Eid ul-Adha, better known in India as ‘Bakri Eid’, has always carried within it a deeply communal spirit. Beyond ritual sacrifice, it is a festival shaped by the sharing of food, space, domestic labour, and the community spirit. I grew up in the suburbs of Kolkata, in a neighbourhood with many Muslim families, and Eid celebrations have been as much a part of my life as Durga Pujo. Across South Asia, Eid tables bring together neighbours, friends, workers, extended families, and entire localities through shared, communal practices of cooking and eating that blur the boundaries between private and public life. In India especially, these traditions reflect a long history of cultural confluence, in which food, language, music, craft, and celebration have never belonged neatly to any one community.
But to celebrate Bakri Eid in India today is also to do so under the shadow of growing hostility. In recent years, Indian Muslims have increasingly been subjected to surveillance, vilification, mob violence, housing discrimination, and political exclusion amid the rise of Hindu majoritarian nationalism. Practices associated with Muslim identity — from food and clothing to prayer and language — have become flashpoints in a broader project of cultural othering. Even acts as ordinary as eating, gathering, or celebrating publicly are now freighted with anxiety and negotiation.
And yet, festivals like Bakri Eid continue to endure as acts of collective resistance, assertion, and cultural memory. They remind us that Indian identity has never been singular, pure, or exclusionary, but layered through centuries of exchange, coexistence, migration, and shared cultural inheritance. This week’s stories, from The Bombay Canteen’s reflection on Bakri Eid food traditions to films, music, design, and photography exploring questions of identity, belonging, labour, and memory, speak to that broader idea of ‘culture’ as living, contested, and profoundly collective practices.
From a South Asian craft and design gallery in New York and Prateek Kuhad’s sonic reinvention and Ritwik Pareek’s critique of commercialised faith to The Bombay Canteen’s Bakri Eid feast and Sunhil Sippy’s portrait of Mumbai’s eastern seaboard — here are the week’s most compelling culture stories:
South Asian craftsmanship exists in a world of irony. For decades, it has been admired and widely referenced in global design while rarely being credited on its own terms. South Asian artisans have shaped luxury interiors, fashion, textiles, and furniture across the world, and yet they have remained anonymous behind European and American brands that built entire aesthetic vocabularies around the subcontinent’s craft and material traditions. House of Santal, a new design gallery and online platform based in New York, wants to shift that narrative. Learn more here.
Prateek Kuhad has long been a key figure in India’s indie scene, known for songs that explore the complex emotions of love, such as longing, distance, and vulnerability. His new single, ‘Blush’, from his upcoming album ‘Full Moon Chamber’, centres on infatuation. With a gentle guitar riff, the track captures the emotional rush of attraction, emphasising nervous excitement and vulnerability rather than longing or absence. It reflects the thrill of opening up to someone new. Learn more here.
Ritwik Pareek’s directorial debut ‘Dug Dug’ transforms a bizarre true-story-inspired premise — a village that worships a haunted moped — into a razor-sharp satire about religion, capitalism, and public desperation in contemporary India. Shot in striking neon hues by cinematographer Aditya S. Kumar, the film explores how faith is manufactured, monetised, and sustained by politicians, priests, and ordinary people searching for hope in failing systems. Learn more here.
This Bakri Eid, The Bombay Canteen presents a special Nose-to-Tail Feast inspired by South Asia’s rich traditions of communal eating, mindful cooking, and regional Muslim cuisines. Featuring inventive dishes made from lesser-used cuts alongside cocktails inspired by familiar flavours, the shared dining experience reflects on sustainability, memory, and the cultural histories embedded in Bakri Eid celebrations across India. Learn more here.
In his first solo exhibition, ‘Eastward’, presented by Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Sunhil Sippy documents Mumbai’s often overlooked eastern seaboard through haunting images of industrial ruins, mangroves, salt pans, and transitional landscapes shaped by urban expansion, ecological precarity, and time. Learn more here.
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