On a Wednesday morning in Hyderabad, on the banks of the Osman Sagar reservoir, I stood inside the Chilkur Balaji Temple and watched people walking in circles. They call it the ‘Visa Temple’ — a shrine where the city’s software engineers pray for H-1Bs and students seek blessings before consulate appointments. I had expected some theatre of aspiration. But I found people moving in overlapping loops around a modest central shrine, some slowly, eyes lowered, lips murmuring, others with the brisk urgency of commuters late for work. The rhythm was simple: make eleven rounds to ask, then come back for one hundred and eight to give thanks if your wish was granted.

Many clutched small cards printed with numbers from one to one hundred and eight, crossing each square with a pen as they completed another round, occasionally pausing to check their count, to reassure themselves that nothing had been missed.

Some cards were yellow, others blue or pink or pale green, picked up from boxes at the entrance or handed out by vendors outside, many already softened by sweat and handling. They were creased, smudged with dust and fingerprints and consulted like exam schedules or fitness trackers.

Outside the main gate, before I had even entered, a small informal market had grown around the temple. Vendors sold garlands of tulsi leaves, coconuts, incense sticks, plastic idols, laminated pictures, strings of beads, trinkets of every description. One of them, a man with permanently sunburnt skin and hands scented with basil, introduced himself as Ranjan. He had been working here for nearly twenty years and was trying to sell me a sixteen-foot tulsi garland which, according to him, would expedite my wish.

“People think it’s only for visas,” he told me. “That’s just how it became famous.”

What I was seeing at Chilkur wasn’t entirely unique. Across India, a number of temples and shrines have, over time, acquired reputations for helping devotees secure visas or overseas travel. In Ahmedabad, applicants visit the Chamatkari Hanuman Temple, which has earned the nickname ‘Visa Hanuman’, and in Punjab, the Shaheed Baba Nihal Singh Gurudwara is filled with toy aeroplanes offered by those hoping to go abroad.

This kind of specificity is not new. Indian devotional practice has long accommodated highly particular, even transactional, forms of prayer — for recovery from specific illness or for success in exams or court cases — often tied to specific deities or sites believed to be especially effective. What has changed is the object of anxiety. In that sense, Chilkur is more like an update: a sacred space absorbing the pressures of globalisation, just as earlier temples absorbed the uncertainties of everyday life.

“So what else is it for, if not just visas?” I asked Ranjan.

“Life,” he said simply. “Business. Health. Marriage. Court cases. Exams. People come when life is stuck.”

“And many like this temple because it doesn’t take any donations, no fees, nothing. You can only give your effort. So people buy garlands from us instead.” He gestured at the other vendors lining the path. “We are the only ones who take money here so if you want to contribute to the temple, it should be here,” he said, as any good salesman would.

Inside, this ethic was written into the laminated notices pinned to the walls, and into the small print on the reverse of the tally cards. The text, in Telugu, instructs devotees to perform the rounds with sincerity and patience, to return in gratitude once wishes are fulfilled, to avoid haste or carelessness, to maintain humility and concentration. It emphasises that the vow is not a bargain but an act of faith, rooted in long tradition. It concludes with a short prayer asking Balaji to grant health, peace, prosperity, and freedom from obstacles.

As I stepped into the moving wave of bodies to begin my own circumambulations, a low chant rose above the shuffle of feet.

Govinda. Govinda. Govinda. It was another name of Balaji, the local incarnation of Vishnu as Venkateswara, the giver of boons, and it was repeated by devotees until it became one steady hum, synchronising breath and movement.

After completing my eleven circles, I stepped aside toward the outer edge of the courtyard, where several people were sitting quietly, watching the flow of bodies. There I noticed a man standing slightly apart from the crowd, hands folded, gaze shifting between the shrine and the moving devotees, as though deciding whether to join them.

His name, he later told me, was Taran. He worked in IT and had grown up visiting the temple with his parents. He had come here more times than he could remember.

“I always stand here first,” he said, when I asked why he lingered. “Before I start walking.” Otherwise, he explained, the ritual risked becoming mechanical, reduced to exercise rather than intention.

“When I was younger, it was very quiet,” he added, glancing at the moving crowd. “Now it’s like this every day.”

I asked him how long his family had been coming here. “My whole life,” he said. “My grandfather used to bring my mother. We never went to Tirupati like other families did,” he said, referencing the most famous of India’s Balaji temples. “We came here.” He paused, watching a group of young people move past, phones briefly checked before pockets swallowed them again. “My grandfather told me a story once, when I was maybe eight or nine. About why this place exists.”

He shifted his weight.

“There was a devotee, a long time ago, who used to make the pilgrimage to Tirupati every year. One year he fell too ill to travel. That night, Lord Venkateshwara appeared in his dream and told him not to worry, that he was already nearby, waiting in the jungle.” Taran gestured vaguely toward the grounds around us, as though we were standing in the forest of that legend. “The devotee followed the vision to a patch of forest and found a mound of earth. He started digging. His axe struck something beneath the soil and blood began to flow—pooling, spreading, staining the ground red.”

I must have looked startled because Taran smiled faintly. “That’s how my grandfather told it. Very dramatic. A voice instructed the devotee to flood the mound with cow’s milk, and when he did, the earth gave way to reveal a self-manifested idol of Balaji, flanked by his consorts Sridevi and Bhoodevi. The temple was built around that mound.”

Did he believe it?

He thought for a moment. “I believed it completely when I was eight. Now?” He shrugged. “I don’t know if it happened exactly like that. But I know this place has been here for centuries. I know my family kept coming back instead of going to Tirupati, even though Tirupati is grander and more famous. There was a reason for that.”

In the late 1990s, according to newspaper accounts, Chilkur had barely been visited, drawing only a handful of devotees each week. Its priest, C.S. Gopala Krishna, had returned from a corporate career to care for his ageing father and inherited a largely forgotten shrine.

Then Hyderabad reinvented itself as ‘Cyberabad’, courting multinational companies and building glass-fronted offices. Students from newly established technical colleges began passing through the area, many of whom were struggling to secure U.S. visas in an increasingly restrictive environment. They came to the temple with their anxieties and Gopala Krishna encouraged them to walk eleven rounds and pray. He reassured them in English. Over time, stories of successful applications circulated, the temple acquired its nickname, and by the mid-2000s, Chilkur was receiving tens of thousands of visitors each week.

When I mentioned the temple’s reputation for visas and passports, Taran laughed. “That’s just what people call it,” he said. “Balaji doesn’t have a passport office.”

Then, more thoughtfully: “When Hyderabad became tech-focused, everyone wanted to leave. So people started coming here for that. When it worked for some, the story spread.”

Did he believe the temple caused those successes?

“I think when you’re anxious,” he said, “you look for places where things have worked before. And I do believe that Balaji makes wishes come true, whatever they may be.”

Chilkur, over time, had become a repository of such stories, a database of favourable outcomes that showed that faith could grow alongside globalisation (or sometimes because of it). I had come on a Wednesday morning, which meant I missed the weekend crowds—the young IT professionals and nervous students who, by most accounts, fill the temple grounds on Saturdays and Sundays, passports sometimes tucked into bags, interview dates circled on calendars. But their presence saturates the temple’s reputation. Online forums and travel reviews overflow with testimonials. A systems analyst whose H-1B paperwork had stalled for three months reported that his visa was approved within days of visiting Chilkur. A game developer described his renewal interview as effortless: “They asked me a single question and told me my visa is approved,” he said, adding the temple had “always been a lucky charm for me.” A twenty-two-year-old woman heading to New York for her master’s degree put it more carefully: “I got the visa because of my capability of course, but I have luck of god as well.”

On one forum, amid the success stories, a parent once asked whether they could complete the rounds on behalf of a child stuck abroad. The question, to this day, remains unanswered. And given the fact that at its peak, the temple reportedly receives seventy-five thousand visitors a week, the arithmetic alone suggests that many wishes must go unfulfilled.

Yet people keep coming. And perhaps that persistence is itself the point. It is tempting, especially for urban, English-speaking observers, to read Chilkur as a parody of modern India: faith bending to neoliberal aspiration, God enlisted in the service of Silicon Valley. But that reading is too thin. What Chilkur reflects more honestly is uncertainty.

For decades, upward mobility in India has been mediated by opaque systems: competitive exams, visa lotteries, unpredictable job markets, institutional gatekeeping. Outcomes often feel arbitrary and preparation does not guarantee success. In such environments, ritual becomes a way of restoring agency. You walk, you count, you mark, and you complete. You do something.

***

Near the edge of the inner courtyard, next to a small Shiva shrine, I met two young men, Karan and Gopal, college friends. One was preparing for government exams. The other had recently started a small company. Both looked tired in the way young men do when their futures depend on systems they cannot see clearly.

“Everything depends on timing,” Karan said. “Exams, interviews, funding. You prepare for years. Then one day decides everything.”

Did prayer help?

“It helps you keep going,” Gopal replied.

“I’ll still study,” Karan said. “I’ll still apply. But here I feel… aligned.”

Aligned with what?

“With effort,” he said, after thinking. “With the idea that trying matters.”

On my way out, I stopped again at Ranjan’s stall. A young woman in her twenties stood nearby, neatly dressed, her accent suggesting she was not from Hyderabad. We spoke briefly. She worked at an electronics firm in HITEC City and had a U.S. tourist visa interview coming up — her first trip abroad, if it came through. Her friends had told her to visit Chilkur, she said, almost apologetically.

I never learned her name, but something about her stayed with me: the slight embarrassment in her voice, the way she held her tally card as though it were simultaneously precious and faintly absurd. She embodied what I had been seeing all morning: people who weren’t sure it would work, and who had come anyway.

“Did you wish for something?” Ranjan asked me, still tying garlands.

“I did,” I said.

He smiled. “Then next time you come, you’ll do one hundred and eight. Now that you’ve asked Govinda, your prayers will be fulfilled. I’ll see you then.”

As I walked back toward my car, I passed the banyan tree behind Ranjan’s stall, where I had seen some devotees earlier circling and tying threads. At its base, scattered among the roots and pressed into the earth, lay several discarded tally cards. I crouched down to look at them more closely. Their numbers were fully crossed out, their grids completed, ink smudged from repeated handling and folding. Someone had finished, someone had returned, someone had once stood where I was standing, anxious and counting, and had later come back in gratitude, crossing out the final square before leaving the card behind.

For those of us still doing eleven rounds, it was strangely reassuring to see them.

I straightened up and looked back toward the temple entrance. The young woman from Ranjan’s stall was beginning her rounds now, card in hand, joining the moving current of bodies. I watched her complete one circle, then two, then lost sight of her in the crowd. In a few weeks she would stand in a queue outside a consulate, documents in hand, and someday after that — hopefully in gratitude — she might return.

On my way to Dassam Falls last month, a natural waterfall at one edge of the Ranchi plateau in Jharkhand, the car slowed as we entered Taimara village. I perked up to see what was causing the fuss and there it was: a bamboo pole across the road. Two children, neither older than ten, held it in place like an official barricade. One of them demanded ₹10 ($0.11) to let us pass. “Pay or we’ll hit the windows,” he said dramatically.

“Is this because of Holi?,” I asked my driver, knowing the festival was approaching and sometimes came with roadside pranks in this part of the country. He laughed. “They are Naxalites,” he said; Maoists who had spent six decades waging a guerrilla war across India’s tribal heartland. Apparently they still had uses for a bamboo pole and a gang of kids. “Thank god it’s not late at night,” he added.

I handed over the money. A few hundred meters down, the pattern repeated and I was ₹20 ($0.22) poorer by the time we proceeded.

I had been in Ranchi for a week by then. On another drive toward Latehar district and into Betla National Park at the edge of Palamau Tiger Reserve, my driver mentioned that this road — once in the heart of what India called the Red Corridor — is still quiet after dark. Vehicles don’t pass through, and even the shops close early. He said it matter-of-factly; it was midday and we were fine. But the habit of caution had clearly outlasted whatever made it necessary.

That’s roughly where Jharkhand is right now. The danger, as most people I met in Ranchi told me, is mostly past tense. Latehar was still on the government’s list of districts affected by Left Wing Extremism (LWE) as recently as mid-2025. By the time I was there, it had been delisted; Jharkhand’s only remaining listed district is now West Singhbhum, further south. The reflexes, as I noticed though, hadn’t caught up yet.

On March 30, in a nearly 90-minute address to the Lok Sabha, Home Minister Amit Shah declared India “Naxal-free” — one day before the government’s self-imposed deadline expired. “With full confidence, we can say that Naxalism has been eradicated from the country,” he told the House. The claim is contested: critics noted that West Singhbhum and Bijapur in Chhattisgarh remain officially designated as affected, and two senior Maoist commanders have publicly pledged to fight on. But the broad direction isn’t seriously in dispute. Travelling through this part of the country earlier this year, what Shah described didn’t feel like bureaucratic optimism. It felt very close, if not complete.

The numbers bear this out. Violent incidents fell 88 percent between 2010 and 2025, and deaths of civilians and security forces over the same period dropped from over a thousand to around a hundred. The affected districts, once 126 at the insurgency’s peak, are now eight. The state came back to districts that were effectively ungoverned, building roads into previously inaccessible forest, opening bank branches, getting welfare schemes to areas that had seen almost no administrative reach.

Tourism has also picked up at Betla in ways that wouldn’t have been imaginable when the Maoists were at their peak. Everyone I spoke to in and around Palamau said some version of the same thing. Relief that people weren’t scared to travel here anymore and that those coming through brought investment with them.

Whatever the grievances that originally fuelled the movement, the Maoist insurgency ultimately imposed enormous costs on the communities it claimed to represent. There have been numerous instances of burnt schools, killed elected officials, extortion rackets running on the rural poor, attacks on the infrastructure that the poorest communities needed most. The movement caused enormous suffering and set Jharkhand back by generations. Its defeat is good news.

But the end of a security crisis is rarely the end of the story.

One of India’s original Project Tiger reserves, declared in 1973, Betla is old forest. Thick sal and bamboo, hills that rise gently from the plains, light in the afternoon that feels like it belongs to a different century. A forest ranger took me around the villages at the reserve’s edge, mostly Bhuiyan — the name itself means children of the soil — and Chero, a warrior tribe indigenous to the region. He talked about how these communities see themselves as the original custodians of the land. Certain groves are maintained not through fencing or signage but through collective restraint, passed down across generations. Across the Chhotanagpur plateau, sarna sthals — the sacred groves of those who follow the Sarna faith — have been doing a form of conservation work since long before the Forest Rights Act existed.

I’m not raising this to romanticise it. I’m raising it because it says something about what peace here actually has to look like. These communities aren’t simply beneficiaries of development or conservation policy — they’re part of the landscape in a more fundamental sense. Laws like PESA and the Forest Rights Act were written to recognise exactly this: to give village assemblies real authority over their own land, to formalise what communities already know about the forests they live inside. The implementation record of both is, generously speaking, incomplete. In neighbouring Bastar, where roads and ambulances have now reached villages that once had neither, there is a new anxiety taking shape alongside the genuine gratitude — that land acquisition and unchecked mining might follow the security improvements. Fixing that isn’t a sideshow to consolidating peace in Jharkhand. It’s fairly central to it.

The question of what happens after the security problem is solved is not unique to central India. Last year I was in Ladakh, about a week before the Sixth Schedule protests intensified. What I remember from those conversations was a disillusionment that even those who had welcomed the constitutional changes of 2019 struggled to put into words. Back then they had wanted more state attention and investment after decades of being an afterthought. Some of that had come. And still the mood had curdled against the feeling that decisions about their future were being made somewhere else.

Jharkhand isn’t Ladakh; the comparison only stretches so far. But the pattern matters. Communities that feel heard at one moment can feel managed at the next.

India has now done something that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago: defeated what was once called the country’s gravest internal security threat. That took sustained effort, serious strategy, and years of difficult work in terrain that didn’t make anything easy. It deserves to be acknowledged.

The question is what happens now, while the goodwill is real and the relief is fresh. PESA and the Forest Rights Act enforced as intended, not treated as aspirations on paper. Development that is negotiated rather than imposed. Gram sabhas with genuine authority over decisions that affect them. None of this is quick, and none of it generates the kind of headline you can put in a press release. But it’s what the situation requires.

At Dassam Falls, when I’d finished taking pictures of the water gushing down, I noticed a group of CRPF jawans making their way down the steep steps to the bottom to join a couple of others already there. Their guns were laid on the rocks beside them and someone was showing the group something on a phone. They all burst into laughter. Off-duty for an afternoon, there was nothing left to watch in these parts of the Chhotanagpur. India has earned the right to feel good about what’s been achieved here. But it should also feel the urgency of what’s still to do.

The road from Dzuleke to Kohima drops you from forest silence into hill-city noise within a couple of hours. After three days in Nagaland, two of them in villages where the loudest sound was the crowing of roosters early in the mornings, Kohima felt abrupt. Then the cathedral appeared.

It sat on Aradura Hill, a massive semicircular building that dominated the skyline in a way I hadn’t expected. The Mary Help of Christians Cathedral, as it is formally known, looked like no cathedral I had been to in Europe or anywhere else in India. I had read about it, heard Vikho — the tour leader of the trip I was on — mention it in passing, but nothing had prepared me for the facade. The front wall borrowed its lines from a traditional Naga house, the kind of high-gabled structure you see in village morungs, but scaled up enormously and set in concrete. Along the base, arranged in a semicircle, were sculptural panels telling stories from the Bible.

We were six in the group, plus Vikho, who had been guiding us through Angami country since Khonoma. Nagaland is home to seventeen major tribes, each with its own language, customs and dress, and the Angami — whose homeland centres on the capital district of Kohima — are among the largest. Vikho was Angami himself, though Revival rather than Catholic, and he watched the building with the mild familiarity of someone who had brought tourists here before but whose own Sundays happened elsewhere.

Inside, the scale opened up further. The light was dim. Workers were fitting interior panelling, the woodwork below the walls borrowing from traditional Naga carving. They smiled at us as we wandered toward the main altar, where rows of pews semicircled around a sixteen-foot wooden crucifix: one of the largest in Asia, carved from a single piece, Christ bleeding down the cross. A group of children, twelve or thirteen years old, were rehearsing a skit on the altar steps. They were preparing for Sunday Mass, we learnt, with their voices echoing off walls that were still, in places, being finished. The cathedral, consecrated as recently as 1991, was not done growing.

One of the most quoted lines of war remembrance in the English language sits on a hillside in Nagaland. “When you go home, tell them of us and say, for your tomorrow, we gave our today,” goes the Kohima Epitaph, attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds and etched at the entrance of the memorial of the 2nd British Division of the Allied Forces in the Second World War.

I, like most Indians, had encountered the Battle of Kohima as a paragraph in my middle school history textbook. The battle itself was fought in the spring of 1944, over a ridge overlooking the town. At its extreme, the fighting took place on what had been the Deputy Commissioner’s tennis court — Japanese and Allied soldiers dug in so close to each other that grenades were lobbed across the net line. The battle turned the Japanese U-Go offensive into India and, for this reason, is often referred to as the Stalingrad of the East. Had it gone differently, the war in South Asia might have taken another shape entirely.

The war cemetery, a ten-minute drive from the cathedral, holds the remains of over 1,400 Allied soldiers. Its terraced lawns and carved epitaphs memorialise the British and Indian dead. But there was no equivalent memorial for the Japanese. Thousands of Japanese soldiers died at Kohima and in the disastrous retreat that followed, many from starvation and disease. Their families carried that grief for decades.

It was those families — Japanese veterans and their descendants — who funded the construction of the cathedral, which had been envisioned by its first bishop, Abraham Alangimattathil, a Salesian priest from Kerala.

The cathedral became, over time, a place where Japanese and British veterans met for reconciliation, with a lamp before the Blessed Sacrament having been donated by British war veterans. Former enemies sitting together inside a building that one side had paid for and the other had blessed, on a hill where both had fought. The Naga people, who had been caught between the two armies in 1944 — their villages destroyed and their fields turned into battlegrounds — now hosted the site of this reckoning.

Nagaland happens to not only be the most Christian state in India, with ninety percent of its population following some sect of Christianity, but it is often also described as the most Baptist jurisdiction on earth. Over three-quarters of the state’s Christians are Baptist. To an outsider arriving for the first time, the sheer density of churches is startling: Baptist, Catholic, Revival, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, with each village often having several. It would be easy to see this as a monolith: an outside faith replacing an older, indigenous animist belief system. But Christianity did not arrive in Nagaland as one thing. It came in waves, each denomination carrying its own theology and its own institutional habits.

The earliest missionaries in the erstwhile Naga Hills were the American Baptists, who came in the mid-nineteenth century. There is an oft-repeated story of E. W. Clark, an American missionary, who baptised 15 converts from the Ao Naga tribe in a pond in the village of Molungkimong on December 22, 1872. By 1905 there were roughly 500 Christians among the Nagas. The Baptists built schools, introduced the Roman script — giving written form to languages that had never had one — and over the following decades converted large portions of the population. The Catholics came much later; Celine, my host in nearby Jakhama, placed her Catholic parish’s age at about sixty years, while her village had been Christian for 125. The Jesuits came later still — three priests from Karnataka in 1970, who set up in Jakhama and built Loyola High School, where Vikho, my guide, studied.

The early conversion were not always clean replacement. In Richard Eaton’s study of conversion among the Nagas, he describes a missionary’s personal copy of an Ao hymnbook in which every instance of Tsungrem — the Ao Naga word for sacred spirits — had been crossed out in pencil and ‘Jihova’ (Jesus) written in the margin. The new faith, thus, did not simply arrive; it was negotiated over time, word by word, with what had come before.

On our first evening in Jakhama, Celine lit a wood fire in the communal kitchen of Campsite Yedhika, her homestay. It was here, passing around cups of rice beer while the wood cracked and the smoke wafted, that Celine told me about the days of rest. Before the paddy harvest, she said, there are certain days when nobody is supposed to go out to the fields and outsiders are not allowed to enter the village. These observances predate Christianity, but they persist. “We still follow these things,” she said, “even though we are Christians, because they are our traditions. They are part of who we are.”

Vikho, when I asked whether Christianity had felt imposed, resisted the question. “For me, Christianity was always part of life,” he said. “Like someone born into Hinduism or Islam in India today, it just becomes part of you. It wasn’t forced on me, it was simply there. But my grandparents’ answer might be different.” His grandparents had experienced both animism and Christianity, but when he asked them why people converted, the answers were vague. “They would say they had a ‘calling’. But what that means exactly, we don’t know. Maybe they were sick, or in trouble, or someone helped them — and they believed that help came from God.”

What interested him more was structure. “The old system had many restrictions. It wasn’t written down; it was passed orally.” Christianity, he said, brought a framework that worked better with modern life. It reduced inter-village warfare. “Villages started gathering together, worshipping together, singing together.”

I thought about all of this the next morning, driving past the cathedral one last time on our way out of Kohima. The building sat on Aradura Hill the way it had when we arrived: a Naga facade on a Catholic church, cherry trees from Japan in the grounds, a British regimental emblem on an interior wall, and an olive wood crib from Bethlehem near the altar. This was a place of worship on a hill where Allied and Japanese soldiers had killed each other eighty years ago, paid for by the families of one side’s dead, blessed by the veterans of the other, consecrated by a bishop from Kerala, in a state where Jesuits from Karnataka had built the first schools and American Baptists had drawn the first religious map. Inside, the children who had been rehearsing when I first arrived would have already performed their skit; performing a faith not preserved but practised, recently inherited and even now remade, in a building that was still being finished. And below, in the villages, people like Celine and Vikho living lives that held all of it at once: the hymns and the harvest taboos, the church calendar and the days when outsiders cannot enter, the calling that nobody can quite explain and the traditions that nobody sees any reason to stop.

In the land of the Nagas, faith has always collected the way soil does on their sacred hills; belief settling on belief, layer on layer, without anyone deciding when one stratum ends and the next begins.

I travelled to Nagaland with ChaloHoppo, a travel company that designs immersive, culture-led trips across India’s Northeast. They are rooted in homestays, local guides and community engagement rather than focusing on the conventional tourist circuit. Interested readers can use the code NISHAD5 for 5% off any upcoming departure.

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The Robe and The Sword by Sonia Faleiro

Fourth Estate India, December 2025

Buddhism travels well. In the West, it has found an afterlife in the mindfulness aisle: wrapped in incense, translated into wellness, reduced to a symbol of zen and calm in a distracted, overworked world. It is often imagined as the peaceful religion, insulated from the fanaticism or violence we associate with others. Sonia Faleiro’s The Robe and the Sword dismantles that comforting fiction.

“Attaining nirvana can wait,” declares Galagoda Gnanasara, a Sri Lankan monk and leader of the Buddhist nationalist organisation Bodu Bala Sena. The remark came in the wake of anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence, and its power lies not in what it rejects, but in what it prioritises instead. In Faleiro’s account, this fusion of sacred duty and worldly domination is the engine driving militant Buddhist nationalism across South and Southeast Asia.

Faleiro’s book is a calm, deeply reported account of how Buddhist authority — or more precisely, institutions speaking in its name — has been harnessed to defend majoritarian dominance across Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. The robe, in her telling, is not a veil but a uniform: a garment that lends sacred legitimacy to acts that would otherwise look indefensible. “The monks leading these violent movements,” she writes, are “driven not by a pursuit of nirvana in the next life, but by a quest for dominance in this one.”

Structured in three parts — one per country — the book blends journalistic rigour with the accessibility of narrative nonfiction. What emerges isn’t simply the story of Buddhist extremism, but the machinery that enables it: the sacralising of the nation, the invention of enemies, the rhetorical laundering of violence into moral duty.

The Sri Lanka section is the most developed. Since independence, the island’s Sinhalese Buddhist majority has increasingly positioned itself as both guardian and embodiment of the nation. The Sinhala-Only Act of 1956, often remembered as a linguistic policy, becomes in Faleiro’s telling something more foundational: the state’s first major gesture of exclusion, forcing minorities to learn a language that was never theirs.

What’s most unsettling is how adaptable this architecture of fear proves to be. For decades, the Tamil Hindu was the primary object of suspicion. After the LTTE’s defeat in the country’s decades-long civil war, that narrative didn’s disappear but mutated — the Muslim, and to some extent the Christian, began to replace the Hindu in the national imagination, recast as proxies for invisible networks and global conspiracies. After all, “Sri Lanka,” as one Reuters journalist tells her bluntly, “always needs an enemy.”

Faleiro shows how theology bends to serve power. Ahimsa, the principle of non-violence, is not discarded so much as edited, with exceptions made to uphold dharma. The Mahavamsa, a sixth-century chronicle, is deployed to argue that Sri Lanka was chosen by the Buddha himself to protect his teachings, and therefore those who endanger Buddhism endanger the island. Violence, in this worldview, becomes not only permissible, but righteous.

In Myanmar, religion and nationalism were entangled from the start. Under British rule, Indians — Hindu and Muslim — were brought into Burma as clerks, traders, and labourers. They became visible in ways native Burmese, systematically excluded from certain colonial privileges, were not.

One of the book’s most quietly striking details concerns U Ottama — the monk once dubbed the “Burmese Gandhi,” who at one point led the Hindu Mahasabha. There is something almost shocking about that porousness now, the possibility of cross-religious political affiliation, a throwback to the shared struggle against colonial rule. What replaced it wasn’t merely a rigid identity, but suspicion: the sense that anyone with divided loyalties might be an agent of something larger and dangerous. This hardening of boundaries is the soil in which later horrors grew.

By the time Ashin Wirathu, leader of the 969 Movement and dubbed “the face of Buddhist terror” by TIME magazine in 2013, rose to prominence, the architecture was already in place. His sermons gave spiritual sanction to the military’s persecution of the Rohingya, dehumanising an entire population before expelling them. The colonial regime’s extractive footprint — Burmese bodies used to fight imperial wars; teak, gemstones, and labour siphoned out — becomes a backdrop for why postcolonial identity hardens the way it does, but Faleiro is careful not to let history become excuse.

What links Sri Lanka and Myanmar, then, is the colonial wound: the sense that supposed “outsiders” were privileged while the true sons of the soil were sidelined, and that independence meant not just political sovereignty but the restoration of a Buddhist order, with the robe becoming the garment of reclamation.

Thailand, the third case study, sits differently. Never formally colonised, it lacks the same postcolonial grievance narrative — and yet Buddhist nationalism persists, suggesting the pattern is not reducible to colonial trauma alone. Here the alliance of monarchy and sangha is longstanding, and Faleiro is good at showing how it shapes the moral order. One of her most useful observations concerns how hierarchy is literally staged in ritual: in Myanmar, monks are seated above the military, while in Thailand, it is the king first, then the royal family, and only then the monks. Even sacred authority has its rank order. If there is one critique, it is that this section feels more subdued and somewhat compressed into the frame established by the other two — Thailand’s particular entanglement of crown, military, and clergy might warrant a different kind of attention.

Overall, though, Faleiro also surfaces a less discussed layer of this story: Buddhism’s patriarchal scaffolding, particularly in Theravāda traditions. Male monks hold institutional power and privileges systematically denied to women, from legal recognition to ordination to education. These hierarchies matter because they show how extremist monks aren’t anomalies operating outside the system, but are amplified by a structure already primed to elevate certain voices and silence others.

Faleiro doesn’t argue that Buddhism is uniquely vulnerable to violence. Her point is that no religion is exempt from the temptation to serve power. She neither demonises monks nor romanticises minorities, but questions what happens when statehood is draped in sanctity, when nationhood is sermonised, when law gives way to liturgy?

This feels particularly urgent now, in a world where religious nationalism has become one of the most portable ideologies on earth. The Robe and the Sword shows how extremism rarely arrives with fanfare. It creeps in sanctified and sermonised, dressed in virtue. Faleiro’s achievement is to show that the robe is not always what it appears to be — that the aesthetically pleasing version carried to the West is part of the story — and that sometimes, the most effective weapon is the one that looks like peace.

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Goa was abuzz with its annual arts festival when I found a table at a café in Panaji last month. Artists and curators occupied most of the tables, laptops open, festival lanyards still around their necks. I’d found a table near the window and was trying to read, but kept getting distra…

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The sleeper bus pulls out of Goa sometime after 7pm, and I realise almost immediately that I’ve made a mistake. I’d booked the cheapest lower berth, right at the back, without understanding why it cost less — and now I know: it sits directly above the rear wheel, which means every crack and pothole travels straight u…

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We were inside Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, in a small gallery towards the end where a row of artefacts sits behind a thinning rope, when my friend finally stopped in front of a large brass Ganesha and said, “Okay, at some point, I want to know his story. Why the elephant head and the human body?”

I had been travelling with four friends from the UK, and all of them turned towards me with the same look: curiosity mixed with that slightly bewildered readiness people have when they know a long story is coming. I recognised that look. I also knew that whatever I said next would be incomplete.

I told them the version I grew up with: Parvati forming a child from the dirt of her skin to stand guard while she bathed; Shiva arriving unannounced and, unable to recognise his own son, beheading him; the elephant head brought as a form of reparation to bring the boy back to life. I even added the extra detail of the one broken tusk Ganesha snapped off to use as a pen when he wrote the Mahabharata as Sage Vyasa dictated it.

But even as I spoke, I could feel the familiar problem. They were hearing the story but were unaware of the architecture holding it up. How do I explain everything that sits around that one tale? It was like trying to explain a single character from the Lord of the Rings without being able to reference the Ring, or Mordor, or the entire gamut of mythology Tolkien built around it, except this universe wasn’t invented by one author but accreted over millennia — wasn’t fiction but faith — and was woven into the daily life of a billion people.

How do I explain that the elephant-headed god’s brother is the six-headed Kartikeya, the god who rides a peacock? That their father, Shiva, is the destroyer of worlds, who holds the river Ganga in the matted locks of his hair and whose neck is blue because he drank poison to save the cosmos? How do I explain the snake coiled around his throat, the crescent moon in his hair, the tiger skin he wears?

How do I explain that Parvati, Durga, and Kali are the same goddess in different moods and forms? That the Trimurti of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva governs creation, preservation, and destruction, and that the cities we were visiting all have Tripolia gates named after them, woven so casually into the landscape that most people don’t even notice?

How do I explain Ardhanarishvara, the version of Shiva and Shakti fused into one body? That millennia before the German bishop and polymath Nicholas of Cusa suggested the concept of coniunctio oppositorum, arguing that contradictory ideas can be reconciled in an ultimate reality, on the Indian subcontinent a deity was worshipped that was literally half-male, half-female, meant to symbolise that the universe is built from complement, not opposition.

And how do I explain that Narasimha, half-lion and half-man, looks like a demon but isn’t one, instead being an avatar of Vishnu? That we don’t have a concept of the devil, only beings on spectrums of chaos and order, black and white?

How do I explain all of this without giving a full lecture on metaphysics, and once you start explaining metaphysics, where do you stop?

At Chittorgarh — India’s largest fort complex that, at one time, housed over a hundred temples — the guide pointed to yakshas carved into the lowest rungs of temple bases: bent, contorted figures carrying the weight of the structure above them. “They were placed here,” he said, “to trap their chaotic and malevolent energy, so it wouldn’t wander into the village.” Yakshas aren’t gods, but neither are they demons. They occupy a category that doesn’t translate neatly.

At that point another of my friends whispered, half confused, half amused, “Your religion is impossible to follow.” I agreed, because it is expansive. A worldview built from pluralities, not hard doctrines.

Standing in that small gallery in Hawa Mahal with four expectant faces in front of me, I felt a mixture of awe and inadequacy. Awe at the vastness of what I come from, and inadequacy at the impossibility of translating it on command.

It wasn’t that I didn’t try. Over those days in Rajasthan, I talked about the grandeur of Jaipur’s maharajas, about the Mughals and the Indo-Persian architecture that borrowed the best of both worlds. At Amber Fort, I pointed out the natural dyes still visible in the frescoes, how art and culture had been fertile in this land for centuries. At Chittorgarh, I spoke of the valour of Maharana Pratap, of the difference between Maharana and Maharaja, warrior kings and civic kings, and what that distinction revealed about how power was understood here. I talked about all of it, and they listened, and asked questions, and seemed genuinely moved.

But even then, I could feel the weight of everything I wasn’t saying. The context behind the context. The references that needed their own references. For every door I opened, ten more remained shut, and I didn’t have the keys or the time to open them all.

Which is probably why, when the conversation shifted to civic life, I found myself speaking more freely. The dirt, the refuse, the lack of civic sense. Those were things I could articulate without footnotes. Things they could see for themselves.

And there was plenty to see. Jaipur, as I noticed more vividly this time, is shockingly filthy. Just a few meters from the same terracotta-pink walls that make the city so photogenic, the inside alleys told a different story: piss, garbage, shit, plastic. It wasn’t uncommon to see men urinating against walls shared by five-star hotels and heritage havelis, despite the government having built public toilets on nearly every corner. I wanted to acknowledge it, to condemn it — and I did. But I also knew that this was the slice of India that travels easiest, the part that confirms what people already expect, and I was trying to protect the idea of this land from being defined by it alone.

It struck me later that this is the trap of translation: you end up oscillating between extremes. You can describe the dirt because it’s visible, undeniable, requires no context. And you can gesture at the beauty because beauty, too, travels easily. Look at this palace. Look at this fresco. Look at this view. But the substance of that beauty, the why of it, the civilisational grammar that produced it, that’s where language falters. I could show them the Indo-Persian arches and the Mughal gardens and the Rajput frescoes, and they could see that these things were beautiful. What I couldn’t easily convey was why they moved me. The silt of history and myth and memory that had accumulated around them over a lifetime. The awe I felt seeing a rock-cut Ardhanarishvara in an fifteenth-century temple, or sculptures of kings and queens in postures from the Kama Sutra carved on palace walls in a society where that would today be considered obscene. Or the strange vertigo of seeing stories recited and learnt in childhood carved on walls older than entire European civilisations. And so I swung between the dirt they could witness and the beauty they could admire, while the meaning of both remained just out of reach.

After all, it is always easier to talk about the dirt on the streets or the beauty on the walls than the cosmos in your head.

Last night, I went for the launch of ’s new book at Kunzum in Delhi. During the talk, when asked about form, Kumar referenced Ryszard Kapuściński’s essay Snow in Ghana. I had read the piece years ago, but I revisited it this morning.

In the essay, Kapuściński writes about being stranded overnight in a Ghanaian village and his interactions with the village elder, Nana, who had never met someone from Poland before. The title comes from an innocent question: Nana asks Kapuściński to explain snow. Kapuściński tries and fails, and the failure reveals something crucial. How do you explain more than the dictionary definition to someone who has no lived feeling of it? The cold, the brightness, the touch, the childhood associations, the culture built around something Nana has never seen. Snow isn’t so much a thing as it is a memory, a landscape, and a sensibility. Explaining it out of context shrinks it into an outline.

As Kapuściński confesses:

Suddenly I felt shame, some sort of shortcoming, a sense of having missed the mark. What I had described was not my country. Now, snow … that’s accurate at least. but it is nothing, nothing of what we know, of what we carry around within ourselves without even wondering about: nothing of our pride and despair, of our life, nothing of what we breath, of our death.

That was exactly it. That was my Jaipur problem. My Hawa Mahal problem.

Everything I had been describing to my friends — the gods, the garbage, the temples, the dirt, the maharajas and the Mughals and the warrior kings — was accurate. But accuracy is not the same as truth. None of it fully captured what I carry. And even the grandeur I managed to convey was inevitably flattened, stripped of the thousand associations that make it mean something to me.

A month earlier, through one of those sprawling WhatsApp community networks Indian families maintain across continents, I met an older couple from the same Konkani community as my family in Kochi who offered to help me with my fieldwork. We met near the Periyar, and they told me about their family’s migrations during the Portuguese Inquisition, about how Goan communities rebuilt ritual life in pockets across Karnataka and Kerala, and about the food and festivals and stories that survived only because families carried them across borders.

At one point the aunty said, “Being a writer interested in our culture is a big responsibility; it’s important you document our traditions. Even my own children don’t know most of it anymore. I don’t know how to pass it on.”

It wasn’t despair so much as recognition; a recognition that culture survives only through attention, and attention today is not guaranteed.

Listening to her, I understood why even trying to translate India for my friends felt so fraught. Some things are too large, some things are too layered, and some things refuse the format of explanation. And when you have four expectant faces with fertile imaginations and limited time, you want to give them everything at once. Which means you end up giving them fragments, and you have no control over which fragments come to stand for the whole.

R.F. Kuang’s Babel, a novel that captures the impossibility of translation, has a line that has stayed with me:

Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?

Although at times my inadequacy felt like a betrayal to India, perhaps I need to acknowledge that these were not unintended eyes. My friends wanted to know. They had come with curiosity, not judgement, and they asked questions not to reduce but to understand. So my feelings of incompetance aside, I tried my best. And maybe that is all translation can ever be: an act of good faith between people who want to meet somewhere in the middle.

And partial explanations are not useless. On that journey through Ghana, when Nana assumed Poland was a colonial power, it wasn’t Kapuściński who corrected him. It was Kofi, his Ghanaian companion from Accra, who said:

They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonised whites.

The man who had asked Kapuściński the same naive question at the start of the trip now had enough context to correct someone else. Which made me think of my own friends. Maybe I can’t explain the whole universe to them, but I hope they leave India with just enough context to correct the next person who reduces this place to dirt or chaos or a pretty little cliché.

Describing India, even to those who arrive with goodwill and curiosity, is always incomplete. There is the India I can point to, and there is the India I carry within me, which no combination of vocabulary, syntax, or carefully arranged sentences will ever fully reveal.

Some things must be seen. Some things must be lived. And the rest, like snow in a place where winter never comes, can only be understood by those who have already stood inside it.

Two of them are here already, and two more land this weekend, and suddenly my days are shaped by reunions and the familiar chatter echoing in unfamiliar places. And all of this has made me think about gratitude in a way I have not allowed myself to in a while; about how none of us ever do any of this alone. About how it is impossible to build a life like this, a life spent wandering and writing and trying to understand a country as vast and complicated as India, without a support system that not only cheers from the sidelines but also gets on a flight and shows up, simply because they want to experience your life from the inside. I am lucky to have that. I know I am.

But there are two other people who keep coming to mind even more often in these weeks. Perhaps because tomorrow happens to be their anniversary, and maybe because this move back to India has also been the first time I have ever lived with my parents as an adult. I left home at eighteen and built a life in other cities, and coming back after more than a decade has been equal parts grounding and disorienting. But underneath all of it runs one steady feeling: a deep, old gratitude that I’ve been excavating.

Part of the hesitation comes from where I come from. South Asian families do not hand out emotional vocabulary the way they hand out food. Affection lives in the weight of a tiffin packed too full, in the way the light is left on and a meal is saved for you when you return late, in the silent sacrifices that no one names because naming them would make them too sharp, too real. And for South Asian men, especially, the language of softness is restricted to two spaces: romance and banter among friends. Anything outside that is treated with suspicion, even ridicule. We grew up on films where parents existed as caricatures: either jumping around making inside jokes like overgrown teenagers, or stone-faced antagonists who’d eventually melt in the face of love (think DDLJ). Never as people with internal lives that shifted and deepened over decades. Romance was allowed centre stage; filial love was something you were meant to intuit, not articulate.

We learned to read love in the negative spaces — in what wasn’t said, what wasn’t asked for, what wasn’t expected in return. My father’s pride lived in introducing me to his colleagues and letting my mother and I use his card when we went out shopping; my mother’s care in the way she still asks if I’ve eaten, even when I’m thirty-one and supposedly capable of feeding myself. And I learned to speak this same language back: taking them along on my travels when I could, messaging Aai on Valentine’s Day because she finds it amusing, picking up dinner tabs before Baba can reach for his wallet, sending money home even when he insists he doesn’t need it — small rebellions against their self-sufficiency to show them I love them. But this linguistic poverty around affection creates its own kind of inheritance: generations of children who know they are loved but have never heard it said plainly, who then struggle to say it to their own children, and so the cycle continues.

But I do not think that silence serves us — or at least me — anymore. There is a different kind of adulthood that arrives when you finally see your parents as people and not just the architecture of your childhood — people who became parents younger than you are now, who were allowed to change their minds and grow into different versions of themselves decade by decade, even if you were too busy becoming yourself to notice. And once that happens, the old script of unspoken gratitude feels insufficient. It feels almost dishonest.

So I want to say this today. Thank you, Aai and Baba, for being the ground that held steady even when everything else shifted. Thank you for struggling in ways I did not witness so that I could grow up believing that the world was open to me. Thank you for making sure my education was paid for, even when that meant tightening your own lives. Thank you for supporting friends and relatives when you had your own battles. Thank you for teaching me the value of pursuing my own happiness instead of solely running behind money. Thank you for giving me the privilege of curiosity, something I now realise is one of the greatest gifts a child can receive.

And maybe I’m not alone in wanting to say this. So for all of us who struggle with these words, here’s what we want to say: Thank you for becoming different people than your own parents so we could become ourselves. Thank you for swallowing your own dreams so quietly we never knew they existed until we were old enough to feel guilty about it. Thank you for translating love into action so consistently that we mistook it for the natural order of things. Thank you for never asking us to thank you, which is probably why it’s taken us this long to try.

When I told you I was thinking of leaving my job to write a book, your reactions were almost comically opposite and yet perfectly complementary. Aai, with her bright, almost disarming optimism — a kind of beautiful naivety that refuses to be cynical even when the world has offered every reason to be — simply said, “Why wouldn’t you do this? This is your dream. You’ve always been creative. Take the time. Write the book.” She believed in the version of me I was still afraid to fully acknowledge.

Baba, meanwhile, listened to every practical anxiety I had over long calls. Anxieties like “what would this mean for my career?” “Could I really pick up consulting again if I needed to?” “Would I manage the finances of a sabbatical year?” He was the one who validated the underlying fear that lives in most men my age, the fear of shedding a corporate identity that has become a shield, a shorthand for stability and success. He didn’t dismiss those fears, but helped me map them, name them, understand them. And by the end of those conversations, I realised that I wasn’t reckless for wanting this life. I was prepared for it.

If I can take risks now, it is because of them. If I feel the confidence to step off well-trodden paths, it is because for decades they held the map while I learned how to walk without it (although let’s be honest, I still Google Maps my way around India). After a decade spent continents apart, this unexpected time under the same roof has become its own kind of blessing — not one any of us wants indefinitely, but one I’m grateful to experience in this moment.

Living with them again has taught me just how hard it has been for their generation. We talk about generational trauma, about patterns passed down, but what we don’t talk about enough is that they were the sandwiched generation: they had to obey their parents unquestioningly and then, with barely a pause, had to adapt to the demands and dreams of their children. They became translators between two worlds that barely spoke the same language. They had to somehow honour parents who believed suffering built character while raising children who believed happiness was a legitimate life goal. They straddled arranged marriages and love marriages, joint families and dating apps, duty and desire. Every family gathering became a negotiation, every life choice a careful calculation between what would disappoint their parents least and what would fulfill their children most.

That kind of generational whiplash is rarely acknowledged, but it reshaped families like mine. It softened something. It created room for kids like me to claim the independence we felt entitled to. But it must have been destabilising — creating space for conversations their own parents would never have entertained, building a framework where none existed before.

So I am grateful to be a beneficiary of that shift. I think, sometimes, that I’ve spent so long trying to build a life of independence that I forgot independence is only possible when someone gave you a stable foundation first.

Perhaps this is what travel really teaches us — not just about new places but about the distances we’ve already traveled from home, both literal and metaphorical. Every guesthouse and train compartment becomes a mirror reflecting back the stability we take for granted. Every solo meal reminds us of tables we once rushed to leave and the ones we were excited to join. And maybe that’s why my friends flying across oceans to be here matters so much: they’re choosing to collapse that distance, to say that some connections are worth the price of a plane ticket and jet lag.

I wrote this piece and wasn’t going to hit send. Part of me thought: of course my parents know I love them, do I need to send a mass email to my audience — many of whom want to read about actual travel — so that they read it too? But this is part of the journey, for only this journey could have led me to feel this way. It’s only on trips like this that you realize what you forget in corporate boardrooms: that freedom is not the opposite of belonging. That you need a tribe even when you’re independent. That gratitude is not childish. And that love, especially the non-romantic kind, is allowed to take up space on the page.

Because it’s not just the crossing of borders that makes a journey. Sometimes we have to cross the distances within our own families. And that, I’m learning, is its own kind of travel writing.

“Saale!” A voice explodes down the aisle. “Abhi nahi! Khana chal raha hai!”

I look up from my book. The train conductor is red-faced, shouting at a young man with plastic bags full of chips and biscuits — an unauthorised vendor moving through the compartment like a loud ghost. Usually conducto…

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This weekend I completed another revolution around the sun and unlike last year, when I did that now slightly embarrassing 30 things I learned before 30 list, I don’t feel particularly inclined to measure or summarise this one. Perhaps that’s part of growing older, realising that birthdays are less milestones of achievement and more c…

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I’ve been hitting a bit of a wall lately.

Since I last wrote to you, I’ve travelled from Pune to the pilgrimage towns of Jejuri and Pandharpur in Maharashtra, then on to Mumbai, Goa, and a lovely hosted stay in Jaipur (more about which later), as well as a weeklong hop over the seas to Muscat. This week brings with it the …

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Someone recently asked me what my writing process is, and I thought of Somerset Maugham when he said “I write only when inspiration strikes,” before adding “fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” The first half is true for me, though the second couldn’t be further. For as long as I can rememb…

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Somewhere in between, I managed to draft a chapter. What I’m sharing today is a very early version of it … still very much rough around the edges, but I hope it gives you a sense of the style and direction I’m aiming for.

This is also my first issue only for paid subscribers: an early look at the work-in-progress. If you’d like to keep reading, you can upgrade below or use the one-issue unlock below.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this chapter — what works, what doesn’t — as every bit of feedback will help me sharpen the writing as I go.

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The Muslim queen who built Buddhist temples

The ruins on the hill stood silent, except for the chant drifting from within the temple complex. I had climbed the weathered stairs alone, each step releasing a puff of ochre dust into the dry air.

“This is not like Thiksey,” Ali had said before I set off,

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“Get the tap water. You’ll see it tastes much better than in England,” said a friendly old woman from the next table just as my father ordered bottled water at a pub in Edinburgh. This was in 2007, on my first trip to the UK, over half a decade before I made the city home. I remember thinking then: water is water, no matter which side of the border, so …

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I am writing today’s essay from a small café in Mumbai — Mary Lodge by Subko, a space that feels designed for the upwardly mobile and gentrified — where queues spill into a narrow Bandra alley, beside a roadside cross with fading Catholic inscriptions, and into a tiled…

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