Q.Watch films such as Bombay and Garam Hawa? What ideals of secularism do they depict? Read a short story 'Name' in Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh by Abdul Ghani Sheikh.

These films and this story explore communal conflict and questions of religious identity in human, personal terms, which is a valuable complement to the chapter's more abstract discussion. …

Bombay and Garam Hawa are both well-known Hindi-cinema explorations of how communal conflict and religious polarisation affect ordinary families and relationships that cross religious lines, set against the backdrop of major moments of communal tension in Indian history. Watching such films allows the abstract discussion of inter-religious domination in this chapter — riots, displacement, the targeting of people because of their religious identity — to be seen in concrete, human terms: the fear, loss, and courage of individuals and families caught up in exactly the kind of events the chapter describes (such as the 1984 violence or the 2002 Gujarat riots).

The short story 'Name', by Abdul Ghani Sheikh, drawn from Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh, similarly engages with questions of identity tied to naming, in the specific religious and cultural setting of Ladakh — a reminder that questions of religious and cultural identity, of the kind this chapter discusses through the Ataturk case study (where even a person's own name became a site of state intervention), play out in very local, personal ways as well as at the level of national policy. …