Explained : Republic Day Parades and the Making of National Hindu Identity and Its Impact

The Republic Day tableaux occupy a central place in India’s national celebration. The parade—a childhood memory for every Indian—stages an evolving narrative of the nation, one that reflects shifts in the country’s sociopolitical attitudes and the priorities of its institutions. Tableaux were not always part of the parade. After the Constitution came into force in 1950, the pageantry of Republic Day constituted only a military spectacle showcasing the strength of the newborn nation.

Beyond displaying military prowess, the nation also needed to be constituted in popular consciousness—in everyday lives, language, and culture. Cultural tableaux were introduced in 1952, adding a pedagogical dimension of pride and pluralism to the parade. The parade became a tool to propagate the meaning of the Indian nation to its own people. Over seven decades, the visual vocabulary and the meaning it creates have undergone substantial transformations, especially as they increasingly intersect with themes of Hindu identity and nationalism.

The cultural tableaux were originally conceived within the Nehruvian principle of “unity in diversity”. Early parades included simple floats featuring regional handicrafts and folk performers mounted on flatbed trucks. The purpose was to visually link distant regions—from Punjab to the north-east—into a cohesive nationhood. There regions were incorporated onto New Delhi’s central axis, the Rajpath, as a single choreographed frame through, for instance, harvest scenes (Punjab), Kathakali dancers (Travancore-Cochin), and Bihu troupes (Assam).

A Madhya Pradesh float in the 1950s displayed Gond and Baiga tribal artisans at work; a Punjab tableau a decade later foregrounded the Green Revolution with wheat fields and mechanised ploughs; a Tamil Nadu tableau repeatedly used Bharatanatyam dancers and temple gopurams to represent Dravidian culture. Temples, mosques, churches, and tribal motifs featured alongside agricultural and industrial achievements—enacting a secular narrative intended to reconcile difference and promote inclusive citizenship. In the aftermath of Partition, the state presented itself as the guarantor of pluralism, even as the visual language often drew heavily on Sanskritic idioms.

As India went through the development decades of the twentieth century, entered the era of liberalisation in the 1990s, and experienced its effects in the early twenty-first century, tableaux increasingly incorporated themes of modernisation and technological advancement. Developmental agendas and heritage could now be staged together.

Gujarat’s 2001 tableau, for example, showcased the State’s industrial growth and its new ports; Maharashtra’s 2010 float depicted the transformation of Mumbai into a “global city” with metro lines and the Bandra-Worli Sea Link as its focus. Other tableaux foregrounded environmental campaigns (such as Goa’s “Save the Frog” float), literacy drives, and the nation-state’s resilience (such as Odisha’s post-cyclone reconstruction float). This layering of imagery between heritage and aspirations allowed the state to project itself as simultaneously modernising and tradition-bearing.

Shift in semiotics

The consolidation of Hindu nationalist discourse in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries precipitated a marked change in the tableaux’s semiotics. Tableaux began to place greater emphasis on Hindu civilisational imagery: monumental temples, scenes from the epics, and pilgrimages were foregrounded as national achievements.

An Uttar Pradesh tableau in the 2025 Republic Day parade, for instance, depicted the Maha Kumbh, with a large central replica of the Amrit Kalash and a visualisation of Samudra Manthan, framing the Ganga as both liturgical and a developmental resource. (Earlier tableaux from the State have also featured such themes.) Similarly, several State tableaux have repeatedly staged Ramayana stories as core symbols of Indian culture, rather than of a particular sectarian tradition. This shift did not entirely displace earlier pluralist motifs, but it re-weighted the visual grammar of the parade so that Hindu symbols increasingly anchored the narrative of, and were used interchangeably with, “Indian culture”.

Since 2014, this tendency has become more explicit and programmatic. Central ministries and BJP-governed States have repeatedly debuted tableaux that highlight temple redevelopment projects and pilgrimage routes as emblematic of both heritage, and national development.

In 2024, the Uttar Pradesh tableau centred on the Ram Lalla consecration at Ayodhya, branding the new temple as heritage, infrastructure, and tourism. The front portion of the tableau symbolically represented the pran pratishtha ceremony that took place on January 22, 2024, with an artistic model depicting Lord Ram in a young avatar holding a bow and arrow. At the same time, national themes such as “Swarnim Bharat: Virasat aur Vikas” for the 76th Republic Day in 2025 explicitly combined heritage and progress, with ministry tableaux on women’s economic empowerment such as the “Lakhpati Didi” initiative framed against motifs of religiously inflected ideas of seva. In this formulation, Hindu sacred history and space provide the deep temporal frame within which the modern republic is made intelligible.

Selection and exclusion

A critical but invisible aspect of this spectacle is the selection process of tableaux—the mechanism of the parade’s ideological curation. The central committee responsible for tableau approvals has, with growing regularity, privileged proposals that conform to the dominant Hindu civilisational narrative, while those from opposition-ruled States—particularly Kerala, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu—have frequently been rejected or postponed.

For instance, Kerala’s 2019 tableau featuring Vaikom Satyagraha, a protest against untouchability, was rejected. In 2020, the State proposed a theme comprising Kalamandalam and the traditional art form of Theyyam; this too was rejected. In 2022, a tableau depicting social reformer Sree Narayana Guru was denied selection. Kerala’s tableaux have been rejected four times in the past six years. In 2022 and 2024, Delhi’s floats highlighting social reform or urban governance were omitted, and West Bengal’s designs celebrating Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and the Indian National Army, among others, were denied permission.

Delhi’s tableaux in the 2011 Republic Day parade depicted communal and cultural unity, and religious harmony. The Republic Day tableaux occupy a central place in India’s national celebration.
| Photo Credit:
Rajeev Bhatt

In the case of Ladakh’s 2021 tableau, social leaders in the Muslim-majority Kargil district protested the focus on Buddhist Thiksey Monastery, alleging deliberate exclusion of Kargil’s rich Islamic heritage. Feroz Ahmed Khan, chairman of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (Kargil), wrote to the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh complaining that “only a single aspect of Ladakhi culture has been incorporated for display”, and that the “partial representation of the UT at an event as prominent as the Republic Day celebration alienates the people of Kargil district”.

Explicit Muslim representation has been rare. In 2011, Bihar’s tableau depicted the shrine of Sufi saint Makhdoom Shah Daulat at Maner Sharif, featuring a Muslim man praying to the tune of Amir Khusro’s verse. This was an exception. An analysis of the past decade shows that tableaux that centre mosques, Sufi saints, or Urdu literary heritage are either rare or marginalised. The absence of mosques from Jammu and Kashmir’s tableaux, for example, is notable and constructs Muslim absence from the largest ritual of the Indian nation.

Manufacturing consensus

The annual repetition and wide dissemination of Republic Day tableaux build both common sense and spectacular consensus about the contours and constituents of Indian nationhood. The floats, broadcast to millions, replayed across mass media, documented in statist archives, and incorporated and re-enacted in schools, reproduce an aesthetic and historical framework in which Hindu-majoritarian symbolism and narratives are rendered natural, familiar, and inevitable—as the obvious visual synonyms for “Indian”.

In this grammar, other communities and histories are not necessarily erased but tend to appear as curated tokens of diversity at best, or tolerable neighbours at worst, within a larger framework that privileges Hindu forms and mythologies as the normative core. This process shows how built form, ritual choreography, and visual spectacle come together to sediment new mythologies of belonging in a postcolonial nation such as India. Rajpath—now Kartavya Path—holds these theatrical meanings that constitute the idea of India.

Fahad Zuberi is a Doctoral Student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes about architecture, cities, history, and politics.

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