MAMDANI’S MULTITUDES, INDIA’S SOFT POWER

I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman, and in Zohran Mamdani’s story, those multitudes seem to acquire living form.

- NIRUPAMA RAO

The newly elected mayor of New York City—born of an Indian mother and an Ugandan father, raised in Queens, educated in Bowdoin, and now an American political figure who speaks fluent Hindi and quotes Jawaharlal Nehru—is a walking conversation between India and America. In him converge the legacies of Mira Nair, who brought the fragrance of Indian life to global cinema, and Mahmood Mamdani, whose scholarship has mapped the intersections of power and identity across continents. Together, they shaped a son whose worldview is an amalgam of the religious, cultural, and ideological that shapes a migrant identity.

In a time when politics everywhere seems to crystallise difference, Mamdani embodies the opposite impulse: fluidity He is of Hindu and Muslim descent, Indian and African, American by citizenship but global by imagination—he stands as a reminder that identity has multiple convergences. When he eats biryani with his hand, plays Bollywood musicat his victory lap, or quotes Nehru to a New York audience, he does not do it to parade ‘Indianness’. He does it naturally, unapologetically. That, precisely, is soft power at work—the persuasion of authenticity, not of propaganda.