits” made and distributed across the internet. Of critical information and “political vibes” being conveyed in 30 second videos on X or Instagram… The playbook he used to emerge victorious in New York City has in many ways been put to its most prominent use in the Indian Subcontinent: e.g. the sudden rise of Balen Shah in Nepal, the incredible rise of C. Joseph Vijay in Tamil Nadu within India, and even more recently, in the Indian “Cockroach Janta Party” protests.

There’s dozens of narrative threads that surround Zohran’s election as the Mayor of New York City. One such narrative that fascinates me is just how much Zohran resembles certain Theater Kids I knew from my schooling at one of India’s most prominent and successful schools in New Delhi. I see it in many ways as the Indian Theater Kid Shuddho faction’s emergence on the leadership stage of Blue Power (liberal, institutional power) in the U.S.. Some within Shuddho might see this elevation as a sign that Shuddho has “arrived”, but I honestly think it is more a sign of the decline in competence of Blue Power, than any increase in the competence of the Shuddho Theater Kid faction.

However, for the purposes of this article, we must focus on Zohran’s identity. Because in the Indian Subcontinent, one’s identity codes for one’s tribe – one’s in-group and out-group – and it largely acts as the animating factor in one’s politics. For better or worse, in the Subcontinent, your identity, your last-name, what you eat and what you wear have a deterministic, almost fatalistic quality to them. This might come as a shock to New World readers, where “stepping off the Boat” wipes the slate clean and (in theory) gives you a new start and allows you to self-actualize yourself in a manner that is free from the shackles of Old World Identity. The rules are different in the Old World.

So let us unpack Zohran’s identity. Does it affect his politics or his worldview? Does it affect how he is perceived, both in the United States and in India, the land of his family’s origin?

Zohran as a “South Asian”

Zohran is the son of Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan Marxist economist of Gujarati Indian extraction, and Mira Nair, a film-maker from India’s Legacy Shuddho Elite. If you’re at home keeping count, this makes him the second son of a prominent Marxist academic after Pete Buttegeig who “suddenly” rose to fame in the Democratic Party in the last decade. In the world of Indian identity politics, this makes Zohran an Indian Moslem, with his father being an atheist but belonging to an esoteric sect of Shia Islam by birth. Curiously, perhaps as a commentary on how identity is ascribed in progressive politics, Zohran is never associated with Hinduism or with being Hindu, despite his mother being from an Indian Hindu Panjabi family. It is instructive that U.S. progressivism, to which all global progressivism now looks to for their guidance, still operates with an equivalent of the “One Drop Rule” when it comes to these things.

In the Indian context, Zohran’s identity becomes even more interesting because is technically the product of an “interfaith” couple, with his parents belonging to different religions. In the playground of Indian politics and history this makes him a particular object of desire to Shuddho ideologues in India (think of them as the specifically Indian version of U.S. progressivism) who want to find in Zohran a totemic ideal of the kind of the world they wish to create. 

Because you see, in the bizarre world of Indian Shuddho ideology, interfaith couples are ascribed a particular high-status moral character just by the nature of their existence. For the U.S. reader, a comparable situation would be that of an interracial couple being considered “inherently morally good”, due to the historical nature of what it represents. In the U.S., possibility of existence of such a pairing is is entangled with the history of slavery and Jim Crow and historical discrimination against African Americans and a historical ban on interracial marriage. While no such restriction exists in the confused landscape of Indian marriage and personal laws – where different religious communities have bargained different personal laws with the Indian State to create what is essentially a Multi-Social-Contract State – Shuddho ascribes a similar moral high stature to interfaith couples in India. They are portrayed as “inherently morally good” through the means of popular media, advertisements, fiction novels, etc. For some reason, it is particularly the pairing of Moslem men and Hindu women that Shuddho finds most morally praiseworthy – some interfaith couples are clearly “more equal” than others in the Shuddho mind. To psychoanalyze for a moment, the steelmanning of the Shuddho position is that such a couple is able to “break through the rigid walls of tribal identity in Indian society and is able to find love beyond that”, or something to that extent.

This is in the first way in which Zohran, simply by being who he is, and by his parents being who they are, qualifies to be a champion of “Southasianism”. If the great divide that cuts through the Indian Subcontinent is religion, and “South Asia” as a term specifically coined to engage in denialism of the crimes of Islam in the Subcontinent, then any event or person or story which countersignals the predictable battle-lines of tribal identities in the Subcontinent becomes an immediate advocate for “Southasianism”.

So in the identity matrix of Indian Subcontinent politics, Zohran is essentially an Indian Moslem. It is not quite certain just how much this identity of his (with his Hindu half erased out of the conversation entirely) even shapes his modern world-view or politics. But it is something he represents, and embodies. And it is something about him that will inspire debate and activism from other, motivated parties.

And through Zohran, we can perhaps explore the place in Subcontinent politics that has been assigned to the community to which he belongs – the Indian Moslem. 

The Indian Moslem as the archetypal “South Asian”

The Indian Moslem is the black sheep of Subcontinent politics. Having played a big role in the creation of Pakistan (with the Hostage Population Theory being the “guarantee” for the Moslems staying behind in India), having chosen not to move to Pakistan during the Partition of India to protect his property and religious places, the Indian Moslem finds his modern-day politics to be in a strange stalemate. Curiously, this act of not moving to Pakistan is always presented as a choice, and it is supposed to be undeniable proof of the (Indian) patriotic credentials of the person in question. I’m always amazed at what the listener is supposed to make of such a statement. And I don’t think Indian Moslems who publicly use this statement realize that saying that their family “chose to stay in India” in a chest-thumping way does not convey the message that they think it does. For one, it reveals that this person feels that there was a choice to be made here – when other communities did not see the choice existing at all. It makes the Indian Moslem’s relationship to India (in their own words) conditional and consciously ascended to, which is a sentiment that doesn’t extend to most other Indian communities. I’ve always found this line of thinking to be a peculiar one, and something that reveals far more than the speaker perhaps wanted to reveal.

In the political sphere, the creation of Pakistan in 1947 clipped the wings of the trajectory of the politics of the Indian Moslem. While it created one (now two) separate “nations” who self-profess to be representatives of the political and historical trajectory of the Indian Moslem (hence why Tipu Sultan is so important to the Panjabi Moslem who grew up in Lahore), it also ended up dividing up the numerical strength and resources of the total Moslem population of the Indian Subcontinent.

While Partition eventually created two new nations in the Subcontinent, it left the remaining Moslems in India in a social and political quagmire. Instead of taking their “separateness” from the Hindu majority (caused by their conversion) to its logical conclusion on a social and political level (like Pakistan and Bangladesh have done to glorious results), the Indian Moslem has had to focus his political energy to nullify the permanently-encroaching majority Hindu culture of India to maintain his “separateness”. The politics of the Indian Moslem therefore becomes “defensive”, focused purely on combating any perceived threat to this separateness.

Again, this existed in the pre-Partition British India too. As is documented extensively by Venkat Dhulipala in his seminal book, this same “defensive” separateness of the Indian Moslem in the late 1930s manifested through the All India Muslim League. In this period, the symbol of encroaching “Hinduness” was (bizarrely for the modern reader) the Indian National Congress. In a way, this dynamic of “defensive separateness” hasn’t really changed for the Indian Moslem. The only problem is, with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi population now separated, the ability of the Indian Moslem to defend themselves against the encroaching “Hinduness” has been severely diminished. In the year 2026, he now finds himself being forced to ally with local caste groups in various Indian states to stop the newest, more rhetorically aggressive, version of encroaching “Hinduness” as represented by a party like the BJP. This is why the Indian Moslem is visibly uncomfortable with outward Indian nationalism. It is too “Hindu-coded” and too associated with “Hinduness” (which in the mind of the convert is permanently encroaching) and threatens to chip away at his “separateness” at the margins.

Hence, the demands of the Indian Moslem polity in its parlay with the post-Partition Indian Republic have been that their community – diminished in number and strength by the Partition – should be left alone to manage its own affairs. So we now find ourselves in the situation where the Indian Moslem polity of the 21^st century is focused purely on maintaining certain political and social red-lines. Any actions of the State that would encroach (or perceived to be encroaching) this separateness – actions that would attempt to change the separate clothes, names, food, language, script, etc. of the convert, qualifies as a red line for this polity. As discussed previously, this manifests on each level of society – separate laws on personal matters, property, marriage, etc., separate institutions to govern these laws, separate educational institutions.

The way it manifests in political discourse is that the only polity that is acceptable to the Indian Moslem is one where Hindus operate on secular lines (more concerned about material issues or internal caste issues) and Moslems are left alone to be governed by their religious and political leaders. A great example of this phenomenon is, paradoxically, found in the United States, where the Indian American Muslim Council, an organization called the Indian American Muslim Council, constantly accuses an organization like the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) of “communalizing” political advocacy within the Diaspora population in the U.S. For any objective observer, the irony should be so blatant and ridiculous that you almost feel like you’re being hammered over the head with a (because it’s the U.S.) baseball bat. But, correctly understood, this position of the IAMC aligns perfectly with the political dynamic desired by the Indian Moslem in India.

And it should be no surprise given the historical and political reality of the Indian Moslem that we have explored, that this has the potential to create a truly unique identity for the Indian Moslem. And we have seen this play out in the close to eight decades since Partition. Having chosen to stay in India during the Partition, the Indian Moslem is unable to fulfill his political destiny of separateness that his conversion and ideology tends towards. At the same time, he is also Indian by nationality, while being surrounded by two bizarre nations that also lay claim to the mantle of his perceived history. He is caught between a rock and a hard place, and his identity is like no other in the region.

This is why I feel that, in many ways, the Indian Moslem is the archetypal “South Asian”. Being a “South Asian” allows the Indian Moslem to have his cake and eat it too. He can continue to associate with his “Indianness” without having to get too close to the encroaching“Hinduness” of “India”. Under the “South Asian” umbrella, the Indian Moslem also suddenly acquires permission to explicitly associate himself with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Moslems, an association that is natural and historical, but one that he cannot profess in public in India due to fears of his “patriotism” coming under question.

It should also not surprise us that this dynamic probably manifests itself best in a foreign country. When growing up in a country like the U.S. or the U.K., an Indian-Moslem second generation immigrant can find common ground with non-Moslem Indians due to the common Indian cultural markers like sports, popular culture, food, etc. But he can also find common ground with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, or Moslems from other countries like the Arab world or North Africa due to the commonality of religion. The “South Asian” (or “Desi” or “Brown”) identity really fits the Indian Moslem like a hand into a tailor-made glove. Suddenly, he doesn’t have to make a choice between the two parts of his soul that would’ve otherwise pulled him in opposite directions…

And this is where I, for the first time, see an actual utility for the term “South Asia”.

To become a genuinely useful and accurate category, “South Asia” should become a term that refers to the common Moslem culture of the Indian Subcontinent. It fulfills a latent desire among the Subcontinent Moslems of three different nations to discuss and associate based on their common history and culture that developed after their conversion in the Medieval period of India. A great example of this kind of usage is in the video by the YouTube channel named “Masaman”. In his video exploring the Subcontinent Diaspora around the world, he uses the title “Most Interesting Indian & South Asian Diasporas Around the World”. I think of a popular song like Pasoori, sung both in Panjabi and Urdu, and calling out to this common peoplehood. In this manner, the term can find an authentic purpose, while also not imposing the term onto other communities who have not, and do not want to be, associated with or categorized by this term.

Zohran as the culmination of “South Asianianism”

This article is the final part of my entire series on the usage of the term “South Asia”. The writing of this article started in 2024, was published largely throughout 2025, and since the election of Zohran in 2025, I’ve been sitting on this final part, because he is such a compelling metaphor for understanding this aspect of “Southasianism”.

First, Zohran embodies a certain Indian Subcontinent Diaspora idealism – especially among the non-Moslem Diaspora, about a “unified” identity around the region in “New World” countries. I’ve already touched on this in the previous part of this series on Diaspora Idealism, but the level of online support Zohran received among many of the Indian Diaspora, especially the Hindu Diaspora, seems to drive this point home clearly. This is partly because of his progressive politics, which has a lot of purchase in the second generation of Subcontinent Americans (as they assimilate into Blue America), but also partly because of his identity, both as an Indian Moslem, and a product of an interfaith marriage. Given the euphoria that was even seen among many of the Shuddho cabal who still live in India over Zohran’s election, it is clear that the people who subscribe to this ideology see Zohran as a vehicle for their dreams and hopes and ideals.

Going even further, Zohran as an Indian Moslem occupies an identity space that is essentially a “no-man’s land” in the context of the “Old World” history of the Subcontinent. Simply put, the Indian Moslem, as a leading voice in the creation of Pakistan, as a group who (despite remaining in India after causing the Partition) feels a sense of ownership over Pakistan, but also still has to claim Indian “patriotism” for practical reasons, is an identity group caught between a rock and a hard place. The Indian Moslem is a group that is especially inclined to adopt the term “South Asian”, as it allows him to claim a sense of place in India (which is supposedly subsumed within the term “South Asian”) without having to associate with the inherent “Hinduness” associated with the identity of “Indian”. It also allows the Indian Moslem to congregate with Pakistani and Bangladeshi Moslems under an umbrella term, undoing a cultural and religious connection that was severed when the Moslems of British India decided to create a “Pakistan” for the good of their religion.

I strongly believe that the only accurate and worthwhile use of the term “South Asian” can be as a term to collectively describe the history and culture and identity of the Moslem converts of the Indian Subcontinent. This level of association already exists – the Pakistani and Bangladeshi Moslem – through the magic of the replacement of the convert’s ancestral memory, considers the Taj Mahal to be “his” legacy, despite the monument being located in India. Zohran’s popularity among Pakistani and Bangladeshi Moslems is representative of something similar. Contradictions and fallacies aside, this is a real identity that has developed over the last 1,000 years, and “South Asian” can be a term used to describe this identity.

Zohran, being an emblem of empty Diaspora idealism, a vehicle of the dreams of many Subcontinent Moslems, is therefore the perfect symbol of “South Asianism”. 

This is the sixth & last part of a multipart series. To follow along & find more of Samyak, follow him at his Twitter & Substack