Polarised Hatred, Politicised Bodies: On Nasir and Communal Violence

Arun Karthick’s Nasir (2020) is set in a working-class neighbourhood in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu’s second largest city. Screened at the PK Rosy Film Festival 2025 as part of the Vaanam Art Festival in celebration of Dalit History Month, the film follows a casual working day of Nasir, the protagonist, and the first part of this essay explores the web of sounds that follow him wherever he goes. Nasir's sincere human connection with his family, colleagues, acquaintances and just about anyone he meets convinces us of his incapability to invite danger to himself. But violence is hiding in wait for him. The state is notorious for caste-based atrocities under the garb of a secularist ethos, and Coimbatore has been the site of serious Hindu-Muslim communal tensions since the 1998 bomb blasts in the city. In the film, when Nasir is killed, one is alarmed by the potentiality of the sound world we inhabit—that the increasing religiosity in everyday practices is not to be taken lightly because we never know when religion transforms into communalism and violence. But when Nasir lies there dead, the aural world is blacked out. The passionate communal voices silenced the innocent Muslim who was not even taking part in their game of hate. 

Nasir’s amicable relationship with one and all gives no obvious premonition of the possibility of violence. There is a great economic interdependence between diverse communities evident in the very neighbourhood he lives in. We see this early in the film through his almost ritual act of walking to the teashop every morning, whose turquoise blue wooden doors hold marks of three horizontal lines standing for the owners’ Shaivite devotion, and even in the idli business run by his own mother and wife at their house’s entrance, where visibly non-Muslim customers wait in queue for idli parcels. In the scenes that follow, Nasir’s deep human connection with people from multiple communities stands in sharp contrast with what happened to him. But signs of his fatal end are present in the film. 

In the morning, as Nasir takes in a few puffs hunching at his shop’s entrance, his young colleague profusely apologises to him for being late and rushes to open the shutters. The colleague shares with Nasir about the boys in his area being fully charged up for Ganesh Chathurthi. Nasir replies by telling him that he should have taken a day off for the festival. It is a moment of diagnosis. The angry men who kill him at the very end of that day were either jobless or youthful lads working in low-paying salaried jobs. His own colleague looks certainly not capable of killing him. But if he had not known Nasir and had been hanging around that night post the celebrations with other passionate, communally charged youth, would he have participated in killing Nasir or any other Muslim counterpart? A strong “no” is doubtful. In her novel The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao, Lindsay Perreira tells the story of how the Shiv Sena are successfully able to turn working-class youth from chawls in Mumbai against anyone who is not Marathi. Their rhetoric is along the lines that the others are taking away lands and jobs from their community. The RSS and BJP have long employed similar strategies by making the most out of the unemployed working-class youth and turning them into sentinels to fight the minorities.

After that exchange with his colleague, Nasir opens the shop and prepares for the day’s business. As a part of his work routine, he dresses up the mannequins and then dusts and garlands the idol of Krishna. There is a question that refuses to sit well here. Does this scene come to stand for Nasir’s syncretic sentiments, making him a secular Muslim, and so killing him becomes strongly unacceptable? Should Muslims in India always underperform their faith in order to become acceptable as citizens? 

In the world-making of Nasir, his colleagues play an important part. A middle-aged colleague who appears friendly with Nasir instructs somebody on the phone to intimidate another group of people with the support of a local group affiliated with a certain party. The colleague’s exact words are: “They need to be shown their place. It is them who should fear us. If we let loose, they would sell us off here.” Though the words are nondescript and the speaker does not expand in detail on the conflict and the participants, it clearly converges to one point: whoever the fighting parties may be, the rifts among social groups grow along the lines of “whose land and who needs to be silenced by whom.” The genocidal proclivity is active. One wonders whether this colleague is capable of doing such a thing to Nasir in a different time and space?

Nasir’s workplace is situated in the financial hub of Coimbatore. So, other business owners from the neighbouring shops also frequent where he works to meet the cashier of the shop, Nasir’s immediate boss. At one such time, when a visitor asks for recommendations of places to eat in the city with the cashier, the latter offhandedly shares a plethora of specific eateries at certain spots. But he also remarks that a particular waiter from a certain restaurant was smelly and wore a dark beard, warning the listener to keep away from the said waiter. Disgust in words and disdain on his face urge the watchful audience to anxiously ask, “Is the waiter in question a Muslim?” 

Against all of these, Nasir is immersed in himself and his own world consisting of his wife Taj, his mother and a neurodivergent nephew under his care. In many parts of the film, he spends his time simply thinking. When he breaks away from work for his midday prayer, we see his inward journey through the prayers fluttering on his lips. This also reminds one of prayer as a problem-solving practice. In an article titled “The Power of Prayer,” on Aeon, Eleanor Schille Hudson explores prayer as a resourceful means that individuals—religious or otherwise—resort to in order to resolve their problems. In the film as well, Nasir is burdened with financial struggles which only come to light when he runs into an old acquaintance in the bazaar area and when he intermittently plays out in his mind the letter he has been writing to Taj. Nasir is a desperate human being but he has all the will to find a solution to his troubles, even as he seeks God, creates poetry and lives a frugal life. Yet all of his grit to live against a growing sense of hate around his Muslim identity—a thing which he himself does not think about often—is undone by the fury of an angry crowd of men. Directed by those in seats of power, the mob chooses to see his Muslim-ness over everything else. 

However, throughout the film, Nasir’s actions show his faith in his country and in others whom he saw as his brethren. He does not speak of it directly or through his poetry, Rather, his faith was in his practice. We see it when he leisurely stops to buy two idlis and four dosais despite hearing a rumour about the rioting mob. He believes that no wrong could happen to him, not even half-expecting it. That is when they came at him calling names—“Thulukkan thulukkan! Slay him dead!” in between chanting “Bharat Mata ki jai! (Hail Mother India!)” as though the act they were involved in was a matter of national duty. Thulukkan is the distortion of the word ‘Tughlaq’ in Tamil referring to Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, who invaded the Deccan to expand the Delhi Sultanate in the fourteenth century. This historical figure is conveniently etched in the collective memory of the people to hold accountable a diverse range of Muslims living in the region even in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Thulukkan is a slur used for Muslims in Tamil Nadu. Most Muslim children in the state get acquainted with the word through their friends at school who would say it in hushed tones in their ears to convey the matter, though often more in a “did you know?” sort of fashion. Others would be introduced to the word firsthand when it was meant as a direct attack at them. So, Nasir was killed because he was seen as a “Thulukkan.” 

The mob’s sole reason for killing Nasir is nothing more or less than the coincidence of his being born a Muslim in South India—which in their post-truth imagination directly makes him a progeny of the fourteenth-century Muhammad Bin Tughlaq. It is an unforgivable move to try and resolve the logic behind a murder like this. But it is important to take a moment to declutter the misinformed idea of history that is being circulated among those who operate from a place of passion and are completely blinded by hatred. Seminal bodies of work written by historians like Susan Bayly are very clear about how Islam in peninsular India was established—via the waters of the Indian ocean through amicable trade ties brought forth by maritime traders and Sufi saints since the 8 CE. Most Muslims in major parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala have more in common with their neighbouring communities of people than the fourteenth century Tughlaq. Bayly also elucidates in detail that Islam in Tamil villages spread mainly through Sufi Khanqahs (hospices). The local people saw this as a practice by healers and mendicants, often not different from the various animistic beliefs they were part of. It was these networks which expanded to become an established religion in South India, very different in flavour, fragrance and practice from their North Indian counterparts. 

Yet, just as this piece is being written and published, on this very same day, a thirty-six-year-old Ashraf’s funeral is taking place at Kottakkal in the Malappuram district of Kerala after he was beaten to death by a group of men affiliated with a Hindutva club called “Samrat Guys” for no fault of his but for simply existing.

In case you missed the first part of this piece, read it here.

To learn more about films documenting the histories of hate politics in India, read Ankan Kazi’s essay on Kasturi Basu and Dwaipayan Banerjee’s A Bid for Bengal (2021) and observations on a panel on political violence titled “Image and Memory.” Also read Vishal Singh Deo’s essays on majoritarianism in the agrarian North and the intersections of caste and communalism through a history of print culture.

All images are stills from Nasir (2020) by Arun Karthick. Images courtesy of the director.